NEWS YOU CAN USE: It’s National Pierogi Day!

CHANGE: How the Court Could Limit Abortion Rights Without Overturning Roe.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs:

Criticism of the Chinese government is forbidden — I don’t mean in China, I mean de facto in the United States for anyone who is part of any institution that has any investment in China.  The sports league that prides itself on freedom of expression and social relevance  — one so politically correct that it banned the word “owner” because the term allegedly evokes slavery — has no one willing to say Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey is right and that people around the world should, as he tweeted, “fight for Freedom” and “stand with Hong Kong.” As of this writing, not a single player, not a single coach, not a single owner has spoken out in support of Morey. You couldn’t get all those guys to agree on any topic in domestic American politics. But for the first forty-eight hours of this controversy, the opinion of everyone associated with the NBA was uniform. Our relationship with China has not made them more like us. It has made us more like them.

Think about it: we have no shortage of professional athletes who are willing to publicly denounce American cops who they deem abusive and brutal. But everybody’s looking at their shoes as the cops in Hong Kong beat the hell out of anybody in a mask and shoot people at point-blank range.

And it’s not just the NBA kowtowing to China: “Video game company Blizzard Entertainment became the latest American company to bow to pressure from the Chinese government, when it banned professional gamer Ng ‘blitzchung’ Wai Chung from competitive Hearthstone events for 12 months and deleted comments he made supporting the Hong Kong protests from its video-on-demand replay of a postgame interview. Blizzard, based in Irvine, California, is perhaps best known in the United States for producing the Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft franchises, which were originally released in the 1990s and have all had wildly successful sequels. The video game company also was responsible for producing World of Warcraft, which is one of the most popular video games of all time.”

HMM: Did NPR Reveal an Ugly Truth About ‘Joker’ Criticism?

CYBERSECURITY: FBI warns of major ransomware attacks as criminals go “big-game hunting.”

Data from CrowdStrike has shown a rise in what the firm refers to as “big-game hunting” over the past 18 months. These attacks focus on high-value data or assets within organizations that are especially sensitive to downtime—so the motivation to pay a ransom is consequently very high.

“Big-game hunters are essentially targeting people within an organization for the sole purpose of identifying critical assets for the purpose of deploying their ransomware,” said Jen Ayers, CrowdStrike’s Vice President in charge of the Falcon OverWatch threat-hunting service in an interview with Ars. “[Hitting] one financial transaction server, you can charge a lot more for that than you could for a thousand consumers with ransomware — you’re going to make a lot more money a lot faster.”

It’s amazing how many servers lack security patches, or sometimes even just password protection.

QUESTION ASKED: Will Cancel Culture Find Out About Karl Marx The Racist?

Here’s a quote on how Karl Marx felt about Mexicans: “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” 

Marx, whose parents converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, was also a raging anti-Semite:

Marx’s essay, On the Jewish Question, originally published in 1844 contains the following:

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.…. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

And in addition to all of the above, Marx and Friedrich Engels, the co-author of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, weren’t keen on blacks, as Walter Williams has noted.

Of course, for 21st century leftists, Marx is guilty of the worst sin of all — being a white male — and for that, he already has gotten at least one taste of posthumous cancel culture. As James Lileks spotted in 2015, “Some Berkeley students are mad about a class that is just plain othering the living heck out of them. From a piece they wrote for the Daily Californian:”

We are calling for an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities. This call to action was instigated by our experience last semester as students in an upper-division course on classical social theory. Grades were based primarily on multiple-choice quizzes on assigned readings. The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.

In response, Lileks wrote:

If there’s one thing you take away from the Daily Californian essay, it’s the pursed-lip’d narrow-eyed glare of someone who is being forced to sit in a room and NOT BE VALIDATED. (Some of the complainants may be angry because they are witnessing the non-validation of others and are compelled to be enraged on their behalf.) College, apparently, is now a place where the notions of people freshly matriculated from high school must be handled with oven mitts and lightly buffed with soft cloth lest their orthodoxies suffer the slightest abrasion. Like the school that canceled the annual performance of The Vagina Monologues because it othered non-traditional women who lacked the titular orifice, it’s a delightful example of leftist autophagy. Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate.

By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.

Heh. Yet another reminder that as Ray Bradbury predicted in Fahrenheit 451, the books will be burned as much to protect everyone’s feelings as much as to block the ideas within them.

Earlier: Question Asked: Since cancel culture is circling around Gandhi, when does it come for Mohammed? And then what happens?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Self-Defense & Communication: Be Careful What You Say.

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OFFICIAL EXTORTION: Minneapolis Mayor Tries to Shut Down Trump Rally With ‘Outrageous’ Security Fee.

They’re scared.

SPENGLER: We Don’t Have Good Options With Turkey and Iran — We’ll Have to Work Hard to Get Them.

DEVELOPING: PROGRESSIVE PARENTS SIT THEIR KID DOWN FOR TALK ABOUT THE BIRDS AND THE BEES AND THE BIRDS WHO WANT TO BECOME BEES AND THE BEES WHO IDENTIFY AS BIRDS AND BUCKLE UP, THIS MIGHT TAKE A WHILE.

I’m so old, I can remember when the Babylon Bee was still satire, before morphing into America’s Paper of Record.

QED.

WELL, THAT’S RATHER UNFORTUNATE: Paris police attacker had top secret security clearance. “Mickaël Harpon, who stabbed three police officers and a woman civil servant to death before he was killed at Paris police headquarters on October 3rd, was a radical Islamist with a top secret security clearance and access to all computers in the police prefecture’s directorate of intelligence, known as the DRPP. The DRPP is responsible for the surveillance of suspected radical Islamists. Yet Harpon continued to work there, even as he showed signs of radicalisation. This mind-boggling fact has shaken President Emmanuel Macron’s administration.”

It should.

I’M NOT WATCHING THIS VIDEO: Warp speeds in ‘Star Trek’ are achingly slow, and a simple animation by a former NASA scientist proves it. “I have genuinely felt a sense of despair at the distances involved in our solar system and beyond. It’s been one of my aims to make everyone else feel as bad as me.”

Gee, thanks.

DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: When Biking and Bears Don’t Mix. “The death of a ranger, Brad Treat, in 2016 was a wake-up call for grizzly bear biologists. Mr. Treat, an avid mountain biker, was zipping along at about 25 miles an hour through dense forest near Glacier National Park in the middle of a summer afternoon when he collided with a large male grizzly bear. . . . ‘I heard a thud and an “argh,”‘ the unnamed witness told investigators.”

DAVID HARSANYI: Hey, Congress: Take Back Your War Powers, Or Shut Up About Syria.

Congress is the institution vested with the power to declare wars, to debate where we send troops, and decide which conflicts are funded. Presidents have been ignoring this arrangement, abuse authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs), and imbue themselves with the power to engage in conflicts wherever they like, without any coherent endgame, and without any buy-in from Congress.

Congress, in turn, has shown no interest in genuinely challenging executive power, because its members are far more concerned with political self-preservation. Ignoring abuse shields them from tough choices and ensuing criticism—even as they use war as a partisan cudgel.

Even if you don’t believe all these conflicts rise to an Article I declaration, and I don’t, the more accountability there is in foreign entanglements the better.

Indeed.

WELL, IF ACTIVISTS SAY IT, IT MUST BE TRUE: Supporting Greta Thunberg is evidence of ‘white supremacy’, activists claim.

THE GILDED RAGE:  Why is America so angry?

THIS IS JUST WRONG: One Of The World’s Most Famous Brands Wants You To Drink Whisky In An Outrageous New Way (And People Are Laughing).

Now along comes the second biggest whisky brand in the world — Glenlivet — to offer a completely new way for the younger generations to get into whisky.

This new way is Tide Pods.

Well, not exactly Tide Pods, but Whisky Pods.

Why have a glass and some rocks when you can have 23 milliliters of fine Glenlivet couched in a seaweed-based pouch?

Just no.

QUESTION ASKED: Since cancel culture is circling around Gandhi, when does it come for Mohammed? And then what happens?

But of course, that’s unlikely to ever happen. As with the NBA protesting North Carolina bathrooms versus communist China, cancel culture folds up pretty quickly when real pressure pushes back upon it.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT DEVELOPER BLIZZARD “BANS GAMER, RESCINDS MONEY, ON HONG KONG PROTEST SUPPORT.” I guess they agreed with NY Times/New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz that “Free Speech is Killing Us.” Or they’re just big NBA fans.

One wonders how much of this goes unreported.

SALUTING THEIR CHINESE OVERLORDS: Blizzard Suspends E-Gamer For Hong Kong Comment.

Sadly related: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs. It’s surprisingly easy to persuade elites to adopt an ideology that empowers elites.

AT AMAZON, shop bestsellers in Kitchen & Dining.

WAIT, WHAT? Muslim Drag Queen in Vice Mag: Islam Is ‘Inherently Queer.’

OUT: FECAL TRANSPLANTS. IN: Germ transplant may help women with recurrent bacterial vaginosis.