LOW UNEMPLOYMENT & RISING WAGES? THAT’S HORRIBLE!!: Or at least that’s what CNBC thinks.
Archive for 2018
July 8, 2018
THE SUPREME COURT SWEEPSTAKES: Jonathan Adler discusses the top candidates … or at least the candidates that somebody said were at the top.
UPDATE: Paul Mirengoff discusses the same four.
TOXIC MASCULINITY, THAI-STYLE: The ultimate sacrifice. (Update on rescue operation here.)
July 7, 2018
AT AMAZON, summer deals on Cordless Power Tools.
OPEN THREAD: Make me proud.
GREAT MOMENTS IN INTERSECTIONALITY. It’s come to this: New Ant-Man film criticized for misrepresenting disabilities, falling back on ‘white science.’ Word salad alert:
Instead of helping Ava find a way to cope (and not necessarily eradicate) her disability, the film seeks to provide a cure. It does so with its own version of “white science,” a term coined by author Carol Clover in her psychoanalytic exploration of horror films, Men, Women, and Chainsaws. It refers to anything considered to be “Western traditional medicine,” usually dispensed or controlled by a white man. The quantum realm functions as this film’s white science, a magical but wholly scientific world discovered by Hank Pym. Once she is freed from the realm, Janet offers to save Ava by transferring her quantum energy into her. She lays her hands on Ava—a technique often associated with tent revival preachers who “cured” poor, afflicted people by touch—and saves the woman through scientific technology.
One could say Janet’s benevolence absolves Hank of his sins [of white privilege], or posits her as a white savior for this disabled woman of color, but it’s unclear whether any of that is directly coded into the film.
As Twitchy notes in response, “We think disabled audiences were there to see superheroes fantastically shrink and grow huge and blow stuff up and defeat the bad guys, but what do we know?”
Related: Identity Politics Totalitarianism.
And for your check-the-box retro needs, here’s A Guide to Properly Hating Old Movies.
TELL ME ALL YOUR THOUGHTS ON GOD, ‘CAUSE I’D REALLY LIKE TO MEET HER: The Episcopal Church Eyes Giving God a Sex Change.
(Classical reference in headline.)
QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Can Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Save the Planet?
To achieve this ambitious goal, she has proposed implementing what she calls a “Green New Deal,” a Franklin Delano Roosevelt–like plan to spur “the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs,” according to her official website. “The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,” she told HuffPost last week. “We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.”
A New, New Deal? Treating global warming as the moral equivalent of World War II? How fresh and original! As the legendary surgeon Dr. Rumack would say, good luck. I want you to know we’re all counting on you.
KURT SCHLICHTER IS ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Should We Invade Mexico?
I’m so old, I remember when the question du jour was whether or not to invade Canada.
I’m pretty sure the latter is the equivalent of going into Wisconsin.
FLASHBACK: The 1911 Heat Wave Was So Deadly It Drove People Insane. “The July 1911 heat wave killed thousands of New Englanders and sent many over the brink of madness. During 11 hellish days, horses dropped in the street. Babies didn’t wake up from their naps. Boats in Providence Harbor oozed pitch and began to take on water. Tar in the streets bubbled like hot syrup. Trees shed their leaves, grass turned to dust and cows’ milk started to dry up. In every major northeastern city, the sweltering heat drove people to suicide. On July 4, temperatures hit 103 in Portland, 104 in Boston (a record that still stands), 105 in Vernon, Vt., and 106 in Nashua, N.H., and Bangor, Maine.”
BECAUSE “CHILD PORN” LAWS GO WAY TOO FAR, AND SOME PROSECUTORS ARE STUPID: Man Faces 30 Years in Prison on Child Porn Charges for Taking Sexy Photos of 17-Year-Old Girlfriend When He was 20. n “The man merely took consensual, sexually suggestive pictures of his 17-year-old girlfriend when he was 20. The age of consent in Ohio is 16, so it was legal for the man, Edward Marrero, to have sex with his girlfriend. It was a crime, however, to photograph her the in the nude, because the federal definition of child pornography covers images of anyone under the age of 18.”
EZRA LEVANT: “Male feminist Justin Trudeau is just as handsy as Bill Clinton was.”
This Creston groping incident would sink another politician. In fact, Trudeau himself has fired a number of Liberal MPs from his caucus for less.
The Canadian Media Party ignored the story.
But slowly, as the foreign press ate the Canadian Media Party’s lunch on this, a few Canadian reporters summoned the courage to put a question to their precious leader. But it was just stranger and stranger.
The UK Guardian has the headline, “Trudeau: I apologised to reporter behind groping claim. Canadian PM ‘very confident’ he did not act inappropriately at music festival in 2000.” Say what you will about Trudeau, but Prime Minister Zoolander sure can tap dance:
Trudeau addressed the allegation briefly on Monday, describing the day of the event as a “good day” and one in which he did not recall any “negative interactions”.
After calls for an independent investigation into the claim and opposition criticism of his initial response, Trudeau addressed the issue at length on Thursday.
“I’ve been reflecting very carefully on what I remember from that incident almost 20 years ago,” he told reporters. “I do not feel that I acted inappropriately in any way. But I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently.”
When asked about why he had apologised to the woman after the alleged incident, Trudeau said: “If I apologised later, it would be because I sensed that she was not entirely comfortable with the interaction that we had.”
Pressed further, he acknowledged he had atoned for his actions at the time. “I apologised in the moment,” he said, without giving details.
Trudeau said he had not attempted to contact the woman, nor had anyone from his team. “We don’t think that would be appropriate at all.”
He said the issues surrounding sexual assault and other behaviours had been something he had been actively engaged in since his early 20s. He characterised the allegation against him as part of an “awakening” currently taking place in society.
“I don’t want to speak for her, I don’t want to presume how she feels now,” Trudeau said. “I’m responsible for my side of the interaction, which certainly – as I said – I don’t feel was in anyway untoward.”
He continued: “But at the same time, this lesson that we are learning – and I’ll be blunt about it – often a man experiences an interaction as being benign, or not inappropriate, and a woman, particularly in a professional context can experience it differently. And we have to respect that, and reflect on it.”
As Rex Murphy of Canada’s National Post writes, in an article found via Small Dead Animals titled, “Trudeau’s ‘awakening’ on groping allegations is (ahem) a bit of a reach,” “And as for the incident being ‘an awakening we’re having as a society,’ that is delusionary nonsense, a string of ‘tone’ words, the vague, anxious music of virtue-signalling hummed by someone in a tight political spot. The thought is inescapable that whoever is devising the ‘communications strategy’ on this incident has a grudge against the prime minister, and is running a private experiment to see how many strange and illogical ramblings he can put in his mouth.”
When does he vow to produce more feminist-themed motion pictures and double-down on his fight against Trump and the NRA?
(Incidentally do not miss the photo of young Zoolander Trudeau, complete with exotic facial topiary and stylin’ shades from the 2000 Creston festival that accompanies Murphy’s article.)
ALL THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE: Dr. Bastiat on Ricochet goes to get a haircut and learns of the small businesses that never were.
The damage wrought by excessive red tape for business start ups is mostly unseen. Even would-be small business owners never know how things would have turned out if they had been allowed to follow their dreams.
GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T LAUGH HERE, THIS IS A COMEDY SHOW! Mrs. Jimmy Kimmel: I Said ‘What The F?’ to Stop Hillary Pantsuit Jokes.
Illustration of how the conversation went, via Jon Gabriel of Ricochet.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The 25 Most Bad-Ass Action Movie Quotes of All Time.
NOWHERE NEAR ME, ALAS, BUT THAT’S HARDLY A SURPRISE: In a year, Earth will experience another total solar eclipse.
GRAY LADY RESORTS TO CLICKBAIT:
● Shot: Anne Frank’s Family Was Thwarted by U.S. Immigration Rules, Research Shows.
—Headline, the New York Times, yesterday.
● Chaser:
A new exhibition at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Americans and the Holocaust, explores Americans’ knowledge of and responses to Nazism, war, and genocide. An unstated question runs through the photographs, films, and artifacts: What explains FDR’s apparent indifference to the plight of the Jews? If he’d had complete freedom to act without concern for the political consequences, what would he have done? Visitors leave the museum without answers.
Roosevelt didn’t address these issues publicly, but confidential files kept in his personal safe in the White House and released to the public decades after his death, as well as correspondence in his personal files, provide valuable clues. They make it clear that the question of where to settle the Jews had been on FDR’s mind for years. While he was uncertain about whether they would be better off on the slopes of the Andes or the savannahs of central Africa, there was one place he knew he didn’t want them: the United States of America.
—New Documents Reveal FDR’s Eugenic Project to ‘Resettle’ Jews During World War II, Tablet Magazine, April 30.
Linking to the Tablet article, fellow Insta-co-blogger David Bernstein wrote, “My grandparents cried when FDR died — that was the wrong reaction.”
SO DON’T EXPECT AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: NASA Reveals Experimental Quiet Supersonic Plane.