May 12, 2024

GOP TO GAIN FIVE SENATE SEATS IN 2024? Senate GOP campaign insiders tell The Epoch Times they are quite confident about retaking the Senate majority in November with a two-seat gain and a pickup of five is a reasonable possibility.

 

Posted at 3:19 pm by Mark Tapscott

MASCOT OF THE ANOINTED REACHES EXPIRATION DATE: Queen Greta has exposed the truth about the green movement.

So, Greta Thunberg has a new cause. She’s found a new crusade to throw her weight behind. Forget saving the planet – now she wants to save Palestine.

Yes, the pint-sized prophetess of doom has swapped raging against industrialism for raging against Israel. Mother Nature will just have to wait – her erstwhile valiant defender is busy fixing the Middle East now.

Yesterday, Greta was snapped at the protest in Malmo, Sweden against Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest.

She looked the part. She had a keffiyeh draped over her shoulders and a smug look on her face: the two must-haves of every puffed-up bourgeois activist who gets off on fuming against Israel.

The keffiyeh really has become the uniform of the self-righteous. Go into a hip coffee shop or overpriced Soho burger joint and I guarantee you’ll see a Gen Z’er decked out in the Palestinian scarf.

Whatever happened to the sin of “cultural appropriation”? Not long ago, the right-on raged against white dudes who wear their hair in dreadlocks and white women who don kominos. “Stop stealing other people’s culture!”, they’d yell. Yet now they themselves spend their days in Arab attire.

That image of Greta in Malmo, looking very satisfied with herself, summed up the role the keffiyeh plays in the life of the 21st-century activist. Keffiyeh-wearing is less about drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians than drawing attention to you. Look at me in my Arab garb, aren’t I good and hyper socially aware – that’s the needy cry of these hipster appropriators.

Yet beneath their radical chic, darker sentiments lurk.

Not least of which is radical environmentalism embracing its nihilistic origins. Plus ça change: the original European environmentalists who had a strange coalition with Islamists were awfully totalitarian as well.

UPDATE:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THEY HATE US, THEY REALLY HATE US!

I can’t say it’s at all surprising to see Pelosi channeling Meryl Streep channeling Hillary in the climactic scene from her dystopian 2015 Harvey Weinstein-produced movie The Giver— it’s leftists all the way down:

UPDATE: Oxford Union Debate: Mumford and Sons Musician Rips Pelosi’s Elitism Apart.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

DADS ARE HUMAN TOO: (Warning, Spoiler Alert) Glenn and I watched the next to final episode of Young Sheldon where the dad, George dies of a heart attack. Like so many other fans of the show, I am heart-broken because as George Sr.’s character grew over time, I looked forward to seeing the complexity of the interactions he had with his family. If you watched the Big Bang shows, you know that Sheldon and his mom badmouth the dad for the most part, talking in negative terms about him to others and between themselves. He had an affair (turns out to be false) he was a bad dad, etc. In the Young Sheldon show, he is a long suffering dad who sacrifices constantly for the family even as they treat him as the butt of jokes:

Chuck Lorre had two jobs when creating Young Sheldon. One was to make a funny show, and two, undo all the damage made to George Cooper throughout The Big Bang Theory’s run. George was dead when The Big Bang Theory started, but Sheldon and his mother revisited him occasionally. More times than not, they had negative things to say about him, making him seem like the worst husband and father. When he was cast, Lance Barber was aware of the prevailing perception of George. In an interview with TV Line, Barber revealed that there were active efforts to change the character and make him more human instead of the butt of the joke. He and everyone in production overhauled the character to create a new person whom people could identify and sympathize with.

The belittling that the family did to this man was just sad. If he wanted anything, the wife said no, the kids put themselves first, especially Sheldon, and even the mother-in-law picked at him. When he got a better job earlier in the series, everyone cried and wouldn’t move, so he endured a lower status job at a high school. When he needed space in the house, he was told to get out of the way, etc. Right before George dies, things are looking up for him, he gets a college coaching job and the kids are nicer to him and so is the wife. Now that he is gone, they will have to go on without him. It’s sad.

George’s life and death seem like a metaphor for how our society treats men–they are expendable and an easy target for jokes and hit pieces on toxic masculinity. No one notices the sacrifices they make to keep the world moving–whether that be working to support a family, sacrificing their time or their lives for others while getting less and less in return and little notice. Except when that work and sacrifice and the men that do them are gone, then the world or in this case the Cooper family might actually miss the man that they so easily scorned while he was here.

Posted at 1:32 pm by Helen Smith

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Far-left U. Wisconsin student groups suspended after antisemitic chalkings.

The University of Wisconsin chapters of Anticolonial Scientists and Mecha have been placed on interim suspension pending an investigation into chalkings which “endorsed violence, supported terrorist organizations and/or contained antisemitic comments.”

According to the student paper The Daily Cardinal, an interim suspension means a group “must cease activities [during] an investigation and decision from the CSO [Committee on Student Organizations].”

The report notes last weekend’s chalk messages had included “Al-Qassam you make us proud, kill another soldier now,” “Power to Al-Qassam” (the military wing of Hamas), “Power to Hezbollah,” and “Down with ‘Israel’ down with ‘USA.’”

Others praised the Houthis, who use the slogan “God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam.”

Why would a college student group even think of deploying chalk when all the best people assured me in 2016 that it was one of the most dangerous powders of mass (mental) destruction that could be deployed on a campus?

It began at Emory University, but has quickly spread across the country like a calcium carbonate plague. #TheChalkening has now terrorized college students from the University of Michigan to Arizona State, with temporary, hand-scrawled messages of support for Donald Trump on public sidewalks and stairways. While various campuses have dealt with the scourge in different ways—some creating safe spaces for the triggered teens, some encouraging the free exercise of ideas in temporary outdoor media—one school, DePaul University in Chicago, is turning to extreme measures. They’re banning chalk. Or, at least, they’re banning the use of chalk. Whether the campus intends on performing door-to-door dorm searches for paraphernalia remains to be seen.

Why were the University of Wisconsin chapters of Anticolonial Scientists and Mech exempt from such searches?

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHY GAZA AND NOT THE UIGHURS?

The Babylon Bee, “the newspaper of record” for anyone with a sense of humor, posed a more interesting thought about the campus demonstrations than anything you can find in the New York Times or Washington Post. The Bee’s headline proclaimed, “Uighur Slaves Struggling to Keep Up with Demand for Palestinian Headscarves.”

Dark humor indeed. The headscarves, like the masks, serve one obvious function: they hide the faces of demonstrators. That’s why bank robbers wear masks, too. Students know they are breaking the rules and professional agitators know they are breaking the law, so it’s smart to hide their faces.

But the scarves have one additional advantage that bank robbers’ masks don’t: the keffiyeh is a visible symbol of Palestinian identity. “Pardon me,” they say, “my virtue is showing.”

The Babylon Bee also picked up another interesting point the legacy media missed. The keffiyehs worn on campus today come from China, like so much clothing. Ah, globalization. Palestinians used to produce the scarves themselves but cheaper Chinese production squeezed them out of the market. The protesters’ attire is a hidden mark of the international trade they loath.

* * * * * * * *

Israel is a prominent target of that ideology. Why? Because, for the left in the US, Canada and Europe, the Jewish state represents so much they hate, wrapped into a single package: capitalism, nationalism, Western religion and economic prosperity success thanks to hard work, intensive education and merit. Since the state’s formation in the 1948, Israelis have resolutely avoided the self-conception of “victimhood,” on which all campus politics is built.

Had Israel chosen to depict itself as the “wretched of the earth,” it had every right to cloak itself in victimhood. The Holocaust, a true genocide, killed more than 6 million and destroyed European Jewry. Arab states have repeatedly launched wars of annihilation against Israel and expelled virtually all Jews from their territories, where Jews had lived for centuries. The ideological left and their Muslim allies demean those refugees as part of a “settler colonial” influx.

Those white settler colonialists are an “unexpectedly” diverse coalition!

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ROGER KIMBALL: Beyond Reason: How Shame and Disgust Shape Law and Society.

It might seem that the meditations of a seventeenth-century French philosopher are pretty distant from the conundrums facing us in the twenty-first century. In some ways, this is true. But Descartes did an enormous amount to define the methods, goals, and ideals of scientific rationalism, a worldview that systematically deprecates the significance of any experience not amenable to rational analysis. Paul Valéry summed up the problem in his brief sketch for an essay on Descartes. Like many moderns, Valéry found himself bewitched by the heroic solipsism of Descartes’ formula, cogito ergo sum. Yet he knew that a corollary of that formula was a world in which “the word ‘knowledge’ is increasingly denied to anything which cannot be translated into figures.” Among other things, this meant that, as Valéry put it, “the truth for modern man, which is exactly related to his freedom of action over nature, seems more and more to be in opposi­tion to everything that our imagination and our feelings would like to be true.” As Valéry understood, we owe our humanity not only to our ability to reason but also to our status as creatures of feeling, imagination, and moral responsibility. In the end, the idea that we are the “masters and possessors of nature” is a risible illusion bred by overweening cleverness. For ultimately, it is nature that masters and possesses us, a fact we deny to our intellectual peril and moral diminishment.

What has all of this to do with the law? For a first answer to that question, let’s broaden the field from hunches to those great underrated human resources, prejudice and the feelings of disgust and moral outrage. On those subjects, I can think of no better place to begin than with Martha Craven Nussbaum, who, among other attainments, is a professor of law, philosophy, classics, and divinity at the University of Chicago. In her book Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law and some related articles, Professor Nussbaum argues that “the law, most of us would agree, should be society’s protection against prejudice.”

Really? I suspect “most of us would agree” that the law ought to be society’s protection against crime. But perhaps Professor Nussbaum thinks that prejudice is itself a crime—though surely not all prejudice. Edmund Burke said that prejudice “renders a man’s virtue his habit.” He meant that if we have a predisposition—a prejudice—toward the right things, they more easily become second nature. Surely Professor Nussbaum would not wish for the law to protect us from that sort of prejudice. And it must be said that she herself is clearly prejudiced against anything she labels “conservative.” I doubt that she believes that the law should be society’s protection against prejudice directed at conservatives.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SHE’S RIGHT:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: San Francisco Giving Homeless Vodka, Courtesy of Taxpayers.

Homeless alcoholics in San Francisco are getting vodka, wine, and beer at the expense of taxpayers, thanks to a crazy program that claims to provide health benefits and save lives. At this point, the reality of life under Democrat rule is far loonier than any satire or slapstick comedy.

The zany program in Democrat-run San Francisco allegedly aims to “curb excessive drinking” among the excessively large homeless population of the city, The UK Daily Mail reported on May 10. The unhoused (to use a silly leftist phrase) can booze it up to the tune of $5 million a year on the taxpayer dime, as vodka shots, wine glasses, and beer bottles are distributed by the City of San Francisco. Instead of aiming to sober up the homeless, the government there is allegedly only trying to provide small and short-term health benefits.

Nurses from the woke city’s “managed alcohol program” administer alcohol to the homeless addicts, the Daily Mail explained, allegedly helping curb the extreme addiction by controlling how much booze the individuals consume. The city claims success from the program, but we know that assurances on expensive and moronic government programs from Democrats are far more worthless than a can of Mulvaney-endorsed Bud Light. Does the program really keep homeless people out of jail or hospital? Who knows for sure? And, of course, it is responsible taxpayers who have to foot the bill.

In December of 2009, SF Weekly had this classic Fox Butterfield-esque line: “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s.”

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: CNN, Media Freak When GOP’s Rep. Scott Perry Accurately Ties KKK History To Democrats.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, the New Republic and The Daily Beast  and others in the liberal media jumped on this as well. The New Republic termed Perry’s remarks “bizarro” while The Daily Beast settled for “bonkers.”

In the Inquirer story the reporter quoted “Matt Jordan, director of the Pennsylvania State University News Literacy” who said that after its founding in 1865 by Democrats “it became an extra-legal terror organization that was never the wing of any political party.”

Where to start with this wildly ignorant understanding of basic American history?

The hard historical fact, per, among many, Columbia University historian Eric Foner is that the KKK was in fact “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.” University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease’s description of the Klan was as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”

Indeed, the Klan was so tied to the Democrats that the party’s 1924 Convention in New York City has been dubbed the “Klanbake” because so many of the delegates were Klan members.

The Klan’s favorite for the presidential nomination that year was one William Gibbs McAdoo, who had served Democrat – and Klan supporter  – President Woodrow Wilson as Secretary of the Treasury. Wilson, recall, was such a staunch Klan supporter that he hosted a White House screening of the pro-Klan, decidedly racist Hollywood blockbuster Birth of a Nation.

Evergreen:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE:

UPDATE: Flash-forward to 2024: Bombshell: Biden Administration Has Been Hiding Intel on Location of Hamas Leaders in Betrayal of Israel.

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

JEWISH VOTERS MOVING RIGHT: Republican campaign strategists see Jewish voters moving to the GOP in the biggest races of 2024.

Posted at 8:47 am by Mark Tapscott

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

Also:

Penn faculty, students break down in tears after cops sweep pro-Hamas encampment

Related:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds