“Hey, it’s three days before Christmas! How about some light, uplifting content?
Sorry, this is what I have instead: Shoe0nHead dissecting the “MAPS community,” AKA “pedophiles who hang out on Tumblr” (and increasingly Twitter).
However, pace Shoe, the gay community has a long history of tolerating pedophiles among its ranks. NAMBLA was a member of the International Lesbian and Gay Association until 1994, when ties were severed due to political pressure. (And this bullshit isn’t helping her case either.)
Chinese hackers are breaching Navy contractors to steal everything from ship-maintenance data to missile plans, officials and experts said, triggering a top-to-bottom review of cyber vulnerabilities.
A series of incidents in the past 18 months has pointed out the service’s weaknesses, highlighting what some officials have described as some of the most debilitating cyber campaigns linked to Beijing.
Cyberattacks affect all branches of the armed forces but contractors for the Navy and the Air Force are viewed as choice targets for hackers seeking advanced military technology, officials said.
Navy contractors have suffered especially troubling breaches over the past year, one U.S. official said.
The data allegedly stolen from Navy contractors and subcontractors often is highly sensitive, classified information about advanced military technology, according to U.S. officials and security researchers. The victims have included large contractors as well as small ones, some of which are seen as lacking the resources to invest in securing their networks.
One major breach of a Navy contractor, reported in June, involved the theft of secret plans to build a supersonic anti-ship missile planned for use by American submarines, according to officials. The hackers targeted an unidentified company under contract with the Navy’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I.
The hackers have also targeted universities with military research labs that develop advanced technology for use by the Navy or other service branches, according to analysis conducted by cyber firms as well as people familiar with the matter.
While Brooklyn is known for liberal silos such as Park Slope and Williamsburg, the Brooklyn I’d known as a child was politically diverse. A number of my former classmates and colleagues remain Republicans. And some of them have come to my aid at the darkest, most tragic times in my life. Many are still my friends. They are police officers, nurses and combat veterans; they are Jews, immigrants, Asians, Latinos and African-Americans. Some would vote for Donald Trump: Conservative Jews who liked his pro-Israel stance; Wall Street workers who liked his business background; rank-and-file police who wanted to stick it to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; visible minorities who liked his “America First” rhetoric, and imagined that he’d bring back secure manufacturing jobs. These promises may have been empty and dishonest. But they resonated with a lot of people, not all of them “troglodytes.”
I also witnessed something else that alarmed me. The charges of Russian collusion against Trump’s campaign—while being a completely legitimate (and ongoing) political concern—were curdling into Russophobic hysteria among some members of the New York literary caste.
“I think Russians have been at the root of our discord for years,” Daniel announced at one point. “I think they own the government and the NRA.…They are the true enemy…Seriously, #russia, fuck you.” Caught up in these negative reveries, he would lapse into Swiftian absurdism, declaring at one point, “I hope we deport every single one of you motherfuckers back to Russia where you’ll live in gulags.” Eventually, Twitter deleted Daniel’s account after he allegedly posted threatening tweets against other users.
On another occasion, after I refused to discuss my Soviet immigration experience via Facebook and suggested we talk in person instead, the daughter of a renowned American novelist told me to “honestly fuck off. Go translate media monitoring kits for Trump… How did you all get into our country? Jesus Christ…You are a great reason why we need immigration reform now.”
As a New York writer, I’m supposed to be reflexively hostile to Trump voters—a political breed that often is caricatured as a bunch of racist Appalachian hillbillies. But because of what I do for a living, and who my friends are, I’ve learned that Trump’s enemies can be every bit as Manichean and hysterical as Trump’s supporters.
Americans are largely against the country becoming more politically correct.
Fifty-two percent of Americans, including a majority of independents, said they are against the country becoming more politically correct and are upset that there are too many things people can’t say anymore. About a third said they are in favor of the country becoming more politically correct and like when people are being more sensitive in their comments about others.
That’s a big warning sign for Democrats heading into the 2020 primaries when cultural sensitivity has become such a defining issue with the progressive base.
Drones shutdown Gatwick airport. When they find the asshole responsible, instead of trying him, they should just turn him over to the people whose flights he’s delayed…
“A prominent ‘Republican’ women’s political action committee that regularly receives national media attention for its criticisms of President Donald Trump and the GOP is bankrolled by three liberal billionaire donors and activists, Federal Election Commission filings show.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
This is not correct. While Hajin itself has just been taken, a core of Islamic State fighters still remains in the remainder of the Hajin pocket:
If President Trump actually means it, this withdrawal is probably some 4-8 weeks premature if the goal is to crush the last remnants of the Islamic State and stabilize SDF territory. Maybe we can let Syria crush the remaining Islamic State remnants, and maybe we can’t. Will we be leaving the Kurds enough weapons and supplies to stand up for themselves against an emboldened Syria, Russia and Turkey? It’s unclear that we will.
Note that the phrase “returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign” leaves a lot of wiggle room. There may well remain a small troop contingent to support SDF forces and direct coalition air power based in Iraq, where some 5,000 U.S. troops are still supporting Operation Inherent Resolve. Also, the British governemnt noted: “Much remains to be done and we must not lose sight of the threat they (ISIS) pose…. (but) as the United States has made clear, these developments in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign.” The French still have a hand in as well.
This comes two days after the Trump-skeptical David French called Trump’s previous policy in Syria both wise and unconstitutional. “The Trump administration is doing the right thing the wrong way, and that matters. The failure to follow the constitutional process means that American forces are in harm’s way without the necessary congressional debate and the necessary congressional approval.”
Cue Bunk Moreland:
Assuming it is a complete and almost immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria, I view President Trump’s move with some skepticism, and suspect that it is slightly premature. Clearly we need to exit Syria at some point, probably sooner rather than later, but I’d prefer Trump to wait just long enough (again, another four weeks) to make sure the Islamic State holds no significant territory upon which to claim the legitimacy of its caliphate. I fear we’re inviting more instability by leaving slightly too early.
Even as the gilets jaunes were ruining the holiday season for the French capital’s richest consumers and most deluxe emporia, a whole different set of protesters tried to disrupt the metropolis’s high-culture scene. On Sunday evening, a mob of two to three hundred migrants, asylum seekers, and illegal aliens, mostly of African origin, stormed the Comédie Française, where a performance of Victor Hugo’s play Lucrezia Borgia was underway. Their goal was reportedly to compel, or convince, the deputy manager of the legendary theater to arrange an appointment for them with Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner, and thereby help them to secure residency documents. An odd approach, to say the least, but maybe this sort of thing makes more sense in France, where high culture, after all, rules. In any event, the mob was successfully repelled, first by the theater guards, then by a large cohort of gendarmes who arrived on the scene with a celerity that one does not immediately associate with French cops. But of course the police in every country have their own priorities: while British bobbies, for example, are quicker to check out reports of online Islamophobia than of Muslim gang rape, it would only make sense for their Gallic counterparts to be more concerned about productions of Victor Hugo dramas in the first arrondisement than about honor killings outside the Périphérique.
Snip.
I began this article by suggesting that it’s getting hard to keep track of these demonstrations in France. In fact, when you come right down to it, the whole thing is really pretty simple. On one side you’ve got these mobs of immigrants, most of whom have no business being in France in the first place, but who, instead of keeping a low profile and showing some gratitude for what the French state has already given them, have a breathtaking sense of entitlement that makes them feel free to charge the very temples of French culture and issue arrogant demands. On the other side, you have humble French workers, most of them from the provinces, who have seen their wages stagnate, in large part because of the mass influx of competitive immigrant labor, and seen their taxes soar, in large part because of the government’s need to fund ballooning social-welfare benefits for immigrants who choose not to work.
During the last couple of years, more and more commentators have suggested that America is splitting into two countries — one composed of immigrants and favored identity groups and their politically correct cultural-elite allies and the other of disgruntled red-state patriots who feel used, neglected, betrayed, and fed up — and that the country is inevitably headed for civil war. That may or may not be an exaggeration. But one thing is clear: a very similar split has long been taking shape — and is even more pronounced — in Western Europe, where the immigrant tide is higher and its impact on the daily lives of ordinary natives even more severe. It’s scarcely a surprise that mass demos motivated by these concerns are making their debut in France, where public protest is the national pastime, but no one should be surprised if large-scale revolts by both the invaders and the invaded begin to be weekly fare in other Western European countries, too. After all, the pressure is mounting all around, and eventually something’s got to give.
Claire Berlinksi also saw two different groups: Orderly middle class protestors against the tax hike, and antifa-types who came to explicitly do violence:
People at the Charles de Gaulle Étoile saw something else entirely. There, the police were physically overwhelmed by about 5,000 Gilets Jaunes who had come explicitly prepared to do violence. About 200 demonstrators showed their ID and allowed police to search them before they entered a security zone on the Champs-Elysées, but the rest refused to play by the rules. From about 8 am, hostile crowds of Gilets Jaunes emerged, in large numbers, from all the avenues around the Arc de Triomphe, trying to push their way onto the Champs-Elysées. The police were physically overpowered because so many of them were protecting the Champs-Elysées and the perimeter around the area where government buildings are concentrated. They were overrun. There were no cops behind the rioters to stop them from burning cars on the other avenues around the Étoile.
The rioter demographics were surprising. They were mainly aged 30-40, the police reported—a bit old for rioting, you’d think. They were “socially well-inserted” into the movement, but unlike the majority of the protesters, they had come with the goal of breaking and smashing things, rejecting the authority of the state and its symbols as savagely as they could. Of the 378 people taken into custody on Saturday, only 33 were minors. Most were rural men. The security services had drastically underestimated the number of violent protesters who would arrive and where they would be. It was immediately clear that this represented a massive police intelligence failure. The Elysée called a crisis meeting. Reports leaked to the press that the failure to anticipate the size of the violent and radicalized contingent of Gilet Jaunes was of a magnitude that “could lead to a deep reform of the Paris police headquarters,” as one television channel put it.
But it isn’t hard to understand how this mistake was made. Most people’s contact with the movement, including the police’s, was like mine—again, most seem to be peaceful, sympathetic people, respectful of authority, and simply too old for that kind of mayhem. What kind of 40-year-old guy from a rural farm comes to Paris carrying a gas mask and a makeshift weapon to desecrate the Arc de Triomphe? I sure wouldn’t have guessed there were so many of them, either.
Macron, who suddenly became head of state at the age of 39, first needed to develop his authority. And he did so with a clear strategy, setting out doing so with single-minded determination, seeking to develop charisma through images and symbols, and to carry out his revolution through shrewd argumentation. He put himself at the epicenter of French politics. As a candidate, he was alone. And he remained so as president. But this over-personalization had its price. Macron’s system relied on the complete centralization of power in the hands of the president and of a few intellectually gifted advisors, who sometimes send out text messages at 3 a.m., as Macron does himself. Macron’s IQ-absolutism was successful in his first year. The furthest-reaching job-market reforms in recent French history, which he instituted in fall of 2017, didn’t even lead to a general strike, as had been feared. Macron loosened the rules for firing employees and broke up the rigid wage-negotiation system. He simultaneously lowered the budget deficit below the 3-percent mark for the first time since 2007. He even modernized the sacrosanct French secondary-school diploma, known as the baccalauréat. Emmanuel Macron has already reformed his country more profoundly than all the presidents before him — at least since Mitterrand, who implemented an important wave of modernization starting in 1983.
Macron is proud of his reforms. Rightly so. He believes these reforms will bring growth back to France. Rightly so. He also believes that new growth in France will repair the social imbalances in the country. Rightly so. But Macron is forgetting about the span of time required between reform, growth and social justice. Many French don’t want to wait. They want results. Immediately. The yellow vests don’t have a face, but they have charisma. And they are united in anger. They want a revolution and they want more net income. They don’t care what this might mean economically for their highly indebted country. They loathe the self-proclaimed revolutionary at the top, his aloof reliance on symbols, his know-it-all revolutionary rationality. Although the Élysée’s arguments are technocratically coherent, the gilets jaunes confront them with brutal simplicity: If you abolish the wealth tax but raise the price of diesel by six cents per liter, you are an enemy of the people.
For years I’d hear that David Icke was using shape-shifting reptoids as a codeword for Jews, and I’d always go “Nah, he’s just a complete lunatic who truly believes shape-shifting reptoids run the world! They’re not a code-word for anything.”
So, is Icke anti-Semitic? Well, here are some other things that he says in the book:
The Talmud is “among the most appallingly racist documents on the planet.”
B’nai Brith, the world’s oldest Jewish service organization, was behind the slave trade (an anti-Semitic canard popularized by Louis Farrakhan) and controls the Ku Klux Klan: “B’nai B’rith means ‘Sons of the Alliance’ (Ed: Actually, ‘Children of the Covenant’) and was established in 1843. Many of its speakers openly supported slavery during the American Civil War and it covertly supports and controls the Ku Klux Klan.”
Racist far-right groups are actually Jewish fronts. “In Britain,” he writes, “I am told by an extremely reliable source very close to the intelligence organisations that the ‘far Right’ group, Combat 18, is a front for the sinister Anti-Defamation League, the United States and of the ‘Israeli’/Rothschild secret service, Mossad. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has been operating in Britain and Europe since at least 1991 and its role is to brand as anti-Semitic anyone who is getting close to the truth of what is going on. What better way to discredit an investigator than to have a ‘far Right’ group like Combat 18 to praise them?” (The “18” in “Combat 18” refers to the first and eighth letters of the alphabet: A and H, for Adolf Hitler.)
Jews are behind anti-Semitic attacks: “If you really want to discredit someone, you arrange for anti-Jewish or anti-whatever events such as the smashing of graves, assaults on people, even a terrorist bomb in the extreme. You then point the finger at your target person or group. You say they are either directly responsible or ‘incited’ the actions by what they are writing and saying.”
Etc.
Up until this time, I never read David Icke’s books, because that would involve reading David Icke’s books. But given those excerpts, it appears that he’s both a complete lunatic and an antisemite. Good to know. Having read small doses of Icke over the years, it may simply be that there’s no conspiracy theory he won’t believe in. He seems that credulous.
(Note: The piece resulted from the author reading a New York Times Book Review interview with Alice Walker, in which she expresses her belief in Icke’s work, something I’ve covered before in the other blog.)
Here’s a pretty important piece from an ex-radical about how embracing social justice warrior politics brings the radical nothing but misery:
When I became an anarchist I was 18, depressed, anxious, and ready to save the world. I moved in with other anarchists and worked at a vegetarian co-op cafe. I protested against student tuition, prison privatization, and pipeline extensions. I had lawyer’s numbers sharpied on my ankle and I assisted friends who were pepper-sprayed at demos. I tabled zines, lived with my “chosen family,” and performed slam poems about the end of the world. While my radical community was deconstructing gender, monogamy, and mental health, we lived and breathed concepts and tools like call-outs, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, privilege theory, and rape culture.
What is a radical community? For the purposes of this article, I will define it as a community that shares both an ideology of complete dissatisfaction with existing society due to its oppressive nature and a desire to radically alter or destroy that society because it cannot be redeemed by its own means. I eventually fell out with my own radical community. The ideology and the people within it had left me a burned and disillusioned wreck. As I deprogrammed, I watched a diluted version of my radical ideology explode out of academia and become fashionable: I watched the Left become woke.
Snip.
Unfortunately, toxicity in radical communities is not a bug. It is a feature. The ideology and norms of radicalism have evolved to produce toxic, paranoid, depressed subjects. What follows is a picture of what happens in communities that are passionately, sincerely, radically woke, as seen from the perspective of an apostate.
Commentators have accurately noted how social justice seems to take the form of a religion. This captures the meaning and fulfilment I found in protests and occupations. It also captures how, outside of these harrowing festivals, everyday life in radical communities is mundane but pious. As a radical activist, much of my time was devoted to proselytizing. Non-anarchists were like pagans to be converted through zines and wheatpasted posters rather than by Bible and baptism. When non-radicals listened to my assertions that nazis deserved death, that all life had devolved into spectacle, and that monogamy was a capitalist social construct, they were probably bewildered instead of enticed.
Instead of developing a relationship to God and a recognition of one’s own imperfection, we wanted our non-anarchist families and friends to develop their “analysis” and recognize their complicity in the evil of capitalism. These non-anarchist friends grew increasingly sparse the longer I was an anarchist. They didn’t see how terrible the world was, and they used problematic language that revealed hopelessly bad politics. Frustrated with them, I retreated further and further into the grey echo-chamber of my “chosen family.”
Trent Eady says of his own radicalism in Montreal, “When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues.” When my friends and I did have theoretical disagreements, they tended towards the purely strategic or to philosophical minutiae. Are cops human? If we pay attention to the few white nationalists in town, will that stir them up? Is polyamory queer, or privileged?
Deep and sincere engagement with opposing points of view is out of the question. Radicalism is like a clan too suspicious of outsiders to abandon cousin marriage, and, like incestuous offspring, radicalism’s intellectual offspring accumulate genetic load. Narrow theories must perform increasingly convoluted explanations of the world. For example, Montgomery and Bergman describe Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s use of the term “Empire,” in their book of the same name, as both a miasma that “accumulates and spreads sadness” and an anthropomorphized figure that “works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.”
No worldview maps reality perfectly. But when a worldview encounters discordant knowledge, it can either evolve to accommodate it, or it can treat it as a threat to the worldview’s integrity. If a worldview treats all discordant knowledge as threat, then it is an ideology. Its adherents learn to see themselves as guardians rather than seekers of the truth. The practical consequences of such a worldview can be devastating.
When I became an anarchist, I was a depressed and anxious teenager, in search of answers. Radicalism explained that these were not manageable issues with biological and lifestyle factors, they were the result of living in capitalist alienation. For, as Kelsey Cham C notes, “This whole world is based on fucking misery” and “In capitalist systems, we’re not meant to feel joy.” Radicalism not only finds that all oppressions intersect, but so does all suffering. The force that causes depression is the same that causes war, domestic abuse, and racism. By accepting this framework, I surrendered to an external locus of control. Personal agency in such a model is laughable. And then, when I became an even less happy and less strong person over the years as an anarchist, I had an explanation on hand.
Snip.
Escape from the paradigm of suspicion is hindered by kafkatrapping: the idea that opposition to the radical viewpoint proves the radical viewpoint. Minorities who question it have internalized their oppression, and privileged individuals who question it prove their guilt. The only thing radicals are not suspicious of is the need for relentless suspicion. As Haidt and Greg Lukianoff write of similar norms on campuses, “If someone wanted to create an environment of perpetual anger and intergroup conflict, this would be an effective way to do it.”
Radical communities select for particular personality types. They attract deeply compassionate people, especially young people attuned to the suffering inherent to existence. They attract hurt people, looking for an explanation for the pain they’ve endured. And both of these derive meaning for that suffering by attributing it to the force that they now dedicate themselves to opposing. They are no longer purely a victim, but an underdog.
However, radical communities also attract people looking for an excuse to be violent illegalists. And the surplus of vulnerable and compassionate people attracts sadists and abusers ready to exploit them. The only gatekeeping that goes on in radical communities is that of language and passion—if you can rail against capitalism in woke language, you’re in.
Every group of people has some mixture of stable, vulnerable, and predatory individuals. That radicals have a poor mix does not doom them. However, radicals also dismiss longstanding norms that would protect them, in favour of experimental norms. They are built with the best intentions and are aimed at solving real problems. But intentions do not matter if one does not consider incentives and human nature.
Abusers thrive in radical communities because radical norms are fragile and exploitable. A culture of freewheeling drug and alcohol use creates situations predators are waiting to exploit. A cultural fetishization of violence provides cover for violent and unstable people. The practice of public “call-outs” is used for power-plays far more often than for constructive feedback. Radicals value responding to claims of harm with compassion and belief. But abusers exploit this the way children exploit parents and teachers—crybullying becomes a way of punishing opponents or prey. While norms such as “believe claimed victims” are important in families and close friendships where trust and accountability are real, they become weapons in amorphous communities.
One particular practice illustrates this well. The accountability process is a subcultural institution whereby survivors can make demands of perpetrators and the community must hold them accountable. Radicals are hesitant to report abusers and rapists to the police, for fear of subjecting comrades to the prison system. But turning victims into judge and jury and shared friends into executioners is a recipe for injustice that satisfies no one. And in light of the instant truth-value given to claims of abuse, accountability processes are an oddly perfect weapon for actual abusers. As one writer for the zine the Broken Teapot says, “The past few years I have watched with horror as the language of accountability became an easy front for a new generation of emotional manipulators. It’s been used to perfect a new kind of predatory maverick—the one schooled in the language of sensitivity—using the illusion of accountability as community currency.”
Snip.
If an individual wants to end suffering, she should think hard about why she’s joined communities that glamorize violence, vengeance, and anti-intellectualism. Having left that scene, I am amazed at how much effort we put into making the world a more painful and difficult place than it is in service of a post-revolutionary utopia.
I can already tell that this post is going to be one of my go-to replies when a social justice warrior says something incredibly stupid on Twitter.
The answer is “probably not,” but not for lack of trying.
WASHINGTON — The FBI said today that a 78-year-old man currently imprisoned in Texas has confessed to committing 90 murders across the country from 1970 to 2005.
FBI analysts are working with federal, state and local agencies — including the Texas Rangers — to try to match Samuel Little’s confessions to cold cases.
If his confessions pan out, Little would be among the most prolific serial killers in American history.
Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was convicted of 49 murders but confessed to 71, and is suspected of committing more than 90.
Some suspect that Ted Bundy’s death toll might exceed 100; he confessed to killing three dozen women and was executed in 1989.
Little, originally from Ohio, has a long criminal history including drug charges, assault, shoplifting, breaking and entering, and solicitation. In the early 1980s, he escaped indictment in Mississippi and conviction in Florida on charges of killing women. He was arrested at a Kentucky homeless shelter on a drug charge in 2012 and his DNA was matched to three unsolved murders — all women beaten and strangled to death — in Los Angeles from 1987-89. The former competitive boxer was convicted in 2014 and sent to prison for life.
Based on the positive match to the L.A. murders, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program “found a case out of Odessa, Texas, that sounded very much like him, and we could place him passing through the area around the same time,” said ViCAP crime analyst Christina Palazzolo.
This past spring, Little, eager for a prison transfer, was happy to talk with investigators. Ticking off victims by city and state, he said he had killed 90 women. Though he wasn’t good at remembering dates, he offered other details such as the car he was driving at the time and even sketched drawings of his victims.
So far, the FBI has confirmed 34 cases tied to Little; he was extradited to Texas to face charges in the Odessa murder. Many cases are pending confirmation, while other claims have been uncorroborated, the FBI said. Challenges for investigators, including Little’s trouble with dates, include his choice of victims — often prostitutes and drug addicts — and his frequent moves. Little is also in poor health.
Little fits the loser/drifter profile of Henry Lee Lucas and Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramierez.
Caveat: After being convicted for life, Little wouldn’t be the first killer to confess to numerous killings with an eye toward getting better food and lodgings, and many believe Henry Lee Lucas’ confessions to multiple serial killings was bogus.
You also run into thorny definitional problems for the term “serial killer”: Do you count every death to every member of the Philadelphia Poison Gang (estimated murder toll: 114)? Do you count killer nurse Orville Lynn Majors, suspected of as many as 130 murders?
The budget busting, premium-hiking monster that is ObamaCare may finally be slain:
A judge ruled Friday evening that Obamacare is unconstitutional, putting the future of the federal healthcare law in jeopardy.
The decision, issued by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in the Northern District of Texas — a George W. Bush appointee, is likely to face an appeal to the Fifth Circuit. Obamacare will remain in place pending appeal .
The suit in the case, Texas v. Azar, was brought by 20 Republican state officials, who have asked that all of Obamacare be thrown out as a consequence of the new tax law, which zeroed out a penalty on the uninsured, known as the “individual mandate.” The officials argued that the penalty was central to making the rest of the law work, and that without it, the rest should crumble.
O’Connor appeared to sympathize with this argument in his opinion. He explained that he believed Congress would not have enacted Obamacare in the first place, with its various rules and taxes, without the mandate, and that the regulatory framework was intended to work together.
“Congress stated many times unequivocally — through enacted text signed by the president — that the individual mandate is ‘essential’ to the ACA,” he wrote of the Affordable Care Act, the formal name for Obamacare. “And this essentiality, the ACA’s text makes clear, means the mandate must work ‘together with the other provisions’ for the Act to function as intended.”
O’Connor was talking about the Obama administration’s argument that the mandate could not be severed from the rest of the law in a 2012 Supreme Court case. In his opinion, he elaborated on the different ways that Obamacare had been challenged in court and in Congress.
“It is like watching a slow game of Jenga, each party poking at a different provision to see if the ACA falls,” O’Connor wrote.
The “death of a thousand cuts” approach undertaken by congressional Republicans and the Trump Administration may finally be bearing fruit. Remember that the central conceit that allowed the Supreme Court to find ObamaCare constitutional in National Federation of Independent Business vs. Sebelius was treating the individual mandate as a tax, and the individual mandate was repealed in 2017.
Consider how radically the political environment has changed. Many of the baleful effects Republican foresaw for ObamaCare (spiraling premiums and declining choices) have come to pass. Also, in chasing their Russian collusion fantasy, the Democratic Media Complex has had precious little bandwidth to expend on extolling the supposed wonders of ObamaCare. Chief Justice John Roberts may well feel that he has a chance to undo a mistake in being the deciding vote in the originalSebelius decision now that the political pressure and scrutiny has lessened.
Texas vs. Azar may deliver ObamaCare the mercy killing it so richly deserves.
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Austin just had a wind storm, to top off a year of weird weather.
Apple to spend $1 billion on Austin campus. This is going to be a couple of miles from my house. Expect more detailed examination in a latter post.
This Andrew Sullivan piece is half-useful for it’s look at Social Justice Warrioring as a religious substitute:
For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness.
And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.
Unfortunately, the second half is just Christian-concern-trolling as a way to bash Trump. Pace-Sullivan, there’s nothing new in his critique that couldn’t also be applied, to say, the “prosperity gospel” movement of the 1980s on, and it all boils down to “Those stupid Christians voted for Trump rather than the positions we enlightened betters believe in.”
ICE workplace arrests up 700% in President Donald Trump’s first full fiscal year.
Think the Paris riots are bad? Just think what would happen if the biggest climate alarmists got their way:
If Paris streets burned over a proposed 25 cents per gallon climate change tax, imagine the global conflagration over a $49 per gallon tax.
That’s what a United Nations special climate report calls for in 12 years, with a carbon tax of $5,500 per ton—equal to $49 per gallon of gasoline or diesel. That’s about 100 times today’s average state and federal motor fuels tax.
By 2100, the U.N. estimates that a carbon tax of $27,000 per ton is needed—$240 per gallon—to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Of course, that isn’t going to happen. The economic wreckage of such a punitive tax would plunge the global economy into a permanent depression—and that’s assuming politicians could enact such huge tax increases over the will of their voters.
Keep in mind that the unrest in France was triggered by a looming 25-cent hike, which is a little less than 10% more in taxes than French drivers already pay. To meet the $49 per gallon tax hike recommended by the U.N., fuel taxes in France would have to go up 17-fold.
“When you said, ‘Paris is going to be so hot,’ I did not realise it would actually be on fire…’Eye-watering opportunities’ did not, in my mind, involve tear gas.”
How corrupt is the Chicago Way? A college student running against Democratic Party boss Michael J. Madigan’s hand=picked alderman Marty Quinn found out:
To get on the ballot, Krupa was required to file 473 valid signatures of ward residents with the Chicago Board of Elections. Krupa filed 1,703 signatures.
But before he filed his signatures with the elections board, an amazing thing happened along the Chicago Way.
An organized crew of political workers — or maybe just civic-minded individuals who care about reform — went door to door with official legal papers. They asked residents to sign an affidavit revoking their signature on Krupa’s petition.
Revocations are serious legal documents, signed and notarized. Lying on a legal document is a felony and can lead to a charge of perjury. If you’re convicted of perjury, you may not work for a government agency. And I know that there are many in the 13th Ward on the government payroll.
More than 2,700 revocations were turned over to the elections board to cancel the signatures on Krupa’s petitions. Chicago Board of Elections officials had never seen such a massive pile of revocations.
Mark Steyn: “If you’re having trouble keeping track, the French protests, Trump, Brexit, the Austrian and Italian elections, and the sudden cancellation of the ‘Murphy Brown’ reboot are all the work of Russian bots. Whereas the Tijuana caravan, the UK grooming gangs and that rental car heading toward you on the sidewalk outside the Berlin Christmas market are the authentic vox populi.” Plus some Max Boot bashing, which is now a year-round pursuit. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
America turned into a net oil exporter last week, breaking almost 75 years of continued dependence on foreign oil and marking a pivotal — even if likely brief — moment toward what U.S. President Donald Trump has branded as “energy independence.”
The shift to net exports is the dramatic result of an unprecedented boom in American oil production, with thousands of wells pumping from the Permian region of Texas and New Mexico to the Bakken in North Dakota to the Marcellus in Pennsylvania.
While the country has been heading in that direction for years, this week’s dramatic shift came as data showed a sharp drop in imports and a jump in exports to a record high. Given the volatility in weekly data, the U.S. will likely remain a small net importer most of the time.
“We are becoming the dominant energy power in the world,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research. “But, because the change is gradual over time, I don’t think it’s going to cause a huge revolution, but you do have to think that OPEC is going to have to take that into account when they think about cutting.”
Good news for every American except Democrats and ecoweenies (but I repeat myself). Especially for those looking for jobs in Midland, where unemployment just hit 2.1%
