AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES THE BIG BANG THEORY: Oregon governor: No way will I authorize our National Guard to carry out Trump’s border security plan.
“Sheldon, Canada is not going to invade California.” “Yeah, really? You think those hippies in Washington and Oregon can stop them?”
WELL, THOSE ALIENS ARE PRETTY ADVANCED: 3D printed bridge looks like alien technology.
I HATE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS: Train Carrying 10M Pounds of Poop Stuck in Alabama Town.
TAKE ME DOWN TO SOLID ROCKET CITY: Solid Rocket City: The Utah Space Center Fighting for Its Life.
BUT I HAD BEEN ASSURED HE WAS AN AUTHORITARIAN MADMAN: Trump National Guard Border Plan to Look Like Bush, Obama Deployments.
QUESTION: WAS BOOKER WASHINGTON AN OBSEQUIOUS UNCLE TOM OR A CIVIL RIGHTS HERO? Answer: Civil rights hero, you idiot. For far too long it was fashionable in civil rights circles to view Washington negatively. Things have turned around somewhat in the last few decades, thanks in part to Louis Harlan’s biographies, and also thanks (more recently) to the work of black conservatives like Lee Walker, Carol Swain, and many others.
One thing that many people don’t know is that (among his many other accomplishments) Washington quietly raised the money to challenge black disfranchisement in the courts. This was typical of Washington: He was a man who got things done and didn’t necessarily demand the credit. Alas, the case–Giles v. Harris—didn’t work out as it should have. In an opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court essentially decided (5-3) that there was nothing it could do to prevent disfranchisement in the South. It was not the Court’s (or Holmes’) finest hour. But the result doesn’t make Washington any less a hero.
Booker Washington’s 162nd birthday is today.
FACEBOOK CLAIM: ‘Malicious actors’ used its tools to discover identities and collect data on a massive global scale.
Facebook said Wednesday that “malicious actors” took advantage of search tools on its platform, making it possible for them to discover the identities and collect information on most of its 2 billion users worldwide.
The revelation came amid rising acknowledgement by Facebook about its struggles to control the data it gathers on users. Among the announcements Wednesday was that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy hired by President Trump and other Republicans, had improperly gathered detailed Facebook information on 87 million people, of whom 71 million were Americans.
But the abuse of Facebook’s search tools — now disabled — happened far more broadly and over the course of several years, with few Facebook users likely escaping the scam, company officials acknowledged.
The problem is the platform and the platform is Facebook.
AT AMAZON, Save on Top Rated Products.
PROMOTING INEQUALITY: Assortative Mating at the Ivy League, where rich students marry rich students, and poor students are left out.
Growing income inequality is a central fault line in American society. Assortative mating might seem like a strange thing to blame, though. After all, in theory, everyone has a chance to go to college. By those lights, if people who work hard and become educated want to marry each other, that’s just how things are.
In reality, access to higher education remains highly unequal. Elite colleges that recruit students with large amounts of social and financial capital get much more public funding than open-access schools that enroll a greater number of academically and economically diverse students. Rising tuition prices make it difficult for low-income students to enroll and graduate, and leave many with large debts. Inequality then becomes intergenerational. . . .
As the sociological research and new data show, even within individual universities, social experiences and long-term outcomes are widely unequal. Instead of being places that provide equal opportunity to everyone based on merit, colleges are often complicit in the forces that push us apart.
If we’re serious about reducing inequality, we really need to abolish the Ivy League. Though I suspect that sexual-harassment rules that prevent doctors from dating nurses and bosses from dating secretaries exacerbate the assortative mating problem.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Have Christian nationalists staged a “soft coup,” with Trump as their figurehead?
Forget it, Jake — it’s Salon.
YET MORE REASONS TO DOUBT LIZ WARREN’S INTEGRITY: Mulvaney’s Letter to the Editor.
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: The weird world of virtual models is full of very real money.
In February, a makeup brand owned by pop megastar Rihanna shared an image on social media of a gorgeous dark-skinned model wearing the company’s lipstick.
The mysterious model, who went by Shudu, was quickly becoming a social media sensation, and as the photo went viral, it added to her growing number of followers.
By April she had more than 90,000 people following her on Instagram, but there was just one problem.
She wasn’t real.
She was a social media mirage, a digital forgery, a computer-generated image. Or, according to the man who created her, an art piece paying homage to beautiful, dark-skinned women.
When does she launch her singing career?
HMM: Turkey-Russia ties move beyond tactical.
This dialogue has had three main results so far: First, Turkey has had to accept the remaining of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power, prompting a radical change in its policy. Ankara has also had to acknowledge that both Iran and Russia have put down their roots in Syria for a very long time, both politically and militarily.
Second, Turkey’s alignment with the Russia-Iran duo in Syria has led to a further souring of its ties with its traditional Western allies, namely the United States. Moscow’s permission for Turkey’s fight against the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Afrin worsened a crisis between Ankara and Washington, whose ties were already strained over several other sources of tension. Strong-worded criticisms also came from European powers, which have questioned the real motives of the Turkish military campaign in Syria. Despite these reactions, Turkey now feels freer to launch new operations in eastern Syria at the expense of further risking its ties with NATO partners. Turkey’s plans to procure S-400 anti-ballistic missile systems from Russia should also be evaluated with this in mind.
Thirdly, cooperation with Russia paved the way for Turkey to become a hard power in its region. Turkish troops are currently in the Idlib, Afrin and al-Bab regions of northwestern Syria, with the government vowing that the next targets will be east of the Euphrates and even northern Iraq.
Putin gets what he wants: Assad stays in power and Russia enjoys a position in the Arab Middle East it hasn’t had since the mid-’70s; and Erdogan gets to indulge his neo-Ottoman fantasies in northern Mesopotamia.
CHANGE: Giving up Facebook can reduce levels of cortisol, a key hormone related to stress, according to a new study. “However, the benefits aren’t quite so clear-cut.”
TIM WU: Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It. “If we have learned anything over the last decade, it is that advertising and data-collection models are incompatible with a trustworthy social media network. The conflicts are too formidable, the pressure to amass data and promise everything to advertisers is too strong for even the well-intentioned to resist.”
RETREAT: Most Migrants Plan to Stay in Mexico as Caravan Stalls Far from U.S. Border. “Only ‘a small handful of migrants with strong claims for asylum’ will continue on.”
I wonder what changed their minds…
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Trump Is Cutting Old Gordian Knots.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. American Journalists are Hysterical Knuckleheads.
Andrew Klavan is mad. You’ll like him when he’s mad.
“WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?” One Million Illegal Aliens Have California Driver’s Licenses.
Related: Calif. Dems darn proud of how many illegal aliens have scored driver’s licenses in the state.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What It’s Like to Go Through Life As a Really Beautiful Woman.
Throughout my life, competitive, attractive, wealthy, entitled women really hated me. At my first job after college, my female colleagues conspired against me. They planted bottles of half-drunk booze on my desk so that it looked like I was drinking on the job. Two women were obsessed with me. They told my boss lies to get me fired. I talked to some of my superiors about it and they put it to me straight: Look, it’s pure unmitigated jealousy. They really do hate you because of the way you look.
Plus: “So I look back over my life and think, What did my looks do for me? They got me a few jobs, and a lot of boyfriends … but what else? I didn’t get married until I was 35 because I didn’t want the merry-go-round to end. One day I realized well if you want to have a kid, you better do it now. Of course all those great guys I didn’t take seriously when I was in my 20s were gone.”
VOX: It’s time to think seriously about cutting off the supply of fossil fuels.
Policies that choke off fossil fuels at their origin — shutting down mines and wells; banning new ones; opting against new pipelines, refineries, and export terminals — have been embraced by climate activists, picking up steam with the Keystone pipeline protests and the recent direct action of the Valve Turners.
But they are looked upon with some disdain by the climate intelligentsia, who are united in their belief that such strategies are economically suboptimal and politically counterproductive.
Now a pair of economists has offered a cogent argument that the activists are onto something — that restrictive supply-side (RSS) climate policies have unique economic and political benefits and deserve a place alongside carbon prices and renewable energy supports in the climate policy toolkit.
In other words, a tacit — if lengthy — admission that they’ve lost the debate.
Or as David Harsanyi quipped: “Green energy is so popular, cost efficient, and moral! that we must cut off your access to fossil fuels to make you buy it.”
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