Archive for 2019
January 2, 2019
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Louis C.K. Isn’t ‘Punching Down’ at the Parkland Kids.
Louis C.K. has lost everything. That seems fair to me. And now he’s trying to start all over again, which also seems fair to me. Nobody owes him movie roles or producer credits or any of the other stuff he lost in the space of a day. But if he can still find comedy clubs that want to book him, and people still want to go see him, how is that hurting you?
Taking shots at Louis C.K. in 2019 is punching down. It makes you the bully. If that’s who you are, go right ahead. And then project your own bullying behavior onto him. Feels good, doesn’t it? Feels righteous. You’re a good person. Sure.
Hooray for you. Wonderful, marvelous you.
Read the whole thing.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: The Boy Scouts’ Bankruptcy Is Not Just Financial. It’s Moral.
Next year’s World Scouting Jamboree in West Virginia reportedly will be the first hosted by the former Boy Scouts of America to make condoms available to participants. A 2016 agreement with the Unitarian-Universalists overrode the group’s membership requirement of belief in God by allowing belief in humanism, contrary to the Scout Oath.
The “bowling alone” syndrome of declining civic groups in the United States, over-scheduling of young people, and the weakening of American family models all played a role. In fact, political scientist Paul Kengor of Grove City College has detailed the history of American communists and cultural Marxists’s efforts to target and subvert Scouting in particular, to help undermine American family life.
Yet it was corporate executives and members of the U.S. political establishment (including Scouting leaders such as Rex Tillerson and Robert Gates) on the national board who with progressive staff members agreed to surrender to pressure to sexualize the organization in recent years, despite an earlier hard-fought U.S. Supreme Court victory by the organization to preserve membership rules. In admitting openly gay members and leaders, accepting transgenderism, then admitting girls, Scouting turned its back on a cultural background of Christian teaching on sexuality going back millennia.
As Iowahawk would say:
HE SELF-IDENTIFIES AS STILL BEING IN POWER: Don’t call Biden the “former” vice president.
Rob Merges and I had a paper on why copyright extensions are wrong a number of years ago.
SINCE WE WERE ALL KILLED BY THE REPEAL OF NET NEUTRALITY, THIS REALLY ISN’T TOO BIG A DEAL: FCC to shutter ‘most operations’ if government shutdown continues.
CAN PAINT AFFECT GUITAR TONE? Cables can, so it’s not a complete stretch.
Related (From Ed): Guitarists can be an obsessive and experimental lot (take it from one who knows). The Beatles went through a phase in 1968 when they believed that lack of paint improved their instruments’ tone:
In early ’68, The Beatles headed to Rishikesh, India, to study transcendental meditation with The Maharishi and friends, including Donovan Leitch. There, Donovan convinced the trio to sand the finish off their instruments, telling them how a guitar sounds better without a heavy finish. After returning to London, during sessions for the self-titled “white album,” Lennon and Harrison sanded their Casinos. Lennon primarily played his newly stripped [Epiphone] Casino for the sessions. Harrison said that once they’d removed the finish, they became much better guitars. “I think that works on a lot of guitars,” he explained. “If you take the paint and varnish off and get the bare wood, it seems to sort of breathe.” With the completion of the white album, promo clips were filmed for the single “Revolution”/“Hey Jude.” The clips showed Lennon using his natural Casino.
Though according to Gibson (which acquired the Epiphone brand in 1957), “Reportedly, [Lennon] was interested in having the Casino restored to its original sunburst finish toward the end of his life, but that never happened. Today the guitar is owned by his widow, Yoko Ono, and listed in the inventory of Lennon’s estate as the ‘Revolution’ guitar.”
Trump phases Arab forces into Syria vs Iran ahead of US pullout. Egyptian/UAE officers on the scene.
When Sen. Lindsay Graham said Monday, Dec. 31: “I think we are slowing things [exit from Syria] down in a smart way,” he confirmed DEBKAfile’s Dec. 22 report: “US troops will leave eastern and northern Syria, but America is not deserting this part of the country and will continue to maintain a presence after the pullout.” On Monday, the Republican Senator, who sharply criticized President Donald Trump for the troop withdrawal as a “huge Obama-like mistake,” stated: “The president assured me he is going to make sure he gets the job done.”
Our sources can now reveal the nature of that presence and the process afoot for the gradual US withdrawal. In the last few days, Egyptian and UAE military officers visited the contested north Syrian town of Manbij. They toured the town and its outskirts, checked out the locations of US and Kurdish YPG militia positions, and took notes on how to deploy their own troops as replacements. On the diplomatic side, the White House is in continuous conversation with the UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Muhammed Bin Ziyad (MbZ) and Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi. The deal Trump is offering, is that they take over US positions in Manbij, where the Kurds have sought protection against a Turkish invasion, and American air cover will be assured against Russian, Syrian or Turkish attack.
Trump’s decision has been played in the media and Official Washington as the most reckless act since Napoleon decided to march on Moscow, but if Debka has the story right, this is a measured and responsible move. It’s certainly much more measured and responsible than President Obama’s “red line” fecklessness which got us into Syria in the first place. But that’s not a story that you’ll get from the media or Official Washington.
KEN MASUGI: Nationalism Is America’s Comeback Kid. The political class doesn’t like the idea of nationalism, because nationalism requires it to be loyal to something other than itself. Or, put another way, the political class is nationalist already, it’s just nationalist on behalf of Davos Nation.
NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Nancy Pelosi’s daughter tells CNN that her mom will ‘cut your head off and you won’t even know you’re bleeding.’
Presumably, she means this as a…compliment?
EARLIER I MENTIONED PHIL HAMBURGER’S Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech.
Here’s an excellent review by Andy McCarthy in The New Criterion, Our Orwellian Tax Code.
THESE FIVE HOUSE DEMS WILL LIKELY BE TRUMP’S BIGGEST HEADACHES: Tomorrow, they become chairmen of five House committees with virtually endless opportunities to cause genuine problems for the president.
But check out their biggest donor groups. There, we find some surprises and several big hints about which of the five incoming House powers Trump should most worry about. Everybody has heard of “Mad Maxine” Waters.
But can you name Richard Neal’s home state? No cheating! My analysis is here, on The Epoch Times where I hope you will be seeing my byline early and often, as they say in Chicago.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Facebook still hasn’t launched a big privacy feature that Mark Zuckerberg promised more than seven months ago. “It’s taking longer than we initially had thought.”
The product, called “Clear History,” got a lot of attention. Not only is browsing data important — Facebook uses it to target people with advertising — but CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Clear History himself during Facebook’s annual developer conference. Clear History was an olive branch meant to show everyone how serious Facebook is about privacy. […]
As it turns out, clearing your browser history was harder to implement than Facebook expected. It’s been more than seven months since Zuckerberg’s announcement and Facebook hasn’t mentioned Clear History since.
Tech blogger John Gruber adds, “I don’t think it was hard, per se, but that the entire announcement was bullshit intended to distract people from the biggest privacy scandal in company history — and Facebook is a company riddled with privacy scandals.”
Zuckerberg’s Everything is great! New Year’s message reads like a smokescreen covering a smokescreen.
KURT SCHLICHTER: What’s A Few More Dead Americans If It Means The Dems Can Score A Few More Political Points? Well, and that GOP donors can continue to hire cheap foreign labor.
ELIZABETH WARREN’S “DUKAKIS TANK” MOMENT:
The release of her DNA test results right before the midterms is almost uniformly seen as a public relations disaster, from which she still is trying to recover. Rather than confirm the validity of her claim when she was climbing the law professor ladder to Harvard to be Native American, it turned her into a laughingstock.
Then Warren announced her candidacy on New Year’s Eve day. What were her handlers thinking? The timing could not have been worse. Perhaps they thought that in a slow news cycle her announcement would dominate the headlines in a good way. Instead, with little else going on, it gave even left-leaning media the opportunity to express doubts about her. And that slow news cycle ended up being dominated by Trump announcing on television that only Warren’s psychiatrist knows whether Warren actually believes she can win.
All those mistakes are dwarfed by what Warren did on New Year’s Eve. She went on Instagram live to drink beer in her kitchen. Seriously.
It’s obvious that she was trying to mimic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the far-left Democrat rising star, who has made a name for herself, among other ways, by live streaming her meal preparation from her kitchen.
As Jaclyn Cashman adds at the Boston Herald, “Just hours after announcing her 2020 Exploratory Committee, with her first Iowa stop freshly booked, Warren went full Dukakis:”
Beer has a time-honored place in presidential politics. But this resident of Cambridge’s la-di-dah Linnaean Street and erstwhile Harvard elitist is really an extra oaky chardonnay kind of lady. Her poor husband was so befuddled — apparently not fully clued in on the stunt — that when she offered him one he declined. More of a 20-year-old tawny port sipper, no doubt.
The most authentic thing about the video, in fact, was its bogusness: Warren once again trying to pretend she is something she is not.
This time, an average beer-drinking American. Warren looked about as natural as former President Barack Obama in that awkward “Beer Summit” after he insulted the Cambridge cop.
Speaking of bogusness, it’s also a John Kerry moment:
The liberal firebrand pointed to her dog, Bailey, who was also in the kitchen and who accompanied her earlier in the day.
“And I went out and talked to the press, and Bailey went out — it was his first press conference — and my husband Bruce [Mann] was with me,” Warren said.
Seconds later, Warren’s apparent craving struck: “Hold on a second — I’m gonna get me a beer,” she said, as she walked out of view of the camera.
“Can I get a me a hunting license here?”
(Bumped.)
THE HELL WITH LOSING GRACEFULLY: Trump Shoots Down Mitt Romney’s New Year’s Day Attack. “I won big, and he didn’t.”
KNOXVILLE MAN KILLED BY APPARENTLY ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT WITH NO LICENSE, INSURANCE: ICE Places Hold on Immigrant Charged With Criminally Negligent Homicide in Fatal Knoxville Accident.
PATRICK POOLE: Cleveland Doctor Ousted After Anti-Semitic Social Media Posts Exposed. “Lara Kollab had joked about giving her Jewish patients the wrong medicine.”
OSPREYS GALORE: An Osprey insertion and a rather spooky photo of Ospreys preparing for night flight ops on the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: My latest Creators Syndicate column, The big story of 2018.
VERY RELATED: Chapter 2, Cocktails from Hell: North Korea – Frozen War, Hot Nukes, Maximum Pressure Cocktails.
SEE THE RACISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: New Orleans Women’s March CANCELED After Co-Chairs Exposed As Racists.
THE STUPIDITY INDEX CONTINUES TO CLIMB: Historian: Museums need to ‘reconsider’ European art exhibits because … white supremacy.