IS ANYONE SURPRISED BY THIS? Vietnam Veteran status of Native American at center of viral encounter in D.C. in question. “According to multiple news accounts, the activist is 64 years old, which means he would have been 18 years old in 1973, the last year any U.S. combat units were stationed in Vietnam. Mr. Phillips also claims to be a Marine veteran, although the last Marine combat units left Vietnam in 1971. A careful reading of Mr. Phillips‘ own descriptions does not make clear if he ever set foot in Vietnam. Instead, he has used much more careful language claiming he is a ‘Vietnam times veteran,’ an ambiguous phrasing that led many media accounts to conclude he was a combat veteran.” Well, of course, they wanted to conclude that because it boosted the storyline they were trying to sell.
Archive for 2019
January 22, 2019
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED:
● Shot: Ruth Bader Ginsburg makes supreme appearance in Lego Movie 2.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is stepping out in a new role — a gavel-wielding minifigure in “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part.”
Lego Ginsburg, in her Supreme Court robe naturally, was featured in a new trailer spot released Sunday for the “Lego Movie” sequel coming to screens Feb. 8.
“These movies are so full of surprises. And we were thinking, ‘Who’s the last person you would think to see in a Lego film as a minifig?’ Ruth Bader Ginsburg!” director Mike Mitchell tells USA TODAY. “And we’re all huge fans. It made us laugh to think of having her enter this world.”
—USA Today, Saturday.
● Chaser: Why Lego wanted people to stop buying its toys.
—Headline, the Washington Post, September 6, 2016.
THEY SAY IT COMES IN THREES: So in the last 72 hours, we saw BuzzFeed screw the pooch with legacy media following them right off the cliff (“if true”), then we saw SJW social media drive “legitimate” media’s news agenda — absent any fact-checking at all — with a selectively edited video, and once the facts came out journalists are now furiously deleting their tweets. So what’s next? Any guesses?
**Update: my I24 interview this afternoon on the subject.**
MODERNIZATION: China cuts down army troops by about 50%; increases size of navy, air force.
The 2 million-strong Chinese military has significantly boosted its navy, air force and new strategic units and downsized its land-based army, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported quoting a state-run Xinhua report.
In a feature report highlighting the “transformational changes” made by the PLA, Xinhua on Sunday said “this new data is unprecedented in the history of the PLA the army now accounts for less than 50 per cent of the total number of PLA troops; almost half of our non-combatant units have been made redundant, and the number of officers in the PLA has been reduced by 30 per cent.”
In the last few years, the PLA has downsized its military by retrenching three lakh troops under the military reforms initiated by President Xi Jinping. But it still remained the world’s largest military with two million personnel in the ranks.
The statement indicated that the four other branches of the PLA the navy, air force, rocket force and strategic support force, which is responsible for areas such as cyberwarfare – now together make up more than half of the Chinese military, overtaking the army, which has traditionally been the dominant unit of the PLA.
It wasn’t that long ago that the entire Chinese military numbered around four million personnel. Beijing is serious moving from a Soviet-style mass conscript army of questionably trained soldiers, to a smaller, professional, and much more lethal force more like the American model.
But an important question remains. Authoritarian regimes can’t tolerate the kind of bottom-up, individual initiative which makes a Western-style military so deadly. Can Beijing maintain a top-down regime and a bottom-up PLA?
We’ll see.
SOLICITING VIOLENCE: Female ‘SNL’ Writer Offers Oral Sex to Anyone Who Punches MAGA Teen in the Face.
FIGHT THE POWER: French Protesters Have Deliberately Trashed More Than Half of Their Traffic Cameras. “Traffic cameras, it turns out, are an easy symbolic target for the Gilets Jaunes. Their movement started in November 2018 over fuel prices, as we’ve previously described. But the list of grievances they have dramatically brought to French president Emmanuel Macron also included one criticizing the proliferation of cameras on French roads and the reduced speed limits (recently cut to 50 mph from 55 mph on many roads). Many motorists in France doggedly believe the government orchestrated these measures strictly to fill its coffers. Attacking speed cameras, the protesters rationalize, will hit the government where it hurts without negatively affecting motorists or private businesses.”
That doesn’t seem like rationalization. It seems like sound reasoning.
SAD: Forget marriage, South Koreans aren’t even dating.
A survey by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs published in early January found that as of 2012, the latest year for which figures are available, less than 40 per cent of 20- to 44-year-olds were actively dating. The proportion in traditional marriages is even lower.
In 2015, 90 per cent of men and 77 per cent of women aged 25 to 29 were unmarried, according to a report in The Korea Herald . Among those aged 30 to 34, the figure was 56 per cent, shrinking to 33 per cent for 40- to 45-year-olds, the report said. For comparison, a 2015 survey by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in neighbouring Japan found that 23 per cent of men had never married by age 50, versus 14 per cent of women.
South Korea’s birth rate is also the lowest in the world, dropping to 0.95 at the end of last year – meaning that for every 100 women, just 95 children were born. To maintain a stable population, the birth rate needs to be 2.1. In the boom times of the early 70s, nearly 1 million South Korean babies were being born each year, but by 2017 that number had more than halved to 357,700.
The result of this is a society that is increasingly made up of old people. By 2030, nearly one-third of all South Koreans will be age 65 or older, according to a report published last year by economist Lee Jong-wha of Korea University.
An entire country with demographics like Florida, where Americans go in large numbers to retire.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: 26% Of Law Students Pay Full Tuition, Down From 53% In 2011.
Me, in The New School, five years ago: “For a time, many schools will try to maintain their enrollments by discounting tuition — disguised, usually, as increased financial aid.”
RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Why Not Mike Bloomberg? “The Democrats could do worse, and probably will.”
In any case, for the Second Amendment’s sake, I hope Trump has the Supreme Court well-stocked with fresh new conservative justices before the end of 2020.
REPOST: SUPER BOWL SEX TRAFFICKING: It’s that time of year again—when the Super Bowl host city starts assuring the public that it is doing everything possible to combat the expected explosion of sex crimes. It don’t really blame these cities for ramping up. If it were true that the Super Bowl brings with it the massive sexual exploitation of minors that would be very serious. But it is not true. Nor is it true that ordinary adult prostitution increases to unusual levels. The Super Bowl is mostly about … shock alert … a football game (and a few very expensive television ads).
A few years ago the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued an overwrought report entitled “Sex Trafficking: A Gender-Based Violation of Civil Rights.” I wrote a 30-page Statement that was critical of the report. A few pages of it deal with the Super Bowl myth. I also included a bit about the White Slavery Panic and about Filipina hostesses in Japan.
I reposted this with the links fixed. Sorry about that.
COVINGTON: IF YOU STILL THINK NICK SANDMANN’S SMILE IS PROOF OF RACISM, YOU’RE SEEING WHAT YOU WANT TO SEE.
Surely if Sandmann’s objective had been to harass the Native Americans and sow racial discord, he would not have attempted to defuse the situation. In fact, this gesture supports the claim he made in his official statement that he “motioned to my classmate and tried to get him to stop engaging with the protestor, as I was still in the mindset that we needed to calm down tensions.”
That’s just one moment from the video footage. There are others. There’s the moment when the Black Hebrew Israelites, a black nationalist cult, tells one of the few black teens that his friends are going to kill him and steal his organs, and a young white man turns to his classmate, touches him affectionately, and says, “But we love you!” There’s the moment when the black nationalists declare that “your president is a homosexual” and a high school kid responds, “Who cares?” There’s the moment when some of the teens begin to suspect that Phillips has not waded into their midst with the best of intentions (he would later assert to media reporters that the teens were “beasts” and the cult members “their prey,” a false and possibly willful misreading of the situation) and one shouts, “I’m so confused.”
There are also moments that cast some of the teens in a less-than-favorable light. At least one appears to make a tomahawk chop—an offensive gesture from sporting events in which team names have been taken from Native American culture. That is insensitive behavior that an adult in a position of authority over these young men should discourage in the future.
But most of the Covington kids do not perform tomahawk chops. Most jump, wave their arms, and cheer—and many do so before Phillips arrives. Their stated explanation—they were attempting to drown out the torrent of hate coming from the Black Hebrew Israelites—makes sense, and it squares with the timeline evident from the video.
Read the whole thing.
Related: “Why has the conduct of the black nationalists escaped notice while that of the Covington students has been unfairly denounced? I think it’s due, in large part, to the identity politics hierarchy.”
THIS ISN’T WHAT I WAS TOLD WOULD HAPPEN: Stocks up 10% since shutdown began.
BRUCE BAWER: Western Elites Still Treating Jihad as Mental Illness. “Another assailant says he’s a terrorist, but what does he know?”
THE SUPREME COURT GRANTS CERT. IN A SECOND AMENDMENT CASE: New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York. Question presented: “Whether New York City’s ban on transporting a licensed, locked and unloaded handgun to a home or shooting range outside city limits is consistent with the Second Amendment, the Commerce Clause and the constitutional right to travel.”
TONI AIRAKSINEN HAS DONE A LOT OF GREAT WORK REPORTING ON CAMPUS GENDER CRAZINESS. Now she’s having health problems and asking for help. I donated $100. Help her out if you can. (Bumped).
GREEK APACHE: A Greek Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopter lands on a U.S. Navy assault ship.
MARK STEYN: The Drumbeat Of The Mob.
IT GETS WORSE: Not only did the Keyboard Warriors use misleading video edits to smear the Covington teens, and not only did media and our celebrity superiors jump on the Outrage Train without any fact-checking, but now the “righteous” have doxxed the wrong kid: who is now getting death threats.
Nice going, all you virtuous jerks.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend on Facebook writes: “Note the common thread between the Kavanaugh and Covington hysterics: there is a significant sense in which ‘progressivism’ as a movement is driven by a cohort bent upon re-litigating its own middle- and high-school years. Perceived losses of social status then are recouped by revenge-by-proxy now. It’s like tens of millions of Jeanie Buellers, but without her own personal growth.”
JULIE KELLY: Call-Out Conservatives Join the Left’s Lynch Mob. “Further, the same crowd of call-out conservatives, the nags who constantly are telling us which Republican lawmaker or presidential aide or Fox News anchor must be reprimanded for one imagined offense or another, have been silent on calling out their own tribe for joining the Covington High School outrage mob.”
GOOD LORD: ‘Not a single day of rest’: victims reveal details of modern slavery case in China.
Syndicate members would take them to work at places such as construction sites, fertiliser plants, grain warehouses, logging operations and dairy farms in Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang province, according to the report.
Wherever they were working, the syndicates rented accommodation nearby. More than a dozen men would have to share a small room, and they were locked in.
The victims told the news site the work day ran from early in the morning until late at night – sometimes until 2am.
Sun said at one stage they were forced to work for two days and nights without sleep at a fertiliser plant in Harbin, while at a state-run warehouse in the province, they spent three days and nights hauling bags of grain. He said anyone who slowed down or complained they were tired was punched or beaten with iron hooks and wooden sticks.
“State-run.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A jury acquitted him of rape in less than four hours. Yale expelled him anyway. Now he’s appealing.
Last March, Khan was found not guilty by a New Haven, Conn. court on four counts of raping a fellow student on Halloween 2015. Yet on Jan. 2, Yale expelled the 25-year-old from its campus following its own investigation into the alleged sexual assault.
The two outcomes highlight the drastically different standards used by criminal courts and universities in determining guilt in sexual assault cases, and gives further ammunition to those arguing university-led sexual assault processes often violate the due process rights of the accused.
“This isn’t ‘he-said-she-said,’” Khan told The Fix in a phone interview. “It’s ‘she-said versus what the evidence says.”
Well, Yale.
DON SURBER: Covington Kids Should Sue Twitter.