But don’t worry: If a knife gang attacks your average Chinese citizens in their home or apartment, they don’t need a gun, they can just call the pol—
Oh, right.
Also, when armed gangs attack a police station, it’s not a “riot,” it’s something closer to an insurrection. Or Assault on Precinct 13, Chinese-style.
If confirmed, it would be one of the bloodiest incidents in Xinjiang since nearly 200 people were killed in the regional capital, Urumqi, in 2009.
The region, which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been the scene of numerous violent incidents in recent years amid tensions between the large population of Muslim Uighurs and the ruling Han ethnic group.
You know, if 200 people were killed in an American city at one time, we’d never hear the end of. The mere fact that such things keep happening suggests that China has a much weaker grip on its hinterlands than the media usually suggests.
So House Intelligence Committee leaders say that Edward Snowden is lying. They’re saying that he couldn’t possibly have had access to the records he said he did, that he lied about his past, etc.
You know what neither the House Intelligence Committee nor Obama seems to be denying? That the NSA gathers data on emails and phone calls for every American in general, or Verizon customers in specific. One need not believe that Snowden is telling the truth about everything, or that he’s a hero, or that everything he revealed (like details of our spying on various Chinese firms) needed to be revealed.
It’s the domestic spying on all Americans that’s the scandal: The United States government ignoring fourth amendment constitutional guarantees. The fourth amendment reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Government asking for “the email and phone records for every American” is, in fact, an unreasonable search and seizure, and “the servers of every major telecommunications and Internet provider in America” is an unreasonable place to be searched. That’s the scandal, not the handwaving Obama and congress have participated in to distract you from the fact that every single piece of electronic communications you participate in is being tracked by the government.
That’s the scandal. One of the many perpetrated by the Obama Administration (who have scaled up electronic eavesdropping and warrantless wiretaps far beyond what liberals screamed about George W. Bush undertaking).
Silly Joanne Chesimard. If she had just served her time, she’d have tenure by now.
Europe is “bleeding out”. Youth unemployment? “59.1% of those under 25 are unemployed in Greece, 55.9% in Spain, 38.4% in Italy, 38.3% in Portugal, 26.5% in France.” More: “Hope and Change economies are crony capitalist systems which pick winners and losers. They maintain the status quo at all costs — and reward those who have captured government over those who innovate.”
So which is funnier, violence against women, or intimidating crime witnesses? Mountain Dew puts both in the same ad! Hilarity ensues! (Oh, and some people think it’s racist. It is, but not any more than a random gangsta rap video.)
People don’t like being bossed around by the political class. But that’s the Democratic Party’s entire model!
“We found 15 Trial Court cases, and 12 Appellate Court cases, where Shariah was found to be applicable in these particular cases. The facts are the facts: some judges are making decisions deferring to Shariah law even when those decisions conflict with Constitutional protections.”
Former New Mexico Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson says that Ted Cruz isn’t allowed to be a Hispanic because he opposes illegal alien amnesty. Maybe they should just declare that you can’t be Hispanic unless you’re a Democrat and be done with it.
Speaking of Cruz, here’s a piece in The New Republic that, when stripped of standard TNR talking points, boils down to “Yes, Ted Cruz could be elected President.”
Another day, another another 20 dead in an Islamist attack on a Christian church.
What did Dianne Feinstein’s gun-grabbing “assault weapons” bill actually accomplish? “These efforts have driven some law-abiding Americans into the loving arms of the NRA.”
“In Harry Reid’s Senate there are more votes against Chuck Hagel than there are in favor of an assault weapons ban.”
“[Ted Cruz’s] infraction was asking the right question. What Cruz wanted to know was this: Why do liberals cherish the First and Fourth Amendments, but trash the one in between – the Second Amendment?”
Louisiana judge rules that ex-felons can own guns. Some caveats: This is based on a newly passed, pro-gun amendment to the Louisiana Constitution, and Louisiana law (as opposed to the other 49 states) is based on the Napoleonic Code rather than English common law.
Thomas Friedman hates the Keystone pipeline because the oil is dirty, but loves China, where industry is a thousand time dirtier than here in the U.S. And where will that oil go if the pipeline isn’t built? China. Maybe Friedman just wants all the jobs to be in China. That, or actual checks from the Chinese government or their business subsidiaries, would explain an awful lot of Friedman’s writing over the last few years…
The degrees of broke-ness varies: from completely and utterly broke, like Greece or Italy; to wobbly, like the U.K., France, the U.S., or Japan; to getting poorer like Germany. But all of them are going to have to raise the percentage of gross domestic product they collect in tax — and many of them very significantly.
The U.S. deficit is more than 7% of GDP. The U.K.’s deficit is just as high. There is very little sign that spending cuts to close gaps of that magnitude are on the cards, nor is there any sign that growth will be sufficiently strong to make up the difference — certainly not in countries like the U.K. or Japan.
Huge sums of additional revenue will have to be raised.
Willie Sutton once famously remarked that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.”
In the same way, governments will look to raise more tax from companies because that’s where the money is.
Or they could, you know, actually cut spending…
I’ve not been following the Prenda Law case closely. Fortunately, Ken over at Popehat has. Exceptionally brief background: Scumbag copyright troll lawyers operate shakedown operation, filing dubious (at best) copyright infringement lawsuits. Then they compounded the problem by suing bloggers and lawyers in an attempt to silence them. As you might expect, that strategy isn’t working out very well for them… (Hat tip: Dwight)
Smart Bomb drug approved. Let me know when they finally approve the Inviso drug, and we can finally finish off those pesky mutants.
China’s “Yellowed Pearls”. “‘Pretty girls do not need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family. But girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult,’ reads an excerpt from an article titled, Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy, posted on the website of the All-China Federation of Women in March 2011. ‘These girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don’t realise that as women age, they are worth less and less. So by the time they get their MA or PhD, they are already old – like yellowed pearls.'” And how old is too old in China? 27 years old. 27?!?! What self-respecting man could possibly love the withered, wrinkled, desiccated husk of a woman who’s reached the doddering, shriveled, decrepit age of 27? Why not just marry a mummy and be done with it?
“Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis.”
ObamaCare exchange costs up 29%…before the first one has even opened.
Iowahawk reports on a recent outbreak of scrutonium, “a deadly poll-eating supervirus that attacks the immuno-hope system, leaving victims vulnerable to material facts.”
Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.
As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.
“Air time will be filled instead with extended news bulletins and ‘programs that promote traditional virtues and socialist core values.'”
I don’t think you want to do that, sunshine. People like their TV, and they need something to distract them from China’s imploding economy, general unrest, specific unrest among the Muslim population, unequal sex ratios, Communist Party suppression of dissent, and the endemic corruption. You want to give them more circuses, not less. Do they really think that The Happy Socialist Progress Hour is an acceptable substitute for a popular drama or comedy, or can they just not afford circuses anymore?
And if they can no longer afford the circuses, how soon will it be before they can no longer afford the bread?
We’ve lost one of the great heroes of the 20th century.
Vaclav Havel, a man who was (in chronological order) an important playwright, a hero of the struggle against communism, and founding President of the Czech Republic, is dead at 75.
Of the three, Havel’s role in the struggle against communism was far and away the most important. In a country in which the state’s (and in turn Moscow’s) imprimatur was necessary for a playwright to make a living, Havel refused to buckle under or avoid criticizing the great evil that was communism. In the wake of Prague Spring, his works were banned and he was repeatedly imprisoned, but he kept speaking out, finally helping lead the Velvet Revolution and, after the fall of Communism, setting the stage for the “Velvet Divorce,” in which the Czech Republic and Slovakia split peacefully into two separate nations, even though he opposed it.
Havel, unlike Yasser Arafat, Le Duc Tho and Barack Obama, never won a Nobel Peace Prize, despite doing more for peace, justice and freedom than the vast majority of winners.
Understand that there are people as noble, brave and truthful as Havel sitting in jail in Cuba and China this very moment, many of whom who have been beaten and tortured for speaking truth to power. And Havel, in and out of power, never stopped fighting for the victims of communism, as shown by this video: