A number of feminist commenters complained that people were calling Portman’s character “female Thor,” saying she should be addressed simply as “Thor.”Wait a second now. Are you sure about 'her' pronouns?
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: And what about Ilhan Omar’s bigotry? The left seems to think racist prejudice is okay if it comes from a cool Muslim. “Yes, if you try to draw attention to Omar’s promotion of anti-Semitic tropes and her feverish, disproportionate obsession with Zionists, you will be denounced as the racist. Taking Orwellian contortionism to new levels, we’re now told it is racist to speak of Omar’s racism.”
Remember, the left doesn’t have standards, only slogans.
The life of Armstrong stands in such fascinating tension with the way people have imagined the moon in the past. The moon was feminine, overwhelmingly powerful, and a vast imaginary expanse where anything might be possible—he trod on it.We lost a lot when she decided to pursue a more private life.
In America, the nationalist claim is that the federal government has abdicated basic responsibilities and broken trust with large numbers of citizens:That all sounds basically correct to me.
• It has failed to secure the national borders and provide regular procedures for immigration and assimilation.
• It has delegated lawmaking to foreign and international bodies, and domestic bureaucracies, that have scant regard for the interests and values of many of our fellow citizens.
• It has acquiesced in, or actively promoted, the splintering of the nation into contending racial, religious and other groups and has favored some at the expense of others.
• It has neglected core American principles and traditions—separation of powers, due process, the presumption of innocence, local prerogative, freedom of association—allowing them to atrophy or be subjected to political conditions.
...
The illusion of unlimited optionality has been especially damaging in government and politics. A dramatic recent instance came in the Democrats’ presidential primary debates, where many candidates favored both open borders and free health care for everyone who shows up. This would plainly amount to the abolition of the United States. Still, the proponents would say in all earnestness that they have ingenious plans to make it work.
That is an extreme instance of the phenomenon that every social problem or inconvenience summons forth costly new spending or regulatory solutions, with hardly a care to where the resources will come from or what other problems will be slighted. It is a bipartisan phenomenon, and it has left us with a massively indebted government that spends trillions of borrowed dollars on our immediate needs, with the bills kited to future generations.
The American nation-state is rich, powerful and less constrained than any other, yet it is much more constrained than we have led ourselves to believe. Thinking of ourselves as a nation-state is, as Peter Thiel has observed, a means of unromantic self-knowledge.
The categories of transgression and innocence, purity and stain, have now effectively migrated from the mainline churches into the universities and from thence into the Democratic Party, which is now the political wing of the universities. To say the same thing in a different manner, the universities are now the theological wing of the Democratic Party. Together, they disseminate the political theology of identity politics....He has some theological recommendations. Perhaps it is right to say that only God can forgive such sins, and thus that eliminating a God who can forgive also eliminates the possibility of forgiveness. Then what? Romans 12:19 (like Deut. 32) assigned vengeance to the Lord God alone. Without the God to own it, vengeance flies free; and without the God to forgive and to instruct us to forgive each other, vengeance is all that's left.
Christian realism, however, is not enough. Identity politics understands the original sin of the white heterosexual male to implicate all that he has touched, not least of which is the nation, which is taken to be a construction of his that is responsible for the great wars of the twentieth century; colonialism in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and South Asia; and slavery in America....
Identity politics recognizes irredeemable sin, but seeks an immanent resolution to the problem, namely, purging all that the white heterosexual male has constructed—including the nation. Not by the sacrifice of Jesus do we achieve redemption, but rather through the renunciation of the nation and its irredeemable stain. That is why citizens in Europe and in America are clamoring for the EU or for global governance. In the world identity politics constructs, there is no other way for their stain to be removed.
Christian realism has nothing to say about this now ascendant frame of mind.... God’s salvific plan of the world of nations is his to disclose, in a providential history that man cannot grasp in advance. Identity politics finds this to be a filthy delusion. The Christian God, the nations he authorizes, and his so-called providential history are the invention of the white heterosexual male who himself and all that he has invented must be purged so that the world may be made pure.
In 2002, the university received a $5 million bequest . . . to fund six professorships at the Trulaske College of Business to be filled by devotees of free market economics.
[The will included] a unique enforcement provision. Mizzou would be required to certify every four years to the satisfaction of Hillsdale College that each professorship had been filled by “a dedicated and articulate disciple of the Ludwig von Mises (Austrian) School of Economics.” The remaining funds would revert to Hillsdale in the event that this requirement was not met.But the university obviously doesn't approve of Austrian economics. You might suppose, therefore, that its moral dilemma was whether it was justified in taking the money. Just kidding. Of course they took the money. The moral dilemma was their concern that "acceding to [the donor's] request would consign the school to being 'held hostage by a particular ideology.'" Ideology is wrong, at least when it's the wrong ideology. The university stands foursquare against it.
Critics complain that the systems turn neighborhoods into places of constant surveillance and create suspicion that falls heavier on minorities. . . . Critics also say Ring, a subsidiary of Amazon, appears to be marketing its cameras by stirring up fear of crime at a time when it’s decreasing. . . . “Amazon is profiting off of fear,” said Chris Gilliard, an English professor at Michigan’s Macomb Community College and a prominent critic of Ring and other technology that he says can reinforce race barriers. Part of the strategy seems to be selling the cameras “where the fear of crime is more real than the actual existence of crime.”Thanks, Prof. Gillard, but I think I'll make up my own mind how secure my front door is. Do front-door lock manufacturers profit off fear? If so, bully for them. Ditto vaccine and airbag manufacturers.
The US government is honoring an 83-year-old Muslim cleric who hid 262 Christians in his home and mosque during an attack in central Nigeria.
Imam Abubakar Abdullahi, along with four religious leaders from Sudan, Iraq, Brazil and Cyprus, were awarded the 2019 the International Religious Freedom Award, which is given to advocates of religious freedom.
Abdullahi was recognized for providing shelter for hundreds of Christians fleeing attacks from Muslim herdsmen who had launched coordinated attacks on Christian farmers in 10 villages in the Barkin Ladi area of Plateau State on June 23, 2018, the award organizers said in a statement.
The colony was thought to be short-lived, but a new find may extend the length of its occupancy.There's more.
While taking sediment cores from a nearby peat bog to help study the ancient environment, archaeologist Paul Ledger and his colleagues discovered a previously unknown chapter in the story of L’Anse aux Meadows. Buried about 35cm (14 inches) beneath the modern surface, they found signs of an ancient occupancy: a layer of trampled mud littered with woodworking debris, charcoal, and the remains of plants and insects.
Based on its depth and the insect species present, the layer looks like similar surfaces from the edges of Viking Age Norse settlements in Greenland and Iceland. But organic material from the layer radiocarbon dated to the late 1100s or early 1200s, long after the Norse were thought to have left Newfoundland for good.
Artifacts like a bronze cloak pin, a soapstone spindle piece, iron nails, and rivets make it clear who lived in the eight Icelandic-style turf shelters at L’Anse aux Meadows. Stone tools at the site suggest that indigenous North Americans, probably ancestors of the Beothuk and Dorset people, also lived or visited here. L’Anse aux Meadows may be the first place where Europeans and indigenous Americans interacted, and those interactions may have happened off and on for as long as 195 years.
Are you tired of paying too little for clean-burning energy that reduces carbon emissions? Then has Berkeley got a deal for you!
On Tuesday, the City Council approved a new ordinance forbidding any new low-rise residences from using natural gas: It's all-electric or nothin', baby. Councilwoman Kate Harrison, who sponsored the measure, told the Chronicle that "It’s an enormous issue" and "When we think about pollution and climate-change issues, we tend to think about factories and cars, but all buildings are producing greenhouse gas."
And more than a few local politicians, too.Discerning readers already were aware that gas heat is much more efficient than electric heat, but California now imports 33% of its electricity, so there's less need to think about what has to be burned (Nevada coal) or killed (Oregon salmon) to produce it out there in non-Cali-land.
