Author:

Stick a fork in it, it’s done

NAFTA: The end is nigh:

…the issue of Canada and Mexico making trade agreements with other nations (especially China), while brokering their NAFTA position with the U.S. as a strategic part of those agreements, is a serious issue that cannot adequately be resolved while the U.S. remains connected to NAFTA.
So you see, if you just look at the pure economics of the options, and you remember that President Trump is constitutionally antithetical to anyone having influence over U.S. interests other than the American people inside the United States, you can clearly see there is only one-way this entire process ends.
President Trump will end NAFTA.

Learning Curve

I was alarmed but not altogether surprised to read that Marie… did not want [her assailant] to be locked up but rather that they should receive a punishment “so that they understand.” Understand what, precisely? That hitting a defenceless woman in the face ten times with a knuckleduster isn’t a nice thing to do? But they understood this already, only too well: It was precisely their understanding that impelled them to do it… Presumably Marie had in mind something such as psychoanalysis, perhaps mixed with a little compulsory social work or planting flowers in municipal flowerbeds. This is like trying to talk reason to Pol Pot at the apogee of his power, to get him to stand down by persuading him that what he was doing was wrong.

Some Definitions of Marxism

Peter Risdon:

Marxism is, in general, cleverness for stupid people. You get to use words like ‘hegemony’ and analyse the world, albeit in unusually fatuous terms.

Yours truly:

Marxism: The belief that if only one could violate the autonomy of enough people, confiscate their earnings and rewire their very nature, the result would somehow be Total Human Contentment™.

Feel free to suggest your own.

We Need More Dusky People in Sector G

Theodore Dalrymple:

Quotas are intrinsically divisive and discriminatory (in the worst possible sense) because the number of categories into which humanity can be divided is infinite: only some categories, therefore, can be favoured, leaving others resentful and liable to seek political redress as their supposed salvation. Quotas therefore not only politicise life but embitter political life itself. They formalise favouritism, thus reinforcing the very problem they are meant to solve. They necessarily inflate the role of government, for someone has to enforce them. Before long, the demand for equality (of a kind) undermines freedom because private associations are no longer able to make the rules they wish, a necessary condition for a truly liberal society in which government is not overweening or preponderant. The imposition of quotas is founded on the belief that everyone is a bigot unless forced by administrative fiat to be otherwise.

The Tolerant Left

Always and everywhere a pleasure to behold:

Ms Korn, the student who objects to academic freedom (for others, that is), lists her interests as “socialism, being angry about gender” and “occupying things.” She also tells us that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Though again, that’s her dissent, not yours. And so she asks the question, “Why should we put up with research that counters our goals?” You see, finding things out must be entirely subordinate to certain, rather fashionable political assumptions. Which is to say, her assumptions. It’s exactly the quality one hopes for in a modern intellectual.

Giving It To The Man

As only feminist students can:

As some readers may be intrigued by the notion of all-female feminist pornography, here’s a brief description: “It begins with a group of girls sitting around a library table taking their shirts off. As the film progresses, the girls engage in activities including kissing, rubbing eggs on their bodies and twerking around a chicken carcass.” The finished political opus, titled Initiation, also features the somewhat lacklustre use of a riding crop, extended scenes of floor-wiping and what feels like an eternity of general aimlessness. Those hoping for red-blooded boi-oing fuel may be disappointed.

You, Taxpayer, Come Hither

Novelist Brigid Delaney is just better than us:

As a member of our creative caste, Ms Delaney wants to capture the buzz and thrum of city life. She wants to inspire “recognition” and, above all, “empathy.” It’s just that she’d prefer not to empathise too much with those non-creative people. Say, by working for a living and paying her own bills.

Lovely, Lovely Guilt

At the Guardian, hands are for wringing:

The attempt to cultivate unrealism, dishonesty and pretentious guilt is a Guardian staple and gives the left’s national organ its distinctive tone. That tinny, unconvincing high-pitched whine. Affecting woe, especially improbable woe, is how many leftwing columnists signal their position in their own moral hierarchy, relative to you. Crudely summarised, it goes something like this: “I am better than you because I pretend to feel worse.”
See, for example, the tearful Theo Hobson, who tells us, emphatically, “There is no excuse for failing to feel liberal guilt about race and class.” Keen to self-emasculate, Mr Hobson also believes that James Bond films do “real harm to the male psyche” while making him feel “embarrassed” and “depressed.” Apparently, the hyperbolical adventures and physical daring of our fictional super-spy are “a big factor in the sexual malfunction of our times; the difficulty we have finding life-long partners, and the normalisation of pornography.”

You Can Imagine My Relief

Chambliss said he recently spent time with NSA officials and was assured that the programs Greenwald describes have been exaggerated.
“I was back out at NSA just last week, spent a couple hours out there with high and low level NSA officials,” Chambliss said. “And what I have been assured of is that there is no capability at NSA for anyone without a court order to listen to any telephone conversation or to monitor any e-mail.”

After all, a couple of hours with Nanny ought to be enough to sooth anyone.

Yes We Scan

… promises with a shorter shelf-life than an open tin of sardines:
“Barack Obama and Joe Biden will restore America’s standing in the world by providing a new American leadership to meet the challenges of a new century”.
Yep … Sardines.

“If the media reports are accurate, then this recalls the methods used by enemies during the Cold War,” Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement to The Associated Press.

Going Rogue

From purple heart to purple face:

The White House quickly distanced itself from both Kerry’s North Korea remarks and has now, since President Barack Obama’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Northern Ireland this past week, seen up close the strength of Moscow’s resistance to Kerry’s Syria strategy.

Hey … maybe John is just doing his best to meet Barack on the wings of love, up and above the clouds.

Out in the Cold

Q: He’ll be prosecuted?
Binney: First tortured, then maybe even rendered and tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even executed.
[…]
Drake: But see, I am Exhibit No. 1. …You know, I was charged with 10 felony counts. I was facing 35 years in prison. This is how far the state will go to punish you out of retaliation and reprisal and retribution. … My life has been changed. It’s been turned inside, upside down. I lived on the blunt end of the surveillance bubble. … When you are faced essentially with the rest of your life in prison, you really begin to understand and appreciate more so than I ever have — in terms of four times I took the oath to support the Constitution — what those rights and freedoms really mean. …
Believe me, they are going to put everything they have got to get him. I think there really is a risk. There is a risk he will eventually be pulled off the street.
Q: What do you mean?
Drake: Well, fear of rendition. There is going to be a team sent in.

Read it all (beware annoying auto-play vid)

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