Archive for 2019
August 18, 2019
THE BABYLON BEE IS INCREASINGLY SAVAGE: Snopes Strikes Deal With Netflix To Provide On-Screen Fact Checks Of Fictional Shows, Movies.
MICHAEL YON EMAILS FROM HONG KONG:
Yesterday’s protest was massive. I have not even slept yet. Estimated 1.7m people. Crowds are notoriously difficult to estimate, but I will confirm it was absolutely massive, stretching for miles in pouring rain. Massive.
Hong Kong is China’s brain tumor. Do nothing…tumor grows. Operate…the procedure could kill the communist party.
This is very serious, Gentlemen. Do not underestimate what is happening here.
I won’t.
KAMALA HARRIS & ELIZABETH WARREN GET 4 PINOCCHIOS FROM WAPO FOR CLAIMING MICHAEL BROWN WAS MURDERED BY OFFICER WILSON: All these efforts to make it sound like the police are the source of all the problems in inner city neighborhoods won’t end well.
OPEN THREAD: Savor the remains of the day.
FREE MUMIA: THE NEXT GENERATION. Philly protest will support suspect accused of shooting six cops: ‘I don’t understand it,’ police commissioner says. ‘There’s certain marches I do understand; this is definitely not one of them’
THE MOOCH, BILL KRISTOL AND THE NEVERTRUMP QUEST FOR RELEVANCE: From Roger Kimball at the American edition of the London Spectator. “Consider this headline: ‘Anthony Scaramucci talks to Bill Kristol about trying to force Trump off the GOP ticket in 2020.’ Can you guess the source? If you said ‘The Onion,’ you would have made a perfectly rational judgment… But no. A joke it may be — an absurdity, too — but the source of that story is not The Onion but CNBC, not exactly an unimpeachable source, I know, but at least one with some pretensions to reporting as distinct from satire.”
As Tom Wolfe wrote thirty years ago,“We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.”
OUT: SELF-DEPORTATION. IN: SELF-DEFUNDING. Planned Parenthood May Reject Federal Funds Over Trump Administration Rule. “Despite years of fighting calls to ‘defund Planned Parenthood,’ the reproductive healthcare organization may now voluntarily remove itself from a massive government funding program, after a federal appeals court allowed a controversial new abortion rule to go forward.”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Without a Stable Moral Currency, There Is Terror Without Trust.
Traditionally the solution to the problem of immorality has been the diffusion of power. Thus the current crisis of morality signifies a crisis in the containment of power. Many of the old checks and balances that once curbed power have been weakened by “changing cultural mores” which expanded the role of Big Government into areas once proscribed by religious taboo. The compartmentalization of formal structures was compromised by international travel, financial mobility, and ubiquitous telecommunications.
Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book is a map of a social network whose power can outflank most walls. It had a list of Hollywood, royalty, political consultants, billionaires, publishers, financiers, entertainers, foreign world leaders, American presidents, state governors, politicians, corporate executives, influential scientists, rock stars, lawyers, Nobel Prize winners, comic book moguls, socialites by the dozen, comedians and of course fixers and assorted low characters. There are dozens of similar social networks in the world. Some are even more powerful.
Bringing power under control again will require expanding the scope of trustless systems and reestablishing a stable moral currency. Readers will recall that such systems don’t actually do away with trust. They simply move it away from one actor to a system where provenance, transaction, and state can be verified independently by anyone through the mathematical security of cryptography. The idea is that you don’t have to trust if you can verify.
But while systems can capture what is through the blockchain and other devices, no amount of technology can say how things ought to be without postulating a set of values.
Read the whole thing.
(Via Small Dead Animals, which also has a related video rant on Epstein and conspiracy theories by PJTV alum Steven Crowder.)
MORE QUESTIONS FOR REP. TLAIB: When will you speak out against this obvious human rights violation being committed by the Palestinian Authority? Not that any MSM reporters have the guts to ask: she hates Trump, they hate Trump, and well, you know, priorities…
ILHAN OMAR WITHDRAWS SUPPORT FROM BILL TO SAVE THE EARTH AFTER LEARNING THAT’S WHERE ISRAEL IS.
I’m so old, I can remember when the Babylon Bee was still satire, before it transformed itself into America’s paper of record.
A FAILURE OF INTERSECTIONALITY: Palestinian Authority bans LGBTQ activities in West Bank.
PREFERENCE CASCADE: In blue Seattle, Trump supporters are starting to come out of hiding. “So what, you may be saying, Trump’s not going to win out here anyway. True. But when your fundraising is breaking records, it indicates an intense passion for the candidate, as it did for Bernie Sanders. That counts for a ton in politics — and likely means Trump is stronger right now than his dismal polls indicate.”
His polls aren’t dismal. He has 51% approval.
#TIMESUP: Katy Perry accused of sexual harassment by a second person.
Related: If you’re a feminist, you have to take the allegations against Katy Perry seriously. Apparently, no one is a feminist. “If Josh Kloss was a woman and Katy Perry was a man, his accusations would be all over the news and Perry would be off the radio. But that’s not the case.”
UM: Dem rep: I’m not surprised to see Trump taking sides against peaceful protesters like … Antifa. “What’s odd, and ominous, about this more ambitious spin from freshman Rep. Deb Haaland is that it whitewashes violence by Antifa *while also* implicitly justifying it.”
Standard practice with Dems. Plus: “We shouldn’t be surprised. If the country is far enough along into its Weimar period to have gangs of ideologues swinging at each other in the streets, it’s far enough along to have members of the legislature defending their own side’s gang.”
As I’ve said before, you don’t get Hitler because of Hitler — there are always potential Hitlers hanging around. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the people in charge of maintaining liberal democracy are too weak and corrupt to do the job. And there are a lot of those now, not exclusively in the Democratic Party. Related item here.
Flashback: Lubricating the Slippery Slope: The Intellectual Astroglide of the Elite.
SOME OF THE BEST-RUN MEDIUM-TERM IMMIGRATION DETENTION FACILITIES ARE PRIVATE: I’ve toured both a public and a privately-run medium-term* facility (and reported on them here). The private one was significantly nicer. I’ve also spoken to a federal official whose job it was to inspect both types. He told me that facilities dedicated to immigration detention tend to be well-run, whether public or private. It’s jails and prisons that do immigration detention as a sideline that tend to have problems, because they are not familiar with the special rules that apply to immigration detention. Yet a vastly disproportionate share of the energies of those who object to the conditions at detention facilities is aimed at privately-run facilities in particular.
This is true when the Left objects to conditions at regular jails and prisons too. It is apparently driven in significant part by unions that object to the lower wages at private prisons.
*I claim no familiarity with the holding tanks at which illegal immigrants are initially held, sometimes for a day or two, after being initially picked up. I have never visited one. The detainees I talked to had no complaints concerning the longer-term facilities I toured, but some did complain about the place they were initially taken. The most common complaint was that they were too cold.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. We Have Ruined Childhood: For youngsters these days, an hour of free play is like a drop of water in the desert. Of course they’re miserable.
School days are longer and more regimented. Kindergarten, which used to be focused on play, is now an academic training ground for the first grade. Young children are assigned homework even though numerous studies have found it harmful. STEM, standardized testing and active-shooter drills have largely replaced recess, leisurely lunches, art and music.
The role of school stress in mental distress is backed up by data on the timing of child suicide. “The suicide rate for children is twice what it is for children during months when school is in session than when it’s not in session,” according to Dr. Gray. “That’s true for suicide completion, suicide attempts and suicidal ideation, whereas for adults, it’s higher in the summer.” . . .
And so for many children, when the school day is over, it hardly matters; the hours outside school are more like school than ever. Children spend afternoons, weekends and summers in aftercare and camps while their parents work. The areas where children once congregated for unstructured, unsupervised play are now often off limits. And so those who can afford it drive their children from one structured activity to another. Those who can’t keep them inside. Free play and childhood independence have become relics, insurance risks, at times criminal offenses. . . .
Kids need recess. They need longer lunches. They need free play, family time, meal time. They need less homework, fewer tests, a greater emphasis on social-emotional learning.
What’s the obvious, but never-mentioned solution?
TO BE FAIR, THEY CAN’T SELL THEIR PROGRAMS IF THEY DON’T LIE, SO WHADDYAGONNADO? Democratic Dishonesty on Assault-Weapon Bans.
WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY REHABILITATING SOVIET COMMUNISM: NY Times Wants to ‘Reframe’ American History to Make Slavery Central to Our Founding.