SARAH HOYT: Come On, Take It. “If you don’t believe in the founding principles, you’re not an American. You’re at best a permanent resident who grew up here and behaves generally within the law. . . . Do I think it was a mistake of the founders to allow citizenship of birth in a nation of volition? You bet your beepy I do. They got so much right, though, and they were only human. They couldn’t believe anyone born here, enjoying the blessings of liberty could possibly wish to believe that a system where ‘we belong to the government’ is better. . . . Take the oath. Then keep it.”
Concerns about the impact of money on politics assume that if you buy enough ads you can elect anybody. If that were true, Jeb would be the frontrunner. Instead, he’s running way behind other candidates who, in different ways, have done a better job of addressing voters’ concerns.
It turns out that addressing voters’ concerns is more important than slick TV spots. And that means that the only campaign finance “reform” we need is for candidates (and donors) to quit tossing money at consultants and instead to speak to the American people about what the American people care about.
If nothing else comes from Jeb’s candidacy, that’s a valuable lesson indeed.
“We’re changing our climates irreparably, and climate change lasts tens of thousands, if not millions, of years,” [DiCaprio mutters to Parade magazine.]
MailOnline can report that DiCaprio took at least 20 trips across the nation and around the world this year alone – including numerous flights from New York to Los Angeles and back, a ski vacation to the French Alps, another vacation to the French Riviera, flights to London and Tokoyo to promote his film Wolf of Wall Street, two trips to Miami and trip to Brazil to watch the World Cup.
“The idea of pursuing material objects your whole life is absolutely soulless.”
The top quote belongs to DiCaprio, who was paid $25 million up front for The Wolf of Wall Street. But this came with a catch: It also included his producing fee, and budget overruns meant he had to defer some of his salary.
The actor owns properties on both coasts. His Tinseltown compound lies in the Hollywood Hills, comprised of two adjoining land parcels (one purchased from Madonna ) and touting a massive basketball court the movie star built. He also owns two Malibu beachfront homes, including a seven-bedroom Malibu Colony home asking $75,000 per month in rent.
An inquisitive journalist might want to press the actor on these inconsistencies. If DiCaprio wants to use his celebrity bully pulpit, then he should be ready to defend himself.
This, then, is the choice confronting Republican primary voters in 2016: Whether to continue the traditional, Reaganesque foreign policy that has been championed by every Republican presidential nominee for decades or to opt for a Jacksonian outlook that is as crude and ugly as it is beguiling.
Cruz and Trump claim they can project power, keep America safe, and destroy our enemies without putting troops into harm’s way or getting embroiled in long, costly occupations or nation-building exercises. They argue that they can defeat our foes simply by killing lots of people, without worrying about setting up more stable governments that will ultimately become American allies.
If only all this were true. But long experience shows that America has been most successful in achieving its objectives in precisely those places—such as Germany, Japan, Italy, South Korea, Bosnia, and Kosovo—where it has kept troops for decades and fostered new regimes to replace the old. Occasionally, as in Grenada or Panama, the U.S. can achieve its objectives and pull out. But in numerous other instances, such as Haiti, Somalia, Lebanon, and Iraq, an overly hasty pullout has sacrificed whatever gains U.S. troops have sought to achieve.
DOING THE JOB THEIR GOVERNMENT WON’T DO: Civilian defense groups on the rise in Germany. Of course, all the Right People are dismayed. But they never learn that the way to prevent this is for the authorities to do their freaking jobs. . . .
That said, if I were in Germany I’d be mounting a public harassment campaign at the responsible bureaucrats and politicians. I’d picket their homes, and make it impossible for them to show their faces without being screamed at as rapist-enablers.
The public discussion about affirmative consent seems to have mixed two quite different issues. Most criminal-law theorists would point out that there is a crucial difference between what they would call in legal jargon an ex ante rule of conduct — that is, telling people beforehand what the law requires of them — and an ex post principle of adjudication — setting the rules by which a violation of the rules of conduct is to be judged.
I think there is little dispute about the value of “yes means yes” as a rule of personal conduct understood beforehand by both parties; the only dispute is whether it is an appropriate standard to determine liability and punishment if those rules are violated. . . .
Modern American criminal law has almost always chosen to require not only proof of the harm — causing another’s death, or having intercourse when the partner is not in fact affirmatively agreeing — but also to require that there was some minimum level of culpability or blameworthiness in the defendant.
Indeed, it is this aspect of criminal law — its commitment to imposing liability only when there is sufficient personal blameworthiness — that has given it the moral prescriptive power that it has. The criminal law that punishes without regard to blame loses moral credibility with the community it governs and is discredited and ignored. A criminal law that earns moral credibility with the community is one that has the power to persuade people to internalize its norms.
Ironically, it is the reformers seeking to change existing norms — such as the norms of sexual consent on college campuses — who would most benefit from a criminal law that has earned moral credibility. It is their reform efforts that are most injured when the law’s credibility is damaged by using affirmative consent as a standard when determining guilt.
The weakness in this analysis is the assumption that the “reformers” care about justice.
“Bernie [Sanders] is speaking to a yearning that is deep and real,” Biden told CNN’s Gloria Borger. “And that is the absolute enormous concentration of wealth in a small group of people, with the middle class, now being shown, being left out.”
When Borger pointed out that, “Hillary’s been talking about that as well,” Biden was undeterred.
“It’s relatively new for Hillary to talk about that,” he said. “Hillary’s focus has been on other things up to now, and that’s been Bernie’s — nobody questions Bernie’s authenticity on those issues. . . . I think they question everybody’s who hasn’t been talking about it all along, but I think she’s come forward with some really thoughtful approaches to deal with the issue.”
You don’t say this sort of thing if you’re enthusiastic about Clinton being the Democratic nominee in 2016. Either the vice president wants to ensure that Sanders gets a fair shot at the nomination, or he’s itching to reverse his own decision not to run in 2016.
Related: “There’s a sweat-bead reunion on Hillary Clinton’s brow, and the minions are starting to mutter. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not this time. This time, there would be no hypnotic upstarts waiting patiently in the wings. This time, the bleak lessons of Iowa would have been learned and internalized. This time, the Clintonian personality would be calibrated to exquisite perfection. There would be challengers, of course. But they would be there to serve as a benign foil and to make the victories appear less regal. They weren’t supposed to be fundraising at a breakneck speed. They weren’t supposed to be leading in the early theaters of war. And they certainly weren’t supposed to be approaching national parity. That tragic play has been staged already; this one was to have a new and updated script.”
DIT DAH, DIT DAH DAH DIT, DIT DAH DAH DIT, DIT, DIT DAH, DIT DIT DIT, DIT, DAH DAH, DIT, DAH DIT, DAH: “Here’s how to sum up the Obama administration’s reaction to Iran’s seizure and release of our sailors: dit dah, dit dah dah dit, dit dah dah dit, dit, dit dah, dit dit dit, dit, dah dah, dit, dah dit, dah. We use that language in honor of Jeremiah Denton. When, as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, the admiral and future senator was marched in front of a newsreel camera and forced to testify to how well he was being treated, he blinked out the Morse code for t-o-r-t-u-r-e.”
Kaddie Abdul, “an IT data engineer working in Silicon Valley,” decided to drive four hours to a Trump rally in Nevada to show how racist “those people” are. She wore her Muslim garb, held her Koran, and waited for someone to attack her. No one did. A few people gave her an odd look, but nary a nibble.
Darn it.
Apparently the Guardian in Britain had paid for her gasoline, so she had to write something, so she wrote: “I went to a Trump rally in my hijab. His supporters aren’t just racist caricatures.”
Actually, she meant “just aren’t racist caricatures.”
The article is itself racist, portraying Trump supporters as a bunch of hick white people who want to kill Muslims.
That sort of racism is always acceptable, apparently. Plus:
But what she did was not dangerous. Going outside without a male escort in Saudi Arabia is dangerous for a woman. The only physical danger in driving to Nevada to troll Trumpkins was the drive itself — something she will not be able to do when she makes her pilgrimage to Mecca.
Trump supporters did not gang rape her because she was Muslim. They did not beat her because she was Muslim. They did not to a damned thing to her — and she should have known they would not. There are no thugs or bullies at these rallies. They are a fiction, just like the fiction that the Tea Party was racist.
RIP ALAN RICKMAN, star of beloved Christmas movie, Die Hard. co-star of Galaxy Quest, and the Harry Potter films. The London Daily Mail notes that Rickman died at age 69 “following his secret battle with cancer,” a sentence I’ve typed twice too often this week.
CHELSEA CLINTON GOES ON THE ATTACK; DEMOCRATS ASK WHY: “They note that Chelsea Clinton has mostly been used to highlight Hillary Clinton’s softer side as a mother and grandmother and say she seemed uncomfortable shedding her first daughter persona for the role of attack dog.”
Attack dog? Well, I’m glad I didn’t write that.
“The thing that tells you as much as anything about [the Clinton campaign’s] current state of mind is Chelsea going on the attack. It tells you everything you need to know,” said one Democratic strategist. “That this [challenge from Sanders] is real and they’ve got to be freaking out.”
And camp Clinton is freaking out: Chelsea’s claiming that Bernie “wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance,” without mentioning that his goal is to usher in single-payer healthcare, as Jim Geraghty writes:
But as flawed and dangerous as single-payer is, Sanders’ plan only “dismantles” Obamacare, CHIP, Medicare and private insurance to replace it with taxpayer-funded care for everybody. Chelsea’s pointing to only one-half of Sanders’ agenda in order to make it look like he wants to unplug Grandma from the respirator and snatch away Tiny Tim’s cane.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be stunned that Chelsea Clinton, former NBC News reporter under the tutelage of Brian Williams, is running around telling stories that are exaggerated to the point of falsehood. Alternately, maybe Chelsea inherited the shameless lying gene from both sides.
Geraghty notes the logical next escalation of the blue-on-blue war: “What happens when Bernie Sanders shoots back, and calls out Chelsea Clinton on this? ‘HOW DARE HE ATTACK A PREGNANT MOTHER!’”
COULD THERE REALLY BE THREE TIMES AS MANY SUNDAY CHURCHGOERS AS FOOTBALL WATCHERS? Turns out there are, at least if NFL data on its TV ratings and the Gallup Survey on church attendance can be believed. So why is utter ignorance about the most basic Christian beliefs espoused by millions of Americans so prevalent in the MSM? I humbly offer some thoughts here.
Thanks to Donald Trump, American elites are finally paying attention to blue-collar, white America. They do not like what they see. Racist. Bigoted. Irrational. Angry. How many times have you read or heard one or more of these words used to describe Trump’s followers? Whether they are the academic, media, and entertainment elites of the Left or the political and business elites of the Right, America’s self-appointed best and brightest uniformly view the passions unleashed by Trump as the modern-day equivalent of a medieval peasants’ revolt. And, like their medieval forebears, they mean to crush it.
That effort is both a fool’s errand for the country and a poisoned chalice for conservatives and Republicans. It is foolish because the reasons the peasants are revolting will not fade easily. Ignoring and ridiculing their concerns, the way European elites have done with their own electorates for most of the last two decades, will simply intensify the masses’ rage and ensure that their political spokesmen become more intransigent and radical. If you want an American version of Marine Le Pen tomorrow, ignore the legitimate concerns of blue-collar Americans today.
And it is a poisoned chalice for the Right because such a strategy requires a permanent informal coalition with the Left. Keeping blue-collar white Americans out of political power will result in exactly what Washington elites have wanted for years: a series of grand bargains that keep the status quo largely intact and the Democratic party in power. . . .
The constituency that is rallying to Trump is not fully conservative, but it shares more values with conservatives than do any of the other constituencies that could possibly be enticed to join our cause. It is thus imperative that conservatives understand what these fellow citizens want and find ways to make common cause with them where we can. . . .
I agree with Olsen’s basic thesis that the GOP establishment must consciously embrace and court blue collar workers, but the overall “us” (“true” conservatives) versus “them” (blue collar workers) tone of the piece seems to reinforce the notion that these groups are fundamentally distinct– a proposition of which I am not yet convinced.
It presupposes that there is a rigid definition of “true” conservatism that blue collar workers inherently do not embrace, such as Olsen’s notion that any “true” conservative would never support spending power-based entitlements such as Social Security or Medicare. In Olsen’s words:
Blue-collar whites are also more open to government action than many movement conservatives. For example, 87 percent of “Steadfast Conservatives,” Pew’s term for movement conservatives, think government is doing too much that should be left to individuals and businesses; only 44 percent of Hard-Pressed Skeptics agree. Sixty percent of Hard-Pressed Skeptics think government aid to the poor does more good than harm; only 10 percent of Steadfast Conservatives agree. Seventy-nine percent of Hard-Pressed Skeptics say that cuts to Social Security benefits should be off the table. Clearly a campaign based on cutting food stamps and reforming entitlements will not resonate with blue-collar whites.
I’m not so sure. Blue collar workers may well vigorously support “reforming entitlements” such as food stamps and Social Security (particularly the former) if the reform is phased in, offers commonsense incentives, and/or expands individual choice. Just because blue collar workers do not want to completely eliminate middle-class entitlements such as Social Security or Medicare (entitlements upon which they rely post-retirement) does not mean they are not “true” conservatives who would not support well-crafted reforms.
What Donald Trump has captured–and the GOPe still remarkably hasn’t yet figured out–is that these “Reagan Democrats” were lured away from the GOP post-Reagan, in part, by some of the moderate reforms embraced by Bill Clinton (e.g., welfare reform) and the simple fact that Clinton (himself a product of a blue collar upbringing) seemed like “one of them.”
Blue collar workers’ general fiscal conservatism, patriotism, and general cultural conservatism are “conservative” values that should, in theory, fit comfortably under the GOP umbrella. The intriguing question, to me, is why hasn’t the GOP understood this all along? Why and when did the GOPe decide to shun the backbone of America?
The GOPe’s elitist condescension, combined with the Obama Administration’s overt 8-year progressive bias towards fringe, non-white, non-blue collar issues, has created the 2016 presidential phenomenon and the voters’ hunger for a candidate who doesn’t embody either of these extremes.
Posted at by Elizabeth Price Foley at 2:56 pm
Link
For those of us who love comedy, one of the most delightful ironies of progressivism is how regressive it is, how mired in the past. While conservatives gather to discuss fresh reformist ideas on how to fight poverty and keep a free society afloat, all progressives ever do is reach into their Magic Box of Tomorrow and draw out the same sclerotic socialism that’s been poisoning the lives of nations since at least the 19th century.
How old and out of date is that, you ask. Well, whenever you point out to these seers of the future that not only is socialism a regressive notion, but it is also a notion that has failed utterly everywhere and every time it’s been tried, they immediately respond by pointing proudly to Europe.
Europe! Oh, sure! Where the Future is Born!
And where it’s been going to die since 1913. Read the whole thing.
FASTER, PLEASE: Non-Invasive Nerve Stimulator Tamps Down Brainwaves That Cause Migraines. “Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) raised the level of resistance to electrochemically triggered CSD threefold, according to the scientists. But the speed with which VNS acted is likely to give it a real advantage over today’s pharmaceuticals. CSD were suppressed a mere 30 minutes after stimulation, a ‘strikingly rapid onset of action compared to prophylactic agents, such as topiramate and valproate,’ Dr. Cenk Ayata, the assistant professor of neurology and neuroscience at Massachusetts General who led the research, said in a press release. Those drugs typically take several weeks to achieve comparable results. Ayata and colleagues published their findings in the journal Pain.”
I’ve never considered myself a single-issue voter. In fact, I’ve always despised the idea that someone would choose a candidate based on a single issue – especially if it was a wedge issue unlikely to be a major concern for a politician.
That said, it was difficult when I realized that on the issue I write most about, campus sexual assault, Socialist (excuse me, Independent) Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was more in line with my views than Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.
On Monday, Sanders told an audience at the Black and Brown Presidential Forum in Iowa that rape accusations on college campuses should be handled by law enforcement and not administrative bureaucracies, a sentiment I share. “Rape and assault is rape or assault whether it takes place on a campus or a dark street,” Sanders said. “If a student rapes another student it has got to be understood as a very serious crime, it has to get outside of the school and have a police investigation and that has to take place.” . . .
Rubio is the only GOP candidate that has seemingly taken a stance on this issue – and it is a bad one. He has co-sponsored a bill that codifies into law the overreach of the Education Department and ensures that accused students will not have a fair hearing. After the Campus Accountability and Safety Act was introduced in 2014, I sent questions to the sponsors of the bill asking about due process protections for accused students.
Rubio’s office was one of the few that responded. His spokesman told me: “This bill does not address this issue” when asked about due process.
Snookered by Schumer on immigration. Snookered by Gillibrand and McCaskill on the rights of college men. Or, worse — not snookered, but actually believing in this stuff.
DONALD TRUMP: You’re Damn Right I’m Angry, And You Should Be Too. Well, that’s basically his whole appeal, right? So calling him “angry” seems like a poor line of attack. Addressing his supporters’ concerns would seem to be a better one, but nobody seems to be picking up on that approach.
There was an irony at the heart of Chris Hughes’ brief stewardship of the New Republic, which, the Facebook mogul announced yesterday, is now up for sale again. Hughes appeared to have two goals at the magazine: First, push the once center-left opinion journal further to the hard left, especially on issues of identity politics. (The cover story of the first issue after the mass departure of the magazine’s longtime staff was an extended denunciation of the “old” New Republic‘s coverage of racial issues). The second goal was to turn the 100-year-old magazine, once understood by its owners and writers as a kind of “public trust,” into a ruthlessly profitable corporation—or, in an editor’s now infamous words, a “vertically integrated digital media company.”
We usually don’t associate left-wing politics with this kind of corporatism and consultant-speak. And yet, this is the outlook that increasingly characterizes America’s new class of left-leaning plutocrats, who are quite left-leaning on social issues, but also deeply immersed in the world of startups, “brands,” and “disruption.”
This tension between the magazine’s political outlook and its business strategy clearly wasn’t the only source of its failure—but it probably wasn’t irrelevant, either.
Also, Hughes is young and ignorant, and rich mostly because he was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard. Basically, an Ivy League lottery winner.
A jury of linguists, journalists and authors in Darmstadt have selected a term each year since 1991 which is omniscient in the press and often ungainly or unwelcome.
“Gutmensch” was selected because, in connection with the current refugee crisis in Germany, it defames “tolerance and helpfulness as naïve, dumb and worldly innocent, as having a helper syndrome or as moral imperialism,” the jury president, linguist Nina Janich, told the press.
* * * * * * * *
Last year’s non-word of the year was “Lügenpresse,” or “liar press.” The expression was popular at the time among supporters of the German anti-Islamization movement “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West,” or PEGIDA. PEGIDA used the term in its weekly rallies that started in October 2014, asserting that the mainstream media were liars and biased in their reporting about PEGIDA and issues that concern the movement.
QUAGMIRE WATCH: President loathed by half the country, who made questionable foreign policy decisions, oversaw an unprecedented expansion of government powers, and threatened to sic the IRS on his enemies decides to soften his image by declaring a war on cancer…
Geneva Overholser, who edited the Des Moines Register when the paper won a 1991 Pulitzer Prize for a series on rape, told the Washington Post that not naming accusers undermines attempts to remove the stigma of rape.
“[Withholding the accuser’s name] is a particular slice of silence that I believe has consistently undermined society’s attempts to deal effectively with rape,” Overholser said. “Nothing affects public opinion like real stories with real faces and names attached. Attribution brings accountability, a climate within which both empathy and credibility flourish.”
Overholser also said that not publishing the names of accusers hasn’t led to more reporting of sexual assault or a reduction in retaliation against accusers.
Sex crimes are the only crimes in which the victim/accuser’s name is withheld unless they give permission. Because of this — and the current media trend of dragging an accused person’s name through the mud before any evidence is presented — I would like to see no one’s name printed in these situations.
Time and time again, those whose accusations make the front page are vindicated — but not before their reputations are destroyed. Duke Lacrosse and Rolling Stone are just the most glaring examples of this, but there are other stories — both at colleges and in the broader public — where the accusation didn’t hold up to even slight scrutiny.
Speaking of Rolling Stone, it was in an article about that story in which Overholser made her comments. The Washington Post asked why the media haven’t named Jackie, the woman who told the magazine she was gang-raped at a fraternity party. Every aspect of her story was proven false, yet she is still known only as Jackie.
THIS EXPLAINS A LOT ABOUT THE SNAFU OTHERWISE KNOWN AS “THE DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS:” The government’s master agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees favors union bureaucrats over veterans in hiring. And when the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak “scraped” thousands of current VA job opening announcements, he found the reason why when vets are hired at VA they typically get mops, not management duties.
This is, as Eliza Doolittle told Freddie, “no time for a chat.” We don’t need elegant words, Republican John Kerry’s slavering all over us with diplospeak. We need action. And if that means there is blood on the tracks, so be it. From Paris to San Bernardino, 2015 was no normal year and with Cologne and now Djakarta, 2016 promises to be the same and more so. Let’s have a vigorous debate. Name-calling is even okay. I’ll be tuning in to watch the Indians fall. Next time there may only be three.
As Roger asks, “Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Carson, Christie, Bush, Kasich. Who will be left for next time?” Leave your thoughts as to the next to fall in the comments.
Major GOP donors and fundraisers are wondering whether they’re wasting their money on super-PACs.
They say they’re not ready to abandon the super-PACs, but they’re starting to look for ways to make them more effective during a presidential cycle that has challenged conventions about how to spend political donations.
GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s relatively cheap campaign — contrasted with the millions of dollars spent on behalf of Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Scott Walker and Rick Perry — has left donors, fundraisers and conservative leaders questioning the value of super-PACs, which got a boost from the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allowed independent groups to raise unlimited cash.
“People are upset about the Citizens United decision; people are upset about all this money flowing into politics, but at the end of the day it has no impact,” said New York financier Anthony Scaramucci, who was a national finance co-chair for Scott Walker’s presidential campaign before moving to raise funds for Bush when Walker quit the race.
“I mean, with the free media, or whatever the term is, when they allow Trump to go on to every TV station in America — if there’s evidence that PACs are so consequential, please explain it to me,” Scaramucci said.
John Jordan, a California winery owner who is running a super-PAC to support Marco Rubio’s bid, agrees.
“Despite all the talk about money in politics, we are entering an era where big money is less and less important,” said Jordan, who nonetheless spends millions on politics, largely through his own super-PACs.
Well, guys, it’s not like I didn’t give you some solid advice before this election cycle even started. But did you listen? Noooo. Think what that money could have done if it had been properly deployed.
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee is warning in a chilling new book that terrorists could easily hit Disney World, the Academy Awards and shopping centers like the Mall of America with killer biological attacks, killing thousands and sending the nation into a panic.
13 HOURS: “It’s clear that director Michael Bay has taken sides in the debate about what happened on the ground that night. Oh yes there was a ‘stand-down order’…The film depicts the men’s sense of abandonment over and over again.”
BREAKING: Several explosions heard in downtown Jakarta, casualties reported. “A massive explosion was seen in front of the U.N. office in the Indonesian capital Thursday and was accompanied by six other blasts, according to a U.N. official. Jeremy Douglas, a U.N. regional representative in Jakarta, tweeted there were at least six ‘bombings’ and then a ‘serious exchange of gunfire in downtown Jakarta.’ He said police are urging people to stay away from the windows.”
TOO BAD THEY WERE SO DAMN SEXY: Sex with Neanderthals May Explain Modern Allergies. “You may have to pump yourself full of Zyrtec just to step outside during allergy season because your ancestors couldn’t keep their hands off those sexy Neanderthals, suggests two new studies in the American Journal of Human Genetics. Neanderthals and a second now-extinct hominid—Denisovans—were living in Europe and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years before humans arrived and were likely well-adapted to the local pathogens, according to a press release. When humans showed up and started interbreeding, they took on some of the Neanderthal and Denisovan genes. One of the studies reports three genes having to do with ‘innate immunity’ in modern humans show more similarities to Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes than the rest.”
You know what they say: Until you’ve had ‘thal, you haven’t had it at all.
I can’t know from personal experience what it’s like to walk around as a woman in the Middle East or North Africa, but I’ve spent more than a decade of my life on and off in that part of the world and have had conversations with more than a thousand people, men and women alike. Women are unanimous here: Harassment in North Africa ranges from annoying to unspeakable while it’s virtually non-existent in Lebanon and Syria. I don’t know why. That’s just how it is.
“The worst part is that Egyptian men won’t back down when I tell them to leave me alone,” the Australian woman in Cairo added.
The Cologne police department says most of the offenders come from North Africa rather than Syria, which is exactly what we should expect.
“In a 2008 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights,” Mona Eltahawy writes in her book, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution. “More than 80 percent of Egyptian women said they’d experienced sexual harassment, and more than 60 percent of men admitted to harassing women. A 2013 UN survey reported that 99.3 percent of Egyptian women experience street sexual harassment. Men grope and sexually assault us, and yet we are blamed for it because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the wrong thing.”
Sexual assault in public is so pervasive in Egypt that the authorities ban men from some cars on the subway so women can get to work in the morning without being mauled.
Foreign women get it in Egypt, too, most infamously when CBS reporter Lara Logan was brutally assaulted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on the night the Egyptian army removed Hosni Mubarak from power. An enormous mob surrounded her, stripped her naked, sexually assaulted her and damn near killed her.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have given up on the 19th Century goal of civilizing the barbarians quite so quickly.
No seriously, considering what Top Scientists, Walter Cronkite, and Leonard Nimoy were predicting 40 years ago, that really is good news.
(By the way, there’s at least one scientist in that show who was caught on camera decades apart predicting both the coming ice age and the coming global warming, just to cover all his bets.)
REPORT: Statins May Help, Not Hinder, Heart Bypass Recovery. “People who are taking statin medications and need heart bypass surgery are often told to discontinue the drugs before and after surgery because of concerns about adverse effects. But that may not be a wise idea, a new review of studies has found. . . . Some of the studies found that statin use reduced the likelihood of irregular heart rhythms, including atrial fibrillation. Others found that statins reduced the incidence of stroke and heart attack and lowered the risk of postoperative kidney injuries. The exact mechanism is unclear, but cardiac surgery, especially those with prolonged anesthesia, significantly increases inflammation, and statins may help control it.”
In what many are panning as ludicrous, the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) has come out with a list of words/chants/actions that they have decided are both offensive and disrespectful to other students, players, and officials during athletic events.
Here are just a few of my favorites … but will give you the link so you can chose your own top five.
Singing the song “Na-Na-Na-Na/Na-Na-Na-Na/Hey-hey/Goodbye.”
“Booing of any kind” (keep in mind, this is at sporting events).
Waving arms or making movements or sudden noises in an attempt to distract an opponent” (Yes, you read that correctly; The Wave = Bad).
Chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A.”
Still, though, it sort of makes sense; as Obama noted in his State of the Union last night, America has solved all of its other problems, so we can finally begin the precision fine-tuning of language to avoid hurt feelings, micro-aggressions, and even micro-micro-aggressions. Which edition of the Newspeak Dictionary are we on these days?
AUSTRIA: Boom in demand for self-defence weapons. “The number of weapons permits issued in Vienna and Styria for pistols and revolvers has multiplied in recent months, a trend which is seen to have taken off after the terror attacks in Paris and in the wake of the increasing number of migrants and refugees entering Austria.”
In an email to staff on Wednesday, Anstey said that the decision to pull the plug on Al Jazeera America was “driven by the fact that our business model is simply not sustainable in an increasingly digital world, and because of the current global financial challenges.”
Al Jazeera America launched in 2013 after its Doha-based parent company bought Current TV from Al Gore and others for $500 million. The channel was billed as a more sober alternative to the rancor and sensationalism that typifies other cable news outlets.
“Viewers will see a news channel unlike the others, as our programming proves Al Jazeera America will air fact-based, unbiased and in-depth news,” the channel’s former CEO Ehab Al Shihabi said around the time of the launch.
The channel was simultaneously a beacon of hope and a subject of ridicule among members of the media. There was widespread surprise when the channel opted to keep its Arabic-sounding name. Rival executives had doubts that the channel’s staid brand of news would ever catch on.
Rank and file journalists, on the other hand, were pleased to see the new entrant into the crowded television news space.
If “Rank and file journalists” really were “pleased to see the new entrant into the crowded television news space,” it was because Al Jazeera America became the final redoubt for some industry old-timers, as Eliana Johnson of NRO wrote in her eye-opening article on the failed network in 2014:
In New York’s brutal TV-news world, Al Jazeera has become a warren of the displaced, a home of last resort for many anchors, reporters, and producers who have been fired, laid off, or otherwise discarded by better-known networks.
On air, former CBS News correspondent and CNN anchor Joie Chen now anchors AJA’s flagship broadcast, America Tonight; John Seigenthaler, whose NBC News contract was not renewed several years ago as a cost-saving measure, now delivers the channel’s 8 p.m. evening newscast; Antonia Mora, the former Good Morning America news reader, now reads to a profoundly smaller audience; David Shuster, who landed at Current TV after he was forced out of MSNBC, serves as an anchor; Soledad O’Brien, one of the first to go when Jeff Zucker took the reins at CNN, is one of AJA’s “special correspondents”; Sheila MacVicar, laid off by ABC News and then by CBS News, is a correspondent. As is Mike Viqueira, whom NBC News would never let off the weekend White House shift. Lisa Fletcher, laid off by ABC News in 2010, is an anchor.
AJA has scooped up the same sort of refugees to work behind the scenes. The senior vice president for news gathering, Marcy McGinnis, was teaching journalism at Stony Brook University when AJA came knocking, after being forced out of CBS News. David Doss, the longtime executive producer of CNN’s AC360, was unemployed before he started at AJA in July. The pattern holds all the way on down to the network’s social-media editor, Jared Keller, who was fired by Bloomberg after text messages surfaced in which he complained about his job. His next stop? Al Jazeera America.
The situation is particularly poignant for Jewish producers, some of whom had to choose between unemployment and relatively well-paying work for a channel whose parent network has exhibited virulent anti-Semitism. A cynical joke making the rounds of television Jewry refers to “Jews for Jazeera,” a subtle play, of course, on “Jews for Jesus.”
Which even the Orwellian CNN article above is forced to admit: “But from the beginning, Al Jazeera America has been beset by lousy ratings and internal strife.Two former employees filed lawsuits last year against the company with charges of anti-Semitism and sexism in the newsroom.”
Anti-Semitism and sexism from a Qatar-based TV channel? Allah forefend! On the other hand, at least we got to see, for a few years at least, a Mad TV sketch from 2004 finally come to life:
Exit quote from Iowahawk, who tweets, “As God is my witness, I thought Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad News would fly.”
One of the most promising developers of advanced nuclear power plants, the Canadian startup Terrestrial Energy, has landed $7 million in funding. Although the investment is small, it is an important signal that the private sector might back innovative nuclear reactors as the search for low- or no-carbon forms of power generation accelerates.
More than $1.3 billion in private capital has been invested in North American companies working on advanced nuclear reactor technologies, according to Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. But much of that money has gone to companies pursuing nuclear fusion, which is in a far earlier stage than technologies that employ fission, the conventional form of nuclear power (see “Finally, Fusion Takes Small Steps Toward Reality”).
In addition to the money Terrestrial Energy has raised from undisclosed investors, Transatomic Power, a nuclear startup founded by a pair of MIT PhDs, has raised $6.3 million from investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Nevertheless, many new nuclear startups are still scrambling to fund their research and development programs. Terrestrial’s funding is “good news for everyone,” says Transatomic founder Leslie Dewan, “because it provides market validation for the sector as a whole.”
Since 1846 the law school at the University of Louisville has provided nonpartisan space for individuals to teach, discuss, and research matters of law and public policy. Despite the thousands of partisans who’ve walked its halls, the law school as an institution has remained nonpartisan, preserving its neutrality, and refusing to embrace an ideological or political identity.
Unfortunately, this long run of institutional neutrality seems headed for an abrupt end. Promotional materials for the law school now proclaim its institutional commitment to “progressive values” and “social justice.” Incoming students and faculty are told that, when it comes to the big issues of the day, the law school takes the “progressive” side.
The plan, in short, is to give the state-funded law school an “ideological brand.” (The Interim dean says it will help fundraising and student recruitment.) In 2014, the law faculty voted — over strong objection — to commit the institution to “social justice.” Now we’re at it again, seeking to brand ourselves “the nation’s first compassionate law school.”
These branding projects are misguided. For starters, the chosen brands are divisive, alienating about half the people in the country. While terms like “social justice” and “compassionate” might seem “inclusive” to you, tens of millions of Americans disagree. People hear these terms in a legal or political context and think “liberal orthodoxy.” . . .
Even those who benefit from our divisive brands (e.g., “progressive” faculty and students) can appreciate the costs to higher education. Universities function as a marketplace of ideas, where conventional ideas are tested, year in and year out, against unconventional ones. Ideological brands like “social justice” and “compassionate” obstruct this critical process. They do so by formally prioritizing liberal orthodoxy in an array of university matters (including research, hiring, and student scholarships).
Read the whole thing, and expect more of this kind of pushback. And more scrutiny from outside funders. Meanwhile, prospective students who aren’t full-tilt leftists should probably look elsewhere.
