Month: November 2018

From Steven Hayward:

David French:

“…Our social-media companies face a series of fateful choices. If they choose to be primarily platforms for human expression, they’ll empower many millions of voices that they despise. They’ll facilitate outcomes they may loathe. If, by contrast, they choose to prioritize progressive ideology and progressive outcomes, they’ll limit their reach, their influence, and their wealth. They’ll open themselves up to aggressive competition.

What’s the lesson here? When you empower people, you find that they have their own will. When you seek to control that will, you find that they’ll rebel. The idealism of tech is dead. Human nature killed it. Nobody can have it all…”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/social-media-idealism-collides-with-human-nature/

A quick refresher course to remind us of previous global warming/cooling scares.

DESPITE A RACIAL-SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN, Andrew Gillum did worse with black voters than Bill Nelson. Maybe naked racial appeals don’t play as well? Or maybe they were offset by DeSantis’ school-choice support.

IT’S AS IF ALL THE GREEN PANACEAS ARE FAILURES: Driving electric cars won’t make a dent in global carbon emissions, and may even increase pollution levels.

You know what works? Nuclear power and fracking.

FLASHBACK: Border Agents Pepper Spray Rock-Throwing Migrant Crowd — Under Obama. Nobody was shrieking in outrage then, because Lightworker.

This is trouble. Russia is acting up because it can close to home. 

“…Russia fired on and then seized three Ukrainian navy ships in the Black Sea close to Crimea on Sunday, injuring six crew members, according to Ukraine, marking a sharp spike in tensions between the two countries and raising fears of escalation.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page, Ukraine’s navy said that ships belonging to Russia’s FSB border service had opened fire on two small armored artillery boats and a tug accompanying them. It said the Russian fire had immobilized the two artillery boats and that Russian special forces had then boarded and seized them, injuring six Ukrainian sailors…”

https://abcnews.go.com/International/

We should shut down all the border points of entry until Mexico can get these folks under control. Take a look at the video below to get some idea of what happened. Remember, the open borders media first told us there was no caravan, then we heard Trump made it up as election fodder, and now we have video of a mob of hooligans trying to breach our border. The mob through rocks at US Border Patrol Agents.

Conrad Black:

“…The controversy over acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker is the inane death rattle of the Democratic addiction to the idea, pushed by the 90 percent-hostile press, that President Trump must remain handcuffed to an endless special counsel inquiry. This conviction persists, despite Robert Mueller’s failure—and the failure of his Justice Department predecessors—to turn up any reason for their investigations in two years’ worth of frenzied efforts to find something damaging about Trump.

Astounding fatuities abound at the U.S. Capitol. Departing senator Jeff Flake, as he finally takes his permanent imitation of a righteous chipmunk back to Arizona, portentously announced he would not support administration judicial nominees or a new attorney general without legislated guarantees of the safety of the Mueller inquiry. Such guarantees have no validity, as even Flake must realize, as the president can fire any employee of the executive branch, or otherwise condense his jurisdiction.

Flake, who snatched Barry Goldwater’s title Conscience of a Conservative for his own book, and was harangued by interlopers in a Capitol elevator to request the Judiciary Committee hear Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s scarcely plausible accuser, seems to be trying for a NeverTrump Indian summer. It won’t happen.

In fact, there is no reason to believe the president now pays any attention to Mueller. Trump is about to send written responses to his questions and there is no visible likelihood that Mueller is going to say or do anything that discommodes Trump at all. The sun is finally rising over the fact that there was never any excuse for this absurd investigation.

Trump-Russian collusion was the most gigantic canard in American political history. The Steele dossier on which the claim was largely based is the dirtiest trick in American political history. Now it is time to put what has recently been called “compartmentalization” into high gear. This is the ability to have a high level of investigative activity contemporaneous with a productive legislative schedule in the Congress…”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/20/get-ready-for-high-gear-compartmentalization/

ABE GREENWALD:

“…A hard problem. The CEO of Google thinks that the question of whether or not to permit minority opinions on social media is a hard problem. Let’s hope Big Tech works that one out wisely because if the thumbs-down side of the debate wins, the likes of Nicholas Lewis and Climate Etc. would be lumped in with anti-vaxxers and banished from the digital public square. So when faulty, tendentious science appears in places like Nature, it will go uncorrected—by design. Pinchai’s understanding of climate-change skepticism as propaganda and misinformation is itself an example of the propaganda and misinformation that dominates public discourse.

Many in the liberal mainstream have determined that their convictions rest on a priori knowledge. That is, knowledge that doesn’t rely on evidence or experience. They know things because these things are true. They sometimes apply this to claims of sexual assault, and they usually apply it to climate change. Keeting, for example, says that he’s certain of the Nature study’s findings even though those findings are uncertain. In actual fact, such matters belong to the realm of a posteriori knowledge. We need evidence to determine whether they are true or false. But if mainstream institutions can pathologize dissent, they’ll never need to provide evidence for the convictions they peddle.

It’s true that the U.S. Constitution protects citizens against totalitarian government. But for all the Founders’ stunning foresight, they couldn’t have envisioned a world in which non-government parties would close in on a cultural monopoly of public debate. The forces of obscurantism are making an end-run around our brilliantly conceived checks and balances and appealing to Big Tech to shut down dissent. Constitutional guardrails constrain demagogic presidents. But CEOs, social-media behemoths, and academic institutions are free to dictate the terms of reality as they see fit. Against them, we have people like Nicholas Lewis. That’s about it…”

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/culture-civilization/science/when-the-scientific-consensus-is-corrected-by-a-skeptic/

Michael Barone:

“…Family elders fret about getting through Thanksgiving and the holidays without violent arguments, and more parents than ever say they’d be upset if their children marry across political lines.

But are things really so bad? Last week’s ceremonies commemorating the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I — or, rather, the Armistice that stopped the fighting on the Western Front but not farther east — suggest that they could be a lot worse, and they have been within the memory of some people only recently departed.

In many ways, today’s troubles look like miniature versions of the woes of the 20th century…

But the threats to legitimacy of established governance were much greater and more destructive 100 years ago. As strange as it may seem to 21st century readers, before World War I European hereditary monarchs, who to varying degrees made government policy, were a widely respected legitimizing force. Allegiance to a ruling family mostly overrode ethnic loyalties.

The Great War put an end to that. The Romanoff dynasty in Russia fell before the Armistice, replaced after civil warfare by the murderous Communist regime for 70 long years. The German Kaiser, Queen Victoria’s oldest grandchild, was ousted in November 1918, as was the Habsburg monarch of Austria-Hungary, whose predecessor Franz Josef reigned for 68 years.

Dynasties were not replaced by stable democracies. Hitler maneuvered into power in Weimar Germany, and his Nazis took control of the multiple nations carved out of Austria-Hungary between 1938 and 1941. The defeat of Hitler was followed by America’s Cold War with its wartime ally, the Soviet Union.

These struggles, gigantic in stature, grave with dangers, dwarf the unpleasant but not existential struggles of our own time. As Steven Pinker argues in The Better Angeles of Our Nature, we live — and mostly thrive — in a far less violent world than our ancestors did 100 years ago. Happy Thanksgiving…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/amid-your-complaints-a-reason-to-give-thanks

Liz Sheld:

“…I don’t know if these sniveling, entitled brats think they are going to scoot in to Congress and take power away from dusty antiques like Nanny Pelosi, but if you come at the queen you better kill zer because you are going to end up on the House Toilet Paper committee. That’s right, those old white people control who gets on the committees and you whippersnappers aren’t going to get squat. You aren’t going to get anything done or get your hyphenated name on any legislation. You will be controlled unless you get in line.

This is just hilarious:

A fight broke out in a closed-door meeting of House Democrats over climate change as a powerful veteran lawmaker fought with freshman star Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members-elect over the creation of a special panel for the issue.

New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, incoming chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee — backed by a number of other committee members — slammed the creation of the new climate panel, according to multiple sources in the room. Pallone argued that his committee and other existing panels within the House could take on the issue aggressively.

But Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Rep.-elect Joe Neguse (Colo.) and some of the other progressive incoming lawmakers fought back, saying they ran on the issue and needed to do it. Ocasio-Cortez earlier this week pushed for a “Green New Deal” as she backed more than 200 young protesters at House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office.

“…LOL. Yeah, good luck fighting the power structure. It’s so refreshing to watch this happen on the left after seeing it happen so many times on the right. Ten bucks Ocasio-Cortez ends up on the Ag. committee, her constituents would just love that…”

https://pjmedia.com/blog/liveblogevent/live-blog-122/entry-246007/

Jim Treacher:

“…Throughout the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation debacle, anybody who presumed the man was innocent until proven guilty in the court of public opinion was branded a “rape apologist” by angry feminists and other Democrats. We were supposed to take the accusations at face value, even though there was absolutely no evidence to support them. The mere presence of the accusations was enough to decide the matter. Guilty until proven innocent, that was the new standard.

One man who did a lot to promote that point of view was cable-news fixture and purported attorney Michael Avenatti. He trotted out a woman named Julie Swetnick to accuse Kavanaugh of being part of some sort of gang-rape ring. Her accusation was completely unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, but it was good enough for the people who wanted to bring down Kavanaugh by any means necessary. And her attorney insisted we believe the tale, because it was told by a woman. If you’re skeptical of a woman’s accusation, that means you hate women. That’s what we were told

Avenatti is singing a different tune today, isn’t he?…”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/avenatti-schadenfreude