AND RIGHTLY SO: Even Wall Street is getting the willies about Warren. The stuff she’s saying is crazy.
Archive for 2019
October 7, 2019
HEY, WHEN DID YASSER ARAFAT BECOME NBA COMMISSIONER?
The NBA has aggressively sought to build its presence in China to tap into country’s vast number of diehard basketball fans. Earlier this year, the league signed a five-year extension to its online screening rights deal with Tencent worth $1.5bn, double the amount paid under its previous contract with the Chinese group. More than 490m viewers watched games on Tencent’s platforms last season, nearly triple the number in the previous season.
The NBA distanced itself from Mr Morey’s comment, issuing official statements in English and Chinese. The English apology said it was “regrettable” that Chinese fans had been offended, but added “the values of the league support individuals’ educating themselves and sharing views on matters important to them”.
However, the Chinese statement appeared to condemn Mr Morey’s tweet more strongly, saying the NBA was “extremely disappointed by the inappropriate comment” and that “he has undoubtedly seriously hurt the feelings of Chinese basketball fans”.
The references to “inappropriate” and “hurt feelings” are considered significant, as they were seen to echo language often used by Chinese officials to describe cultural gaffes by foreign groups.
The NBA’s response failed to assuage the outrage in China but also drew bipartisan criticism in Washington that the league was valuing its commercial goals over American values. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican senator, wrote on Twitter that the NBA was “shamefully retreating” in pursuit of “big $$”. Tom Malinowski, a Democratic congressman, accused Beijing of “using its economic power to censor speech by Americans”, and said the NBA’s response was “shameful and cannot stand”.
Via Clay Travis, who writes of the NBA’s dual translations, “Talk about duplicitous. Just pathetic.”
And Jim Geraghty adds, “The Soul of the NBA, a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of the Chinese Government. The Chinese government says, ‘jump,’ the National Basketball Association says, ‘how high?’ Every time an NBA official, team, or player tells us they’re socially aware, dedicated to improving their communities, throw this back in their faces.”
(Classical allusion in headline.)
IF IT WERE UP TO ME, I’D GIVE THE KURDS NUKES: U.S. Consents to a Turkish Invasion in Syria; Kurdish Forces Call It ‘A Stab in the Back.’ It is, however, kind of funny to see some people who told us that Trump was going to get us into endless wars now complaining that he’s not starting anything here.
Personally, I think this is a bad move and I don’t like anything that gives Erdogan more power. However, I rather doubt the claim, aired in Reason at the link, that this is about Trump’s hotels in Turkey. And, really, that article is mostly evidence of how impossible it is to talk about foreign affairs, or anything, really, intelligently in the age of Trump Derangement.
UPDATE: Yeah, pretty much:
So there’s a lot of interesting diplomacy going on in the region right now, and I suppose it’s possible that this deal is part of a larger scheme that makes sense, but if it were I think Nikki Haley would probably know that.
PHILIP KLEIN: Stand for Freedom: Boycott the NBA.
OH FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD: Obviously Toy Gun Prompts Lock-Down of 3 Florida Campuses.
IN THE MAIL: From Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity.
CUE THE HOWLS OF OUTRAGE FROM THE SAME PEOPLE WHO CREATED THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE: Administration Proposes to Deny Visas to Those Without Health Insurance.
THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT BE KING: Top Biden Donors Gather Amid Storm Clouds Over Campaign.
Over cocktails on Friday evening and a Saturday spent in a drab hotel conference room, Mr. Biden’s top financiers and fund-raisers received strategy briefings and PowerPoint presentations, and plotted the path forward for the former vice president, who suddenly found himself in fourth place in the money chase.
Only hours before the gathering began, the news broke that Ms. Warren, now seen as Mr. Biden’s chief rival, had out-raised him in the last three months by nearly $10 million — $24.6 million to $15.2 million. He lagged behind Senator Bernie Sanders ($25.3 million) and Mayor Pete Buttigieg ($19.1 million), too.
Nearly four million dollars behind Mayor Pete?
THE WRECKAGE THAT IS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES:
Limping in crutches, his broken leg shielded in plaster following a jogging accident, the distinguished biologist Edward O. Wilson made his way slowly toward the stage at a convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1978. Climbing the stairs, taking his seat, and shuffling his notes, a sudden burst of activity punctuated the silence as the entire front row of the audience leapt onto the stage hurling insults. They jostled Wilson and then poured iced water over his head. The protesters would turn out to be Marxists, incensed by the publication of Wilson’s book Sociobiology.
This story has become a familiar feature of the nature/nurture debate, used to illustrate the vitriolic hostility expressed by ideological groups scrambling to silence what most people already take to be an incontrovertible fact: that humans, just like every other species on earth, have a nature. As crowds abandoned Wilson to evacuate the auditorium that day, one man at the back of the room tried to push his way forward against the multitude heading towards the exits. “It was the most hateful, frightening, and disgusting behavior I’ve ever witnessed at an academic assembly,” the famed anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon would later recall. He didn’t know it then, but the events of that day were an omen of things to come for Chagnon himself, whose Wilsonian worldview would help to bring about one of anthropology’s greatest controversies.
Marxists are trash, who in a just world would be treated like Nazis, their moral equivalents. Indulging and coddling them on campus has been one of the signal failures of the West.
DAN MARKEL UPDATE: Week 2 Highlights Of The Dan Markel Murder Trial.
NO ONE SHOULD SEND THEIR KIDS TO THIS CESSPIT OF VIOLENCE. THINK OF THE CHILDREN! K.C. Johnson: Is Yale More Dangerous Than Detroit?
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump-Hating NBA Gives Commie China a Hug. “The National Basketball Association has had no problem whatsoever in recent years whenever any of its players or coaches have publicly expressed their hatred for President Trump. Over the weekend, the league finally found a political line it didn’t want anyone to cross: offending the People’s Republic of China.”
REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: It’s Not All About the Bidens: Why Trump Has Ukraine on the Brain.
Given all the focus on nefarious Russia, you could be forgiven for missing the fact that Ukraine was always at the center of the Trump-Russia affair.
Viewed in this light, the Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo bribery narrative must compete with another explanation: Trump’s determination to get to the bottom of an underhanded years-long campaign arrayed against him. One of the first things he did after the Mueller report debunked the collusion narrative was to call the Ukranian president and ask him to help do just that.
The impeachment battle is not just about congressional probes and alleged presidential strong-arming, but about the Russiagate narrative. Anti-Trump forces in the government and media are working to vindicate their previous efforts and discredit a forthcoming Justice Department inquiry into the origins of Russiagate by again connecting Trump and a foreign power to a U.S. election.
Yep.
B-29 DEPARTS MIRAMAR: One of the two B-29s still capable of flying departs MCAS Miramar on Oct. 3. The bomber was on static display during the 2019 MCAS Miramar Air Show.
BY THE NUMBERS: Critics Versus Audiences: Movies We Disagree On. “Critics and movie audiences don’t always agree, and the disparities can be revealing, in part because critics are overwhelmingly leftist and, frankly, often pretentious. An analysis of 10,000 films made from 1970 to 2013 revealed the biggest critics vs. movie audience gaps in recent film history.”
The biggest gaps seem to be between left-leaning films beloved by critics but ignored by audiences, and right-leaning films the critics hated but audiences enjoyed.
ROGER KIMBALL: Anti-Trump Fraternity and NeverTrump Sorority Collude in Impeachment Scam. “Donald Trump asked President Zelensky to help with the Justice Department’s investigation of efforts to subvert the 2016 election. Donald Trump is the president of the United States. It is part of his responsibility to see that our elections are open and fair. Bottom line: not much to work with there for the anti-Trump fraternity.”
I’m so old, I remember when even a hint of foreign collusion demanded a deep, probing investigation.
CLARICE FELDMAN: Mr. Trump Goes To Washington.
Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who changed the rules governing “whistleblowing” to accommodate this hearsay gossip, will rue the day he did this. He said he was unaware that the “whistleblower,” reportedly a CIA functionary assigned to the White House years ago where he worked with anti-Trump Ukrainians to stop Trump and who has not worked there for two or three years, had first talked to congressional staff. He was unaware of it, perhaps because the whistleblower complaint form asks if he had previously told anyone, including congressional staff, about this and lied about that, subjecting himself to possible felony charges. Moreover, allowing in such unsubstantiated gossip by a liar who had no firsthand knowledge of the substance of the complaint will only unleash a flood of these baseless charges, tying up more government resources on nonsense.
At every juncture, the people who we were told to regard as dedicated apolitical professionals holding the line against Trump’s madness have turned out to be crazed partisan hacks of limited competence. I’m beginning to think that much (most?) of our government is made up of crazed partisan hacks of limited competence.