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Archive for 2018
December 18, 2018
THIS IS YOUR MIND ON GLENN GREENWALD: Everyone is misreporting the Texas BDS lawsuit:
In short, this story is being widely misreported, the hysterical claims that Amawi is being forced to sign a pro-Israel pledge or personally do or not do anything in particular regarding Israel outside the context of her business are false, and the First Amendment lawsuit will almost certainly lose. Moreover, it’s nearly impossible to think of a way in which Ms. Amawi’s speech pathology business would ever have an opportunity to in any way boycott or otherwise economically harm Israel, rendering this pure political theater.
THE SOBER MAJESTY OF THE LAW: Byron York: Judge’s accusations mar Michael Flynn sentencing hearing.
The sentencing of former Trump White House national security adviser Michael Flynn on a single charge of lying to the FBI turned into a dramatic scene in a Washington, D.C., courthouse Tuesday. Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan excoriated Flynn for what is called uncharged conduct — that is, for crimes that Flynn has not been formally accused of committing.
In open court, Sullivan raised the question of whether Flynn, a retired Army three-star general with more than three decades of service, might have committed treason. He questioned whether Flynn sold out the United States. He said Flynn had served as an unregistered foreign agent (for Turkey) inside the White House.
“Arguably, that undermines everything that this flag over here stands for,” Sullivan said, gesturing toward the American flag in the courtroom, according to reporters who were present. “Arguably, you sold your country out.”
All were terribly damaging accusations, especially coming from a federal judge sitting in court. And all were false, given that Flynn did not commit treason, did not sell out the United States, and did not serve as an unregistered foreign agent in the White House. There’s a reason Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller did not charge Flynn with those crimes, and the reason is he did not commit them.
It appeared Sullivan had a momentary loss of reason or didn’t have his facts straight, or both. He later walked back some of his comments, but the damage was done.
People filed judicial ethics complaints against Brett Kavanaugh for less.
NARRATIVE: ALL WE NEED TO STOP HARASSMENT IS TO PUT MORE WOMEN IN POSITIONS OF POWER. Reality:
Beverly A. Kopper, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, will resign just months after the university system opened a second investigation into her husband’s alleged sexual misconduct, she announced on Monday.
Kopper’s husband, Pete Hill, was banned from the campus in June and stripped of an honorary position when an investigation found that he had sexually harassed two women on the Whitewater staff. The university system began a second investigation in September.
After news broke about the results of the first investigation, more women came forward to describe their interactions with Hill and to accuse him of sexual harassment. Some of the women said Kopper was in part responsible for the harassment, and called for her resignation.
Oh, well.
AND YOU THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: “Despite a number of studies questioning the usefulness of very low-salt diets in the last few years, most major medical organizations continue to recommend them. We would assume that they do so from a strong base of evidence. But with respect to heart failure, there is a shockingly small amount of evidence.”
I’m constantly astounded at how many apparently settled items in medicine turn out to be based on weak evidence — or supposition — mindlessly repeated for many years.
WHY IS THE NEW YORK TIMES RECOMMENDING ANTI-SEMITIC CONSPIRACY THEORIES?
So imagine Cockburn’s surprise yesterday morning when the Times ran The Color Purple author Alice Walker’s recommendation of And the Truth Shall Set You Free by David Icke. As the truth might well set you free, Cockburn can tell you there’s no truth to David Icke, a recycler of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and myths about aliens in human form. And the truth about Alice Walker is that she is an anti-Semitic fool.
In 2013, Walker chose Icke’s Human Race Get Off Your Knees as the one book she would take if she were stranded on a desert island. Icke’s book claims that the planet is ruled by shape-shifting reptilians and ‘Rothschild Zionists’. In 2017, she posted a poem on her website — it’s still there — that called the Israeli state ‘demonic / To the core’, claimed that its unique ‘evil’ was inspired by the ‘poison’ of the Talmud:
Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only
That, but to enjoy it?
Are three-year-old (and a day) girls eligible for marriage and intercourse?
Are young boys fair game for rape?
Must even the best of the Goyim (us, again) be killed?And so on. Foul drivel, indicative of an enfeebled mind given to racist conspiracy theories. The sort of person that the New York Times, so woke and careful in its every statement, so proud of choosing what’s fit to print, would want nothing to do with. The sort of person, really, that any sane and civil person would want nothing to do with. A racist, a spreader of hate and lies, and a promoter of shoddy and malevolent conspiracy theories by people like David Icke.
And even beyond most anti-Semites, Icke is some piece of work; as Charles C.W. Cooke writes, followed a quote of Icke’s own writing, “This is a guy who believes quite seriously that:”
An inter-dimensionary race of beings called the Archons have hijacked our world and have stopped us from realising our true potential. Instead, they keep us trapped in “five sense reality”, feeding off the negative energy created by fear and hate. Frequencies broadcast from a “hexagonal storm” on Saturn are amplified through the hollow structure of our artificial moon (whereas a standard conspiracy theorist might be satisfied by not believing that man walked on the Moon, Icke doesn’t even believe in the Moon itself). A genetically modified human/Archon elite of shape-shifting reptilians manipulate global events to keep us in this state of fear. Only by waking up to the truth and filling our hearts with love can we defeat this Archontic influence.
Big, if true.
AS I SAID, THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON: With the ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ Uproar, Islam and #MeToo Intersect.
SAN JOSE MERCURY: Video shows Oakland man telling FBI he wanted to kill 10,000 in Bay Area.
An Oakland man hoped to kill 10,000 Bay Area residents, according to court records that reveal a chilling plan of planting bombs around Oakland and UC Berkeley, blowing up a gay bar in San Francisco, setting arson fires around the Berkeley hills and distributing poisoned cocaine in local night clubs.
Amer Alhaggagi, whose last name is also spelled “Al-Haggagi” in court records, was caught on video discussing the plots with an undercover FBI agent.
Alhaggagi pleaded guilty in July to attempting to give material aid to a terrorist organization, stemming from when he helped set up propaganda social media accounts for people connected to the Islamic State, known as ISIL and ISIS. He also pleaded guilty to three identity-theft counts. He appeared in federal court Monday for a sentencing hearing, which was continued to next month.
“I want to make it to a point where every American here thinks twice or three times before he leaves his home,” Alhaggagi said on the video, which was obtained by KQED. “Like, ‘Is it necessary for me to leave right now?’ That’s how I want it to be.”
But in a letter to the court, Alhaggagi claimed the purported plots were fantasies he concocted out of boredom and said he had no intentions of committing terrorism.
“Everything was a joke to me, … I didn’t think anyone was taking me seriously,” Alhaggagi wrote to the court.
Read the whole thing. The Merc’s article doesn’t seem to describe Alhaggagi as a modern-day Merry Prankster.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 10 Budget-Priced .22 Rifles Under $200.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Trentonian Declares “We’re All Gonna Die.”
To be fair, having spent a fair amount of time in Trenton, NJ over the years, I can understand how the hometown paper reached that conclusion.
(Classical reference in headline.)
THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD: Scott Johnson of Power Line (whose grandfather immigrated to the US in 1916 from Russia and was drafted the following year and served in the Battle of Argonne Forest) attended the afternoon screening of Peter Jackson’s new WWI documentary and returns impressed — at the both the film and its crowd size: “Something is happening here. Each showing of the film at the Edina [MN] AMC yesterday was sold out. The film is to be shown again on December 27 in theaters playing Fathom Events. Highly recommended.”
Indeed. Read the whole thing.™
UPDATE: IMDB notes that something is happening indeed:
Jackson’s World War I documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old” earned $2.3 million at 1,142 theaters in North America on Monday.
Warner Bros. released the movie five weeks after it aired on Armistice Day on the BBC. The studio partnered with Fathom Events in the U.S. for a one-day event, marking the largest single night for a Fathom documentary, a spokesman said.
That’s awesome; the good-sized theater we saw the movie yesterday in Fort Worth had quite a crowd for a Fathom-type show.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER… MEASUREY THING: Measuring Left-Wing Authoritarianism in America.
ONWARD AND UPWARD: Trump Signs Order To Create U.S. Space Command. “The new order is separate from the president’s much touted goal of creating a ‘Space Force’ as an independent armed service branch, but is considered a first step in that direction.”
I’ve been using a Space Force coffee mug at the office for most of the semester, which kinda shocked a few of my serving military students until I explained that it was just something I bought off Amazon, not leakage from a secret program. . . .
YOU CAN BUILD SOME NUCLEAR PLANTS TO POWER THEM: The EV Is the Car of the Future, and It Might Always Be.
BRUCE BAWER: What’s the Deal With All This Unrest in Paris?
In fact, when you come right down to it, the whole thing is really pretty simple. On one side you’ve got these mobs of immigrants, most of whom have no business being in France in the first place, but who, instead of keeping a low profile and showing some gratitude for what the French state has already given them, have a breathtaking sense of entitlement that makes them feel free to charge the very temples of French culture and issue arrogant demands. On the other side, you have humble French workers, most of them from the provinces, who have seen their wages stagnate, in large part because of the mass influx of competitive immigrant labor, and seen their taxes soar, in large part because of the government’s need to fund ballooning social-welfare benefits for immigrants who choose not to work.
There would seem to be a simple, if not exactly easy fix to this mess.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The Progressive Patriarchy.
We are also meant to chant along with the crowd that Ponce is a woman. Anything less is transphobia. Decency and charity are no longer enough; affirmation and glorification — ideally before as large an audience as possible — are the only acceptable course.
And what does this new frontier of progressivism mean for other planks of the platform? The unassailable dogma that women are constantly oppressed and subjugated by the patriarchy — that we can only be free if we recognize and disempower the tyranny of white male privilege that prevents women from expressing ourselves and taking control of our lives — requires that there is such a thing as womanhood, and that it can be defined consistently.
Ponce’s much-hailed appearance in the Miss Universe contest, on the other hand, implies societal acceptance of the idea that men can in fact be women.
These two doctrines of progressivism are in fundamental tension. Even if one accepts the notion that some biological males can feel so female that they essentially are, in some intangible way, women, such a view necessarily conflicts with the feminist claim that there is something unique about being a woman — and that womanhood deserves to be shielded from the encroachment of male power.
The wholehearted embrace of transgender ideology necessarily, and quite intentionally, erases womanhood. It allows biological males to don the mantle of femaleness simply by asserting that it is their birthright. There has never been a more patriarchal claim.
How does this contradiction play itself out in the coming years?
WELL, GOOD: Texas girl’s inoperable brain tumor vanishes.
PROGRESS? California’s homeless number drops a little as programs appear to pay off. “Investing billions of dollars in affordable housing and homeless programs in recent years has apparently put the brakes on what had been a surge in California’s homeless population, causing it to dip by 1 percent this year, a federal report released Monday showed.”
Billions for a one percent drop? Color me unimpressed. And incensed, if I were still a California taxpayer.
RINGING IN THE NEW YEAR WITH A RECESSION?
If the economy goes into recession in 2019, President Trump may well relish having the Democratic-controlled House to blame. It’s unlikely that House Democrats will have much ability to influence U.S. economic policy, other than blocking any new initiatives from the Trump administration. But the timing for them would be pretty bad — they step into the new majority and the economy suddenly slows on their watch.
No doubt Trump would exploit that calamity for political gain; just as we know the left would never let such a crisis — or non-crisis — go to waste.