THE WORSE, THE BETTER? Barack’s ICE chief: Cages were Obama’s idea.
Archive for 2019
June 27, 2019
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, 21ST CENTURY BLUENOSE EDITION: VSU forbids student organizations from violating ‘public morals.’ Applicable to frats, but not to pride parades, of course, because that would be bigotry.
AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Who Won Medals at the Woke Olympics Debate? “I am ashamed to say I watched the entire debate. Who was the winner? I would say it was a tie between Donald Trump and those who did something else. Perhaps the second round of debates will be different. Just kidding.”
READY TO BREACH: 116th Brigade combat engineers position their M1150 Assault Breacher Vehicle during a live-fire training exercise at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California.
GOOD NEWS FOR NATO AND FOR THAT MATTER, TURKEY: Turkish voters reject Erdogan’s Ego-Sultan regime.
This was not a family turned coldly away as it fled violence and oppression. They were not turned away at all. They simply grew impatient waiting for the bureaucratic wheels to turn. Indeed, family members confirm that the family was not being persecuted in its home country…Ramirez and his family were looking for asylum from low-paying fast-food jobs, which isn’t how the asylum program is traditionally meant to be used.
Read the whole thing.
UNITED STATES OF FACEBOOK: Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency Betrays the Company’s True Ambitions.
So let’s imagine that Libra does get off the ground. What’s its biggest competition? Hint: it’s not Bitcoin. Let’s start with the dollar—arguably the most powerful currency in the world. About 350 million people use the dollar around the world. That’s a little under 13 percent of Facebook’s claimed 2.7 billion users (across all three platforms), so even accounting for duplicates, fake accounts, and rounding errors, Libra could be used by more people—if not actual amount spent—than the dollar, and without a whole lot of sweat from Facebook.
Not buying it? Here’s an example of anemic adoption on Facebook. The company introduced Stories on Facebook in January 2017, and the feature was derided as a direct Snapchat ripoff that was so poorly implemented and confusing as to be laughable. By fall of 2018, over 300 million people were using Stories. Boom. Dollar.
The likelihood of Libra’s adoption is even higher because the company’s fastest growth is international, and Libra is likely to be the most useful in countries where the local currency is hyperinflated or banking is unreliable. Think of the 170 million Facebook users in Africa, many of whom already bank and transact on mobile phones. It’s an easy sell.
And if Libra starts big, the network effects of the Facebook platform will ensure that it just keeps getting bigger.
Then what?
The mind reels.
ALL IS PROCEEDING AS SCOTT ADAMS HAS FORESEEN: Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne Used To Hate Donald Trump. Now, He’s Kind of a Fan. “Byrne has reconsidered his views on President Trump, who he says is dismantling the administrative state and deregulating the economy in powerful ways. Byrne, who wrote his Stanford doctoral dissertation on the limited-government philosophy of Robert Nozick, even says that Trump is right to challenge China on trade and that libertarians need to be willing to confront places where the world is more complicated than our theories allow. He says that while there are still many things that bother him about the president—especially his rhetorical style—it’s time to realize Trump is not only a far better president than Hillary Clinton would have been, but has moved things forward on issues such as tax reform, criminal justice reform, and school choice.”
SWAMP-DRAINING: EPA Unilaterally Imposes New Union Contract Slashing Telework, Easing Firing. “The new, one-sided agreement is set to go into effect on July 8 and severely limit telework, evict union representatives from agency office space and restrict employees from filing a grievance over disciplinary actions, among other changes. EPA blamed the American Federation of Government Employees for the unilateral implementation of the new contract, telling the union its refusal to open up the entire agreement to negotiation required the agency to take action on its own.”
RESISTANCE TO COLONIAL OPPRESSION: Hundreds of Chinese and Bangladeshi labourers in deadly clashes at Beijing-backed power plant near Dhaka. “Locals accuse the Chinese of trying to cover up the death of a Bangladeshi worker.”
WHY WAIT? Delete your Google account when you die.
More seriously:
Think about all the photos you have stored that your family and friends would like to have — or personal account information that your beneficiary will need to know about in the event of your death. There may be important files that you have stored on your Google Drive that someone will need access to. For those reasons, it’s a good idea to take five minutes and let Google know what to do with your data.
Instructions at the link.
THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR PUBLIC STYLE GOES FROM HAPPY AND FABULOUS TO ANGRY AND CONTROLLING: LGBTQ acceptance in ‘toxic’ decline among young Americans: study.
Related item here.
COLLUSION: Protecting Google, Vimeo takes down Project Veritas video.
UPDATE: It’s on YouTube competitor BitChute, which you may recall was banned by PayPal a while back. It’s as if these big tech companies stand shoulder to shoulder against competitors and political opponents.
A FREE SPEECH VICTORY: Minnesota Supreme Court Holds That Nonmedia Speakers Are Fully Protected by First Amendment. I filed an amicus brief in this case, along with several other prominent law professors and bloggers, taking the winning side.
Well they all agree that Orange Man is Bad.
Related: Roger Kimball: A pathetic exhibition of virtue-signaling in Miami. “Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has presided over one of the most — I think it is probably the single most — successful opening years of any president ever. That’s a difficult record to run against. So what tonight’s 10 candidates did — and I am certain that tomorrow’s will as well — was to deny reality and pretend that they were running against the Donald Trump of their dreams: a dark figure whose policies hurt instead of helped average Americans, who was anti-black, anti-woman, anti-immigrant.”