Is Jim Webb getting ready for an independent run?
I noted on Twitter yesterday that I’d like to see a five-way race between Trump, Hillary, Webb, Sanders, and a real Republican.
[Update a few minutes hater]
Fun. Michael Bay is coming out with a movie about Benghazi, just in time for primary season.
Not really Christmas related, but I was working on a section of the report about this, and realized that I hadn’t blogged it at the time, a few days ago. Pew Research released an opinion poll, in which they asked “what role the US government should play in advancing space exploration,” in the context of a broader poll asking what the government role should be in a wide range of activities. For “space exploration,” the public was basically split according to Pew, with almost half favoring a government role, and almost half favoring little or none. But there was a crucial assumption in the question: That everyone agreed on what “space exploration” meant.
I think polls like this are meaningless, because the public is so ill informed, and the notion of “space exploration” so (no pun intended) nebulous. Planetary probes? Space mining? Space settlement? Astronomy? The answer is going to depend very much on what the individual thinks that space exploration is. That’s why I’ve declared warfare on the phrase.
I have been “othered.” I have been mocked and ignored. I have been forced to live in red-lined areas of the community. I have been slandered and slurred and libeled and smeared. I have been treated, quite simply, the way one might treat a “monster.”
The hate ends now. It ends today.
You want your Christmas back? Seriously? The colored lights and the jingtinglers and floobfloobers? The roast beast? The Who Whompers? Want to know what I want back? I want the land your people stole from me. I want an awareness of exactly how I’ve suffered for the past two centuries. I want an acknowledgment that your Who Privilege has perpetuated a system in which people like me have been kept down (ironically by being exiled above) and forced to accept and use the language of oppression.
Finally.
And as a gift to my readers, a roundup by Judith Curry of Christmas-related climate humor. And note this in comments from her: “Mann is insane if that is what he pulled from my testimony. Oops, prob. not insane, just agenda driven.”
Why he never left the White House until the day after:
After a few years, curiosity finally got to the former Washington Times reporter and he asked a low-level administration official why.
“I still remember what she said,” Curl wrote. “’So all of us can be with our families on Christmas.’”
“Who was ‘us’? Hundreds and hundreds of people, that’s who. Sure, the reporters who covered the president, but also dozens and dozens on his staff, 100 Secret Service agents, maybe more, and all of those city cops required whenever the president’s on the move in D.C.,” Curl added in his column.
However, things seemingly changed when Obama took office.
“[T]his president would never delay his trip to his island getaway. He’s off every year well before Christmas. Hundreds and hundreds head off with him, leaving family behind,” Curl wrote.
Some people have class, others are narcissists and leaches on the wealth of the taxpayer.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Barack Obama’s top ten violations of the Constitution this year. Note that this implies that there were many more.
…was much warmer than today:
Last winter, the East Coast had record cold. That was ignored because it was “less than 1% of the Earth.” But this week, the Eastern US defines the global climate.
Funny how that works.
..and the Washington Post decides it’s all about Obama:
He’s dead now but the thing you have to worry about is how this might spoil Obama’s 600th round of golf.
Don’t think about these minor characters.
Think only of this Hero, the Star of Our Movie, in a difficult moment on his Hero’s Journey. The deaths of these walk-ons with no lines aren’t important, except to the extent they cause him to reflect, or feel a moment of triumph in…. golf.
At least when he’s golfing it minimizes the damage he’s doing to the country.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of the WaPo, here are the ten stupidest things about it portraying Ted Cruz’s kids as monkeys.
No, the Republicans aren’t “politicizing it”:
For decades, the government has advised Americans on what they should eat. The advice isn’t just advisory; it drives everything from school lunches and agricultural subsidies to marketing for those bowls of candy we call breakfast cereal. But the science behind this enterprise has always been shaky.
Yes. And Michelle’s lunch program continues to constitute literal, physical child abuse.
Who will call these thugs out for what they are?
Hard to think of a better way to engender sympathy for your cause than preventing people from Christmas shopping, or getting home for Christmas.
[Update mid afternoon]
Enough is enough: Hold “Black Lives Matter” accountable.
David Solway has thoughts on living with it:
Our electrician is a fundamentally decent man, as are probably the majority of his fellow citizens whose views are shaped by skewed reporting and yellow journalism, and who share the same erroneous beliefs. Moreover, many do not enjoy sufficient disposable leisure to research the topics and issues on which they vote. I suspect that even if they did, however, they lack the interest, desire and will to educate themselves, to acquire a historical perspective and a grasp of the less obvious details that ultimately impinge on their well-being. Vigilance is a desideratum of informed citizenship.
Even more dispiriting, many do not want to hear the Muslim hum for what it is, instead attributing it to other sources or re-interpreting it as something it is not. Perhaps the hum is only an auditory hallucination or, for those with ears differently attuned, the hum is “really” a sweet and appealing melody. Robert Spencer recounts a recent instance of such a convenient transposition, involving a young woman affiliated with Georgetown University’s Saudi-funded Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. She was photographed at a Washington demonstration carrying a sign reading: “I’m a Christian and I LOVE the Quran.” The woman presumably believes, Spencer comments, “that Jesus is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, who was crucified and rose from the dead for the salvation of the human race. Yet she is professing love for a book that not only denies all of that, but also insists that Christians are accursed, vile beings who should be waged war against until they submit to the hegemony of a group that believes differently.”
This may be an unaccommodating thing to say, but what one tends to find among the temporizers is a particularly daunting combination of ignorance, stupidity and self-infatuation. Such people do not want to recognize the peril before them since that would require the impulse to think, which is always hard, and the courage to act, which is never easy. Meanwhile, it’s obvious that ear mufflers won’t work against the Muslim detonations. Living beside a construction site is bad enough; living in a destruction site is infinitely worse.
Europe is learning this the hard way.
[Update a couple minutes later]
From early in the year, but related: Islamaphobia is a myth:
“Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations, of their native hordes, whom they imagine to be unenlightened, prejudiced, easily led by the tabloid media, and given to outbursts of spite and violence.”
Yes.
[Update late morning]
The perils of Islamic apologetics: “…it’s not my job to make Islam look good, or to argue that Islam “is a religion of peace,” when the reality is more complicated.”
You don’t say.