Friday, July 27, 2018

Jessica Valenti: The snowflake/safe-space phenomenon is all the fault of feminism

And darn it, it just hasn't spread far enough.

The tantrum against intractable human nature continues.


One of feminism’s biggest successes was creating an alternative culture for girls and women seeking respite from mainstream constraints. Girls worried about unrealistic beauty standards, for example, can turn to the body positivity movement. Those of us who find traditional media’s treatment of women unappealing can read feminist blogs and magazines; female college students who have critical questions about how gender shapes their lives can take women’s studies classes.

From social media campaigns to after-school equality clubs, feminism has birthed dozens of online and real-life spaces where girls can find alternatives to the sexist status quo.

But boys and young men who are struggling have no equivalent culture.

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Rick Santorum is suddenly doing robocalls for Sandy Pensler for US Senate here in Michigan, which sounds like desperation

Just got the call a few minutes ago.

Turns out the race is now deadlocked after some time with Pensler in the lead.

Pensler has been advertising vigorously in Rush Limbaugh's timeslot on the radio as well.

His opponent John James has been relying on direct mail to reach his voters.

Pensler is spending an awful lot of money to win when he went out of his way in January to alienate voters by stating for the record that the Polish people were complicit in the Holocaust in World War II.

That's hardly how to win friends and influence people in Macomb and Wayne counties if you really want to be elected to the US Senate in 2018! 

'The Polish legislature yesterday, with particularly insensitive timing, hammered home humanities [sic] dangerous proclivity to insulate ourselves against others. It passed legislation outlawing calling Polish based concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzic and others as “Polish concentration camps” rather they must now be called . [sic] “Nazi concentration camps in occupied Poland”. This attempt to whitewash and deny complicity in the horrors of the Holocaust is dangerous.'

H. W. Crocker III is very confused, and his editor ought to be horse-whipped

In America’s Next Civil War Will Be Worse Than Our Last for The American Spectator, which by the way never says that, H. W. Crocker III says many wonderful things but ends up making a hash of it.

He rightly concludes that the left's hysteria is a "destructive fire that will not be easily quenched, and cannot be reached by cool waters of rational argument."

But then immediately he advocates for just that, rational argument:

"[I]t seems to me that we can at least be as understanding of our own history [as President William McKinley]."

And also:

"[B]ut the point is to regain a rational, even if nostalgic, perspective on our past by eliciting laughter."

And finally:

"If America is to come together again, it will do so only through the restoration of what Lincoln called our mystic chords of memory, a common culture that emerges from a shared and sympathetic understanding of our past."

Well said, but by his own admission Crocker admits the North and South already had these things:

"North and South venerated the Founders. They shared the same language, the same religion, and, in large part, the same general stock. Most of all, they shared what Jeff Sessions was recently rebuked for calling an “Anglo-American heritage” of liberty under law, stretching from the mists of medieval England — even before Magna Carta — to our own Bill of Rights."

Just so. And still they went to war.

How much more we, whose "Anglo-Americans" can't even agree among themselves to stem the tide of the replacement of "the general stock" through immigration?

Such self-understanding demands what must be done for self-preservation: a halt to immigration, revaluation of citizenship, enforcement of assimilationist policies, and prioritization of family formation.

Without these things more leisure to ruminate about history won't even be possible. We'll be too busy watching our backs.

Henry Kissinger: Trump-Putin summit had to take place, I advocated it for years

For more on the reverse Nixon strategy, see Henry Kissinger Pushed Trump to Work With Russia to Box In China.



Wednesday, July 25, 2018

This elephant, Republican symbol, doesn't like litter and cleans it up without being asked (or paid)








Time Magazine loved Obama, hates Trump



Meanwhile the US east coast floods, but it's sunny and warm in Grand Rapids

Somebody's bad weather means good weather some place else.


"More than 26 million Americans are under a flood watch this morning, as severe weather grips the eastern U.S. for a fourth straight day. Beginning Wednesday, the storm will start to be felt further north, especially in New York. The heavy rain is expected to last through the weekend and possibly into next week. More than a foot of rain has fallen in parts of Maryland and Baltimore County is having its wettest July on record." 

Greece can't get a break: First financial meltdown, then overrun by refugees, now swept by wildfires


"A pair of wildfires have [sic] left at least 79 people dead, and CBS News correspondent Seth Doane reports dozens are still believed to be missing. In some places around the Greek capital the fires were still burning. Elsewhere people began returning to neighborhoods left unrecognizable."

Turkey defies NATO and the West again over Iranian oil

Drought conditions return to the southwest US, this time to Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado

Mid-July 2017

Mid-July 2018

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Al Hunt's tortured logic about Wikileaks: Release e-mails when no one's paying attention in order to divert attention

Yeah, that makes sense!

Poor Al, he thinks voters are so stupid that whenever they hear or read something they are automatically programmed to do as instructed. Dumb lumps of clay are they. To believe otherwise would be unthinkable . . . to the journalist, the academic and the ad-man.


In early October, almost immediately after a video surfaced in which Trump bragged about groping women, WikiLeaks released its first leak of emails from the account of Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. This happened on a Friday afternoon, not the best time to leak a story if the object is to get attention; the intent was almost certainly to deflect attention from the Trump video. An indictment of 12 Russian operatives last week by Special Counsel Robert Mueller traced the email hacks to a Russian military intelligence unit.

HaHaHaHaHaHa!

And by the way, the indictment asserts, it traces nothing. That would be up to a jury to decide, you know, in an actual trial, which will never happen because it's a show indictment, not a real one.

Al, you are such a joke, just like your outfit with its "You have 6 free articles remaining" message. I'm counting the days.

William Murchison thinks The Wall was a ridiculous, unserious notion, analogous to Sanders' great, gooey slices of socialist pie in the sky

Here in The American Spectator:

Donald Trump, it could be argued, made the political environment safe for over-the-top declarations, e.g., he was going to wall off Mexico from the United States and make Mexico pay for the wall. I am not sure anyone outside the Trump bedroom ever took such a ridiculous notion seriously. It was an attention-grabber.

Mr. Murchison lives in the afterglow of a Reagan revolution which he thinks makes new schemes like Social Security and Medicare permanently unthinkable to the American people.

There are no lost causes because there are no permanent victories.

Ebola survives in woman for 13 months to infect and kill her oldest son after giving birth

From the story here:

Scientists do not know how the virus hid inside the woman for 13 months before re-emerging in lethal form. However, because she fell ill soon after giving birth, experts believe the immune suppression that normally occurs in pregnancy may have triggered a relapse. ...

A 15-year-old boy, the woman’s oldest son, was hospitalized vomiting blood. He tested positive for Ebola and, despite intensive treatment, died 10 days after his symptoms first appeared. ...

[S]urvivors must be tested for Ebola if they fall ill, even if they lack common Ebola symptoms.


Monday, July 23, 2018

Bill Clinton adviser Mark Penn: Mueller investigation is the progeny of Obama administration abuses

"We thought, after the actions of J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, that we had put in place safeguards to prevent such abuse. ... [T]he Page warrant is a significant indication that government officials are quick to assume the worst about disliked rivals and to use those beliefs to overcome the guardrails on their authority through this backdoor secret FISA process."

Read the whole scathing thing here.

Kevin Williamson asserts but does not prove that conservatives have made peace with New Deal economic nationalism


Williamson simply presupposes that there is a coherent Trump program to sign up for, not to mention that there was a coherent Obama program, neither of which is true. Lots of Republicans have "made peace" with Social Security, but that doesn't mean they have become New Deal ideologues. Williamson ignores their political pragmatism, and Trump's.

The essay is otherwise interesting. He might have added Reagan to his so-called new nationalist "Roosevelt-Obama-Trump model", but not wanting to inflame too much is understandable given his recent history:

"Conservatives have a conflicted view of government. Many who revile FDR as the root of all welfare-statist evil revere Ronald Reagan, who insisted all his life that he was an FDR Democrat whose former party had simply gone insane."

Yes, Reagan was confused. Hence his movement, and Williamson.

Increase to deficit in fiscal 2018 under Keynesian Trump expected to add 0.6 points to GDP

Discussed here.

Bill and Hillary Clinton, David Boies, photographed dining with Harvey Weinstein at Rao's Dec. 13, 2016!

21 million people in the world receive treatment for HIV and continue to spread the disease

1.8 million new infections last year.

NOT DISCUSSED here.

Hillary at Oxford at June end avoids discussing Electoral College: Because it prevented the populism which would have elected her

She can't tell the truth about anything.


Hillary:

"‘Turkey also shows that political and intellectual elites, both inside the country and around the world, persistently underestimate the threat which these kinds of leaders pose to the survival of democratic institutions'".

Morrissey is too charitable to say that precisely Hillary is one of these leaders who pose a threat to the survival of democratic institutions, since she's repeatedly come out against the Electoral College since her memoir appeared a year ago:

Ahem. Among those democratic institutions in the US happens to be the Electoral College. And why did the framers of the Constitution create it? To act as a buffer against populism, at least in form. The Electoral College reflects the popular vote on a state-by-state basis to prevent a handful of the most populous states from controlling the executive through the nationwide popular vote, which creates a buffer against the very impulse Hillary decries in this speech.

Why Hillary hates it now: Remembering Trump's completely unexpected landslide victory over Hillary in the Electoral College























Flashback Reuters October 15, 2016:


Hillary projected to win "by a margin of 118 Electoral College votes".

Or The New York Times October 17, 2016:


"The maneuvering speaks to the unexpected tension facing Mrs. Clinton as she hurtles toward what aides increasingly believe will be a decisive victory — a pleasant problem, for certain, but one that has nonetheless scrambled the campaign’s strategy weeks before Election Day: Should Mrs. Clinton maximize her own margin, aiming to flip as many red states as possible to run up an electoral landslide, or prioritize the party’s congressional fortunes, redirecting funds and energy down the ballot?"

Or International Business Times November 7, 2016 (Hillary +108):


"Emerson pollsters predicted Clinton will garner 323 electoral votes compared to 215 for Trump."