Author: Raymond

 
From John Scalzi:

Dear Humanity:

Thank you so much for your application to join the Intergalactic Federation of Civilizations (henceforth abbreviated as the IFC). We regret to say that after careful consideration by our Admissions Committee, we are currently unable to offer you admission, either as a full or probationary member of the IFC. Indeed, I have to confess there was serious consideration as to whether we should refer your application to the Containment Committee as possible evidence of the need for a quarantine of your planet and sequestration of your species. But after a close vote, we decided simply to table the matter and move on.

I understand that this news will come as a disappointment to many of you. While it is not the practice of the Admissions Committee to offer detailed explanations of its decisions to reject applicants, I understand that, as this is your first attempt at an application, you may benefit from a few hints, tips and pointers that will put your civilization in better stead if and when you ever choose to apply for IFC membership again. So in the spirit of helpfulness, and to give you something productive to do with your time, here are some of the reasons committee members gave for rejecting your application.

– More –
 

 
From nojo at Stinque:

Facts, as we know them, haven’t been around very long. It was only a hundred and fifty years ago that science, literacy, communications, and availability of written material started kicking in, providing the distribution of knowledge beyond previously limited enclaves.

It was exciting at first, knowing the world as it is, instead of what we thought it was. New discoveries! New understanding! New breakthroughs! All with the promise of more amazing things to come, soon as we got more facts under our belts. Finally, humanity was being liberated from millennia of superstition!

Yeah, funny thing about that: Folks stopped caring.

– More –
 

 
From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

The good news is that the Democrats retain a 9 point lead in the congressional preference of voters this year (see top chart). A nine point advantage could well be enough to flip control of the House, and maybe even the Senate.

The bad news is contained in the second and third charts above. Some Democrats think that opposition to Trump will be enough to turn the coming election in their favor. That may be true for Democrats, but it is not enough for Independents — and it will be Independents who decide which party prevails in November.

– More –
 

 
From The Onion:

“Rudy, it’s always a pleasure to have you on ‘Mueller Tonight’—now, I wanted to really dig in and ask you about the President’s state of mind on April 11, 2017,” said Mueller, who leaned over his desk as Giuliani eagerly answered a series of follow-up questions concerning Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and the Seychelles islands, stressing that the millions tuning in to watch the 8 p.m. primetime Fox News talk show “really appreciated” the former New York City mayor’s insight.

– More –
 

 
From Cato’s Julian Sanchez:

Has the thorny problem of providing law enforcement with access to encrypted data without fatally compromising user security finally been solved? That’s the bold thesis advanced by a piece at Wired that garnered an enormous amount of attention last week by suggesting that renowned computer scientist Ray Ozzie, formerly a top engineer at Microsoft, had developed an “exceptional access” proposal that “satisfies both law enforcement and privacy purists.” Alas, other experts have been conspicuously less enthusiastic, with good reason. It’s worth saying a few words about why.

– More –
 

 
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

What happened, you ask?

Citigroup imposed new gun control policies on its clients, like age restrictions and background checks, and Bank of America said it would stop lending money to clients who manufacture military-style assault weapons. It seems “Guns” was the safe word, and the Bankers didn’t honor it.

When Citigroup arrived at the Securities and Exchange Commission for what they expected to be a meeting about derivatives regulation (you know, the thing that destroyed the global economy), instead they got a lecture on guns, and no knobbers from their hookers.

It seems the bank’s new policy hadn’t gone over so well with the Republicans on the S.E.C. committee, who tore into them for straying into social policy.

– More –
 

 
From conservative T. Paine at Saving Common Sense:

We’ve seen it pop up over the news repeatedly and unceasingly. The media is often duped and is complicit, if not actually members of the far left whiners complaining about the rest of us “not understanding” leftist supporters.

Oh, but we do.

When angry leftist snowflakes accuse me of being racist and opposing the Constitution, when they lie like calling me a White Nationalist, when they accuse and blame conservatives, resort to the race card and every race-baiting technique ever devised, and NEVER bring up the double standards and duplicity of their actions going on today, when they attack pro-life organizations as “racist hate groups”, when they claim that only innocent victims and not some numbers of violent protesters marched with BLM, when they are angered by the Congressional Freedom Caucus for even existing, when they constantly deflect and claim that we are blaming the former Black President, when they refuse to look at President Trump and realize that he is doing his constitutional job as commander in chief by trying to prevent potential Muslim terrorists from dangerous and unstable countries from entering America with his temporary ban until they are vetted and thus claiming he is a racist xenophobe because of this, all the while excusing the anti-colonialist, would-be-Marxist, Islamic-enemy strengthening idiot that preceded Trump into the White House, Etc. ad nauseum…. well, we do get it.

Yeah, if that doesn’t fit anti-constitutionalism and hate America first leftists, then it doesn’t exist.
I will not compromise with hate and lies. (Some on the left have become the very essence of hate and lies.) I will call haters and liars out for what they are going forward. There can be no common ground with this leftist extremism. It will never disappear, and it must be defeated by every generation. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” so said the greatest president in my lifetime, Ronald Wilson Reagan, whom the militant left hates for restoring America’s prosperity, standing, and respect among the nations of the world.

– More –
 

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

From the perspective of presidential power, President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran deal seems to offer little upside and quite a bit of downside risk.

The move adds all sorts of uncertainties, but doesn’t appear to satisfy any significant demands from Trump’s coalition. And it inflicts further damage on the president’s professional reputation, which has already been shredded by some of his other actions. The combination stands to make Trump an even weaker president than he already is.

– More –
 

 
From Green Eagle:

From the Washington Post:

“CIA nominee says she would obey her moral compass, not Trump, if told to carry out questionable activities”

Moral compass! The “moral compass” of someone who approved and carried out torture in the first place! The moral compass of someone who engaged in illegal destruction of evidence to hide that torture. That’s some moral compass you have there, lady.

“She resisted efforts by senators to get her to say whether she believed it was morally wrong to use techniques such as waterboarding on terrorist suspects.”

Her “moral compass” can’t tell her whether it is okay to torture people, but by God, she will rely on that moral compass. She wouldn’t ever engage in “questionable activities,” as long as we understand that those activities would have to be a lot worse than torture and destroying evidence before she would consider them questionable.

And that is good enough for Republicans.

– More –
 

 
From PZ Myers:

Once upon a time, I would have assumed everyone would recoil in disgust at the murderous selfishness of incels, but I guess I was wrong. Here’s how Ross Douthat sees them:

One lesson to be drawn from recent Western history might be this: Sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane.

What he’s setting up is the argument that maybe the incels are right, and that maybe everyone is owed sex to some degree, and he’s going to bring in an “authority”.

…it brings me to the case of Robin Hanson, a George Mason economist, libertarian and noted brilliant weirdo. Commenting on the recent terrorist violence in Toronto, in which a self-identified “incel” — that is, involuntary celibate — man sought retribution against women and society for denying him the fornication he felt that he deserved, Hanson offered this provocation: If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?

After all, he wrote, “one might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.”

Robin Hanson is also icky. He’s another example of how libertarianism is a corrupt ideology of greed that is destructive to the social contract. And he’s a tenured professor!

It’s a disquieting example of how what we might call hyper-misogyny has crept into academic discourse via sexually frustrated and clearly angry men who believe men are not only entitled to sex but entitled to sex with women they find attractive. It’s not lost on me by any means that the idea that women owe men sex is not at all new. But this is a new frontier in embedding these ideas into formal public policy proposals, particularly ones that ape the language of rights and equality in much the same way modern racists groups do.

That these people are making analogies to the redistribution of wealth is particularly odious. Such a comparison falls apart quickly, for a couple of reasons.

– More –