NASA Spies Earth-Like (Well, A Little Bit Bigger Than Earth) Planet in Habitable Zone

—Ace

Usually they only spot gas giants and very, very heavy terrestrial-type planets, because such things are hard to see, and you can only "see" them by the shadows they make when they cross their sun, or their gravitational effects.

They say this one is just a bit heavier than earth... well, a fair bit heavier, but not gigantic, and it's in the habitable zone, not too close to its star, not too far.

So: Who's comin' with me?

Astronomers have spotted the closest thing yet to the first true 'Earth twin’ -- a small planet orbiting the bright star Kepler 452, at a distance where liquid water could exist.

You have to remember, the media always lies, and the media knows nothing about science -- so be prepared for some disappointment on that "earth twin" claim.

It may be the closest to earth yet found outside of our system, but it's not super-close.

...

"It is the first terrestrial planet in the habitable zone around a star very similar to the Sun," says Douglas Caldwell, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

The alien world is 60% larger than Earth and orbits its star at a distance similar to that between Earth and the Sun. The star itself lies 430 parsecs from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus.

60% larger wouldn't translate to exactly 60% more gravity, because the planet's radius is bigger too, but it would be, like, guessing, about one and half earth's gravity -- so, not superfriendly to human bone and muscle, though I guess if you went to fat camp there you'd come back pretty buff.

Or, like, dead, from your spine collapsing or something.

Still, there is hope.

Graphic taken from Nature -- no rights claimed

Update: There is no hope. Scientists report an emission coming from the planet:

READY

FOR

HILLARY

Might As Well Throw Up This Old Tab: Black sky mining.

Hillary Clinton: Of Course I'm Not Asking People To Vote For Me Because I'm a Woman. I'm Asking Them To Vote For Me On the Merits. And My Merits Are, I'm a Woman.

—Ace

No really it's close enough to that that it might as well be that.

"Clearly I'm not asking people to vote for me simply because I'm a woman. I'm asking people to vote for me on the merits. And I think one of the merits is I am a woman and I can bring those views and perspectives to the White House."

You can watch this old drunken cow say these words on video at the link, if you can take it.

And of course she's defending the Planned Parenthood Organ Harvesting Combines, because of course she is.

"For more than a century, Planned Parenthood has provided essential services for women," Clinton said in South Carolina.

"I think it is unfortunate that Planned Parenthood has been the object of such a concerted attack for so many years," she added, according to multiple reports.

"And it's really an attack against a woman's right to choose, to make the most personal, difficult decisions that any woman would face, based on her faith and the medical advice that she’s given."

A secretly recorded video released early last week shows a top Planned Parenthood medical doctor discussing -- between bites of salad and sips of wine-- methods to preserve livers, lungs and "intact" hearts.

A second video released Tuesday shows another Planned Parenthood official apparently negotiating the price of fetal tissue for medical research, joking, "I want a Lamborghini."

Kudos, btw, to The Hill and to Jesse Byrne for reporting that backstory pretty much straight and neutral. Amazing -- something happened that damaged the liberal coalition, and yet this story just straight-up reported what happened.

Meanwhile, in the article, you can read Bernie Sanders at least being troubled by the "tone" of the videos -- he seems then to be less left-wing than the alleged "centrist" Hillary Clinton.

Loretta Lynch: I'll Be Looking at "All Information" Connected to These Planned Parenthood Videos

—Ace

Allah wonders what the catch is, then answers himself: She probably means she'll be investigating the people who conducted the sting.

Will she? Yes of course she will, and I'll bet you she'll charge them too: I saw someone claiming that the group had, in order to make its cover seem real, registered its fake company, "Biomax" (if I remember right) as a 501(c)(4) group.

I don't know if they did that or not, and if they did, they would have been careful to have not taken donations, and also to have not misstated their purpose: They would have said something vague like the company's mission is to increase the health of women and children, which is, of course, precisely what their goals are.

Just not what you might think, necessarily, when they come looking to buy baby livers.

But I bet you $100 they will in fact criminally investigate, and possibly charge, the whistleblowers, because we now live in a society in which the Party of Government has declared full illegal war on non-members of The Party.

They did not destroy all those emails just to protect Lois Lerner, you know.

It is now effectively illegal to not be a member of The Party.

The Donor Class, Which Is Stupid, Has Mistaken Itself for Clever, and Other Things You Already Knew

—Ace

Their big idea was to convince Jeb!, Walker, and Rubio to announce they were boycotting any debate in which Trump is present, in order, I guess, to make Trump even more popular and elect him president.

There are two things that can happen with Trump:

1. He can either fizzle or be beaten by other candidates noting his prior support for partial birth abortion, or

2. He can actually win.

Let me just note that if the other candidates cannot beat Trump, given his prior support of liberal candidates and causes, and still refuse to treat the immigration issue as anything more than lie-to-the-base-and-stay-true-to-the-US-Chamber, then they deserve to lose, and I will laugh and laugh as I cast my vote for Trump in both the primary and the general.

Come what may -- come what may.

Either you fools and eunuchs know how to play a man's game, or you don't.

And if you don't -- then to hell with you.

Well Okay Sure But

—Ace

Our incestuous little Rome on the Potomac -- Hillary was a guest at Kasich's engagment party.

Pardon the long delay, and this crap post; I've been doing a "Paolo The Cuckmaker" character on Twitter. I will link all those posts (they're pretty funny) after I get some real posts up.

This isn't a real post; I know that.

Oh, Just Until That Real Post: This is pretty amazing stuff, from the New Republic.

The Many Manipulations of the Planned Parenthood Attack Videos

An OB/GYN explains how medically incorrect language is used to distort the facts

By Jen Gunter @DrJenGunter Photo: The Center for Medical Progress

The anti-choice organization Center for Medical Progress--which, in 2013, claimed tax-exempt status as a biomedical charity--have recently released two "undercover" videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing post-procedure tissue donation. The group claims the videos demonstrate that Planned Parenthood profits from fetal tissue donation (which would be illegal) and that they are "haggling" over the price of "baby parts."

As an OB/GYN, I can tell you that neither of these claims are true.

These are not "baby parts." Whether a woman has a miscarriage or an abortion, the tissue specimen is called "products of conception."

Oh, I'm terribly sorry -- you've created euphemisms to make this sound less ghoulish to yourselves, and now you're claiming your Magic Words of euphemism have reified (become real) and transformed baby parts into "products of conception"?

Yeah that just happened.

What you just read, someone actually wrote.

By the way, Adolf Hitler just emailed me to say they weren't "gas chambers for Jews." They were merely "processing centers for social undesirables."

So, there you go.

Thanks to @markhemingway of the Weekly Standard.

Regarding Paolo

—Ace

Some people missed the Paolo story; here's that link. (Don't comment on old posts; the system will ban you.)

To make this not just a re-link, here's the scandalous Milo Yiannopoulos' terrible, awful, horrible story about the "men" feminism is breeding.

Milo's gay. Milo's take is basically: Hey thanks for giving me lots of n00b gay dudes to bang, Feminists!

I can't even really quote the money grafs I want to quote.

One other link: As many of us are discussing, there is some chance the Paolo article, and possibly the GrillCuck article, are kinda, what's the word, fake.

R.S. McCain just doesn't believe the "Paolo" article at all.

I suspect it's bullshit, however, for the purposes of a joke, I will play along and pretend it's real.

I do know cuckolding is a big thing, apparently, at least if PornHub isn't lying to me, and certainly it's never done so before.

So even if this article is a commissioned hoax, it's Fake but Accurate, as CBS might say.

So This Guy... This Guy Isn't My Kind of Guy

—Ace

Slate looked at the traffic NY Magazine was pulling in with its Cuckold Trolling, and, of course, being Slate -- and therefore click-hungry and shamelessly derivative -- said "Let's think of a story that will bring us some of those Cuckold Revulsion clicks!"

And so that's exactly what they did.

They're extremely cynical. And that's the only masculine trait they have.

Grillax, Bro

I'm a feminist. I'm a dude. And I hate that I love to grill.

By Jacob "Chelsea" Brogan

I might had added something to his name.

I hate how much I love to grill. It's not that I'm inclined to vegetarianism or that I otherwise object to the practice itself. But I'm uncomfortable with the pleasure I take in something so conventionally masculine.

He said, waiting for his wife to get back from her date with Paolo.

Or I should say: "Date." Whatever you call it when an unemployed Salsasize Instructor has your wife in the back of his Nissan Cube with her legs pinned back behind her head like the ears of a Dirty Bugs Bunny.

Looming over the coals, tongs in hand, I feel estranged from myself, recast in the role of suburban dad.

Melvillean, really. Like Ishmael's watery wanderlust. Except, you know. For sissies.

At such moments, I get the sense that I've fallen into a societal trap, one that reaffirms gender roles I've spent years trying to undo. The whole business feels retrograde, a relic of some earlier, less inclusive era.

I take food prep a little too seriously, curtly brushing others out of the way when I step up to the kitchen counter. In my online dating days....

Wait, online dating? You?

Was it really online dating or was it some kind of sordid Cuckold Match message board?

I tried to spin this fault as a feature, describing myself as "a finicky, meticulous cook."

You don't take nearly enough opportunities to feminize yourself.

On reflection, I'm probably just kind of a jerk, but when I'm grilling I worry that I've become something even worse. Am I shoving others out of the way because it makes me feel like a man? Have I become some sort of monster?

No, you're still a girl. Don't sweat it, Sally. Girls push all the time, especially when it involves cooking, shopping, or having dates behind your back with the hunk who pumps your gas and who looks like a borderline idiot but she just knows he has the soul of a poet.

Paging through photographs of my years in grad school recently...

I did not see that coming.

Finally got that MA in American Studies, huh?

... I came across one in which two colleagues and I stand in a semicircle around a kettle grill...

This picture captures so much of what delights me about grilling and so much of what embarrasses me about that delight. On the one hand, there's the peculiar alchemy of sun and smoke that makes summer days sprawl. On the other hand, it bears the stain of unintentional masculine cliche.

Honestly: Not really. If cooking is the most masculine thing you do, I'd say your fears about being mistaken for a man are, like so much else about you, contrived and histrionic.

By the way: Seems pretty clear you think you're hitting it out of the park with these attempted novel-like descriptions.

How's that novel coming, Brian? You know, the novel you say you've been working on for three years?

Gathered around the coals with beers slung low, we're all but enacting a myth of the American man, telling a story in postures and poses. No longer mere Ph.D. students, we have become bros.

This is the saddest thing I've ever read.

It's not that I think we're doing anything consciously sexist. Friends who were there that day remind me that we were actively making light of cookout customs even as we were participating in them. I suspect that everyone in the photograph identifies as a feminist. Yet the three of us look suspiciously like characters in a commercial, one where masculinity itself seems to be for sale.

Pretty sure you know the under-bridge places where masculinity itself might be for sale.

Okay, I can't take it any longer.

Paolo just texted me. He said some American Studies dweeb's wife is just dying for a three-way. I'm not really into that, but Paolo says this woman is so starved for masculine attention, she's like a little suburban sex tiger.

Failure Theater, Act III, Scene ii: The Fleecening

—Ace

Bob Corker to John Kerry: You got fleeced.

Oh, Kerry got fleeced? Because I thought a bunch of dumbass, sell-out, go-along-to-get-along Republican Senators got fleeced by Obama and Kerry into approving this treaty before it was even finished.

So now we're in the "I just can't believe the outrageous things I already voted for" phase of the Failure Theater performance.

Open Thread

—rdbrewer

Mason, "Night Scene" (n.d.)

Morning Thread (7-23-2015)

—Andy

The best part of Trump vs. the GOP establishment is that we're screwed no matter who wins. So we've got that going for us.

Overnight Open Thread (7-22-2015)

—Maetenloch

Quote of the Day I

The organizers of Free Pride Glasgow in Scotland have hit a snag in their mission to plan a totally inclusive event: Some activists think drag queens are offensive to transgender people, others think banning drag queens is offensive to transgender drag queens, and still others think allowing only transgender drag queens is offensive to cisgender [straight] drag queens.

The sad part is that thanks to the media I now mostly understand this sentence despite having negative interest in the subject. Sort of like my osmosis-based yet scarily detailed Kardashian knowledge.

Quote of the Day II

The tortured effort by some young progressives in the media to craft a trendy brand around the octogenarian Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg exposes the terrifying shallowness of the left's bench of fashionable political figures. Democrats who watched a recent video released by Hillary Clinton, in which the candidate hawked her campaign's branded "chillery" beer cozy and declared that she was "just chilling" herself, must have cringed; an android in a Philip K. Dick novel struggling to mimic human emotion could display more charisma and sincerity. Like the 82-year-old "Notorious R.B.G.," Clinton will require a transparently fabricated campaign to be perceived as current and something that appeals to a younger generation. Among Democrats with ample national name recognition, only Joe Biden effortlessly projects the kind of approachability and nonchalance that drew young voters to Barack Obama, and he is not in the race. Yet.

-- Noah Rothman

Quote of the Day III

She got up in somebody's business in a very public place. She sought to dominate a situation where her very presence was untoward. And she asserted her titular authority in the pursuit of special treatment at a time when such a power play seemed wholly inappropriate.

But there's one way in which the altercation last month between XXX's Democratic congresswoman and the Capitol Police deviated significantly from her reputation: She was coming to the defense of an aide, not castigating one.

Can you name the congresswoman without peeking at the article?

Quote of the Day IV - Nostalgia For the Collectivism of the 70s

I recall a collective meeting about setting up a weekly telephone support service for lesbians. It was decided that each collective member would volunteer to take turns manning the phones at their own home, until we could raise the money to rent a space. One of the members did not have a telephone in her house, but insisted she was being discriminated against and "oppressed" by being left out of the rota.

...Sitting in endless meetings, unable to reach agreements, and taking days to produce one leaflet because someone objected to the word seminal.

...There was a total resistance to the cult of the individual...until the Thatcher government declared war on society.

Ah yes the Thatcherite War on Society. Good times, good times.

Obamacare To Be Opened Up To Illegal Immigrants In California

Advantage: Joe Wilson

Marine and Navy Commander Both Engaged Chattanooga Terrorist With Personal Weapons

It now seems that both a name officer who survived the Chattanooga terrorist attack and one of the Marines who died both engaged the Islamist with their personal handguns, despite an out-dated Department of Defense directive banning personal weapons.

...Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the United States military celebrated and revered troops who disobeyed orders to save lives.

We should do so again, and commend Lt. Cmdr. White and the as-yet unnamed Marine who took on bureaucrats in order to protect their men, not punish them for violating a directive that has cost us 34 lives and another 54 casualties under feckless leadership since 2009.

It'll be a sad day for America when surviving members of the military are punished for defending themselves against an enemy attack.

Why The Second-Tier GOP Debate May Be the One to Watch

Charlie Hebdo Says No More Mohammed Cartoons

And Mark Steyn comments sympathetically on their choice of dying on their feet versus living on their knees:

It's not pompous, but it is lonely. And the slippery, weaselly nature of the post-bloodbath support told Charlie Hebdo it was only going to get lonelier. It's hard standing on your feet when everyone else with the #JeSuisCharlie buttons is on their knees, bottoms in the air, prostrate before the fanatics. And so Charb's successor has opted to live on his knees.

#JeSuisCharlie? Even Charlie isn't Charlie now.

RIP American Marine Lou Lenart: Savior of Tel Aviv

On May 29, 1948-just two weeks after the fledgling Jewish state was invaded by the armies of five Arab nations-Lenart led the newly-formed Israel Air Force's (IAF) first combat mission, stopping a massive Egyptian army column less than 30 miles away from Tel Aviv.

In what can only be described as one of the greatest fake-outs in military history, Lenart-who, as the most experienced pilot, led the assault-and his three buddies flew four junk Czech-built German Messerschmitt fighter planes for a country that had no actual airforce. Dropping 70 kilogram bombs on the Egyptian column and attacking them with gunfire, this bit of daring-do managed to convince the Egyptians that there was enough competition in the sky to warrant a retreat.

...Had the Egyptians been able to advance to Latrun they would've joined the Jordanian troops. Lenart's mission pushed back a crucial enemy advance, helping to save the new Jewish state from what would've been a near certain defeat during that phase of the war.

The Irony: Global Warming Research Team Iced In In the Hudson Bay

A carefully planned, 115-day scientific expedition on board the floating research vessel, the CCGS Amundsen, has been derailed as the icebreaker was called to help resupply ships navigate heavy ice in Hudson Bay.

"Obviously it has a large impact on us," says Martin Fortier, executive director of ArcticNet, which coordinates research on the vessel. "It's a frustrating situation."

...Johnny Leclair, assistant commissioner for the Coast Guard, said Tuesday conditions in the area are the worst he's seen in 20 years.

Get On Board With The Nation's Caribbean Cruise

Because you'll have this to look forward to:

"AND a pre-cruise send-off featuring a freewheeling, intimate conversation with Representative Alan Grayson on December 12-free for all booked passengers!"

And of course the very first thing I thought of after reading this was PJ O'Rourke's classic essay, Ship of Fools, about his experiences aboard a Nation cruise in the Soviet Union in 1982. Ed Driscoll had the exact same thought and helpfully included a link to it:

They were leftists all right. In between palsies of fretting, they'd tell you how wonderful the Soviet union was: Pensions were huge, housing was cheap, and they practically paid you to get medical care. Believe me, you haven't been bored until you've been buttonholed by a seventy-year-old woman who holds forth all afternoon on the perfidity of American foreign policy and shows you pictures of her grandchildren. These were people who believed everything about the Soviet union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.

Police Not Issuing Charges For Handgun-Firing Drone - Feds Undecided

When SJWs Get Eaten

Finally: McDonald's On the Verge of Making Breakfast Available All Day Nationwide

Studies Find Genetic Signature of Australian Aborigines In Native Americans

30-Year-Old Man Agrees to Full Head Transplant

Or body transplant depending on how you look at it.

Valery Spiridinov, a 30-year-old Russian man with the severely debilitating Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, intends to undergo the world's first human head transplant. The doctor who plans to perform the surgery - which would take place in 2017 - is Dr. Sergio Canavero, a confident neurosurgeon from Italy who claims the procedure can be done in one day and will have a 90 percent chance of success. Other doctors are highly skeptical, both of its possible success as well as the ethics of such a procedure.

The surgery, which was unsuccessfully performed on monkeys in the 1970s, is divided into three stages, as explained in the Telegraph. In the first stage the body must be chilled to 10-20 degrees. The second stage involves cutting the spinal cord. And in the third stage the nerves and blood vessels must all be woven back together before putting the patient into a coma for a few weeks. The biggest concern doctors have is whether or not Spiridinov's brain will still function after the surgery, but for Spiridinov, who is bound to a wheel chair with very little control over his body, it's a risk worth taking.

The Artwork of Walter Molino

One of the inspirations for Frank Frazetta.

 

The Group knows your sins but doesn't care. But cross them and they just might.

Tonight's post brought to you by criticism:

Notice: Posted by explicit and uncut permission of AceCorp LLC. The secret moderators have their directions. The rest of you just try and look busy if the ewok peeks his head in.

Close it up

Trump on CNN with Anderson Cooper

—Ace

On now.

Open Thread. Prepping for the podcast.

"Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!" Open Thread

—Andy

Tonight at 9 EDT on SyFy. You know you're watching.

Sure

—Ace

The Daily Bruin ran an editorial, which was already stupid, calling for free tampons to "reduce inequality." (Remember when Romney wanted to ban tampons? How far we've come.)

Now that's pretty stupid, you're thinking. Surely, it could not become more stupid.

Once again, You Lose. I don't know why you're always shooting your mouth off claiming things can get neither worse nor more stupid. You're always wrong, wrong, wrong, and one of these days you're just going to have to accept that.

So, what makes it even more stupid is the disclaimer/apology that runs with the article:

They want to apologize to referring to those who menstruate as "women."

So... You're supposed to keep two contradictory thoughts in your head simultaneously:

1, that feminists are serious thinkers, Just Like Sir Tim Hunt, only more socially relevant, and are definitely not obsessed with puerile, girlish nonsense to distract them between games of Candy Crush.

2, that it is a major step in societal evolution to draw period stains on Disney princesses to let them know menstruation isn't shameful.

These two claims cannot possibly both be true simultaneously, but you're going to have to make them both true if you want to be a member of The New Elite.

Hillary Has Fallen and She Can't Get Up

—Ace

She runs poorly against Walker and Rubio in three key swing states. She also lags Jeb Bush, but not as badly. (Jeb does best in Virginia, but only edges her in Colorado and Iowa.)

It gets very easy for me to say Let It Burn given my assumption that we're doomed anyway and need a dramatic loss to shake anyone's brain up. Never let a crisis go to waste -- if you're going to lose, lose in such a profound way that it disrupts the current Loser's Trajectory and leads, a decade hence, to a win.

Then a poll like this comes along, and I start thinking about supporting a candidate.

It sure would be nice to not elect Hillary Clinton.

Did the White House Farm the Rolling Stone Fake-Rape Jackie Story to Rollling Stone?

—Ace

From once and future Congressional candidate Mike Flynn, my own answer here is by a qualified yes, and that qualification is "of course it was, dummy."

The Obama administration disclosed Tuesday it first learned about Rolling Stone’s ill-fated story on campus rape in Sept. 2014, about two months before it was published, when reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely called seeking information on the government’s investigation of the University of Virginia’s handling of sexual assaults.

The revelation from the Department of Education came the same day that a media watchdog group asked congressional oversight committees to start an investigation into what the administration may have known about the story before and after it was published and what it did to address the concerns raised in the article.

"The larger question we raise regards the role of public officials: Was this contrived, indeed fabricated story, part of an orchestrated power grab over U.S. universities by administration officials intent on using a major publication as a political weapon?" the Institute on Government and Media Integrity wrote in a letter to Rep. John Kline, Minnesota Republican and House Education and the Workforce Committee chairman, and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the Senate education committee.

The request could open the door for Congress to obtain access to documents that have also been sought by news reporters but so far have not been released.

White House officials who talked to The Washington Times on Tuesday said the administration had virtually no involvement in the story except to arrange a short interview between an Education Department official and Rolling Stone, which was supposed to be limited to a broad discussion about Title IX investigations and the Office of Civil Rights ongoing inquiry into UVa.

Oh is that all?

"In response to the [Rolling Stone] reporter’s inquiry, the press office arranged an interview with Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon for Sept. 24, 2014. The interview focused on what it means to be under Title IX compliance review by the OCR. That was our only participation in the reporting of the Rolling Stone story, other than some fact checking about Title IX investigations once the story was written and ready for print. We did not suggest any other people for the reporter to talk to, and she did not tell us who she had interviewed for her story," the department said in a statement to The Times.

Read on to see the White House distancing itself from Rhenda, claiming she's just a gal from around the neighborhood.

Matt Lewis and The Top-Down, Corporate Hierarchy View of Conservatism

—Ace

He's calling on Rush Limbaugh to "sack up" and tell his listeners that Trump is bad.

I myself am a little exasperated at Limbaugh's running defense of Trump -- no, he's not endorsing Trump (as Lewis points out). But he is always talking about how the Establishment and Media (and Establishment Media) is running Trump down, demanding others denounce him, and how Trump is refusing to be the "perpetrator" in the media You Said a Dirty War speechcrime narrative -- which elevates Trump into a folk hero, frankly.

To be honest, all of these points are fair -- and Trump is a folk hero for telling the media (and the establishment) to blow him. I don't really like Trump, but I can't pretend I don't like that part of Trump. (Or the part where he agitates against illegal immigration -- and I'm starting to have my doubts about of the legal kind, too, to be honest with you. I'm tired of the Democrat Party importing a million new Democrats every year.)

My problem with Lewis' piece is that he continues -- as so many corporate/establishment conservatives do -- to assume that the conservatives they don't like are just stupid Followers of Entertainment Wing demagogues, and if those demagogues could just be persuaded to change their tunes, the stupid Followers would finally Do the Right Thing (which continues to be Following, but this time they'd be Following the correct orders, these orders approved by Corporate/Establishment Central).

Eh, I'm not going to populist demagogue this and claim that there's no Follower thing going on, and that every talk radio listener has a one-hundred percent Sovereign Mind which is totally Independent of Everything except his own Reason and the Sentiments of Morality imbued in him by Holy God.

Still, this whole idea that the Out Group -- the Other -- is just a band of fucking idiots who get off on Hate and Talk Radio and do whatever the disembodied voices on the Talking Box tell him to do is part of the problem.

There is no true, legitimate hierarchy in the conservative movement -- though all the little assclowns who have blundered into positions of authority or persuasion like insisting that there is.

The conception here of followers following politico-corporate leadership is far too close, for my liking, to the Washington Post's notorious description of the conservative movement: "poor, uneducated, and easily led."

I will continue to say this: If the Establishment wants to end the Trump Rebellion, then they should talk a lot less -- stop issuing orders, stop putting out plans as to How to Make the Crazies Understand Reason -- and start listening for once in their fucking lives.

There is a reason people are supporting Trump, and there is a reason pro-GOP people like Levin and Limbaugh and Coulter refuse to take orders from Corporate/Establishment Central and kneecap him.

If the Establishment wants to keep pretending, despite their manifold failures (both of the unplanned and deliberate Failure Theater varieties), that they have all the answers, they can keep whistling past the GOP's coming grave.

A third party is coming unless there is an actual dialogue and actual new consensus reached between the wings.

The Establishment has deployed its various insults -- "crazies," "hobbits," "wacko birds," etc., for years, to no discernible persuasive effect. In fact, it's resulted in a great deal of alienation and anger.

Hey, I thought these Establishment Types were supposed to be the Super-Experts on How to Be Smart at Politics and Win All the Things?

How come they can't go five minutes without stepping on their own dicks?

At what point do they begin to even consider the possibility that 25% of the party (and rising!) might have something useful to contribute to the discussion?

Fantastic: Black Progressive Racists Really Pissed Off at White Progressives (Who Are Also, As Most Progressives Are, Racist)

—Ace

Via Hot Air.

Black protesters, who were determined to let the world know that black lives matter and not a single life of any other race matters, turned Netroots Nation into what many are calling a "disaster."

Dave Wiegel reports on the intolerance and gonzo racial tribalism on display.

The left-wing writer Matt Bruenig added to the backlash by annotating an interview with Tia Oso, the Phoenix activist who led the disruption. Oso chastised Sanders for discussing poverty "without the context of white supremacy." Bruenig found her critique to be incoherent.

"Does Bernie Sanders really want to talk about job creation?" he asked. "It's all he talks about. The fact that job creation and similar economic topics is mostly what he talks about is the supposed racial critique!"

If you click on that link, you'll see that Tia Oso believes that politics should be about #BlackLivesMatter and nothing else.

The black activists prefer indulging in Ta-Nehisi Coates-style histrionics about their black bodies being perpetually menaced by roving bands of racist Murder Cops.

The best way of understanding what the fuss was about is to watch one of the many videos shot from the thick of the Netroots protest. At 8:47, in a video uploaded by Andrew Davey, you can hear protesters demand that Sanders explain how he'll ameliorate racism in America. You can watch Sanders give what he thinks is complete answer -- and be denounced.

"We're going to transform the economics in America so that we create millions of decent-paying jobs," said Sanders in the clip. "We're going to make tuition at public colleges free."

"Jobs and college don't stop the police from killing me!" said a woman in the crowd, audible in the room but not on official videos of the event. "Jobs and college don't stop the police from killing me!"

Sanders plowed forward. "We're going to reform our trade policy so that corporate America invests in this country, and not low-income countries around the world," he said.

"Trade policy doesn't stop the police from killing me!" said the woman....

In the conversations that spilled into the hall, activist after activist asked why white liberals were so insistent on talking about poverty before discussing white privilege.

More like this, please. As a man once said, every corrupt system contains within it the seeds of its own destruction.

And black racism is just as ugly and just as corrupt as the white version.

Open Thread

—rdbrewer

Thomas Cooper Gotch, "Study for the Birthday Party" (1930)

Wednesday Morning News Dump

—BenK

• Brother Can You Spare $725M? Famed Texas Waggoner Ranch For Sale
• CEO Calls Local Pols Bluff on Blocking Pipeline
• 5 Counts Against Blagojevich Tossed, 13 Remain
• You Don't Say: Chattanooga Terrorist Followed Writings of al Qaeda "Cleric"
• Top MD at Planned Parenthood Suggests “Less Crunchy” Technique to Better Enable Women's Freedom, or Something
• FFS: Obama Now Wants Bureaucrats to Determine if we are Financially Responsible Enough to Buy a Gun
• Outgoing Top Army General says we Could Have Stopped ISIS
• Judge: Evidence in Freddie Gray's Death Can be Made Public
• Well Warren Knows Hillary Can't Pick it up on Her Own
• Planned Parenthood Admits to Congress it is a Corporation
• What Could go Wrong? Driverless Car Hacked
• 7th Circuit Makes it Easier to Sue Over Data Breaches
• Vikki Breaks up with Boyfriend, Mohammed, who Then Hires Thugs to Attack her with Acid
• Don't Feel Bad Man, Kate Upton Always Rejects my Proposals Too
• In Depth Report of Gambian Coup Attempt Led by Former US Army Officer
• China Rounds up Hundreds of Human Rights Lawyers
• Another Terrorist Killed in US Airstrike
• We Should All be so Lucky: Man Dies, leaves 1,200 Guns Behind
• Humorless Outraged Outragers Stomp on Other People's Fun
• Living the AOSHQ Lifestyle

Thanks to Michael James Barton for putting this together for me while I'm out working on a project. Be sure to give him a follow.

Morning Thread (7-22-2015)

—Andy

"Those dastardly pro-lifers. Notice how it even looks like her lips say 'Lamborghini' when they dubbed that in. Very clever." ~ Planned Parenthood, later today.

Overnight Open Thread (7-21-2015)

—Maetenloch

Quote of the Day I

Gawker isn't going to die from its current imbroglio - there will always be a pack of young liberal writers in New York willing to do anything for $40,000 a year.

-- Jonathan Last

Quote of the Day II

Quote of the Day III

I hear that civilians showed up to guard the recruiting center in Maryville, TN, too - a suburb of Knoxville - but I haven't seen anything on local media about it. I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I like it that civilians are self-organizing to respond to the federal government's manifest inability to deal with a problem. On the other hand, there's the federal government's manifest inability to deal with a problem...

-- Glenn Reynolds

On the Loathsomeness of Gawker

Just look for a second at some of Gawker's biggest stories over the years. There was the time they stole an iPhone prototype and nearly faced criminal prosecution for it. There was the time they ran private nude photos of quarterback Brett Favre to his objections and the objections of the recipient. There was the nude video of Dov Charney. There was the time they published an anonymous source's recounting of a supposed one night stand by a female Senate candidate. There was the time they ran humiliating commentary against stolen footage of a sex tape featuring Hulk Hogan.

And then, to think, this is the same site that sanctimoniously lectures other outlets and readers for sexism, for not respecting privacy, for misogyny, for publishing leaked celebrity nudes and on and on .

...Hypocrisy is too weak a word when it comes to Gawker. It is instead an indisputable pattern of malice and mendacity almost without parallel in the history of media. It is essentially a twelve-year spree of destruction, pain and waste. The sole purpose of the entire repugnant edifice has been to make a single owner fabulously rich and a revolving door of mediocre writers feel important and powerful.

Human Speciation and The Today Show's Fear of the Complex and Dangerous Tool Known as a 'Fire Extinguisher'

Via Insty.

Savannah Guthrie: "A lot of us are intimidated though, like, by the idea of turning it on..." *makes gestures and facial expressions as though she's holding a well-greased and annoyed cobra at arms length*

Me: "Wut?" *tilts head on side like RCA Victor mascot*

Jeff Rossen: "I... I will tell you, I actually never used a fire extinguisher before and I thought there would be a kickback and I was afraid to use it..."

Me: (yelling) "OH. MY. GOD! It's a fire extinguisher, you sackless herbivore! What are you afraid of, you big girl's blouse?"

Iran "Deal" Includes Secret Side Agreements as to How Obama Will Treat Important Iranian Nuke Facilities... and When I Say Secret, I Mean It's Not Released to Congress, and Not Even Released to Other Negotiating Partners

—Ace

Just a secret side-deal between an America-hating ideologically-bent fascist, and the Iranian president.

Isn't that just swell.

We heard about this some time ago, when Obama's spinners claimed that just because some things would be kept secret from everybody but the Mullahs, didn't mean they were actually secret.

Meanwhile:

Ayatollah Khamenei told supporters on Saturday that U.S. policies in the region were "180 degrees" opposed to Iran's, at a speech in a Tehran mosque punctuated by chants of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel".

"Even after this deal our policy towards the arrogant U.S. will not change," Khamenei said.

Via Hot Air.

The Administration was recently spinning that they were not counting on any change of behavior on Iran's part due to this deal. That's a complete lie. These diplomatic easy lays were convinced Iran would be our Bestest Frwiends Ever, if we just gave them their nukes.

Because they hinted that, or claimed that, at the negotiating table.

Well, now they've got their nukes and they don't have to lie anymore so guess what, assholes?

You were played. You let them f*** you up the a**** and you didn't even get a Sorry I Broke Your Assh***, Asshole condolences card.

Open Thread.

The #WarOnShirts: First They Went After that Rocket Scientist, Now They're Going After Target

—Ace

So many shirts, so much rape culture.

The new Outrage -- and honestly, it's been days since the last one; weren't you getting a little bit itchy? -- concerns a shirt sold at Target department stores.

This t-shirt promotes, the Totalitarian Feminist Maenads insist, rape culture.

It promotes rape, suggests to men that rape is Just Fine, and also chills women from telling their narratives about rape.

Wow, you're thinking --that must be quite a shirt.

Indeed, it is.

Behold the Rape Garment:

You see, when a woman wears this t-shirt -- and, by the way, and I am being 100% honest here: I just saw a woman wearing this t-shirt two hours ago -- she is not just making a harmless little boast that she is eye-candy and the sort of hot young thing that makes men's eyes glitter with the desire to win her.

No, when a woman wears this t-shirt, she is saying Rape me, and she's also telling men Rape as many other people as you can, and she's telling rape victims Shut up with your stupid rape-shaming already.

Jen Groover, a motivational speak and author of, "What If? & Why Not," says the tees indeed depict women negatively.

"The general use of the term 'trophy wife' in our society, is meant as a demeaning term toward the woman and a symbolic ‘high-five’ toward the man for scoring outside of his zone," Groover told FOX411. "I would prefer seeing more positive statements that are empowering for myself, my daughters and all women."

So, she doesn't like how some women present themselves.

For my part, I would prefer it if some women did not perpetuate the image of women as excessively emotional and fascinated by vindictive little squabbles about petty little trivias in order to give some semblance of greater meaning to their empty (and empty-headed) lives; but so many women seem determined to wear the cultural markings that proclaim that women are just that.

There is a psychological condition that RD Brewer always talks about; it is the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks that are easy for them are also easy for others.

David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University have postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in the unskilled, and external misperception in the skilled: "The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

Dunning-Kruger syndrome has been understood largely as a workplace phenomenon, but let me posit that it is a powerful factor in politics:

Incompetent, low-value people constantly imagine themselves to be smarter than they are, and smarter than other people generally, and believe that other people require their (incompetent) guidance in a nearly limitless number of lifestyle choices.

In fact, the people who assert that they are smarter than others, and thus must lend their competency and intellect to others, are in fact among the stupidest, most incompetent, and least useful people in existence.

Let me point something out:

An expert is someone who gets called upon to offer his expertise. He is usually a highly paid person. His consultancy is highly sought-after.

If you are the sort of person who believes she has an "expertise" in an area, but, strangely enough, finds herself always having to force this expertise upon other people, rather than being approached by them for it: You are almost certainly an incompetent, useless, stupid person, who has very little actual value, but whose value has been inflated and overestimated by your own poorly-informed, low-competency ego.

Thus, even your estimation of self is, as is all other things about you, incompetent.

Women have many reasons for doing things. Among them might be a, get this, humorous sort of view of the world.

Stop looking at all these other people who you are so certain can learn from your immense, and yet completely unsought, expertise, and instead set about learning from the great mass of people, almost all of whom are more intelligent and higher-competency than you are.

The Idiot and the Expert have one thing in common: They both have lots and lots of opinions.

The easiest way to tell the Idiot from the Expert -- you don't even bother to have to listen to their opinions this way -- is to determine if anyone is seeking those opinions out, or if that person is contriving new ways to inflict those opinions upon unwilling strangers.

If you're pushing your unsolicited opinions on strangers, and have to resort to the tools of coercion to make yourself heard: Guess what, Idiot?

All Women Who Allege Rape Should Be Believed, Part 17 of a Continuing Series

—Ace

IMMa just let you read this.

Spoiler Alert: The only rape that occurred was of a blameless, falsely-accused man, raped by lie by a lying accuser, then raped a second time by a feminist (I assume) harpy of a DA, who withheld evidence from the defense that cell tower records indicated the woman abducted for rape was never anywhere near where she said she was to be raped.

In fact, she was just home, safe and unraped, as the falsely-accused man always maintained.

Martin O'Malley: You Know, Climate Change Created ISIS

—Ace

Do go on.

One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation state of Syria and the rise of ISIS, was the effect of climate change and the mega-drought that affected that nation, wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, created a humanitarian crisis that created the symptoms -- or rather, the conditions -- of extreme poverty that has now led to the rise of ISIS and this extreme violence.

Everyone knows there usually aren't any droughts in the arid, semi-desert terrain Syria and non-riparian Iraq.

Meanwhile, Obama finally orders flags at the White House lowered to half-mast, because he frankly despises our troops and considers them bitterly clinging subhumans.

As a wag cited at that post notes: Obama had the White House splattered in rainbows colors hours after the Obergefell decision.

But honor dead troops? Nah.

Obama lives in a pretend world, and so does his supporters. And it is important to Obama and his supporters to pretend that bad things simply don't happen under his watch.

In this way beheaded reporters are simply made to disappear from any sort of national attention.

No drama Obama.

No bummer Bammy.

A Make-Pretend President for an increasingly make-pretend America.

Trump Reveals Lindsey Graham's Cell Phone Number on TV

—Ace

I don't know if he did this on purpose, or if he was just holding the paper away from his eyes to read it (nearsightedness).

It looks like it was on purpose, but it's hard to tell. I really don't know.

This will once again be a flashpoint: Those who are against doxxing, and those who are going to say it's great theater and fight the enemy with any weapon fair or foul, etc.

This is becoming a true clownshow. Who knows, perhaps that's good for America; perhaps we need it revealed to us all what a clownshow is this country and its political parties are.

Trump, meanwhile, "clarifies" his weekend remarks and says McCain was, in fact, a war hero. He says that we all misheard what he said -- which AllahPundit points out is a silly claim. It's true that Trump said McCain was a war hero, but only because he was captured; it was wrong for people to report (not sure who did this, but I guess some did) that Trump said McCain was not a war hero.

No, he did say he was a war hero -- "only because he was captured... I prefer guys who weren't captured, but that's just me."

Allah calls this "sarcastic" which I don't think is the right word, exactly; it's dismissive, it's denigrating.

Which, as I said, is fine, as far as McCain goes; my problem is about denigrating all of America's POWs -- after all, they're just the idiots who got captured.

And what about those killed in action? What a bunch of assholes, am I right or am I right?

As I said, I don't think this is the worst thing; I'm sure Trump wasn't thinking about that when he made his crack about McCain.

But that's the problem: He wasn't thinking. He is in that particular mode, the mode of not thinking about obvious traps he's walking into, an awful lot of the time.

And far from seeking to correct this, he's genuinely proud of his Not Thinkingness, and many of his supporters are shouting that Not Thinkingness is the way to win.

None of his gaffes, so far, is such a big deal, and yes, as Rush Limbaugh says (day after day after day), these gaffes are chiefly of concern to beltway insiders who can't stand Trump anyway.

But they do begin to pile up, and meanwhile, we're talking about Trump's latest outrages, pro or con, instead of any actual policy initiative that would be helpful for the nation.

Remember, in case we've all forgotten, that the first raison d'etre for the Trump candidacy was his ability to start an important discussion that the beltway political class didn't want to have, but that the people were aching for.

Fair enough.

But in that case -- what important discussions are we having this week? Lindsey Graham's cell phone number, or whether John McCain is a tool for letting himself be captured?

These are the Great Fights we need to have, that only a man with the audacity of Trump can begin on our behalves?

We don't seem to be talking about the issues that only Trump has the guts to bring to the people -- we only seem to be talking about Trump.

"Less Crunchy Techniques:" 2nd Planned Parenthood Video Drops

—Ace

Three key things here:

1, the subject discusses the possibility of performing "less crunchy techniques" of extraction in order to secure whole first-trimester fetuses for parts. It should be noted that this discussion is hypothetical, as she's not actually doing that; she is open to it, however.

2, the subject thinks there is no difference between "crunchier" techniques and the less crunchy ones, and rolls her eyes at the silly protocol which says she cannot change the method of an abortion for tissue-recovery purposes. Having an opinion on the law isn't criminal or anything, but it does tend to suggest that throughout Planned Parenthood, this particular protocol is viewed as silly and perhaps easily discarded.

3, they continue talking about money, under the guise of discussing compensation, and say it's not payment (which would be illegal). But they continue negotiating price in exactly the same way that people discussing a payment do. Including the subject's demand that the interviewers state their price first -- after all, the one who opens her mouth first in a negotiation loses, right?

Open Thread

—rdbrewer

Erich Kleiber, "Evening tea time with Chinese Lanterns" (1912)

How Trump Is Affecting The GOP Field

—DrewM.

A rich businessman with a history of not supporting Republicans while holding liberal positions on things like immigration and big government health care schemes combined with a propensity to say head shaking things. But enough about Mitt Romney, this is about Donald Trump.

A new poll is out showing Trump up to almost 25% "support." I put support in scare quotes because, he's not going to get 25% in any actual contest. 6+ months or so out from Iowa and New Hampshire and he's not leading in either state. So let's not even pretend this is about winning.

That's not to say that he's not having an impact. So here's a look at how I see him affecting each of the other candidates. We'll start with those least affected by Trump up to the most affected (either positively or negatively).

First, the group of candidates he's not having any impact on because no one cares about them...Huckabee (5th among evangelicals in Iowa? Go back to Fox Huckster), Kasich, Santorum, Jindal (which I think is a shame), Pataki, Graham.

Next are candidates who should be in the no-one cares about bin but might have escaped that hell if not for Trump:

Ben Carson. Raised a lot of money for his consultants but found the "outside guy people thought was a conservative but really has lots of liberal policy positions" suddenly filled by Trump. Carson wasn't going anywhere but Trump has ended his 15 minutes of fame earlier than it would have otherwise.

Carly Fiorina. She's the candidate everyone likes and wondered why she wasn't doing better while they supported someone else. She did a lot of dirty work early on to grab attention by saying things about Hillary no one else would. People wanted to get her on the stage instead of Trump but his rise has pushed him into the big leagues for now and left her and her pitch as the successful in business candidate in the dust.

Chris Christie. He consigned himself to irrelevancy by not running in 2012 and spending the next few years sucking up to Obama and non-GOP voters by attacking conservatives. Remember how he attacked House conservatives over delaying Sandy pork, er, relief? And then kept quiet while Harry Reid sat on it and Obama dithered over disbursing it. He wanted to run up the score in his reelection bid. Well he did that but at the cost of alienating actual GOP voters.

He's now running as the "I don't care about your feelings, I'm going to tell it like I see it" guy. Sounds familiar, huh? Trumped!

Scott Walker. So far there doesn't seem to much either way here. As he's the front runner in Iowa, a state he basically needs to win to have a shot at the nomination, he might be helped somewhat by Trump sucking up all the air from other candidates who might rise up to challenge him there. So far though it's mostly a push.

Rick Perry. He should be at the top of this list with the also rans who have no chance but he's breaking with the pack by hitting Trump the hardest, first on Trump's language on Hispanics and now on McCain. I doubt it's enough but when you're stuck in a dark basement with others it helps to be the only one who might have a flashlight to help you find the stairs.

Tuesday Morning News Dump

—BenK

• The Butchers Of Planned Parenthood
• Ideas For Reporting Struggling To Cover Planned Parenthood
• The Trump Surge Has Nothing To Do With Trump
• The Imaginary Becket Fund Conspiracy
• Proof Of Life
• Charlie Hebdo Teaches Us Terrorism Does Work
• Deportation's Revolving Door
• More Proof Voter Fraud Is Real
• All Of The Dem Candidates Are Trump-esque
• Fear And Loathing At Netroots Nation
• The Real Reason Troops At Chattanooga Were Unarmed Is Absolutely Infuriating
• Homeland Security Leaders Bent Rules On Private E-mail
• Black Confederate Flag Supporter Killed After Being Run Off The Road
• Appellate Judges Know Nothing About Tech
• Bill De Blasio To Address Climate Change At The Vatican

Morning Thread (7-21-2015)

—Andy

There's supposed to be a new Planned Parenthood video dropping soon - maybe today. Must be pretty bad since they tried to get out ahead of it through their MSNBC cable channel.

Overnight Open Thread (7-20-2015)

—Maetenloch

Quote of the Day I

And, though you may not have noticed, this last week was an especially racist one.

-- Karol Markowicz in Suddenly, Everything Is Racist

Quote of the Day II

It would be an improvement if the left could stick to either of its double standards. Personally, I think fellow Americans - even ones who wear Lynyrd Skynyrd shirts - deserve some of the nuance and understanding so many reserve for Islam extremism. But if you're going to take your zero tolerance for symbols of 19th century slavery so seriously, maybe you should show the same myopic zealotry with regard to the forces who are enslaving people right now.

-- Jonah Goldberg

Quote of the Day III

An avowed socialist was heckled by #BlackLivesMatter protestors while being interviewed by an illegal immigrant and author of a recent documentary about white privilege.

-- Andrew Stiles in The Modern Democratic Party, Explained in One Sentence

Quote of the Day IV

There are few things more cringeworthy than watching stiff-shirted, scripted folks attempting charisma. But that's exactly what happened in Hillary Clinton's latest social media soirée.

-- Kemberlee Kaye in Watching Hillary Clinton's Embarrassing Snapchat Video

Quote of the Day V

Die-hard conservatives thought that if I couldn't get everything I asked for, I should jump off the cliff with the flag flying-go down in flames. No, if I can get 70 or 80 percent of what it is I'm trying to get ... I'll take that and then continue to try to get the rest in the future.

-- Ronald Reagan

Trump At 24% in ABC/WaPo Poll; Has 11-Point Lead Over Nearest Competitor

—Ace

So, there's that.

Whether or not you support Trump, you must concede that this is pretty funny:

Open Thread.

Planned Parenthood Getting In Front of Next Round of Sting Video Disclosures: Um, There Might Be Some Racially-Charged Material

—Ace

I don't know if that is a fake raising of expectations -- remember that Clintonistas put out word that Clinton had become purple with rage at his Lewinsky deposition, so that when people saw he had barely become agitated, they said "meh" -- or if they're really preparing their troops for the possibility they might have to defend on these grounds.

Wouldn't that just be fulfilling their historic mission, though?

When you see the heavy, heavy editorializing in the below, do make note that this comes from Planned Parenthood's public relations firm, MSNBC:

Planned Parenthood, under fire for a heavily-edited video suggesting the organization violated federal law in facilitating the donation of fetal tissue, says it believes future videos may make racially-charged claims....

The new information was disclosed in a letter from Planned Parenthood's senior counsel, Roger Evans, in response to a request from a congressional committee that the doctor depicted in the video appear there for questioning. The Center for Medical Progress, a group that appears to have been formed for the sole purpose of secretly recording Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, has said it plans to release a video a week.

...

Abortion opponents have tried for decades to accuse abortion providers, particularly Planned Parenthood, of being motivated by racism, citing founder Margaret Sanger;s early-20th century alliance with eugenicists and claiming, falsely, that abortion clinics are disproportionately clustered in neighborhoods where African-Americans live. Evans wrote that Planned Parenthood believes that "in at least one interaction at a Planned Parenthood facility, the Biomax representative asked questions about the racial characteristics of tissue donated to researchers studying sickle cell anemia, apparently seeking to create a misleading impression."

Well, we'll have to wait and see if the impression is misleading or not.

Yogi Okey-Dokey Just Wants to Hug Your Children and Touch Them A Little While They Stretch

—Ace

From tmi3rd, the least problematic thing here is the racism.

The Times (UK): Video Surfaces Proving that Sir Tim Hunt Was Joking in the Speech That Was Seized Upon for His Social Justice Warrior Smearing

—Ace

Sir Tim Hunt was reported by a longtime SJW as having claimed that he didn't like working with women in his labs, because they sometimes cried and were occasionally complications, as he would fall in love with them, and vice versa.

He was made to resign from his post curing cancer because of the report of these remarks.

However, within a week, people who were at the speech said he was clearly joking, making fun of himself as a "chauvanist."

The SJW's did not accept this, because they are horrible.

Now the Times says video of the speech has surfaced which proves he was in fact completely joking.

So here we have what seems to be another case of Totalitarian Feminist Maenads becoming outraged over suggestions they are emotional and illogical and pointlessly vindictive, once again demonstrating themselves to utteyly emotional and illogical and pointlessly vindictive.

Even as the videotape clears Hunt, Totalitarian Feminist Maenads have pressured an Italian University to cancel an invitation for Hunt to speak there.

The Maenads, the drunken, ecstatic female followers of the god of revelry,
Dionnysus, attack a man for no reason except pure pack-animal mob pleasure...
one site notes "in their frenzy they tear apart wild animals and devour the raw flesh"...
that's the most important word: frenzy

Even Super Anti-GamerGate SJW Brianna Wu:

And where will people with cancer go to get their Nobel Prize winning biologist back?

But you got your scalp, and you distracted yourselves from your own empty, envious lives for a day and a half, and that's all that matters.

So Two "Top Editors" Have Resigned from Gawker, In Protest of "Interference" From the "Business Side" of the Entrerprise

—Ace

This piece is hosted on an archive site, so Gawker doesn't get any traffic from it.

Nick Denton published an extraordinary claim on his site Kinja (no link):

I’m sorry also that Jordan Sargent, reporting this story impeccably despite a personal drama, was exposed to such traumatizing hatred online, just for doing his job.

Gawker is apologizing for exposing Jordan Sargent to "traumatizing hatred online"?

Isn't exposing random people to traumatizing hatred online their entire business model?

Don't forget: The Justine Sacco incident was contrived by a Gawker writer at ValleyWag, a vertical which seeks to dump hatred on random people in Silicon Valley.

If you don't know about the Gawker meltdown, you can read my piece about it from Friday night. It's got a hell of a headline, if I do say so myself.

This is like watching a game between two teams you despise: You're rooting for injuries.

Oh, and Michael Wollf wrote that in a recent conversation with Gawker's head Nick Denton, Nick Denton took a cavalier attitude towards gratuitous nastiness.

Denton immediately emailed me [after a completely gratuitous attack on Wolff's "noncombatant" pregnant girlfriend] and, in our exchange, apologized for the Gawker coverage about my girlfriend and forthcoming baby: "That description of Victoria was mean and pointless." Then he added: "I do wish there was a better way to address insults without storing up resentment ... I would love to institutionalize and automate some right of response. Even the most insolent of Gawker bloggers is better and more reasonable in an exchange."

Again, there is this odd after-the-fact, hands-off, extremely passive sort of contrition. And then the weird, "I would love to institutionalize and automate some right of response." Huh?

His point seemed to be that there was in fact no oversight, and no responsibility, prompting questions about whether Denton is able to exercise oversight, or has in effect relinquished most responsibility. Last fall, he acknowledged something like this, saying he was pulling back and assigning greater oversight powers to a management committee.

No oversight = a damaging admission which will be used in the Hulk Hogan lawsuit.

Also, Wolff goes on to note, bitterly but deservedly, that Gawker writers will have a hard time getting jobs at other places.

Milo Yiannopoulos collected all the people who should sue Gawker.

The strongest case would appear to be James Franco's -- because a former Gawker writer admitted on Twitter (before deleting it) that he made up a "baseless" claim that Franco was guilty of a violent gay rape, and he did so because he "felt like" doing it -- and so did his boss. (He did not specify which "boss" he meant.)

Punk Rock is Now Just Empty Posturing, But Monk Rock Is the New Punk

—Ace

This makes a surprising amount of sense.

There are obvious similarities between punk rock and religious monasticism.

Both are cultures that deviate from the mainstream. Both eschew high fashion in favor of simplicity. Both believe in a Do It Yourself (DIY) ethic. (Corporate label won't sell your record? Produce and distribute it yourself. The secular world is obsessed with fame and toys? Wear a robe and shave your head.)

Punks and monks are about a stripped-down opposition to a sinful world that can me sermonized into making sense.

Enter MONKROCK. The all-caps official name of the company is the brainchild of Kevin Clay, a musician and artist who lives in Tennessee. Clay, who is a "lay monastic," believes that the most authentic expression of punk in 2015 is traditional Catholic monasticism. From his website:

The anti-pop...spirit of punk finds its highest expression in the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, obedience and a rule of prayer, repentance, and work offered to "God alone." Through community and the dissemination of art, media, propaganda and merchandise, MONKROCK exists to make everyday life a religious experience by empowering people to see the world as their monastery.

...

What's left is what the punks once criticized mainstream rock for: bloat, meaningless posturing and sad nostalgia. There seem to be endless documentaries being made about the history of D.C. punk -- more films than have even been made about communism. In Prospect piece, contemporary punks, faced with the kind of leaders and cultural atmosphere they could only dream of in 1984, are left with vague slogans about "social change." There's also what I call "retroactive repression," wherein a liberal confronted with a string of culture war victories [resorts] to the past to complain. Thus a woman in the Prospect piece is angry because there weren't enough "women or people of color" in the 1980s punk scene.

Punks and liberals seem to have won the culture war, but leftist iconoclasm is so woven into their sense of self-worth that they ignore the real misfits and rebels of 2015. Completely co-opted by liberalism, punks have no interested in what is now a truly marginalized group: the orthodox religious.

Worth reading.

The website sells merch, but I do not see any actual music.

True enough, punk rock was an awful lot about the fashion, merch, and other tribal signalings, but they also did have some music to go along with it.

So we'll see what tunes come out of this "monkrock" thing, but I guess we'll see later.

Trump: I've Never Asked God for Forgiveness

—Ace

I'm still chewing this over.

On one hand, I really hate this tribalistic nonsense where people say "He's not a born again Christian, I would never vote for him."

There's a nagginess to liberalism which became discredited because it was so naggy, and so arrogant, and so often used by bad people for dishonest purposes. But the old nagginess used to be about giving people a chance, even if they're different than you.

The opposite impulse I don't like: Retreat to the primitive comfort of tribal affiliation.

His answer here is... well, you can watch it for yourself and make your own choices. I think it's pretty obvious he's an irreligious guy who barely even knows the lingo he's supposed to say in projecting the image of a religious guy. (He does claim to be religious -- but not plausibly.)

So is his real failing here that he failed to be fully honest? Or is there a kind of honesty on display in that he never bothered to fake up a good answer to a question about his relationship with God?

He eventually grabs at an answer -- that "drinking the little wine" and "eating the little cracker" constitute, maybe, an asking of forgiveness from God. He doesn't sound very sure of that (I don't know either way myself), but has already, by then repeatedly said he doesn't even think to ask God for forgiveness. So if the "drinking of the little" wine is such a request, it is only inadvertent, accidental, and symbolic.

And on that -- this is why his McCain answer bothers me. He just doesn't seem to be able to anticipate these big problems coming with his answers. He keeps telling me he's a bright guy, but then he steps on to a bunch of rakes of his own making.