…and there’s BDS. As Antonia Tamplin wondered in her Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal,
Regarding Jillian Kay Melchior’s “Dissent Against Beijing Is Becoming a Firing Offense” (op-ed, 19 Aug): Where is the international BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against China?
What she said.
Portland’s city government ran a survey of the residents therein to see if the government folks could understand the major problem facing those residents in the eyes of the residents. Homelessness was the biggie, with 88% of respondents saying so.
Respondents also had decidedly mixed views of the city’s future.
…45% of respondents said they felt positively about the city’s future, while an equal number declaring [sic] their pessimism.
On the matter of race, there’s this:
Asked to react to the statement that Portland is “making progress on becoming a city where a person’s outcomes are not based on their race,” 40% of respondents agreed with its sentiment and an equal number disagreed. Black residents were most likely to disagree.
But here’s the money quote, and it throws the whole thing into a cocked hat.
Results likely would have been more unflattering if officials did not weight the survey responses based on the race of respondents. Responses from the 12% of survey takers who declined to state their race were disregarded. Those people were “more likely to feel negatively about the future of Portland,” according to the survey report. They were also more likely to name safety and trust in government as city challenges.
45% of a carefully selected subset of respondents. Forty per cent of a carefully selected subset of respondents.
Hmm….
What we have here is city government deliberately skewing the results by throwing out responses it didn’t like or thought it wouldn’t like. On top of that, they did the skewing right out in the open, which shows pretty conclusively their achievement of the near impossible: they’re simultaneously oblivious and dishonest.
This is the Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) influence.
h/t The Great Adventure at Ricochet
Deutsche Welle‘s Loveday Wright wondered about the Amazon forest fires in northern Brazil: Can international pressure help put them out?
Not when the Brazilian government, for good or ill, exposes them to fire by allowing clear-cutting in favor of agriculture.
But more importantly, not when climatistas openly lie about the extent and level of destruction of the fires.
Several of the most widely shared images aren’t actually from this month’s fires.
Some are old photographs of the Amazon, and some aren’t even from the area at all.
For instance:
Although [a fire image] shows a fire in the Amazon, it’s actually a stock photo taken in the 1980s by a photographer from National Geographic….
And
An image of a burned rabbit has been shared over 1000 times, but is actually from fires in Malibu, California.
One of those who shared it also posted a picture of a monkey crying over her sick baby, which is actually from Jalabur in India in 2018, by Avinash Lodhi.
And not when national politicians celebrating trading on their celebrity openly repeat the lies.
French president Emmanuel Macron and Leonardo DiCaprio were among those to share a photograph showing a wall of flame rising up from a swathe of rainforest.
Although it shows a fire in the Amazon, it’s actually a stock photo taken in the 1980s by a photographer from National Geographic….
While there are legitimate images of the real fires in the Brazilian Amazon, the lies and manufactured hysteria about climate! climate! climate! eliminate all credibility about global warming, and they hinder legitimate efforts to deal with the legitimate fires and other local ecological problems and their actual causes.
Now The Wall Street Journal is beating the drum for red flag laws that would authorize seizure of weapons from anyone, and anyone associated with that one, that Government, or a Government-appointed/approved body deems a threat.
Consider one of the three cute anecdotes the WSJ cited via its drumbeat.
Police were tipped off by school officials that a 14-year-old boy had praised mass shootings. He used campus computers to search firearms and terms like “white power.” Taken to a psychiatrist, the student said he was joking.
The boy’s father owned a rifle and a pistol. A short-term red-flag order was obtained, and the two firearms were relinquished. After a hearing a one-year order was issued. [In all three anecdotes cited, the outcome was a “one-year order.”]
The WSJ right wondered whether
the father whose guns were handed over suggest[ed] that he was unable or unwilling to secure them from his 14-year-old son?
Then the Editors dismissed this trivial concern. I ask, though, what happened to the father’s Second Amendment rights? I answer with dismay: they seem to have been trampled without a fare-thee-well. His firearms were taken for no better reason than that someone associated with him was deemed maybe a threat sometime in the future. The boy’s claim that he was joking seems to have been dismissed just as out of hand.
There are larger problems, though, than just a few carefully selected anecdotes. What about false positives? Where will the wrongly accused—whether mistakenly or maliciously—go to get his reputation back?
What about false negatives? Now the true threat is both warned and angrified—and in the same household, perhaps, as the one who accused him.
With true due process, how can the system act quickly enough to forestall an imminent threat?
The WSJ‘s Editors closed their piece with—perhaps—a glimmer of understanding:
…red-flag laws are no panacea for mass shootings. But…if reasonably drafted, they appear to be a step forward: gun control for the dangerous and unstable.
But then they demonstrate their fatal misunderstanding. Red flag laws cannot be reasonably drafted, not only for the reasons above but for the WSJ‘s rationalization of that step forward: the laws focus on the tools a dangerous and unstable person might use and not on the dangerous and unstable person.
No system is perfect, certainly, but no system should be put in place that threatens the liberty and fundamental rights of all of us because a tiny per centage of us are bent on mayhem, especially when that system is so badly flawed as the one proposed here.
The energy being pumped into this euphemism for an assault on our 2nd Amendment should be focused instead on finding ways to deal specifically with those tiny few dangerous and unstable persons.
Folks are growing concerned about the magnitude of, and problems associated with, the massive student loan situation, and the some are even calling it a scam.
Defaults have fallen for most forms of consumer debt as the economic expansion continues. Mortgage delinquencies last quarter hit a historic low. But severely delinquent student loans have soared since 2012 and are now 35% of “severe derogatories”—more than credit cards (23%), auto loans (21%), and mortgages (11%).
This “scam” is laid at the feet of the CBO during the Obama administration. It’s certainly true that the CBO misread the situation, perhaps even negligently so.
Here’s the short and sweet of it, though.
The student loan overhang is a serious problem. However, the real scam is that of so many Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates who want to forgive all those loans—transferring the loan problem directly onto the backs of taxpayers, instead of leaving it where it belongs: the responsibility of the students and parents who borrowed so foolishly and of the lenders who so foolishly loaned.