Archive for 2019
May 8, 2019
“TESTING THE PERIMETER:” Understanding Google’s Military Mindset.
YOU DON’T SAY: Lower-Income Americans Less Likely to Own Technology.
I wonder if they’re also less likely to own cars or homes or many different pairs of shoes.
WHY ARE CAMPUSES SUCH CESSPITS OF LEFTIST BIGOTRY? Texas A&M event blames CHRISTIANITY for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia. Also for global warming, no doubt.
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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: DoJ Threatens Executive Privilege Smack Down. “What time is it? It’s privilege o’clock at the DoJ. The Justice Department says it will move to have sections of the Mueller Report protected by executive privilege if Rep. ‘Fat Jerry’ Nadler of the House Judiciary Committee doesn’t stop quacking about a contempt of congress charge.”
ESCAPE FROM BARBARISM: Asia Bibi arrives in Canada after leaving Pakistan: Christian woman freed last year after spending eight years on death row for blasphemy. “Blasphemy is a highly inflammatory issue in Pakistan, where even unproven accusations of insulting Islam can spark lynchings. Human rights activists say blasphemy charges are frequently used to settle personal scores.”
IF THE GOP CONGRESS HAD MADE THIS BIG A DEAL ABOUT OBAMA’S COLLEGE TRANSCRIPTS, THE PRESS WOULD HAVE CALLED IT A MCCARTHYITE WITCH HUNT: President Trump Should Not Turn Over His Tax Returns To Congress, Tax Professor And Tax Lawyer Say.
The Democrats’ open campaign to get rid of Trump extraconstitutionally, using every institution they control from the FBI to the media, is enormously destructive. The consequences need to be severe enough to ensure it is not repeated.
GOOD: Congress Approves Over-the-Counter Hearing Aids. “Clinical studies of 125 patients reviewed by the FDA indicated that on average the outcomes for the self-fitted OTC hearing aid were comparable to those for people who had the device fitted by a hearing professional.”
Requiring a prescription for a hearing aid always seemed to me like the silliest kind of rent-seeking. It doesn’t exactly require a medical professional to figure this stuff out: If it’s too small, get a bigger one; If it’s too big, try a size down; Too quiet, turn it up; Too loud, turn it down.
I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED TO SEE HYPOCRISY GOING ON HERE: Democrat seeking Trump’s taxes hasn’t released his, spends lavishly on lobbyists. “The House Democrat demanding President Trump’s tax returns is coming under fire for not releasing his returns and spending lavishly on lobbyists and potential donors. Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, hasn’t released his recent returns, though said he planned to in the future. . . . Neal’s suggestion he’d release his returns later came after he didn’t respond to a question about releasing his taxes in a 2017 Roll Call survey.”
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WEIRD, JUDGING BY WHAT YOU SEE IN THE MEDIA IT’S ALL THE RAGE: Poll: Majority say socialism is incompatible with American values. In general, the American people aren’t as stupid as those who purport to rule them.
FATAL FLAW: Rogue Boeing 737 Max planes ‘with minds of their own.’
An excellent explainer courtesy of Instapundit reader Mike Perry.
THE ECONOMIST: Globally, People Are Eating More Meat And Leading Longer, Healthier Lives.
Well, you know what they say: Meat Heals.
BAN ALL THE THINGS! New Jersey Politician Wants To Ban All Bags — Paper or Plastic.
Working its way though the legislature right now is S2776. As written, the legislation would ban food service businesses and other retailers who have stores larger than 1,000 square feet from providing their customers with plastic bags. The bill would also naturally ban plastic straws.
Naturally.
Smith stands a good chance of getting his paper bag ban through. He claims to already have the support of Senate leadership. The state’s grocery store association is also on board with the policy.
Still, one wonders what the practical effects of Smith’s amendment, as well as the wider plastic bag ban, will be.
A recent study of plastic bag bans in California found that the policy—while still reducing plastic bag consumption overall—did lead to a 120 percent spike in the purchase of smaller garbage bags.
As it turns out, the single-use plastic bags people used at the grocery store were hardly single-use at all, but rather were reused to line waste baskets or clean up after pets. When the free option disappeared, people simply started purchasing unprohibited garbage bags.
New Jersey’s bag ban would seem to have a similar potential for this kind of substitution. While it bars stores from handing out thinner plastic bags, it still allows them to provide customers with plastic tote bags provided they’re thicker than 10 mils.
As written, stores could well end up ditching their current carry-out bags for another type of thicker plastic bag, which would seemingly increase overall plastic consumption.
More important however is the very real increase in official moral preening.
HARVARD KEYNOTER FAVORED JAIL FOR CHRISTIANS, JEWS: Yes, you read that right. This HillFaith post on the event is addressed primarily to the most influential and overlooked group in Washington, D.C., the 20,000 aides working for senators, representatives and congressional committees, because sooner or later they will all have to make a decision about whether to join the Intolerance Brigades.
But the information about the speaker, the survey data and the issue analysis ought to be of interest to everybody who cares about the First Amendment. And yes, you can call me a First Amendment Fanatic if you like. We all should be.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Excelsior? ‘Superhero’ AOC Pummels President Trump. “Pop culture’s fawning treatment of the freshman Representative doesn’t quite mesh with reality.”
It seems the freshman Congresswoman is baffled by this new technology called the “garbage disposal.”
It’s par for the course for the woman now known as AOC. Right-leaning folks routinely mock her on social media, assuming Twitter doesn’t ban them in the process.
They poke fun at her slippery grasp of economic facts, her painfully thin skin and, of course, the silliest proposal in modern times, the Green New Deal.
It makes up for the fact that 98.9 percent of comedians won’t go near her. The other 1.1 percent? They’re more comfortable turning her into an action heroine.
It’s embarrassing, or at least ought to be.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Get Out — American universities have become whirlpools of downward mobility that target the people and the ideas that they once cherished and protected. It’s time for Jews to stop paying for them.
Jewish students should take note. What the undergraduate Jacobins at Williams hate isn’t Bibi Netanyahu, or “the occupation,” or even Zionism. What they hate are the values that used to make American universities great, and that made Jews such a great fit for American universities. In an intellectual environment increasingly governed by fear—adopt our rigid worldview or be labeled racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, ableist, or worse—and living almost entirely in the shadows, away from public scrutiny, the true intellectual seeker is not an asset but a liability. There’s nothing Jewish students, at Williams or anywhere else, can do to change that. They should realize, as many already do, that they’re not disliked and targeted because of the views they hold, which they might conceivably change; they’re disliked and targeted because of who they are. Paying for teenagers to be subjected to this kind of rejection and abuse is an act of communal self-destructiveness that we would be smart to eschew.
If this sounds like needless histrionics, consider the case of NYU. After seven years of hard work and good fortune, I graduated with a Ph.D. from Columbia in 2007, and was thrilled to find employment teaching at the downtown campus of New York’s other great university. It didn’t take long for me to realize that no amount of effort or excellence—not even a teaching award I had won a few years into my career—would absolve me of the original sin of failing to conform to my colleagues’ rigid worldview, a zealous outlook that anointed all the world’s minorities as inherently and irredeemably oppressed and condemned the Jews to play the comically ahistorical role of privileged white oppressors.
The Corbynization of the Democratic Party continues apace. Read the whole thing.
EXPERT ADVICE FROM THE ATLANTIC: Don’t Let Students Run the University: Trying to get professors fired because you don’t like their views isn’t activism—it’s preening would-be totalitarianism.
Related: ‘Unbridled and Performative Student Activism Is a Disease of Affluence’: Camille Paglia Edition.
No, it’s a disease of no consequences. These kids spent years in SAT prep and bogus extracurricular activities to get into their schools. You’d only need to expel a half dozen or so to put an end to this behavior.