COLLEGE CAN’T JUST WALK AWAY FROM FREE SPEECH CASE: A federal district court judge in Atlanta said Gwinnett College can’t just pay $2 in nominal damages and be free of litigation in which officials were found to have violated students’ right to share their religious views on campus without prior permission.
Archive for 2021
December 27, 2021
WAKE UP, IT’S A CHELSEA MORNING: Nearly 30% of New COVID Cases in America Came From One City. “I feel like this story would be framed differently if it were Florida.”
BE PREPARED: LifeStraw Personal Water Filter for Hiking, Camping, Travel, and Emergency Preparedness, 1 Pack, Blue. #CommissionEarned
NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: What The Media Didn’t Tell You About Bishop Desmond Tutu.
CAMERA.org quoted: Harvard University Law School Prof. Emeritus Alan Dershowitz about Tutu:
“is no mere anti-Zionist …. He has minimized the suffering of those killed in the Holocaust. He has attacked the ‘Jewish’— not Israeli — lobby as too ‘powerful’ …. He has invoked classic antisemitic stereotypes … about Jewish ‘arrogance,’ ‘power’ and money …. [A]nd has accused ‘the Jews’ of causing many of the world’s problems” (“Bishop Tutu Is No Saint When it Comes to Jews,” Dec. 20, 2010, The Gatestone Institute). Tutu, impervious to facts, also has denied that Israel is a civilized democracy and unsuccessfully urged the Capetown Opera not to perform there.
How can Tutu, a vocal defender of human rights, a fighter for the oppressed, winner of the Nobel Peace prize in 1984 when it still had meaning, be accused of being an anti-Semitic bigot? By reading his own words.
Tutu has made some alarming statements about the Holocaust. He has publicly complained about what he calls “the Jewish monopoly of the Holocaust.” (Jerusalem Post, July 26, 1985) Sorry Bishop, but Jews do own the copyright. We paid for it with more than Six Million lives, one and a half million of those were little children.” Tut also asserted that “the gas chambers” made for “a neater death” than did apartheid.
Read the whole thing.
SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME BECOMES FIRST MOVIE TO HIT $1 BILLION SINCE PANDEMIC:
The film has become the first movie to surpass the $1 billion mark since the latest Star Wars film “The Rise of Skywalker” was released in December 2019. Nearly all indoor theaters in the U.S. and many theaters worldwide shut down for months starting in March 2020.
“No Way Home” reportedly hit $260 million in the U.S. alone in its opening weekend, according to Sony. The strong opening made it the second-highest opening weekend nationwide, according to Deadline. The opening weekend was also noted as the second-best opening weekend in history globally behind one of Marvel’s top Avengers films.
The remarkable success of the film during the rise in COVID-19 numbers nationwide has surprised many in the film industry.
“With Covid-impacted domestic earnings and China’s growing disinterest in Hollywood flicks, there was cause to wonder if Rise of Skywalker would be Hollywood’s last $1 billion grosser at least until Avatar 2. That Spider-Man: No Way Home has zoomed past the milestone in just over two weeks without China is the very definition of hope,” Forbes reported.
“It’s impressive that ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ managed to blow past $1 billion in ticket sales worldwide given the rapidly spreading omicron variant of COVID-19. But, so far, coronavirus concerns have done little to slow Peter Parker’s prowess; the film is still playing to many sold-out screenings nationwide,” Variety added.
Some have argued “No Way Home” has found success in part by avoiding strong progressive political messages that have divided audiences.
Well, yes. I saw it in a three-quarters full theater in Dallas on Christmas day. As a movie, the ghost of David Lean isn’t losing too much sleep over it. But as a two and a half hour love letter to Marvel fans, it’s terrific, non-woke fun: Spider-Man: No Way Home Review: A Woke-Free Blast of Fan Service and Fun.
THERE WAS NEVER AN INSURRECTION: Prominent Dem Lawyer Predicts Lawsuits To Remove GOP Members From House Seats Next Year.
KWANZAA: A Fake Holiday With A Racist Goal, Created By A Criminal Madman.
Perhaps Kwanzaa is observed because this part of the Kwanzaa story is rarely mentioned by the mainstream media.
When he invented the holiday, Karenga said his goal was to “give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”
Why would an African American of Christian faith want to dissociate from their religion on Christmas or a Jew of color want to ignore the joy of a family lighting their Chanukiah (Menorah) sing-song and eating jelly donuts?
This holiday raised by some to the level of Christmas by wokeism has a purpose totally antithetical to Christmas. While Christmas is meant to unify, Kwanzaa is meant to divide and isolate Black Americans from the rest of the people who practice their same faith.
Related: College Republicans tweeted out wishes for a “happy Kwanza” and got absolutely destroyed for it.
More: Kamala Harris Touts ‘Seven Principles’ of Marxist-Rooted Kwanzaa. “Vice President Kamala Harris celebrated the beginning of Kwanzaa Sunday night, an underlying Marxist holiday created by black nationalists, by praising one of the ‘seven principles’ of Kwanzaa, which happen to coincide with the seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army.”
I’m pretty sure Tom Wolfe didn’t write Radical Chic as a how-to guide.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why Are We Pouring Money Into a Black Box? Why Are We Subjecting Our Young People to a Process with Such Little Transparency? Why Are We Risking Our Economy On It All? Because doing these things suits the interest of our ruling class, of course. The same reason we’re doing so many other dysfunctional things, too. The key is, it’s bad to have a ruling class that has a vested interest in dysfunctional things.
Plus:
Princeton still requires the SAT. How much does it matter? You don’t know, and you can’t know. Neither can the kids who break their backs to get in or the parents who develop ulcers over it. They keep such information close to their chest, even as people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on application fees annually for the tiny chance to attend. The answer is almost certainly that the amount the SAT matters is entirely variable, depending on how badly they want a student, and how badly they want that student depends on money, on prestige, and on cobbling together a little phony diversity for the brochure. And for this untold thousands of young people work their asses off and invest all their hopes, and on its basis we decide who goes on to affluence and professional success.
It’s hard for me to overstate the absolute audacity of these schools insisting on even less transparency. Princeton is an institution that sits on a $37.7 billion dollar endowment, for which it has enjoyed an annual 12.7% return over the past decade. This is an astronomical sum of money, but then, when you’re exempt from the large majority of taxes that apply to most human institutions, it’s a little bit easier. I can’t imagine there’s a lot of people getting Pell grants but they’re handing out Stafford loans, federally underwritten, and they receive hundreds of millions in federal research funds. Typically there are all manner of other means through which taxpayer dollars are making their way onto a given college campus. And for our money and our trouble we get a tiny number of elites graduating into affluence and a school that thinks that the way they choose students just isn’t our business. Imagine, cruising through life as a tax-free entity with an endowment the size of the GDP of Uganda, and being expected to open your books to the taxpayers. The very thought.
I guess for many people the SAT is such a visceral nexus of anxiety and insecurity, even decades after they took it, that they are simply incapable of critical thinking about this issue. And so they never pause to ask, “could these existentially elite institutions, which deepen inequality and further the interests of the moneyed and powerful at every turn, perhaps be getting rid of the SAT for reasons other than a pure and sincere commitment to racial and socioeconomic diversity?” I would argue that, if you really care about our poorer and Blacker teenagers, you would feel even greater need to be ruthlessly cynical in understanding the institutions that you naively think will save them.
That’s not how to get ahead on the left. Or in most of the institutional right, for that matter.
Related thoughts here.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
Why, yes he did:
‘The way I look at CNN now is so different than the way I looked at CNN 15, 20 years ago. I used to look at them as ‘this is how I get the news.’ This is unbiased, professional news,’ Rogan explained.
‘They’re going to tell me what’s happening in Pakistan and, you know, what’s happening in Mogadishu. These are the real journalists that are telling you the news.’
He continued: ‘Now I look at them, I go, “You f***ing propagandists, the right-arm of Pfizer. What are you doing?”‘
— “Joe Rogan slams CNN as ‘f****** propagandists’ as star host Chris Cuomo is fired over sexual harassment claims and Don Lemon ‘texted Jussie Smollet to tell him Chicago cops didn’t believe he was the victim of a homophobic attack,’” the London Daily Mail, December 7th.
Related: The Last Days of CNN.
CNN is far behind FOX News and MSNBC in the ratings. It averages around half a million viewers in prime time and it recently hit a 7-year low in the demo.
So it was the perfect time for Chris Wallace to leave FOX News for CNN+.
Some might have thought that Wallace was leaving to fill Chris Cuomo’s slot at CNN. No such luck, though without Cuomo the failing news network’s ratings have crashed to new lows.
But crashing to new lows is the default story at CNN.
CNN Airport, its captive audience operation, shut down earlier this year. And CNN isn’t far behind. CNN+ is the network’s bet that enough people will pay 6 bucks a month to watch it.
CNN’s effort to launch CNN+, a paid streaming service, at a time when its core ratings are crashing is confusing observers who wonder why the news network thinks people will pay for CNN when they won’t even watch it for free.
CNN President Jeff Zucker billed CNN+ as being for “CNN superfans, news junkies and fans of quality non-fiction programming.”
The existence of CNN superfans is as improbable as Bigfoot and UFOs. No one has ever spotted a CNN superfan in the wild and not even the most exotic zoos have them in stock.
I hope the Zuckerbucks — and all that come with it — were worth it for Wallace to jump ship.
MAYBE CANNING HEALTH WORKERS IN THE MIDST OF A PANDEMIC WAS A POOR DECISION:
VACCINATE THE DEER! COVID-19 infection detected in deer in six Ohio locations. Or at least make them wear masks.
COME SEE THE RACISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Following higher ed’s lead, K-12 schools deny Asian students’ achievement. “Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Chris Rufo posted an image last month of a presentation reportedly delivered by university president Darryll Pines, which separated the average scores and GPAs into two categories: ‘students of color, minus Asians’ and ‘white or Asian students.'”
‘BLIND, PITILESS INDIFFERENCE’ OR DESIGN: That’s how Dr. Stephen Meyer frames the debate in an excellent Prager U video between scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins and himself, an advocate for the Intelligent Design school.
NO, US IS NOT SPLIT ON MANDATES: Latest Issues & Insights/TIPP Poll finds surprising agreement across the ideological spectrum regarding mandates. But the one exception — Republicans aren’t so sure about vaccine mandates — points up a major failing of the Mainstream Media’s Covid reporting:
“That, among all parties and ideologies, there is majority agreement on the effectiveness of the policies that have been pursued so far to deal with the spread of COVID-19 and its growing number of genetic variants.
“The agreement varies only by degree. Significant numbers of people on the right and the center have reasonable objections to COVID policies, such as mandatory vaccines for children, that politicians would be wise to heed.
“Indeed, of all the political groupings tracked by I&I/TIPP, the only groups that show virtually no objection to the most draconian masking, vaccination, and lockdown policies are the Democrats and their ideological kin, the liberals.
“Ironically, those same groups were strongly anti-vaccination when President Trump made his big push in 2020, but today with both the White House and Congress controlled by liberal Democrats, are the strongest proponents of sweeping government anti-COVID measures, including lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
“Unfortunately, this overarching majority agreement is muted or ignored by the mainstream media, which from the beginning has politicized the government’s COVID-19 response.”
LEFTISTS HATED HIS WORK, WHICH CONTRADICTED THEIR “BLANK SLATE” THEORIES: Scientist E.O. Wilson, dubbed modern-day Darwin, dead at 92.
But his trailblazing work was not without controversy. In much of his 1975 book “Sociobiology,” he laid out his theory of animal behavior, which earned high praise from fellow scientists.
In the final chapter, though, Wilson caused an uproar by proposing that human behavior is largely genetically based, and that humans acquire a predisposition to such matters as the division of labor between genders, tribalism, male dominance and parental-child bonding.
But his strong reputation as a revered authority on the natural world remained intact.
Well, the culture was healthier then.
HERE’S WHAT THE MSM DIDN’T TELL YOU ABOUT BISHOP TUTU: Jeff Dunetz at The Lid exposes the virulent anti-semitism that darkens Tutu’s life and career and that nobody in the Mainstream Media has the guts to acknowledge.
THE ONLY PEOPLE I’VE SEEN MENTION KWANZAA THIS YEAR ARE WHITE, LIBERAL WOMEN POLITICIANS:
OLD AND BUSTED: “Never Again.”
The New Hotness? Just NBC the Whitewashing: MSNBC senior producer’s tweet about China human rights abuses gets ‘allegedly’ trending.
GET IN SHAPE: Bowflex SelectTech 552 Adjustable Dumbbell. #CommissionEarned
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I ordered a set of these and a doorway chinup bar just before the lockdowns and got surprisingly good workouts from that combination.