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Archive for 2019
June 30, 2019
KURT SCHLICHTER: Joe Biden Learns You Can Never Be Woke Enough.
He could probably win the Dem nomination — and the general election — by going to war against the woke minority that’s terrorizing so many, but that would require courage, which he has never possessed.
READER BOOK PLUG: From Dr. Insensitive Jerk, Dandelion Slap.
OPEN THREAD: Ring out June in fine fashion.
THIS JUST IN: Raise your glasses! Beer goggles really do exist, study reveals.
To coin a phrase, I need a study to tell me this?
LIVING IN AN AGE OF HATE: “Advocacy of incivility and violence isn’t coming only from the zany far left. It finds a home in formerly respectable news outlets, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, as well as among Democratic Party office-holders… Democrats obviously think that the ‘new rules’ will never apply to them. Why is that? Evidently, they believe–correctly–that we conservatives are better people than they are. But our patience is not infinite.”
Read the whole thing.
WELL, HE’S NOT CRAZY, SO . . . Poll: Trump Aligns Better with Voters than Democratic Candidates.
HILLARY LAWYER CHANGES STORY ON EMAILS. IMAGINE THAT! Judicial Watch peels away another layer in the coverup. Heather Samuelson told the FBI three years ago that she first learned about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email system to conduct official U.S. diplomatic business in 2014. But that’s not what she told Judicial Watch’s lawyers in a new deposition.
ANN ALTHOUSE ON TODAY’S PERVASIVE CULTURE OF SEXISM: “Would we ask of any other group, what do we need them for? It’s fundamentally immoral to believe that other people exist for your purposes, but there are so many things you can say about men — as long as you’re assuming that they’re white — that you’d never say about any other group.”
GREAT AGAIN: Oil supply to swamp demand, squeeze OPEC in 2020, IEA says.
Even though growth in world oil demand will accelerate to 1.4 million barrels a day in 2020, it will be eclipsed by a 2.3 million barrel-a-day surge in output, as the ongoing boom in U.S. shale is augmented by new fields in Brazil, Norway and Canada.
As a result, the world will need significantly less crude from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the IEA, which advises most major economies, predicted in its monthly report on Friday. Though Saudi Arabia and its allies have been deliberately cutting supply this year, and political crises have crushed exports from Venezuela and Iran, OPEC is pumping much more oil than will be required in 2020. . . .
About half of the supply expansion will be provided by the U.S., which has been transformed by the fracking boom in Texas and North Dakota into the world’s biggest crude producer. But unlike in previous years, growth in America is being supplemented by significant gains elsewhere, such as in Norway and Brazil.
That may make for painful reading for the Saudis and other OPEC nations, who together pump 40% of the world’s oil.
Remember when Barack Obama told Sarah Palin she was stupid for thinking we could drill our way out of our oil dependency?
STACY MCCAIN: ‘Godless Commies!’
One of the reasons younger people — and by “younger,” I mean, under 40 — are so vulnerable to leftist “progressive” propaganda is because they aren’t old enough to remember the Cold War. Today’s 35-year-old was in kindergarten when the Berlin Wall fell, and thus has no personal memory of what it was like to live during the decades when we were faced with the possibility of annihilation by Soviet aggression. The permanent sense of terror inspired by the menace of Communism, a godless creed of murderous hatred, was so deeply embedded into American culture during my youth that my children (the oldest of which was born some six months before the fall of the Berlin Wall) can scarcely understand what it was like. When my oldest was a teenager, I was driving her and her friend to a Christian music festival and, to pass the time, began talking about politics and history. I tried to explain to them how, growing up in a Baptist church in Georgia, I was horrified by stories of how Christians were persecuted in the Soviet Union, in Red China and wherever else Communist regimes came to power. The worldview of Communism — “historical materialism,” or “dialectical materialism” — was based explicitly in atheism, and Communists everywhere were determined to destroy Christianity. Imagine what it would be like to live in a dictatorship where you could go to prison for possessing a Bible!
“Godless commies!” I yelled, as we rolled along the highway, and the vehemence of my expression rather startled my daughter and her friend.
To deny the existence of God is, as Nietzsche foresaw, to deny that there is any eternal law. The categories of “good” and “evil” are meaningless to the atheist, so that the most basic of moral maxims — “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not kill,” etc. — meant nothing to the godless Commies, whose only ideas of right and wrong were summarized by Lenin’s frightening question: “Who? Whom?” Anything that advanced the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was justified, including deliberate deceit and cold-blooded murder, so that the Communists claimed unquestioned authority to lie, steal and kill on behalf of their revolution, and none of their victims had any claim to justice.
As Tom Wolfe wrote of Nietzsche in his essay, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists,” part of his 2000 collection of his then-recent non-fiction articles, Hooking Up:
But if there was decadence, what was decaying? Religious faith and moral codes that had been in place since time was, said Nietzsche, who in 1882 made the most famous statement in modern philosophy—“God is dead”—and three startlingly accurate predictions for the twentieth century. He even estimated when they would begin to come true: about 1915. (1) The faith men formerly invested in God they would now invest in barbaric “brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers.” Their names turned out, in due course, to be the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. (2) There would be “wars such as have never been waged on earth.” Their names turned out to be World War I and World War II. (3) There no longer would be Truth but, rather, “truth” in quotation marks, depending upon which concoction of eternal verities the modern barbarian found most useful at any given moment.
Flash-forward to the College Fix last week: Cornell summer seminar asks: Should we still use concepts like ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’?
SO THIS MEANS THAT BY REACHING A TRADE DEAL WITH MEXICO, TRUMP IS KILLING PEOPLE! Mexican-grown papayas linked to salmonella outbreak in U.S. Remember, any story can be shoehorned into the narrative if you try hard enough.
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE MEMORY HOLE: Destroying Our History: Of Wokeness and ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Barbarism.’
Pity future generations who will live in a world scrubbed clean of the sins of our forefathers.
And sins there were. No one denies that. No one questions it. But to judge their entire lives — their foibles as well as their majestic accomplishments — without viewing both sides of their Janus face, demonstrates a towering ignorance and an aggressive denial of the truth.
What is truly frightening about the current attitude present in our “woke” culture, is the utter lack of care and concern for the damage being done to history on the part of the self-proclaimed arbiters of purity. Someone (always unnamed), somewhere might/could be offended by a sculpture, a painting, or a statue. The “offense” is that viewing this devil’s work might/could “trigger” an unwanted emotion of some kind. (Not to mention the encouragement it gives to white supremacists!)
Then there’s the case of the San Francisco school board voting to spend $600,000 to destroy a Depression-era mural of George Washington painted by an ardent Communist.
Forget “future generations” — found via Maggie’s Farm, a Website called McSweeney’s is getting a jump on things by publishing satiric “Obituaries for the Recently Canceled:”
Matthew Edwards, 41, was canceled early Friday evening after he was seen in his car singing along to “Remix to Ignition.” Mr. Edwards has not watched the R. Kelly documentary, but colleagues say he was aware of its existence and general content. He leaves behind his intersectional feminist wife Julia and two woke children.
– – –Following a long battle in defense of a controversial Facebook post, Meredith Van Dorn, 20, finally succumbed to cancellation at her home on Thursday night. Ms. Van Dorn was surrounded by friends and loved ones who, upon her cancellation, insisted they always had kind of a weird feeling about her, actually. Ms. Van Dorn’s parents, Peter and Linda, would like their daughter to be remembered for her sweet smile and love of dancing, rather than her provocative feelings about Japanese toilets.
* * * * * * * *
Simon Mulchfield, 27, was a rising journalist at The Atlantic. On Saturday he canceled himself at his parents’ Westchester home, after re-reading an essay he wrote in his freshman year of college about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr. Mulchfield leaves behind his uncanceled fiancé, Shayna Al-Ahmadi, who is fluent in both Hebrew and Arabic and whose undergraduate essays have been read before Congress. Ms. Al-Ahmadi remains grateful for their time together and notes that if Mr. Mulchfield had not canceled himself, she absolutely would have done so.
* * * * * * * *
On Wednesday, three-day-old Lily Hobbes became the youngest person ever to be canceled, when her father read to her from Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming and she immediately started crying.
Mao’s Struggle Sessions: a warning from the past for the rest of us — a how-to guide for today’s left.
TEN YEARS AFTER HE BECAME VP, NEWS OUTLETS DECIDE BIDEN’S TRACK RECORD ON BUSING IS NOTEWORTHY. At Hot Air, Allahpundit writes:
Did Team Obama, at least, do that investigation? Vice presidents are normally vetted within an inch of their lives before being selected. Presumably O and his team knew all about Biden’s view of busing, the crime bill, and so on and determined that they were collectively not so problematic that they should look elsewhere for a running mate. But the media was free to render a different verdict, as it’s now in the process of doing, and to challenge Obama aggressively on it. They didn’t. And it’s no mystery why.
I think the most charitable explanation for this oversight is simple laziness. They didn’t give Biden the kid-gloves treatment in 2008 because they were in the tank and determined not to make trouble for a historic Democratic nominee, one might say. They gave him the kid-gloves treatment because they don’t do much investigating themselves, even of their own archives. Even this year, it may be the case that most of the media reports about Biden’s history with busing have been spoonfed to them by rival campaigns like Sanders’s or Harris’s. The reason Uncle Joe didn’t get dinged for this a decade ago might be as simple as the RNC’s oppo team having either dropped the ball or concluded that there was little to be gained by feeding the press stories about Biden’s opposition to busing (a position overwhelmingly shared by Republicans). But again: If you prefer this theory, you’re stuck believing that the press is uninterested in doing the basics of its own job, even when there are potentially high-stakes consequences in a national election.
Well, yes. Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
ROD DREHER: Some Woman’s Husband, Some Kids’ Father. “This is a powerful essay by a woman whose husband — the father of their three young children — decided that he was really a woman, and transitioned. It appeared in The Guardian in 2012. I bet the newspaper would not publish something like this today; it challenges the Narrative too strongly. . . . This Pride Month, our media never tell us the stories of people like Christine Benvenuto and her children — those whose lives were shattered by men like Jay Ladin, following their dream. They are the collateral damage on the way to Utopia.”
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BRUCE SCHNEIER: iPhone Apps Surreptitiously Communicated with Unknown Servers.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Colleges Shouldn’t Escape Blame For The Student Debt Crisis.
QUESTIONS ASKED: “When it is fine for an all-white gang to assault an Asian American in broad daylight? When he’s a conservative journalist. Where is it fine to do this? Portland, Ore. How do you do it? By all means necessary.”
‘Why did I, a Vietnamese-American gay journalist, receive this reaction from a self-described anti-racist social justice movement?’
The answer, [Quillette editor Andy Ngo] wrote, was that he has tried to report honestly on Antifa — which, as Ngo wrote last year, is a ‘far-left movement of communists, socialists, and anarchists who agitate for revolution’, and who revel in ritualized violence against their enemies. If Ngo is not with them, he must be against them. And if he is against them, then he is a ‘fascist’ and deserves what he gets.
This is the logic of ‘By all means necessary’, the moronic line coined by Malcolm X, and familiar from the Malcolm X t-shirts issued to liberal white Humanities’ students on their first day in graduate school. Typically, the t-shirt shows Malcolm X, carbine in hand, peering out of a window as he tries to protect his family. Not against white racists, but against his fellow radicals, the sectarians of the Nation of Islam who would eventually murder him.
The story behind that image, and the false impression given it is reproduced without context, tells us everything we already know, or should know by now, about the radical fetish for violence.
Read the whole thing.
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SCIENCE: Boys More Likely To Be Victims Of Teen Dating Violence Than Girls, Study Shows. “A lot of our interventions assume that the girl is always the victim, but these findings tell us that it isn’t always so.” Do tell.