53percenter's Blog

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the law professor behind popular political blog Instapundit, published an article in USA Today, Monday, explaining why he decided to delete his Twitter account which had over 100,000 followers.

In his article, titled “Why I deleted my popular Twitter account,” Reynolds claimed the social network has become a “breeding ground for thoughtlessness and contempt.”

“I was partly acting on impulse, because the social media site had just, for no obvious reason, ‘permanently banned’ someone I follow, something that seems to be happening more and more,” he explained. “But I was also acting on my growing belief that Twitter is, well, horrible.”

Reynolds added that social networks “promote bad feelings and bad behavior,” and declared, “I think that Twitter is the worst.”

“In fact, if you set out to design a platform that would poison America’s discourse and its politics, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more destructive than Twitter,” Reynolds proclaimed. “I also think that Twitter actually makes people meaner and less thoughtful. People I’ve followed both on Facebook and Twitter are generally much meaner on Twitter, where they’re in the political arena, than on Facebook, where their friends and family are a big part of the audience.”

Reynolds then concluded his article by claiming he’s “happier” now that he isn’t using Twitter, and is instead devoting his “downtime” to “reading novels.”

In 2016, Reynold’s Instapundit account was temporarily suspended from Twitter, before it was reinstated.

Reynolds has previously criticized social media, and in a June article for USA Today, titled “Blame social media for making us more hasty and emotional. Can we fix this?” he questioned whether social networks were “bad for our brains.”

 

Last week, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics released a shocking fact: life expectancy dropped in the United States for the third straight year, down to 78.6 years as of 2017. What, exactly, drove that decline? Drug overdoses and suicides. Drug overdoses were responsible for more than 70,000 deaths in 2017, with the overdose rate climbing 9.6 percent over 2016; suicide jumped 3.7 percent.

CDC director Robert Redfield explained, “Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable.”

The continuing decline in American life expectancy should give the lie to the bizarre notion that drug overdose and suicide are results of a stagnant economy—a common theory on both the Right and the Left. That theory suggests that the globalized economy has left behind a particular segment of Americans, and that those Americans are dealing with economic hardship through drugs and depression. But that wouldn’t explain why life expectancy is declining now, when it continued to increase throughout the 2007-2009 economic recession. As David Brooks of The New York Times points out, “[economic] gains are finally being widely shared, even by the least skilled…Thanks mostly to government transfer programs, incomes for the bottom fifth of society have increased by about 80 percent over the past four decades.”

It also wouldn’t explain the demographics of drug overdoses. As the CDC points out, “Some of the greatest increases [among heroin users] have occurred in demographic groups with historically low rates of heroin use: women, the privately insured, the people with higher incomes.” And those taking their own lives are disproportionately not middle aged people falling out of the workforce—they are older American males, predominantly white. These are not the demographics of the economically dispossessed in the United States.

No, something else is missing. That something else is also manifesting in social fragmentation, tribal polarization, and political rage.

Read the rest here.

The common phrase “bringing home the bacon” may now be offensive to some. If you thought women (because it is about providing for a household and because women seem to be offended by everything these days) you’d be wrong.

According to the Independent, phrases like “bringing home the bacon” and “putting all your eggs in one basket” aren’t merely “harmless quirks of the English language,” but actually phrases that “could be offending vegans and vegetarians.”

The poor, malnourished souls.

The Independent article is based off another article, from a researcher who wrote in the Conversation that meat is not just a “form of sustenance,” but “a source of societal power.” Throughout history, Shareena Z. Hamzah wrote, meat was something only the wealthy could afford, while peasants had to subsist on a “mostly vegetarian diet.”

After some literary references, Hamzah then lists all the bad things meat has wrought: Climate change, “environmental degradation,” studies noting some “negative effects of meat-eating on the human body,” and concerns about animal welfare. She wrote:

“The increased awareness of vegan issues will filter through our consciousness to produce new modes of expression – after all, there’s more than one way to peel a potato. At the same time, metaphors involving meat could gain an increased intensity if the killing of animals for food becomes less socially acceptable. The image of “killing two birds with one stone” is, if anything, made more powerful by the animal-friendly alternative of “feeding two birds with one scone.” If veganism forces us to confront the realities of food’s origins, then this increased awareness will undoubtedly be reflected in our language and our literature.”

Hamzah points to a survey from CompareTheMarket.com, which claims there are 3.5 million vegans in the United Kingdom, a sharp uptick from 2016, when a survey published by The Vegan Society and Vegan Life magazine found just 540,000 vegans living in Britain. It’s difficult to say there was such a sharp increase in just two years, considering the different surveys and potential sample sizes.

This increase, which Hamzah accepts without question, will lead people to stop using meat-based idioms like “bringing home the bacon.”

It’s doubtful, since idioms persist, people hate their speech being censored by the easily offended, and “bringing home the bacon” is about money, not delicious salt-cured pork belly.

Back at the Independent, Olivia Petter notes that the aggressively unpopular “animal rights” group PETA has been trying to get meat-based idioms banned from classrooms.

“While these phrases may seem harmless, they carry meaning and can send mixed signals to students about the relationship between humans and animals and can normalize abuse,” the organization wrote on its website. “Teaching students to use animal-friendly language can cultivate positive relationships between all beings and help end the epidemic of youth violence toward animals.”

These people truly think others are so dumb and evil as to hear a phrase like “killing two birds with one stone” and actually take it as a challenge.

PETA suggests saying “bringing home the bagels,” but what happens when that is deemed racist (since the food originated in Jewish communities) or sexist (please don’t make me explain why) or offensive to people on a no-carb diet?

President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who has adopted as his signature policy a violent nationwide crackdown on drug use, claimed in remarks on Monday that he uses marijuana “to stay awake.”

Duterte later told reporters he was “of course” joking, trying to keep a rambling speech about how much he disliked the experience of attending this year’s Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit from getting too boring.

Duterte was speaking at an event celebrating the Philippine Organizing Committee that put together the country’s delegation to ASEAN. The Philippine president typically deviates from the main themes of events he attends in his remarks, instead taking time to discuss matters of interest to him, such as his distaste for the Catholic Church. Last week, he threatened to “decapitate” a Philippine bishop for allegedly buying drugs, a claim Duterte did not back with evidence.

At the ASEAN event in Manila Monday, Duterte took the time to detail his many complaints about the conference, calling it a “killing activity,” implying that the world leaders who attend spend most of their time there slowly dying inside.

“Me, not so much,” he added, “because I take marijuana to stay awake. It doesn’t work, with others.”

Duterte used Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah as an example of one of the world leaders who fell asleep during the event.

“Just between us, but Bolkiah slept during the events,” Duterte said during the public speech at the presidential palace Monday. “He has a talent to make it appear that he was not sleeping, so it is as if he is contemplating his oil.”

Duterte also complained about the “awful” food at the event, claiming he had to bring his own canned meats and eat them in his hotel room to avoid consuming catered ASEAN food for heads of state.

“The food sucked. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s true,” Duterte protested. “I have to bring Karne Norte and dried fish.”

He went on to complain that the heads of the ASEAN “think we’re boy scouts” and overbook each world leader’s schedules. “I can’t take it,” he added.

The ASEAN conference occurred last month in Papua New Guinea. At the time, Duterte skipped several significant meetings at ASEAN and went on to skip four meetings scheduled at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Singapore, which occurred immediately after the ASEAN summit. He also skipped the ASEAN gala, which he hosted in 2017 when the Philippines organized it. Duterte’s presidential spokesman, Salvador Panelo, told reporters that Duterte skipped the meetings for “power naps” necessary due to the “punishing” schedule he faced.

Duterte’s remarks about marijuana have triggered the most outrage, as police have killed thousands of Philippine nationals in shootouts since Duterte took office in 2016, vowing to kill the nation’s drug criminals and eradicate illicit drug use entirely. Marijuana use is illegal in the Philippines. An estimated 5,000 people have died since Duterte took office in incidents related to law enforcement against drug crime. The first police convictions for wrongful killing of drug suspects occurred on Friday; Duterte has vowed to pardon officers who kill Philippine citizens suspected of using or trafficking in drugs.

Asked to clarify his remarks Monday, Duterte said, “Of course I was joking. … I want to shake a tree in the middle of a [speech].” He added that his speech “would be boring” if he did not make jokes and that this was part of his “style.”

“It’s too late to change,” he concluded, adding, “If you believe it, you are stupid.”

In an interview in 2016, Duterte issued support for legalizing medical marijuana, insisting that cannabis “is really an ingredient of modern medicine now. … There are medicines right now being developed or already in the market that contains marijuana as a component but used for medical purposes.” Yet he rejected the idea of smoking cannabis recreationally, warning that those who “fight” the law by using it in the manner will “die.”

Rappler added that Duterte has previously admitted, without claiming to be joking, to the use of fentanyl, an extremely addictive and dangerous opioid believed to have played a role in nearly half the opioid overdose deaths in the United States in 2017. Duterte claimed to use fentanyl in a patch form to relieve chronic back pain.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

European Union regulators are reportedly asking Google competitors whether the Big Tech company is harming them.

According to Reuters, the investigation “followed a complaint by U.S. search and advertising company Yelp and rivals in the travel, restaurant and accommodation industries,” which led to European Union antitrust regulators sending “questionnaires to Google rivals last month, asking for details of the company’s practices and the impact on competing services between January 2012 to December 2017.”

“Regulators also wanted to know if rivals experienced an impact in the operation of their local services as a result of major search algorithm changes by Google, including the introduction of its Panda 4.0 algorithm,” reported Reuters. “Introduced in 2014, this algorithm determines what appears in Google search results.”

Regulators also asked if “Google used content from rival local search services such as reviews on Local Universal or One Box.”

Reuters noted that the investigation could prompt the European Union’s fourth antitrust case against the company.

In July, Google was fined $5 billion by the European Union for “denying rivals a chance to innovate” through its Android phones — a ruling it appealed in October.

In 2017, Google was also fined €2.4 billion by the European Union for taking advantage of its search engine “dominance” to push consumers to its own businesses, while last month, European Union consumer groups accused Google of tracking users’ movements and violating privacy laws.

Assuming, of course, Congress gets around to authorizing one. Earlier today, the Supreme Court shot down a challenge by environmentalists to the building of the long-promised, never-funded wall on the southern border. The court refused to grant cert to a challenge by three groups to stop the project before it began:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rebuffed a challenge by three conservation groups to the authority of President Donald Trump’s administration to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, a victory for Trump who has made the wall a centerpiece of his hardline immigration policies.

The justices’ declined to hear the groups’ appeal of a ruling by a federal judge in California rejecting their claims that the administration had pursued border wall projects without complying with applicable environmental laws. The groups are the Center for Biological Diversity, the Animal Legal Defense Fund and Defenders of Wildlife.

Their lawsuits said construction operations would harm plants, rare wildlife habitats, threatened coastal birds like the snowy plover and California gnatcatcher, and other species such as fairy shrimp and the Quino checkerspot butterfly.

Remember which federal judge wrote the initial ruling? None other than Judge Gonzalo Curiel, with whom Trump feuded during the 2016 campaign in what was predicted to be yet another end of Trump’s political aspirations. My, how times have changed.

Curiel ruled in February that a 1996 law aimed at stemming illegal immigration provided the Trump administration with the legal authority to waive environmental laws and permitting processes. Curiel noted at the time that his role on the bench isn’t to evaluate the wisdom of policy but to apply duly enacted and constitutional laws:

In his ruling Tuesday, Curiel at the outset acknowledged the political dissension over the border wall — and hinted at the extra scrutiny he and this case are under — but stressed that his decision here does not and cannot consider whether such border barrier plans “are politically wise or prudent.”

He then quoted U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts — who he pointed out is a fellow Indiana native: “Court(s) are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

That’s clearly what the Supreme Court thinks, too, or at least enough of the justices to matter. Don’t forget that it only takes four justices to grant cert, which means that the challenge to the 1996 law wasn’t significant enough to interest the four-member liberal wing, even with the Dark Night of Trumpism as an ever-present threat. For that matter, it didn’t interest enough of the limited-government contingent that appears to have arisen and might be preparing a powerful rebuke to property seizures by police. The federal government reaches its zenith of authority in national security issues, which includes border security whether people want to acknowledge it or not, so tripping over its own non-national security permit system makes little sense anyway.

That doesn’t automatically mean the wall will get built. Congress still has to fund it, and the incoming Democratic majority in the House will want a steep price for it — if they agree to fund it at all. There are several interest groups involved in that decision, but the Supreme Court has made it clear that the federal judiciary is not among them.

SAN YSIDRO, California — Officials in Tijuana moved approximately 2,000 caravan migrants from their original shelter site due to health and sanitation concerns.

Mexican officials moved just over 2,000 to a new encampment after determining the original location was overrun with raw sewage and trash after several days of heavy rain, local media reported.

The original Benito Juárez Sports Complex site sits only feet away from the U.S. border. Officials moved the caravan migrants to a former concert venue approximately 10 miles to the southeast of the international border. “El Barretal” is located in one of Tijuana’s most dangerous neighborhoods, colonia Mariano Matamoros.

The move to the new temporary shelter began on Thursday and was led by personnel of the National Institute of Migration (INM). The agency will assume full control providing food, medical care, and a secure location for those who choose to relocate. While the move is not a mandatory one, authorities will be shutting down services at the original location.

The new shelter will be used by migrants primarily from Honduras and other Central American countries as they wait their turns to request asylum in California. Others appear to bide their time before attempting to cross illegally into the United States.

According to local news outlet Milenio, migrants are classified into three categories:

1. those interested in seeking asylum in the U.S.;
2. those who would like to stay in Mexico; and,
3. those who wish to return back home.

Local media report that approximately 2,000 requested to return home. According to the most recent official count, a total of 2,385 of the 6,062 housed at the Benito Juárez Sports Complex agreed to be relocated. Those who refused reportedly decided to stay near the original location out of fear of being tricked into deportation.

Breitbart News toured the Benito Juárez Sports Complex on Friday, as documented in an exclusive report which described the very poor and unsanitary conditions and reported seeing, “a lot of sick people,” and “people wearing masks and a lot of people coughing.”

The reporting added, “They’re living in a flooded situation, a lot of water, a lot of backed up portable toilets … so the conditions are very bad. … It’s really the filthiest stuff I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in a lot of places … These are pretty heinous conditions.”

Milenio noted that in the first meeting held by authorities of the new Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, “it was determined that the federal Welfare Secretariat will be responsible for assigning resources to improve the conditions in which the shelter is located.” The newly installed government will be coordinating with state and municipal authorities in handling the needs of the migrants while they are in Mexico.

Robert Arce is a retired Phoenix Police detective with extensive experience working Mexican organized crime and street gangs. Arce has worked in the Balkans, Iraq, Haiti, and recently completed a three-year assignment in Monterrey, Mexico, working out of the Consulate for the United States Department of State, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Program, where he was the Regional Program Manager for Northeast Mexico (Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Durango, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas.)