IT’S ALWAYS NICE TO MAKE TWITCHY. “Luckily a few men haven’t been so emasculated that they can’t defend themselves in the era of third wave feminism … like Instapundit.”
True. My hypermasculinity is legendary. I mean, just look.
PROBIOTICS AND ULCERATIVE COLITIS.
QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: “As Environmental Catastrophe Looms, Is it Ethical to Have Children?,” asks a headline in left-leaning Foreign Policy.
Somebody give the needle on the record a push; the left have been stuck in the role of Chicken Little for a half-century now. I’m sure the Frisbee Ion will bring eco-doom any day.
HIGHER MINIMUM WAGES, NANNYISM, AND OVERREGULATION: The Decline of the Summer Job. Summer jobs promote a work ethic and a spirit of independence. They don’t want people growing up with those anymore.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Milo Yiannopoulos shoots to number one on Amazon with self-published book after it was dropped by Simon & Schuster.
As Glenn asked yesterday, “frankly, if you know your book is going to be a big seller, why use a publisher at all? And where are publishers once people figure that out?”
ONE SECOND AFTER: EMP Commission Chair Warns on North Korean EMP.
‘I WORK AT A F**KING NEWS STATION, MOTHERF**KER’: YOUNG REPORTER ARRESTED AFTER UNLOADING ON COP:
A young reporter went on an obscenity-peppered tirade Sunday night outside a Philadelphia entertainment venue before getting arrested by local police officer.
Employees at the Helium Comedy Club asked Colleen Campbell, a 28-year-old recent graduate of Temple University, if she could be more quiet during actor and comic Craig Robinson’s standup performance, according to Philadelphia Magazine.
Even though management personally declined to comment, the broadcaster reportedly refused to lower her voice during Robinson’s show.
“About last night: this very obnoxious lady, who wasn’t drunk (nor high I think) was disturbing the show with her ‘loud whispering,’” comic Wil Sylvince wrote in a Facebook post. “After 3 warnings and other customers were complaining she was asked to leave.”
But as Campbell is escorted out of the building, she allegedly became extremely unruly to the point where a police officer felt compelled to get involved.
Sylvince notes that when she was initially kicked out of the comedy club, she kicked, punched, and even poked the eyes of three different employees.
“You guys are fucking dickeaters, that’s what you fucking are. You going to record that on tape?” Campbell says directly in the face of a well-mannered officer. “You are fucking cocksuckers, ” she continued emphatically, making sure to enunciate the “S” sounds.
And not surprisingly, the New York Post reports that Philadelphia’s PHL-17 quickly offloaded the young would-be television journalist and airbrushed her from their Website. Or as the New York Post adds, “Fired TV reporter says she’s ‘ruined’ after ugly rant:”
A television reporter who was fired for berating a cop during an expletive-filled tirade outside of a Philadelphia comedy club says she feels “ruined” and wants to apologize to the officer after getting threats.
Colleen Campbell, 28, of Philadelphia, said she only learned that her cringe-worthy rant outside of the Helium on Sunday was caught on camera and posted to Facebook after she was busted on charges of resisting arrest, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct.
“When I came home, I called my producer to talk about why I was absent,” Campbell told Philadelphia Magazine. “I didn’t realize a video was out. I found out about it later because HR called me and said I was being terminated. They said there’s a video. I said, ‘What video?’”
Oh there’s video all right; click on the link above to watch it at the Post. After the video ended, according to Philadelphia magazine, “Police: Colleen Campbell Later Assaulted the World’s Most Patient Cop.”
According to a police statement about the incident, shortly after the calm, cool, and collected cop who responded to the scene led her away in cuffs and the video stopped, Campbell, a recent Temple University graduate, allegedly assaulted him. Police say that she kicked him repeatedly and also kicked the doors and windows of a police car.
If those last allegations are true, Iowahawk really needs to update his 2008 blog post titled, “Bylines of Brutality: As Casualties Mount, Some Question The Emotional Stability of Media Vets.”
WE MAY NEVER KNOW HIS TRUE MOTIVE: Notre Dame hammer attack suspect yelled ‘This is for Syria’
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CHUCK SCHUMER: ‘BDS Supporters Will Be Defeated’
Schumer argued that the Obama administration should have vetoed Resolution 2334, which declared Israeli settlements to be a violation of international law, in December and said the U.S. “should never use the United Nations as a forum to put pressure on Israel of any kind.”
Schumer slammed the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as a “deeply biased campaign aimed at delegitimizing the Jewish State.”
“There’s no greater example than this insidious effort to harm the Jewish State than through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions,” he said. “The global BDS movement is a deeply biased campaign aimed at delegitimizing the Jewish State and its supporters, sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly, but all of them practice a modern form of anti-Semitism, and we have to call them out for that.”
Schumer said the BDS movement is silent about the human rights abuses happening in the Middle East.
“BDS condemns Israel and seek to impose boycotts solely on the Jewish State, but willfully turn a blind eye to nations that actually violate human rights. When Iran sponsors terror and executes dissenters, BDS movement is quiet. When Arab nations jail journalists and punish homosexuality with prison sentences and physical abuse, BDS is nowhere to be found,” he said.
President Obama helped unleash a wave of “legitimized” Jew-hatred in a fit of pique against Benjamin Netanyahu.
THE STORM BEFORE THE STORM: Liberalism is exhausted, but illiberalism is still taboo. What’s next for Weimar America?
IMPORTANT ADVICE FOR A LIFE OF CRIME: “Get the money and don’t get caught getting the money.”
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: @realDonaldTrump, delete your account.
President Trump too often uses Twitter to stream his thoughts directly to the world. Some of his supporters revel in the howls these tweets produce from news media and other critics. This trollish appreciation misses the main consequence, that Trump imperils his own agenda, much of which we agree with, when he tweets from the hip.
“[T]weets on legal matters seriously undermine Admin agenda and POTUS,” wrote respected Republican attorney George Conway, husband of Kellyanne Conway, councilor to the president. He continued, “and those who support him, as I do, need to reinforce that and not be shy about it.”
Conway is right, and early on the morning after the London Bridge terrorist attack, in a span of 14 minutes, Trump rattled off a series of tweets that demonstrated his potential and actual self-harm.
Campaigning and governing are two different things.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE ON TERROR AND THE TEDDY BEAR SOCIETY:
My female Muslim patients who had grown up in Britain told me that the school inspectors had never intervened when their parents prevented them from attending school, often for years. On the other hand, white working-class parents were bullied by those inspectors when their refractory 15-year-old daughters refused to go. A few years ago it came to light that police in Rotherham had for decades systematically turned a blind eye to the mass sexual abuse of children—at least 1,400 victims—by Muslim men. This type of willful neglect by the authorities came as no surprise to me. On the contrary, it is precisely what I would have expected.
From all this the terrorists surely draw a great deal of comfort. It gives them the impression of living in a weak society that will be easy to destroy, so that their acts are not in the least nihilistic or pointless, as is often claimed. They perceive ours as a candle-and-teddy-bear society (albeit mysteriously endowed with technological prowess): We kill, you light candles. The other day I passed a teddy-bear shop, that is to say a shop that sold nothing but teddy bears. I am sure that terrorism is good for business, but the teddy bears are more reassuring for the terrorists than for those who buy them to place on the site of the latest outrage.
Fortunately though, Europe is finally pushing back hard against terrorism…with more gun control laws.
I’m sure that’ll work this time, right?
LINDSEY GRAHAM: I don’t think GOP can pass healthcare bill this year.
WELL, WE HAD EIGHT YEARS OF OBAMA. WE’VE ONLY HAD FOUR MONTHS OF TRUMP TO UNDO THE DAMAGE. Study By MIT Economist: U.S. Has Regressed To A Third-World Nation For Most Of Its Citizens.
THIS IS NOT AN EXCUSE TO GAIN WEIGHT: An apron of fat is the body’s first line of defense.
SEARS WENT RADICAL CHIC SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Sears Hawks ‘Free Palestine’ Line of T-Shirts.
Related: “Can someone tell Sears [you] can’t free or restore a state that never existed!!”
I get the feeling they may take a creative liberty or two.
POLLING: Conservatives gain 31 seats and have 77% chance of controlling a majority.
As noted here previously, Theresa May’s Conservatives appear to be doing better in traditionally Labour regions, rather than just running up the totals with Tory voters.
“ELIMINATE” SEEMS A BIT STRONG: New antibiotic could eliminate the global threat of antibiotic-resistant infections. This approach, which I mentioned earlier, just extends the useful life of last-resort antibiotic Vancomycin.
BUT THE NARRATIVE! NSA Leaks Contradict What Obama Promised The Public About Russia’s Election Meddling.
“What I was concerned about in particular was making sure [the DNC hack] wasn’t compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself,” Obama said. “So in early September when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out and there were going to be serious consequences if he didn’t. And in fact we did not see further tampering of the election process.”
“But the leaks through WikiLeaks had already occurred,” Obama said, indicating that any further election interference was the result of emails released by WikiLeaks in the days and weeks leading up to the election.
“The president made it sound like that worked,” The New York Times reported at the time, noting Obama’s claim that “we did not see further tampering of the election process.”
But NSA documents published by The Intercept on Monday revealed that as late as October 31 or November 1, hackers launched an election-related spearfishing operation “targeting U.S. local government organizations.”
In other words, Russia was still tampering with the American electoral process after Obama said they ceased doing so. The documents’ authenticity have been confirmed by U.S. officials, and the U.S. Department of Justice charged on Monday the woman who leaked the Top Secret documents to The Intercept.
“The NSA assessed that this phase of the spear-fishing operation was likely launched on either October 31 or November 1 and sent spear-fishing emails to 122 email addresses ‘associated with named local government organizations,’ probably to officials ‘involved in the management of voter registration systems,’” The Intercept reported.
The leaked documents reveal that two other election-related hacking efforts were launched in October — one month after Putin supposedly “cut it out.”
Putin was merely taking advantage of the flexibility afforded him by Obama’s reelection.
RICHARD EPSTEIN: Containing Climate Change Hysteria.
THIS SEEMS LIKE A BIG DEAL: Security Analysts Confirm Links Between Beijing Spy Agency and Security Firm.
RAND PAUL: We should repeal Obamacare like Republicans promised, not just “fix” it.
Well, that is what they’ve promised to do in every election since 2010.
QUESTION ASKED: At What Point Is Islamist Rhetoric a Crime?
Jim Geraghty:
Yesterday on Twitter, Sam Hooper gave me a little grief – perhaps deserved – for my comments on the day’s Three Martini Lunch podcast generally supportive of U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s proposal of new measures in response to the recent Islamist terror attacks.
Hooper asked, “should someone be arrested for saying ‘I want to overthrow the US government and establish an Islamic state?” Not for actually doing it, mind you, but merely for saying the words. Are saying those words aloud a crime? If so, aren’t we getting unnervingly close to the concept of “Thought Crimes”?
It’s fair to ask that question; it’s entirely possible that my perspective on terrorism right now is emotionally clouded by the thought of those ten children, and 22 people overall, went to an Ariana Grande concert one night and never came home. Indeed, it would be odd and unnerving and inconsistent with our traditions of free expression to arrest and imprison someone for the mere expression of the thought.
(On the other hand, if you’re going to have a hate crime law the way the United Kingdom does, it’s pretty ridiculous to not apply it to someone who’s preaching violence against infidels.)
But when we’ve witnessed and endured Islamist terror attack after Islamist terror attack in one Western city after another, isn’t it fair to ask how many who call for an Islamist overthrow of the government and imposition of Sharia law are truly harmless?
This is a gray area for liberal (in the classic sense) governments. But perhaps it would clarify our thinking if we imagined what steps would be permissible and advisable if parts of the Islamic world were at actual war with the West — which they are.
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BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: Roger Simon on “Islamophobia” as Murder Weapon.
(Classical reference in headline.)
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: It’s The Hypocrisy, Stupid: Progressives Go The Full Jimmy Swaggart. “Some concerned Democrats are worried that their party may have lost the key blue-wall states because of its elitism, manifested as disdain for Americans between the coasts. . . . Perhaps what drives proverbially average Americans crazy is not the success and money of others, but the condescension and hypocrisy of what a particular elite says contrasted with how it lives: The disconnect recalls the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, the televangelist who on Sunday mornings three decades ago used to break into tears as he loudly condemned the sins of the flesh, while he privately indulged his worldly appetites. Elites, whose lifestyles lead them to burn lots of carbon, rail about the Paris accords to those who get by burning lots less. What is galling is to see how little the elites’ green rhetoric is backed up by their green behavior. Could Hollywood celebrities at least for a year swear off the use of their private jets that emit more carbon emissions in a year than entire small towns in Ohio?”
Apparently not.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: To Save Public Higher Education, Defang Public Sector Unions.
In the New York Times last week, David Leonhardt denounced “the assault on colleges—and the American Dream” by state legislatures across the country that are gradually reducing their investments in public higher education. These cuts, Leonhardt says, undermine social mobility by forcing state colleges to pass over low-income students and enroll less economically diverse freshman classes. While there are reasonable objections to the way colleges spend the money they do have, the trend Leonhardt describes is indeed a cause for concern.
But why do public university budgets keep getting the ax? It’s not (at least not primarily) about the selfishness of wealthy taxpayers. The real answer is more inconvenient for the Democratic coalition: Namely, that exploding public pension costs are putting tremendous pressure on state budgets, and higher education is the softest political target for the belt-tightening needed to make up for it. . . .
So long as public sector unions have a powerful grip on state legislatures, and so long as they can extract inviolable pension commitments (and paper over the magnitude of these promises by assuming unrealistic rates of return) discretionary programs without guaranteed funding carveouts will continue to be squeezed. You won’t hear many progressive activists making this case, but the single best avenue for ensuring that public colleges are fully funded is to roll back collective bargaining rights for unionized public employees so that pension obligations can be put on a sustainable path.
Or at least, you won’t hear many progressive activists making this case anytime soon.
But in the long-run, the contradiction between state-level Democrats’ loyalty to public sector unions and their desire to expand social welfare programs of various kinds will become increasingly hard to conceal.
But you can bet they’ll try to conceal it as long as they can.
ANGELO CODEVILLA: Punishing The Real Russia Crime: Leaking.
To divert attention from Clinton’s assorted e-mail problems, the DNC hired its associated IT firm, Crowdstike, which concluded―without giving any evidence―that “the Russians” had been hacking Democrats, and that they had done so to help the Republicans. The intelligence agencies concurred. Numerous intelligence officials have claimed to know who supplied the-mails to Wikileaks. No one has given evidence on the record. A minor defensive maneuver at the time, the “Russia interference in the elections” narrative grew into the Democratic Party’s main explanation for the massive electoral rejection at all levels it ended up suffering on November 8, 2016.
When Donald Trump became the Republican nominee, much of the U.S government, intelligence agencies included, conducted “opposition research” on him. This included tacitly validating a scurrilous report by a British source of Donald Trump with Russian prostitutes. At first, it targeted Paul Manafort, whom Trump had chosen to manage his campaign at the Republican convention, and Carter Page, a minor foreign policy advisor. The FBI and the Justice Department obtained a warrant from the secret court established under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to intercept their electronic communications. Both men had worked, legally, with Russian entities.
On May 24, 2017 Obama’s CIA Director John O. Brennan testified in that regard with language that reflected the “probable cause” assumption presented to the court that these were or could be “foreign agents.”
As Glenn has noted here previously, “Brennan’s track record is poor and his motives suspect.”
And do read the whole thing.
COMPETITION: Amazon Fights Wal-Mart for Low-Income Shoppers.
The online retailer giant said Tuesday that it will offer a nearly 20% segment of the U.S. population—people who obtain government assistance with cards typically used for food stamps—a $5.99 monthly Prime membership, less than the $10.99 a month or $99 annual plan for other consumers. The membership buys access to unlimited two-day shipping, video and music content, photo storage and other perks.
The new Prime offering takes direct aim at Wal-Mart, which counts on shoppers who receive government assistance for a large percentage of sales. Wal-Mart generated about $13 billion in sales last year from shoppers using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, accounting for around 18% of the money spent through the program nationwide. Those customers also spend additional income while in Wal-Mart stores.
Amazon will require cards typically used for food stamps as an initial measure to determine participant eligibility, although they can’t yet be widely used for shopping online. The retailer plans to add additional ways to qualify.
What could go wrong?
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Is a Vasectomy Now the Only Way Men Can Be Truly Safe from Financial Extortion? “Ironically, this notion – of privileged white men taking control of their reproductive destinies – has given some feminists the willies.
If I were a young single guy, I’d be inclined to bank a bunch of sperm, then get a vasectomy. For men, that’s pretty much the only way to achieve “reproductive rights.”
And on this topic, I should once again plug a piece by my Tennessee colleague Michael Higdon (just promoted to full Professor): Fatherhood by Conscription: Nonconsensual Insemination and the Duty of Child Support.
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WINGS OVER THE NORMANDY COAST: A USAF C-130 participating in a D-Day commemoration ceremony flies past Mont St. Michel.
RELATED: Taking D-Day’s high ground.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Better School, Better Scholars, Right? Not So Much. “Deadwood blossoms among Ivy. World-class sprinters labor at institutions considered also-rans.”
CHARLIE MARTIN: Courage, ‘Courage,’ and the British Blitz Spirit.
“Things I say and do don’t have to fit into a political manifesto,” she said. “The way I see my role is to make people understand that the wonderful Western idea of multiculturalism and political correctness is counterproductive. It works to help them [the radical Islamists]. So we have to abandon that.”
The article includes her take on Trump: “…he is too inexperienced to resist distractions.” She thinks he Trump should focus on combating political Islamism. She’s also worried about European populists.
HOW THE FEDS CAUGHT NSA LEAKER REALITY WINNER. I actually suspect this is BS, and that they had her — or The Intercept — under surveillance already, as per the Obama-era “Insider Threat” program.
Of course, there may have been other tipoffs: NSA Leaker: ‘Being White Is Terrorism.’
NSA LEAKER: ‘Being White Is Terrorism’
That’s according to a tweet the alleged leaker, Reality Winner, sent in February. Winner, who is herself white, tweeted at rapper Kanye West that he should make a shirt declaring whiteness an act of terror.
“@kanyewest you should make a shirt that says, ‘being white is terrorism’,” she tweeted.
Winner’s social media history is filled with left-wing messages and support for progressives like Bernie Sanders, as The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross has previously documented.
The majority of her recent tweets are angrily directed against President Donald Trump, in particular rehashing the liberal trope about “tiny hands.” She has also called the president an “orange fascist,” a “cunt” and bashed his selection of “Confederate General” Jeff Sessions amounts to racism. Sessions is head of the agency currently prosecuting Winner.
Winner held a Top Secret security clearance for her job at Pluribus International, an NSA contractor. She reportedly is the source for The Intercept’s Monday report about previously unknown Russian interference in the 2016 election.
It seems she had quite the progressive education.
The sad truth, and getting sadder with every attack, is that the political class has little interest in doing what would really be necessary to combat Islamist terrorism, let alone talk about it. They don’t want to talk about how Britain’s lax immigration policies over decades led to hundreds of thousands of immigrants entering the country with varying degrees of willingness to assimilate and adopt Western values. They don’t want to openly criticize the blatant problems with the multiculturalism the UK has pursued for years and the obvious impact it has had on the immigrant population.
Oh no. This would cost them too much. It would shatter the façade of political correctness that’s been constructed over our “civilized” western world, and destroy the illusion, so vital to the political class, that Western values are universal. . . .
There’s little to no tolerance in polite society for the kind of honesty for which many in the West are hungry. The Washington Post ran a headline Sunday that read, “World Leaders Call For Unity After London Attack. Trump tweets the complete opposite.” The article chastises President Trump for not joining in the fake condolences and platitudes of the political elite, and praises those elites for their messages of hope. But what, exactly, are they saying we should be hopeful for?
Trump, who is often wrong, was correct in tweeting Sunday that, “We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people.” A growing number of those people are scared, and sick of turning on the news to hear of yet another heartbreaking attack then hearing the same meaningless bromides from their leaders.
They want a leader who doesn’t just try to inure them to this kind of random violence but stands up and says that we’re not going to take it, that this isn’t an acceptable status quo. Whether Trump is that leader is highly debatable, but at least he’s making a nod toward it.
Indeed.
ANDREW MCCARTHY ON wishful thinking and the London attacks.
UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!
LAST STAND FOR CHRISTIANS IN IRAQ: The disappearance of first Jews and now Christians from most parts of the Middle East means the termination of the historical Middle Eastern mosaic of peoples.
Despite periods of violence and persecution, coexistence between ethno-religious groups on the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq, Christians, Shabak, Yazidis and Kaka’i, has over the years been marked by pluralism and cooperation.
This coexistence also used to include Jews.
When I recently visited the town of Alqosh, where Jews and Christians lived together for a thousand years, I had the honor to visit the tomb of the biblical prophet Nahum. The last Jew leaving Alqosh 1948 left the keys to a Christian family. It was this very family that helped us visit the synagogue and the tomb upon my visit.
The disappearance of first Jews and now Christians from most parts of the Middle East means the termination of the historical Middle Eastern mosaic of peoples. The result will be a region rapidly going into a dark age – with no hope for peace and stability for a very long time.
A Middle East without Christians will no longer be able to rely on a group which for centuries has been able to act as a broker between ethnic or religious groups. The risk of irreconcilable conflicts between remaining groups will be even higher if and when Christians are gone forever.
Given the level of religious cleansing throughout the Islamic Middle East, I’m afraid that’s considered a feature, not a bug.
LEFT-WING VIOLENCE IS ROOTED IN A LACK OF CONSEQUENCES: The Roots of Left-Wing Violence. “The victims and perpetrators of recent violence are hardly who Rensin makes them out to be. ‘The poor and oppressed’ are not students at Claremont McKenna College (est. 2017–18 tuition: $52,825), and Muhammad Ashraf, the Muslim immigrant who owned the limousine burnt out on Inauguration Day, is not ‘the company’ stamping its vulgar capitalist boot upon the downtrodden.”
They want to represent the poor and downtrodden? Take their money with lawsuits and tread them down with criminal prosecutions. See how long their enthusiasm lasts.
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CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: While National Politics Rage On, Connecticut Democrats Are In A Serious Crisis With The Law.
During the 2016 elections, Democrats cheated at federal, state, and local levels, for which they have been hit with record penalties. In each case, the violations provided them with an unfair advantage and in some cases violated the law.
In 2016, Wikileaks revealed that the DNC actively worked to undermine the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders by conspiring to disrupt his events. Wikileaks also revealed that then Deputy DNC Chair Donna Brazile went as far as to provide Hillary Clinton with presidential debate questions before the debates took place in order to give her an unfair advantage, something to which she now admits after initially denying having done.
But as recent evidence has shown, the lying and cheating by Democrats didn’t stop at the federal level. They cheated their way through state and local elections too. Lets look at Connecticut as an example.
A fish may rot from the head, but the whole thing spoils pretty darn fast.
FLASHBACK: The European Left as the Ichneumon Wasp. It’s not just the European left. . . .
PATRICK POOLE: Today’s Known Wolf…
BRENDAN O’NEILL: After London: let’s start talking about Islam.
Islam now enjoys the same kind of moral protection from blasphemy and ridicule that Christianity once (wrongly) enjoyed. All last week, for example, I received furious emails and messages in response to two articles I wrote about the Manchester attack, telling me I was wrong to defend the use of the phrase ‘Islamist extremism’. That term has an Islamophobic bent to it, we’re told. It demeans Islam and its adherents by suggesting they have something to do with terrorism. You should just say ‘extremism’, not ‘Islamist extremism’. Don’t ever name the extremism, don’t label it, because you might hurt people’s feelings.
This is why our political leaders so rarely use the terms Islamism, radical Islam and Islamic terrorism: because they want to avoid offending Islam and also because they don’t want to stir up what they view as the public’s bovine, hateful prejudices. This censorious privilege is not extended to any other religion. We do not avoid saying ‘Catholic paedophiles’ about the priests who molested children for fear of tarring all Catholics with the same brush. We happily say ‘Christian fundamentalist’ about people who are Christian and fundamentalist. We use ‘Buddhist extremists’ to describe violent Buddhist groups in Myanmar. And yet Islam is ringfenced from tough discussion; phrases which at some level include the word ‘Islam’ are tightly policed; criticism of Islam is deemed a mental illness: Islamophobia.
This is incredibly dangerous. This censorious flattery of Islam is, in my view, a key contributor to the violence we have seen in recent years. Because when you constantly tell people that any mockery of their religion is tantamount to a crime, is vile and racist and unacceptable, you actively invite them, encourage them in fact, to become intolerant. You license their intolerance. You inflame their violent contempt for anyone who questions their dogmas. You provide a moral justification for their desire to punish those who insult their religion.
Yes. Appeasement is provocation.
THE CAMPUS CRY-BULLYING REPRESENTS A MINORITY OF STUDENTS WHO ARE INDULGED BY ADMINISTRATORS BECAUSE, FUNDAMENTALLY, THE ADMINISTRATORS AGREE WITH WHAT THEY’RE DOING AND REGARD THEM AS USEFUL TOOLS: New Poll Shows What College Students Really Think About Safe Spaces. “A majority of students do not actively endorse safe spaces on campus, according to a recently-released study. Sixty-two percent of students did not agree with or felt indifferent to safe spaces, according to a poll of 1,659 current college students taken by LendEDU, a student loan consolidation and refinancing organization. Of those surveyed, 37 percent agreed that safe spaces ‘are completely out of touch with reality’ and 25 percent said they were indifferent.”
A BRIDGE TOO FAR: 130 British imams refuse to perform funerals for London, Manchester attackers.
In what is a highly unusual move, Muslim religious leaders from different schools of Islam — both Sunni and Shia — issued a statement late Monday saying their pain at the suffering of the victims of Saturday’s attacks had led to their decision, and they called on others imams to follow suit.
“We are deeply hurt that a spate of terror attacks have been committed in our country once more by murderers who seek to gain religious legitimacy for their actions. We seek to clarify that their reprehensible actions have neither legitimacy nor our sympathy,” the statement put out by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella body representing over 500 organizations, read.
“Consequently, and in light of other such ethical principles which are quintessential to Islam, we will not perform the traditional Islamic funeral prayer for the perpetrators and we also urge fellow imams and religious authorities to withdraw such a privilege. This is because such indefensible actions are completely at odds with the lofty teachings of Islam,” the statement continued.
It would be even better if they’d cooperate with the authorities on identifying the radical religious leaders.
NSA PLUGS A LEAK, ISIS GOES DOWN UNDER, AND AL FRANKEN CANCELS ON BILL MAHER: Liz Sheld’s morning brief has it all.
THIS PIECE IN WIRED QUOTES MY TENNESSEE COLLEAGUE MAURICE STUCKE: Digital Privacy: The Next Frontier in Antitrust Law.
To get a sense of Silicon Valley’s stupefying power writ large, just glance at a list of the world’s top 10 most valuable companies. In the first quarter of 2017, Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Microsoft, and Amazon inhabited the top four spots; Facebook sat just a few rungs below, at number eight and has already climbed up to number five. Companies that were near the top of the heap just a few years ago—big pharma, big box chains like Walmart, the “big four” Chinese banks, oil conglomerates, household names like Nestle or General Electric—are glaringly absent from the mix. The world’s most valuable resource is now data, and Silicon Valley has cornered the market on amassing personal information.
This new world order is one of many reasons why antitrust officials are questioning their methods, even if they’re a bit slow to do so. (Even in the EU, as recently as last fall, Margrethe Vestager, the antitrust czar, was still calling Facebook’s terms of service “a gray area” between privacy and competition.)
If competition policy were working, “we wouldn’t have record wealth inequality,” law professor Maurice Stucke says. “We wouldn’t have market power and monopoly profits.” Stucke should know. He’s a former trial attorney for the US Department of Justice’s antitrust division and has published research on algorithmic collusion, big data, and digital cartels.
American antitrust statutes like the Sherman Act are broadly worded and largely centered around competition; they don’t explicitly instruct regulators to account for political realities like income inequality or the effect on wealth creation for small businesses. But the number of new companies started has reached a 40-year low, and profits for some US companies are abnormally high compared to GDP. The cracks in the antitrust establishment are starting to show, said Stucke, and experts are wondering if “the emperor maybe has no clothes.”
If Google isn’t an antitrust worry, what is? What could be?
Stuckey, by the way, is coauthor (with Oxford’s Ariel Ezrachi) of Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy, and Big Data and Competition Policy.
June 5, 2017
MORE ON THE FBI’S ARREST of leaker Reality Winner.
Honestly, I suspect she didn’t even want to keep it secret, and we’ll discover she has an expensive defense lawyer and is going to prepare a defense based on being a whistleblower.
What’s kind of amazing about this is that the Intercept story was published today. So the FBI was able to track her down and arrest her that quickly?
Something is up. Expect more dropping shoes.
Indeed.
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It doesn’t mean much to be “known to the authorities” when the authorities are too pathetic to do anything.
TO BE FAIR, IT DOESN’T TAKE MUCH: Roger Kimball: “Pittsburgh Not Paris” Triggers the Eco-Nuts.
Like many international agreements, the unspoken subtext of the Paris Climate Accord is “hamper America. Grab as much of its wealth as you can. Say it’s in the name of ‘fairness.’”
That’s not going to wash with Donald Trump. In this respect, he has returned to a much more traditional view of the role of president. He is not the president of the world. He is the President of the United States. We seek to get along with others, but his first task is to assure the prosperity and well being of the citizens of the United States. America First.
As Andrew McCarthy and others have pointed out, in withdrawing from the Paris Accord, Trump has also returned to a more traditional—which is to say, a constitutional—view of treaties. The Paris Accord was a treaty. But it was never presented to the Senate for ratification. In this respect, it was just another of Obama’s initiatives to circumvent the Constitution and govern by administrative fiat. The reason that the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority vote of the Senate to ratify treaties is because treaties can deeply affect the the lives of American citizens.
The use of treaties as a means to end-run the democratic process has been a concern ever since Missouri v. Holland. Some pushback is warranted.
SUZANNE VENKER: Hell hath no fury like a feminist scorned.
WHISKEY AND CIGARS: BEST THING FOR YOU! At Age 111, America’s Oldest Veteran Still Smoking Cigars, Drinking Whiskey, and Loving Life.
BRUCE BAWER: Why I Refuse to Lie About Islam.
MILO YIANNOPOULOS IS NOW #1 on Amazon. Dropping him is going to cost his old publisher a lot of money, and self-publishing will put a lot more money in Yiannopoulos’ pocket anyway. “If you strike me down. . . .”
And frankly, if you know your book is going to be a big seller, why use a publisher at all? And where are publishers once people figure that out?
AT AMAZON, save big on Wheels and Tires.
BOB DYLAN FINALLY DELIVERS NOBEL PRIZE LECTURE: It’s worth 900 grand. He lauded Buddy Holly.
Dylan had until 10 June to deliver the lecture or forfeit the prize money.
Hey, don’t look back.
IF YOU WANT TO WIN, YOU NEED TO GO ALL SHERMAN AND SHERIDAN, WITH PERHAPS A SOUPCON OF LEMAY: Counter-terror Lessons from America’s Civil War. “The way to win the war is to frighten the larger community of Muslims who passively support terror by action or inaction–frighten them so badly that they will inform on family members. Frightening the larger Muslim population in the West does not require a great deal of effort: a few thousand deportations would do.”
MILO YIANNOPOULOS: He’s Baa-aack!
KURT SCHLICHTER: A Week Of Surfing On A Sea Of Liberal Tears. “The big event was when President Trump did something that has caused the liberal elite and the conservative Wormtongue contingent to wet their collective Underoos. He chose democracy, science, and normal Americans over the elitist twits of the pagan climate cult.”
BAD ECONOMICS, MICRO AND MACRO EDITION:
Micro: ‘We are the Obama people,’ said Camille Sweeney, a New York writer and member of the Authors Guild. Her insurance is being canceled, and she is dismayed that neither her pediatrician nor her general practitioner appears to be on the exchange plans. What to do has become a hot topic on Facebook and at dinner parties frequented by her fellow writers and artists. ‘I’m for it,’ she said. ‘But what is the reality of it?’
—NRO, December 14, 2013.
Macro: “California Democrats Just Voted for Single-Payer Healthcare But Have No Idea How to Pay for It.”
—Headline, Heat Street, yesterday.
As Yuval Levin wrote at NRO’s Corner after quoting Sweeney’s “I’m for it. But what is the reality of it?” line, “Answer first, question second. This would be funny if it weren’t so sad and serious.”
California is likely to become increasingly sad and serious in the coming years. This is known as “bad luck.”
THE ABOLITION OF BRITAIN, PART 1,237,322:
Turn to this video captured during the attack, and you’ll see, or rather hear, what I’m talking about. You’ll see police barge into a pub near London Bridge, shouting at customers to get on the ground. http://vlt.tc/2vhp At the 37 second mark, you’ll hear a man, in the midst of an attack and likely believing his life was in danger, shout “F–king Muslim c–ts!” The man making the video replies, “Shut up mate, you f–king idiot. It’s not Muslims.” He later took to Twitter to follow up. http://vlt.tc/2vj8 “It’s me saying it isn’t the Muslims in that video because it bloody well isn’t. Stop grouping people based on a cult. They aren’t Islamic. It’s f–king lazy and downright racist to label all Islam alongside these scumbags.” So again, keep in mind that as this video is being filmed, people are being stabbed and attacked. The police are running to try and stop them. And in the middle of this attack, this young Brit’s priority is to say “not all Muslims” to those huddled on the floor. A nation of juveniles yelling “that’s racist” on their phones in the midst of a terror attack does not exactly indicate the persistence of the toughened spines that beat the Boche.
Expat British conservative John Derbyshire coined the phrase “Better dead than rude” to describe the PC mindset shortly after 9/11. It’s staggering to see how internalized it’s become among the residents of Airstrip One.
Earlier: In the Face of Terror, Londoners Told to “Run, Hide, Tell.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
IDIOCY ON PARADE: New York Magazine Writers Revolt Over Colleague’s Suggestion That Gal Gadot Is Conventionally Attractive.
But Jim Treacher has spotted the real problem: “Wonder Woman, both the film and the character, erase the lived experiences of women who were born male. It’s bad enough that creeps like Edelstein notice that a supermodel is good-looking, but the whole thing is pretty damn transphobic smdh. How about Wonder Person Who Identifies As Female? Tell me I’m right or else you’re a bigot.”
IT’S WEIRD HOW WHEN PEOPLE MAKE PUBLIC STATEMENTS LEFTIES DON’T LIKE, LEFTIES WANT TO “INVESTIGATE” THEM, RATHER THAN TRYING TO REFUTE THE STATEMENTS. Evergreen faculty demand ‘investigation’ into professor who dissented from no-whites day. I assume this response stems from a fear that the statements are not capable of being refuted.
OF COURSE IT DOES: Washington Post covers up left-wing violence in Portland.
IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME WAY TO INEXPENSIVELY KILL MOSQUITOES IN LARGE NUMBERS: Zika: What to Expect this Year.
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NEWS YOU CAN USE: Most Annoying Moviegoers, Ranked.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Trump Is Ruining My Teeth.
JIHADI TV: Neighbors identify London Bridge attack suspect as man featured in recent documentary.
Neighbors have identified one of the London Bridge attack suspects as a man known by the nickname “ABZ” or “Abs” who was featured in a recent documentary on the British Channel 4 from 2016 called “The Jihadist Next Door.”
Neighbors say he was the attacker who wore the fake suicide vest during the vehicle and stabbing attack that killed seven people in London on Saturday night.
He was a member of Al Muhajiroun, a small group of men led by Anjem Choudary and Siddartha Dhar who openly preached for the need for Sharia law.
The group was closely monitored by authorities. Police know the man’s name but have not yet publicly announced it.
Yet another known wolf — this time in the most public way possible.
MEDICINE: Dangerously Addictive Painkiller Prescribed for Patients Who Shouldn’t Have Received It, Says Whistleblower. “It’s called Subsys and it’s a painkiller 100 times more powerful than morphine that was approved by the FDA for cancer patients whose agony can’t be relieved by other narcotics alone. But despite the fact that what’s known as ‘breakthrough cancer pain’ is uncommon, Insys Therapeutics — the Arizona-based company that sells what can be a highly addictive drug, and nothing else — has sold almost a billion dollars worth of this medication in five years.”
LONG OVERDUE: Trump plans week-long focus on infrastructure, starting with privatizing air traffic control. It’s been done with success by those Randian anarchocapitalists, the Canadians.
THAT’S (NOT) ENTERTAINMENT! ISIS rock star Choudary extends Islamist influence – even from behind bars.
WHITE WOMEN: Are they the worst, or what? “White women, especially the monied ones, are so dangerous because they are allowed to be so soft. Stroke by stroke, they construct a type of womanhood that viciously negates the fact their bodies still function as agents of white supremacy. . . . I don’t know if I liked sleeping with white women because I’m queer or because they all smell so good.”
TWITTER BATTLE: Donald Trump versus George Conway — Kellyanne’s husband.
