BUT OF COURSE: Celebs Blame Palestinian Deaths in Gaza Strip on Trump.
I’ve seen the video, and Trump wasn’t even in Gaza yesterday.
Archive for 2018
May 15, 2018
BEND THE KNEE: Gap sorry for T-shirt’s ‘erroneous’ China map.
In a posting late Monday on China’s Weibo microblogging platform, the company said it discovered that some T-shirts sold overseas “had an erroneous design of China’s map.”
“We are truly sorry about this unintentional mistake,” Gap said, promising to carry out “more rigorous reviews” in the future.
Gap took action after photos began circulating on Chinese social media of a T-shirt with a map that didn’t include Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing regards as Chinese territory. The map also appeared to leave out southern Tibet and the disputed South China Sea, the state-owned Global Times said, adding that it drew hundreds of complaints on Weibo.
“Look, it’s a badly drawn map on a lousy t-shirt,” doesn’t cut it with Chinese nationalists.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UNL Faculty Side With Faculty Member Who Bullied Conservative Student.
HEY, CNN, IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK: Hamas’ use of people as human shields continues, and the incurious journalists moving stories like this are either really lazy or really biased, or both. CNN pulls the heartstrings:
Dozens of funerals were expected to take place after 60 Palestinians were killed in demonstrations, according to figures provided by the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Among the dead were eight children, including eight-month-old Laila Anwar Ghandour. The health ministry said the baby was asphyxiated by tear gas.
The unasked question: who the hell brings an eight-month-old infant to a violent riot/protest? Even worse, it appears CNN may have fallen for a propaganda hoax: AP reporting that:
“Gaza health officials are casting doubt on initial claims that a 9-month-old baby died from Israeli tear gas fired during mass protests on the Gaza border with Israel. A medical doctor said Tuesday that the baby, Layla Ghandour, had a pre-existing medical condition and that he did not believe her death was caused by tear gas.”
That update came the same day as the CNN report, but they apparently couldn’t be bothered to question their narrative.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Hamas Attacks Israel as Embassy Opens in Capital and Much, Much More. “The American Hamas sympathizers in the media and Hollywood remove any agency from the malefactors suggesting that, of course the proper response to the US opening its embassy in Jerusalem is bringing children to a war zone while throwing explosives at border guards.”
EDUCATION MYTHS PERPETUATED: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ most recent significant offering is entitled Report on Public Education Inequity in an Era of Increasing Concentration of Poverty and Resegregation. Alas, like many such reports, it perpetuates several destructive myths. For example, it suggests that school districts with high concentrations of minority or low-income students get fewer actual dollars per students than the average school district. Nope. While pockets of underfunding exist, low-income and high-minority school districts tend to get somewhat more money than the average school district on a per-pupil basis (though they get less per-pupil than some mostly-small, mega-wealthy school districts). This “fewer actual dollars per pupil” myth needs to be corrected; it gives rise to unnecessary resentments. It’s hard to have an honest and productive discussion about how schools should be funded, when people are being led to believe that things are worse than they are (and that racism is to blame). I am certainly willing to entertain the possibility that schools with high concentrations of low-income students need more money than the average school. Indeed, I’m inclined to believe it. But I’m not willing to start from the notion that more money for schools is the primary thing that’s needed to solve the nation’s educational problems.
My Dissenting Statement to the Report on Public Education Inequity in an Era of Increasing Concentration of Poverty and Resegregation tries to deal with some of the realities of school finance. Among other things, it makes the point that the relationship between funding and student success is pretty tenuous. (E.g. Washington, D.C. schools are both the highest spenders and the lowest performers.)
I’m not sure I can fix all that’s wrong with schools today. But I least I can point out when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is on the wrong track.
ELIMINATIONIST FANTASIES TURN OUT TO BE A POOR FOUNDATION FOR POLITICAL SUCCESS: The ‘white minority’ illusion. “The doubling down on identity politics among liberals since Donald Trump’s election follows from something like this ambition to unify non-whites against the Republican Party and in favor of the Democrats. (At the same time, the left’s growing emphasis on intersectionality, which sows division instead of unity by highlighting the distinctive, irreducible grievances suffered by the members of ever-narrower demographic sub-categories, adds a heavy dose of self-contradiction to the project.). It would appear that the “emerging Democratic majority” requires anti-white identity politics as its midwife.”
PRIVACY: Inside the Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers.
Anyone who works in the $200 billion digital advertising industry should be scared of people like Mark Drobnak, because the ad blocker he uses is way more powerful than yours. The college freshman says it feels as though everyone at Rochester Institute of Technology, from his roommate to his professors, has installed some way to ward off online ads. Drobnak is one of the die-hards who goes further, working with a handful of comrades to build what they call “a black hole for advertisements.” His parents say the one he built them works great.
Pi-hole (as in “shut your …”) is a free, open source software package designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, a basic computer that’s popular with DIYers, fits in the palm of your hand, and retails for about $35. Most ad blockers have to be installed on individual devices and work only in web browsers, but Pi-hole blocks ads across an entire network, including in most apps.
Interesting. I get similar results taming the most obnoxious sites using a customizable JavaScript blocker, but it can be tedious to set up and the results aren’t always easy to predict. I’ve thought about picking up a cheap PC and setting it up as a Ubuntu-based web server with ad and tracking firewalls installed, but the effort-to-reward ratio still breaks on my lazy side.
But Pi-Hole installed on a $35 Raspberry Pi is awfully tempting.
MORE FROM SALENA ZITO: ‘We knew exactly who he was when we voted for him.’
“I made a promise to myself, four years out, after Obama won his second term, that I would never vote for a Bush or a Clinton. That was absolute. Nothing would ever change that. I thought they were both corrupt,” he says of the former Democratic nominee and Jeb Bush, son and brother of a former U.S. president.
“When Trump first announced, I laughed. I just couldn’t believe that he even had a chance,” he says, but Harry was dead set on someone outside of the establishment so he started to look at the other choices.
“The only other nonpolitician was Dr. Ben Carson. Everybody else, outside of [Kentucky senator] Rand Paul, I didn’t really have any use for. Put them in a bag and shake them and they all come out the same.”
As the campaign went on he wasn’t committed to anybody. “The one I liked the best was Jim Webb,” Harry says of the Democratic ex-senator from Virginia and former secretary of the navy, “and I thought he was probably the best candidate out of everybody, but he didn’t last except for a couple of months.”
The more he listened as the campaign went on, he explains, the better he understood that the Democrats definitely hated Trump, and the Republican establishment hated Trump. All the lobbyists on K Street hated Trump. The Chinese came out against him. India came out against him. Mexico came out against him.
“I figured I must have a candidate, because everybody who’s coming out against him are all corrupt, and he’s an outsider. So, I said, ‘I think I found my candidate,’ ” says Harry. . . .
And no, he does not care about what Trump tweets. “We knew exactly who he was when we voted for him, tweet and all.”
“What I liked about Trump was that it was more than about Trump, it was about people, it was about being part of something bigger than just me, I felt as though I was part of something important and worthy of accomplishing something better than what have had,” Harry says.
As long as Trump stays away from becoming a Bush or a Clinton and stays tough, Harry is in for the long haul with this new alliance. “If he becomes one of them, then I think this movement continues, without him.”
Yep. Trump’s a manifestation, not a cause.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College tells students to report ‘hate speech’ to police.
HATE CRIMES LAWS ARE A BUST: Robby Soave reports on what he learned at Friday’s hate crimes briefing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Soave wasn’t just a journalist there; he was also a witness. Indeed, he was the only witness in the all-day briefing who argued against these problematic laws.
POLITICO: GOP tax cut not why economy is booming.
Brian Faler:
Republicans facing a tough midterm election season are pointing to the strong economy as proof their new tax law is working its magic.
But as campaign ads tout swelling payrolls and lawmakers spotlight companies handing out employee bonuses, there’s little evidence the tax cuts are already having an impact across the economy, which was already humming even before the law was enacted.
Unemployment, which dropped to 3.9 percent in April, has been declining for years, falling to 4.1 percent before the tax cuts were approved.
The billions in bonuses being handed out are tiny compared to the trillions of dollars in overall wages that Americans workers earn – and with the tight labor market, they might have been handed out anyway.
Meanwhile, the Treasury Department hasn’t even finished writing the new rules spelling out how exactly the new law will work. And the pace of change in business investment and labor supply is typically very slow.
OK, fine — let’s stipulate all that.
But what did change for sure on January 20, 2017 was the business climate, with the end of the Obama Administration’s incessant cronyism and regulatory warfare against unfavored businesses.
And if tax reform’s effects have yet to kick in, we’ll be even more better off when they do.
Finally, despite Faler’s best effort here, I’m not sure “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” is exactly the rallying cry Democrats are looking for.
THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED, FANATICS WOULD BE CLAWING THROUGH OLD RECORDS TO PUNISH PEOPLE WITH IMMIGRANT ANCESTORS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Genealogist trolls Tomi Lahren over comments on immigrants.
Of course, the left tries to turn anything into a race-like issue, in this case treating “immigrants” as something akin to a race: How can you be against “immigrants” if you have ancestors who were “immigrants” themselves.
But a century or more ago, we were a big country still being settled, with basically no taxpayer-funded welfare system. Now we’re something very different. Our immigration policy logically should be different too. But when the only card you’ve got is the race card, it’s natural to try to turn everything into a race issue.
SONNY BUNCH: Donald Trump Is Killing Humor.
Honestly, try to sit through the recent [SNL] sketch in which Stormy Daniels, playing herself, warns Baldwin—legitimately the worst impressionist I have seen get regular airtime on a major broadcast show; it’s still galling they fired Darrell Hammond for Baldwin—that she’s coming for him. I dare you.
These cold opens are the equivalent of an Andy Borowitz column brought to life: a string of references that vaguely resemble humor but are done in such a ham-handed and incompetent way that you are not only unamused, you are vaguely horrified. It’s like the Uncanny Valley of humor. You know it’s a joke but you’re so repulsed by its inability to be truly joke-like that you run away screaming.
Heh™.
And read the whole thing™.
HEATHER WILHELM: Tough times for the resistance?
At first glance, one might think that resistance membership might be at least somewhat exciting and purposeful, not depressing. After all, every few days, some fevered news agency announces some variation of the following: “This is it! We have the smoking gun that will crack the Trump presidency, and it is completely different from the 1,326 purported smoking guns that we thought we had before!”
If you found that headline intriguing, I fear you’ve missed what generally happens next: The story drifts, the supposed smoking gun sputters, and everything slowly morphs into a cable-news cartoon soap opera, narrated by a voice not unlike that of Charlie Brown’s disembodied and unintelligible murmuring teacher.
Depending on the day, the tale in question will likely involve layers of campaign-finance law, the name-dropping of a Russian oligarch, 13 unintelligible memos (probably), Stormy Daniels and her lawyer (definitely), several acts of mind-boggling incompetence from both sides of the aisle, countless insufferable bureaucrats who are wildly overpaid with your hard-earned tax dollars and at least one narrative element that you can’t appropriately discuss with children under the age of 23.
As an aside, the previous sentence is a fairly good illustration of why I think everyone should lean libertarian — well, that, and an alarming recent Washington Post piece that suggested D.C. hipsters be called “govsters.” But that’s a whole other column.
“Well, whatever,” a resistance loyalist might say. “Didn’t you read ‘All the President’s Men’ ”? (Author’s note: I did.) “Drip, drip, drip,” said loyalist might continue. “The truth shall potentially out, and this is not like the late 1990s at all!”
That’s right. In the ’90s, the Democrat-Media Complex provided the Clintons with just enough political cover to keep them in office. Today, that same (though enlarged) DMC has been trying to remove Trump from office since Day One, but has yet to reveal a smoking gun. And yet they persist.
So while it’s true that there are a lot of drips, it would be needlessly rude to call them that.
MORE PEOPLE NEED TO SHOOT: Shooting an ‘assault weapon’ helped me understand the gun debate.
The gun in my hands could be made illegal if the Delaware General Assembly passes Senate Bill 163 — the “assault weapons ban” that has become the most fiercely-contested legislation of this session. It would be a felony to buy, sell or transfer it — even to own it, unless you could prove you bought it before the ban took effect.
This particular gun is owned by Jim Bowman, president of the Delaware Rifle and Pistol Club outside Wilmington. He and another club leader, Roger Boyce, graciously invited me to come shoot so I could get a better understanding of why gun owners like them oppose SB 163.
The gun is fitted with an electronic sight, so, even as a relative novice, it doesn’t take long before I’m rapidly cycling between five different targets, the bullets chewing big holes in the orange circles.
There is a trance-like feeling to concentrating utterly on a target, focusing on the minute muscle movements that separate a hit from a miss. I can quickly understand the appeal of sport-shooting.
More profoundly, holding this firearm is immensely empowering. I understand how it would give its owner a sense of strength in protecting himself and his family.
Yep.
ARKANSAS JUDGE ISSUES TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER AGAINST POLITICAL AD ALLEGED (BUT NOT YET PROVEN) TO BE LIBELOUS: Uh … I thought judges weren’t supposed to do that. More significantly, First Amendment guru Eugene Volokh agrees.
THIS IS A PROBLEM MOST COUNTRIES WOULD, WELL, KILL TO HAVE: Training Kills More Troops Than War. Here’s What’s Being Done About It.
DON SURBER NOTES THE CLASSISM INHERENT IN A LOT OF PRESS SADNESS:
IS THIS AN IMPROVEMENT? Jails Are Replacing Actual Visits With Video Calls. “Theoretically, these products could make it easier for inmates to maintain their relationships with family and friends outside. But many jails have moved in the opposite direction, using the advent of these ‘video visitation’ services as an excuse to restrict or eliminate traditional in-person visits.”
STRIKE EAGLE OVER IRAQ: Photo was snapped on May 5th.