Archive for 2017
August 20, 2017
THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED, OUR CAMPUSES WOULD BECOME RACIST CESSPITS OF HOSTILITY TOWARD ANYONE DIFFERENT: Blonde women in Trump gear TRIGGER students at Howard University. “A group of white women, some of whom were wearing Trump gear, triggered the Howard University community over the weekend when they dared attempt to eat lunch in the school’s cafeteria. . . . Jamilah Lemieux thought campus police should be involved. . . . Even the Twitter account for the school’s dining services weighed in on the need for students to have ‘safe & comfortable’ dining spaces.”
What’s next, denying them service at a lunch counter?
JOURNALISM: CNN’s take on Antifa: Peace through violence (Update: CNN scrubs headline).
UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Vaginas absolutely need sex or they’ll waste away: study. “It’s a painful condition that can leave you itching, even burning down there — and no, it’s not a sexually transmitted infection! Just when you thought you had enough to worry about after realizing having a ‘depressed’ vagina is a thing, women are also at risk of vaginal atrophy.”
WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING? 10 missing, 5 injured after USS John S. McCain collides with tanker in Pacific. “This crash came days after the top three leaders aboard the USS Fitzgerald were relieved of command. That warship was damaged badly in a collision off the coast of Japan that killed seven sailors in June. . . . This marked the fourth mishap for U.S. Navy ships in the Pacific since February. Aside from the USS McCain and USS Fitgerald incidents, the Navy crusier USS Antietam ran aground dumping over 1,000 gallons of oil in Tokyo Bay in Februray. In May, another cruiser, USS Lake Champlain, hit a South Korean fishing vessel.”
How are they going to dodge Chinese submarines if they can’t dodge commercial shipping?
VOX GONNA VOX: OK, being Vox, the odds are good that it’s factually way off, but this is a neat little widget. Punch in your zip code and you’ll see what to expect on Eclipse Day.
NEVER TRUST GUYS WHO WHITE-KNIGHT THIS MUCH FOR FEMINISTS: Joss Whedon Is a ‘Hypocrite Preaching Feminist Ideals,’ Ex-Wife Kai Cole Says: “He used his relationship with me as a shield … so no one would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist,” she writes.
See also Hugo Schwyzer.
OLD AND BUSTED: BAKE THAT CAKE! THE NEW HOTNESS: Blonde Women In Trump Gear Trigger Students at Howard University. “A group of white women [on a high school field trip], some of whom were wearing Trump gear, triggered the Howard University community over the weekend when they dared attempt to eat lunch in the school’s cafeteria,” Twitchy notes. And it was quite a meltdown.
Straight out of Michael Graham’s Redneck Nation — apparently no one at the historic black college is aware of the irony of their barring people from eating in a cafeteria merely because of their different appearance.
THERE’S A WHITE HOUSE PETITION to declare Antifa a terrorist organization. It’s approaching 100,000 signatures already.
FASTER, PLEASE: Genetic Enhancement In Adults Will Be Many Times More Powerful Than Steroids.
See, I enjoy the Niven Man-Kzin war stories, but I’ve always wondered why the Kzinti’s tiger-like physical power remains such a big deal in a highly advanced future. Surely humans could (and if dealing with Kzinti, would) be enhanced to be equally strong and fast. But I guess that wouldn’t fit the storyline.
WELL WELL WELL: Al Jazeera is reporting that Iran’s mullah dictatorship has decided it must protect the nuclear deal it made with Obama. This is a 180. Last week the ayatollahs and their terrorist cohort were pounding their robed chests and declaring they’d just walk away from the agreement — you know, to trump Trump.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said the top foreign policy priority for his new government was to protect the nuclear deal from being torn up by the United States.
“The most important job of our foreign minister is first to stand behind the JCPOA and not to allow the US and other enemies to succeed,” Rouhani told parliament on Sunday, using the technical name for the 2015 agreement that eased sanctions in exchange for curbs to Iran’s nuclear programme.
“Standing up for the JCPOA means standing up to Iran’s enemies,” he said on the last day of debates over his cabinet selections.
Now think about that quote from Rouhani, and assume the translation is fair and accurate. Does that mean Obama was Iran’s friend? Barack Obama and John Kerry are the culprits who made this very very bad deal that puts America and American allies at risk.
RIP: LEGENDARY ENTERTAINER JERRY LEWIS DEAD AT 91.
Not my cup of tea, but he was hypnotic to watch while playing Jerry Lewis playing Johnny Carson in Martin Scorsese’s 1982 film The King of Comedy, a sequel of sorts to Taxi Driver, and which foreshadowed our current fame at all costs culture.
TRUMP AND THE MEDIA LOVE MUD WRESTLING:
Trump is right to complain about how he never gets any credit for doing the right thing because the media and the rest of his critics are always waiting to pounce on him for doing the wrong thing.
All I could think was: The media have lost their collective mind. They used to be content to just tell us what to think. Now, in the era of Trump, they go further and tell us not to trust what we see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears.
Trump does a superb job of getting in his own way, and turning every policy disagreement into a junior high school fistfight.
Still, the last few days have been excruciating for me. Not because I have any affection for Trump or neo-Nazis or white supremacists. I don’t. The country would be better off without the lot of them. However, I have become quite fond of journalism.
I sure miss it.
Me too. Note that this syndicated column by Ruben Navarrette, Jr. is running in the San Francisco Chronicle, which buried its editors’ videotaped interview with Obama in January of 2008 in which he vowed to bankrupt the coal industry, instead of putting his words in giant 72 point type on its front page the next day. A serious presidential candidate vowing to wipe a major industry should be major news no matter what your political leanings or your views on environmentalism. Its omission by the Chronicle served as a stark reminder that long ago, old media morphed into Democratic operatives with bylines, who merely produce content as a side function of their main goal of keeping their team in power and accumulating more of it.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND LIBERAL FASCISM. Dartmouth prof defends Antifa: It’s just self-defense against Nazis.
Responding to the appearance of Dartmouth’s Mark Bray, the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook on NBC’s Meet the Press, Allahpundit writes:
The other thing Bray has in common with his enemies is needing the public to believe that the threat from the other side is greater than it is. To hear him tell it, the neo-Nazi menace has reached such proportions in America that a national left-wing gang willing to fight it in the streets is urgently needed. In reality, neo-Nazi groups have existed for decades and have enjoyed moments of high visibility — the march through Skokie, the rise of the American Nazi Party under George Lincoln Rockwell in the 60s, and so on. They faded away without help from Antifa. As Richard Cohen notes, Antifa’s existence is actually manna for alt-right groups insofar as it gives them more of a reason to exist and gives mainstream right-wingers a reason to sympathize with them, however grudgingly. If the left is going to try to intimidate the right with paramilitary rabble, turnabout is fair play. That’s the “spiral” Cohen talks about. Heightening the contradictions is good for radicals on both sides, which is why there’ll be more Charlottesvilles.
Read the whole thing, which dovetails well with this brief Facebook post by Brendan O’Neil of Spiked on Wednesday:
“You are a white man. Check your privilege. Stay in your lane. You will never understand black people’s lives or experiences. You’re all about whiteness, that’s how you’re conditioned.” — SJWs
“I am a white man. What a privilege. I’m going to stay in my lane. I will never understand black people. I’m all about whiteness, it’s how I’m conditioned.” — White Nationalists
Bray actually played the “privilege” card on his debating opponent on Meet the Press, telling Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center*:
BRAY: Well, there’s a big difference between confronting fascism and confronting other forms of violence. We can see that during the ’30s and ’40s there was no public opinion to be leveraged by nonviolent resistance. If you get fascists to be powerful enough in government, they’re simply not going to listen to the kind of public opinion that nonviolence can generate. That’s the argument for resistance to Nazis. The other point that I’ll make is a lot of people don’t have the choice whether they can defend themselves or not. We’ve seen that even before this sort of, what you called it spiral of violence, started there were attacks on mosques, there were attacks on synagogues. A lot of people are under attack and sometimes they need to be able to defend themselves. It’s a privileged position to be able to say that you never have to defend yourself from these kinds of monsters.
COHEN: You know, it’s not an issue of defending yourself. It’s an issue of trying to silence other people. No one is saying that, you know, if you’re slugged in the face that you have to sit there and take it. The question here is when white nationalists want to walk down the street, should people stop them. And that’s a very different issue. It’s a very peculiar notion of self-defense to say you can censor people.
But it’s Google, Firefox, Twitter, and CNN approved.
Twitchy asks a great question about the segment: “Does Bray endorse throwing bottles of urine at cops as self-defense, because that’s what really happened in Boston as no white supremacists even showed up.”
And as veteran blogger AG Conservative notes in a thread on Twitter, “Antifa openly justifies violence against what they consider hate groups and people who help them, even in response to just speech. The problem is that their definition expands constantly and can be used to justify violence against almost anyone who disagrees. Antifa often clashes with police (as in Boston) and a chant they use constantly is ‘Cops and Klan go hand in hand.’ So while the media allows antifa to act like they are just opposing Nazis, suddenly that includes cops & justifies violence against them. Now where does that lead? Well the other night a man named Everett Glenn Miller ambushed a murdered two Kissimmee police officers. What hasn’t been reported much? Miller used the same logic that Antifa does to justify his murders,” according to a reporter with the Orlando CBS affiliate WKMG-TV:
The agency has not disclosed why the former Marine was involuntarily committed to a mental health facility under Florida’s Baker Act, nor is it known whether Miller received any treatment.
Miller unofficially changed his name to Malik Mohammad Ali, acquaintances confirmed, although Miller wrote on his Facebook page that he is not Muslim and does identify with any other religion.
In the days prior to the shooting, Miller posted several articles on Facebook related to the Ku Klux Klan and Neo Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia.
On the morning the police officers were killed, Miller posted a meme of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that included the caption, “When I said march I didn’t mean forever (expletive). Shoot back.”
“You can only poke a tie (sic) up dog so long,” Miller wrote above the photo. “Once that chain breaks it’s over. Wake up America before it’s too late.”
Later that day, just hours before Miller would be accused of murdering two police officers, he posted an article on Facebook suggesting white supremacists had infiltrated police departments.
“F— you, rich bastards,” Miller wrote above photos of police officers allegedly wearing KKK hoods.
* I know, I know. But as Allahpundit writes, “This may be the first time in TV history that someone from the Southern Poverty Law Center was booked to argue with the far left instead of the far — and usually not-so-far — right. Good for them for doing it, though. The counterpoints to this Antifa idiocy are more effective here coming from a liberal than from a conservative. If it’s a conservative versus Antifa, that’s standard left/right noise to the average viewer. If it’s the SPLC versus Antifa, that’s a signal that Antifa should be considered a radical outfit. Which, of course, they are.”
TONI AIRAKSINEN: 75% of Republicans Think That Church Is A Good Thing.
NPR RUNS PIECE ON HELPING WOMEN RECOVER FROM CHILDBIRTH, GETS HATEMAIL: “I found the headlines used to introduce your story (both on air and in print) to be focused on size and shape, and therefore they reinforce damaging cultural standards about women’s bodies.”
IT’S BEEN A BAD COUPLE OF YEARS FOR “Extremely Smart Pundits.”
NONSENSE. THAT SORT OF THING CAN ONLY APPLY TO REPUBLICANS. Does Sen. Blumenthal have an emoluments clause problem?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Valparaiso Enrolls 28 1Ls, Down 73% From Last Year (87% From 2013).
WELL, THAT’S WHAT HE WAS ELECTED TO DO: The Trump administration just disbanded a federal advisory committee on climate change.
Related: Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel sold $163 worth of tickets per screen last night.
Which makes sense — why increase your carbon footprint to drive to the movies?
THE SCIENCE IS UNSETTLED: “Richard Florida, one of the most influential thinkers about cities in postwar America, wants you to know that he got almost everything about cities wrong…His observations quickly formed the basis of a set of breezy technical solutions. If decaying cities wanted to survive, they had to open cool bars, shabby-chic coffee shops, and art venues that attract young, educated, and tolerant residents. Eventually, the mysterious alchemy of the creative economy would build a new and prosperous urban core. Today, even Florida recognizes that he was wrong. The rise of the creative class in places like New York, London, and San Francisco created economic growth only for the already rich, displacing the poor and working classes. The problems that once plagued inner cities have moved to the suburbs.”
Unexpectedly.
(Via SDA.)
MAYBE THEY’LL CALL IN ANTIFA TO FINISH THE JOB: Barcelona terror cell intended to target Sagrada Familia cathedral with massive truck bomb.
R.I.P., Jerry Lewis.