JACK WILSON SAYS ‘BE PREPARED TO PROTECT YOURSELF:’ Wilson took down the shooter in the West Freeway Church of Christ of Fort Worth, Texas, in six seconds. America needs more like him.
Archive for 2020
January 20, 2020
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University cancelled seminar by feminist speaker following threats of protest from transgender activists.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Impeachment Trial Week Is Here and Please God Kill It With Fire. “Nancy Pelosi’s House Democrats — who are now under the complete control of de facto Speaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — conducted and impeachment ‘inquiry’ that was so sham-ridden an alcoholic carnival barker would be embarrassed to be associated with them.”
THINGS I NEVER EXPECTED TO SEE IN MY LIFETIME: The fall of the Berlin Wall, a Washington Nationals World Series Championship and this.
UPDATE: OK, perhaps “this” was too obscure. I was referring to Chevy actually producing and selling a mid-engine Corvette. Lots of prototypes over the years, but never the real thing. Until now. I just wish the stylists would rediscover the beauty of the curved line.
SEEN ON FACEBOOK:
LITTLE MIKEY ISN’T RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT, HE’S RUNNING FOR PEOPLE’S COMMISSAR: Bloomberg All In on Climate Change, Wants Gas-Fueled Cars Gone, Ready to Use Executive Order.
All these Dem candidates talking about governing via sweeping executive order are setting up Trump’s second term very nicely.
SO BRING TULSI GABBARD BACK TO THE DEBATES: Sanders says gender, age pose obstacles to candidates.
JOEL KOTKIN: Big Tech’s Hypocritical Wokeness Might Soon Backfire.
Not long ago, in our very same galaxy, the high-tech elite seemed somewhat like the Jedis of the modern era. Sure, they were making gobs of money, but they were also “changing the world” for the better.
Even demonstrators against capitalism revered them; when Steve Jobs died in 2011, the protesters at Occupied Wall Street mourned his passing.
Increasingly, Americans no longer regard our tech oligarchs as modern folk heroes; today companies including Google, Apple and Facebook are suffering huge drops in their reputations among the public.
The tech oligarchs make a big show of their social “wokeness.” They play up on gender issues, despite a wicked record of sexual harassment at companies like Google and across the “bro culture” of the male-dominated valley.
Worse still are issues of class. The Bay Area, as CityLab put it, has devolved into “a region of segregated innovation” where the rich wax, the middle class declines and the poor suffer increasingly unshakeable poverty. Over the past decades wages for African Americans and Latinos in Silicon Valley have fallen during the boom while much of the work, up to 40 percent, has gone to temporary immigrant workers, the modern-day equivalent of indentured servants.
Of course, the oligarchs rely on immigrants to work as low-wage janitors, dog walkers and restaurant workers essential to their high-amenity economy. Not surprisingly they have been among the fiercest critics of President Trump’s immigration policies. This fits into their image, cultivated, for example, by Jeff Bezos mouthpiece The Washington Post, as principled defenders of democracy and human rights against the would-be dictator in the White House.
Yet these pronouncements obscure remarkable hypocrisy. Time, owned by oligarch Marc Benioff, rejected its own readers’ poll, which favored making the Hong Kong protesters “person of the year,” and instead gave the honor to Greta Thunberg. This will bolster the Salesforce.com founder’s green bona fides but also protects the company’s growing presence in China. It seems there’s no conflict between advocating wokeness in America while supporting repression in China. If tech-rich Taiwan, which just voted strongly against pro-mainland candidates, ever thought it could look to Silicon Valley for support, they should look again.
Then there’s the assistance with Chinese spying, and their effort to create some sort of similar surveillance apparatus here at home.
Flashback: Silicon Valley has gone from liberating to creepy. Next stop, government regulation. “Silicon Valley seemed to have gone from the hammer-wielding woman in that famous ‘1984’ Apple commercial, to the Big Brother figure up on the screen in that famous ‘1984’ Apple commercial.”
Plus: “Digital Maoism.”
OXFORD GUY SAYS SOME ATHEISTS NOW QUESTION GODLESS UNIVERSE: Brit Mathematician John Lennox often debates atheists and he hears some of them asking an unexpected question, one that torch-singer Peggy Lee would instantly recognize.
WITH THE GREATEST OF EASE: How five members of Joe Biden’s family got rich through his connections.
BYRON YORK ON DEMOCRATS’ TWO IMPEACHMENT DECEPTIONS: Some might wonder if Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler hiked in the same area as the guy who was bitten in the neck by a low-hanging copperhead in a Mississippi tree.
PAUL MIRENGOFF: Sympathy for Sanders? I have none. Well, it can be true both that the Democratic/media establishment is screwing him again — because they are — and that he’s an awful person who should never get close to real power. And, in fact, both are true.
HE WAS A HERO: Navy Announces CVN-81 To Be Named The USS Doris Miller.
SUICIDAL TENDENCIES: Anger over new no-bail law killing LI Dems but progressives don’t care.
YEAH, PRETTY MUCH:
THE LACK OF SELF AWARENESS HERE IS AMAZING: Elizabeth Warren: “How could the American people want someone who lies to them?”
Related: Article Cites Elizabeth Warren As First Woman of Color Hired by Harvard Law School.
Also: Elizabeth Warren said, “Let me remind you, I think, I’m the only one running for president who’s actually been on the executive side.” Well, except for Little Mikey, who was Mayor of New York, and Pete Buttigieg — maybe the “Mayor Pete” nickname should have been a clue? — and even Bernie Sanders, who was mayor of Burlington, Vermont (“long ago.”) But what this does underscore is just how little executive experience there is on the national level in the Democratic field.
And there’s Biden, who was VP, but the Vice President is better understood as a legislative officer — President of the Senate — than an executive one, since the VP isn’t part of the presidency and isn’t a member of the executive branch.
AT AMAZON, Deal of the Day, Timbuk2 Uptown Travel-Friendly Laptop Backpack, Midway , One Size.
THE DISASTROUS TRUMP ECONOMY: America just had its best month for new home construction in 13 years.
Paul Krugman hardest hit.
First, however, since CNN apparently undertook its cheerleading for Warren in order to declare its feminist bona fides, I would like to pose a few questions as a sort of prolegomenon, what Kierkegaard, in another context, called a “preliminary expectoration.” 1) Why are feminists so unpleasant? 2) Why do they insist on whining instead of getting on with the task at hand? 3) Why do they tend to blame other people for their failures?
I do not propose to answer these questions—I am writing a column, not a book—but I would like to register my suspicion that part of the answer to all three is the dim, imperfectly articulated awareness that feminism’s real complaint is not with men or “the patriarchy” but with reality, with human nature.
To illustrate this, ask yourself questions such as why are there not special programs to recruit more men in engineering programs? Why aren’t grants available to encourage men to study math, or physics, or—when you come right down to it—to study anything? Why do politicians announce to general applause that this year there are more female representatives, or judges, or senators than ever before? Why is it thought to be a badge of virtue to have more women in this profession or that but the same is never claimed for men?
As I say, I am not going to attempt to answer these questions. I just want you to bear them in mind as you contemplate CNN’s quite extraordinary attack on Bernie Sanders after the last presidential debate.
Read the whole thing.
BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID. 2020 is about what kind of country we should have. Dems want it to be more like California.
Neo-feudalism is all the rage on the Left.
I WAS GOING TO ASK WHY VIRGINIA DEMOCRATS ARE SO RACIST, BUT THEN RALPH NORTHAM DID POSE IN BLACKFACE. OR MAYBE A KLAN ROBE, HE WON’T SAY WHICH WAS HIM. Actually, gun restrictions will target the black community.
UCLA LAW PROF: Why I Won’t Let My Classes Be Recorded. “Another concern is that recording chills classroom discourse. … Finally, regardless of what colleges might claim, once these recordings are made, they are likely to last indefinitely. That means they will be available for scrutiny years or decades into the future. Imagine if recordings existed of the college or graduate-school classes that today’s politicians and business leaders took in their student days. It’s a safe bet that there would be a cottage industry of people working to dig those recordings up, scrutinizing them for any comments that could be weaponized, and triumphantly posting the fruits of their searches on social media.”
I wish this was wrong.