Archive for 2019
June 14, 2019
SPOKESMAN FOR NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” PAYS DIVIDENDS: My Precious! AOC spokesman loses it in tweet-rant against potential challenger then deletes like a coward (we got it):
As Twitchy asks, “Now, why oh why would Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesman be so defensive and even angry about the idea of someone challenging his precious?”
Just off the top of my head, I can think of at least 25,000 reasons.
HEY, BERNIE, WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO WON’T JOIN THE COMMUNE? Or, as the scribes of Issues & Insights put it in a thought-provoking editorial: “The big question that never gets addressed regarding these and other ‘explanations’ of socialism is: Why do the self-identified ‘democratic socialists’ feel it’s OK to force those who’d rather be free into their collective?”
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Charlamagne tha God: Elizabeth Warren Should Just Admit She Lied About Her Ancestry. “A white woman looks a black man in the eye and lies to him, and he refuses to pretend he believes her. That’s considered a good thing, unless the white woman is a Democrat. If Elizabeth Warren is the woman with a plan for everything, why doesn’t she have a plan for people asking her obvious questions about her brazen lies? Well, she rightly assumes that since she’s a woman and a Democrat, ‘journalists’ will protect her. Erin Burnett sure tries to protect her there. She’s part of Warren’s plan. Kudos to Charlamagne for seeing through it.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: It’s Florida Man Friday!
BUTTERFIELD ALERT: Hispanics stick with Trump despite tough border stance.
“Despite?” Fox Butterfield, call your office. Presumably, many if not most of those who were born here, and/or whose families made the effort to become American citizens approve of that tough border stance.
AMELIA HAMILTON’S ‘GROWING PATRIOTS’ PODCAST: Episode 18: The Trouble Begins.
Not a bad way to introduce your kids or grandkids to the Revolutionary War.
IT’S COME TO THIS: As James Lileks writes, “the Well Axtually lads over at Vox” defend Prohibition. Needless to say, Lileks, with much more of a sense of perspective and knowledge of that time period pushes back:
Fewer people got drunk and beat up other people. Maybe. The stats are not clear. There was the whole gang thing, but it was blown out of proportion. Yes, it made an entire nation learn to shrug at the law, but other than that, it worked better than you think.
Question is, how well did you think it worked in the first place? I think it did a pretty good job of shutting down every legitimate avenue for alcohol consumption. In fact I think it had a rather robust success rate for that. The failures were deeper and unsustainable.
To be fair, Prohibition is far from the worse thing that the Vox juiceboxers have come to the defense of.
HEALTH: The Real Gender Gap in Heart Disease.
The graph demonstrates that over the last few decades the number of women dying from heart disease has been significantly higher than men dying from heart disease. In the year 2000 alone the gap is the most impressive, with 70,000 more women dying than men. The problem with this chart is that it is completely misleading.
Mortality in this case is best judged by death rates that take into account age and the population at risk rather than the crude number of deaths. The following table assembled from the CDC database for heart disease deaths by gender and age group for the year 2000 paints a more descriptive picture. The number of men dying from heart disease exceeds women in almost every age group. It’s not even close.
The absolute number of men dying in the prime of their lives is staggering. Between the ages of 35 and 64, 92,000 men die every year, which is twice as many men as women, and equivalent to those who died in the Korean War and Vietnam War combined. Even after the age of 75 when more women die than men in total, men die at higher rates because there simply are far fewer men left alive.
My dad died at 41 of heart disease, which taught me the hard way to pay close attention to my health — especially heart health. Everyone should.
FASTER? PLEASE! US Air Force flight tests hypersonic missile on B-52 bomber.
THE BEST CRAIGSLIST AD OF ALL TIME: The Story Behind That Hilarious Toyota Corolla Craigslist Ad.
When I ran the CarFax for this car, I got back a single piece of paper that said, “It’s a Corolla. It’s fine.”
Let’s face the facts, this car isn’t going to win any beauty contests, but neither are you. Stop lying to yourself and stop lying to your wife. This isn’t the car you want, it’s the car you deserve: The fucking 1999 Toyota Corolla.
Hey, it’s a ‘90s Toyota. You can drop it off a building and it will start:
Needless to say, read the whole thing, which is a riot.
(Via Ace of Spades.)
TERMINATED HARVARD FACULTY DEAN WHO REPRESENTED WEINSTEIN SPEAKS OUT: Harvard prof and well-known attorney Ronald Sullivan, who (along with his wife) was defenestrated as faculty dean of Harvard’s Winthrop House after students complained that his decision to represent Harvey Weinstein made them “unsafe,” has released a video making it clear that Harvard has betrayed both its and America’s principles and that he’s not done with this situation. Harvard administrators have provided their own explanation, as per usual.
WILL OBERLIN LEARN ITS LESSON?: Steven Hayward has evidence that it’s unlikely.
MAYBE RAISING MINIMUM WAGE TO $15 ISN’T SUCH A GREAT WAY TO GET PEOPLE JOBS: Even a few Democrats are worried.
Meanwhile at the Babylon Bee (yes, of course it’s satire, but it wouldn’t be funny if it weren’t fundamentally true): “Walmart Self-Checkout Machine Wins Employee of the Month Award Again.”
WHAT IS TO BE DONE ABOUT FACEBOOK? From Christine Rosen of Commentary, with a mention of Glenn’s new book:
Like the break up of AT&T in the 20th century, which led to further innovations in the telecommunications industry, a breakup of Facebook could spur innovation and competition in the social-media landscape and end Facebook’s unfair exercise of monopoly power. Facebook has made it impossible for competition to flourish. Even if half of Facebook’s users closed their accounts tomorrow, they would have nowhere else to go. We need legitimate alternatives to Facebook.
Fearful of anti-trust action, Facebook executives have taken to raising the threat of Chinese social-media companies as an argument against breakup or regulation. In an interview in May on CNBC, Sheryl Sandberg claimed Facebook was committed to earning back people’s trust but also warned, “While people are concerned with the size and power of tech companies, there’s also a concern in the United States with the size and power of Chinese companies, and the realization that those companies are not going to be broken up.”
But raising the specter of WeChat is a distraction. Anti-trust action such as requiring Facebook to relinquish control of Instagram and WhatsApp wouldn’t mean the destruction of those services or a takeover of the social-media sector by Chinese companies. It would mean the beginning of genuine competition. Competition would blunt the worst tendencies of Facebook while continuing to protect free-speech rights. As Glenn Harlan Reynolds argues in his new book, The Social Media Upheaval, many of the problems created by social-media platforms, such as polarization and disinformation, could be solved with competition. “If Twitter or Facebook were competing with five or ten other similar services, or maybe even two or three,” Reynolds writes, “this sort of thing would be more likely to damp out, after the fashion of the old, loosely coupled blogosphere.” Competition would also “promote greater attention to matters of privacy, algorithmic integrity, and so on because users could more easily leave for another service.”
This is a solution that would remove the free-speech questions inevitable in any attempt to moderate content on these platforms—in practice, even with sophisticated A.I., an impossible task given the scale of platforms like Facebook.
Second, the United States needs stronger data-privacy and -protection laws, including laws that grant users access to the data dossiers that Facebook has compiled on them and the option to deny Facebook the ability to share that data with third parties unless explicit permission (as opposed to byzantine terms of service agreements) is given. There are plentiful models for such laws, most notably data- and privacy-protection laws now in force in Europe. Another proposal would have Facebook safeguard user information the same way that other “information fiduciaries” such as lawyers and medical providers and financial advisers do for their clients, and face fines and other punishments if it did not.
Third, we need stronger and more consistent enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission of existing agreements it has signed with Facebook and harsher punishments when Facebook is found to be in breach of those agreements (which, if history is any guide, will be often). The time for symbolic punishments and slaps on the wrist and weakly enforced consent agreements is long past. At the beginning of June, the FTC announced that it was planning an anti-trust investigation of Facebook, which suggests that Facebook’s long honeymoon period with regulators might finally be over.
As Rosen notes, the end of that honeymoon has been a long time coming, and is extremely well-deserved. Lengthy, but well worth a read.
WHO WILL REPLACE SARAH SANDERS? A dozen contenders: Sanders’ departure triggers scramble for new press secretary.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Heather Mac Donald asks, “Who ‘Deserves’ to Go to Harvard?” A dean at the university tells graduates all success stems from inherited privilege and chance:
Rakesh Khurana opened his Class Day speech to graduating seniors with a summary of the changes at Harvard over the previous four years. He omitted two in which he played a central role: the removal of law professor Ronald Sullivan from oversight of an undergraduate dorm and the effort to banish single-sex social clubs. Mr. Sullivan’s legal representation of rape defendant Harvey Weinstein had put the “well-being” of Harvard’s students at risk, Mr. Khurana announced earlier this year, and the single-sex clubs perpetuated “spaces that are rife with power imbalances.”
* * * * * * * *
Graduating from Harvard, contrary to what its students and administrators may think, is not the sine qua non of a good life. But if Mr. Khurana is so troubled by the systemic inequities that allegedly enable some Harvard students to attend, he should have directed the Class of 2019 to send their alumni donations to less-favored schools. Harvard chases alumni dollars with a zeal that is bracing to behold. It can never get enough, despite an endowment of $39 billion generated by participation in the capitalist system.
Harvard must believe it deserves that money.
Perhaps Mr. Khurana was speaking in code, like a Vietnam War-era American P.O.W. Have we checked to see if his eyes weren’t blinking the following message in Morse Code? To reduce inequality, abolish Ivy League.
COCAINE MITCH: A UNITER, NOT A DIVIDER! Mitch McConnell: ‘For the first time in my memory, I agree with Nancy Pelosi.’
Earlier in the day, Pelosi unveiled a “McConnell’s Graveyard” poster, listing several legislative items, written on tombstones, suggesting that the GOP leader was happy to stall the measures in Congress, McConnell explained on “The Ingraham Angle.”
The list included the For the People Act, the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act and Gun Violence Prevention.
“She’s got it right,” McConnell said, referring to Pelosi. “She’s got it absolutely right. For the first time in my memory, I agree with Nancy Pelosi.”
“I am indeed the ‘Grim Reaper’ when it comes to the socialist agenda that they have been ginning up over the House with overwhelming Democratic support, and sending it over to America,” he added. “Things that would turn us into a country we have never been.”
When it comes to the cultural revolution that Pelosi seeks, slower, please.
GENEVIEVE WOOD: Why the Declining Marriage Rate Affects Everyone.
Decades of statistics have shown that, on average, married couples have better physical health, more financial stability, and greater social mobility than unmarried people.
Other studies show that the children of those couples are more likely to experience higher academic performance, emotional maturity, and financial stability than children who don’t have both parents in the home.
The social and economic costs of family breakdown are paid by everyone.
Studies show divorce and unwed childbearing cost taxpayers over $110 billion each year. But the real victims are children.
Children raised in single-parent homes are statistically more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, exhibit poor social behaviors, and commit violent crimes. They’re also more likely to drop out of school.
And when it comes to fighting poverty, there is no better weapon than marriage. In fact, marriage reduces the probability of child poverty by 80%.
So what can and should be done?
Much more at the link.
(Hat tip, Chris Wray.)
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