Archive for 2024
May 6, 2024
HMM: Judge mulls sanctions over Google’s “shocking” destruction of internal chats. “According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ’s attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should ‘conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law.'”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: This year’s Harvard commencement speaker compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
Everyone’s a Nazi, except for the people actually calling for the eradication of Jews.
AMERICA’S RED GUARDS: George Washington Students Hold ‘People’s Tribunal,’ Call for Faculty’s Deaths.
CHAOS AT FORDHAM: Woman speaks out after protester rips Israeli flag from her hands, says it’s ‘Baffling.’
It’s only baffling if you close your eyes to the truth of what’s going on.
YOU’VE HEARD OF ATHEISM, AGNOSTICISM: But what about Apatheism? That’s when you just really don’t care one way or the other about the “God question.” Apologetics Professor Maryjo Sharp, a former Apatheist, explains on HillFaith this morning.
ETHNIC CLEANSING: Egypt: Islamist Mobs Attack Christians, Set Fire to Homes.
Videos circulating on Twitter apparently show angry Egyptian rioters chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and burning homes with joyful Arabic music in the background.
“The attack occurred after word spread that residents of the village, which is home to 3,000 Christian families, had obtained a permit to construct a church building,” the watchdog International Christian Concern (ICC) reported. According to Islamic Sharia law, non-Muslims, or ‘dhimmis,’ living under the Muslim-rule are not allowed to repair their places of worship, let alone build new ones.
Muslim rioters reportedly had tacit backing from the Egyptian security services. “Despite promises of safety from security forces, the cries of help from the archbishop and the local Coptic community went unanswered as the attack unfolded. Security forces arrived only after the attack, leaving a yet unknown number of Christians to perish in their burning homes,” the ICC added.
Previously: Persecution of Christians ‘coming close to genocide’ in Middle East.
And right now in Great Britain:
Muslim men go wild as they celebrate another local election win in Bradford, UK.
“We did it.”
The English city of Bradford has a 30.5% Muslim population while Christian’s make up 33.4%.
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 4, 2024
Holy shit. Meet the new City Councillor of Leeds, UK who just won their Election. pic.twitter.com/W5JaTMjcIg
— Liz Churchill (@liz_churchill10) May 4, 2024
If you were looking for examples of genocide and settler-colonialism…
RFK’S FOUR ‘EXISTENTIAL ISSUES:’ Robert Kennedy Jr. sits down with Epoch TV’s Jan Jekielek to discuss the four “existential issues” facing America that Kennedy claims both Biden and Trump are ignoring. Issue one, for instance, is the national debt:
According to RFK Jr., “our country is facing a series of existential issues and neither of them even has an opinion on them, and neither of them can do anything about them.
One of those is the debt. We have a $34 trillion debt. We’ve added a trillion dollars in the last hundred days and it’s growing exponentially.
“The cost of servicing that debt now exceeds our defense budget. Within five years, the cost of servicing this debt will be 50 cents out of every dollar that the federal government collects in taxes.
“Within 10 years, it will be 100 percent, so this is existential for our country. It means defaulting on the debt or taking some other radical course that will be devastating to the middle class, to private ownership, and to everything that we believe in.
“Yet, President Trump and President Biden have no capacity to deal with this issue. Why is that, and why do they never discuss it? Because those presidents ran up a bigger portion of that debt than any other presidents in history.”
I don’t agree with everything RFK Jr. says, but there are more than a few folks who think he’s absolutely right that the debt issue can no longer be ignored, it must be addressed and the American people have a right to know how anybody who claims to be qualified for the Oval Office will deal with it.
IT’S NOT ‘PUBLIC’ HOUSING: It’s “Social Housing,” according to a growing number of Lefty advocates, according to Issues & Insights and Pacific Research Institute. We live in an age in which the meaning of words is as pliable as the value of an unborn life.
100% AWESOME: Fund a mariachi band to play next to Penn’s encampment 24/ 7
“Over the past week a merry batch of campers has struck fear into the heart of Israel by having a sleepover on Penn’s College Green. As Tel Aviv waits in horror to see their next move, I believe these protestors should be serenaded for their efforts, just as they have constantly serenaded my efforts to study for finals with a megaphone and drum set.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Yeah, President Joe Is Getting Dumber. “The man’s cognitive decline is painful for anyone to watch. Those of us who are fortunate enough to have long-lived families are aware of how things change with older relatives even in the best of circumstances. We love our elders, and we do all we can to accommodate the aging process.”
THE “EMERGING DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY” REPLACEMENT THEORY ISN’T WORKING OUT AS PLANNED: Survey: Texas Hispanics Support Abbott’s Border Crackdown, Jumping on the Trump Train.
MICHAEL WALSH: On Abortion, Take The Win and Move On. “Conservatives need to understand that handing the abortion club back to the Left is political suicide. They should instead be celebrating their Dobbs win, the partial restoration of the Tenth Amendment, and the option to put their morals where their mouths are and fight for their beliefs at the state level, as the Constitution intends — especially in a fraught national election year. To lose the White House over an issue that’s already been constitutionally decided is lunacy. So take the win and move on to the next battlefield. There’s no shortage of them.”
Related: On abortion, Trump gets what many conservatives don’t.
ENGINEERED TO FAIL: ‘Equity’ Grading Is the Latest Educational Fad Destined To Fail.
Always eager to embrace easy-button solutions rather than, say, ideas that promote competitiveness and excellence, our school bureaucracies are on to some “innovative” ideas that have a ballpark-zero chance of improving educational outcomes. The new ones are based around the concept of equity. As with every education reform fad, they sound OK in the elevator pitch. Who doesn’t support equity? But they will create a mess that further impedes student progress.
For instance, some Bay Area schools have approved “equity grading.” It’s strange to focus on grading rather than teaching, but the details are even stranger. The Mercury News reports that one district removed “the practice of awarding zero points for assignments as long as they were ‘reasonably attempted.'” It also eliminated extra credit for class participation. EG offers students “multiple chances to make up missed or failed assignments and minimize homework’s impact on a student’s grade.” Now it will be almost impossible to get an A or an F.
It brings to mind Garrison Keilor’s Lake Wobegon, the fictional Minnesota town “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.” Parents rightly worry that the new grading system will promote slacking. Why work extra hard when you won’t be able to get an A? Why try to improve when you won’t get worse than a C?
If you think of it as training for our glorious socialist future — “So long as they pretend to pay us, we’ll pretend to work” — it all makes sense.
THEY ASSUME ANGRY LEFTISTS COME FROM A POSITION OF MORALITY: Ben Sasse criticizes other universities for ‘bizarrely’ giving attention to ‘smallest, angriest group’ amid protests. They don’t come from a position of morality. They come from a position of greed for power.
DON SURBER: Where are the anti-Hamas protests? Why does the world accept the rape, torture and slaughter of Jews?
Because protests in the world are organized by leftists, and leftists are garbage people.
JEFFREY CARTER: By Any Means Necessary: Yesterday Climate, Today Hamas, Tomorrow?
The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. “You must participate. Hiding your head in the sand is exactly what the terrorists want. For an example, see voter turnout in Chicago. They have a Marxist for mayor. Let me try to help my liberal friends. Though it is very hard to understand, when someone says they want to kill you and they protest publicly, they really do want to kill you. We don’t think that way but they do.”
IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL: DOJ’s Kristen Clarke Testified She Was Never Arrested. Court Records and Text Messages Indicate She Was.
Before becoming one of the Justice Department’s top leaders, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke was allegedly involved in a violent domestic dispute, according to court documents, records, and text messages—an incident that ended in her arrest and was ultimately expunged. During her Senate confirmation, Clarke specifically denied ever having been arrested for or accused of committing a violent crime. . . .
Clarke’s ex-husband, Reginald Avery, alleged to the American Accountability Foundation’s Tom Jones in 2021 that Clarke attacked him with a knife, deeply slicing his finger to the bone, on the night of July 4, 2006, while they were married and living in Maryland.
According to messages and documents reviewed by The Daily Signal, police arrested Clarke that night. She did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
She’ll get a pass due to race, skin color, and — particularly — political affiliation.
COVID FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: What Neil Ferguson’s booty call tells us about modern politics.
The conspiratorial left, convinced the world is run by secret cabals of bankers and cigar-chomping media moguls, thinks the Neil Ferguson story is a ‘dead cat’. In other words, they think the Daily Telegraph – Evil Tory Rag – revealed that Ferguson carried on bonking his mistress in defiance of a lockdown that he himself bears much responsibility for in order to distract attention from Britain overtaking Italy with the highest Covid death toll in Europe. A ‘dead cat’ strategy is when a sensationalist story is introduced to the mix to divert attention from a far more serious political crisis. Ferguson’s sexual antics are the Tory regime’s dead cat to Britain’s corona death toll, apparently.
This sums up the political infantilism of the left. It is actually incredibly important news that Ferguson, the Imperial College modeller who said it was possible 500,000 Brits would die if we didn’t lock down, defied the lockdown. It deserves the frontpage treatment it is getting today. For Ferguson’s booty call with his married lover actually reveals a great deal about the 21st-century elites and how they view their relationship with the masses. It’s one rule for them and another for us. They can carry on enjoying sneaky freedoms because their lives and jobs are important; we can’t because we are mere little people, whose silly work lives can casually be disrupted, whose love lives can be turned upside down, and whose families can be ripped apart. The Ferguson affair provides an illuminating insight into the new elitism.
It’s worth thinking about the largeness of this scandal. Ferguson’s scaremongering, his predictions of mass death if society didn’t close itself down, was the key justification for the lockdown in the UK. It influenced lockdowns elsewhere, too. Of course, this isn’t all on Ferguson. He does not exercise mind control over Boris Johnson. It was a combination of disarray among the political class and the wild clamouring of the media elite for the severest lockdown possible that led to the working people of Britain being decommissioned and almost the entire population being put under an unprecedented form of house arrest. But Ferguson’s figures, his graphs and models, his worst-case scenarios, were the godly pronouncements upon which this historic disruption of society was based. And Ferguson fully backed the lockdown that sprung from his work.
As the BBC reported the same day, Ferguson “quit as a government adviser on coronavirus after admitting an ‘error of judgement’.”
Mistakes were made! But the biggest was made by the man who hired him: Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment: The pandemic was Boris’s biggest test. He failed.
When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.
This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.
Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.
Well, to be fair, Airstrip One become an even bigger police state — and most of the authorities there needed little prompting to scale up their efforts.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: 2.5×4 American Flags for Outside | American Flag Made in USA. #CommissionEarned
WHERE’S THE SURPRISE? Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors.
The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Gates, Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis.
Two of the organizers behind protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and it in turn supports numerous small nonprofits that work for social change. (Gates did not return a request for comment, and Soros declined to comment.)
Another notable Democratic donor whose philanthropy has helped fund the protest movement is David Rockefeller Jr., who sits on the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In 2022, the fund gave $300,000 to the Tides Foundation; according to nonprofit tax forms, Tides has given nearly $500,000 over the past five years to Jewish Voice for Peace, which explicitly describes itself as anti-Zionist.
Several other groups involved in pro-Palestinian protests are backed by a foundation funded by Susan and Nick Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt Hotel empire — and supporters of Biden and numerous Democratic campaigns, including $6,600 to the Biden Victory Fund a few months ago and more than $300,000 during the 2020 campaign.
The trail of donations shows a series of blurred lines when it comes to liberal causes and Democratic politics.
They look perfectly clear to me.
IF THEY’RE HIDING SOMETHING, IT’S BECAUSE THEY HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE:
For the 3rd consecutive year the City of Pittsburgh run by Ed Gainey did not turn over its annual numbers to the FBI including homicides & assaults making it impossible for police & citizens get a true picture of crime in the nation from the FBI https://t.co/4rgQ58O2CE
— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) May 5, 2024
A BLOW FOR CIVILIZATION: MIT becomes first elite university to ban diversity statements.
JIM MEIGS: Unscientific American: Science journalism surrenders to progressive ideology.
Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview.
It is hard to put a single name on this sprawling ideology. It has its roots both in radical 1960s critiques of capitalism and in the late-twentieth-century postmodern movement that sought to “problematize” notions of objective truth. Critical race theory, which sees structural racism as the grand organizing principle of our society, is one branch. Queer studies, which seeks to “deconstruct” traditional norms of family, sex, and gender, is another. Critics of this worldview sometimes call it “identity politics”; supporters prefer the term “intersectionality.” In managerial settings, the doctrine lives under the label of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI: a set of policies that sound anodyne—but in practice, are anything but.
This dogma sees Western values, and the United States in particular, as uniquely pernicious forces in world history. And, as exemplified by the anticapitalist tirades of climate activist Greta Thunberg, the movement features a deep eco-pessimism buoyed only by the distant hope of a collectivist green utopia.
The DEI worldview took over our institutions slowly, then all at once. Many on the left, especially journalists, saw Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as an existential threat that necessitated dropping the guardrails of balance and objectivity. Then, in early 2020, Covid lockdowns put American society under unbearable pressure. Finally, in May 2020, George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer provided the spark. Protesters exploded onto the streets. Every institution, from coffeehouses to Fortune 500 companies, felt compelled to demonstrate its commitment to the new “antiracist” ethos. In an already polarized environment, most media outlets lunged further left. Centrists—including New York Times opinion editor James Bennet and science writer Donald G. McNeil, Jr.—were forced out, while radical progressive voices were elevated.
In other words, journalism went from a sometimes-propaganda enterprise to a full-time propaganda enterprise.