Counter-terrorism official claims that mass shootings in America are White right-wing terrorism and therefore should be handled like any other terrorists.
Author ignores untreated mental illness, claims it’s all White Supremacy and easy access to guns.  Only nation in the world to have this problem.  Article is easy to read, conveniently free of citations to studies or news reports or actual proof.  Entirely based on “I’m an expert, believe what I say,” which is a form of the logical fallacy “appeal to authority” that I’ve found particularly annoying since junior high school.
And what’s the proposal – treat White Supremacy like Muslim terrorism?  How?  Put all White American Presbyterians under surveillance?  Infiltrate spies into White organizations like the Kiwanis?  Tap the President’s phones (wait, already did that, it was a bust). No, the author wants the country to adopt two gun control bills presently in Congress, tinkering with background checks. 
Suppose the FBI receives a background check application.  Applicant has no criminal record, never officially diagnosed as mentally ill, not in their database.  But the FBI agent finds disturbing Facebook pictures of the applicant in front of a Nazi flag giving the Nazi salute saying “Finish what Hitler started.” 
Is that enough to deny him the gun?  On what legal grounds?  That he’s a member of the American Nazi Party?  “Being a hater” isn’t listed in any state or federal law as grounds for denial and for good reason – it’s political speech protected by the First Amendment, and thus cannot be used to deny firearms purchases under the Second Amendment.
The author was a Deep State government employee for years.  And his big solution to mass shootings – background checks – can only work if it’s expanded to include crushing unapproved political opinions.  Now we see why draining the swamp is more important that anyone thought.
Joe Doakes

If I were President, it’d be the moral equivalent of…

…well, not “war”. Maybe “dismantling the Department of Education”.

Which is, to be fair, mighty important.

NASCAR is too woke for gun ads in its printed programs?  Wow, I had no idea people who attend races are such sophisticated, urbane Liberals.  I didn’t even know they SOLD white wine spritzers at the track.  I thought NASCAR were a bunch of gas-loving, beer-drinking, gun-toting, red-neck mothers like me.
Shows what I know.
Joe Doakes

When Marketing people operate without adult supervision…

Still not tired of the winning
Joe doakes

“Faster, please”
— Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds

So Yesterday: Gillette slamming “toxic” masculinity. “Woke” advertising campaign costs billions, shreds through market share.

Today: Masculinity good.

Tomorrow: Ads with Andrew “Dice” Clay?

A friend of the blog writes:

This thread!
I read it and think back to my own woes 20 years ago after I graduated from college. People were being laid off in my chosen field, so there were no jobs for new grads. Some of my cohorts refused to take jobs that they were also qualified for, but with way less pay. Not me. I took a low paying job, worked a bit, went to my manager’s boss, showed him my resume, talked about my skills. He looked up my recent review and gave me a raise. I then added two other part time jobs that were actually in the field for which I had a degree. Eventually, one of those became full time. And eventually, I became a manager.
I am so struck by how many of my cohorts, and most of today’s millennials, think promotion, good pay, etc, all happen immediately. It is something you work to, you demonstrate your worth, demonstrate your willingness to work, then pay happens. Then promotions happen. The cohorts that I know who wouldn’t work for less pay, lesser jobs are still mostly not working full time, still complaining that life is unaffordable.
My parents are the Silent Generation, so I think they instilled this in me. I am generally thought of as not an optimist, but I have to believe that the children of millennials will rebel against their parents and actually get back to work, show much better work ethics.

After college, it took me seven years and a career change to earn over $20K a year (after inflation, probably 35ish today). It was because of choices I made – going into an industry that was awful for entry-level wages even before it died – and I knew it at the time. Figured it was worth it for a shot a the big time.

I think kids today figure the big time will come to them…

My parents were 9 and 5 on VJ day – nowhere near child-bearing age – so I’m not a baby boomer. Culturally, I share none of their references; my only memory of the Beatles was hearing they’d broken up. I didn’t hear a thing about Woodstock until I was probably in fifth or sixth grade (heck, I was in sixth grade before I had a radio that could bring in any kind of even mainstream rock).

So I’m no baby boomer. Of course, I doubt I’m an X-er. Call me part of the “Generation that nobody cared enough to give a name to”, for all I care.

Anyway – in my earlier years, I suppose I bagged on the Boom generation as readily as any Xer or Millennial does today – especially as I , as I became a conservative, started associating the boomers with the Hippie generation. It was a mythology pushed by everyone from Jerry Rubin to the TV show Family Ties.

And as Paul Mirengoff at Power Line notes, it just wasn’t true. The tale was in the (voting machine) tape:

[R]adical leftism did not define “a generation” — at least not the generation of Woodstock. In the first presidential election after the festival, about half the members of that generation voted for Richard Nixon. As the Woodstock generation came into its own, it elected Ronald Reagan twice by landslides, and Reagan’s successor by a comfortable margin.
This was followed by two terms of a center-left president and two terms of a center-right one. Not until 2008, 39 years after Woodstock when that generation was on the wane, did America elect a president as far left as the one who had departed the year of the festival.
If I recall correctly, there was at least one reference to Reagan on the Woodstock stage. He was referred to as Ronald Ray-gun (maybe during Joan Baez’s segment). The Gipper also appears in the PBS retrospective. He is seen denouncing radicals during his time as governor.
So it’s ironic, I guess, that Ronald Reagan, not Woodstock, is the political legacy of the Woodstock generation.

And with that, I salute ’em.

Greta Thunberg seems to be for Swedish environmentalists what Alexandria “Tide Pod Evita” Ocasio Cortez is for American progressives; overconfident, undereducated, and very, very overpromoted.

I’ll give her this much, though; unlike the folks flying in private jets and ocean motor yachts to climate conferences, the girl – who has “led” a number of climate-related school strikes in Sweden – is putting her travel plans where her mouth is. More or less.

Greta Thunberg is to sail across the Atlantic in a high-speed racing yacht next month to attend UN climate summits in the US and Chile as part of a sabbatical year the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist will spend in the US.“Good news! I’ll be joining the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, COP25 in Santiago … I’ve been offered a ride on the 60ft racing boat Malizia II. We’ll be sailing across the Atlantic Ocean from the UK to NYC in mid August,” Greta tweeted. The journey will take two weeks.

So at least she’s sailing, rather than taking some plutoprog’s Gulfstream.

Although it’s not exactly the kind of boat my great-grandparents sailed from Norway and Sweden on. It’s the kind of rustic adventure Robin Leach in his heyday might have said was “a bit much”.

So – travel is apparently either for those who are wealthy enough to qualify as exceptions to global warming, or only for people who can take a month out of their lives to cross the ocean on a yacht that costs millions to build and tens of thousands a week to charter.

Sounds about right.

You can’t eliminate supply until you eliminate demand; otherwise, somebody is always willing to meet the demand – we learned that in Prohibition, and the War on Drugs. 
If restaurant managers create the demand for illegal aliens, we need to educate restaurant managers not to do that.  And by “educate,” I mean “learn to make license plates at Stillwater.” 
Of course, the restaurant managers can defend saying “I thought she was legal,” same as any bartender who cards a college kid.  Show me what steps you took to verify identity and eligibility to work here.  Didn’t bother to look too hard, afraid of what you might find?  Weren’t willing to pay the wages an American demanded so you hired an illegal do to the work Americans would do – for that price?  Sucks to be you, Mr. Restaurant Manager.  You broke the law.
Notice who’s being targeted for deportation: families who have received deportation orders.  These aren’t refugees, they aren’t asylum seekers, these are people who had a court hearing and LOST.  They were ordered to leave and are defying the court order.  I’d like to see anybody else get away with that.  Just refuse to pay your child support and see what happens.
Joe Doakes

Would that they’d develop the same consideration for IRS courts.

But that’s just crazy talk.

Using law enforcement and the federal bureaucracy to “target” immigrants who are breaking multiple levers of the law (not just being here illegally, but defying deportation orders) is a bad thing…

… while targeting tea party members is just no big deal?

Big fight over whether the Trump Administration can ask census respondents about their citizenship. The census is used to determine who gets seats in the House of Representatives. So the real issue becomes who are we counting them for?
If the House of Representatives is supposed to represent the citizens living in a district, then we need to know how many of the people responding to the census are citizens. They’re the only ones who should count in determining proportional representation.
If the House is supposed to represent all the residents of a district, then we don’t care about citizenship.
I strongly suspect this is a holdover from slavery days. Slaves didn’t count as full citizens for purposes of proportional representation. And neither do illegal aliens. But people who think they will pick up votes, want them to.
I doubt counting foreigners was the intent of the framers of the Constitution. I foubt counting illegal aliens was the intent of the Voting Rights Act. I think Americans all along, have wanted the House to represent the citizens who reside in the district, not everybody wandering through the district.
I don’t think the court should be meddling with that intent. Add the question.
Joe doakes

I coudln’t agree more. Of all the great scams that Big Left has foisted on us, positing open borders as “kindness” is the most cynical of all.

My office assistant is a nice young lady, pink hair and piercings, knows nothing but she’s cheerful and shows up every morning, which is about as much as you can expect these days.
She complains that she has no money, living in her uncle’s basement cuz the rent is cheap, then says she has to take her kitten to the vet to be neutered. Wait a minute, you already have a bird and a dog, why’d you buy a kitten? Oh, she didn’t, someone gave her a free kitten but now she’s looking at vet bills that she can’t afford.
I didn’t even bother to suggest giving it to the animal shelter. I knew that would be unacceptable, because they kill animals that no one wants, and that’s cruel.
How do you explain to someone that their entire view of the world is slanted the wrong direction? If you can’t afford to support yourself, then you can’t afford to support any animals. And you certainly can’t afford to go clubbing in Minneapolis, or have your hair done a brighter color, or a new tattoo. No, just no. You can’t afford it. That’s not cruel, that’s just the way it is.
I am officially a fuddy-duddy.
Joe Doakes.

I’ve had more than a few conversations with “broke” (and woke? I dunno) Millennials with “Sleeves” of tattoos up and down their arms, and wondered “how much less broke would you be without that collection of tacky, tasteless, ugly ink all over you?”

Among other things.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is taking a walk through a local winery, when he notices Avery LIBRELLE trying to open the tap at the bottom. He tries to reverse course, but LIBRELLE, as always, notices him.

LIBRELLE: Merg! You’re a racist misogynist!

BERG: Uh, OK. Why now?

LIBRELLE: On, no reason. It’s just my new greeting. But Trump is holding children in squalor on the border.

BERG: Separating kids from their parents is a bad thing. But this speaks to the same incompetence that covers most aspects of dealing with the bureaucracy. Nothing to see here.

LIBRELLE: We must treat pre-documented immigrants of color with the respect they deserve.

BERG: Question for you, Avery. Is the US the world’s policeman?

LIBRELLE: No. We can not solve all the world’s problems with the military.

BERG: OK. Are we the the world’s moral arbiter?

LIBRELLE: It is to laugh! We are the most corrupt, least just society on earth!

BERG: Huh. Is the spread of American culture through the world a good thing?

LIBRELLE: We have the most despicable culture there is, buried to its eyeballs in racism and hate. The world’s authentic cultures must be preserved.

BERG: Does the US have anything to teach the world?

LIBRELLE: How to be hateful and horrible.

BERG: So can we keep people from coming here, with or without regard to the law?

LIBRELLE: What are you, a fascist? Everyone has an absolute right to come to the US!

BERG: So if someone comes to this country illegally, or uses an exceptionally broad asylum statute to gain entry to this hateful, horrible, despicable, racist, corrupt, militaristic place, then we are in fact the world’s ATM machine?

LIBRELLE: Why yes! (Turns back to trying to open the tap on the fermentation keg).

BERG: I know I’ll hate myself for asking, but what are you doing?

LIBRELLE: Wine is an appropriation of California culture.

BERG: Of course it is.

And SCENE

… but, almost incredibly, it’s not:

Program at the U of M helps transgender women…sound like women…:

“Every time [“Alice”, the transgender woman who is one of this story’s subjects] called [her grandmother] in high school, she would say, ‘Oh, your voice is getting deeper, you sound like you’re growing into such a nice man, you’re going to be like your dad,'” Alice said.
Those were painful words to hear [of course they were – Ed]. Alice remembers artificially raising the pitch of her voice to thwart her grandmother’s comments.
It wasn’t until years later that Alice realized she was transgender. She started to publicly transition during her senior year in college. She’s 23 now and recently graduated from a speech therapy program that helps transgender people safely adjust how they speak, so they can sound more like themselves.
“I’m at a point where for like 90 plus percent of the time, I’m happy with how I sound and how I’m perceived by other people,” Alice said. “This is something I never expected to be in a position of. And it’s really exciting.”

…but only the kind of women they approve of:

Alice did adopt some behaviors, such as using her hands differently when she spoke. But she refused to fall in line with gender norms she thought were antiquated or offensive.
“I am a feminist. I’m going to act like it. Just because this is a typical feminine behavior, if it is just a very patriarchal, like trying to silence and subdue women, I’m not going to do that,” Alice said. “It’s not worth it.”

Wait’ll the Progressive Powers that Be learn that people think they can turn their intesectional triggers on and off.

She’ll never do lunch in the Warehouse District again.

This American Life is a guilty…well, sometimes pleasure, sometimes intellectual hemorrhoid.  Either way, the guilt is real.  As is the pleasure, sometimes.

This piece was a pleasure in the sense that it showed the Escher drawing that is modern intersectionality, and the nightmare it leaves modern Democrats (darn), as vividly as anything I’ve heard recently.

A refugee who wants to come to the United States can apply and wait for approval.  May take years.  Meanwhile, you sit in the refugee camp overseas.
A person who sneaks into the United States can apply for asylum.  Your approval also may take years.  But meanwhile, you’re released into the United States and given a work permit and relocation benefits. 
A person who sneaks into the United States and claims to be an unaccompanied minor seeking asylum, gets all of that plus extra cash and benefits. 
A person who sneaks into the United States and claims to be an unaccompanied minor trans-gender seeking asylum, gets all of that plus extra cash and benefits and now might receive even better preferential treatment.
No documentation is required for any of this stuff.  In fact, if you have it, it can be used against you.  So nobody has any papers when they arrive, the entire system is based on verbal claims.
Now I ax ya . . . if you wanted to get into the United States plus maximize your benefits, what story would you tell?   

The story that was given to you by those who want your vote in exchange, that’s who.

…with trying to run a society with the entitled cranks that make up so much of the modern left is that if you’re a consevative, they really, really hate you and the idea of sharing a society with you.

University of Texas “Anarchist” (really Maxarchist) group promises to “dox” students who joint the campus’s conservative organization:

“Hey #UT23! Do you wanna be famous? If you join YCT or Turning Point USA, you just might be. Your name and more could end up on an article like one of these,” the tweet said, linking to previous doxxing posts of conservative students at the school. “So be sure to make smart choices at #UTOrientation

There are times I wish I was still in school.

The unqualified David Hogg couldn’t get into a junior college in Florida on his merits, but Harvard grabbed him because he’s got the right Social Justice profile. 

Kyle Kashuv – who survived the same shooting – got into Harvard on his merits.  

Or so he thought.  

Kashuv explains in this twitter thread:

1/ THREAD: Harvard rescinded my acceptance.

Three months after being admitted to Harvard Class of 2023, Harvard has decided to rescind my admission over texts and comments made nearly two years ago, months prior to the shooting.

I have some thoughts. Here’s what happened.

— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) June 17, 2019

Because it’s not enough merely to be a victim (forget about pretty brilliant). It’s about being the right kind of victim. Otherwise, you’re expendable – and, if you’re too obstreporous, must be destroyed.

New York is ending the religious exception for vaccinations.
Do we really believe Orthodox Jews in New York are the ones bringing back once-eradicated diseases?  There’s no connection between illegal immigrants from sh**hole countries and rising cases of measles and tuberculosis?
This is the same logic as taking guns away from law-abiding citizens, or looking for your lost car keys under the street light.  It’s easier to find them.  But it doesn’t do any good.
Joe Doakes

Everything that isn’t banned is mandatory

Over the weekened, I listened to “It’s Been a Minute” with Sam Sanders – one of NPR’s many mad grabs for virtue-seeking relevance – and I heard a bit that simultaneously nauseated and thrilled me.

It’s at about 17:00 into this week’s broadcast.

But don’t worry – I listened to it, so you don’t have to.

Big Left is finding it necessary to rescue, reclaim and rehabilitate the word “Intersectionality”.

I thought about transcribing some quotes – but I’ll just leave it to y’all.

Because this is the sound of Big Left launching a counter-counter-attack in the culture war and the Battle for the Language.

Oberlin – perennial contender for the most obnoxiously “progressive” college in the country – gets hit with an $11 million defamation judgment after its social justice legion falsely accused a local bakery of racism:

A Lorain County jury ordered Oberlin to pay $11 million in compensatory damages to Gibson’s Bakery, a local fixture since 1885 that was beset by protests and racism allegations after three black students were arrested for shoplifting the day after the 2016 presidential election.
“The jury saw that Oberlin College went out of their way to harm a good family and longtime business in their community for no real reason, and the jury said we aren’t going to tolerate that in our community anymore,” Owen Rarric, an attorney for the Gibsons, told Legal Insurrection.

The award, which could triple at Tuesday’s hearing on punitive damages, came as a warning to universities that encourage social-justice activism as student protests spill from the campus to the local community.

The protests started after three black students were arrested for shoplifting.

And what of that?

Meanwhile, the three students pleaded guilty to shoplifting and aggravated trespass while issuing statements absolving the bakery of racism.
In 2017, Gibson’s sued the college for libel; tortious influence with business relationships and contracts, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, culminating in the nearly month-long trial in Elyria, Ohio.
“The students eventually pleaded guilty, but not before large protests and boycotts intended to destroy the bakery and defame the owners,” Mr. Jacobson said. “The jury appears to have accepted that Oberlin College facilitated the wrongful conduct against the bakery.”

Let the caterwauling about “chilling effecdts” begin.

More of this. Faster.

UPDATE: It’d seem Oberlin itself is doing its best to make sure more of this happens faster.

UPDATE 2: Oberlin costs $55K a year. Don’t you just love it when people with that kind of pedigree start yapping about other peoples’ “privilege”?

(Post title h/t Paul Havemann)

The NOW didn’t really vote to “believe all women, but also reserve the right to decide who is a “real woman”” …

…did it?

Yet?

This epi of “Marketplace” – or, more specifically, its A-line feature on workplaces catering to (liberal) peoples’ politics – may have been one of the most depressing things I’ve heard lately.

It starts at 17:36.

The unstated coda to the piece: “progressive” America wants to “other” all dissent out of every aspect of life.

I just left a contract at a group that was less obnoxious about it than the preening virtue-signalers in the Marketplace piece – but not, I suspect, out of lack of wanting to be. And it got me thinking – for all the talk about “tribalism” – usually from the left, aimed at the likes of Trump supporters and Tea Partiers – it’s Big Left that really takes this stuff seriously.

It seems to have become a bit of a ritual on the left to proclaim one’s guilt for…well, all the sins the Church of Intersectionalism recognizes. The louder the better. It’s a tradition that dates back to the Cultural Revolution; to denounce oneself before being denounced (not that that was necessarily protection).

Indeed, it seems to have become literally a religious observance.

Or, alternately, a form of mental illness.

I’ve spent most of my life – virtually my entire adult life – first raising and now working with millennials. And getting used to their various quirks – like, the way the seem to collect diagnoses and physical and mental illnesses (or at least their labels) the way they used to collect Pokemon cards. If I had a nickel for every group of millennials I’ve heard comparing being celiac and dysthemic to being “on the spectrum” and having anxiety, I could contribute enough money to get a republican elected in Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’ district.

Bemusement turns to irritation when they start yapping about “the world the previous generations left them”. The Great Recession, “climate change” and Trump, I guess, all combine to make millennials all goth-y about the world around them.

I’ve tried – without much success – to expose the idea that maybe, just maybe, the world they’re growing (Still. Interminably) is actually, if not better, at least no more malignant than the worlds their elders had:

• Their grand, or sometimes great grand, parents of the “Greatest Generation”, of course, had the Great Depression and World War 2 – with some of them adding Korea and Vietnam. They had hard economic times after the war, as well as a sharp little recession in the late sixties – after which, in their thirties and forties, they got to start watching the social fabric fray throughout the sixties.
• Their children, the “Baby Boom”, had Vietnam and the immense social dislocation that brought, the JFK and RFK and MLK assassinations, the turning of our major cities into dysfunctional hellscapes, the miserable miasma of the seventies with stagflation, an unprecedented political crisis in Watergate, and shag carpeting, and of course the ongoing Cold War.
  
• My generation – I’m not a baby boomer – started out being told overpopulation was going to kill us all; India was going to starve itself down to 100 million people, and there would “inevitably” be food riots in the US by the 1980s. If pollution didn’t kill us first, of course. The seventies – which I remember from the news as a kid – gave way to a recession as brutal as the 2007 one (but shorter, and followed by the sort of robust growth that usually follows recessions, thanks to conservative policies, not that the Jon Stewarts of my generation were any smarter about economics than the Jon Stewarts of the millennial generation, whoever they are). Terrorism in the Middle East became a constant lifestyle. And just as we started getting into adulthood, this mysterious disease started killing people off; gay guys, drug users and Haitians, at first, but – we were assured – it was going to affect us all, and could even kill us all off! And above it all (to me, anyway), the Cold War, with its constant, ambient threat to incinerate us all (I grew up in missile country, and it wasn’t an abstract thing at all), with bombers on standby and Europe split down the middle with barbed wire and troops and mines in between, and Jakov Smirnov an A-list star. Plus we had the 1980-81 season of “SNL”, plus “I’ve Never Been To Me“, by Charlene.
  

It never really sinks in. But then it never really does, with the young.

David Harsanyi moves from memory to fact, to prove the point – millennials just don’t have it that bad, and to the extent they do, it’s largely because of lifestyle choices. From his conclusion:

Of course life has a new set of challenges for every generation, and no one expects millennials to sit around prefacing every complaint by noting, “Hey, life is better for me in so many ways.” But it’s simply untrue, despite a sense of unearned victimhood, that millennials have it harder than those who came before them. In most ways, the opposite is true.

I’d urge you not just to read athe whole thing, but to pass it on to a millennial close to you. Presuming they’re not triggered.