BIDEN, 1992: My crime bill has so many death-penalty offenses, it does everything but hang people for jaywalking.
Weird how all this negative stuff is coming out just as the Democrats decide he might be a liability.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Trump’s Way To Victory. “Trump’s path to reelection is blazingly obvious – avoid mistakes (like some new war) while focusing on the new normal of economic prosperity. Ask the Reagan Question: ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ For Normals, the answer is yes, yes, yes.”
IT’S OKAY, SHE’S A LEFTY, SHE’LL GET A PASS: Naomi Wolf is holed below the waterline: However much she plays it down, her fatal misunderstanding of a 19th-century legal term has destroyed her thesis on Victorian homophobia.
LLOYD MARCUS: Trump’s Orlando Speech: Unprecedented and Remarkable. “Trump’s speech revealed a far more ideologically conservative Trump than he was is 2016. When Trump ran for the presidency, he was not ideological. His leanings appeared to be towards the left. He probably thought conservatives were a bit paranoid and over-the-top sounding the alarm about how Democrats seek to undermine our country’s best interests. But when the American left responded with furious wrath and anger against Trump for his ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign slogan, Trump’s eyes were opened. Incredibly, the American left’s vitriolic, insane 24/7 relentless rebuke and hatred for everything Trump does for America has pushed Trump further to the right.”
Trump’s presidency has revealed a lot. Perhaps even to Trump.
THE DEMOCRATS’ LONG KNIVES ARE OUT FOR CREEPY JOE: Biden sidesteps questions about his son’s foreign business dealings but promises ethics pledge.
MEET THE DALLAS-AREA WOMAN SHEPHERDING A ‘MOVE TO TEXAS FROM CALIFORNIA!’ MIGRATION:
But here’s what the “liberal Californians, go home” crowd misses: The vast majority of West Coast dwellers who make up Bailey’s more than 11,500 Facebook followers lean conservative.
And after spending a few days perusing Bailey’s page, I’d say this comment best sums up its audience: “We fell in love with Texas immediately … we’re conservative Christians who love God, country, freedom, family, gun rights and barbeque.”
Bailey said cost of living and taxes are hot buttons for commenters, but so are gridlocked roads, the homeless and illegal immigration.
The Realtor welcomes people of all political stripes onto her page — after all, she’s in this to make money. And she and her husband, Scott, identify as libertarian.
The political climate in Prosper and Texas suits the Baileys. “The standard in California, especially in Los Angeles, is very liberal, and we didn’t feel comfortable even sharing that we were libertarian,” Marie told me.
Billionaire GOP contributors and libertarian-types like the Koch Brothers (depending upon the latter two’s current level of Stockholm Syndrome) should still get going on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon idea, pronto.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE? Facebook Usage Has Collapsed After Privacy Scandals, Data Shows.
Flashback (From Ed): Kevin Poulsen is the symptom, not the disease. “Excuse me, but… what? A reporter from the Daily Beast can just pick up the phone, call up Facebook, and have an official there reveal one of their user’s personal information? How does that work? One might expect that they wouldn’t be doing that for anyone other than a law enforcement official with a warrant.”
ALL THE LEAVES ARE BROWN: Stacy McCain on “California Dreamin’,” then and now.
A couple of days ago, I was driving my youngest daughter (born in 2002) to her summer internship and told her to look up “California Dreamin’” on her Spotify. Why was that song in my mind? Probably some headline I’d read about California’s recent descent into Third World chaos. It’s a forlorn bit of nostalgia to recall what California signified in the 1960s, before Democrats turned it into a socialist nightmare of typhus infections, homeless encampments and heroin needles. At any rate, the song had been stuck in my head and so I asked my 16-year-old daughter to play it on her phone — she’d never heard it before — and when it ended, I said, “That was Number One for the Mamas and Papas in 1966.”
My daughter is quite the chip off the old block, however, and she quickly Googled up the fact that “California Dreamin’” only made it to #4.
That seemed wrong, an injustice. From the first notes of the classical guitar intro to the sonic crescendo of the vocal harmony ending, “California Dreamin’” is a musical masterpiece, two-and-a-half minutes of pure genius in the key of A-minor. In 2004, when Rolling Stone published its list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” this 1966 hit was #89 on the list and yet it never actually topped the charts? When I got home, I decided to explore this mystery further and, being rather obsessive about research, I dived in deep.
Read the whole thing, which is a reminder that in the 1960s, the counter-culture actually was the counter-culture, back when it still had a grownup, if rather staid, postwar overculture to push against.
SCOTT JOHNSON: What was Mueller up to? His victims speak.
COLLUSION: If Media Don’t Want To Be Called Propagandists, They Need To Stop Publishing Chinese and Russian Propaganda. “The American media’s Trump-Russia hysteria of the last few years gains some real perspective when you consider that they are more than willing to take blood money to distribute publications that whitewash authoritarian crimes.”
Related: China, not Russia, is the biggest threat.
Also Related: While Everyone Is Distracted By Russia, Chinese Spying And Influence Runs Wild.
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YOUR DAILY TREACHER: If Biden Is a Racist, Why Did the Media and Other Dems Let Him Stand Next to Obama for Eight Years?
If Biden is a racist now, why wasn’t he a racist between January 20, 2009, and January 20, 2017? The gatekeepers didn’t have Google that whole time? Why didn’t they say something back then?
And by the liberal rule of guilt by association, why isn’t Obama a racist for elevating such a racist?
The Biden-free zone went up in the DNC-MSM only a few months after the Wright-Free Zone.
FLORIDA CITY GIVES IN TO $600,000 BITCOIN RANSOMWARE DEMAND. But there’s no guarantee hackers will actually restore Riviera Beach’s systems.
Silly hackers — don’t they know that the really big bucks are to be made in environmental impact studies of removing high school George Washington murals?
HOW CAN WE MISS YOU IF YOU WON’T GO AWAY? Roy Moore will run for the Senate again.
NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON: Cracking down on “Emotional Support Animals.” “Obviously, you want to accommodate people with legitimate requests, but that’s harder to do when you have so many bogus requests.”
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Why ‘A’ Students Struggle In BigLaw.
SATIRE… OR IS IT? Ocasio-Cortez Gets Head Stuck In Bucket, Journalists Rush To Explain Why It Was Actually A Genius Move. “Most people don’t have her scientific curiosity and intelligence,” said MSNBC pundit Chris Hayes. “Someone incurious like Trump would never look at a bucket and ask ‘Could my head fit inside that?’ But Ocasio-Cortez dives into such questions head first.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Mural of George Washington that ‘traumatizes students’ of George Washington High School in San Francisco to be covered up.
And that cover-up won’t be cheap, no matter what method is chosen:
A high school in San Francisco is considering three options for censoring a mural of George Washington deemed problematic by the local activist community: putting up a curtain (price tag: $300,000), painting over it ($600,000), or hiding it behind panels ($875,000).
* * * * * * * *
According to National Review‘s James Sutton, most of the students want to keep the mural, or don’t really care one way or another. The controversy is the work of “outside busybodies.” Naturally, it looks like they are going to get their way. The school board is currently deciding between three different plans, all of which involve destroying the mural, or covering it up. A final decision is expected next week, reports The College Fix.
By the way, if you’re wondering why it would cost several hundred thousand dollars to get rid of the mural, here’s your answer: Officials are required to conduct environmental impact reports before they take any action.
It’s important that the memory hole be as carbon-neutral as possible.
Flashback: “Here’s the irony, though. The murals were painted in 1936 by artist Victor Arnautoff, who was a protégé of Diego Rivera and a communist.’ He included those images not to glorify Washington, but rather to provoke a nuanced evaluation of his legacy. The scene with the dead Native American, for instance, calls attention to the price of ‘manifest destiny.’ Arnautoff’s murals also portray the slaves with humanity and the several live Indians as vigorous and manly,’ The Wall Street Journal reported in late April.
As I wrote in May at that last link, Stalin smiles (and so does Mao).
2020 DEMOCRATIC PARTY CANDIDATE MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: VACCINE MANDATES ARE ‘ORWELLIAN.’
Related: “As many on Twitter have pointed out, Orwell died at just 46 years old from tuberculosis, which is now preventable by vaccine.”
BLUE ON BLUE: Biden Touts Civility With Segregationists, Dems Slam Him for ‘Praising’ Racists Backed by the KKK.
Biden has been leaning on his “civility,” presumably as some kind of antidote to a voting public tired (they believe) of Trumpism. But civility didn’t work well for the Republicans in 2008 or 2012, and it clearly isn’t a good fit for the social media mobs who make up such a vocal segment of the Democratic base.
Just another reason to think of Biden as “The Evitable Nominee.”
As a Mr. A. Goldfinger would say, “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’”
WINNING: Democrats fear Trump, Republicans are making inroads with Hispanic voters in Florida.
The usual “Don’t get cocky™” disclaimer aside, Trump’s not-so-secret weapon is going after the other side’s base. Reagan was a master at that, too, but every GOP candidate since then has preemptively surrendered yuge blocks of voters.
Maybe that’s a bit unfair to George W. Bush, who did make some plays towards black and Hispanic voters, but not nearly to the degree Trump does — and much less aggressively, too.
THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: More pregnant women are using marijuana, study finds.
DUKE NUKEM MEANS BUSINESS! Eric Swalwell: If Elected President, I Will Fire Jared Kushner on Day One. “Setting aside the unlikelihood of Swalwell even winning the Democratic nomination and ultimately the presidency, it is unlikely Kushner would be a holdover from the Trump administration to his. For instance, President Trump did not have to fire senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett when he took office; she just left.”
DON’T BE EVIL: Millions of Business Listings on Google Maps Are Fake — and Google Profits.
Google’s ubiquitous internet platform shapes what’s real and what isn’t for more than 2 billion monthly users. Yet Google Maps, triggered by such Google queries as the one Ms. Carter made, is overrun with millions of false business addresses and fake names, according to advertisers, search experts and current and former Google employees.
The ruse lures the unsuspecting to what appear to be Google-suggested local businesses, a costly and dangerous deception.
A man arrived at Ms. Carter’s home in an unmarked van and said he was a company contractor. He wasn’t. After working on the garage door, he asked for $728, nearly twice the cost of previous repairs, Ms. Carter said. He demanded cash or a personal check, but she refused. “I’m at my house by myself with this guy,” she said. “He could have knocked me over dead.”
The repairman had hijacked the name of a legitimate business on Google Maps and listed his own phone number. He returned to Ms. Carter’s home again and again, hounding her for payment of a repair so shoddy it had to be redone.
Three years later, Google still can’t seem to stop the proliferation of fictional business listings and aggressive con artists on its search engine. The scams are profitable for nearly everyone involved, Google included.
I imagine Google hasn’t fixed the problem because their incentive is not to.
MICHELLE MALKIN: Dear Oberlin: You had it coming…and you still don’t get it!
The jury voted. Now it’s time for more parents, alumni and donors of ideological insane asylums like Oberlin to vote with their own feet and pocketbooks. De-fund the divisive defamers of American higher education. It’s the only way they’ll learn.
That radical chic colleges are now chum in the water for trial lawyers might help as well.
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DIGITAL DEFAMATION: How Secret Algorithms Are Crushing Conservative Media. “Where do I go to get my reputation back, even though nobody knows I lost it?”
DON’T GET COCKY: Why the polls will be wrong about Trump – again.
MICHAEL TOMASKY: The Democratic Civil War Is Here. “If one of these two quarrels is going to metastasize into something ugly, it’ll be Sanders, who remains apart from the party whose nomination he’s running for.”
I dunno — the sniping at Biden is already getting ugly.
FLASHBACK: The Coming Democrat Civil War.
WELL, TO SKYNET, MAYBE: This Video of a Robot Beating Up Humans Is Extremely Satisfying.
HMM: Introducing Guardian Firewall for iOS.
This is from the developer’s press release:
Starting over 2 years ago, we embarked on an ambitious mission: Build a tool that allows any electronic device owner in the world to take back control of their digital privacy. This tool needed to be incredibly easy to use, straightforward, and must allow a user to “set it and forget it” if they did not want to apply any customizations.
We could have cut plenty of corners and shipped an acceptable tool. Instead we took our time and did things right, putting together the most powerful tool and dataset we were capable of building. Why? Because we are working towards a broader set of goals: Make surveillance capitalism an untenable business model. [Emphasis added] Degrade the quality of shadow profiles maintained on every user of an internet connected device. Methodically expose every bad actor we can find. The electronic devices you bought and own should not be snitching on you at regular intervals. Something has gone very wrong, and the course must be corrected to prevent pervasive data collection from becoming an acceptable norm. It’s time for war. No stone will be left unturned.
Thousands of hours and a 5 month back-and-forth with Apple’s App Review team later, this mission has resulted in our creation of the first real firewall for iOS devices. Managed by a unique dataset that is the result of our continuous and exhaustive in-house research, Guardian Firewall updates instantaneously as we discover new threats to ensure that you don’t have to do any work at all. We will find threats before they can find you.
They promise continuing updates through the life of the company, presumably to block new snoops and the inevitable workarounds.
The company says their model allows for “easily portability” to other platforms, so I’d expect an Android version to follow sometime after the full iOS rollout next month.
At $9.99 a month ($99.99/year), Guardian Firewall isn’t cheap — about the top price even the best VPNs charge. But if their service does what they say, this is much more than just another VPN. I’ll test it out for a month after it goes public and report back.
THE DEMOCRACY OF THE DEAD: Supreme Court Upholds A War Memorial Cross On Public Land In Maryland.
Justice Samuel Alito delivered the opinion for the Court, with a total of seven justices finding that the memorial — known colloquially as the Peace Cross — should be upheld. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor were the two dissenters.
“After the First World War, the picture of row after row of plain white crosses marking the overseas graves of soldiers who had lost their lives in that horrible conflict was emblazoned on the minds of Americans at home, and the adoption of the cross as the Bladensburg memorial must be viewed in that historical context,” Alito wrote.
“It has become a prominent community landmark, and its removal or radical alteration at this date would be seen by many not as a neutral act but as the manifestation of ‘a hostility toward religion,’” he added.
HMM: Rush Limbaugh Has A Nasty Reality Check For Joe Biden.
“Imagine if you’re Joe Biden last night,” said Rush (transcript via RushLimbaugh.com). “You’re Joe Biden last night, and your advisers come in, and they say, ‘Joe, don’t sweat it, don’t sweat anything that happened last night. What happened last night doesn’t mean anything, Joe. The debates are the only thing that matter, Joe, and you’re gonna wipe the floor with this guy, Joe. You’re gonna wipe the floor about him in the debates, and you got the big money behind you, Joe. You got fundraisers, you’re setting records all over. Joe, don’t sweat this stuff last night.’”
But then came a tweet from Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel early Wednesday morning: “Donald Trump has raised a record-breaking $24.8 million in less than 24 hours for his reelection,” she announced. “The enthusiasm across the country for this president is unmatched, unlike anything we have ever seen.”
Don’t get cocky.
MAKE TEXAS GREAT AGAIN… ER, MORE GREAT: New Texas law will allow handgun owners to carry weapons in church.
ROGER SIMON: Why Are There So Many Homeless in Los Angeles?
I left Los Angeles for Nashville slightly over a year ago. When I call friends back in my former home (for 50 years), most of them tell me I got out just in time.
Actually, they’re wrong. I should have gotten out ten or even fifteen years before. The handwriting was on the wall. “California dreamin’: pace Mama Cass, ‘was no longer a ray-al-it-tee.” It hasn’t been for a long time.
Now everybody knows about 36,000 homeless on the streets of LA, over 60,000 in the county, replete with human feces and syringes littering the sidewalks, along with rats, typhus and even rumors of Bubonic Plague.
And those figures are what we’re told. No one, if you can trust the comments sections in the LA Times or the Next Door app for my old Hollywood neighborhood, remotely believes them. They could three or four times the number. And how do you take a census of the homeless anyway? They are inherently nomadic.
Read the whole thing.
IN THE MAIL: Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.
SUMMER CAMP WAS MUCH MORE BENIGN WHEN I WAS A KID: Portland Church Hosts Summer Camp to Train Grade School Kids to Be Antifa Activists.
NEO-FEUDALISM: Joel Kotkin: What Do the Oligarchs Have in Mind for Us? “What kind of world do they have in mind for us? Their vision of what our society should look like is not one most people—on the Left or Right—would like to see. And yet, unless unchecked, it could well be the world we, and particularly our children, will inhabit. . . . The oligarchs are creating a “a scientific caste system,” not dissimilar to that outlined in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1932 novel, Brave New World. Unlike the former masters of the industrial age, they have little use for the labor of middle- and working-class people—they need only their data.”
Plus: “For an industry once known for competition, the level of concentration is remarkable. Google controls nearly 90 percent of search advertising, Facebook almost 80 percent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about 75 percent of US e-book sales, and, perhaps most importantly, nearly 40 percent of the world’s “cloud business.” Together, Google and Apple control more than 95 percent of operating software for mobile devices, while Microsoft still accounts for more than 80 percent of the software that runs personal computers around the world.”
DAN MARKEL UPDATE: The Mother-In-Law From Hell In The Dan Markel Murder Case.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Judge rips into University of Michigan for evasion, bad faith in accused student’s lawsuit.
CHANGE: In Response To Trump’s Tariff Threat, World’s Top Bicycle Maker Says the Era of ‘Made in China’ Is Over. “The world is no longer flat.”
AND SO IT BEGINS: Kamala Harris accuses Biden of cozying up to segregationists.
That’s pretty poisonous stuff.
NONSENSE. IF IT WERE, YOU’D BE EXPLAINING IT AWAY. Ivy League prof: Trump immigration comments a ‘terroristic act.’
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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Iran Shoots Down American Drone, Ready for War. “Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced: ‘Shooting down the American spy drone had a clear, decisive, firm and accurate message,’ he said, translated from Farsi. ‘The message is that the guardians of the borders of Islamic Iran will decisively respond to the violation of any stranger to this land. The only solution for the enemies is to respect the territorial integrity and national interests of Iran’.”
If the drone was flying over Iranian airspace, that’s just the risk we take for keeping an eye on things. If it really was flying in international airspace, that’s (yet another) act of war against us by Tehran.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Just remember, before fracking we had to be able to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. Now all we have to be able to do is keep them closed. And if Iran decides to close down oil shipments from the Gulf, it’s basically an oil embargo on China.
ANOTHER UPDATE: In response to the above, a reader emails:
As of a few weeks ago, Texas is exporting natural gas…to Saudi Arabia.
And on top of that, the United States is now recognized for having the most recoverable oil in the world, 100 billion barrels more than Russia and 20 billion more than Saudi Arabia.
And add to that, China is buying more and more natural gas, and Texas is producing more and more of it, and more efficiently than ever. Iran’s actions may drive China straight into our arms to buy up more good, clean American natural gas and oil.
Well, good. And thanks, frackers!
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Conlawprof, Dachau, and Auschwitz: The New “Learning.” “People are crossing America’s southern frontier—they are coming from Mexico, south of Mexico, and (it is reported) from other continents. They are doing so knowing full well that there is a good chance the US authorities will detain them in border facilities of the sort that are now being compared to Dachau. They are coming in large numbers—some (perhaps many) in good health with money and education. There is an element (for some of them) that can be fairly described as voluntary action seeking a better life in the US. I have never heard that such conduct was a proper characterization of those who inhabited Dachau or Auschwitz.”
Today’s academia is fundamentally unserious.
BREAK UP BIG TECH: Alphabet Tries to Silence Conservative Investors As they Question Why Google’s Parent Company Silences Conservative Voices. “In 1961, at age 12, I was one of two-dozen black children who integrated an all-white junior high school in Richmond. White parents jeered me outside the school, and inside, their kids stuck me with pins, shoved me in the halls and pushed me down the stairs. So when the group of Google employees resorted to calling names and making false accusations because they didn’t want a conservative voice advising the company, the hostility was reminiscent of what I felt back then — that same intolerance for someone who was different from them.”
HBO WRITER AND COMEDIAN CALLS BLACK COLUMNIST A ‘COON’ FOR OPPOSING REPARATIONS:
Classy stuff, and very much par for the course at sister networks HBO and CNN.
PRAGER U: Who Cares About the National Debt?
The interest payment on our debt is currently $300 billion dollars per year, heading towards a projected $1 trillion dollars within a decade. At that point, a fifth of all federal taxes will go towards the interest on the debt, not education, infrastructure, and defense – you know, the stuff government is supposed to do. And that’s with historically low interest rates. Imagine if those rates normalized. Well, maybe you don’t want to imagine it because that picture is very dark.
In a better world, voters would be marching on Washington, demanding that our politicians dig us out of this hole before we’re buried in it.
In the real world… almost no one cares.
I’ve railed against big spending/big borrowing for more than 30 years, for all the good it hasn’t done.
There’s an instructive video podcast at the link, for anyone who might care at least that much.
THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST: FBI, warned early and often that Manafort file might be fake, used it anyway. Though here it’s probably more a case of corruption than incompetence.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela Is Now Awash in U.S. Dollars.
We used to catch only rare glimpses of them in public. A waiter willing to risk jail time might be persuaded to accept them for the right price. Amateur tourists would flash them at the airport. Shady street hawkers made offers for them under their breath.
Now, U.S. greenbacks are everywhere. They’re stacked high in cashiers’ drawers at supermarkets and bodegas and even make their way into panhandlers’ cups. The wealthy tip parking valets with singles and pull out wads of twenties to pay for buckets of beer. Currency traders casually set up on busy street corners in slums and shout, “Compro dolares, compro dolares”—“I buy dollars.”
With the bolivar all but worthless, devalued into irrelevance by the autocrat Nicolas Maduro, the cash printed by the gringos he rails against has become king. It is beyond ironic that Washingtons and Benjamins—and not the domestic notes named for the South American independence hero—are keeping the consumer economy afloat.
Until recently, using foreign money was a crime the government enthusiastically threatened to prosecute. After the ruling socialists established currency controls back in 2003, they began patrolling for transactions that ran afoul of their Kafkaesque rules about money. Plain-clothed inspectors ran stings and raided businesses.
Weird how anti-American regimes so often wind up needing US dollars to to keep their regimes afloat.
WHY IT’S NECESSARY TO BRING JEWISH COMMUNISM INTO FULL VIEW:
It is admittedly risky to raise the subject of Jewish involvement with Communism. Anti-Semitism trolls for excuses to blame Jews for anything and everything. After the fall of the Soviet empire, some citizens of countries that had been for decades under Soviet control found it convenient to explain their lingering anti-Jewish animus as payback for the Jewish Bolsheviks who had oppressed them.
On the American scene, Harvey Klehr in his response to Evanier’s essay very helpfully puts the numbers in perspective, showing what a small percentage of American Jews actually belonged to the CPUSA or supported Bolshevism. Still, there’s reason to worry that just raising the subject could provide fuel for dedicated anti-Semites. And yet, however legitimate the concern, it is dwarfed by the greater dangers of sustained self-deception.
Here, in three parts, is why I say that.
I.
American Jews who joined the Communist party and spied for the Soviets betrayed the Jews before they betrayed America.
To become a member of the party was to undergo a kind of conversion—a voluntary conversion, and one not literally requiring baptism, but, particularly for a Jew, an act far more radical than any mere change in political affiliation. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 established the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the Communist International (Comintern) undertook “to struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state.” Yet whereas other nationalities were allowed to “transition” to self-dissolution, Jews, already scattered among the nations, were denounced as reactionary for wanting to retain their Jewishness.
Marxism-Leninism, ideologically incompatible with Judaism, specifically required the Jewish people to dissolve into the international proletariat. As part of its need to eradicate both the Jewish religion and Jewish nationhood, the Soviet Union forbade the teaching of Hebrew, a language essential to both. The “Jewish sections” of the party, the yevsektsii, enforced this program of Sovietization. As the historian Yuri Slezkine writes in his The House of Government, while Polish, Latvian, and Georgian high-ranking members of the party “seemed to assume that proletarian internationalism was compatible with their native tongues, songs, and foods,” high-ranking Jewish members did not speak Yiddish at home or try to pass anything Jewish on to their children. Many proved their new loyalty by pursuing their fellow Jews with special vigor.
When it came to Zionism, the Communist party under Stalin hailed the 1929 Arab pogroms against Jews in Palestine as the start of an Arab Communist revolution and created the watchwords of 20th-century anti-Zionism: a leftist version of anti-Semitism that condemned Jewish national aspirations as a crime against the international order.
Read the whole thing.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: America’s First Third-World State.
If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks, he would have been considered unhinged. After all, the city that gave us the modern freeway system is not supposed to resemble Justinian’s sixth-century Constantinople. Yet typhus, along with outbreaks of infectious hepatitis A, are in the news on California streets. The sidewalks of the state’s major cities are homes to piles of used needles, feces, and refuse. Hygienists warn that permissive municipal governments are setting the stage — through spiking populations of history’s banes of fleas, lice, and rats — for possible dark-age outbreaks of plague or worse.
High tech does its part not to clean the streets but to create defecation apps that electronically warn tourists and hoi polloi how to avoid walking blindly into piles of sidewalk excrement. In Californian logic, public defecation butts up against progressive tolerance, so it is exempt from the law. Yet for a suburbanite to build a patio without a permit, for example, costs one dearly in fines. Indeed, a new patio without a permit can be deemed more dangerous to the public health than piles of excrement in the public workplace.
One out of three Californians who enters a hospital for any cause is now found to be suffering from either diabetes or pre-diabetes, an epidemic that hits the Hispanic community especially hard but for a variety of reasons has not led to effective public-health efforts and sufficient publicity. State-run dialysis clinics now dot the towns and communities of the Central Valley — a tragic symptom of dietary culture, massive illegal immigration, and poor public-health education.
Flashback: Ten Plagues of California Are Turning The Golden State into a Third-World Hell Hole.
JOURNALISM: MSNBC host Kasie Hunt falsely claims Joe Biden’s segregationist colleagues were Republicans.
Flashback: The Party of Civil Rights.
This magazine has long specialized in debunking pernicious political myths, and Jonah Goldberg has now provided an illuminating catalogue of tyrannical clichés, but worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century.
GOOD: Dem Staffer Who Doxxed GOP Senators During Kavanaugh Hearings Headed to Prison.
Prosecutors said Cosko had “self-righteous entitlement” and a “belief that he could violate the sanctity of the United States Senate at will and threaten individual Senators as he pleased.”
He wanted to use stolen data “to punish people who disagreed with his politics” by publishing the personal information of Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham, Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell, the memo says, which noted that Cosko laughed about his actions.
Prosecutors said his case must be a deterrent to what they said are rising politically-motivated attacks.
We need to end the left’s culture of impunity.
But wait, there’s more: “The sentencing came on the same day a second former Hassan aide, Samantha Deforest-Davis, was charged with two misdemeanors stemming from the same scheme: aiding a computer fraud and evidence tampering.”
DECOUPLING: Apple investigating move of up to 30% of production out of China. “A team of between 30 and 40 people at Apple is surveying the company’s major suppliers about the cost implications of moving production out of China. Nikkei reports that several major suppliers have confirmed that Apple has asked them to look into moving and restructuring production.”
MONSTROUS. The flying saddle: Would you give it a try?
WHAT IF TRUMP ACTUALLY CAN DEPORT A MILLION OR MORE ILLEGALS? The president’s immigration critics instantly condemned as impossible his vow to deport “millions” of illegal aliens starting next week. But a close look at the data suggests Trump can put a huge dent in their ranks.
COMFORTABLY DUMB: Ocasio-Cortez: ‘I’m Absolutely Comfortable’ Using Concentration Camp Term to Describe Border.
June 19, 2019
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ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Even MSNBC’s Chuck Todd Slams Ocasio-Cortez For Her ‘Concentration Camp’ Remarks. Ocasio-Cortez Responds By Lying.
Ocasio-Cortez was angered by Todd calling her out and responded to him on Twitter, writing: “Well, @chucktodd – the fact that you slipped in ‘Nazi’ when I never said that is pretty unfortunate. Almost as unfortunate as the fact that you spent this whole time w/o discussing DHS freezers, “dog pounds,” missing children, & human rights abuses that uphold use of this term.”
This is a lie.
Ocasio-Cortez, in her Instagram live video, specifically mentioned “Never Again,” which is a direct reference to the Holocaust, which was carried out by Nazis.
As Stephen Miller tweets, “Jesus, Chuck Todd actually committed journalism. Can we get a welfare check on him?”
THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T WORKING OUT THE WAY I HAD HOPED: The Sexbot Devolution.
HMM: Study reveals biology of leptin, the hunger hormone. “The researchers discovered that the mechanisms by which reductions in plasma leptin concentrations stimulate food intake are not limited to the brain, as previously thought. In rodents, fasting first activates leptin receptors in the brain, followed by an intermediary step that involves the endocrine system. This system includes the pituitary and adrenal glands, which secrete another hormone, corticosterone, that regulates energy, stress responses, and food intake. The research team learned that this chain of events is required for leptin to stimulate hunger when food is restricted, or when diabetes is poorly controlled and plasma leptin concentrations drop below a critical threshold.”
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RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: Feds arrest Syrian refugee accused of plotting Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack on Pittsburgh church.
HOW CAN WE MISS YOU IF YOU WON’T GO AWAY? Good News, America: Obama Doesn’t Plan to Shut Up in 2020.
But will he still be bedeviled by the forces stopping him from being clear?
WHY IS DEMOCRAT-DOMINATED HOLLYWOOD SUCH A CESSPIT OF DEPRAVITY? It Took Jurors Four Hours to Find Accused NXIVM Sex Cult Leader Keith Raniere Guilty.
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MEDIA AWAKES FROM SLUMBER; WILL RETURN TO NAPPING BY THE FALL OF 2020: Watch CNN suddenly discover that Joe Biden might have a racism problem (video).
As Kyle Smith wrote of Biden in March, “When he became veep, any attack on Biden risked looking like casting aspersions on the man who made him his number two, and the media could not countenance any naysaying about the judgment of the Precious. For the next few months, though, we’re in an amusing interstitial period when the media actually has a reason to attack their fellow Democrats: any hacks out there who think their party can do better than Biden (or Sanders, or Warren, or Harris, or etc.) can rip into their disfavored candidates in order to give an assist to their preferred picks. All of this goes away as soon as the Democratic pick for 2020 becomes evident, but until then we’ll be seeing some actual vigorous reporting.”
Related: De Blasio slams Biden with N-word tweet after he fondly recalls racist senator.
WAIT, ALL THE BEST PEOPLE TOLD ME THAT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: The Slow, Welcome Death of the GMO Panic.
In the United States, the public panic about the dangers of genetically modified foods is fading fast. This is an amazing—and rare—triumph of reason and science over public hysteria and political posturing.
On Monday, for example, the New York Times published an article by Knuvul Sheikh detailing recent advances in genetically modified crops without offering a single word about potential health dangers or environmental concerns. In fact, it seems there’s a rebranding effort on the left to hype GMO foods as a vital response to climate change.
After describing the benefits of growing plants under artificial light conditions, Sheikh writes: “Researchers have also adopted new genetic techniques to optimize flowering times and make plants more resistant to the rigors of a warming planet.” What types of techniques? None other than Crispr-style gene editing: “Unlike older crossbreeding and crop modification techniques, newer tools like Crispr allow scientists to snip out portions of the plant’s own DNA that may make it vulnerable to disease. [Plant geneticist] Dr. [Lee] Hickey and his team are working on adding Crispr machinery directly into barley and sorghum saplings, in order to modify the plants’ genes while simultaneously speed breeding them.”
Scientists are going full Frankenplant and the New York Times thinks it’s just great: “With cheaper, more powerful technology, opportunities are opening up to improve crops around the world.”
Faster, please.
TOTALLY EXPECTED HEADLINES: Willie Nelson says he’s ‘chief tester’ at his marijuana company.
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