Archive for 2018
August 3, 2018
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Meanwhile, back in Somalia. My latest Creators Syndicate column.
NAVY REFUELING TEST: An F/A-18 refuels an F-35C. The F-35C is the U.S. Navy carrier version of the F-35 Lightning II.
REPENT! LEST YE BURN! OR GIVE UP PLASTIC STRAWS, INSTEAD: The New York Times devotes its entire magazine this week to a story asserting that we knew about global warming in the 1980s and failed to act, so we’re all going to die. Manhattan Contrarian takes a sledgehammer to that argument, using evidence from, err, the New York Times.
SARAH JEONG AND HER NEW WHITE COWORKERS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: Every one of them knows that she hates and disdains them… and every one of them also knows that they’d better keep their damn mouths shut about it.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I dunno, the next white guy laid off will have a pretty good “hostile environment” claim. . .
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CANCER-ANALOGY EDITION: The University Run Amok! Higher education’s insatiable appetite for doing more will be its undoing.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Public Enemies and Much, Much More. “Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders performed a beat down on anti-Trump resistance activist Jim Acosta of the political street gang known as CNN.”
ENEMY OF THE STATE: Tommy Robinson compares jail to Guantanamo Bay claiming inmates threw ‘excrement’ at him. Actually, at Guantanamo that only happens to the guards.
DUMB: Apple shuts App Store affiliate program, imperiling recommendation sites.
“TouchArcade: ‘Apple extending a massive middle finger” to third-party linkers’.”
This might be understandable if the App Store weren’t such a mess, but it is.
SO MUCH WINNING: U.S. gains 157,000 jobs in July; unemployment falls to 3.9%.
MICHAEL BARONE: Liberals against freedom of conscience.
Why is it considered “liberal” to compel others to say or fund things they don’t believe?
That’s a question raised by the Supreme Court’s decisions in three cases this year. And it’s a puzzling development for those of us old enough to remember when liberals championed free speech — even when it involved advocacy of sedition or sodomy — and conservatives wanted government to restrain or limit it.
The three cases dealt with quite different issues. In National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, a 5-4 majority of the court overturned a California statute that required anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers to inform clients where they can obtain free or inexpensive abortions — something the people operating these centers regard as homicide.
The same 5-4 majority in a second case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, reversed a 41-year-old precedent by ruling that public employees don’t have to pay unions fees covering the cost of collective bargaining. The court, echoing a position taken by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, reasoned that collective bargaining with a public employer is inevitably a political matter and that forcing employees to finance it is compelling them to subsidize political speech with which they disagree.
In the third case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the court avoided a direct decision on whether a baker, whose Christian beliefs oppose same-sex marriage, could refuse to custom design a wedding cake for a gay couple, despite a state law barring discrimination against gays. Seven justices ruled that the commission showed an impermissible animus against religion, but the four liberal justices endorsed a separate opinion indicating they’d otherwise rule against the baker.
Using naked force against one’s enemies, to their humiliation, is a core appeal of leftism.
SHE’S STILL GOT IT: Navy’s Old Harpoon Anti-Ship Missile To Get New Tricks After Scoring Six For Six At RIMPAC.
During the U.S. Navy’s giant Rim of The Pacific (RIMPAC) international naval exercises, which occurs every other year off the coast of Hawaii, six Harpoons of various sub-types were fired off at targets, which include two decommissioned warships, the ex-USS Racine and the ex-USS McKlusky. These six missiles were fired from U.S. and Australian P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft in the air, from the Singaporean frigate RSS Tenacious on the ocean’s surface, and from an American Los Angeles class fast attack submarine from below the waves.
Out of the six missiles fired, every one of them worked just as advertised, resulting in an awesome showing for Boeing’s supposedly near-obsolete anti-ship missile.
What’s really remarkable is that the US-fired missiles probably spent the last 20 years in storage.
A NEW STUDY FINDS STRONG EVIDENCE THAT THEY DO: Do law schools discriminate against conservative and libertarians in faculty hiring?
LATER, IF THEY EVER TAKE POWER, THEY’LL BE LYING ABOUT THE SIZE OF THE WHEAT HARVEST: Despite claiming on its website to have 250+ campus chapters, the Young Democratic Socialists of America organization actually has just 57 active chapters.
ASHE SCHOW: Study Shows Liberal Universities Show Liberal Bias Even In Tweets.
Andrew Selepak, a researcher at the University of Florida, analyzed more than 1,000 tweets sent by the top 25 and bottom 25 universities on the U.S. News and World Report’s 2016 college ranking. He found that more than 80% of the tweets were politically neutral, but tweets that included political statements by the top 25 schools were overwhelmingly liberal, according to Campus Reform’s Toni Airaksinen.
“Among the elite universities, for example, Selepak documented 87 pro-liberal tweets in comparison to 30 pro-conservative tweets, whereas less prestigious colleges sent out more politically balanced tweets: 35 liberal tweets compared to 30 conservative-leaning tweets,” Airaksinen wrote.
Honestly I would have expected the numbers to be much more lopsided. Perhaps Selepak could gather a larger sample, because 1,000 tweets is not that many.
BECKET ADAMS: CNN contributor (wrongly) accuses Trump of treason.
They keep using this word. I do not think it means what they think it means. Ret. Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, who fled Fox News for CNN in March, accused President Trump this week of treason.
“Collusion outright may not be a crime in and of itself,” he said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “[but] treason is a crime. Collaborating and conspiring with a hostile foreign power against the United States is a crime.”
Peters added, “Receiving material support, clandestine material support from a hostile foreign power is a crime. And we get to the people around Trump. Money laundering is a crime. Tax fraud is a crime. Lying under oath is a crime.”
Let’s back this train up for a second and look at his treason allegation. The politest way to respond is to say: He’s full of it.
I’ve enjoyed reading Peters’ novels since the late ’80s. Red Army, The War in 2020, and especially Flames of Heaven remain favorites to this day. And his non-fiction work for the US Army War College magazine Parameters during the Nineties and early Naughts was always brilliant and frequently prescient.
But lately he’s really come unhinged.
THERE’S NO POINT TRYING TO MAKE LEFTIES HAPPY, BECAUSE NOT BEING HAPPY IS KEY TO THEIR IDENTITY: Politically correct effort to rename Austin proves Donald Trump was right. “First they came for the Confederate monuments, but who knows where progressive efforts to erase history will end? It is a ‘short hop from the unthinkable to the mandatory.'”
WHAT’S THIS? A LIBERAL FEMINIST LAWYER FOR KAVANAUGH? It’s true, Attorney Lisa Blatt has argued 35 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court while working for the Solicitor General’s office. Her remarkably kind words for and about Kavanaugh demonstrate that there are still some sane minds on the Left. Elizabeth Economou has some surprising details in LifeZette.
TYLER O’NEIL: RNC Declares War on the Kochs. “Tells donors it is ‘NECESSARY’ to keep the Party in business.”