The Drive-By Media can be depended upon to fill up their pages and minutes of air time with hand-wringing about the fear of an ‘anti-Muslim backlash’ every time Muslims go nuts and start killing people.
But the much-feared backlash never seems to happen.
But wait! The Post tells us there is an “intense backlash.” But the opening paragraphs don’t describe a backlash, they describe the fear of one by an activist. Where is the actual backlash?
By dint of much digging around, eventually a news outlet will discover an instance of someone being rude to a Muslim, or shouting at hin/her, or maybe even throwing a punch — you know, the sort of thing that a white person would encounter in any Black Lives Matter demonstration. Pretty wimpy for an ‘intense backlash’.
Even more toxic than what? The FBI’s latest statistics, for 2014, show a total of 1,140 religion-based hate crimes in the U.S. Only 16% (182) were directed against Muslims, about one for every 44,000 Muslims living in the U.S.
Perennially, the ‘anti-Muslim backlash’ is the dog that doesn’t bark in the night. And yet the Drive-By Media seem to assume that it’s there, just because they wish it to be there.
Actually, Muslims are more likely to perpetrate hate crimes than to be victimized by them. In 2014, more than half of the religion-based hate crimes–58%–were directed against Jews, and in many instances were perpetrated by Muslims. Does the United States currently have a “toxic climate” for Jews? Apparently so.
Not that you’ll know it by paying attention to the Drive-By Media.
The Guardian, in Britain, is a tediously tendentious left-wing rag, whose writing is superior to The Daily Worker but whose political agenda — and lack of intellectual rigor — are exactly the same.
Does the massive foreign and national corporate buying of urban buildings and land that took off after the 2008 crisis signal an emergent new phase in major cities? From mid-2013 to mid-2014, corporate buying of existing properties exceeded $600bn (£395bn) in the top 100 recipient cities, and $1trillion a year later – and this figure includes only major acquisitions (eg. a minimum of $5m in the case of New York City).
Oh, noes! Things are being bought! Things are being owned! The sky is falling!
Well, not really. Because of land-use restrictions, urban property, especially urban core property, has skyrocketed in price to the point where only corporations, or extremely wealthy individuals, can buy it. Why this comes as a surprise to a ‘journalist’ escapes me; I have no trouble explaining it to a 10-year-old. (Of course, if extremely wealthy individuals were doing this buying instead of corporations, I suspect that the Guardian would still think that the sky is falling.)
I want to examine the details of this large corporate investment surge, and why it matters.
Prediction: Details will be few and far between, and airy generalities will rule. Like this one:
Cities are the spaces where those without power get to make a history and a culture, thereby making their powerlessness complex.
Actually, they go there to get jobs and support themselves and raise families. But nobody could do a Studies major in that.
If the current large-scale buying continues, we will lose this type of making that has given our cities their cosmopolitanism.
People are actually paid to write this stuff. If this guy wants to talk about ‘people without power’, he ought to look to small farmers and small businessmen, who have the least power in our society. But no — they aren’t fashionable, and the Guardian is all about The Narrative.
The rest is simply more of the same. Picking it apart is left as an exercise for the reader, not involving not much exercise at all.
Donald Trump’s insistence that he saw one or more television news stories about Muslims in Jersey City celebrating the collapse of the Twin Towers in September 11 provoked outrage on the left. Among others, the Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, awarded Trump four Pinocchios, claiming that his assertion was “outrageous.” I wrote about the controversy here, agreeing that Trump exaggerated–there was no evidence that thousands of Muslims celebrated–but that Kessler was also wrong in dogmatically denying that there was any evidence of any such reaction to the 9/11 attacks. The controversy has continued from there, as Trump has doggedly insisted that he saw a television report that was the basis for his statement.
Now, someone has found the TV news report that Trump probably was talking about. It is from a local station in New York and was broadcast on September 16, 2001. The report confirms that Muslims were observed celebrating the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, and says that eight were arrested. This is consistent with newspaper accounts that were published at the time, including one in the Washington Post:
No apology will be coming from the Drive-By Media, of course.
Yes, that’s what the LA Times is calling it. Not Islamic terrorism. A rampage.
Meanwhile, we now know that the two (not three) suspects were a devoutly religious Muslim of Pakistani origin, Syed Rizwan Farook, and his Saudi Arabian bride. He allegedly met the Saudi Arabian woman, Tashfeen Malik, online, and went to Saudi Arabia to meet her in person, and then they were married.
The mainstream media, which is trying to pin the terrorism label on the crazy guy who shot people at Planned Parenthood, is trying to assign this obvious case of terrorism to workplace violence.
Yeah, workplace violence like the jihadist Nidal Hassan shooting up Fort Hood.
This tells you everything you need to know about the Narrative.
The only ‘stronger background check’ that would have prevented the San Bernardino shooting would be one that barred Muslims from buying guns or explosives. But, of course, that’s not what he meant; after all, that would be ‘profiling’.
I’ve often wondered how they distinguish a ‘background check’ from ‘profiling’. I suspect it has to do with skin color.
The National Women’s Studies Association is the newest scholarly group to back the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.
What does ‘Women’s Studies’ have to do with Israel? Is Israel a place where women are significantly oppressed? (What about the surrounding Arab states? Can we expect a similar boycott? I’m sorry, I can’t say that with a straight face….)
“We’re basically redefining feminism and putting solidarity with Palestine into that definition of what it means to be a feminist,” said Sharoni, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. “Or, to put it differently, the vote of almost 90 percent of the members of the National Women’s Studies Association in support of this resolution underscores the fact that boycott, divestment and sanctions can be or is seen by members of our association as an example of expressing feminist solidarity.”
In other words, ‘women’s studies’ aren’t about studies at all, but merely a vehicle for pushing cultural Marxism and lining up behind the ‘progressive’ Narrative.
As James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal points out, when Islamic terrorists strike, we get immediate assurances of the peaceableness of Islam. When an oddball drifter attacks a Planned Parenthood clinic, we hear about the collective guilt of pro-lifers.
The following video features clips from yesterday’s demonstration by global warming activists in Ottawa. In addition to their leftist knee-jerk racism — why are Indians touted as having a unique moral authority on “climate change”? — they are volunteering to fight for the right of their comrades in the Frozen North to remain frozen.
Slate, of course, let’s us know the Party Line on the Planned Parenthood situation.
Tendentious sub-head: Forget Syria. The most dangerous religious extremists are migrants from North and South Carolina.
Let’s see: Just because there are dangerous people already in the United States is somehow an argument for our bringing in more from overseas. I’m sure it makes sense to the Bright People at Slate, but I’m afraid it says non sequitur to me.
From Wikipedia: “William Saletan, a Jewish native of Texas, graduated from Swarthmore College in 1987.” He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, so he apparently escaped Texas as soon as he could. I rather doubt he’s ever lived in North or South Carolina, so I guess that makes him an expert…?
Oh, and in 2004 he wrote a book — Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. No doubt that explains why abortion is now illegal in the U.S. Oh, wait….
This guy appears to be a poster child for the ‘progressive’ ability to live in a fantasy world and write about it as if it were reality. I wish I could get a job like that.
David Dayen, contributing writer for Salon, is shocked, shocked that Google is spreading its money around to buy a little influence.
I’m thinking that David Dayen doesn’t get out much.
I’m willing to bet that David Dayen is too young to remember the days when Microsoft was too apolitical to have a lobbying operation in Washington, D.C., and as a result got bogged down for TEN YEARS in a bogus ‘anti-trust’ suit prompted by people who were less pristine and more government-savvy. (Microsoft has since learned better.) Say what you will about Google, they’re not stupid, and they can learn from the mistakes of others.
(I’m waiting for the day when David Dayen, or some other squeaky clean do-gooder at Salon, does a similar expose regarding, say, the Clinton Foundation. I am not, however, willing to hold my breath waiting for it.)
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Google’s Insidious Shadow Lobbying: How the Internet Giant Is Bankrolling Friendly Academics—and Skirting Federal Investigations
The weekend before last, Donald Trump egged on a frenzied crowd of sweaty Alabama rednecks as they beat, kicked, and bludgeoned a peaceful Black Lives Matter activist, while last Monday night five peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors in Minneapolis were shot by a group of armed white supremacists who came looking for trouble and fired wantonly into the crowd. This is all part of the ongoing terror and violence that our white supremacist society routinely rains down on noble, longsuffering black Americans.
Of course that’s all bullshit. But that’s the impression you’d get from reading most media accounts.
Let’s “deconstruct” these real-life events, shall we?
On Sunday, a 20-year-old Israeli woman was stabbed to death, another Israeli was rammed by a car and attacked with a knife and a third was assaulted by a knife-wielding teen affiliated with the Islamic Jihad terror group.
All three assailants were killed in the course of their attacks.
But the headline to the Times’ story about Sunday’s attacks did away with cause and effect, muddled victim and aggressor: “1 Israeli, 3 Palestinians Killed in Attacks in West Bank.” The online headline was later changed, but the print headline Monday morning was equally obtuse: “West Bank Faces Spate of Assaults That Kill 4.” The “West Bank” faced nothing. It was Israelis who faced assaults.
Oh, good grief. The New Yorker is trying to give the New York Times a run for its money as the most pathetic attempt to put The Onion out of business….
There’s a lot of competition these days for that space, unwitting though it might be.
As has been noted, funny how climate change doesn’t seem to cause Lutherans, Hindus, Jews, or Zoroastrians to become terrorists or start wars, though as we have seen climate change caused Hitler and Nazism, so there’s that. If the climate-Syrian war connection is “uncontroversial,” it’s because it is . . . completely idiotic. Is it really the case that if it were four degrees cooler in Syria there’d be no civil war? Gosh, why are we wasting all of this time on peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians? Just send air conditioners and tankers full of Evian to Gaza.
The New York Times editorial page (insert guffaws here) has just discovered, a few days after the brightest and best at Princeton, what conservatives have known for decades: Woodrow Wilson was a racist! They still haven’t been able to connect the dots between Wilson’s racism and his progressive ideology, nor grasp the irony that Wilson was merely aiming to provide blacks with a “safe space,” as we say nowadays. We know liberals are slow learners, but this is embarrassing, unless the Times is planning to announce tomorrow that it has in fact decided to compete with The Onion.
Fisking the New York Times is both easy and fun, so far be it from me to point out that the editorial board that endorsed Woodrow Wilson for President is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the same as the editorial board that condemns him today. However, since the New York Times shows no reluctance in ignoring such historical changes when it chooses to smear some venerable American institution or movement, turnabout is certainly fair play.
This is a sobering week for women’s liberation in the UK. Tomorrow, our Chancellor will announce further austerity measures on the UN International Day to End Violence Against Women. This coincidence would be darkly funny if it wasn’t so devastating. Make no mistake: austerity is state violence against women.
I am not making this up.
We use words like ‘cut’ and ‘slash’ to describe austerity, so how can we deny that it is economic violence? And when it is women’s services at the receiving end of such brutal assaults, austerity becomes state violence against women that reinforces interpersonal violence against women. What better way to assist perpetrators than make it almost impossible for their victims to receive the support they need to flee?
The staff of the Onion must be jumping out of windows; how could you possibly parody this stuff?
The editorial contains the inevitable slash at the greed and deceptiveness of Wall Street, but that part feels tired and pro forma.Even the NYT can’t fail to observe that this dynamic involves failures of governance on the part of the trustees of public pension funds. Either the trustees are stupid and credulous, or they are “willfully blind”—they choose to ignore the risks and odds because they need to throw Hail Marys to get the kind of returns they need to meet their unrealistically aggressive growth targets.
This is another way of saying that public sector unions—and state and municipal governments—have made promises to workers about their pensions without setting aside enough money to fulfill those promises when they came due. As a result, pension managers are forced into the casinos to make risky bets. But because they tend to be among the stupidest players in the financial market, they all too often end up getting hosed.
Funny how that works.
Over and over again, the answer is large but unfunded pension promises. Union leaders can posture to their members about all the lovely bacon they are bringing home, and politicians can posture to the taxpayers about how fiscally prudent they have been. The game depends on the unions shutting up about the underfunding of the pensions. If the politicians had to fund the pensions at the real level of these promises, they couldn’t make the promises.
Oops.
The Gray Lady, to her credit, realizes that something terrible has happened, and she is doing what she does best: sounding the alarm. But she is still doing her utmost to pretend that there is no real cause for this terrible, multi-trillion dollar hole in the pension system. She sees no systemic flaw in the way that the modern progressive city and state are both designed, no structural defect that produces these terrible consequences in cities as different as Houston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and in states ranging from tiny Rhode Island to giant California, New York, and Illinois.
That would require … oh, what was the word … oh, yeah, journalism.
My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
After an initial burst of interest spurred by CBS’s big-bucks saturation advertising campaign for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the show’s ratings have tanked and it is now running third in late night behind NBC’s Jimmy Fallon and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who rarely has managed second place before.
The reason? A survey by the Hollywood Reporter found that conservative viewers are turning off Colbert in droves. Nearly twice as many Republicans are watching Kimmel as Colbert, who has turned “Late Night” into a sort of wannabe MSNBC show.
The pattern is familiar: When a Democrat is the guest, Colbert is Barbara Walters. When a Republican is on, he turns into Tim Russert.
Gosh, whoever could have predicted that?
I, for one, have never found Colbert all that funny. He gets laughs from the people who are delighted by snide treatment of the sort of people that Colbert gives snide treatment to.
I wrote earlier today about the liberal media attacking Donald Trump’s statement that on 9/11, “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims in Jersey City celebrated the successful terrorist attacks. Another Democrat who got into the act was the Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler. He addressed Trump’s claim here, and, calling it “outrageous,” awarded it four Pinocchios.
…
This assertion is astonishing, because it means that Kessler is ignorant–or pretends to be–of his own newspaper’s reporting. As I wrote in the earlier post, the Washington Post, on September 18, 2001, wrote:
In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.
Somebody at the Washington Post lied? Say it ain’t so!
Did Kessler know about his own paper’s September 18, 2001 news story or not? If he didn’t, he is a lousy fact checker. If he did, his column was deceitful, to put it politely. So far, Kessler has refused to answer that question. I he does respond, I will publish an update. In the meantime, I award Kessler four Pinocchios.
One of the weirder trends in American discourse these days is the decline in any sense of how long ago specific dates in the past were when asserting theories of historical causality. Black students at Princeton are oppressed by Woodrow Wilson, while Genius T. Coates blames everything on FDR’s FHA.
America may be obliged, for reasons unrelated to the inscription on the Statue of Liberty or holiday season humanitarianism, to accept Syrian refugees. But there’s a right way to talk about this—and a wrong way—irrespective of one’s position.
…
When it comes to partisan cheap shots, however, President Obama was in a class all own. For three straight days he lashed out at Republicans who expressed opposition to accepting Syrian refugees, and did so while on foreign soil.
…
“When you start seeing individuals in position of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land,” he added, “that feeds the [ISIS] narrative.”
Notwithstanding the fact that Obama’s story line has taken hold in the mainstream media, this is precisely backward. Syrian Christians are fleeing their home country because they were ticketed for extermination. “Genocide” is the word you’d hope administration officials would use, not “narrative.” What Obama is really doing is demonizing political dissent. His default response to anyone who says his foreign policy is a disaster is to label them racist or un-American.
Obama doesn’t give a shit about refugees, he’s reaching for any stick he can grasp with with to beat Republicans.
Sanders’s democratic socialism isn’t socialism. He disclaims public ownership of the means of production. Sanders’s socialism is Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights, only more so. It’s the welfare state above all, in which income and wealth are confiscated from some and redistributed to others in the interest of “equality” and “security” and all things good.
Well, that’s all right, then.
Whereas Roosevelt connected welfare rights with the Bill of Rights, Sanders connects “democratic socialism” to Roosevelt. In Sanders’s manifesto, as among Democrats generally, everything is up to date if the date is 1944. Only the animus is really of the moment.
They’ve gone about as furr as they kin go … not really.
To invoke the marketing cliché, in his speech Sanders “rebrands” Democratic Party orthodoxy as “democratic socialism.” Democrats prefer the camo.
Dear Reader (Including those of you stunned by the news that Charlie Sheen has a sexually transmitted disease. Not since Jim J. Bullock announced he was gay have I been more shocked),
If you Google “Christian terrorism,” you’re probably a jackass to begin with. But if you do — bidden not by your own drive to jackassery but by the natural curiosity inspired by this “news”letter — you’ll find lots of left-wing trollery about how the worst terrorist attacks on American soil have been committed by Christians. Much of it is tendentious, question-begging twaddle. But I really don’t want to waste a lot of time on whether Tim McVeigh was a Christian or not (he really wasn’t).
What I find interesting is that many of the same people who clutch their pearls at the mere suggestion that Islamic terrorism has anything to do with — oh, what’s the word again? — oh right: Islam, seem to have no problem making the case that “Christian terrorism” is like a real thing. Remember how so many liberals loved — loved — Obama’s sophomoric and insidious tirade about not getting on our “high horses” about ISIS’s atrocities in the here and now because medieval Christians did bad things a thousand years ago? They never seem to think that argument through. Leaving out the ass-aching stupidity of the comparison, it actually concedes the very point Obama never wants to concede. By laying the barbaric sins of Christians a thousand years ago at the feet of Christians today, he implicitly tags Muslims with the barbarism committed in their name today.
Now, I see no need to wade too deeply into the theology here, but I think I am on very solid ground when I say that Islamic terrorism draws more easily and deeply from the Koran than Tim McVeigh drew from the Christian Bible. Of course, you’re free to disagree. In a free society, everybody has the right to be wrong in their opinions. (But don’t tell anyone at Yale that.)
Modern politics grew more coherent, if not rational, when I realized that discussions like terrorism or the Syrian refugee crisis are all hormone-flinging directed at the flesh. Your Progressive overlords think you’re stupid, and will attempt to herd you with guilt, fear, and bribes to Do What They Say.
Conversely, there is shag-all interest in rational discussion, analysis, and a dispassionate effort at finding an optimal overall solution. “They never seem to think that argument through” because #ShutUp. There is power to be protected here, and allowing any sort of intellectual exchange is a direct threat to that power.
Obama is what you get when kids grow up without a father on hand to smack the silly notions out of their heads when necessary.
According to a report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), one of the world’s most influential conservationist groups, global warming is now the single biggest threat to the long-term surival of the polar bear as a species.
Of course, the chances of an organization named ‘International Union for the Conservation of Nature’ releasing a report that says polar bears are find and ‘climate change’ no big deal are — let me hit the calculator quickly — let’s see — less than zero.
Farid Esack, a former professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard University, blamed the West for the Paris attacks in a post on his Facebook page, calling them “your chickens come home to roost.”
By this logic, Negroes are to blame for being lynched by the KKK.
Esack, who is now a professor at University of Johannesburg and a prominent activist in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, has previously spoken at interfaith events aimed at mutual understanding.
Sounds as if he’s a little unclear on the concept of ‘mutual understanding.’
These are the people teaching the future Ruling Class. Be very afraid.
On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton unloaded on Mr. Sanders, charging that he wants to raise taxes on the middle class to pay for his single-payer health care plan, whereby the government would replace private insurance companies and pay for almost all health care costs.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t favor raising taxes on the middle class? Hillary Clinton doesn’t favor single-payer health care? Oh, wait, she’s lying again … never mind.
Of course, I’ve often written about this scam here. What the Crust mean by ‘wealthy should pay more in taxes’ is that ordinary income tax rates ought to be raised; of course, they don’t get their wealth through ordinary income, so it won’t touch them.
And even if it did, their focus is on income taxes rather than wealth taxes; nobody dares mention the latter, because the wrong ox would get gored. (Pun intended.) If you’ve already got a hundred million dollars, it’s no skin off your wallet if the government taxes income at 75% — you’ve got enough to live in comfort for the next five generations. All it means is that there are less grubby entrepreneurs and farmers and contractors getting in your way when you want to book a table at the French Laundry or buy a condo on Central Park West.
In the case of the Clintons, their actual power comes through the financial leverage of their foundation(s), and so even if they didn’t have two dimes to rub together they’d still be getting their butts licked by people who want ‘funding’ via the sacred foundation grant. (‘Funding’ is a fine Crustian term for ‘money I get to spend that I don’t have to work for’, like a teenager’s allowance or food stamps.)
Read it. And watch the video of your tax dollars at work … sort of.
Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes made the rounds on the Sunday morning gabfests yesterday. The burden of Rhodes’s comments as he made the rounds was to explicate Obama’s declaration on Thursday that ISIS had been “contained” just before ISIS demonstrated its reach with the massacres it committed in Paris on Friday. Rhodes danced as fast as he can to explain that Obama didn’t mean that ISIS was “contained.”
And those Syrian refugees Obama is admitting to the United States? Don’t worry, they are fully “vetted.” Who ya gonna believe, political hack Ben Rhodes or FBI Director James Comey?
Jonathan Butler played high-school football at Omaha Central High, where he won a state championship, and earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Mizzou, the newspaper reports. He is working toward a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy.
He is a member of a prominent Omaha family. The newspaper says that Butler’s father is Eric L. Butler, executive vice president for sales and marketing for the Union Pacific Railroad. His 2014 compensation was $8.4 million, according to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Guess he isn’t really an oppressed black dude from the ‘hood after all.
… which everyone will ignore because they do that all the time anyway, so what’s different?
Perhaps College Republicans could return the favor by tweeting accusations of fascism during the next Democrite ‘debate’ (sorry, to have a debate you have to have more than one set of opinions on display) — but it’s just easier to post the video afterwards.
A graduate student at the University of Missouri has begun a hunger strike that he says will not end until either he dies or university president Tim Wolfe is fired.
Jonathan Butler, who describes himself as a “liberation activist” on his Twitter profile, sent a letter to the UM Board of Curators on Monday morning, laying down the terms of the strike.
I’m sure they trembled in their boots. Well, Birkenstocks.
“During this hunger strike, I will not consume any food or nutritional sustenance at the expense of my health until either Tim Wolfe is removed from office or my internal organs fail and my life is lost,” Butler claims
Sounds like a plan. What’s not to like? Unfortunately I’m sure he’s going to keep blathering during the process, so there’s no rose without a thorn.
In the publicly-posted letter, Jonathan Butler blames President Wolfe—whom he referred to as “decaying flesh”—for “a slew of racist, sexist, homophobic, etc[.] incidents” since Wolfe took office in 2012.
Butler, who is receiving a master’s in education, according to his LinkedIn profile, lists the university’s decision to cancel its contract with Planned Parenthood as one of those “racist, sexist, homophobic, etc[.] incidents.”
I guess he’s worried about getting pregnant and not being able to afford a you-know-what. You know what student budgets are like.
Butler also claims that the loss of health insurance for graduate students—the result of an IRS ruling on Obamacare—is another example of what he says is the failure of the university to create “a safe and inclusive place” for “marginalized/underrepresented students.”
Well, he was the kind of guy Obamacare was aimed at. Seems to me his beef is with Obama, not Wolfe.
Several students have publicly voiced their support for Butler on Twitter, telling him to “remain strong” and declaring themselves in “solidarity” with him.
Although not, of course, to the extent of going on a hunger strike as well. You know how it is — an expression of solidarity is sufficient, without, like, actually doing anything. We’re with you, brother. [burp]
Butler previously led a group of black students in forming a human chain to block president Wolfe’s car at the university’s homecoming parade in October, as part of the students stated goal of new “inclusive policies” at the university, “as well as an overall shift toward a safer and more inclusive campus environment.”
Human chains to block people’s cars are an obvious step toward a safer and more inclusive campus environment, don’t you know.
The university has promised to require diversity training for all six thousand incoming freshmen, and already allows students to turn in their peers and professors for so-called “bias incidents.”
That worked so well for the old Soviet Union that it has quickly become a fashion in this country. We long to get rid of that dead weight Obama and have a leader like Putin that will get things done.
Despite these concessions, however, Butler and other students continue to call for Wolfe’s job. In addition to Butler’s hunger strike, Missouri students have launched a Change.org petition addressed to Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, demanding that he fire president Wolfe.
Let the world tremble before a Change.org petition; since Jay Nixon is a Democrat, this actually might work.
No trace of Politically-Incorrect-Cooties must be allowed to exist.
If these guys are so offended by the seal, they ought to go to a different law school. C’mon, put your tuition where your mouth is. (Never happen, of course, they need that Harvard Law School ticket stub.)
The family of a Chicago man gunned down during a robbery attempt are calling for his shooter, a concealed weapon permit-holder, to be prosecuted for the shooting. The Washington Post is helping to further that effort, suggesting the failed robbery could even be a Halloween prank gone horribly wrong.
Police say Saturday night Reginald Gildersleeve walked into the small bodega Agencia Mexicana while wearing a mask and announced a holdup, whipping out what appeared to be gun. Moments later he was gunned down by an unnamed patron. It was later discovered that Gildersleeve’s gun was a paintball gun.
Think of it as evolution in action.
But now, Gildersleeve’s family is calling for charges to be levied, saying that the habitual criminal didn’t deserve to die. Igbinosa Oronsaye, Gildersleeve’s stepson, told The Chicago Tribune the shooter overreacted in shooting multiple times.
“Some people don’t actually know how to use guns,” Oronsaye said. “They go to firing ranges, but it’s not the same as a bullet going into someone’s body, it’s not the same as a bullet going into flesh. They should be able to wound first, kill next. He didn’t deserve to get shot multiple times.”
Uh, yes he did.
The family’s argument is being pushed along by The Washington Post, where writer Michael Miller says the shooting is “raising questions.” Miller wrote up Gildersleeve’s death Monday morning in a manner that seems intended to frame Gildersleeve in the best possible light. Miller, for instance, describes the shooting as “mysterious” because it “occurred on Halloween and involved a man in a mask with a fake gun,” although robberies with fake guns happen all the time.
From Hillary Clinton to Reginald Guildersleeve, the Washington Post never met a criminal it didn’t like.
Biden goes out of his way to assert that Trump’s opposition to illegal immigration is an “attack on all immigrants.” Why lie? Anyone who is paying attention knows that Trump’s position on immigration is addressed to illegal immigrants. Why efface the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants?
Biden is utterly representative of Democrats on this point. It could be that Biden and his fellow Democrats such as Hillary Clinton see no distinction between legal and illegal immigration. It could be that Biden sees illegal immigrants as a core constituency of the Democratic Party. It could be that Biden thinks it is in the Democrats’ interest to foment confusion among voters on this point. It could be that the man is a natural born demagogue. It could be all of the above.
In the wake of the CNBC debate debacle, Joe Scarborough went on an epic rant on liberal media bias on today’s Morning Joe. He summed things up this way, in challenging the panel: “you can’t do it and nobody here can do it:name the single Republican that has hosted a Sunday show, that has been an anchor of a news network for the big three networks over the past 50 years: you can not do it.”
So what if he stole your stuff? Doesn’t make him a bad person, does it?
In the site’s Crime and Safety area, where residents share strategies for fighting crime, Malkia Cyril of S.F. suggests that her neighbors stop using the label because it shows lack of empathy and understanding.
Cyril pointed out that instead of calling the thief who took the bicycle from your garage a criminal, you could be more respectful and call him or her “the person who stole my bicycle.”
“I [suggest] that people who commit property crimes are human and deserved to be referred to in terms that acknowledge that,” Cyril, who’s the executive director of the Center for Media Justice in Oakland, writes in the thread.
Anthropology is one of those fields where politics trumps science more often than not. Not as bad as economics, of course, but then it doesn’t, like economics, purport to be a science.
Another feminist intellectual finds herself in the crosshairs of the safe-spacers: Germaine Greer, a feminist academic and author, is scheduled to give a lecture at Cardiff University in Wales next month, but students are circulating a petition demanding the cancellation of the talk.
That’s because Greer, a self-proclaimed Marxist anarchist who opposes hierarchy and capitalism, is nevertheless out of step with the modern left on transgender issues: she does not recognize “men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it” as women, according to her 1999 book, The Whole Woman.
Here’s the narrative: mass killers are almost always white men. The Daily Kos recently published a piece with this headline: “How come we can’t tell the truth about the White Mass Killer Problem?” It asks, “Just what the fracking hell is the matter with all these mass-murdering white people?” Certainly mass killers are almost always men. But they’re not almost always white men. Overrepresented? Perhaps. But almost always white? No.
Chris Harper Mercer walked into Oregon’s Umpqua Community College and killed nine people, wounding nine more. On a dating site, Mercer, whose father is white and mother is black, referred to himself as “mixed race.”
If Obama is black, this guy is black.
As to non-white mass killers, Selwyn Duke, writing in American Thinker, cited a Mother Jones Magazine compilation of data on mass shootings from 1982 through, at the time of Duke’s writing, September 16, 2013 — after the Washington Navy Yard murders. Duke wrote:
“Of the last 20 mass killings of that period, 9 were perpetrated by non-whites.
“That would be 45 percent, which exceeds non-whites’ 37 percent share of the population.
Don’t expect to read that in the MSM.
The media are often accused — by the eternally offended crowd — of intentionally “undermining the image of blacks.” In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The media lean over backwards to avoid any hint of anti-black sentiment. In the case of Mercer, a man with one black parent and one white parent, the narrative of mass-killers-are-almost-always-white caused the media great difficulty. But they tried their best.
After all, Rachel Dolezal, the white former NAACP chapter head who pretended to be black, says we’re whatever race we think we are.
It’s a funny thing: papers like the Times are always telling us about the torrent of financial support for the GOP, yet in virtually every contested election, more money is spent on behalf of the Democrat. Moreover, with respect to this election cycle, the Times never considers the possibility that more money is flowing into the GOP side because its candidates are more numerous, more diverse and more appealing. The Democrats have nothing on offer but elderly, warmed-over leftists.
