Archive for 2019
June 10, 2019
AT AMAZON, save on CDs and Vinyl.
IF THE SUPREME COURT HADN’T DECIDED ROE, WE’D PROBABLY HAVE WOUND UP WITH SOMETHING LIKE WHAT EUROPE HAS. Poll: Majority Want To Keep Abortion Legal, But They Also Want Restrictions.. That is, easy access to abortion for the first twelve weeks, much more stringent rules thereafter.
THIS IS NOT SHOCKING: Trump More Popular in New York than Mayor DeBlasio.
VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Northam Genuflects To The Gun-Control Movement.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Rob Schneider: The Free Speech Hero We Need. “Hollywood is deathly silent about the battle to clamp down on free speech. This comic actor is a glorious exception.”
AT LAST, THE 1948 SHOW: Don Surber on how The Left normalizes Hitler.
The Los Angeles Times ran a piece that is demonstrated just what is wrong with today’s ramped up rhetoric. The headline read, “Call immigrant detention centers what they really are: concentration camps.”
No. That is a lie. The centers are nothing like concentration camps. No one is tattooed with a number. No one is worked to death. No one is sent to gas chambers. There are no mass cremations in fact there are no cremations at all.
Running that piece was irresponsible because it downplays the evil that Hitler and his nation did.
The American left has demoted Hitler. He no longer is a monster who killed 12 million people in concentration camps. He no longer is an anti-Semitic demagogue who wiped out two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe. He no longer is a savage dictator who invaded every adjacent nation in an attempt to rule the world.
By calling the last four Republican presidential nominees Hitler, Democrats have turned Hitler into someone we merely disagreed with.
The last four? Virtually every Republican nominee has been dubbed Hitler since Thomas Dewey in 1948, by no less than Harry Truman himself.
(Classical reference in headline.)
DANIEL MCGRAW: Oberlin College’s identity crisis led to its Gibson’s Bakery train wreck.
Oberlin College, in the minds of the jury, wasn’t guilty only of what they did, but also what they didn’t do. They had opportunities early on to see the bullshit flying in their faces — thrown by the social justice warrior students – and didn’t have the good sense to see a basic problem and recognize the simplest of solutions.
What happened here is that Oberlin College and many universities have lost the understanding of their identity and basic purpose, and when that happens with most of us, when we don’t know who we are, we tend to do stupid things. That’s what happened here.
A few years ago, they had students saying they wanted finals cancelled because they were protesting minority men being shot by police in nearby Cleveland; in Dec. of 2015, the school’s black student union published 14 pages of racial accusations against the school with 58 demands to fix them; and the school had students thinking that the sushi in their cafeteria was “cultural appropriation” and unfit for eating because of that.
Instead of the school telling their students, “You are all crazy, and get back to studying,” they took on the “these poor snowflakes need our support” attitude.
It was the tail wagging the dog in the end, and ended up how most things like that do.
If there’s a difference between “the inmates running the asylum” and “the students running the school,” it’s only in the wording.
AT AMAZON, Deals of the Day.
THEY’RE SHIFTING ALREADY: Joe Biden: The Evitable Nominee. “Joe Biden leads in the major polls because people think he’s going to win, and people think he’s going to win because he’s leading in the major polls — but all it takes to puncture his Cloak of Inevitability is a shift in perceptions.”
HOW ENVIRONMENTALISTS PUT CHINA IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT ON RARE EARTHS: “It’s a little known fact that the United States was once the largest producer of rare earths in the world, at the Mountain Pass Mine in California.”
I HAD BEEN ASSURED THIS HAD ALL BEEN SETTLED: Great Lakes Reveal a Fatal Flaw in Climate Change ‘Science.’
THE GUILD PROTECTS ITS OWN: CBS Helps Jim Acosta Paint Himself in Heroic Hues, Endangered by Trump’s Taunts.
Flashback: Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw Defend Dan Rather, Who Sees Effort to “Smear” Him.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with Chyrons, and it all makes sense.
IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE IN DC TUESDAY OR THURSDAY: If your schedule permits and you have the inclination, I absolutely love meeting Instapundit readers (who in my experience constitute a noticeably classier bunch of folks than I am accustomed to here in The Swamp!). Check out my “Office Hours” schedule here.
SO AS HAPPENS EVERY YEAR, I’m off at a secure, undisclosed location and will be offline all week. I’m leaving you in the skilled hands of my co-bloggers. Back all too soon!
HAVE YOU BEEN RADICALIZED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES?
Now the New York Times has gone one better. Yesterday, they ran a prominent piece in the print and online editions headlined ‘The Making of a YouTube Radical’. The piece is about a single unheard of young man in America who claims that because he watched ‘radical’ videos on YouTube he became ‘radicalized’. For instance:
‘“I just kept falling deeper and deeper into this, and it appealed to me because it made me feel a sense of belonging,” he said. “I was brainwashed.”’
The montage of scary YouTube personalities which the NYT illustrates the piece with, and likes to blame for such a horrific story of absorption of wrong opinions is – conveniently enough – a number of the paper’s hate figures. Jordan Peterson, of course. Then some people from Infowars. And Milton Friedman. That’s right. The late Nobel Prize winning economist is now – posthumously – a ‘radicalizing’ figure. In trying to elide all such boundaries the NYT itself provides a very good demonstration of why people might be turning away from the mainstream media. The paper doesn’t even attempt to give a fair summary of the problems it claims to be identifying.
So it would be interesting to try this exercise back on the NYT.
I’m told that removing the microchip from the brain that makes millions of New Yorkers believe every word in the paper is a difficult and painful procedure, but it can be done. An alternate procedure is to ask them to take a small dose of Instapundit each day and to slowly increase the dosage, until the painful side effects of socialism and smugness fade to manageable levels.
THAT WOULD BE NICE: Trump Says Twitter Should Reinstate All Of The Conservatives It Banned.
GETTING INTO SERIOUS INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM, AT LEGAL INSURRECTION.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: With Venezuela in collapse, towns slip into primitive isolation.
With bank notes made useless by hyperinflation, and no easy access to the debit card terminals widely used to conduct transactions in urban areas, residents of Patanemo rely mainly on barter.
It is just one of a growing number of rural towns slipping into isolation as Venezuela’s economy implodes amid a long-running political crisis.
From the peaks of the Andes to Venezuela’s sweltering southern savannahs, the collapse of basic services including power, telephone and internet has left many towns struggling to survive.
The subsistence economy stands in stark contrast to the oil boom years when abundance seeped into the most remote reaches of what was once Latin America’s richest nation.
“The fish that we catch is to exchange or give away,” said Yofran Arias, one of 15 fishermen who have grown accustomed to a rustic existence even though they live a 15-minute drive from Venezuela’s main port of Puerto Cabello.
“Money doesn’t buy anything so it’s better for people to bring food so we can give them fish,” he said, while cleaning bonefish, known for abundant bones and limited commercial value.
If you think money is evil, try living on barter.
WE’VE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE: Liberal Critics’ Bizarre Take: HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’: It’s Not About Communism.
Anyone who can tell you that Chernobyl is anything other than one of the most powerful indictments of Soviet communism with a straight face is nothing other than a propagandist.
Now try to act surprised that the media is full of them.
In the 1980s, plenty of lefties convinced themselves that the film adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 that starred John Hurt and Richard Burton was a searing indictment of Margaret Thatcher’s Tories, despite the fictitious totalitarian regime’s ideological portmanteau, Ingsoc, serving as an abbreviation of the words “English Socialism,” as a way to project Stalinism, circa 1948, further into the post-WWII future, and into Orwell’s England.