THESE ARE THE CRAZY YEARS: Star Trek Fan Forced to Surrender ‘ASIMIL8’ License Plate for Being Offensive.
“But the lie is obvious now, isn’t it? Because it is not conservatives who coerced today’s young people or made them afraid of ideas that challenge them. Conservatives did not shame people into silence, or send thugs out on college campuses to beat down those who wanted to speak. The left did all that.”
I HOPE NOTORIOUS ROBOPHOBE MATTHEW YGLESIAS DOESN’T FIND OUT ABOUT THIS: The race to build the world’s first sex robot. “Harmony smiles, blinks and frowns. She can hold a conversation, tell jokes and quote Shakespeare. She’ll remember your birthday, McMullen told me, what you like to eat, and the names of your brothers and sisters. She can hold a conversation about music, movies and books. And of course, Harmony will have sex with you whenever you want.”
WELL, IT’S RIGHT UP THERE: Is Trump’s biggest first 100 day accomplishment muting the media? “President Trump fought the media and, well, Trump won. After 100 days, this has been the president’s most visible achievement. More Americans believe Trump’s word than the journalists he’s left black-and-blue. Altogether, 37 percent of Americans, according to a new poll by Morning Consult, say they trust the White House more than the press, while 29 percent chose the media.”
ANOTHER LOUSY DAY IN PARADISE: Fyre Fest Attendee Describes Chaotic Scene: ‘It Was Just a Nightmare:’ Ja Rule’s first – and probably last – luxury festival in the Bahamas widely condemned for substandard conditions.
The swine will find their pearls. . . .
UPDATE: Sadly, no one seems to have gotten the reference. From perhaps the most underrated album of the 1980s.
IMMIGRATION AND HEALTH: Measles outbreak at 32, with Somali-Minnesota children hit hard. Why aren’t all refugees/immigrants vaccinated as soon as they reach America?
One of the problems is that immigrants are ignorant enough to believe Jenny McCarthy.
TO THE GOVERNMENT, you are disposable: “A disturbing trend has been emerging in my practice over recent years: More men are being diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer, and in some cases the cancer has already metastasized to the bones and become incurable. It’s a direct result, in my opinion, of 2012 guidelines by an influential government panel recommending against routine prostate cancer screening in men of all ages.”
NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE: The People’s Climate March — in 26 Zany Photos.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What Would Happen If We Killed All The Mosquitoes?
JOURNOS RESPOND HARSHLY, PROFANELY TO BRET STEPHENS’ FIRST NEW YORK TIMES COLUMN:
Even an appeal to recognized authority (in Stephens’ questionable opinion) like former Times writer Revkin couldn’t save the columnist — or the Times — from the intense and often profane wrath of journalists, many of whom, if they had the power, would clearly relish the opportunity to cooperate in censoring any and all climate-change skepticism. Some examples (HT Twitchy; profanity cleansed but still recognizable):
Jesse Berney, Rolling Stone: “literally go f*** yourself, new york times. go, eat, dog, d*cks.” (Note: This is from someone at a magazine proven to have published a spectacularly false story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia. — Ed.
A still deeply hungover and mescaline-soaked Hunter S. Thompson just rolled over in his grave. You younger readers might not believe this, but there was actually a time when Rolling Stone paid considerable lip service to questioning authority and that ’60s notion of “doing your own thing.” But then, as they say at David Horowitz’s Front Page Website, sooner or later, inside every liberal — or leftwing institution — is a totalitarian screaming to get out.
UPDATE: “If you’re wondering why certain speakers need protection from violence at colleges, just look at reax on Twitter to one NYT column.”
MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO TRUMP’S SECOND TERM: Principal Slams Jesus: ‘It’s a Public School, We Don’t Believe in That Here.’
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I WORKED AT FYRE FESTIVAL. IT WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE A DISASTER:
Then yesterday, to my dark delight, the rug was pulled out from under them. In the morning headliner and all-around relevant band in 2017 Blink-182 pulled out, citing sub-par production standards. Last night the festival evacuated almost everyone off the island on account of they didn’t have food or tents for anyone (minor details). Today, after a wild night of #fyrefestival terror broadcast on social media, Fyre announced the festival would be indefinitely postponed.
I cannot explain how or why the bros running this festival ignored every warning sign they were given along the way. The writing was on the wall. I saw it firsthand six weeks ago. They overlooked so many very basic things. And baby, they forgot to make me sign an NDA.
Heh, indeed.™ Was the Fyre Festival organized by out of work Hillary campaign staffers?
THE FIRST CAR TO CROSS ANTARCTICA IS . . . a Hyundai?
EARLY X-RAY RESEARCH NOT UP TO MODERN SAFETY STANDARDS:
Because Taylor was one of only a few radiological physicists working on defining what amounts of radiation were harmful to humans, the lab he worked in at NBS wasn’t always the safest, especially early on. In a 1995 interview, Taylor recalled one such episode:
“The only single documented whole body exposure that I know that I’ve had was in 1929, and it was measured to be 150 [Roentgen]…. I sat in an X-ray beam for 20 minutes or half an hour or something…. I was just sitting right smack in the beam…. [With that much radiation] you’re supposed to get nauseated, but we didn’t know that in 1929, so I wasn’t.”
For the record, 150 Roentgen is equivalent to 1.4 sievert, which according to this chart starts to put you in the realm of “severe radiation poisoning, in some cases fatal.” But since the chart wasn’t around in 1929, Taylor was just fine. Indeed, he told the interviewer in 1995, “I also used to treat [my] athlete’s foot…. I don’t remember what the dose was, but it was probably four or five hundred R [3.7 to 4.7 Sv].”
“That exposure in addition to medical radiation treatment for bursitis and other benign conditions and from radiation experiments resulted in an estimated whole-body dose-equivalent in excess of a thousand rem [10 Sv],” Taylor’s obituary for the Health Physics Society stated. “He experienced no discernible adverse effect.”
Hmm. Either there’s some sort of quantum observer effect here, where you have to know about radiation sickness to suffer it — which I doubt — or he was just one of those individuals on the right tail of the sigmoid curve, with better-than-average resistance. And, of course, he didn’t receive that 1000R dose all at once. He lived to be 102.
Still . . . .
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Quantum experiments probe underlying physics of rogue ocean waves. “The researchers said their experimental system could provide clues about the underlying physics of rogue waves—100-foot walls of water that are the stuff of sailing lore but were only confirmed scientifically within the past two decades. Recent research has found rogue waves, which can severely damage and sink even the largest ships, may be more common than previously believed.”
YOU MAY NOT WANT THE KINDLE EDITION OF THIS ONE: EMP-Hardened Radio Communications.
WELL, GOOD: CDC working to keep yellow fever vaccine supply from running out. “A year after the Zika outbreak hit the U.S., health officials are now concerned about preparing to fight another mosquito-borne illness: yellow fever. Today officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that they are taking urgent measures to keep the nation’s supply of yellow fever vaccine from being depleted within a few months.”
TIMES COLUMNIST BLASTED BY “NASTY LEFT” FOR CLIMATE CHANGE PIECE:
“After 20 months of being harangued by bullying Trump supporters, I’m reminded that the nasty left is no different. Perhaps worse,” Stephens tweeted Friday afternoon, as the hateful messages kept rolling in.
“Go eat dog d—s,” fumed one Twitter user.
“When is the Times going to get rid of you?” another asked.
Stephens even managed to tick off fellow journalists.
“You’re a s–thead. a crybaby lil f–kin weenie. a massive twat too,” tweeted Libby Watson, staff writer at Gizmodo.
“I’m gonna lose my mind,” seethed Eve Peyser, politics writer at Vice.
“The ideas ppl like @BretStephensNYT espouse are violently hateful & should not be given a platform by @NYTimes,” she said.
In the column, Stephens never states that he believes climate change is a farce. He simply asserts that people should look at claims from both supporters and deniers, in the attempt to get all the facts.
The freakout of the Times‘ core readers is reminiscent of the famous moment when the late Julian Simon debated an earlier iteration of hard left religious zealots:
Simon, the economist who was legendarily skeptical about environmental doom, once posed a question at an environmental forum: “How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Almost every hand shot up. He then said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” There was no response, so he asked again, “Is there any evidence I could give you—anything at all—that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Again, no response. Simon concluded, “Well, excuse me. I’m not dressed for church.”
Heh, indeed.™
WELL, GOOD: Inexpensive Drug Prevents Deaths in New Mothers, Study Finds. “An inexpensive generic drug that saves the lives of wounded soldiers and civilian car crash victims has now been shown to rescue women suffering hemorrhages in childbirth. . . . In a major six-year trial involving over 20,000 women in 21 countries, researchers showed that tranexamic acid, a little-known blood-clotter invented in the 1950s, reduced maternal bleeding deaths by a third if it was given within three hours. It costs less than $2 a dose and does not require refrigeration.”
BUT OF COURSE: New Biography Says Obama ‘Considered Gayness.’
TIMELY NEWS YOU CAN USE: Seven American Movies About Messing with North Korea.
REPAIR SHOPS — THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR CARS ANYMORE! Congrats to Seth and Bethany Mandel who had their baby at an auto-repair shop in NJ.
UPDATE: Link missing previously; now added.
OBIT GIVES US AN INSIDE LOOK AT INSIDE JOURNALISM. IT’S NOT PRETTY:
A new documentary about the New York Times arrives at just the moment America’s newspaper of record presents itself as something that stands not for news but for power, partisanship, and elitism. It’s titled “Obit,” perhaps in a witty response to the digital era’s advance on outmoded media. An inside look at how the paper’s staff of obituary writers and researchers perform their tasks, Obit may be the closest that any media-maker gets to examining the Times’ confidential procedures during this terrible period of oppositional journalism.
Obit’s timing and title is particularly apropos, considering how universally the DNC-MSM dropped the mask last year — and only a few years prior, already completed building their own mausoleum.
Related: “If you want to see, in an instant, what the New York Times has become, just consider the lead headlines in this morning’s editions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal.”
NEWS FROM KNOXVILLE: World’s Fair Beer is back, 35 years later.
IN THE MAIL: The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.
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WHY IS NBC LYING ABOUT ELIZABETH WARREN? In a story headlined Trump Again Derides Elizabeth Warren as ‘Pocahontas,’ NBC’s Daniel Arkin writes: “President Donald Trump returned to one of his most derogatory insults Friday, referring to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as ‘Pocahontas’ — a jab at her Native American ancestry.”
Now I’m sure that Arkin knows that this isn’t a jab at her “Native American ancestry,” but at her fake Native American ancestry. So why pretend otherwise? To make Trump look bad. Which I guess explains why more people trust Trump than the media after 100 days.
UPDATE: From the comments: “Warren = fake Indian. Arkin = fake journalist.”
HAVE YOU HUGGED A FRACKER TODAY? Poland Finds A Friend In US Shale.
American shale gas is, at long last, penetrating into Eastern Europe. Poland just purchased its first cargoes of U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG), an important milestone in Europe’s quest to reduce its dependence on Russian energy imports. . . .
Europe has a gas problem, and America is helping to solve it. The continent has long relied on Russia for its natural gas supplies, and currently sources roughly a third of those hydrocarbons from Russian companies—predominantly Gazprom. That gas comes with conditions, though. Moscow has used contract terms and prices to coerce its European customers, offering cushy deals to countries it sees as friendly to the Kremlin’s interests, and hiking prices or, in the case of Ukraine, halting supplies altogether when a country crosses it.
For years, this seemed to be Europe’s fate, as the continent had few other options for overland pipeline suppliers to help it meet its natural gas demand. The advent of LNG changed that, however, by allowing any country with a port to import super-chilled natural gas on board ships from suppliers all around the world. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Europe began to accelerate its development of LNG import infrastructure as a way to help reduce its dependence on Gazprom.
Faster, please.
#NARRATIVEFAIL: The Unheralded Mettle of For-Profit College Students. “Much of the discussion of higher education’ proprietary sector assumes that its member schools enroll students who are academically marginal and lack other options. That’s far too simplistic, a new study concludes. . . . Contrary to common stereotypes, the two researchers say, their subjects generally saw their experience with a for-profit college as positive, and said little that traced their decision to enroll in it to poor academic performance in high school. Generally, they framed their enrollment in a for-profit as having stemmed from a desire to gain confidence, reach their potential, take charge of their lives, and shed social labels associated with a lack of a college degree.”
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Married Mom Accused of Raping Teen at School.
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WHY ARE DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS SO FULL OF HATE AND VIOLENCE? Elizabeth Warren On Republicans Attempting To Repeal Obamacare: ‘I Would Like To Cut Them Open.’
NOT SO IMPRESSIVE: The Media’s First 100 Days.
Reporters are spending the day prattling about how short President Trump has come up in his first 100 days, but why should they have all the fun?
In that same 100 days, a new Morning Consult poll released Friday said that more people are trusting of the White House than the media to tell them the truth.
The poll also said that more than half of Americans think the media are out of touch and that 48 percent think the media have been harder on him than on past presidents. (The other 52 percent must not recall the time Julie Pace of the Associated Press asked Obama in 2014 if he had a good night’s sleep.)
What’s the opposite of “success?”
Everyone knew Trump, a celebrity businessman with no political experience, would be on a steep learning curve after his surprise win in November, so that he hasn’t passed any major legislation in 100 days means nothing.
The press, however, isn’t new to this and it’s done worse in the same amount of time. But even after two years of journalists confessing they “missed something” in Trump’s rise, the national papers, networks and news websites have done nothing different and even when they have, it’s been dumb.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and it all makes sense.
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DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY: The Hill: Dems struggle with abortion litmus test.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who appeared at an event last week with Omaha mayoral hopeful Heath Mello, defended his support for the Nebraska Democrat with the anti-abortion voting record, arguing that not all Democratic candidates will share the same views.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) echoed that sentiment, saying someone can be part of the Democratic Party and also be anti-abortion rights. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) sounded a similar tone, saying Democrats are a “big-tent party.”
DNC Chairman Tom Perez has sent confusing signals on whether candidates need to be in lockstep with the party on abortion rights.
In response to the controversy, Perez first issued a statement saying that he stands by the party’s platform, while also noting that it’s his job to back candidates who will win support from voters in their areas.
He followed up with another statement last week, saying that every Democrat should be pro-abortion rights — a stance Perez said is “not negotiable” and shouldn’t vary by city or state, according to The Huffington Post. Hogue applauded Perez’s comment, which was viewed by some as a reversal from his earlier statement.
I think the strategy will be to lie about your position if you’re running in a purple district, then to “grow in office” immediately after election.
JOIN THE CLUB, DONALD: Trump ‘disappointed’ in congressional GOP.
A BIG WIN FOR THE INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE: Indiana Governor Signs Bill Untangling Hair Braiders from Licensing Laws.
WHY ARE BLUE-STATE JUDICIARIES SUCH CESSPITS OF “RAPE CULTURE?” “A state judge freed a previously deported Uber driver accused of rape on light bail even after a prosecutor insisted that federal immigration agents were drafting a detainer and asked for high bond to hold him, according to a court recording obtained by the Herald. The stunning tape of Tuesday’s hearing reveals Newton District Court Judge Mary Beth Heffernan cutting the arguments short before a defense attorney could even counter the prosecution’s $100,000 bail and GPS-monitoring demand, interjecting, ‘Twenty-five hundred dollars cash.'”
They’re fine with going easy on accused rapists, so long as they come from Democrat-voting demographics.
YES, BUT IT SPEAKS VOLUMES ABOUT THE PARANOIA OF ITS MAKERS: Sorry: ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ tells us nothing about Trump’s America.
April 28, 2017
BECKET ADAMS: This USA Today characterization of government shutdown threats is nonsense. “USA Today badly bungled its timeline this week of the White House’s back-and-forth with Democratic leaders over a possible shutdown of the federal government. Instead of presenting the issue as one where Democrats issued the threat, and then seemingly backed off after President Donald Trump vented about it on social media, USA Today suggested Thursday that talk of a government shutdown has been primarily of the president’s own doing.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: College Speaker Whines About Prison but Fails to Mention That She Tortured and Killed a Man.
WEIRDLY, VANITY FAIR IS MORE UPSET BY THIS PROSPECT THAN I AM: With what he says is a $12 million stake from secret investors, the former Breitbart tech editor is launching Milo Inc., a live-event touring company, dedicated to making progressives’ lives a “living hell.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Andrew Klavan on the Cruelty of the Academic Left.
MSNBC’S JOY REID LOSES IT WHEN BUSH CHIEF OF STAFF CRITICIZES OBAMA, LOBS CHEAPSHOTS AT BUSH:
REID: Let me ask you because the same — similar criticism was made of the boss that you worked for George W. Bush, that he came in with no fixed ideology, and so he was easily swayed by the strongest voices in the room —
CARD: See —
REID: — namely the neoconservatives, which is why we wound up in Iraq.
CARD: Wow. That is —
REID: Isn’t that a fair — isn’t that a logical case to make?
CARD: First of all, your myth — your creation was a myth. That’s not the way it really was and I worked with President Bush. He had strong grounded values and he did not want to go to war.
REID: Was he a neoconservative when he came in? Was he a neoconservative because that’s who wound up being the loudest voice in the room.
CARD: No, but he — he knew who the neoconservatives were and he came to office with strong views and an expectation and then he had to deal with the world as it was, now how he wanted it to be and that’s what every president has to deal with. That’s a natural reality.
Oh the comedy gold that would have resulted if Andy Card asked a simple question in response to Reid’s ridiculous “Was he a neoconservative when he came in?” query about Bush #43: I can’t answer that Joy, without first defining our terms. So, what’s your definition of a neoconservative?
OH NOES: Army Secretary pick Mark Green faces criticism from “military professors.”
IS THERE ANYTHING ABOUT AMERICA THAT PUTIN ISN’T TRYING TO UNDERMINE OR OVERSHADOW? “Russia’s Kim Kardashian.”
VOTE FOR US, YOU RACIST INBRED MORONS! ISN’T A GOOD SLOGAN? Democrats Are Being Crushed In The Heartland.
TO BE FAIR, THAT WHOLE DECADE WAS PRETTY SCARY: Five 1970s Thrillers That Still Chill Us Today.
JOURNALISM: “By the way, did Davidson ever critique the global effort to flatter Barack Obama’s wife (not to mention the truly insane effort to flatter Bill Clinton’s wife — which is the main reason we’ve got Ivanka Trump’s father as President).”
GOOD FOR THE SECOND AGE OF NUCLEAR PREPAREDNESS, I GUESS: Radiation Detectors As Sleek As Your Smartphone.
A FUEL-CELL MILITARY TRUCK: Chevrolet Colorado ZH2 Concept: An Experiment with an Eye toward the Military Vehicles of Tomorrow.
I drove an earlier model GM fuel cell vehicle several years ago. It wasn’t bad.
YES, OF COURSE: Neither Ann Coulter nor Linda Sarsour should be censored.
IMPORTANT PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT: Knoxville is not on Central Time. Like much of the Southeast, it’s on Eastern Time. Nashville is on Central Time, but it’s a different city located 3 hours to the West. If you schedule something with me by email, and you don’t specify a time zone, I’ll assume you mean Eastern time.
UPDATE: This isn’t even close to the worst Knoxville error. Over a decade ago, Fortune magazine sent a team of photographers (complete with leather pants and German accents, like something out of a bad movie) to my house for a story on blogs, which were then new and exciting. Only they sent them to Kentucky because Fortune’s travel person apparently thought Knoxville and Fort Knox were the same thing. They took a $500 cab ride to my house in Knoxville — and the travel person at Fortune had booked them out on a flight from Nashville that afternoon, because, hey, it’s all the same, right? I had to tell them to book from TYS, and then I drove them to the Knoxville airport myself just to be sure they made it. . . .
READER BOOK PLUG, from H.D.Woodard, Wearing the Cat: The Complete Novel – Volume One.
WELCOME TO FANTASY ALTAMONT ISLAND: Fyre Festival: Luxury music festival turns into chaos.
Perhaps the attendees are getting off easy though. As Iowahawk tweets, “In fairness people who paid $12k to watch Blink 182 deserve a life sentence to a dystopian Cannibal Island.”
HMM: EU prepares for post-Brexit membership for united Ireland.
In a step that may stoke concerns in Britain that Brexit could hasten the fragmentation of the UK, diplomats are planning to ask leaders of the EU’s 27 post-Brexit member countries to endorse the idea in a summit on Saturday.
It would allow the province to follow the example of German reunification in 1990 and reflect the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
The agreement allows a referendum on reuniting Ireland where there is reason to believe a majority in the province is in favour.
Brussels is playing hardball.
TRUMP TO NRA: The 8-Year Assault On The Second Amendment Is Over. “Trump reaffirmed his campaign pledges to expand gun ownership rights and roll back some of the restrictions instituted under his Democratic predecessor.”
THE WORST PART ABOUT WRECKING A RACE CAR “is the bit where you sit there, strapped into the thing, waiting to be towed back to your trailer.”
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THE FANTASY-BASED COMMUNITY: Cersei Lannister, Hillary Clinton, human nature, and bad government.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT MONOPOLY CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF VIOLENCE? L.A. Police Commission Makes Violent Protests Like UC-Berkely More Likely, Jack Dunphy writes.
WORRIED ABOUT “RAPE CULTURE?” LEGALIZE PROSTITUTION. An unexpected court order in Rhode Island decriminalizing indoor prostitution decreased rape offenses by 31%. Much more here.
FACEPALM: Facebook and Google confirmed as victims of $100M phishing scam.
Both companies confirmed to Fortune that their employees were victims of the phishing scam, where the perpetrator — 48-year-old Evaldas Rimasauskas — forged email addresses, invoices, and contracts to swindle Facebook and Google into paying for electronic supplies. The payments were deposited into bank accounts in Latvia, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Slovenia, Hungary, and Lithuania.
The court documents unsealed by the DoJ last month described the two tech companies as a “multinational technology company, specializing in internet-related services and products, with headquarters in the United States,” and a “multinational corporation providing online social media and networking services.” There are hundreds of companies that could have fit the above descriptions, but the reveal makes it pretty obvious in hindsight.
How much of your data do you entrust to these two companies?
MEDICAL MYSTERIES: Another Study Just Linked Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to Gut Bacteria.
JUST THINK OF HIM AS A DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH A PUNCHLINE, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Trevor Noah wants you to cut the outrage over Obama’s $400,000 Wall Street speech.
It’s fun watching the left act so surprised at Obama’s cozy relationship with Wall Street — some of us were aware that his anti-big business shtick was pure kabuki quite a long time ago.
HMM: Mud DNA means we can detect ancient humans even without fossils. “We have an astonishing new way to study our early human ancestors: looking for their DNA in ancient sediments in places such as caves. A team of researchers has found the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans in some of the sites where they are known to have lived. . . . The approach can now be used to find out whether early humans were present even when no bones have been found – and what kind of humans they were. It might also help resolve the debate about when the Americas were first inhabited by people, for instance.”
Yeah, I immediately thought of this mud.
BUT WOULD THEY GIVE IT BACK? Turkey’s Erdogan will tell Trump Turkey could help retake Raqqa.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Can the Liberal Arts Be Saved?
NO, REALLY: Mark Zuckerberg, Man of the People.
HOW THE FEDS COULD GROUND Uber’s Flying Taxis.
DO YOU WANT MORE SEX BOTS? Because this is how you get more sex bots.
BREAKING: Jim DeMint out at Heritage.
WELL, YES: Lawyer for Berkeley Republicans: University Engaged in ‘Clear Censorship’
Anyone talking about “safe spaces” is trying to hide their opposition to free speech. Anyone threatening violence isn’t even bothering to hide it.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: Tax Policy In The Trump Administration.
CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN: Can California hit 1.5M zero-emission vehicles by 2025?
TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY: The Democrats’ First 100 Days.
Matthew Continetti:
Democrats feel betrayed. The Electoral College betrayed them by making Trump president. Hillary Clinton betrayed them by running an uninspiring campaign. James Comey betrayed them by reopening the investigation into Clinton’s server 11 days before the election. Facebook betrayed them by circulating fake news. This sense of resentment isn’t so different than the sort Democrats attribute to Trump supporters: irritation at a loss of status, vexation at changed circumstances. The despondence of a liberal is alleviated when he sees throngs of protesters, hears Samantha Bee, scrolls through Louise Mensch’s tweets.
Makes him feel better. But his party is in tatters, reduced to 16 governors, 30 state legislative chambers, a historically low number of state legislative seats, 193 members of the House, 46 senators. The Democrats are leaderless, rudderless, held together only by opposition to Trump. The most popular figure on the left refuses to call himself a Democrat while sitting alongside the newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee. That chairman, dirty-talking Tom Perez, represents a professional, technocratic class that supports Wall Street and globalization as long as there is room for multiculturalism and social liberalism. That is a different strategy from both the 50-state approach of Howard Dean, Rahm Emanuel, and Schumer that brought Democrats control of Congress in 2006, and the anti-Wall Street, protectionist, single-payer left of Bernie Sanders. Perez fights with Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi over whether there is room for pro-lifers in the party—Perez thinks not. Pelosi enjoys the distinction of being an American political figure less popular than Donald Trump.
What is the Democratic agenda?
The question can be answered with just three words: “Resist we much.”
FOLLOW THE MONEY: Shale investments have surged by $100 billion, Rystad says.
Norwegian consultancy Rystad Energy estimates $100 billion in investment funds has flowed into the U.S. shale industry over the past year, propping up domestic drilling by 60 percent. So-called completion activity – procedures like hydraulic fracturing that stimulate shale wells – has gone up 30 percent, Rystad said.
And there’s no sign things will slow down. Shale investments could climb another 50 percent this year, Rystad analyst Espen Erlingsen said in a written statement.
A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.
IN THE MAIL: From Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, Trump vs. the Media (Encounter Broadsides).
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TO BOLDLY GO WHERE MARTIN HEIDEGGER HAS GONE BEFORE: Roger Simon asks, Will Fascism Come to America through Its Colleges and Universities?
THE ISLAMIC STATE: Gets a little help from its enemies — unfortunately.
While on paper ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) seems doomed in Syria this is not the case. No, what is keeping ISIL alive are growing disagreements among the many nations and factions mobilized to crush ISIL in Syria. This is a sad situation but also so typical of the region.
DO-NOTHING CONGRESS: Republicans Fail In Second Attempt To Repeal Obamacare.
Late on Thursday night, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy confirmed that, as expected, the GOP leadership would not bring up a revised ObamaCare repeal bill to the floor this week, after it became clear Thursday night that the 216 GOP votes needed to pass the healthcare bill had not materialized. At least 21 Republicans had come out against the bill, with many more undecided. Leaders can only afford 22 GOP defections.
After a two-hour meeting in Speaker Paul Ryan office in the Capitol, McCarthy told reporters that the GOP had again failed to whip enough support for the bill: “we are not voting on healthcare tomorrow or Sunday.”
He promptly then downplayed the adverse healthcare development, saying leaders had been discussing the short-term stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown.
“We’ve been making great progress, and when we have the votes we’ll vote on it.” Just not yet.
So yes, another embarrassing failure for the president and House speaker.
In 2009, the Democrats set out to “fundamentally transform” health coverage, and were willing to sacrifice the House to get it done. They assumed, and apparently rightly so, that the ratchet effect would remain in full force and that the Republicans would never dare undo what they had done.
Until the GOP is as bold, they will continue to fail. Embarrassingly.
STILL NOT HITLER: 100 Days in and the Reichstag Hasn’t Burned Yet.
With President Trump’s 100 day mark approaching, those prophesying apocalyptic doom have not come out looking so good.
There have been no mass arrests of peaceful protestors. Federal judges rule against presidential orders, the President sputters in indignation—and the rulings stand. Putin hasn’t been offered the code to the nuclear football. Late night comics excoriate the president and the Gestapo doesn’t knock at their door. The grifters and mountebanks who hopped on the campaign wagon back when nobody in the establishment was willing to help the Trump operation are either learning to play in the big leagues or being edged toward the exits. The stock market is strong; the economy hasn’t tanked. An avalanche of leaks hasn’t exposed the collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign that so many people were sure was going to lead to impeachment.
In other words, life in our constitutional republic is still rolling on much as usual—or at least, closer to usual than any of the hyperventilators predicted. Congress and the courts are functioning as they did before; the powers of the President are still limited by the rule of law. . . .
But the Trump-Hitler folks made buffoons of themselves with paranoid fantasies and steamy, overheated scenarios of impending doom. Some will be big enough to admit their mistake, look hard at what they got wrong and why, and emerge as smarter and more creditworthy participants in the national conversation. Others, many others, will try to act as if nothing has happened, and will wonder why nobody listens the next time they cry “Wolf.”
Yep. Flashback: Perhaps we should require reading “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” in journalism schools.
THOMAS FRANK: The Democrats’ Davos ideology won’t win back the midwest.
I am a midwesterner too, and I like to think I share the values and outlook of that part of the country. I have spent many of the last 15 years trying to understand my region’s gradual drift to the political right. And I have spent the last three weeks driving around the deindustrialized midwest, visiting 13 different cities to talk about the appeal of Donald Trump and what ails the Democratic Party. I met labor leaders and progressive politicians; average people and rank-and-file union members; senior citizens and Millennials; sages and cranks.
Along the way I gawked at abandoned factory complexes and at Gothic-style water filtration plants. I visited affluent college towns and crumbling relics of twentieth-century prosperity. I ate pork tenderloins in Iowa and ribeye steaks in Indiana and “fast-casual Italian offal” (as a friend called it) in a bohemian zone of Chicago. I saw countless old fighter planes mounted on pedestals. I stood in a union hall in Indianapolis and breathed in that glorious odor of industrial beer mixed with decades of cigarette residue, the sweet fragrance of my youth.
And what I am here to say is that the midwest is not an exotic place. It isn’t a benighted region of unknowable people and mysterious urges. It isn’t backward or hopelessly superstitious or hostile to learning. It is solid, familiar, ordinary America, and Democrats can have no excuse for not seeing the wave of heartland rage that swamped them last November.
They don’t like that America anymore, and the feeling has become mutual.
ROGER KIMBALL: Annals of Academic Fatuousness, Yale Edition, Part 9876.
GIRLS GONE WILD: Inside the Secret NSFW Female-only Facebook Group ‘Bad Girls Advice.’ “There are countless other pictures of penises being shared in this secret, female-only Facebook group. In an age where men are rightly condemned for sending unsolicited pictures of their genitalia to women, it seems women sharing pictures of men’s penises with each other is fair game — even if the men have not consented.”
Women have sexual rights. Men, not so much. Thus, when men share naked pics of women without consent, it’s “revenge porn” and demands draconian laws, while if women do the same thing, well, men should be more careful who they share nudes with.
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AND WE’RE ONLY LEARNING OF THIS IN 2017 BECAUSE…? FBI Convened a Grand Jury to Investigate Hillary Clinton in 2016.
OVER AT USA TODAY, THEY HAVE A BUNCH OF US GRADING TRUMP’S FIRST 100 DAYS. I gave him an A+. Click through to see why.
HE’S ACCOMPLISHED MUCH FOR THE GOP: The First 117 Days of Chuck Schumer.
Schumer is no dummy when it comes to reading polls and he knows that being labeled a Democrat these days isn’t what it used to be. In fact, recent Gallup tracking of party identification found just 28 percent of Americans identify as Democrats, down 11 points since Barack Obama was elected president.
In a move that can only be described as savvy, Schumer, responding to this polling, has turned over representation of the party to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who by his own admission is not actually a Democrat. Sanders is traveling the country with national party chairman Tom Perez, holding rallies and doing media interviews in which they openly fight about what policies Democrats actually stand for. CNN charitably called the tour “bumpy.”
Schumer is nothing if not responsive. With 40 percent of registered voters in a recent Harvard-Harris poll saying the party has no leader, turning the thing over to people who aren’t actually Democrats is probably the right tactical move.
Heh.
Read the whole thing.