A college basketball player at the University of Wisconsin has taken to sitting on the bench during the pregame national anthem playing. Her rationalization is this:
I’m going to speak up about things that are harming my culture and my people.
She certainly should speak against iniquities, but she needs to understand that her culture is American, and her people are her fellow Americans.
Full stop.
Now it’s Twitter that’s engaging in toxic (non)-speech, not the speech in the tweets themselves.
A Canadian blogger is having to sue Twitter over the latter’s blatant censorship of free speech because, apparently, she isn’t toeing the Twitter (or me also “movement”) sexual politics line.
Meghan Murphy, the founder of the blog Feminist Current, was locked out of her account last year when the company asked her to delete a tweet that said, “Men aren’t women,” CNET reported, citing the lawsuit. A second tweet said, “How are transwomen not men?” according to the suit.
This is evil?
In January, a Houston homeowner successfully defended himself and his family against a large, violent home invasion—with a gun.
Authorities say the homeowner defended himself when the suspects entered the home. Following the shooting, the suspects fled from the scene.
…
At another scene, a vehicle was found about two blocks from the shooting, where a man was found dead in the backseat.
Authorities say that out of five people shot, three of them died. All were suspects in the alleged home invasion.
In Florida this week, another homeowner successfully defended his property—with a gun.
The Volusia County Sheriff’s Office said…a woman called 911 to report a stranger on her property.
When the woman’s husband walked outside [with his pistol] to check the situation out, he told deputies he found the man standing at the door to his garage with his hand on the doorknob.
…
Once deputies got to the home located south of Daytona Beach they allegedly found a syringe, tools and gloves on Edwards.
…
[The man] was charged with attempted burglary and possession of burglary tools, according to police.
No one was shot this time, either—it was only property at risk.
Imagine the mayhem that would have resulted in the first instance had the homeowner not been armed. Imagine the theft, and the possible mayhem (because burglars really don’t like witnesses), in the second instance had the homeowner not been armed.
This is the gun control Progressive-Democrats and their accomplices of the Left want to take away from us.
Senator Cory “Spartacus” Booker (D, NJ) says the first criterion he has for his Vice President candidate, should he get the Progressive-Democratic Party nomination, is that the person be a woman.
I’m not going to box myself in, but should I come to it, you know I’ll be looking to women first.
Think about that. Booker won’t be looking to the best qualified first, and if that turns out to be a woman, great. He’ll be looking to a woman first because she’s a woman. How pandering is that?
Think about another implication of that criterion. His looking to pick a woman because she’s a woman means he doesn’t think women are capable of competing on their own merit. Women, he’s implying, are just incapable, and the only way they can aspire to the White House is by being selected on the basis of their gender. How bigoted is that?
The People’s Republic of China is facing an increasingly serious demographic problem.
New data show the reversal [in the one-child policy] isn’t having the anticipated impact. The number of newborns in China dropped to 15.23 million in 2018, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That’s two million less than 2017 and 30% below the median official forecast of more than 21 million.
This has serious implications for, among other things, the PRC’s old-age pension and medical care capacity (eliding the impact on the PRC’s ability to man an armed forces establishment of the size it currently has).
By 2050, there will be 1.3 workers for each retiree, according to official estimates, compared with 2.8 now.
Most of these retirement programs are funded by local jurisdictions, rather than from the center, and most of those jurisdictions’ facilities are badly underfunded and getting more so (sound familiar?). As a result, the PRC is trying to increase national control of those retirement facilities and to increase the bite on businesses to pony up more for the programs. That last, especially, has its own problems.
Huang Weibin, the general manager of a property-management firm in Guangdong province, said higher pension costs mean his business will suffer a loss this year, likely forcing him to lay off some of his 80 employees.
“If the government doesn’t help us out with subsidies or tax breaks, we will go broke for sure,” he said.
He and the PRC government need only consult with that famous American economist and blogger, David Roberts:
If the question is what the [PRC] can afford…, the way to think about it is not in terms of how much money the country has. It literally has as much money as it wants. It prints its own money!
Problem solved. Or maybe not.