TIANA LOWE: Megyn Kelly is being fired because she shone too much light on NBC’s #MeToo problem. Now that she’s out, they can begin the process of rehabilitating Matt Lauer.
Archive for 2018
October 28, 2018
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS. Ask the Rabbi: Why Don’t Jews Believe in Original Sin?
October 27, 2018
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OPEN THREAD: Enjoy.
IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER, BECAUSE IT WAS GOOD FOR THE CAUSE: Matthew Shepard Is the World’s Most Famous Gay Hate Crime Victim. But Was He Really Killed for Being Gay? “That’s right: One of Shepard’s killers was queer. Jimenez found through his reporting that McKinney had been Shepard’s lover. Sure, it’s possible that he had some internalized homophobia, but the narrative that Shepard was killed by bigot rednecks who targeted him for being gay is not, according to Jimenez, actually true. They killed him over meth. What’s more, Jimenez argues that Laramie wasn’t a hotbed of idiocy and homophobia either. It was a college town, home to the University of Wyoming. And like most college towns, it was, and is, quite liberal and even gay-friendly. That truth got lost as the story spread, and Laramie became a parody of white trash ignorance and bigotry.”
THEY’VE ALL GONE CRAZY: Guardian reporter screams at ‘anti-Semite’ Salena Zito for causing synagogue shooting by reporting on Trump.
Though in my experience, the Guardian folks are generally fine with actual anti-semites.
POINT TO REMEMBER: So far terror attacks tied to Obama Chicago pal Bill Ayers have killed more people than the evil bombs mailed by Cesar Seyoc. And the unrepentant Ayers had the rampant stupidity to say he should have detonated more bombs. (The New York Times, September 11, 2001: No Regrets For A Love of Explosives. This is 100 megaton irony.)
Alan Dershowitz has noticed this absolutely essential point:
The entire episode [[Seyoc’s bombs]] brings back painful memories of the Weathermen and other radical left wing organizations that planted bombs in the 1970s. The Weathermen and other radical leftist groups targeted universities, army bases, police officers, banks, and other establishment places and people. The death toll was considerable, and the fear was palpable. At about the same time, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and other radical leftist groups terrorized the United States.
So far no one has tried to glorify the arrested person responsible for the recent pipe bombs. Although President Trump has condemned the alleged perpetrator, it would not be surprising if some right wing extremists took perverse pleasure and pride in the attacks on the left wing icons. This is different from how some liberals glorified the Weathermen, Black Panthers, and other hard left terrorists. Left wing lawyers, who would never defend an accused right wing terrorist, rushed to represent these radical groups, while prominent liberals contributed to defense funds and attended fundraising parties. Films, books, plays, and articles sought to understand the motives of these young murderers.
Years later, Barack Obama befriended Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who had been active members of the Weathermen and supporters of violent terrorism. Both Ayers and Dohrn were invited to teach at well known American universities, as was Kathy Boudin, who had served a long prison term for participating in a terrorist inspired robbery that resulted in the deaths of two police officers and one armored guard and seriously injured another guard.
MORE:
The Ku Klux Klan was a violent radical group with significant support from political figures and ordinary citizens. During the first decades of the 20th century, left wing anarchists planted bombs and engaged in other forms of violence that killed many innocent people.
The Ku Klux Klan was a Democrat terrorist organization created after the Civil War — to RESIST!. In the 20th century the KKK was the militant wing of the Democratic Party, mostly in the South but not solely. It existed to intimidate — like Antifa. Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), a Democrat lion of the Senate beloved by Bill Clinton, was a KKK grand kludge benighted fleagal frothing whatever. (If you recall his actual title, mention it in the comments.)
As for the Dershowitz essay — read the whole thing.
WELL, I’LL BE WAITING UNTIL I’M OLD ENOUGH: Why You Shouldn’t Wait To Sign Up For Medicare Part B. “He should have signed up for Medicare Part B three years earlier when he turned 65. By delaying, he had missed the best window — the so-called Initial Enrollment Period — to apply for Part B, which covers much of what we consider health care: doctor visits, tests, injectable drugs (including chemotherapy), ambulances, physical therapy and other non-hospital services. As a result, he has to pay permanently higher premiums, and he had to endure an unsettlingly long period — from December to July — before the coverage actually kicked in.”
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JOHN PODHORETZ ON THE SLAUGHTER IN PITTSBURGH:
In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us. In a classic act of anti-Semitic violence, which is what this is, Jews hear the echoes of every violent anti-Semitic act that has preceded it in history. And we hear those echoes because they are there. That which motivates Jew-hatred today is what has motivated it from time immemorial—the poisonously attractive idea that Jews need to be extirpated because our existence is an offense or a threat to an existing larger order. The blessing of Jewish life in America is that this notion has largely been consigned to the dregs from which today’s human malignancy rose. Despite the fact that most hate crimes in America are aimed at Jews, the actual number is vanishingly small—especially compared to France, from which Jews are now fleeing, and England, whose Labour Party is in the hands of an actual Jew-hater.
Because we are obliged by the sickness of our political culture to analyze every despicable event in a manner designed to confirm our priors, we have already, mere hours after the barbarity, sunk into a nauseating discussion about how much blame to assign to the president for this unspeakable act. The obvious answer is: None. Donald Trump should be assigned no such blame, even if the shooter were the president of the Donald Trump Fan Club, because he pulled no trigger and committed no crime. Period. To do that, to assign blame, is to whitewash the crime itself and the criminal’s responsibility for it. He becomes a cultural robot, seized by an evil collective unconscious that drove him to his crimes.
Read the whole thing.
PHILIP WEGMAN ON WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO GO AFTER AVENATTI’S LIES:
Working to clear Kavanaugh’s name, Grassley is also working to protect the names of future nominees. It is an effort to reestablish precedent in the nomination process through deterrence.
Grassley just referred Julie Swetnick and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, to the Department of Justice for possible criminal investigation. Swetnick made allegations that Kavanaugh was present at a party where she was “gang raped,” and further that he habitually attended such parties and even had a hand in drugging girls so that they could be assaulted in this way. Although her accusations were so incredible that only a few Democrats dared talk about them at Kavanaugh’s hearings, they were brought up — Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was among those to mention them as Democrats worked to kill Kavanaugh’s nomination and reputation. . . .
More than control of the court was at stake during the Kavanaugh hysteria. It wasn’t just about the reputation of one man. It quickly became a referendum on what political tactics would and wouldn’t fly in future confirmations. At stake was whether or not Democrats, with their all-out assault on Kavanaugh, would be allowed to rewrite the confirmation playbook for the future.
Grassley and company succeeded in getting Kavanaugh confirmed. But now Grassley is addressing the second issue by meting out consequences. Future nominees, Democrat and Republican both, can expect a crucible of a confirmation. But if Grassley is successful and the DOJ takes action, those nominees can take limited comfort in the fact that witnesses against them will be held responsible for egregious lies.
It is a small step, and it is up to Attorney General Jeff Sessions to decide what to do next. But it is an important step toward cleaning up the mess that was made of the confirmation process.
This is exactly right.
SCIENCE MARCHES ON: ‘The Blowjob Paper:’ Scientists Processed 109 Hours of Oral Sex to Develop an AI that Sucks Dick.
But laugh at your peril. Organic evolution has done all it can in the short term to make people attractive; humans aren’t going to improve significantly in our lifetimes. Mechanical evolution is moving much faster, and sexbots are improving at a rapid clip.
GEORGETOWN PREP: THE MEDIA CIRCUS IS GONE, BUT THE DAMAGE IS DONE.
Journalists phoned us by the dozens, mostly demanding to know how long we had presided over a circus of drug and alcohol abuse, misogyny, and criminality. At least these reporters gave us the courtesy of a call. Many other national media outlets simply ran archly critical stories without bothering to contact us at all.
This was all necessary for American democracy, some of them explained, since one of our graduates had become a Supreme Court nominee. In a sense, that’s understandable. But as I learned firsthand, the lens trained on Georgetown Prep was warped, obscuring details that ran counter to preferred narratives, and the resulting portrait of our community was grossly distorted.
We were garishly described as an institution that “celebrated heavy drinking,” “a troubled, morally questionable symbol of a snobby elite [where] alcohol was an integral part of the school’s identity,” and a place where “disregard or mistreatment of women [was] widely accepted.” A “debauched . . . scene of cloistered young men.” And those are just a few such insults from the more than 60 articles that appeared about Prep in the Washington Post alone.
Democracy dies in demonization.
More here: Post Truth.
YIKES: IVANKA TRUMP CONDEMNS SYNAGOGUE ATTACK, TRIGGERS AVALANCHE OF BLUE-CHECK TDS ON STEROIDS. “The replies are something else. The left is irreparably damaged.”
CALIFORNIA-BASED COMPANY OFFERS PAID PROTESTING SERVICES:
A California-based public relations firm is offering paid protesting services to its clients.
Crowds on Demand, out of Beverly Hills, offers “protests, rallies, flash-mobs, paparazzi events and other inventive PR stunts,” according to their website. “We provide everything including the people, the materials and even the ideas.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, the company hired protestors to lobby the New Orleans City Council on behalf of a power plant operator, however the operator claims it only hired Crowds on Demand to bring supporters to the meetings, but did not know paid actors were involved. Each actor was reportedly paid $60 to attend the meetings, and $200 to speak on behalf of the power plant.
Actors were also hired to protest a Masons convention in San Francisco, and to act as paparazzi and fans for an L.A. life coaches conference.
The late Andrew Breitbart could have gotten hours of YouTube clips dunking on a lefty rent-a-crowd.
(Via SDA.)
LEARNING TO LOVE the counter-depth fridge. We have one. It’s fine. It’s true that the extra depth in a standard fridge is mostly just space to accumulate stuff you never use, and eventually throw out. Of course, we have a second refrigerator-freezer in the utility room, where we can stage party supplies, etc. when needed.
ILYA SOMIN OF THE VOLOKH CONSPIRACY: Mail Bomber Cesar Sayoc Threatened Me on Facebook.
STAY THIRSTY, MY FRIENDS: US Troops Deploy ‘Overwhelming Force’ Against Iceland’s Beer Supplies.
KIMBERLY LEONARD AND SALENA ZITO: 11 shot dead in Pittsburgh synagogue, 4 police wounded. Suspect shouted: ‘Jews need to die.’
As we all know, this shooting is Trump’s fault because he moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS DEPARTMENT: Below is someone who works for the Intercept and Al Jazeera blaming anti-Semitism on *other* people promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Let me repeat, the Intercept and Al Jazeera. Meanwhile, this is as good a time as any to tell the anti-Semites who I’ve heard sometimes infest our comments section to get lost, you aren’t welcome here.
