At the O.C. Register, "Holiday gift guide."
Holiday gift guide https://t.co/o0atK2lX6q pic.twitter.com/nrVDsOXbcM
— O.C. Register (@ocregister) December 8, 2017
Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education - from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Holiday gift guide https://t.co/o0atK2lX6q pic.twitter.com/nrVDsOXbcM
— O.C. Register (@ocregister) December 8, 2017
TWITTER- @AugustAmesxxx ❤— AugustAmesFan™ (@AugustAmesFan) December 4, 2017
INSTAGRAM- https://t.co/UB42y0wW9q ❤
ONLYFANS- https://t.co/CpeVxiWNnI ❤
WISHLIST- https://t.co/Qj9lsCzcnV ❤ pic.twitter.com/9FLF3XehkW
August Ames was a porn star who said she would not have sex on camera with a guy who had done gay porn. Apprently the "tolerance brigade" of gay porn starns litterally hounded her until she really did kill herself
— Kinda Bored & Why Am I Wasting Time Here? (@lamblock) December 8, 2017
The Gaystapo drove August Ames to suicide because she wouldn’t work with a crossover actor in a state where it’s no longer illegal to knowingly infect someone with AIDS.
— CraigĂ© Schmuckatelli (@CraigR3521) December 8, 2017
For a while now, the joke has been that political correctness is moving so swiftly that not only will you have to approve of gay sex, it will become mandatory. I don’t mean this as an unfortunately literal bit of gallows humor, but Ames’ death does raise eyebrows because it speaks to a frightening dystopia where any traditional deference to female vulnerability becomes subservient to liberal pieties about sexuality.RTWT.
The day Ames killed herself, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about a case involving a Colorado cake baker who doesn’t want to make cakes for gay weddings. The baker, quite understandably and credibly, insists there’s a rather large expressive and artistic component to his vocation, so he shouldn’t be forced to endorse any particular message or religious ceremony he disagrees with. The counterargument is that it’s just a cake, and as long as you’re open for business, you have to serve anyone without discrimination.
Well, I’m scratching my head trying to figure out how Ames’s detractors weren’t extending the exact same logic of “public accommodation” to her. After all, she’s open for business, if you want to call it that. Wouldn’t it be discrimination to exclude working with an entire class of people?
Pearl Jam
Alive
9:17 AM
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
American Girl
9:16 AM
Capital Cities
Safe And Sound
12/06/17
9:13 AM
Pink Floyd
Another Brick In The Wall
9:10 AM
Berlin
The Metro
9:06 AM
AC/DC
Dirty Deeds
8:54 AM
Third Eye Blind
Semi-Charmed Life
8:49 AM
David Bowie
China Girl
8:45 AM
Elton John
Rocket Man
8:40 AM
Kings Of Leon
Use Somebody
8:37 AM
ZZ Top
Sharp Dressed Man
8:32 AM
Dead Or Alive
You Spin Me Round
8:22 AM
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Dani California
8:17 AM
Fleetwood Mac
Say You Love Me
8:13 AM
REO Speedwagon
Keep On Loving You
8:06 AM
New Order
Bizarre Love Triangle
8:03 AM
“Women have had it with bosses and coworkers who not only cross boundaries but don’t even seem to know that boundaries exist,” Time magazine writes. “These silence breakers have started a revolution of refusal, gathering strength by the day.” pic.twitter.com/NUr6wo50ZR
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) December 6, 2017
End of Apartheid in South Africa? Not in Economic Terms. This a powerful @NYTimes read ... https://t.co/jyNPeqaTYT
— Jason Burke (@burke_jason) November 15, 2017
CROSSROADS, South Africa — The end of apartheid was supposed to be a beginning.Still more.
Judith Sikade envisioned escaping the townships, where the government had forced black people to live. She aimed to find work in Cape Town, trading her shack for a home with modern conveniences.
More than two decades later, Ms. Sikade, 69, lives on the garbage-strewn dirt of Crossroads township, where thousands of black families have used splintered boards and metal sheets to construct airless hovels for lack of anywhere else to live.
“I’ve gone from a shack to a shack,” Ms. Sikade says. “I’m fighting for everything I have. You still are living in apartheid.”
In the history of civil rights, South Africa lays claim to a momentous achievement — the demolition of apartheid and the construction of a democracy. But for black South Africans, who account for three-fourths of this nation of roughly 55 million people, political liberation has yet to translate into broad material gains.
Apartheid has essentially persisted in economic form.
This reality is palpable as turmoil now seizes South Africa. Enraged protesters demand the ouster of President Jacob Zuma over disclosures of corruption so high-level that it is often described as state capture, with private interests having effectively purchased the power to divert state resources in their direction. The economy keels in recession, worsening an official unemployment rate reaching nearly 28 percent.
Underlying the anger are deep-seated disparities in wealth. In the aftermath of apartheid, the government left land and other assets largely in the hands of a predominantly white elite. The government’s resistance to large-scale land transfers reflected its reluctance to rattle international investors.
Today, millions of black South Africans are chronically short of capital needed to start businesses. Less than half of the working age population is officially employed.
The governing party, the African National Congress, built empires of new housing for black South Africans, but concentrated it in the townships, reinforcing the geographic strictures of apartheid. Large swaths of the black population remain hunkered down in squalor, on land they do not legally own. Those with jobs often endure commutes of an hour or more on private minibuses that extract outsize slices of their paychecks.
“We never dismantled apartheid,” said Ayabonga Cawe, a former economist for Oxfam, the international anti-poverty organization, and now the host of a radio show that explores national affairs. “The patterns of enrichment and impoverishment are still the same.”
South Africa began the post-apartheid era facing challenges as formidable as those confronted by Europe at the end of World War II, or the Soviet Union after communism. It had to re-engineer an economy dominated by mining and expand into modern pursuits like tourism and agriculture, while overcoming a legacy of colonial exploitation, racial oppression and global isolation — the results of decades of international sanctions.
“It’s a very deep structural problem,” said Ian Goldin, who served as a senior economic adviser to Nelson Mandela when he was president of South Africa, and is now a professor of globalization at the University of Oxford in Britain. “The Russians had capitalism before the Soviet Union. Africans lost their rights 300 years ago. It’s a much longer period of subjugation.”
Even so, from 1998 to 2008, the economy expanded by roughly 3.5 percent a year, doubling the size of the black middle class. The government built millions of homes, extended the reach of clean water and electricity, and handed out cash grants to millions of poor people.
But the global financial crisis of 2008 ravaged South Africa, destroying demand for the mineral deposits at the center of its economy. It wiped out half of the roughly two million new jobs that had been created in the previous four years.
Today, South Africa is a land of astonishing contrasts.
In the Sea Point neighborhood of Cape Town, a sweep of apartments and restaurants alongside the Atlantic Ocean, women gather on the beach for an evening yoga class — some black, some white, some Asian. Children of multiple races scamper through a playground, a scene unthinkable during apartheid.
High above the city, atop the ridgeline at Table Mountain, American exchange students recount a sky diving experience while pointing smartphones at the orange sun arcing toward the ocean.
To the east, the parched land vibrates in the golden light. Judith Sikade’s tin roof is down there somewhere, reflecting the last rays of the sun.
In her community, people are cooking over coal fires and breathing in fumes. Children run barefoot on paths littered with broken glass. Grown-ups exchange word of the latest armed robbery.
All the while, they keep an eye out for the police, who frequently descend bearing sledgehammers to tear down the shacks, given that they sit on private land.
“Where’s the freedom?” Ms. Sikade said, anger rising in her voice. “Where are the changes?”
Having retired from my lawprof job, I experience weekends as the time when the people with structured jobs flow into activities that the nonstructured among us can do all the time. That affects me slightly. My job was already relatively unstructured, except for class times and the occasional meeting, so I was already experiencing the joy of the unstructured life (especially in the summertime). And when you let go of your structured employment, you will employ yourself doing something. In my case, I was and continue to be strongly structured to write this blog every morning, but the nonstructured thing about it is ending the process — breaking the trance. I don't have to break the trance because a structured task is approaching. I love that! I was pretty sure I would love that, and I chose to retire from my lawprof job so I could jump fully into the nonstructured life. Looking back on the year, I'm thoroughly happy about where I have landed...Keep reading.
U.S. airstrikes rise sharply in Afghanistan — and so do civilian deaths https://t.co/NXnAQsCfLP pic.twitter.com/Qpg2OgzVcv— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) December 4, 2017
As U.S. warplanes flew above a cluster of villages where Islamic State militants were holed up in eastern Afghanistan, 11 people piled into a truck and drove off along an empty dirt track to escape what they feared was imminent bombing.
They did not get far.
An explosion blasted the white Suzuki truck off the road, opening a large crater in the earth and flipping the vehicle on its side in a ditch. A teenage girl survived. The 10 dead included three children, one an infant in his mother’s arms.
The lone survivor of the Aug. 10 blast in Nangarhar province, and Afghan officials who visited the site, said the truck was hit by an American airstrike shortly before 5 p.m. Relatives expressed horror that U.S. ground forces and surveillance aircraft could have mistaken the passengers, who included women and children riding in the open truck bed — in daylight with no buildings or other vehicles around — for Islamic State fighters.
“How could they not see there were women and children in the truck?” said Zafar Khan, 23, who lost six family members, including his mother and three siblings, in the blast.
In a statement after the incident, the U.S. military acknowledged carrying out a strike but said it killed militants who “were observed loading weapons into a vehicle” and “there was zero chance of civilian casualties.”
Pockets of Nangarhar remain inaccessible to outsiders because of fighting, making it impossible to independently determine the cause of the fatal explosion. What is not in question is that in the 17th year of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, American airstrikes are escalating again, along with civilian casualties.
Operating under looser restrictions on air power that commanders hope will break a stalemate in the war, U.S. fighter planes this year dropped 3,554 explosives in Afghanistan through Oct. 31, the most since 2012.
American officials say the firepower has curtailed the growth of Islamic State’s South Asia affiliate — known as ISIS-Khorasan, which they believe numbers about 900 fighters, most of them in Nangarhar — and enabled struggling government forces to regain ground against Taliban insurgents in other provinces, such as Helmand, where a Marine-led task force has helped coordinate a months-long offensive.
But innocent Afghans are asking: At what cost?
The United Nations mission in Afghanistan documented 205 civilian deaths and 261 injuries from airstrikes in the first nine months this year, a 52% increase in casualties compared with the same period in 2016. Although both U.S. and Afghan forces conduct aerial attacks, preliminary data indicate that American strikes have been more lethal for civilians.
In the first six months of 2017, the U.N. said, 54 civilians died in international air operations, compared with 29 in Afghan strikes. Twelve additional deaths could not be attributed to either force, the U.N. found.
In the case of the blast in Nangarhar province in August, U.S. officials have continued to assert that the American airstrike that day struck only militants. But they have since offered an alternative explanation for the civilian deaths. Responding to questions from The Times, coalition officials said that a passenger vehicle — presumably the Suzuki truck — hit a roadside bomb planted by Islamic State militants slightly more than a mile from where the airstrike killed the militants. It was the roadside bomb that resulted “in multiple enemy-caused civilian casualties,” said Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, a spokesman for coalition forces in Kabul.
Afghans vigorously dispute that account. The district police chief, Hamidullah Sadaqat, said there was only one deadly explosion in the area that afternoon. Rozina, the 17-year-old survivor, said her memory was clear...
When will the politicians who support open borders be held accountable for their policies? Kate Steinle would still be alive today if it wasn't for San Francisco's sanctuary city policy. h/t @michellemalkin @seanhannity pic.twitter.com/nJFKnTfJtw
— Nick Short 🇺🇸 (@PoliticalShort) December 1, 2017
Goats can change everything.
Their milk provides great protein to help children grow. The family can also sell any extra to earn money for medicines and other necessities.
A healthy dairy goat can give up to 16 cups of milk a day. Goat’s milk is easier to digest than cow’s milk and is an excellent source of calcium, protein, and other essential nutrients that growing children need. Goats are practical animals — flourishing in harsh climates while producing valuable manure to fertilize crops and vegetable gardens...
My lecture against squeezing out free speech from colleges got me smeared. The students who smeared me got a safe space complete with coloring books and markers.(More at Legal Insurrection.)
See u in two!!!! pic.twitter.com/3Ct1fjNt3d— Courtney Friel (@courtneyfriel) December 2, 2017
ABC News faces criticism after correcting bombshell Flynn-Trump report https://t.co/iW0t98jW4i pic.twitter.com/GMglUAREzW
— The Hill (@thehill) December 2, 2017
Yeah, that’s a big *correction,* not a clarification. Flynn erred for lying about it, not for making inroads during transition like literally every other admin prior, including Obama admin. https://t.co/WvVtmXB2dI— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) December 2, 2017
— RamTrucks (@RamTrucks) December 2, 2017
— RamTrucks (@RamTrucks) November 30, 2017
— RamTrucks (@RamTrucks) November 28, 2017
Conservatives let SF have it over verdict in #KateSteinle case. https://t.co/EvRLHAtuza via @jfwildermuth @rachelswan pic.twitter.com/Oui2YaabSz
— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) December 1, 2017
#BREAKING: #KateSteinle trial verdict: Jose Ines Garcia Zarate acquitted of murder and manslaughter in killing at Pier 14 in S.F. https://t.co/j88ocGJ6Ll pic.twitter.com/5eI2tG8FtD
— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) December 1, 2017
Chronicle editorial: Justice not served in trial of Kate Steinle's killer https://t.co/71K643dlgK pic.twitter.com/6GP1HhrDdH
— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) December 1, 2017
INFURIATING: Illegal alien acquitted of murder, manslaughter in shooting death of Kate Steinle https://t.co/c0vmbaZr7P
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) December 1, 2017
Awful: Dan Bongino lays out MADDENING 'mockery of justice' timeline in Kate Steinle death https://t.co/gfxdmLluPT
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) December 1, 2017
BOOMAGE --> Guy Benson ZINGS California over #KateSteinle verdict and it's PERFECT https://t.co/iYEZ2UmBNN
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) December 1, 2017
'Damning indictment'! Michelle Malkin NUKES Pelosi & open borders pols after Kate Steinle verdict https://t.co/yKMnzoWQa8
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) December 1, 2017
I've talked to several people who say Rep. John Conyers is super stressed out and this is taking a toll on him. Now, Mr. Conyers is in the hospital while still maintaining that he did nothing wrong. https://t.co/P0xYdw4Zdm
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) November 30, 2017
NEW: Longtime Rep. John Conyers has been hospitalized for stress-related illness, his spokesperson says. Conyers has faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, and recently stepped aside as ranking member of House Judiciary Committee. pic.twitter.com/sDxNONyjnD
— ABC News (@ABC) November 30, 2017
NEW: Longtime Rep. John Conyers has been hospitalized for stress-related illness, his spokesperson says. Conyers has faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, and recently stepped aside as ranking member of House Judiciary Committee. pic.twitter.com/sDxNONyjnD
— ABC News (@ABC) November 30, 2017
Walmart just pulled a T-shirt that said: ‘‘Rope. Tree. Journalist. SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.’’ pic.twitter.com/WPPHFfNlBu
— Marie Connor (@thistallawkgirl) November 30, 2017
"Rope. Tree. Journalist. SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED." T-shirt has been removed from @Walmart's website at RTDNA's urging. https://t.co/lA8FGCUnHt pic.twitter.com/qnDiVGIwTN
— RTDNA (@RTDNA) November 30, 2017
Omg this variety story on Lauer. Oh my god. https://t.co/Itzw15cuY6
— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) November 29, 2017
8 Million People Could Die in a Nuclear War with North Korea https://t.co/mobYHD0AC3
— National Interest (@TheNatlInterest) November 29, 2017
Use code “Blackfriday” to get 15% off on https://t.co/Smq8FeWAAB today!! pic.twitter.com/x7kjCfGVAj
— genevieve morton (@genevievemorton) November 24, 2017
Head to https://t.co/Smq8FeWAAB to order your 2018 calendar pic.twitter.com/5FoBd2VpLP
— genevieve morton (@genevievemorton) November 26, 2017
“Believe all women” is a powerful war cry, but it can be turned into a weapon to hurt us. Exhibit A: Roy Moore’s false accuser. My latest: https://t.co/TlpopSzH9m
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) November 28, 2017
Just got home from the beach. Hey, that’s the old man and the sea! #NewportBeach #California pic.twitter.com/QIHEwrppy3
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) November 27, 2017
Take a highway out of any Mexican city and you'll see rapidly-decaying slums, even though they're only a few years old. What went wrong? My LA Times investigation. https://t.co/JWPmnpjC8O
— Richard Marosi (@RichMarosi) November 26, 2017
Sixteen years ago, Mexico embarked on a monumental campaign to elevate living standards for its working-class masses.More.
The government teamed with private developers to launch the largest residential construction boom in Latin American history. Global investors — the World Bank, big foundations, Wall Street firms — poured billions of dollars into the effort.
Vast housing tracts sprang up across cow pastures, farms and old haciendas. From 2001 to 2012, an estimated 20 million people — one-sixth of Mexico’s population — left cities, shantytowns and rural ranchos for the promise of a better life.
It was a Levittown moment for Mexico — a test of the increasingly prosperous nation’s first-world ambitions. But Mexico fell disastrously short of creating that orderly suburbia.
The program has devolved into a slow-motion social and financial catastrophe, inflicting daily hardships and hazards on millions in troubled developments across the country, a Los Angeles Times investigation has found.
Homeowners toting buckets scrounge for water delivered by trucks. Gutters run with raw sewage from burst pipes. Streets sink, sidewalks crumble, and broken-down water treatment plants rust. In some developments, blackouts hit for days at a time.
Inside many homes, roofs leak, walls crack and electrical systems short circuit, blowing out appliances and in some cases sparking fires that send families fleeing.
The program cost more than $100 billion, and some investors and construction executives reaped enormous profits, hailing themselves as “nation builders” as they joined the ranks of Mexico’s richest citizens.
Meanwhile, the factory workers, small-business owners, retirees and civil servants who bought the homes got stuck with complex loans featuring mortgage payments that rose even as their neighborhoods deteriorated into slums.
The Times visited 50 of the affordable-housing developments from Tijuana to the Gulf of Mexico. It also reviewed thousands of pages of government and industry documents, and interviewed hundreds of homeowners, municipal leaders, housing experts, civil engineers, construction workers and government officials.
The American housing crisis and recession a decade ago also were marked by regulatory failures, and the U.S. economy eventually recovered. But the crisis in Mexico has been deepening.
Conditions at the developments vary widely. While some meet basic standards, rapid decay is evident at developments in or near every major city: Failed water systems. Unfinished electrical grids, wastewater systems and other infrastructure. Parks and schools that were promised but never materialized.
Many developments were built far from employment centers on marginal land — wetlands, riverbanks and unstable hillsides — with scarce access to water. Local officials rewrote zoning laws and approved developments with little or no review.
Developers downsized homes — building about 1 million one-bedroom units as small as 325 square feet, which is smaller than a typical two-car garage in the U.S. Many families of six, seven or more live in these postage-stamp dwellings, sleeping in laundry nooks and hallways.
Builders have all but abandoned hundreds of developments without completing infrastructure, resulting in a patchwork of public services.
In developments without working streetlights, youngsters wield flashlights to navigate pitch-black streets. In those without trash-hauling, people burn garbage in vacant lots to deter rats.
Tree stumps are placed in open manholes to alert children to the hazards of poorly maintained streets. Residents of water-parched neighborhoods lock the lids of rooftop cisterns to keep thieves from siphoning water.
The unfinished developments blight cities across the country. An estimated 300,000 people live in more than 40 incomplete tracts in the fast-growing Baja California cities of Tijuana and Ensenada.
In Mexico state, which surrounds Mexico City, developers have completed only 36 of the 235 developments started between 2005 and 2012, leaving 200,000 to 500,000 people in limbo, according to state records.
“It was a world of corruption,” said Alberto Uribe, the mayor of Tlajomulco, a suburb of Guadalajara. His predecessors in the city approved developments where the well water has run low for an estimated 300,000 people, he said. Water is now rationed, and many families receive water only every other day...
#MissSouthAfrica Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters is crowned #MissUniverse 2017 https://t.co/khfcCxIdp4
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) November 27, 2017
Congratulations to Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters, the winner of the 2017 #MissUniverse competition! pic.twitter.com/JYuQYc3Lvo
— Miss Universe (@MissUniverse) November 27, 2017
The face you make just before you take the @MissUniverse stage.
— Demi-LeighNel-Peters (@DemiLeighNP) November 26, 2017
RT if you're tuning in to watch #MissUniverse on @vuzutv tomorrow morning? #SouthAfrica pic.twitter.com/WffMU2bMJ7
Top 5.🇿🇦 #MisssUniverse #SouthAfrica pic.twitter.com/2XpflbDdso
— Demi-LeighNel-Peters (@DemiLeighNP) November 27, 2017
Fears of a tax hike are fueling talk of an exodus in Greenwich and Manhattan https://t.co/EI8reC8OBj pic.twitter.com/IFp50a7VLB
— Bloomberg (@business) November 27, 2017
Even Bruce McGuire, founder of the Connecticut Hedge Fund Association, understands if wealthy Northeasterners flee the region due to changes in the tax code.
“It would almost be irresponsible if you weren’t thinking about moving,” he said.
The problem for the Connecticut hedge-fund set -- and, more broadly, for a lot of the Wall Street crowd -- is that Republican proposals in both the House and Senate would drive up taxes for many high-earners in the New York City area. By eliminating the deduction for most state and local taxes, an individual making a yearly salary of $1,000,000 -- a figure not uncommon in the financial industry -- would owe the Internal Revenue Service an additional $21,000, according to a preliminary analysis by accounting firm Marcum LLP.
Billionaire hedge fund managers have blazed the trail south in recent years. David Tepper, Paul Tudor Jones and Eddie Lampert are New York-area transplants to Florida, which has no personal income tax.
A final bill could still do away with the hike, but so far there are no signs coming out of Washington that will happen. Financially struggling New Jersey had the sixth-highest individual income rate this year, according to the Federation of Tax Administrators. New York ranked eighth and cash-strapped Connecticut 12th. Nine of the 10 states with the highest individual taxes, including Washington, D.C., voted Democratic in the 2016 presidential election.
Tax Refugees
No one interviewed for this story would talk openly about making plans to move, but Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is estimating that New York City alone could lose as much as 4 percent of its top earners if the bill becomes law. In Florida, where there’s no state income tax, there’s the sense that this is a great opportunity to lure disgruntled tax refugees.
The Miami Downtown Development Authority is throwing a party next month during the annual Art Basel show, and Nitin Motwani, a real estate developer, has invited wealthy Northeasterners who’ve expressed interest in moving to the area. Because the proposed tax changes are practically begging them to relocate, Motwani expects a crowd.
State and local taxes, also called SALT, “can and should be a major catalyst,” said Motwani, a development authority board member. Tax reform will “certainly be something we’re highlighting” at the party, in the Perez Art Museum. “Inertia is a tough thing, but you add on another tax bill and maybe that pushes you over the edge.”
"Stand by Me. "
Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit "AND THE ROLE OF EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN WILL BE PLAYED BY…: Liberals’ Knives Come Out for Nate Silver After His Model Points to a Trump Victory..."
R.S. McCain, "'Jews Are Dead, Hamas Is Happy, and Podhoretz Has Got His Rage On ..."
Ace, "Georgia Shooter's Father Berated Him as a "Sissy" and Bought Him an AR-15 to 'Toughen Him Up'..."Free Beacon..., "Kamala Harris, the ‘Candidate of Change,’ Copies Sections of Her Policy Page Directly From Biden's Platform..."