I DON’T THINK THIS IS GOING TO END IN THE GUILTFEST YOU’RE HOPING FOR. AT LEAST, IT NEVER HAS BEFORE: White People Are Noticing Something New: Their Own Whiteness.
Archive for 2018
June 15, 2018
I BLAME SOCIAL MEDIA: Study: People Are Getting Dumber.
Related: Social Media as Social Disease.
BEST. NEWS. EVER. $17 Supermarket Brand Scotch Named Best in the World.
BILLIONAIRE, PUBLISHER, LIBERAL, OPPRESSOR: Hey, you know what’s cool about this country? Not just monster trucks, the Blue Angels and the fact that one can say “fuck you” to the Nation’s leader on national television without being hauled away by secret police in the middle of the night. (Try *that* in Saudi Arabia or Turkey, kids).
No, those are all cool, but we live in a country where you can be one of the three richest men in the world, own a newspaper that touts income equality and wealth distribution, but according to your own employees, underpays them. At least, according to the 400 staffers at the Washington Post who penned an open letter to Bezos:
#DearJeffBezos, we workers of The Washington Post have been bargaining for a year and have little to show for it because The Post won’t meet us halfway on much of anything. We love The Post. We know you do too. Our work has earned us more than what The Post is offering.
Democracy Dies in Darkness, you know. Resist and all that good stuff.
IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL BE HITLER FOR 15 MINUTES — AND THE FUTURE IS NOW:
● Shot:
During an overwrought panel discussion on Friday’s MSNBC Live With Stephanie Ruhle, former Barack Obama campaign staffer Stephanie Cutter and political analyst Michael Steele took turns comparing illegal immigrant detention centers along the U.S. southern border to Nazi death camps.
“We can’t find a solution to this problem without harming children? Without putting them into concentration camps?,” Cutter pleaded. Steele doubled down on the extreme rhetoric: “I call this a concentration camp for kids because that’s exactly what it’s turning out to [be]. When you give kids 22 hours of lockup time and two hours of air time, what else can it be?”
—“MSNBC Accuses Trump of Creating ‘Concentration Camps’; Warns: ‘Your Kids Could Be Next,’” NewsBusters, today.
● Chaser:
D.L. HUGHLEY: …The tenets of the Republican Party are amazing and they seem warm and welcome. But when I watch it be applied — like you didn’t have to go much further than the Republican National Convention.
MICHAEL STEELE: Agreed.
HUGHLEY: It literally look[s] like Nazi Germany — it really did. I make — said that point. It just does not seem — like not only are we not welcome — not only are we not welcome, but they don’t even care what we think. And that —
STEELE: Well, I’m here now…
—“CNN Host D. L. Hughley: Republicans ‘Literally Look Like Nazi Germany,’” NewsBusters, March 2, 2009. At the time of this interview, Michael Steele was chairman of the Republican National Committee.
VIRGINIA ALLEN: The Importance of Dads in an Increasingly Fatherless America.
There is a “father absence crisis in America,” according to National Fatherhood Initiative, and the results are sobering.
Studies have found that children raised without a father are:
At a higher risk of having behavioral problems.
Four times more likely to live in poverty.
More likely to be incarcerated in their lifetime.
Twice as likely to never graduate high school.
At a seven times higher risk of teen pregnancy.
More vulnerable to abuse and neglect.
More likely to abuse drugs and alcohol.
Twice as likely to be obese.From education to personal health to career success, children who lack a father find themselves at a disadvantage to their peers raised in a two-parent household.
Murphy Brown was wrong and Dan Quayle was right.
CRACKS IN TWITTER’S LEGAL WALL? Like Facebook, Twitter has been able to avoid any First Amendment claims of those banned (or shadow banned), but a California judge has kept alive claims from a guy named Jared Taylor (his account was disabled), noting that allegations that Twitter’s policy of suspending accounts, in the judge’s words:
“[A]t any time, for any reason or for no reason” may be unconscionable and that the company calling itself a platform devoted to free speech may be misleading and therefore fraudulent.”
Taylor describes himself as a “racialist” who believes in “racial realism.” The media rely on the questionable SPLC to refer to him simply as the founder of the New Century Foundation, an organization that “purports to show the inferiority of blacks to whites.”
This is going to be interesting. Not being the government, they are not restricted by a “content-neutral” requirement, but they may have to rewrite their Terms of Service and sales pitch.
BULL DURHAM AT 30: An Unrequited Love Story. “Three decades after the film’s release, writer-director Ron Shelton reflects on the making of the (maybe) best sports movie of all time.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Angela Merkel’s political near-death experience in Bavarian brawl. “Fight over migration risks toppling chancellor’s alliance — and her government.”
Merkel’s refusal to endorse a plan by her Bavarian interior minister to turn back some refugees at the German border set the stage for a showdown that, barring a last-minute compromise, could bring down her government.
“I consider illegal immigration to be one of the biggest challenges for the European Union and think that we therefore should not act unilaterally, without consultation and at the expense of third parties,” Merkel said Thursday at the end of a day packed with crisis meetings.
The dispute ostensibly revolves around the question of whether Germany should turn back refugees who have applied for asylum in other EU countries. Merkel opposes the policy on the grounds it could hasten the collapse of Europe’s system of open frontiers by forcing Germany’s neighbors to re-impose border controls.
The root of the dispute has less to do with that narrow question, however, than with Merkel’s broader refugee policy, which the CSU has resisted from the beginning.
Worst German Chancellor since… you know.
NO BIAS IN THE FBI’S HILLARY EMAIL PROBE? YOU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT? There is a basic problem at the heart of the report of the Department of Justice Inspector General on the FBI’s 2016 investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and address to conduct official U.S. diplomatic business.
The report provides reams of evidence that the key FBI executives running the email probe were extremely prejudiced, nay, obsessively biased against President Donald Trump and for Clinton. But the report offers zero logical explanation for why those reams don’t provide the most likely explanation for the fact the FBI gave Clinton a free pass after she demonstrated gross negligence in handling hundreds of the country’s most sensitive national security secrets.
And that’s why come Monday, IG Michael Horowitz is likely to have a very rough time of it before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And no matter how bruised and battered he may be at the day, he’ll have to face it all over again before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 8 Things Your Dad Could Do That You Should Learn.
I had a column on this a while back.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Harvard Rated Asian-American Applicants Lower on Personality Traits, Lawsuit Says.
Why are leftist-monopoly institutions such cesspits of racism?
HEH: California Might Split Into 3 States. The US Should Only Keep One of Them.
A modest proposal from Jon Gabriel:
The new map would create a centrist Southern California, including much of the agricultural heartland, Riverside, and San Diego; a leftist state called California, running up the coast from LA to Monterey; and an essentially communist state called Northern California above them both. (A better name for the latter would be “Woke-ifornia.”)
If voters support the new map, both houses of the California Legislature would need to confirm it. Then it would go through the courts, the US Congress, and whoever sews new stars on the flag.
Quickly looking at the map, the problem for conservatives is quickly apparent. Instead of offering two bat-guano leftist senators, we’d end up with at least four and as many as six. No bueno.
Nevertheless, I support the plan wholeheartedly. Voters should split Cali thrice, have Sacramento give its blessing, and ship the paperwork to DC. At that point, Congress should endorse it … but only allow Southern California to remain in the union.
Well, OK… but only if they’re on double-secret probation.
TOM ROGAN: The crazy reason the FBI didn’t search the devices of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle.
The agents’ primary excuse was to point to “the culture of mishandling classified information at the State Department which made the quantity of potential sources of evidence particularly vast” (see page 153).
Put another way, the agents thought that they might find so much classified information on unauthorized servers and systems that they would become lost in the maze. Horowitz, in what can only be described as a generous admonition, counters by noting “that [this excuse] fails to acknowledge that the team was not required to take an all-or-nothing approach. For example, a middle ground existed where those devices belonging to Clinton’s three top aides – which the team determined accounted for approximately 68 percent of Clinton’s email exchanges – would have been reviewed, but devices belonging to other State Department employees would not.”
This suggestion by Horowitz seems rather, well, obvious.
From my perspective, by failing to investigate material held on the personal devices belonging to Clinton’s senior leadership team and senior aides, the FBI failed in their duty to fully pursue realistic and feasible avenues of profitable investigation.
The only thing they failed to do was get Hillary over the finish line.
That didn’t work out very well for Thelma or Louise.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): As a colleague said at the time, what really happens in the Thelma & Louise movie is that two women get out from under male supervision, immediately do a lot of stupid things, then commit suicide. And the only voice of sanity is the older white male cop (Harvey Keitel), whom they ignore. And yet it’s portrayed as some sort of feminist masterpiece.
DAVID HARSANYI: 3 Takeaways From The IG Report That Seriously Undermine The FBI’s Credibility.
Here’s one:
Former FBI director James Comey’s actions are roundly condemned in the report. The IG concludes he violated long-standing procedure and policy, and basically did whatever his capricious idealism told him to do. The more you read the IG report, the more obvious it becomes that Comey had absolutely no basis for clearing Hillary.
Page texted Strzok at one point about the possibility of using fewer agents to interview Clinton, since “she might be our next president,” and they don’t want to upset her. (Not that it really mattered, since the investigatory conclusions were reached before the end of the witness interviews). Comey functioned under the same rules.
In the eyes of liberals, Comey’s sin was sending a letter to Congress when new evidence in the server case emerged. But, by that point, Comey had no choice but to tell Congress, which he likely did unilaterally. If the Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner laptop kerfuffle had been leaked, Comey would have looked like he was actively political.
Would Comey have done the same if he believed Trump had a chance to win? That’s a different story.
Madam President was supposed to return the favor and provide all the cover Comey needed, but she failed.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Profs deride ‘weight loss’ as a ‘Western value.’
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Baseball, Comey’s Reckoning, The Bible, and Much, Much More.
Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz today.