[VIDEO] Students Asked What They Thought Of The Kavanaugh Controversy
Posted: September 22, 2018 Filed under: Education, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Kavanaugh Leave a comment
They need more evidence
… Reporters from The Daily Caller News Foundation asked students at George Washington University what they thought of the Supreme Court nominee, the allegations he’s facing and what they would tell him or his accuser.
Almost everyone said if Kavanaugh is guilty, he should not serve on the bench, “even if it was 35 years ago.” But most found it a difficult situation Read the rest of this entry »
Headline of the Year: Author of ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ arrested for allegedly killing her husband
Posted: September 12, 2018 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere | Tags: Crime fiction, Hell on the Heart, How to Murder Your Husband, Mystery, Nancy Crampton-Brophy, Oregon Leave a comment
Life has apparently imitated art for one romance writer.
Storm Gifford reports: In a twist of irony so devious it would have turned Agatha Christie green with envy, Oregon chef Daniel Brophy was found shot to death nearly seven years after his wife of 27 years penned an essay titled “How to Murder Your Husband.”
Nancy Crampton-Brophy, the writer of sensuous mysteries such as “Hell on the Heart” and “The Wrong Husband,” was arrested for murder on Sept. 5 — more than three months after the death of her spouse.
“Dan was one of the very few people I’ve known that knew exactly what he wanted in life and loved doing it,” she said at a candlelight vigil two days after Daniel’s demise.
Oregon cops were mum on arrest details such as why Crampton-Brophy, 68, was taken into custody only last week for the June 2 shooting.
“Detectives believe Nancy L. Crampton-Brophy is the suspect in Daniel C. Brophy’s murder,” said Portland police, who refused to discuss motive or evidence. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] What Should Have Happened at the Kavanaugh Hearing
Posted: September 8, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Law & Justice, Mediasphere | Tags: Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh Hearing, Reason, SCOTUS, video Leave a comment
Alternate reality.
Something light to cleanse the palate via Reason at the end of a week that was even stupider and more irritating than expected … (read more)
Source: HotAir.com – Reason
Testosterone May Make Men More Honest
Posted: September 1, 2018 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Hormones, Masculine, Testosterone Leave a comment
Alex Berezow reports: Testosterone does a lot of different things for a men — it masculinizes the body, boosts the sex drive, and contributes to hair loss. Now, researchers think it may also make men more honest.
In recent years, there has been an interest in determining how our hormones affect our economic behavior, such as gambling and financial risk taking. The financial industry is dominated by men, and if testosterone influences decision-making, this potentially has a profound implication for the national economy.
Paradoxically, testosterone promotes pro-social behaviors in some circumstances and anti-social behavior in others. The reasons for this aren’t entirely clear, but it may involve a man’s desire to increase his social status. Previous research shows that testosterone may actually make a man a fairer negotiator.
To investigate such phenomena further, a team of researchers administered testosterone gels to 124 college-aged male volunteers and placebo gels to 118 males. (The total sample size was 242.) They were then given a die and told to roll it, and whatever number came up was the amount of money they were to receive for participating in the experiment. Because they rolled the die in private, they could cheat (by reporting a higher value than they actually rolled). The authors hypothesized that the testosterone group would be more honest.
The results showed that both groups cheated, but the placebo group cheated more, which was consistent with the team’s hypothesis.
The Mental State of M. Todd Henderson by Elaine Ash
Posted: August 29, 2018 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, Reading Room | Tags: Books, M. Todd Henderson Leave a comment
The Mental State of M. Todd Henderson
by Elaine Ash
As the purge of conservative and libertarian pundits roils You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and anywhere speech is supposedly free, M. Todd Henderson and his political thriller Mental State fight an uphill battle to release in October.
In late 2015, I was hired as a freelance editor by Mr. Henderson, a law professor at the University of Chicago. His book, Mental State, is based on the real-life partially unsolved murder of Florida law professor Dan Markel. In the book, the murder is pinned on the wrong perp.
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[VIDEO] WHITE HOUSE PRESS BRIEFING: A Bad Lip Reading
Posted: August 24, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Bad Lip Reading, Press Briefing, Sarah Sanders, White House press corps Leave a commentHow White House press briefings sound in Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ head… Follow on Instagram and Twitter: @badlipreading and Facebook
John Brennan, Heroic American
Posted: August 16, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: CNN, corruption, John Brennan, media, MSNBC, National security, Obama administration, Security clearance, Trump Administration Leave a comment
Democratic Socialism is Totalitarian Slavery
Posted: August 15, 2018 Filed under: History, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Academia, censorship, Democratic socialism, George Orwell, Liberty, Marxism, propaganda, property rights, Slavery, Socialism Leave a comment
How to properly understand this system
S.G. Cheah writes: Have you ever wondered why, despite the continuous systemic failures of socialistic, communistic or fascistic regimes, -as evidently proven by the observable catastrophes of 2018’s Venezuela, Mao’s China, and the Soviet Union — this idea of the Utopian collectivist commune never seem to die? Witness the popular resurgence of this idea in today’s celebratory praise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s push for Democratic Socialism.
The secret to the existence and survival of these ideas is far more sinister than you may have realized.
George Orwell, who was a Democratic Socialist himself, anxiously warned us about this in his book ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’. Ayn Rand laid out their calculated plans in ‘The Fountainhead’. Friedrich Hayek illustrated the imminent dangers of what’s to come if they succeed in his ‘Road to Serfdom’.
Literature is brimmed with thinkers who had alerted us to the dangers of this idea throughout history. What they would have warned us today, which they did in the past, is how Democratic Socialism is simply slavery re-branded.
If you make the argument that Democratic Socialism is slavery, you will likely be accused of exaggerated fear mongering. But are you wrong? Read on to know why Socialism is essentially slavery.
Socialism does away with property rights.
It is a basic tenet of life and liberty that without property rights, no other rights are possible. The problematic error of which most of us tragically hold today is to view property only as inanimate matter because this materialistic view classifies property as being separate and apart from man’s life.
[Read the full story here, at Medium]
The truth is, property is the implementation to life and liberty. It is crucial to understand how the bond between private property and political freedom is an indissoluble one, because an individual’s property is an extension of his own life.
Why property rights is essential to freedom
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Published in 1719.
It is important for people to learn the connection between property rights as being directly protected by liberty, and how this connection ensures life. To help picture this clearly, think of yourself as Robinson Crusoe. Or Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Or if you’re talking to the very young, Matt Damon in The Martian.
These fictional characters illustrate this bond between property and life. When these castaways were shipwrecked alone, the only choices presented to them is either to survive or to perish. In order to live, they will have to employ the use of their mind and direct their body to produce the necessary requirement of survival: shelter, water, food.
Socialist guilt tripping
A socialist will bring up the example: imagine if a year later, another castaway is stranded on the same patch of land as you. Don’t you have the moral obligation to share your shelter, water and food with him? The answer to this is not “yes you’re obligated morally to share” nor “no, you’re not obligated morally to share”, but rather, the correct answer is: “you shall decide”.
Why is “you shall decide” the right answer? It is because the shelter, water and food you’ve created is a product of your mind and body, which is an extension to your very life. Read the rest of this entry »
Karol Markowicz: The Media’s Blatant Hypocrisy — Even About Media-Bashing
Posted: August 14, 2018 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, Terrorism | Tags: Antifa, Bill de Blasio, Charlottesville, CNN, journalism, media, New York Post, NYPost, Rupert Murdoch, The Press Leave a comment
On Sunday, the Unite the Right II rally of white supremacists fizzled out. Antifa demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va., who gathered to mark the anniversary of the first Unite the Right rally, threw eggs at Secret Service, were arrested for assaulting a man wearing a Make America Great Again hat, launched fireworks and smoke bombs at police and assaulted NBC reporter Cal Perry. Perry had his camera knocked out of his hands while the protester screamed profanities at him.
The story appears on various media sites, and several reporters tweeted about the attack, but the outrage was muted. Instead, nearly every outlet went out of their way to gently describe the Antifa mob. The headlines at CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post made sure to call the group “anti-hate protesters.”
[Read the full story here, at nypost.com]
After two years of constant self-applause, and furrowed-brow concern about President Trump sowing mistrust in the media as well as possibly instigating violence against its members, where is the outrage when a reporter is physically assaulted?
Had it been an alt-right member doing the attacking, is there any doubt the story would lead all news shows and make the front page of all the major newspapers?
Also on Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio sat down with Brian Stelter at CNN to continue his crybaby “News Corp is mean to me so I wish they’d disappear” tour. Read the rest of this entry »
In Hollywood, ‘Anything Goes’ Becomes ‘You’re Fired’
Posted: July 23, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: #MeToo, Activism, Guardians of the Galaxy, Hollywood, James Gunn, media, Mob, Twitter Leave a comment
Disney has severed ties with filmmaker James Gunn, who previously directed two ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ movies. Photo: Jordan Strauss/Associated Press
Joe Flint reports: Executives and creatives are losing their jobs as the entertainment industry becomes less tolerant of offensive remarks, abusive behavior
Hollywood’s longstanding say-anything, do-anything culture is rapidly turning into one where the wrong words can have career-killing consequences.
Top executives at Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures and Netflix Inc., as well as creative talent who worked on the “Lethal Weapon” television series and “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies have been fired in recent months after allegations of offensive remarks, verbal abuse and other inappropriate behavior that in the past was more likely to have been tolerated, industry veterans said.
“Saying something offensive back in the day wouldn’t necessarily get you fired,” said Tom Nunan, a former high-ranking television executive and executive producer of the Oscar-winning movie “Crash,” about race relations in Los Angeles. “Now the consequences are severe and immediate.”
The recent firings comes in the wake of the #MeToo movement that started in Hollywood with allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and has had repercussions throughout workplaces. Mr. Weinstein has denied accusations of nonconsensual sexual acts. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Remember When Obama Did This In Response To Russian Meddling?
Posted: July 19, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Mediasphere, Russia | Tags: Cyber Attack, Cyberwarfare, Democrats, Dmitry Medvedev, media, Obama, Rush Limbaugh Leave a comment
Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was on a tear on Wednesday over the media’s response to President Trump’s widely criticized summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Limbaugh dedicated one segment of the three-hour show to providing some uncomfortable flashblacks for Trump’s Democratic critics.
Limbaugh led into the discussion by quoting a June 2018 story by Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff titled, “Obama cyber chief confirms ‘stand down’ order against Russian cyberattacks in summer 2016“:
The Obama White House’s chief cyber official testified Wednesday that proposals he was developing to counter Russia’s attack on the U.S. presidential election were put on a ‘back burner’ after he was ordered to ‘stand down’ his efforts in the summer of 2016.
Here’s the video of Obama’s chief cyber official Michael Daniel revealing the “stand down” order in a Senate Intelligence Committee:
“This is the Obama administration,” said Limbaugh. “They knew the Russians were hacking. They knew Russians were engaging in cyber warfare, and the Obama White House chief cyber official testified that he was told to stand down. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Obama DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson: ‘We Expanded Family Detention’
Posted: June 25, 2018 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Border, Chris Wallace, Daily Caller, Department of Homeland Security, Detention, DHS, Immigration, Jeh Johnson, video 1 Comment
‘I freely admit it was controversial …’
Scott Morefield reports: Former Obama administration DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson “freely admitted” to Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday morning that his department “expanded family detention” as well as detained some children alone, but added that he believed the decision “was necessary at the time.”
After showing pictures of detained children from 2014, Wallace noted that “in some cases you separated children from their parents” before asking, “Did you handle it so well?” Read the rest of this entry »
TIME Cover, Corrected
Posted: June 22, 2018 Filed under: Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Illegal immigration, Illegal immigration to the United States, media, Migrants, satire, Time Leave a comment
[VIDEO] Exposing the ‘Ruling Class’ Behind Border Policy Uproar: ‘Their Goal Is To Change Your Country Forever’
Posted: June 20, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Democratic Party, Illegal immigration, Immigration, Migration, Radical Left, Tucker Carlson Leave a comment
Tucker Carlson on Monday blasted the “self-righteous posturing” of politicians and media figures eager to condemn the Trump administration for its border policy.
Before playing a clip of examples, Carlson began the segment by calling the “spectacle of illegal immigrants separated from their children at the border,” an “event in which the elites vie to see who can reach greater heights of rhetorical excess and self-righteous posturing,” rather than a news story.
“So, the same people who support the third term post-viability abortion for purposes of sex selection are now lecturing you about God and sin and the holiness of children. Feel chastened?” Carlson asked sardonically before launching into a few more examples, including Michael Hayden’s comparison of the border situation to Nazi Germany.
“We could go on,” The Daily Caller co-founder said. “There was so much more just like that. The rich and powerful reminding you just how virtuous they are. Read the rest of this entry »
Christopher F. Rufo: Fed Up in Seattle
Posted: June 18, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Amazon, Anarchy, anti capitalist, Drug Addiction, Head Tax, Homelessness, Hyper-progressive, Marxism, Progressivism, Seattle, Socialism, Taxation Leave a comment
Citizens of the ultra-progressive city have lost patience with political leaders’ failure to address the homelessness crisis.
Don’t believe the hype that “Amazon killed the Seattle head tax,” the new levy that the city recently passed on businesses to fund an affordable-housing initiative. The truth behind the city council’s stunning reversal—repealing the tax by a 7-2 vote, just four weeks after passing it 9-0—is that Seattle citizens have erupted in frustration against the city’s tax-and-spend political class that has failed to address the homelessness crisis, despite record new revenues.
“To my astonishment, I’ve heard at least a dozen neighbors, friends, and colleagues whisper that ‘Seattle needs a Giuliani’—that is, the city needs to recognize that, in addition to public programs, we need to get tough on street homelessness and enforce the law.”
As recently as a few years ago, it seemed as if Seattle voters largely viewed our hyper-progressive city council as a harmless oddity in an otherwise tolerant, thriving, liberal city. But times have changed. Now, according to recent public polling, 83 percent of Seattle voters are dissatisfied with how the council has addressed homelessness, 65 percent believe that the local government hasn’t used new tax revenues effectively, and 63 percent believe that the city has enough money to solve the problem but isn’t pursuing the right policies.
[Read the full story here, at City Journal]
Progressives have tried to paint the anti-head tax campaign as corporate astroturfing, but beneath the surface, it’s being driven by this broader shift in public opinion. In just two weeks, the No Tax on Jobs campaign, led by local businesses, recruited 2,000 volunteer signature-gatherers and collected nearly 46,000 signatures—more than double the amount required to qualify as a ballot measure. When I spoke with one of the volunteers in the liberal Fremont neighborhood, he told me: “I’m retired and I wanted to volunteer for the cause. I think the tax is a bad idea: if you tax something, you get less of it. I’m going to collect two pages of signatures and then go home.” Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Brilliantly Mocks the ‘Magic of the Birth Canal’
Posted: June 6, 2018 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Science & Technology, U.S. News | Tags: Abortion, Birth, Choice42, Health, Logic, Magic, Medicine, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, science 4 Comments
… A few days ago, Choice42 released this deliciously sardonic video entitled “The Magical Birth Canal.” It is a searing take on the pro-abort narrative that says life begins at birth.
Quite simply, it is brilliant …
… Something within that canal confers humanity on a life that has been human from the moment of conception. But pro-aborts prefer to think of the unborn as a mass of tissue not worthy of protection. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] A Bad Lip Reading of the Royal Wedding
Posted: May 23, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Mediasphere | Tags: Bad Lip Reading, Royal Wedding, video 1 Comment
Source: Boing Boing
[REWIND] March 30, 2016: Tom Wolfe’s View of Trump
Posted: May 19, 2018 Filed under: Art & Culture, History, Mediasphere, Reading Room | Tags: Tom Wolfe Leave a comment
One of the preeminent chroniclers of the sociological circus that is New York City, Tom Wolfe recently spoke to The American Spectator at his Upper East Side apartment about the Big Apple’s most famous resident turned presidential candidate.
TAS: Having written so much about New York City, the rise of Donald Trump must be a subject of interest to you.
Tom Wolfe: It is. There is a lot of distress and contempt for government and he is capitalizing on that. He has also said a lot of things that are politically incorrect. He comes out and says things like, no more illegal immigrants from Mexico, no more immigrants from Islamic countries, and so on, and a lot of people say, “Hey, yeah, finally, someone has come out and said what I believe.”
Trump is not caught up in the whole ethos of politics. He goes from gaffe to gaffe and it only helps him. I have never seen anything quite like it.
You would think, for example, that his refusal to be on a television program with Megyn Kelly [at Fox News] would hurt him. My God, if you can’t debate Megyn Kelly, what are you going to do with Vladimir Putin? But it didn’t hurt him at all. That seemed to help him also.
I love the fact that he has a real childish side to him, saying things like: I am too worth ten billion! Most politicians would play that down, that they have all this money, but he is determined to let people know that. And he wants people to know that five billion of it comes from just his name—that you can start a hotel and call it Trump and it is going to be a success.
TAS: Do you see him as a New York original?
Wolfe: He is a lovable megalomaniac. People get a big kick out of going to his office and behind his desk is this wall of pictures of himself in the news. The childishness makes him seem honest. Read the rest of this entry »
Police Brilliantly Employ Anti-KKK Law to Arrest Mask-Wearing Anitfa Protestors
Posted: April 23, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Health and Social Issues, Law & Justice, Mediasphere | Tags: Activism, Antifa, Communists, Coweta County, Demonstration, Georgia, KKK, Marxism, Newman, Protest, Radical Left, Rally, Socialists, White Supremacists 3 Comments
Counterprotesters are held by law enforcement officers as the National Socialist Movement holds a rally at Greenville Street Park in downtown Newnan on Saturday, April 21, 2018. The far-right hate group also drew anti-fascist demonstrators as well as hundreds of police officers. (HYOSUB SHIN / AJC)
‘Remove your mask, or you will be arrested’
Greg Bluestein reports: Faced with hundreds of demonstrators rallying against a crowd of neo-Nazis in Newnan, local and state authorities turned to a little-known Georgia law adopted in 1951 to combat the Ku Klux Klan.
The law, which makes it illegal to wear a mask at most public events, was cited in several of the arrests of counterdemonstrators who joined a protest Saturday against white supremacists.
And the irony was not lost upon the organizers of the counterdemonstration, who were fuming Sunday that a law aimed at weakening white supremacists was used to arrest protesters who opposed a neo-Nazi rally.
“They were trying to stop us, and we were trying to dial down the racist stuff,” said Jeremy Ortega, a 19-year-old who was among the counterprotesters charged with a misdemeanor for wearing a mask.
He said many of the demonstrators wore masks to avoid being identified and threatened by white power groups.
Barricades and fencing are in place around a city park in Newnan as police prepared for Saturday’s rally by a neo-Nazi group on Saturday, April 21, 2018. The neo-Nazis expected a turnout of 50 to 100, but only a couple dozen showed up. They were well outnumbered by counterprotesters and law enforcement officers. (HYOSUB SHIN / AJC)
“The law, which makes it illegal to wear a mask at most public events, was cited in several of the arrests of counterdemonstrators who joined a protest Saturday against white supremacists.”
“We were peacefully protesting, yet they put guns in our faces and told us to take our masks off,” said Ortega, who added that he is considering filing a civil lawsuit. “It made no sense.”
State and local authorities did not comment on specific allegations of abuse on Sunday. But Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vernon Keenan said the overwhelming security – nearly 700 law enforcement officers were on hand – helped prevent the clashes from escalating.
“Making arrests in a volatile situation is never going to be pretty,” Keenan said.
No one from the white supremacist group was arrested on Saturday, and they largely avoided confrontations with police or the counterdemonstration group. The two dozen white supremacists who attended the rally were separated from the group by an 8-foot fence – and hundreds of armed officers.
‘Remove your mask’
On Sunday, a coalition of counterprotest groups planned a vigil at the Coweta County Jail to criticize what they said was excessive violence by police.
The Huffington Post reported that a contingent of officers approached a group of 50 counterdemonstrators before the rally and demanded they remove their masks or face arrests. The news outlet wrote that officers then “grabbed those who were still masked, tossing them to the ground and handcuffing them.” Read the rest of this entry »
‘SEX CULT!’ New York Post Cover for April 21, 2018
Posted: April 22, 2018 Filed under: Breaking News, Entertainment, Mediasphere, Religion, U.S. News | Tags: Cult, media, New York, New York Post, news, Newspaper, NYC, Sex, Sexuality, Slavery, Tabloid Leave a comment
Source: New York Post
New York Post Cover for April 18, 2017
Posted: April 18, 2018 Filed under: Breaking News, History, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Barbara Bush, headlines, media, New York Post, Newspaper, Tabloid Leave a comment
Source: New York Post
The NSA Wants a Skeleton Key to Everyone’s Encrypted Data
Posted: April 18, 2018 Filed under: Mediasphere, Self Defense, Think Tank | Tags: Data, Ecryption, NSA, Privacy Leave a comment
Encryption can protect personal data from government intrusion, which means the government wants the key to break it.
Gavin Hanson reports: Like it or not, you are your data. In this day and age, your receipts, social media activity, public records, GPS data, and internet search history are the proof of who you are. And while you may have thought you had secrets, the Federal Government would like the rest of them.
The seemingly innocuous pieces of information we trade away every day create a detailed mosaic of our lives used 
to target advertising and create personality profiles that are exploited by the FBI, political operatives like Cambridge Analytica, and Russian propagandists.
And those are just the legal shenanigans! Instances of malicious hacking that jeopardize social security numbers and other important data are on the rise as well.
But all hope is not lost! There is but one meaningful defense against such intrusions, one used by whistleblowers, banks, the government (often poorly), and college students: encryption.
Encryption, to oversimplify, is the process of putting your data in a combination locked safe, and it’s becoming more popular. Like all passcodes, these combinations are best stored non-electronically.
Automatically encrypted search engines and internet services simplify the process for users. They protect individuals’ data from hacking, theft, and even the government, but they also retain a repository for all the combinations they use to lock data up.
This is the Trojan horse the NSA means to use to gain access to your private data even when it is encrypted.
But that may soon change.
If the executive agencies have their way, the NSA will have a record of every lock combination in use by every company—a skeleton key, if you will, to gain access to your digital home, papers, effects, and aspects of your person without warrant or probable cause—effectively mandating that companies hand over skeleton keys to the locks that they provide to their users, at any time: what they call “exceptional access.” Read the rest of this entry »
Thomas Jefferson’s 275th Celebration
Posted: April 16, 2018 Filed under: Education, History, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Liberalism, Self Government, Tacitus, Thomas Jefferson, US Constitution, Virginia Leave a comment
Studying Jefferson should be a guiding star.
Jamie Gass and Will Fitzhugh write: “Students of reading, writing, and common arithmetick . . . Graecian, Roman, English, and American history . . .,” Thomas Jefferson advised that democratic education “should be… able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.”
Mid-April marks the 275th anniversary of Jefferson’s birthday. Given his world-changing achievements, this milestone is worthy of recognizing – and of being taught in our public schools. His contributions to the American civilization are incalculable; he was a revolutionary, statesman, diplomat, man-of-letters, scientist, architect, and apostle of liberty.
Rather than forcing a titan like Jefferson to conform to our era’s often Lilliputian-style narcissism, we should study history by entering the past with imagination and humility.
In drafting the Declaration of Independence, the most elegant and universally quoted political document in history, Jefferson displayed his greatest talents. He powerfully combined literary language and self-evident truths to shape the legal and political future of the United States.
The first member of his family to attend college, Jefferson loved books and classical learning. He could read six languages, including ancient Greek and Latin, while his 18th-century education taught him timeless principles.
Jefferson’s trinity of great thinkers – Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke – embodied what’s been called the Enlightenment’s “science of freedom.”
But his favorite writer was the ancient Roman historian Tacitus – a brilliant chronicler of warped, tyrannical emperors. Jefferson’s liberal-arts-centric education instilled in him a vigilance for liberty, which made him ever wary of threats to his republican experiment in ordered self-government.
Legal scholar David Mayer effectively summarized Jefferson’s strict federalism: “constitutions primarily [served] as devices by which governmental power would be limited and checked, to prevent its abuse through encroachments on individual rights…” Jefferson despised the corruptions of kings, standing armies, banks, and cities, which he identified with the Roman and British empires. Read the rest of this entry »
‘SYRIA STRIKE’: New York Post Cover for April 14, 2018
Posted: April 14, 2018 Filed under: Breaking News, Foreign Policy, Guns and Gadgets, Mediasphere, Russia, U.S. News, War Room | Tags: media, New York, news, NY Post, Syria, Tabloid 1 Comment
Source: New York Post
[VIDEO] MONTAGE: Zuckerberg Promises ‘More AI Tools’
Posted: April 12, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, video Leave a comment
Amber Athey reports: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a simple solution for most of the problems presented to him by Congress: “more AI tools.”
Zuckerberg repeatedly stressed Facebook’s growing focus on artificial intelligence during his testimony Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] MONTAGE: Zuckerberg Doesn’t Know — His ‘Team’ Will ‘Follow Up’
Posted: April 11, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, Science & Technology, U.S. News | Tags: Congress, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, media, video Leave a comment
During Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before two Congressional committees, it was unclear whether the Facebook CEO knew the answer to ANYTHING. Don’t worry though, his ‘team’ will be sure to follow-up.
Kevin Williamson Firing Shows the ‘Nonpartisan’ Media’s True Colors
Posted: April 9, 2018 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank, U.S. News | Tags: Atlantic Magazine, Kevin Williamson, Media bias, New York Post, New York Times Leave a comment
Karol Markowicz writes: Atlantic magazine editor Jeff Goldberg’s decision last week to fire writer Kevin Williamson drives home a discouraging point about the “mainstream” media: Conservatives need not apply.
Williamson came to The Atlantic from the conservative National Review, and his hiring sparked an uproar on the left. After combing through over a decade of his writings, detractors found a tweet where he called for death, by hanging, for abortion. When Goldberg learned Williamson also had referenced the tweet on a podcast, he gave in.
Surely Williamson’s quip was mere hyperbole, meant to provoke. After all, he never wrote an actual column making that argument, despite having written extensively, including about abortion. And his first tweet simply argued that “the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.”
Only when he was asked what kind of punishment he had in mind did he tweet back: “hanging.” He was “absolutely willing to see abortion treated like regular homicide under the criminal code.”
You don’t have to agree with that; I don’t. But Williamson’s position (not all pro-lifers’) is that abortion is murder (literally, the killing of a baby), that it should be made illegal and carry a punishment equal to that of similar crimes.
Is this more radical than Ruth Marcus’ view in The Washington Post? “I’m going to be blunt here: That was not the child I wanted,” she wrote about how she would have aborted her child if the baby was found to have had Down Syndrome. Her view is disgusting to conservatives, yet there was no move to get her fired. Read the rest of this entry »
‘WE OWN YOU: Pay Us For Your Privacy’: New York Post Cover for April 7, 2018
Posted: April 8, 2018 Filed under: Business, Entertainment, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: Advertising, Facebook, media, New York, NYC, Sheryl Sandberg, Tabloid, Zuckerberg Leave a comment
Source: New York Post
[VIDEO] Black Gun Owner’s Epic Rant Against The Government Goes Viral
Posted: April 6, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Guns and Gadgets, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, Self Defense, U.S. News | Tags: African Americans, Civil Rights, Gun rights, Mark Robinson, North Carolina, video 1 Comment‘When are you all gonna start standing up for the majority? … I’m the majority!’
Ryan Saavedra On Tuesday, while speaking during a city council meeting on curtailing gun violence, an African-American gun owner in North Carolina blasted government officials who want to restrict gun rights of law-abiding citizens.
“When are you all gonna start standing up for the majority? … I’m the majority! I’m a law-abiding citizen who’s never shot anybody,” Mark Robinson said. Read the rest of this entry »
Peggy Noonan Channels Jordan Peterson: ‘If Adults Won’t Grow Up, Nobody Will’
Posted: April 6, 2018 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, History, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Adulthood, Facebook, Harvey Weinstein, Jordan Peters, Laura Ingraham, Mark Zuckerberg, PEGGY NOONAN, WSJ Leave a comment
From Facebook to Harvey Weinstein, America’s scandals amount to a giant crisis of maturity.
“The signal fact of Mr. Zuckerberg is that he is supremely gifted in one area—monetizing technical expertise by marrying it to a canny sense of human weakness. Beyond that, what a shallow and banal figure.”
It has to do with not being able to fully reckon with your size, not because it is small but because it is big. I see more people trembling under the weight of who they are.
Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has been on this message for years. Are voices like his finally being being heard?
Laura Ingraham got in trouble for publicly mocking one of the student gun-control activists of Parkland, Fla. She’s been unjustly targeted for boycotts, but it’s fair to say she was wrong in what she said, and said it because she didn’t remember 
who she is. She is a successful and veteran media figure, host of a cable show that bears her name. As such she is a setter of the sound of our culture as it discusses politics. When you’re that person, you don’t smack around a 17-year-old, even if—maybe especially if—he is obnoxious in his presentation of his public self. He’s a kid. They’re not infrequently obnoxious, because they are not fully mature. He’s small, you’re big. There’s a power imbalance.
As of this week, it is six months since the reckoning that began with the New York Times exposé of Harvey Weinstein. One by one they fell, men in media, often journalism, and their stories bear at least in part a general theme.
They were mostly great successes, middle-aged, and so natural leaders of the young. But they treated the young as prey. They didn’t respect them, in part because they didn’t respect themselves. They didn’t see their true size, their role, or they ignored it. Read the rest of this entry »
Camille Paglia’s Defense of Jordan Peterson, Excerpted from a Longer Statement Sent in Response to Queries from a Brazilian Journalist
Posted: March 29, 2018 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Activism, Advocacy journalism, Anthropology, Biology, Brazil, Camile Paglia, Epoca, Jordan Peterson, journalism, Media bias, Nature, New York Review of Books, propaganda Leave a commentFrom Camille Paglia: excerpted from a longer statement sent in response to queries from a Brazilian journalist writing a profile of me for a major Brazilian magazine, Epoca.
COMMENTARY: How Obama’s Portrait Reveals the Failures of the Elitist Art World
Posted: March 26, 2018 Filed under: Art & Culture, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Elitism, Fine Art, Illustration, Portrait 1 Comment
In the Weeds: Kehinde Wiley’s Obama Portrait
.As the United States clips along at the speed of Trump, the news cycle races by in a dizzying blur. Events rapidly recede without any time for real analysis. Such was the case for the big reveal of the official portraits of former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. Although it just happened on February 12, it already feels like ancient history. Yet this regrettable image is going to be cluttering up the National Portrait Gallery forever, so it’s worth understanding just what the tax payers had to subsidize.
The Michelle Obama portrait is just sad. A tentative, pallid non-likeness. The apparatchiks at the museum assure us that it is so popular it had to be moved to a larger display space. Perhaps a pilgrimage to it gives the same solace that some progressives get from the plastic Obama…
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CRACKDOWN: China to Take Direct Control of Media, Film
Posted: March 24, 2018 Filed under: Asia, Censorship, China, Mediasphere | Tags: Authoritarianism, Communist China, Communist Party, David Zweig, Film, Parody, propaganda, satire, Socialism, TV, Xi Jinping Leave a comment
BEIJING (AP) — Chinese state media will be getting more propaganda now that the Communist Party has announced it will be in direct control of broadcasters and the regulators of everything from movies and TV to books and radio programs.
The move is part of a push by President Xi Jinping — emboldened by the removal of term limits on his time in office — to tighten party supervision over broad swaths of Chinese public life as he pushes for what he calls “unity in thought” among officials and citizens.
Magazines and books, featuring Chinese President Xi Jinping on the cover, are seen at the media centre during the China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing, China March 7, 2018. REUTERS
Analysts say having direct oversight of the media will help the party hammer home its message domestically and also work to improve its image internationally.
“It’s one vast effort to get everybody thinking together,” said David Zweig, director of the Center on China’s Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology … (read more)
Source: The Japan News
No laughing matter: China regulator bans TV parodies amid content crackdown
BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Pei Li and Adam Jourdan report: China’s media regulator is cracking down on video spoofs, the official Xinhua new agency reported, amid an intensified crackdown on any content that is deemed to be in violation of socialist core values under President Xi Jinping.
The decision comes after Xi cemented his power at a recent meeting of parliament by having presidential term limits scrapped, and the ruling Communist Party tightened its grip on the media by handing control over film, news and publishing to its powerful publicity department.
Xinhua said video sites must ban videos that “distort, mock or defame classical literary and art works”, citing a directive from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television on Thursday. Read the rest of this entry »
BIG DATA: A Tale of Two Campaigns
Posted: March 24, 2018 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Barack Obama, Big Data, Data, Donald Trump, Facebook, Presidential Election 2012, Presidential Election 2016, Social media Leave a comment
[VIDEO] REWIND: Ambassador John Bolton – The President of Red Eye
Posted: March 23, 2018 Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Greg Gutfeld, John Bolton, National security, Red Eye, video Leave a comment
[VIDEO] Suspect in Kim Jong Nam’s Killing Simulated Attack in Pranks
Posted: March 22, 2018 Filed under: Asia, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Terrorism | Tags: Hanoi, Kim Jong Nam, murder, North Korea, video Leave a comment
Security camera footage shows a Vietnamese woman accused of poisoning the North Korean leader’s half brother, Kim Jong Nam, performing a prank at Hanoi’s airport that simulated the attack.
What’s ‘Genius’ for Obama is Scandal When it Comes to Trump
Posted: March 21, 2018 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Cambridge Analytica, Democrats, Donald Trump, Facebook, Facebook’s algorithm, journalism, Mark Zuckerberg, media 1 Comment
The scandal involving Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of Facebook data underscores the point.
Ben Shapiro writes:
… In 2012, The Guardian reported that President Obama’s reelection team was “building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.”
… Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. There’s a reason for that. The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” She added, “They came to [the] office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
Not so with Trump. As soon as Facebook realized that Cambridge Analytica had pursued a similar strategy, they suspended the firm.
This whole hullaballoo about Facebook isn’t complicated.
1. Trump wins.
2. Democrats/Left declare social media in “crisis,” threaten legislation.
3. Social media heads punish conservatives.— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 20, 2018
Again, this isn’t surprising. Since Trump’s election, Democrats — in search of a rationale for their favored candidate’s defeat — have blamed a bevy of social media outlets. Senate Democrats trotted out pathetic Russian-created memes on Facebook, viewed by a handful of human beings, as an excuse for Hillary’s loss; Democrats claimed — without evidence — that “fake news” had swamped Facebook and thus led to Trump’s victory. Democrats have also insisted that Facebook be regulated. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) raged, “You’ve created these platforms, and now they’re being misused, and you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will.” Facebook’s former privacy manager called for the government to step into an oversight role regarding Facebook.
[Read the full story here, at TheHill]
In February, Wired magazine ran a cover story specifically dealing with Facebook’s role in the election of 2016, and their subsequent attempts to “fix” the problem. After the election, Mark Zuckerberg even met with Barack Obama, apparently in an attempt to convince Obama that he was serious about stopping the “misuse” of the platform. And in February, Zuckerberg said he wanted to re-jigger the algorithms on his platform to benefit content that Facebook deems “trustworthy, informative, and local.” Wired celebrated: “You can’t make the world more open and connected if you’re breaking it apart.” Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] KAMIKAZE INTERIOR SECRETARY: Ryan Zinke Says ‘Konichiwa’ To Hawaii Congresswoman
Posted: March 16, 2018 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: House Committee on Natural Resources, Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, Ryan Zinke Leave a comment
That… was a very dumb thing to say.
Christian Datoc reports: Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke put his foot in his own mouth during a Thursday hearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources by attempting to make a very ill-advised joke about Rep. Colleen Hanabusa’s Japanese heritage.
The Hawaii representative first asked Zinke about decisions to cut funding for a memorial to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, during which she herself brought up her heritage.
“I sit before you the granddaughter of two internees,” Hanabusa stated. “I didn’t even know my grandfather was interned on Oahu for a lot of the war time because he was 80 years old.” Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] China’s Eye-Rolling Journalist Incident – the Aftermath
Posted: March 15, 2018 Filed under: China, Mediasphere | Tags: 13th National People's Congress, Eye-Rolling, media, video Leave a comment
A remarkable moment during a media conference of the 13th National People’s Congress has ignited a social media storm.
A female journalist attracted the attention during a live broadcast when she disapprovingly glanced at the woman next to her posing a rather long and stylized question. Everything about this controversy and its aftermath. (Turn on English subtitles if needed).
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