MY TAKE ON THE KAVANAUGH APPOINTMENT is up at USA Today.
Archive for 2018
July 9, 2018
NOT THE ONION: Feminist Apparel CEO Fires Entire Staff After They Learn He’s An Admitted Sexual Abuser.
The employees of the popular clothing company Feminist Apparel thought they were creating tools for the resistance. The online store’s viral shirts and accessories — which feature sayings like “Cats against catcalls” and “Trans rights are human rights” — became staples at events like the Women’s March and Pride. The brand amassed over 360k followers on Instagram and Facebook and was behind viral moments like the “No Catcall Zone” signs that took over NYC. Plus every item sold helped support an independent artist, and in many cases, a partnering organization that would receive part of the proceeds.
It all came to a grinding halt in June of 2018 when Feminist Apparel staff discovered that the brand’s founder and CEO Alan Martofel had an admitted history of sexually abusing women. In fact, he claims it’s the reason why he started the company in the first place. After asking for his resignation, all nine employees were fired without notice or severance. (Only Martfel and an outside consultant remained.)
“This is the patriarchy and toxic masculinity at its fucking finest,” says Rebecca Green, the company’s now-former art director. “I feel righteous and angry. I feel supported by my coworkers and friends. I also feel tired. I feel incredibly sorry knowing that there are survivors in this office who were led to believe that their contributions to this company were directly going to creating a safe space and platform for survivors, feminists, and marginalized identities. As an artist myself creating work based on my own experiences with the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, and harassment for this company — and by extension this man — I feel used and willfully mislead.”
As Richard Fernandez says, the torpedoes the Democrats put in the water to sink Trump keep circling back on them.
JENNA ELLIS: Judge Brett Kavanaugh is Neil Gorsuch 2.0, a huge accomplishment for Trump. We can hope.
On Facebook, Prof. Bainbridge weighs in: “I would have preferred Amy Barrett but Brett Kavanaugh is a great choice. I look forward to supporting him.”
Randy Barnett: “Kavanaugh’s appointment would move the Court in the direction of textualism and originalism. He’s very interested in the separation of powers in general and with respect to the administrative state in particular.”
AKHIL AMAR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: A Liberal’s Case for Brett Kavanaugh.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Robin Wright Had No Idea About Kevin Spacey, Honest.
Savannah Guthrie asks a good question here: “Was there any kind of red flag or anything that would’ve made you think this is possible?” I know, right? How could a woman work that closely with a man for so many years and claim to have no idea he was a serial sexual predator?
* * * * * * * *
I don’t believe for one second that these two women had no idea what was going on right under their noses. Even if it didn’t happen to them, even if they didn’t witness it personally, they had to know what was going on. It’s called an “open secret” for a reason. But they kept their mouths shut because they wanted to keep working. And now they’re claiming they had no idea, because they want to keep working.
Read the whole thing.
FROM THE YALE JOURNAL ON REGULATION: All of Brett Kavanaugh’s Concurrences and Dissents.
THIS SEEMS PLAUSIBLE:
OPEN THREAD: It’s yours, to make of what you can.
IT’S BRETT KAVANAUGH. With a narrow majority, Trump goes for a safe pick. Of course, he’ll still be Hitler. Because whoever the nominee was, he or she was going to be Hitler.
WHEN ARCHAIC IS NEW: How hardy volcanic microbes helped track down an anti-aging “superhero” protein.
Faster, please.
NO NOMINEE YET, BUT THE TEEVEE IS SHOWING DEM PROTESTERS WITH PREPRINTED SIGNS IN FRONT OF THE SUPREME COURT BUILDING. The level of enthusiasm is less than impressive.
UPDATE: Miraculously, right after Trump’s announcement they had preprinted anti-Kavanaugh signs. I guess they had bins of signs for each potential nominee.
OLD-SCHOOL ANTI-CATHOLICISM: The Daily Beast Sounds the Alarm About a Papist Menace.
JOURNALISM: “MSNBC Does Not Merely Permit Fabrications Against Democratic Party Critics. It Encourages and Rewards Them.” Says. . . Glenn Greenwald.
DON’T TRUST “MALE FEMINISTS:” Feminist Apparel CEO Fires Entire Staff After They Learn He’s An Admitted Sexual Abuser. One would need a heart of stone not to laugh.
“GROPE:” Justin Trudeau hates this t-shirt, so get yours from The Rebel.
Trudeau hates this satirical t-shirt. I know that, because when I tweeted a picture of it, the Liberals went nuts.
Get it at GropeShirt.com!
It’s humorous satire, but it makes an important point — a point Trudeau would rather we all forgot.
Indeed.™
KURT SCHLICHTER EXPLAINS: Democrats Love Socialism Because They Want To Take Your Stuff And Enslave You. “Ocasio-Cortez is an idiot, like all adolescent socialists, so she qualified to be the Great Pinko Hope for a party in decline. Here’s how bad she is – she apparently went to college, got a degree in economics, and still ended up a socialist. If she went to med school, she would have probably left a chain smoker.”
Related: Actually, Socialism Does Work:
I think the leaders of the socialist movement are perfectly well aware that the inevitable result of socialism is tyranny and mass poverty. But for them, this isn’t a bug, it is a feature. In fact, it is the whole point. Socialism is now, and always has been, a pretext under which power-mad psychopaths seize power and terrorize their fellow humans.
Viewed with cold realism, socialism works very well for those who bring it about. It worked for Lenin and Stalin. It almost worked for Trotsky, but socialism is like “Game of Thrones”–it is a risky business. It didn’t work for the Old Bolsheviks for the same reason: they lost out to the more vicious and more power-crazed socialist, Stalin. It worked for Yezhov, Yagoda and Beria, although they, too, lost out after years of demented revels. It worked for Khruschev, Brezhnev and Andropov.
Socialism worked for Mao. It worked for Fidel Castro. It worked for Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceaușescu, until the very end. It worked for Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, again with sad ends that didn’t inflict anywhere near enough pain to negate the years of glory and power that went before. It worked for Hugo Chavez, who like Castro, parlayed socialism into a multi-billion dollar fortune, and it has worked so far for Nicolas Maduro. All of these psychopaths, and many others, got exactly what they wanted out of socialism. From their point of view, it is a successful ideology.
While the vast majority suffer under socialism, such suffering is by no means universal. Any number of commissars, Stasi informants, Cuban snitches, petty apparatchiks with dachas, etc., have parlayed their sadistic tendencies into good livings and what they want most, power over others. If you follow Twitter, or generally pay attention to the American Left, you see an army of would-be commissars who yearn for the day when they can accuse a neighbor of wrongthink and have him sent to an American Gulag. In the meantime, they settle for mob action, “doxxing,” and so on.
Socialism isn’t misguided, it is evil.
True. Related: “Under capitalism, the rich grow powerful. Under socialism, the powerful grow rich — and everyone else grows poor.”
PROBLEM: Shocking study reveals 90% of global plastic waste comes from just TEN rivers in Asia and Africa. So while woke Westerners are beating us over the head about straws and grocery bags, the real source of the problem is elsewhere.
I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: So Long TNT, There’s a New Explosive in Town: Bis-oxadiazole could replace TNT and other explosives in military ordnance.
TEST DRIVE: 2018 Lexus RX450hL AWD. It’s longer, but is it long enough?