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Archive for 2019
October 20, 2019
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OPEN THREAD: You can do this.
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Chemsex Addiction.
PETER HITCHENS DIDN’T INTEND FOR THE ABOLITION OF BRITAIN TO BE A HOW-TO GUIDE: Police forces let rapists record their gender as female.
(Classical reference in headline.)
YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: Liberals Smash All Norms of Civility. I hope to teach them to regret it.
UPDATE: Maine Columnist Suggests Sen. Susan Collins Deserves Death Threats. Columnist Bill Nemitz looks exactly as you’d expect.
WASHINGTON STATE VOTERS GET TO DECIDE … AGAIN: Twenty-one years ago, voters in Washington State adopted Initiative 200. Modeled after California’s Proposition 209, its operative clause was as follows:
The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
The initiative thus outlawed both “affirmative action style” preferences as well as the more traditional kind of discrimination. The vote wasn’t close: 58.22 % of voters supported it.
Unlike Proposition 209, however, Initiative 200 merely created a statute. It did not amend the Washington State Constitution. Some folks has been trying to get the legislature to repeal it ever since. Recently, they got their way. The new legislation is called Initiative 1000. Adopted on a party-line vote, it purports merely to amend Initiative 200, but in fact it completely guts it.
Fortunately, through the hard work of Washington Asians for Equality, the issue has been forced into a referendum, now titled Referendum 88. It’s on the ballot for November.
To Washington State Voters: Please vote to reject Initiative 1000’s effort to gut the original Initiative 200 by voting “NO” on Referendum 88 (There are many reasons to vote no, but here some reasons that are less well known.)
To Everyone: The heroic little organization that forced this to a vote—Washington Asians for Equality—is being vastly outspent by the opposition. If you have some extra money, please consider sending it their way. I have dug pretty deep into my pockets. This is important. If we lose this referendum, the MSM will treat it as gospel that public opinion has shifted on this. It won’t matter how much polling evidence there is to the contrary (and there is plenty).
(BUMPED FROM FRIDAY: Thanks to everyone who already contributed!)
FOUR WAYS PELOSI’S IMPEACHMENT FAILS HILLARY’S WATERGATE TESTS: There was a time a little more than a year ago when Clinton actually had some sensible observations about her role in the 1974 Watergate impeachment, the one against her husband in 1998 and the mockery now hurtling to its denouement.
VICTORY IN THE PARKING GAME: ParKam Is Waze for Parking and Can Get You the Perfect Spot.
Of course, you’ll need the parking app if you’re renting out your garage for storage using the Stache app.
WHY IS CNN SUCH A CESSPIT OF SEXISM? White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham Hits Back At CNN’s Anderson Cooper For Mocking Her.
Cooper, who portrays himself as an unbiased news anchor, repeatedly mocked Grisham, saying: “Ooh, Stephanie. You got to increase your vocabulary, I mean, your criticism. Theater now has been used twice. I mean, Grisham clearly doesn’t get to Broadway enough if she, you know, thinks those press conferences are theater.”
“I am a single mom who (proudly) holds three roles in the White House, and I am doing the very best I can,” Grisham said in response. “But I definitely don’t get to Broadway enough.”
Cooper’s segment attacking Grisham came shortly after Grisham hit CNN over the network’s extreme left-wing bias, which was further revealed this last week after James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released more undercover sting videos on CNN.
“America needs real journalism. Real journalists don’t have an agenda,” Grisham tweeted. “They gather and present the news in an unbiased manner. They report the facts – and let the citizens decide. But audio of @CNN meetings, captured by @Project_Veritas, expose a very real agenda.”
I disagree slightly with Grisham: real journalists can have an agenda — as long as they disclose it. As John Nolte wrote last week when Shepard Smith abruptly vacated Fox News:
You might not agree with, or even like, Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity, Lawrence O’Donnell, or Tucker Carlson, but at least they have the personal integrity, professional maturity, and moral courage to say This is my opinion. This is what I believe personally. Come at me, bro. At least they have enough respect for their audience, for themselves, and for their profession not to shiver like a punk inside the armor of an Objective Journalist Just Telling the Objective Truth as a means to avoid challenge and criticism.
Fox and MSNBC are pretty open about the worldviews they represent. In contrast, as O’Keefe reported last week: Field Ops Manager At CNN: Zucker’s 9am Calls Are ‘Bulls***;’ “We’re Totally Left-Leaning…(But) We Don’t Want To Admit It.”
BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER: Apple under fire from AOC and Ted Cruz for censoring App Store in China.
BLUE ON BLUE UP NORTH: Justin Trudeau Exploited the Culture of the ‘Woke.’ “A former member of the prime minister’s foreign-policy staff encourages Canadian progressives to consider other candidates.”
Holding Trudeau up as a progressive paragon, Marche then lays down the pragmatist’s verdict: “Canadian progressives, like progressives all over the world, must decide whether they care more about the pursuit of social and cultural change, through the eradication of racist and sexist imagery, or the pursuit of transformative policies.” Notice the false dichotomy presented here as inevitability. Framing the progressive dilemma as a choice between “style” (wokeness) and “substance” (policy) is too simplistic. An officeholder’s style—in my opinion, their character, judgment, reasons for seeking power, and the story they tell and persuade you to believe in—is a perfectly legitimate area for investigation and critique. And if anyone benefited from and exploited the culture of the “woke,” it was Trudeau himself.
Voters were drawn to Trudeau in the first place because of his style as well as his substance. It is a mark of deep lament that Trudeau bears the distinction of getting so many young people excited about politics for the first time and then disappointing them within a single term. “I wasn’t cynical before Trudeau,” a Palestinian Canadian friend remarked to me last month. He was resigned, not even angry. It is a sentiment that could be echoed by many people in the vital suburbs outside Toronto where the upcoming election will be decided.
A little cynicism towards politics, politicians, and government itself is a healthy outlook, so by that measure Trudeau did wonders to improve the health of his fellow Canadians.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: The End of Men’s Magazines. Great piece by Brian Patrick Eha explaining how men’s magazines lost faith in men — and lost their readers.
Esquire, Details, Men’s Journal, Maxim, Playboy—it would be easier to list the men’s titles that haven’t shut down, cut issues, changed owners, blown up their editorial strategies, or become all but unrecognizable since 2015. In a tough media environment, men’s magazines are suffering more than most. Some—notably, Playboy and Esquire—appear to have decided that appealing primarily to men is no longer the best way forward. Their recent issues serve as signposts toward the future that, we are told over and over these days, is female—or, better yet, divorced from the gender binary altogether. What we stand to lose from their cultural eclipse is a certain ballast and guidance just as men need it most.
MICROBIOME NEWS: Gut microbiota may ‘prevent and cure’ rotavirus. “This discovery was serendipitous. We were breeding mice and realized that some of them were completely resistant to rotavirus, whereas others were highly susceptible. We investigated why and found that the resistant mice carried distinct microbiota. Fecal microbiota transplant transferred rotavirus resistance to new hosts.”
DOG DAY AFTERNOON: San Francisco 49ers become first NFL team to adopt a “‘specifically designated’ emotional support animal, a 49ers spokesperson told CNN.”
Somewhere, the late Bill Walsh, who was a boxer in college, in addition to playing multiple football positions, must be shaking his head and wondering what’s going on with the current incarnation of the team he built.
THE NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME POLICEWOMAN: Here we oops again? Looks like Team Kamala learned nothing from Hillary Clinton’s most embarrassing tweet ever.
UPDATE: Possible suspect Identified:
Earlier: Sams on critical reporting as “Whiteness Manifest” and Kamala as Force Ghost.
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: Mastering The Double-Action Revolver.
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