Archive for 2018
January 27, 2018
WEIRD, BECAUSE ALL THE EXPERTS TOLD ME THAT THIS KIND OF THING WOULD NEVER HAPPEN: FedEx to invest $3.2 billion in people and facilities in response to tax reform.
THEY DON’T PAY ME THAT MUCH AT TENNESSEE: New U.S. Attorney Takes 65% Pay Cut From His Law Prof Salary ($574,232).
LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT CHECKERS AND EDITORS: 15 Times Major Media Outlets Used a Statistic about Plastic Straws Based on Research by a 9-Year-Old.
TAMARA KEEL LOOKS AT THE Kimber Mini-Me Pistols.
AT AMAZON, January Deals on Appliances.
IT’S AS IF THE NCAA IS REALLY JUST A CARTEL PROTECTING UNIVERSITIES, AND NOT A BUNCH OF GOOD GUYS AT ALL? Report: NCAA President Mark Emmert Was Personally Informed About 37 MSU Athlete Sex Assault Cases In 2010, Did Nothing.
MICHAEL WALSH: The Wreck of Hillary Clinton.
Read the whole thing.
BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: Culture Wars Have Ruined American Politics. I Pray Britain Avoids the Same Fate.
True. British conservatives rolled over for the left without a fight in the 1960s and ‘70s.
(Classical reference in headline.)
THE CHALLENGE OF SCALE: January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.
The extermination camps were different. The Nazis built only six, and for just one overriding purpose: the destruction of European Jewry. The vast majority of the 1.1 million Jews deported to Auschwitz never entered its concentration camp at all. They didn’t last the few weeks that most other prisoners did. They lasted less than an hour. When their trains arrived, these Jews (and it was only the Jews who were brought this way) were pulled from the lethally packed cars, stripped, and separated into men, women, and children. A few adults were pulled aside if they looked healthy or were known to have special skills. The rest were marched a few hundred yards down the line to the gas chambers. The largest held 2,000 people at a time. They were made to look like showers, but the pipes were filled not with water, but with a delousing pesticide called Zyklon B. Once released, the gas took only 20 minutes to kill everyone inside. It took half a day for the Sonderkommandos (Jewish prisoners forced to run the crematoria) to haul the bodies upstairs to the furnaces for burning.
Dead within an hour of arrival and, the same day, nothing but ash in the air. Some 960,000 Jews died at Auschwitz. That is more than the total combined number of American deaths in every war fought since 1865. If buried in 5-by-8-foot graves (the average dimensions at Arlington National Cemetery), they would fill an area larger than New York’s Central Park. Their names would fill the panels of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial more than 16 times over.
But there are no mass graves at Auschwitz, no physical markers that convey the magnitude of what happened. All that a visitor can see are the ruins of a half-sunken gas chamber, which the Nazis blew up as they retreated before the Red Army. It is less than half the size of a regulation basketball court. There were six other such chambers at the camp— all together making up an area no larger than a high school gymnasium. One looks at their mangled ruins—some charred brick, a bit of twisted metal, an empty hole in the ground—and the mind reels. How could a million souls have disappeared into a space so small?
Human beings are simply not equipped to handle such a mismatch in scale. We need visceral guideposts and personal experiences to understand things emotionally. The Nazis exploited this truth to diabolical ends.
Read the whole thing.
SWAMP DRAINING: Frustrated State Department employees hire attorneys, charging ‘political retribution.’
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has made clearing a backlog of FOIA requests a priority and reassigned staff to what State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert has called “an all-hands on deck” effort to clear the backlog. Significant progress has been made, and the number of outstanding requests — which stood at 22,000 in January 2017 — has been reduced to about 13,000, Tillerson said in November, adding that he hopes the backlog will be cleared by the end of 2018.
The backlog grew over the last several years in part due to numerous requests from journalists and conservative groups, including Judicial Watch and Citizens United, for records relating to Hillary Clinton’s emails.
“Those helping with FOIA requests have a range of skills and backgrounds, from interns to deputy assistant secretaries,” Nauert told CNN. “The assignments are temporary — some staffing the office are simply between assignments as they determine their next step.”
But many of those assigned to the “FOIA Surge” effort resemble a band of misfit toys*, including several ambassadors returning from overseas and senior career and civil service members who were detailed to other agencies. Others worked in offices created by Obama as policy priorities, which the Trump administration has announced it intends to close.
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the civil servants. Read the whole thing, which is schadenfreudelicious.
* Likely in more ways than one.
LICENSE TO KILLJOY: Millennial SJWs are trying to kill the highly problematic James Bond.
ALSO, WHAT WE CALL “TITLE IX” HAS NO REAL CONNECTION TO THE ACTUAL LANGUAGE OF TITLE IX: Title IX Is an Insult to Victims of Sexual Assault.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Why the Academic Left Fears and Loathes Dr. Jordan Peterson.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
THE SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE has a lot of questions for Donna Brazile. There’s a lot here. Just look at all the people named in paragraph 12.
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PAGING WINSTON SMITHNOWICKI: “Polish Parliament Votes to Criminalize Any Mention of Polish Crimes During the Holocaust.” Not that I believe any enforcement of this law would succeed in the ECHR under Article 10, but speech bullies rarely care about a law’s infirmity as long as they can bring the pain for speaking up.
According to the law, which was approved on Friday by the country’s lower parliament, anyone who publicly attributes guilt or complicity to the Polish state for crimes committed by Nazi Germany, war crimes or other crimes against humanity, will be liable to criminal proceedings. Punishment will also be imposed on those who are seen to “deliberately reduce the responsibility of the ‘true culprits’ of these crimes.”
The European Court of Human Rights has spanked Poland’s judiciary before for enforcing judgments against political speech. Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression Center (where I serve pro bono as one of their experts) details Ziembinski v. Poland where a writer was punished for calling a local politician “a “numbskull”, “poser” and “dim-witted official.” That sounds like most local officials I know.
As to the new law, it’s doomed on extraterritorial reach as well: “The new law will apply both to Polish citizens and to foreigners regardless which country the statement is supposed to have been made in.”
Good luck enforcing a judgment enforcing that law in a US Court:
The SPEECH Act provides that a domestic court “shall not recognize or enforce a foreign judgment for defamation” unless it satisfies both First Amendment and due process considerations.
The law also forbids use of the term “Polish death camp” to describe the death camps where Jews and others were murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War.
THIS WENT BADLY: This Mom Went To Her Doctor For Postpartum Depression—And Was Escorted To The ER By The Police; Ten hours later, she reportedly left the emergency room without even seeing an M.D. Odds-on, though, they still sent her a bill.
ON THE ONE HAND THIS STINKS, ON THE OTHER HAND, POLICE HAVE ALREADY BEEN DOING THIS FOR A DECADE: Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Means ICE Will Track Your License Plate Even if You’re Not an Immigrant.
AT AMAZON, the Valentine’s Day Gift Shop.
CHARDONNAY IS A HELLUVA DRUG: ‘Activist bitches supporting bitches’: Hillary posts bizarre ‘feminist’ video hours after it emerged she refused to fire top campaign aide accused of sexually harassing a subordinate.
Related: “To every Democrat still wondering how you possibly lost in 2016, look no further.”