Archive for 2019
March 21, 2019
KURT SCHLICHTER: We Are Going To Lose The Coming War With China. “Nations famously tend to always try to fight the last war, and what America is preparing to do today with the newly assertive China is no exception. The problem is our last war was against primitive religious fanatics in the Middle East and China is an emerging superpower with approaching-peer level conventional capabilities and an actual strategy for contesting the United States in all the potential battlespaces – land, sea, air, space and cyber. America is simply not ready for the Pacific war to come. We’re likely to lose.”
YOU CAN’T TRUST FACEBOOK: Millions of Facebook user passwords were accessible to employees.
AT AMAZON, save in Blu-Ray and DVD.
WHEN YOU’VE LOST THE NEW YORKER: The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the Center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics; like most liberals, our view of the S.P.L.C. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited listings of U.S. hate groups, its reputation for winning cases against the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and its stream of direct-mail pleas for money to keep the good work going. The mailers, in particular, painted a vivid picture of a scrappy band of intrepid attorneys and hate-group monitors, working under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in the deepest heart of Dixie. When the S.P.L.C. hired me as a writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of super-dedicated colleagues. I felt self-righteous about the work before I’d even begun it.
The first surprise was the office itself. On a hill in downtown Montgomery, down the street from both Jefferson Davis’s Confederate White House and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where M.L.K. preached and organized, the Center had recently built a massive modernist glass-and-steel structure that the social critic James Howard Kunstler would later liken to a “Darth Vader building” that made social justice “look despotic.” It was a cold place inside, too. The entrance was through an underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic security. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure at once. But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,” one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The “professional staff”—the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raisers—were almost exclusively white. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay.
During my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t help laughing at my bewilderment. “Well, honey, welcome to the Poverty Palace,” she said. . . . And the unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top of the organization—Dees and the Center’s president, Richard Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would ever be addressed.
An apt description. But here’s the thing: The SPLC has been an obvious fraud for 20 years or more. Why are all the usual media suspects suddenly noticing now?
Plus: “We were part of the con, and we knew it.” That could apply to the press, too.
THE PREMISE IS A LIE, SINCE VIDEO SHOWED THAT TEA PARTY PROTESTERS NEVER DID THAT, AND LEWIS BACKTRACKED: Devin Nunes appears to defend protesters called John Lewis the N-word in newly-resurfaced video. But then, lying is what they do.
UPDATE: From the comments: “They have to lie about us because we tell the truth about them.”
WELL, THAT’S IT — TRUMP JUST LOST THE ALL-IMPORTANT LONDON VOTE: Quite the endorsement! London Mayor Sadiq Khan says the next U.S. president ‘can’t be Trump.’
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why Lifting Weights Can Be So Potent for Aging Well. “Weight training by older people may build not only strength and muscle mass but also motivation and confidence, potentially spurring them to continue exercising, according to an interesting new study of the emotional impacts of lifting weights. The findings intimate that people worried that they might be too old or inept to start resistance training should perhaps try it, to see how their bodies and minds respond.”
What’s really impressive is how many old people went on lifting after the study was over and they were on their own. Plus: “Also surprising, the researchers discovered little direct correlation between muscle and motivation. The people who had gained the most strength or muscle mass during the study were not necessarily those most likely to stick to the training. Instead, it was those who had come to feel most competent in the gym.”
KAMALA HARRIS STRUGGLES TO COME UP WITH A REASON WHY YOU SHOULD VOTE FOR HER:
“So how are you different from — I mean obviously besides from being yourself and your background, but as far as policy goes, as far as a plan goes, how are you different?” Kimmel followed. “Because, for me, what I need to figure out is, ‘Okay, there’s a lot of people here.’ How do you distinguish?”
“That’s fair … Obviously it’s going to be a long campaign and all of us will, you know, have opportunities to speak and the voters will learn more and obviously, voters ultimately will make the decision,” Harris said, taking her time to answer.
“I think one of the distinctions is, um … I have a background in having been a leader and I think that the voters are going to decide who will be the next commander in chief and president of the United States based on experience of leading. I have led on a local government level, state government, and now federal government.”
This doesn’t set her apart from any of the other candidates. Many of the politicians here have had leadership experience on some level or another. Harris essentially admitted on national television that she’s got nothing.
I thought Beto was the Ted Kennedy retread during this presidential primary season.
BETO-MANIA AND OUR CULT OF PERSONALITY POLITICS:
Everything about his candidacy feels like a triumph of nostalgia-peddling. The constant refrain that he’s this generation’s Robert F. Kennedy is an interesting play on the time-tested effort by Democratic candidates to claim the Kennedy mantle, though usually it’s John F. Kennedy, not RFK. Then again, it makes sense given that RFK moved left of JFK — and so has the Democratic party.
There’s also a shared authentic inauthenticity to O’Rourke. Joe Kennedy groomed his boys for the presidency from an early age. O’Rourke’s dad assigned his son the nickname Beto almost from birth, because he thought it would help win votes in El Paso.
Like a 1960s Kennedy, O’Rourke is an old person’s idea of what a young person is supposed to be like, albeit with a Gen X spin: skateboarding, membership in a punk band, etc. Sure, O’Rourke was born the same year that Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders first ran for the Senate, as a Democrat and social democrat, respectively. (Biden won.) But that only makes him young compared with those guys.
Then there’s the déjà vu. O’Rourke’s candidacy feels like a rerun, and not merely because the media covered his recently concluded Senate race against Ted Cruz as if it were a presidential contest. (A race, it’s worth nothing, that O’Rourke lost despite having raised more money than any Senate candidate ever, and despite the fact that his opponent was wildly unpopular.)
And speaking of déjà vu, as Scott Whitlock writes at NewsBusters, “Time Cheers ‘Phenom’ Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Best Storyteller in the Party.’”
Their encomium is merely their way of saying thanks, given that AOC’s party piece is a retread of a pair of decade-old Time magazine reruns, which itself are built upon decades of FDR nostalgia.
WHAT’S THE SPANISH FOR STASI OR CHEKA? Juan Guaido’s chief of staff snatched from his home at 2am.
FUNNY HOW THE PRESS WILL JUST TAKE A LIE AND REPEAT IT FOREVER: Ari Fleischer Destroys the Left’s ‘Bush Lied, People Died’ Myth About Iraq War.
(Classical reference in headline.)
WORST NAZI PRESIDENT EVER: Trump says it’s time for US to recognize ‘Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights.’
A LOOK AT the new BMW X7.
HERE’S PRESIDENT TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE ORDER ON CAMPUS FREE SPEECH, and here’s FIRE’s statement.
COVERING THE IMPORTANT NEWS: Most Pupular — Labrador Retrievers Top List Of Dog Breeds For 28th Year.