Pat Condell on Progressivism and Cultural Marxism

April 22nd, 2018

Pat Condell nails modern progressivism for its naked intolerance.

If not for the spiteful underhand nastiness and shallow vindictiveness of the progressive mindset, the sanctimonious moralizing, the phony liberality the assumption of moral superiority, and the arrogance in that assumption, not to mention the instinctive recourse to deliberate misrepresentation slurs insults and maliciously slanderous labels in place of argument; if not for all that I wouldn’t have such a problem with progressives because, unlike them, I’m a liberal kind of guy.

Snip.

Try publicly advocating liberal values like freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, free speech, individual liberty democracy. secularism, civil rights; you know, the ideas of the Enlightenment, and you are guaranteed to be called a far-right extremist, a hate monger, a bigot, a racist, a fascist or a Nazi, yes, a Nazi, by progressives.

Condell seems to be refrencing either classical liberalism, or a form of liberalism that has became all but extinct in the modern world, replaced in tot by progressivism’s victimhood identity politics.

Progressivism is Marxism attempting to wear a liberal mask and failing. The militant Marxist and the militant progressive are birds of a feather. They have the same aims they share a common purpose.

Watch the whole thing.

Possible Coup in Saudi Arabia? (Update: Probably Not)

April 21st, 2018

Twitter has recently been abuzz of reports of gunfire outside the Saudi royal palace in Riyadh, and the Jerusalem Post seems to be the first major news outlet to have a story up about it:

Gunfire and explosions have been reported outside the home of the Saudi king in Riyadh, the country’s capital. Sources on Twitter have posted photos and videos of the situation and have said that the gunfire is part of a coup attempt. The king has reportedly been evacuated.

The Jerusalem Post has not been able to independently verify these claims.

A sampling of tweets:

Something certainly seems to be going on…

Update: Some reports say it was just a toy plane that got too close to the palace and was shot down.

Not sure if I believe that, but Twitter reports seem to have died down, and I’m not seeing any additional videos or new reports of gunfire, so whatever it was, it does appear to have died down for now.

Update 2: Official Saudi sources are confirming the toy drone story.

DNC Jumps On Shark, Then Jumps Another Shark

April 21st, 2018

If the DNC was run by normal people, someone might have gone “Hey, maybe we should back off all this Trump-Russia collusion fantasy.”

The DNC is not made up of normal people.

The Washington Post reports that The Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit Friday against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.

The lawsuit alleges that in addition to the Russian Federation, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0, top Trump campaign officials, including Donald Trump Jr, Roger Stone, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and pretty much everyone else who has been mentioned in the same paragraph as Trump….

ZeroHedge also swipes this swell graphic to make his point:

This move reeks of desperation. The Mueller campaign is getting nowhere fast, the RNC fundraising numbers continue to set records, while the DNC recently took out another $2 million loan to keep the lights on, despite all the anti-Trump fervor. With the economy humming along, and both job numbers and trumps own poll numbers up, the posited “blue tsunami” in November is looking more and more like a ripple. The lawsuit looks like a last-ditch effort to keep their base fired up until then.

Just think of all the discovery Donald Trump’s legal team will be able to compel from Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Debbie Wassermann-Schultz, all the DNC staffers who colluded to screw Bernie Sanders, etc.

This has all the hallmarks of a publicity stunt that will backfire badly.

LinkSwarm for April 20, 2018

April 20th, 2018

Finished my taxes! Now I need to go back and do all the stuff I let slide while I was doing my taxes…

  • The Syrian strike and Russia’s crummy air defense systems:

    The attack on April 13th went up against a 21st-century Russian superweapon–the S-400 Triumf air-defense system, a mobile state-of-the-art anti-aircraft and missile network featuring four distinct missile types targeting aircraft in any performance envelope from treetop level to high altitude – including stealth aircraft (at a range of 150 miles, yet). For a decade we have been assured by military analysts that the S-400 is a game-changer – a system that could rend the heavens in twain and call into question the very concept of air power under battlefield conditions.

    And yet, last Friday, the epoch-making Triumf failed to let out so much as a peep as 105 cruise missiles trashed Bashar Assad’s chemical warfare plants. Not a single SAM left the rack while the attack was proceeding. (The Syrians did fire over 40 missiles at nothing, but only after the attack was completed. This is standard behavior among Arab armed forces – the Libyans and Iraqis did the same thing.) The Russians claim to have shot down over 70 of the attacking cruise missiles. How do we know this isn’t true? First, because the targets were utterly destroyed, and second, because the French were involved. If the Russians had shot down any U.S. missiles at all we would be hearing from Paris that American “missiles de croisière” are useless, and that’s why we had to turn to the French, who invented the cruise missile in 1689. (This is scarcely an exaggeration – Emmanuel Macron has gone on record to state that it was he, le président de la France, who persuaded Donald Trump to carry out the strike.)

    Some might argue that the new AGM-158 JASSM stealth missile foxed the S-400, but half the missiles launched were actually thirty-year-old BGM-109 Tomahawks, the equivalent of Colt Peacemakers as far as the world of missile development is concerned. If the mighty S-400 can’t shoot down a thirty-year-old missile, what can it do?

    Also this: “Russia today is what it always was – a Potemkin village hiding a nation in a state of suspended collapse.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • President Donald Trump’s approval ratings hit 51%.
  • Republicans: “Hey, how about you vote on these Trump nominees?” Democrats: “Ha ha! Slow walking! Filibuster!” Mitch McConnell: “Well then, I guess we’ll just have to keep the senate open on weekends during campaign season.” Democrats: “Uh…”
  • Democrats: Give Us the House so We Can Raise Your Taxes.” You would think they would have learned from Walter Mondale’s example…
  • “Trump overrules Sessions: DOJ won’t target marijuana in states like Colorado where the drug is legal.” Good. The federal government should stay out of the marijuana prohibition business on Tenth Amendment grounds.
  • Rush Limbaugh enumerates some of the many conflicts of interest among mainstream media members with ties to the Democratic Party.
  • In the UK, a machete attack every 90 minutes.
  • How gentry liberals really hate the poor. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Mark Steyn remembers Enoch Powell, who got more right than wrong.
  • UK Prime Minister Theresa May is concentrating on: A.) Brexit, B.) Muslim rape gangs, or C.) Plastic drinking straws?
  • Deleted Facebook Cybercrime Groups Had 300,000 Members.”

    Hours after being alerted by KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook last week deleted almost 120 private discussion groups totaling more than 300,000 members who flagrantly promoted a host of illicit activities on the social media network’s platform. The scam groups facilitated a broad spectrum of shady activities, including spamming, wire fraud, account takeovers, phony tax refunds, 419 scams, denial-of-service attack-for-hire services and botnet creation tools. The average age of these groups on Facebook’s platform was two years.

  • Everything is hackable.
  • “Pasta Is Good For You, Say Scientists Funded By Big Pasta.”
  • Egg McMuffin’s vaunted honesty and integrity evidently doesn’t extend to his campaign filing timely FEC reports. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • More on the same theme:

    Former presidential candidate Evan McMullin owes his former campaign staff members tens of thousands of dollars and most believe he has no intention of ever paying them, a former campaign worker tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.

    Right before McMullin’s failed bid for president in 2016 as the conservative alternative to President Donald Trump, the campaign was inundated with debt. The disastrous fiscal situation was a combination of frivolous spending by McMullin and his campaign manager Joel Searby, according to the former staffer.

    McMullin received news weeks before Election Day 2016 about how dire the campaign’s finances were, and he had “no remorse” and said “I have qualms about this thing ending badly in debt,” the former staffer claimed. McMullin’s cavalier attitude towards the campaign’s spending struck many as a surprise, particularly because he billed himself as a fiscal conservative, he added.

    The staffer also claims the campaign never paid him somewhere between 12-15 thousand dollars on top of a few thousand dollars in reimbursements. While he has since recovered, he expressed concern about former staffers with “families and children.”

  • “911 operator who hung up on emergency calls is sentenced to jail.”
  • The Littlest Weasel accomplished one thing: he raised Laura Ingraham’s ratings by 20%.
  • “Three New Plaintiffs Join James Damore’s Discrimination Lawsuit Against Google.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Here’s a cool piece by Houston Rockets center Clint Capela talking about what it was like to move from Europe to Texas:

    I’ll never forget the first time I went to a steakhouse here. I thought I’d eaten steak before. I was expecting this small, flat circle of meat, maybe a couple of fries on the side. Fine. C’est bon.

    So in Texas, steak is a different thing. I’m at this restaurant and they put this plate in front of me, and, well, there was barely any plate visible — all I saw was this was this big, big piece of meat. I look around, maybe I had been mistaken in what I ordered. Maybe this waiter was playing a prank on me. It looked like a whole farm animal in front of me. But everyone with me laughed and nodded and told me that in Texas, this is a steak.

    Then I was introduced to these other foods I’d never seen before but were totally amazing. Mac and cheese, man. Guys, you are blessed for having mac and cheese here. It’s a work of art. Bravo, guys.

    And that was the first time I thought, O.K. O.K., I think I can get used to this place.

    But if he really wants to be “King of Books,” he should know that road runs through me

  • Pro-tip: If you’re trying to smuggle hundreds of pounds of cocaine, it is best not to document your expensive vacation travels on Instagram. (Hat tip: Jammie Wearing Fool’s twitter feed.)
  • First they came for the buxom barmaids
  • The next horror movie monster: Tumbleweeds:

  • A tweet:

    Seems an overreaction. Let he who has never taken a sacred oath using a dinosaur handpuppet cast the first stone…

  • Hurst, Texas House Explodes on Dashcam

    April 19th, 2018

    And sometimes blogging is just “Whoa! I’ve got to post that!”

    Story here. Thankfully, no one was killed, though one woman remains in the hospital.

    Also this: “The driver was not hurt, but was taken into custody for not having a license, then transferred to federal custody on an immigration hold.”

    Barbara Bush, RIP

    April 18th, 2018

    Former First Lady Barbara Bush, wife of one President and mother of another, has died at age 92.

    She was a class act as First Lady, pretty much universally loved and respected, and she will be missed.

    A few quick reactions:

    Even the overwhelming majority of Democrats on Twitter were polite and respectful.

    A few were not:

    Most people would avoid making the death of a First Lady an occasion to score political points.

    Most people.

    Note: I’ve limited the Bush Derangement Idiocy to the Blue Checkmark Brigade…

    UN: Hey, Let’s Inspect This Entirely Peaceful Site Hit By Missiles. Syria: Die In A Fire

    April 17th, 2018

    Syria has sworn up and down that missiles from the United States, the UK and France only hit peaceful sites of toys for crippled orphans a baby milk factory a cancer research center (no really, that’s their story this time) rather than a chemical weapons facility.

    So naturally, they would have no problem with UN inspector’s visiting the site, right?

    We all know exactly how that movie turned out:

    The international chemical weapons watchdog that sent a fact-finding team to Syria said Monday that Syrian and Russian officials blocked efforts to reach the site where rebels claim government forces unleashed chemical weapons against civilians.

    The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the team arrived in Damascus on Saturday and met with government officials to work out a plan for deployment to Douma.

    The Syrian and the Russian officials informed the team that “pending security issues” needed to be worked out before the group went to Douma, the organization’s director general, Ahmet Üzümcü, told an emergency meeting of the group’s executive council in The Hague, Netherlands.

    Of.

    Course.

    Some other Syria strike news:

  • Hezbollah says that “Syrian air defenses had intercepted three missiles aimed at Dumair military airport north east of Damascus.”
  • ZeroHedge is reporting that Israel just hit Syrian sites near Homs. Not seeing any confirmation right now.
  • Speaking of ZeroHedge reports on Israel strikes against Syria, they also reported another Israeli airstrike two days ago I haven’t seen other confirming reports of. “I know what you’re thinking, punk. Did I hit Syria six times, or only five? In all this excitement, I sort of lost track myself…”
  • In fact, this New Yorker piece asserts that Israel has launched more than a hundred trikes in Syria since the civil war began.

    Israel has hit a wide range of sites, including convoys of Hezbollah or Iranian fighters near the Golan, trucks ferrying missiles and rockets destined for Hezbollah en route to Lebanon, bases for Iranian drones, and an Iranian command-and-control center.

    “We are facing now a determined decision by Iran to take advantage of the vacuum in Syria, the coming victory of Assad, and the defeat of ISIS to extend Hezbollah’s stand in Lebanon at the expense of Syrian territory, especially in the Golan Heights,” Amos Gilead, a retired Israeli major general who now heads the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, told me. “This is a strategic threat. It’s an intolerable plan. We are trying to preëmpt them and protect Israel.”

  • Israel confirmed it hit Syria on April 9, as previously reported.
  • French President Emmanuel Macron says he convinced President Donald Trump to join in on strikes against Syria. France wants to initiate military action in the Middle East about as often as Henry Youngman’s wife wants to have sex. (She died in 1987, so: Not often!) But France has a continuing relationship with both Syria and Lebanon, having administered the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon between 1923 and 1946. France still has extremely close relations with Lebanon, and has been royally pissed with Assad’s consistent meddling there, especially the assassination of Rafiq Hariri.
  • New York Times is Shocked, SHOCKED To Find Out There’s a Public Pension Crisis

    April 16th, 2018

    The New York Times was kind enough to notice that public employee pensions are bankrupting many portions of the country:

    A public university president in Oregon gives new meaning to the idea of a pensioner.

    Joseph Robertson, an eye surgeon who retired as head of the Oregon Health & Science University last fall, receives the state’s largest government pension.

    It is $76,111.

    Per month.

    That is considerably more than the average Oregon family earns in a year.

    Oregon — like many other states and cities, including New Jersey, Kentucky and Connecticut — is caught in a fiscal squeeze of its own making. Its economy is growing, but the cost of its state-run pension system is growing faster. More government workers are retiring, including more than 2,000, like Dr. Robertson, who get pensions exceeding $100,000 a year.

    Left out of that list: California, New York and Illinois.

    The bill is borne by taxpayers. Oregon’s Public Employees Retirement System has told cities, counties, school districts and other local entities to contribute more to keep the system afloat. They can neither negotiate nor raise local taxes fast enough to keep up. As a result, pensions are crowding out other spending. Essential services are slashed.
    Continue reading the main story

    “You get to the point where you can no longer do more with less — you just have to do less with less,” said Nathan Cherpeski, the manager of Klamath Falls, a city of about 21,000 in south-central Oregon.

    Klamath Falls’s most recent biennial bill from the pension system, known as PERS, was $600,000 more than the one before. PERS has warned that the bills will keep rising. Mr. Cherpeski has had to cut back on repairing streets and bridges.

    Even as the American economy is humming, many states and cities are still hurting from the 2008 financial meltdown. The crash hammered their pension funds and tax revenues, but didn’t reduce the amounts they owe retirees.

    It wasn’t until 2016 that average state tax collections returned to pre-2008 levels. In the meantime, states and cities have had to rebuild pension funds to cover the rising numbers of retirees drawing benefits. That has left less money for the police, school sports programs and everything else. Local residents might not know why, but they are paying more taxes and getting scantier services in return.

    Golly, if only the New York Times had been reading conservative and libertarian new source like BattleSwarm and Pension Tsunami, they could have found out this starting information years or even decade ago.

    In related news, Illinois courts are already imposing mandated tax hikes on various municipalities to shore up underfunded public pension programs.

    However, I bet that the next links in the logic chain (that all these locals seem to be controlled by the Democratic Party, and that fat pensions are a naked political payoff for the support of public employee unions who donate to and vote for Democrats, at the expense of the poor and middle class who see public services cut to pay for those fat pensions) will somehow continue to elude the New York Times

    Trump Voter Feels Betrayed By President After Reading 800 Pages Of Queer Feminist Theory

    April 15th, 2018

    The Onion comes through again…

    Texas Pregnancy Mortality Rates Double Due to Bad UI Design

    April 14th, 2018

    Here’s a cautionary tale.

    Two years ago, you may have heard that Texas’ maternal mortality rate had just doubled. No one was quite sure why—some blamed a recent shuttering of family-planning services, others a lack of concern for women’s health generally—but it seemed most were confident Texas was a cautionary tale. The U.S. maternal mortality rate overall had been rising for years, even as nearly every other developed country saw declines. Surely, the new numbers out of Texas portended what could happen across the country if we didn’t change soon.

    It turns out that the numbers in Texas were wrong. The extent to which they were incorrect was just published in Obstetrics & Gynecology, as investigated by several researchers who went back and double-checked the cause-of-death for 147 total deaths in Texas in 2012.

    Though we only now realize how flawed the data were, this isn’t entirely a recent revelation. Experts suspected that something was wrong with the data, they just weren’t sure what. The authors of that original study noted that “in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a 2-year period in a state with almost 400,000 annual births seems unlikely.” Their suspicions turned out to be right. Instead of roughly 36 deaths per 100,000 births, the mortality rate was more like 14.6 deaths per 100,000 births.

    Texas is, in fact, a cautionary tale, just not in the way we all thought. It’s been collecting data poorly for years now, and they’re not alone—maternal mortality rates could be wrong all over the U.S. Ever since some states introduced a checkbox to their death certificates asking about pregnancy back in 2003, the stats on maternal mortality have been skewed. A 2017 study concluded that this addition “appears to be the main driver of the increases in [maternal mortality rates] during the last decade.” States with and without the checkbox differ so much in reported data that we haven’t published an official national maternal mortality rate since 2007. The data just haven’t been good enough.

    But they have to be better. Maternal mortality rates are still high nationally by many estimates, and understanding the extent of the problem is crucial if America is going to save mothers’ lives.

    When researchers found that twofold increase in maternal mortality in Texas two years ago, they suspected it was so extreme as to be an error. Texas was one of the states that implemented a new checkbox on death certificates that asked about the pregnancy status of the deceased, and as mentioned before it was already known that states with that checkbox tend to report higher maternal death rates. This is in part because asking about whether the deceased was pregnant increases the rate at which it’s reported—when you start looking for pregnancy-related deaths, you’ll tend to find more. But it’s also because people make mistakes.

    The recent paper notes that it may be a simple design problem that’s contributed significantly to the apparent rise in maternal mortality: “Texas’ current electronic death registration system displays pregnancy status options as a dropdown list. The “pregnant at the time of death” option is directly below the “not pregnant within the past year” option; this could have led to erroneous selection and could explain why pregnancy at the time of death was reported for nearly 76% of the 74 obstetric-coded deaths with no evidence of pregnancy on review.”

    The authors also note that the number of death certificates being submitted electronically in Texas jumped from 63 to 91 percent from 2010 to 2012. Having a bunch of new users entering information into death certificate software may have exacerbated the misreporting.

    They suggest two main solutions: better training for workers who report death information, and instead of a drop-down menu, try buttons. Separate buttons for “pregnant” and “not pregnant” force the user to move the mouse to totally different areas to make a selection, rather than clicking in a small drop-down menu where it’s easy to make a mistake and not realize it before moving on to the next question.

    Texas may have had a double-whammy situation, but the problems they ran into are true of all checkbox states.

    Those states that chose to implement a pregnancy checkbox on their death certificates have seen a 149.8 percent in maternal mortality (as of 2012 data). But a study from last year estimated that a whopping 90.3 percent of that change was likely due to the checkbox issues alone.

    “Because pregnancy-related deaths are so uncommon, the frequency of the box being checked in error can significantly impact the maternal mortality rate reported,” Elliott Main, medical director of the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative, told the Washington Post.

    If we assumed that the non-checkbox-adopting states showed the true rate, the study authors reasoned, the true rate would be 14.4 percent.

    Lesson: Bad UI design kills! Or at least fools you into thinking someone’s been killed…

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)