FLASHBACK: DEMOCRATIC ACTIVISTS WITH BYLINES TRIGGERED, DEMAND SAFE SPACES.
As Sean Davis wrote at the Federalist two years ago, Watch A Bunch Of Journalists Freak Out After Being Asked If They Know Anybody Who Drives A Truck.
Exit quote: “It turns out that people who are paid large sums of money to opine on what Americans outside the Acela province think get very upset if you demonstrate that they don’t actually know any of the people about whom they pretend to be experts.”
#HIMTOO? “National Geographic Channel has pulled its long-running Neil deGrasse Tyson chat show ‘StarTalk’ off the air, at least for now, following allegations of sexual misconduct against the famed astrophysicist. ‘StarTalk’ will remain on hiatus as a Fox Networks Group investigation into the multiple claims continues.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Environmentalists make good movie villains because they want to make your real life worse.
But it’s amusing that Hollywood, which worships Al Gore, and fetes Learjet Leftists such as Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s always flying off to audit the next climate reduction talk, chooses to make radical environmentalists the supervillains of their comic book movies
TIM COOK TO INVESTORS: People Bought Fewer New iPhones Because They Repaired Their Old Ones.
And they repaired their old ones because the new ones aren’t delivering the innovation and performance that used to make people scrap their perfectly-good older phones to buy the new ones. Possibly because Apple’s CEO is spending more time on social-justice nattering than on running the kind of company Steve Jobs would be proud of.
Related (From Ed): Apple’s Terrible No Good Very Bad Earnings Warning.
UPDATE: Five Ways to Look at Apple’s Surprise Bad News: None of them is good.
I DUNNO, IF I’M GONNA CARRY OPENLY I WANT SOMETHING BIGGER: Classic Guns: Colt Model 1908 General Officer’s Pistol.
THAT’S NOT GOOD: PTSD drug may increase nightmares, insomnia, suicide risk.
I BELIEVE GLENN SAID “THIS WHOLE THING STINKS” OVER A YEAR AGO: Exculpatory Russia evidence about Mike Flynn that US intel kept secret.
There is something in the human psyche that must abhor tranquility. The resilience born of suffering and sacrifice, after all, is not afforded those who languish in prosperity and comfort. Though we are not without significant personal and public challenges, they pale compared to those endured during the Great Depression and the Second World War. And so, bequeathed an inferiority complex, we seem eager to appropriate these terrible experiences for ourselves.
The scale of the threat posed by climatic and environmental changes is just not comparable to an aggressive fascist menace and the collapse of the global economy. Perhaps that’s why advocates for radical environmental policy prescriptions are so eager to borrow from the Greatest Generation’s hardships if only to lend psychological urgency to a cause that is empirically lacking.
“This is kind of like Winston Churchill in 1939,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who is preparing a presidential bid on a platform consisting primarily of measures that purport to mitigate the threat posed by climate change. Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders seems to agree. “We must look at climate change as if it were a devastating military attack against the United States and the entire planet,” he wrote. California Gov. Jerry Brown noted that it took Franklin Delano Roosevelt years to nudge Americans toward support for Britain over Nazi Germany, and climate change represents an “enemy” that is “devastating in a similar way.”
In response, Tim Blair is succinct: If radical environmentalism is refighting WWII, “Fair enough. Nuking Hiroshima it is, then.”
Progress during the real WWII was much faster though: Marines stormed Iwo Jima in March of 1945, only a few months before finishing off Japan. Original “Progressive” philosopher William James coined the phrase “the moral equivalent of war” to justify lefty power grabs in 1910. Al Gore envisioned the planet’s woes as the equivalent of Kristalnacht in 1989; Time magazine’s imaginary eco-warriors raised a tree on Mount Suribachi in 2008, and still this quagmire of moral equivalency mindlessly rages on.
CONTAINER CARGO CULT: Residents of the Dutch islands of Terschelling and Vlieland are having a grand time treasure hunting. A container ship lost up to 270 containers in a storm. Now merchandise is washing up on local beaches.
The Dutch Coast Guard said up to 270 containers had fallen off the Panamanian-flagged MSC ZOE, one of the world’s biggest container ships, in rough weather near the German island of Borkum and floated southwest toward Dutch waters. …Dutch media reported that local treasure hunters had found an array of items from containers whose contents had spilled, including light bulbs, car parts, Ikea furniture, clothing and toys.
Some containers are still floating in the sea and present a hazard to ships. The article notes that it’s “unclear if the goods were water-damaged” but the locals say they enjoy scavenging. A short report worth reading.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN is on the Supreme Court and obsolete laws.
AMERICA’S HALL MONITORS PROTECT THEIR OWN: NewsBusters Staffer Locked from Twitter for Mocking Drunk Don Lemon of CNN.
ANYBODY OUT THERE ACTUALLY DOING THIS? ‘Dry January’ Helps People Lay Off Alcohol Even Months Later, Study Finds.
#JOURNALISM: Deadspin Just Doxxed Me And You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next: Nothing. Wait, Deadspin is still around?
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND MAGICAL THINKING: The great awokening — Do social justice warriors believe in magic? Yes. Next question?
The same belief in magic reveals itself in the claim that certain words or ideas associated with ‘white privilege’ are a form of ‘epistemic violence’, capable of wreaking untold psychological damage on women and minorities. When a group of LGBT+ activists at a university claim that giving a platform to a ‘Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist’ will ‘erase’ the identity of trans students, it is tempting to dismiss this as hyperbole. But maybe we should take what they say at face value. If we grant them that courtesy, we have to conclude that the members of this cult attribute a terrifying supernatural power to those in possession of ‘white privilege’. They really do believe that the people at the top of the intersectional hierarchy can literally ‘erase’ people by uttering certain words, almost like magic spells. In this context, the ‘safe spaces’ that have been created in universities, in which students are protected from the harmful effects of these spells, are a bit like churches — holy places where evil cannot penetrate.
What’s distinctive about members of the social justice left is not that they don’t believe in magic — they clearly do — but that the supernatural forces that govern their universe are all malevolent. Theirs is a religion bereft of a divine being. There are only white Devils.
Read the whole thing.
Earlier: From Astrology to Cult Politics—the Many Ways We Try (and Fail) to Replace Religion.
EVERYONE IS CONSERVATIVE ABOUT WHAT HE KNOWS BEST: Google shifted $23 billion to tax haven Bermuda in 2017: filing.
(Classical reference in headline.)
MARK RIPPETOE: Heavier Kit? Stronger Soldiers!
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