Forum: What Are Your Predictions for 2017??

Every week on Monday, the WoW! community and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher's Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week's question:What are your predictions for 2017?

Don Surber : President Trump will kick ass and take names, proving Washington conservatives wrong. NAFTA and NATO will be changed in our favor. Obamacare will be gutted with the popular parts restored, taxes continued, and the mandate repealed. Liberals will battle the wall and EPA reform in court. Washington conservatives will try to muck things up by touching the third rail - Social Security -- again and again. Guys, 2033 is twenty years away. Government works best in a crisis. Handle the stuff already on the plate first.

Trump, Putin and Bibi will take care of the Islamic State. Trump, Putin and Taiwan will pressure China.

Off year elections in New Jersey and Virginia will give Democrats hope, but Trump's popularity will top 50% as the economy improves.

Stately McDaniel Manor: A Happy New Year, and here you go:

My Top Twenty, Infallible, New Year’s Predictions:

(1) The rule of law will make a comeback; the forces of progressivism will fight tooth and nail to retain and expand lawlessness.

(2) Tyranny will be beaten back: the forces of progressivism will fight tooth and nail to retain and expand tyranny.

(3) Political correctness will take a hit; the forces of progressivism will rejoice in the difficulty involved in rolling it back even a little.

(4) Big government will be momentarily interrupted in its inevitable growth; the forces of progressivism will, as always, bide their time.

(5) The legacy media will continue to lose ground: All the while, they’ll whine about how important they are and how essential to the democracy they have, for decades, done their best to destroy.

(6) Progressives will continue to be the best gun, ammunition and accessory salesmen in history.

(7) Obamacare will be repealed in name only; the forces of progressivism will smirk.

(8) Paul Ryan will continue to demonstrate what a miserable little weasel he is; the forces of progressivism will smirk.

(9) Mitch McConnell will continue to demonstrate he is a dedicated RINO by allowing progressives to prevail whenever he can get away with it; the forces of progressivism will praise his enlightened leadership.

(10) Our relationships with our allies, particularly Israel, will improve; the forces of progressivism will fight tooth and nail to weaken them.

(11) Our enemies will, once again, begin to fear us; the forces of progressivism will wail, gnash their teeth, and rend their garments.

(12) Many of Barack Obama’s illegal, harmful regulations and rules will be obliterated; the forces of progressivism will wail, gnash their teeth, and rend their garments, and predict the end of the world.

(13) Our enemies will learn there is, after all, a military solution to many issues; the forces of progressivism will wail, gnash their teeth, and rend their garments.

(14) It will become abundantly clear that virtually everything John Kerry did or said was actually exceedingly stupid and traitorous; the media will do all they can to keep us from realizing that.

(15) The depth of Barack Obama’s treason in unconstitutionally treating with Iran will become obvious; the media will do all they can to keep us from realizing that.

(16) Barack Obama will hold nearly daily news conferences from the office of the post president; the media will try to make them care; most Americans won’t give a boatload of deceased rodents.

(17) Islamist terrorists will, once again, be identified as Islamist terrorists; the forces of progressivism will wail, gnash their teeth, and rend their garments at the inhumanity of it all.

(18) Our immigration laws will, once again, actually be enforced; the forces of progressivism will wail, gnash their teeth, and rend their garments; they will not volunteer to house illegal aliens.

(19) Donald Trump will struggle against big government impulses; the forces of progressivism will do all they can to ensure he loses the struggle.

(20) America will, once again, be on the path to greatness; the forces of progressivism will join with their terrorist allies to lay as many IEDs as possible.


JoshuaPundit: I think we're in for a major shift.  First of all,  America's economic engine is about to be turned loose. I think we've already been in a major recession and will now see a recovery. Trump will cut corporate and personal income taxes, cut the ridiculous regulations strangling business, and rebuild our military. All of these steps will generate taxable economic activity and promote growth. Supporting and expanding our energy sector will also lead to cheaper fuel, and cheaper prices for goods and fuel. A moderate rise in interest rates will also flood America with investment  capital and reduce our debt.

Trump will also, if he's smart let the Chinese know that the way to avoid tariffs is to build plants here and hire Americans (which is exactly what Reagan did with the Japanese and Germans). 

The dollar is super strong right now, but I'm a contrarian when it comes to predictions that this will kill our exports. America's prosperity in the fifties and sixties vis a vis exports was that the American worker was the best in the world and we made stuff  everyone wanted. The dollar was strong then too.

In foreign policy, look for Barack Hussein Obama  to take another kick at Israel. It will likely take the form of colluding with the usual suspects to outline a 'peace agreement' recognizing a Palestinian state on the the 1948 ceasefire lines including East Jerusalem. It will subsequently be introduced as a UNSC resolution (whichis probably already written).  If it passes, Israel will ignore it, and take some fairly aggressive action in response since the whole premise of all the concessions they've made over the years for peace will have been negated and thanks to this diktat, suddenly they're being told there's nothing to negotiate and Israel's concerns simply don't matter. Don't be surprised if  Putin,of all people vetoes it just to spite Obama.

Look also for a major change in Europe. 'Refugees' are already starting to be expelled from some surprising places. Norway, for instance, just kicked out 850 'refugees' a month or so ago and saw a 30% decrease in crime.  There are elections coming in France, Germany and the Netherlands as well as anEU referendum in Italy. France may very well see Marine Le Pen of the National Front as President of France at best and an important coalition member at worst, Frauke Petry and AFD are growing by leaps and bounds as failed leader Angela Merkel's popularity is cratering. Geert Wilders will, like Le Pen, either be the Dutch leader or, as the head of the largest party in the Netherlands, an indispensable coalition member. All three are anti-EU, and want  the 'refugees' out.  All three are also pro-Israel, as are the Visograd nations, something that will also likely negate any anti-Israel UN activity. The voters in the UK are getting increasingly impatient at the deliberately slowed down Brexit. Look for that to speed up as well.

There's going to be a major change in media as well. The old line media has been outed as purveyors of fake news and the biased whores that they are. And we now have a president who's not at all inclined to kiss their backsides. Look for alternative media like Drudge, Breitbart and of course, Wow! Magazine to have an increasing role in the national conversation.

I personally am exhilarated at the direction our national politics are going. The Donald made two sincere efforts to try and unify the country (his victory speech and his Thanksgiving address) , but the Left isn't having any of it.  They slapped his hand away with an angry sneer. I for one am happy about that, because it clarifies things.

 Since the party's leadership and many of the rank and file have no interest in unity for the sake of the country, fine. They need to be defeated and marginalized even further, and there are lots of ways to do it. That's exactly how this needs to be approached.  And believe it or not, I think that with a couple of dishonorable exceptions, the Republicans are going to unite behind Trump on this, because they see the consequences of screwing up again. If not, Trump has the option of the precedent Obama set, executive orders.

Senator Ted Cruz isn't someone I quote often, but he made the point in a FOX news interview that if the Republicans in congress fail to deliver yet again, people are going to be coming after them with pitchforks and torches, and it will be entirely justified.


The Glittering Eye : My crystal ball is sadly in need of recalibration and has been for some time. I no longer have any idea what's likely to happen next so I would have made the following remarks regardless of who was elected president.

Expect a recession in 2017. Based on the National Bureau of Economic Research's figures, we're overdue for a recession. It's possible that the pump-priming that President-Elect Trump has promised and the Congress will likely approve that might be forestalled but, well, we're still overdue and they haven't repealed the business cycle yet. China's woes are likely to spread here. Which leads me to my next prediction.

China's economy will get worse before it gets better.

Expect Trump Derangement Syndrome to exceed Clinton Derangement Syndrome, Bush Derangement Syndrome, and Obama Derangement Syndrome in its virulence. You ain't seen nothin' yet.

The differences in economy, politics, and attitudes between California and the rest of the country will become more apparent rather than less so. It's a whole 'nother country.

Expect the Democrats to obstruct anything the Trump Administration attempts to accomplish (see TDS above).

By the end of 2017 the alliance of the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, et al. will have restored Syria to government control.

By the end of 2017 there will be no prison camps, gas chambers, mass executions, or suspensions of civil liberties in the United States. You might think that would deter the Hitler references but it won't. If everything you know about current events came from reading the New York Times, you would believe that fascism was descending on the United States.

 Laura Rambeau Lee, Right Reason : We worked hard to see Donald Trump win the presidential election.  Now the real work begins.  This “draining the swamp” is not going to be easy.  The problem will be the pushback from the entrenched establishment which has grown accustomed to growing government and justifying its existence. Unless the DC elites undergo a radical change of thinking and understand the mandate that delivered President-elect Trump to the White House, the next four years will be extremely turbulent. They will not give up their power easily and I hope Trump is up to the challenges he will surely face.  It may not be until the election in 2018 before we can establish strong and influential conservative representation and start the task of shrinking the size and reach of the federal government.

Under the Obama administration, the cabinet departments have been charged with providing social, economic, and environmental justice to one or many underserved classes of people. This culture needs to be eliminated if we are to restore the rule of law and equal justice for all.  I hope the new cabinet secretaries understand this going into their positions and will work to reduce and eventually eliminate these bureaucratic and regulatory mandates.

I remain hopeful that Trump will fulfill the promises he made to the American people to secure the border, rebuild our military, re-establish our position as a super power in the world, improve the care we provide our veterans through the Veterans Administration, reduce the power of the U. S. Department of Education, and rein in the bureaucracies and regulations coming out of all of the federal departments that are crippling businesses, and help bring back jobs to grow our economy again.

On a lighter note, I would love to see the Pittsburgh Steelers win a seventh Super Bowl.
Well, there it is! Happy 2017 to all our wonderful readers...and thanks so much for your support.

Make sure to drop by every Monday for the WoW! Magazine Forum. And enjoy WoW! Magazine 24-7 with some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere. Take from me, you won't want to miss it.

The Council Has Spoken! Our Watcher's Council Results

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week's Watcher's Council match up.

"Americans have the right to choose to be unarmed and helpless. Be my guest." - Ted Nugent

“The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.” - Jeff Cooper, Art of The Rifle

"There are no dangerous weapons. There are only dangerous men."- Robert A. Heinlein





This week's winning essay,Stately McDaniel Manor's A Post-Orlando AR-15 Primer is one of those rare gems of the blogosphere - a very well written, compact, information packed source of practical knowledge by someone who knows what he's talking about. Here's a slice:

The recent Jihadist slaughter of Americans in Orlando is a crisis Mr. Obama and his sycophantic minions are determined not to allow to go to waste. Accordingly, he has come up with a typically Obamite plan to deal with Islamist terror: disarm law-abiding Americans who pose no threat to anyone. Fox News reports: 

Being tough on terrorism — particularly the sorts of homegrown terrorism that we’ve seen now in Orlando and San Bernardino — means making it harder for people who want to kill Americans to get their hands on assault weapons that are capable of killing dozens of innocents as quickly as possible,’ Obama said in his weekly radio address. ‘That’s something I’ll continue to talk about in the weeks ahead.

Hillary Clinton, who has never seen an anti-liberty, gun control idea she did not embrace, was true to form:

Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has also joined the fight to ban semi-automatic weapons, saying last week: ‘Weapons of war have no place on our streets.

Some Democrats, Liberal Republicans, and some in the media are calling for compromise, but compromise requires that each side surrender something. Such compromise is commonly presented as integral to “common sense gun safety” proposals, but what will anti-liberty forces surrender? They have nothing to offer, but they demand total surrender. How may fundamental, unalienable rights be compromised? How does one compromise on due process? How does one compromise on the right to keep and bear arms? Allow the abridgement of rights every other week only?

Professional anti-gun shock troops in the media and Congress have implied that the AR-15 and all of its variants are uniquely dangerous and commonly used in mass shootings and crime.  This is abject nonsense.  Rifles of all types are used in less than 3% of all shootings, and AR-15s in only a tiny portion of that already tiny portion of the firearm universe.

The AR-15 has been demonized, and will continue to be disparaged because the anti-gun movement has, for decades, worked to convince the public that any gun that looks like a machine gun must be a fully automatic weapon.  One of the oldest tactics of these anti-freedom forces is to ban any gun, type of gun or accessory possible in the hope that such bans will be a foot in the door to eventual total bans of firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens.

Early M-16

With this in mind, I present a basic AR-15 primer in the hope that facts are the best antidote to lies.  Anti-gunners often call the AR-15 a “high-powered” rifle, or an “assault weapon.”  Both are entirely false.  The AR-15 fires a rifle cartridge of intermediate power at best, and there is no such thing as an “assault weapon,” which is entirely an invention of anti-gun organizations and the media, though some states have used that language in gun banning legislation.

L to R: .22LR, 9mm, .223, .308

For an understanding of the relative size of the cartridges mentioned herein, here is a photo of four of the most common contemporary cartridges.  From left to right, the .22 Long Rifle, the 9mm, the .223, and the .308. True high-powered rifle cartridges are on the order of the .308 and larger.

M1 Garand Battle Rifle

Battle Rifles:  After WWII, the Army sought a replacement for the M1 Garand, a large and heavy rifle, firing an unquestionably high-powered cartridge, the .30 caliber 30.06.  This–a high-powered, full-sized cartridge–is the defining characteristic of the battle rifle.  Because of the power of these long-range cartridges, battle rifles tend to be heavy, weighing in the ten-pound range, and have been historically made of steel and wood, which has been replaced with plastics in the modern era.  The M1 was the first generally issued semiautomatic battle rifle.

General George Patton called the Garand “the greatest battle implement ever devised,” but it did have drawbacks.  Loaded, the weapon commonly weighed more than 11 pounds, and it did not use magazines, but metal clips holding only 8 rounds.  The 30.06 is also a physically large and heavy cartridge, limiting the number of rounds a soldier can carry.  The Garand remains the only widely available firearm that is actually fed via a clip, which term is commonly misused when one actually means “magazine.”

FN FAL Battle Rifle

After WWII, modernization efforts among western militaries nearly led to the American adoption of the excellent FN-FAL semiautomatic rifle in .308 caliber.  Unfortunately, the “not invented here” syndrome prevailed and the US adopted the M-14, which was essentially an M1-Garand in the somewhat smaller .308 cartridge, with a flash hider and a removable 20-round box magazine.  This more or less forced NATO to adopt the .308. At around the same time, the British were experimenting, to good effect, with sub-.30 caliber cartridges.

M-14 Battle Rifle

The M-14 was the rifle that initially accompanied our troops in Vietnam.  Its unsuitability as a general issue rifle for counter insurgency warfare, particularly fought in a jungle environment, quickly became obvious.  The need for a lighter weapon capable of fully automatic fire–battle rifles are too light to be controllable in full-auto mode–and firing a smaller cartridge became obvious. One can carry far more .223 cartridges for the same weight and space than .308 cartridges.

StG44, the first assault rifle
credit:www.geocities.ws

Assault Rifles:  The first true assault rifle was the German StG-44, first used in combat near the end of WWII.  It was this rifle that was part of the inspiration for the ubiquitous AK-47, the most widely produced assault rifle in history.  True assault rifles have these characteristics:
(1) Shoulder fired
(2) Gas operated (with a few well-known exceptions)
(3) Single-operator fired
(4) Removable magazine fed
(5) Firing an intermediate-sized cartridge
(6) Semiautomatic and full automatic (and/or burst) capability

Eugene Stoner, working for the ArmaLite Company (hence “AR”), developed the forerunner of the AR-15, the AR-10, in the mid 1950s.  Like the AR-15 that followed it, it was made with aircraft grade aluminum and plastics, and had a very futuristic appearance.  Unlike the AR-15 it was chambered for the .308 (finalized as the 7.62 NATO) cartridge.  It competed against the M-14 and the FN-FAL in Army trials, but the Army adopted the M-14, and the AR-10 was scaled down to become the AR-15, which would ironically require the kind of intermediate cartridge the British wanted.  A more detailed history of the development of the AR-15 can be found here.  

It was the Air Force, not the Army, that initially adopted the AR-15, designated the M-16, for base security, in the iconic triangular hand guard configuration.  The initial flash hider had a multi-pronged, open end, which was quickly found to catch on foliage, and was replaced with a closed end design as depicted here.  Eventual redesigns of the rifle resulted in the round hand guard and the heavier barrel now standard on the military family of weapons.  The .223 civilian cartridge was standardized as the 5.56mm NATO cartridge.  While the cartridges have very similar dimensions, there are some caveats regarding their use. It is entirely safe to fire .223 cartridges in weapons chambered for 5.56mm, but the opposite may be unsafe in some circumstances. Those interested can find more detailed information here.  

The Civilian AR-15:  The AR-15 is the best-selling rifle family in America.  However, it is not an assault rifle, and certainly not a non-existent “assault weapon,” which is best defined as any firearm anti-gun forces want to ban on any given day, particularly if it is black, or scary-looking to the uninformed.  The standard military rifle has a barrel of approximately 20”, but the most popular civilian configuration resembles the military M-4, which is a short-barreled, fully automatic carbine with a collapsing stock.  Civilian equivalents are not fully automatic firearms, and have barrels of no less than 16” to conform to federal law.


Much more at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Scott Adams@Dilbert.com with How to Un-Hypnotize a Rabid Anti-Trumper submitted by The Glittering Eye.

Let's just say that if you are an anti-Trumper or know someone who is, you owe it to yourself to read this one, redolent with the creator of Dilbert's cynical wit and knack for getting to the truth of the matter.

It might be noted that Scott Adams has endorsed Hillary Clinton, because 'I live in California and I fear for my physical safety.'

Here are this week’s full results. Only Fausta was unable to vote but was not subject to the usual 2/3 vote penalty for not voting :

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 2/3 votes!-Stately McDaniel Manor – A Post-Orlando AR-15 Primer


• Second place with 2 votes –Bookworm Room – “Détente through the looking glass” — Obama’s foreign policy


• Third place with 1 1/3 votes –VA Right! - I May Be Adding ‘The Bull Elephant’ to my ‘No Read List’ of Political Blogs


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -The Glittering Eye -It Shall Not Be Named


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Puma By Design – Attacks Crowd for Putting LGBT Community First, Mizzou Activist Hijacks Orlando Shooting Vigil


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Joshuapundit-Why Obama Backed Herzog - The Secret Plan To Betray Israel


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Angry White Dude – What Will You Do If Donald Trump Is Stripped Of The GOP Nomination?


• Fifth place with 1/3 vote –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Strategic Amnesia

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 1/3 votes! –Scott Adams @ Dilbert.com – How to Un-Hypnotize a Rabid Anti-Trumper submitted by The Glittering Eye


• Second place with 1 2/3 votes –Free Range International-Fourth Generation War Comes To America: What Are You Going To Do About It?submitted by Bookworm Room


• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –James Kirchick/The Daily Beast –Why Are Prominent Liberals Closeting the Motivations of the Radical Islamic Murderer Who Targeted Gays? submitted by The Razor


• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –David P. Goldman (Spengler)/PJ Media – How Anti-Semitism Became Respectable Again submitted by Joshuapundit


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Heat Street –College "Bias Response Team" Targets Free Speech With 680 Signs submitted by Stately McDaniel Manor


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Council of Foreign Relations – How Powerful Is Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps? submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Daily Caller – Reporter Tries Buying 'Assault Rifle' To Show How Easy It Is, Failssubmitted by VA Right!


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes - Joel Hirst – The Last Flight submitted by The Watcher


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote -The Other McCain -God and Man at #Skepticon: Atheist @RichardCCarrier Gets Bannedsubmitted by The Daley Gator


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote -The People's Cube – Global Warming scientists dispatched to analyze Orlando submitted by The Watcher

See you next week!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum. and every  Tuesday morning, when we reveal the weeks' nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council, and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere, and you won’t want to miss it...or any of the other fantabulous Watcher's Council content.

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The Council Has Spoken!! Our Watcher's Council Results

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week's Watcher's Council match up.

"I give interracial couples a look. Daggers. They get uncomfortable when they see me on the street." - Spike Lee

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today" - Thomas Sowell

“Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom” - Ludwig Von Mises





This week's winning essay,Stately McDaniel Manor's These Aren’t The Justice-Involved Individuals You’re Looking For is his reaction to the innate mental disconnect of the new Obama doctrine of referring to criminals as 'justice involved individuals,' especially as it applies to education. Here's a slice:

Let’s review: America’s colleges are virtual snakepits of rape. One in four young women embarking on a college career—according to the Obama Administration—will be raped during their undergraduate days. College life is suffused with a “rape culture,” and the “war on women” continues unabated. Strangely, parents continue to send their daughters off to colleges, apparently blithely unconcerned that their daughters stand an excellent chance, a chance about which they are fully aware, of being raped, beaten, perhaps even murdered. And they’re willing to pay tens, even hundreds of thousands, of dollars for that chance.

Then what do we make of this from Judicial Watch: 

 "The Obama administration has ordered the nation’s colleges and universities to stop asking applicants about criminal and school disciplinary history because it discriminates against minorities. Institutions are also being asked to offer those with criminal records special support services such as counseling, mentoring and legal aid once enrolled. The government’s official term for these perspective students is ‘justice-involved individuals; and the new directive aims to remove barriers to higher education for the overwhelmingly minority population that’s had encounters with the law or disciplinary issues through high school."

Instructions are outlined in a cumbersome document (Beyond the Box) issued by the U.S Department of Education (ED) this month. It says that ‘data show plainly that people of color are more likely to come in contact with the justice system due, in part, to punitive school disciplinary policies that disproportionately impact certain student groups and racial profiling.’ Because education can be a powerful pathway to transition out of prison and into the workforce, it’s critical to ensure that admissions practices don’t disproportionately disadvantage justice involved individuals, the directive states. Colleges and universities should also refrain from inquiring about a student’s school disciplinary history—including past academic dishonesty—because that too discriminates against minorities. Civil rights data compiled by ED show ‘black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students and often for the same types of infractions.’

Therefore colleges and universities should consider designing admissions policies that don’t include disciplinary history so they don’t have the ‘unjustified effect of discriminating against individuals on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, religion and disability,’ the new ED guidelines state. Three out of four colleges and universities collect high school disciplinary information and 89% of those institutions use the information to make admissions decisions, according to the order. That needs to change, according to the administration. A few years ago it warned public elementary and high schools to administer student discipline without discriminating on the bases of race, color or national origin because too many minority students—especially blacks—were getting suspended. The feds assert they issued the directive after reports of ‘racial disparities’ in ‘exclusionary discipline policies’ that created a ‘school to prison pipeline.

Oh, “data show”? Well, as long as “data show,” who can argue with that? Actually, anyone with a functioning, non-progressive virus-infected brain can, and should, argue with that. What “data show” is that Blacks, and to a much lesser degree, Hispanics, particularly males, commit not only the overwhelming majority of disciplinary offenses in schools, they commit the overwhelming majority of crimes in schools and elsewhere, at rates far outstripping their numbers in the population. This has been known for as long as such statistics have been kept. Rational people understand that the problem is such people choose to misbehave in school and to commit crimes. Obamites and other Progressives are embarrassed by what “data show,” because the data exposes their ideology as a lie, therefore, they have to pretend that the criminals are the helpless, innocent victims of statistical racism and purposeful, institutional discrimination, an issue I explored in March of 2014 with Race-Based School Discipline: The Movement Continues, and in November of 2014 in Race-Based School Discipline Finds Fertile Ground In Minnesota.

The Progressive point is simplicity itself: don’t deal with the problem, just stop collecting the data and change the messaging to blame Conservatives.

 

The Atlantic makes the Obamite case: 

Gathering background information about future students is a core business of admissions departments, but some box opponents believe the criminal-history question has an unintended negative effect. “Students of color are the most likely to be harmed by putting these questions on the application,” said Natalie Sokoloff, professor emerita of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She conducted a study that looked at the use of (or absence of) the question by two-year and four-year colleges in Maryland, a total of 50 schools. She analyzed all application forms used during one year and concluded that 40 percent included a question about criminal background. ‘Public four-year and two-year colleges are less likely to ask the question at the state and national level. Places that are more likely to give an opportunity to people with criminal records are two-year public colleges, and places that are least likely are private four-year colleges,’ she said.

Sokoloff believes, ‘These kinds of practices really are de facto forms of race-based discrimination, because people of color are disproportionately impacted by these policies.’ Scholars like Sokoloff, reform advocates, and public thinkers often point to the structural racism already at work in school systems—in which the over-disciplining of black children creates a school-to-prison pipeline. So not only are black students more likely to end up in prison than other groups, but once they are released and attempting to break that cycle by applying to college, they are more likely to confront the box—and the conundrum of whether or not to check it.

‘This question doesn’t belong on the college-admissions form any more than questions about the weather belong there,’ said Barmak Nassirian, current director of policy analysis with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. The organization represents 420 four-year colleges, universities, and other educational institutions. ‘These are not facts that in any way relate to the matter at hand,’ he said, ‘which is to decide if someone is qualified to come learn something.’ Nassirian also agreed that the school-discipline and criminal-history questions disproportionately affect low-income students, students of color, and students with disabilities. ‘We know that communities of color and students with disabilities are disproportionately affected by run-ins with the law’; it follows that they are more often asked to disclose such histories. ‘This mindless adoption of these mechanical so-called ‘safety checks’ does have the predictable downside of disproportionately affecting the students who need it the most,’ he said. ‘This amounts to extrajudicial punishment on someone who has already served a punishment for a crime.

 

More at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Christian Lowe in the Federalist with ‘Real Sports’ Trolls Public About America’s Most Popular Riflesubmitted by The Daley Gator
. It's a great piece that looks at how the Leftist media promotes its anti-Second Amendment agenda at all costs.


Here are this week’s full results. Only Angry White Dude and Fausta were unable to vote, but neither was subject to the usual 2/3 vote penalty for not voting:

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 votes!-Stately McDaniel Manor – These Aren't The Justice-Involved Individuals You're Looking For


• Second place with 2 votes –Bookworm Room – Trump crept a little bit closer to earning my vote today


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Angry White Dude – College Sports - Is Winning More Important Than Decency?


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Joshuapundit-The Iran Deal: The Foul, New Deception


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –The Razor – A Presidential Apology to the People of Japan


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –The Daley Gator – Daley Gator Daley Thoughts Podcast


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –VA Right! - Why the Mainstream Media is Obsessing Over Trump’s Veteran Donations and Other Such Minutia


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Puma By Design – Snoop Dogg Urges Fans to Boycott Remake of ‘Roots’: ‘I’m Sick of This S**t’

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 votes! –Christian Lowe/The Federalist -‘Real Sports’ Trolls Public About America’s Most Popular Rifle submitted by The Daley Gator


• Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes –HeatStreet–Hamilton Awards Speech: The Only True Safe Space Is Liberty And Freedom submitted by Stately McDaniel Manor T


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Steve Sailer/Taki's Magazine –The Mexico Way submitted by Angry White Dude


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Kurt Schlichter/Townhall-Why Is This Hardcore Conservative Not #NeverTrump? Because Hillary Is So Much Worsesubmitted by Bookworm Room


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –David Frum/The Atlantic – The Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy submitted by The Glittering Eye


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Canada Free Press –What Memorial Day means to a Gold Star Mother submitted by Puma By Design


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Foreign Affairs – Why IR Theory Gets Russia Wrong submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Caudia Rosett/ PJ Media – The Obama Narrative Goes to Hiroshima submitted by Joshuapundit


• Fifth place with 1/3 vote -Vlad Tepes –Anon. Open letter translated from PI News submitted by The Razor

See you next week!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum. and every  Tuesday morning, when we reveal the weeks' nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council, and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere, and you won’t want to miss it...or any of the other fantabulous Watcher's Council content.

And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter..’cause we’re cool like that, y'know?

The Council Has Spoken! Our Watcher's Council Nominations

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week's Watcher's Council match up.

"Do not live in shame as a prisoner. Die, and leave no ignominious crime behind you." - Field Service Code issued by Tojo, 1941

"Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Ending wars is very simple if you surrender.” - P.J. O'Rourke






This week's winning essay,The Glittering Eye's Apologize For What? is his reaction to calls by the usual suspects for President Obama to follow his usual practice and issue and apology for the bombing ogf Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here's a slice:

There’s been quite a bit of speculation about what President Obama will say when he visits Hiroshima next week. Some say they think that the president should apologize. This report from ABC News should provide a taste:

A group representing Japanese survivors of U.S. atomic bombings urged President Barack Obama to hear their stories and apologize when he visits Hiroshima next week.

Two leaders of the Tokyo-based nationwide group told a news conference Thursday that many survivors still want an apology, though they have long avoided an outright demand for one out of fear that it would be counterproductive.

Toshiki Fujimori, a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, said he found it awkward to hear local and central government officials say they are not asking for an apology.

“I suspect there was a pressure (not to seek an apology) to create an atmosphere that would make it easier for Obama to visit Hiroshima,” Fujimori said, declining to identify where the pressure was coming from. “But many of the survivors don’t think they can do without an apology at all.”

Apologize for what? For saving the lives of millions of Japanese? That’s how many would have been killed in the invasion for which the Japanese were preparing. Not to mention the tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans who would have been killed.

For many years I thought that our use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been a ghastly mistake. Then I applied what I knew of the Japanese culture of the time and realized that we had, literally, no other way to communicate to the Japanese that the war was over and they had lost. Only the emperor could have told the Japanese people that and the only way of communicating that reality to the emperor was through demonstrations so graphic and awful they could not be denied.

James Gibney, writing at Bloomberg, arrives at the same conclusion:

After reading this book, though, I found it hard to argue with what Yamashita told me: “Had the bombs not been dropped, and had the Allies invaded as they were planning to, it would have been horrible beyond belief.” The numbers support him: As many as 150,000 civilians may have perished in the battle for Okinawa alone, for instance. Never mind the Allied servicemen who might have died — including perhaps my father, a battlefield interrogator in U.S. naval intelligence who went on to join a cadre of postwar Japanologists. Spare a thought for the Japanese boys and girls training to throw themselves under advancing U.S. tanks with bombs strapped to their chests.

More at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Robert Trcinski in the Federalist with Imagine No Possessions, Imagine Venezuela submitted by The Glittering Eye. Admittedly, John Lennon's stupid little paean to socialism, atheism and anarchy is an easy target, but Tracinski does a great job of destruction on it by giving us a good look at a place where Lennon's 'vision' is being practiced.


Here are this week’s full results. Only Fausta, The Daley Gator and Angry White Dude were ubnable to vote this week, but none were affected by the 2/3 penalty for not voting:

Council Winners

• *First place with 2 votes!-Apologize For What?


• Second place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –The Razor – A Coming Out Post


• Second place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Bookworm Room – The challenges of talking about rape in a post-modern, post-rational age


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Stately McDaniel Manor – Delusions Of The Left


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Joshuapundit-The Story Behind The Israeli Government's Move To The Right


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 vote –VA Right! - Reality vs Government Mandated Overtime, “Living” Wages and other Mandates


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Puma By Design – Facebook Bans Conservatives For Complaining About Censorship

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 2/3 votes! –Robert Tracinski/The Federalist – Imagine No Possessions, Imagine Venezuela submitted by The Glittering Eye


• Second place with 1 1/3 votes – Martha Gellhorn/The Atlantic(Note the date this was written) – The Arabs of Palestine submitted by Joshuapundit


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Michael Freund/The Jerusalem Post- Poking a gaping hole in the Palestinian narrative submitted by Bookworm Room


• Third place *t* with 1 vote – Nate Silver/538 – How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump submitted by The Watcher


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Military Times – U.S. military trains eclectic group of anti-ISIS fighter submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -George Will –The Inaugural Address We Should Hear, But Won't submitted by Stately McDaniel Manor


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Shane Harris/Daily Beast –The FBI Is Keeping 80,000 Secret Files on the Saudis and 9/11 submitted by Angry White Dude


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Gavin McInnes/Taki's Mag –Surrendering to Death submitted by The Razor

See you next week!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum. and every  Tuesday morning, when we reveal the weeks' nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council, and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere, and you won’t want to miss it...or any of the other fantabulous Watcher's Council content.

And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter..’cause we’re cool like that, y'know?

The Council Has Spoken!!! Our Watcher's Council Results

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week's Watcher's Council match up.

"Boys will be boys and girls will be men/It's a mixed up hung up shook up world..." - Ray Davies' lyrics to The Kinks 'Lola'

"They can’t do that. It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything – anything – but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you." - Julia, to Winston Smith in George Orwell's '1984'

“Liberty means refusing to allow some men to use the state to compel other men to serve their interests or opinion.” - Auberon Herbert




This week's winning essay,Bookworm Room's Sex and State Power — What’s Behind Obama’s Transgender Push is pretty much exactly what it sounds like - Bookworm's exploration of exactly what's behind President Obama's threatening new diktat to America's schools and other public facilities to normalize the use of women's bathrooms and locker rooms by transgender males whom claim they feel 'female' - or else. Here's a slice:

The Obama administration has announced that from this day forward, all public schools in America must let children choose their bathroom and locker room based upon a child’s feelings about his or her gender on any given day. This means that, if a male sexual predator (or simply a sexually curious boy) feels that today is a good day to be a girl and watch the girls’ volleyball team strip off in the bathroom, that is his right and the school is obligated to comply:

The guidance from leaders at the departments of Education and Justice says public schools are obligated to treat transgender students in a way that matches their gender identity, even if their education records or identity documents indicate a different sex.

“There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement accompanying the directive, which is being sent to school districts Friday.

Because Congress has already allotted funds to the Department of Education, the DOE wields the power of the purse over this issue, and there’s nothing Congress can do to stop it.

If asked why they are forcing this policy onto American public schools, administration figures, from the president on down, would reply that they’re doing it “for the good of the children.” It’s all about self-actualization, and self-realization, and personal empowerment, right?

Wrong! This comes from the Left, so there’s good reason to believe that it’s not “for the children” at all. Indeed, there’s extremely good reason to believe that the transgender movement is very bad for those who identify as transgender, starting with the children and working up to the disproportionate number of transgender adults who commit suicide. David French has a good breakdown of the heartbreaking numbers behind the suddenly trendy tranny movement:

The evidence of transgender despair is overwhelming. A Swedish study found that trans people were 19 times more likely to die from suicide. An American study found that a horrifying 41 percent of transgender and “gender non-conforming” people had attempted suicide, compared with a national rate of 1.6 percent. In Canada, a study found that each year one in nine transgender people try to commit suicide, compared with the national rate of one out of 167.

So it’s not “for the children.” Lie Number One is exposed.

Lie Number Two is the contention that the transgender movement is the same as the gay rights movement. In fact, the transgender movement also weirdly homophobic, even though the LGBT movement has embraced it . The weirdly homophobic aspect comes from the fact that the transgender movement puts the lie to what gay rights activists have been telling us for a good decade or more, which is that when it comes to gay, “Baby, I was born this way.” Again, David French neatly defines the conundrum:

For the last decade, the American public has been told that sexual orientation is a fixed, immutable characteristic — like skin color. Now we’re told that “gender identity” is much the same. Psychology is fixed. Biology has to adjust.

But observe the lamentation in the video: A transgender boy wants other boys to change, to reject the “born this way” of their own sexuality for the open-mindedness of “getting physical” with a girl with a penis. Claire is desperate for their psychology to change, for their minds to open, and for their sexual identity to change in response to Claire’s allegedly unchangeable desires.

Writing in the Gospel Coalition, Trevin Wax asks: “When a person feels a disjunction between one’s sex at birth and one’s gender identity, why is the only course of action to bring the body into closer conformity with the person’s psychological state, rather than vice versa?” That’s the course of action for the transitioning person. The course of action for their loved ones is substantially different. In essence, the Caitlyn Jenners are saying to their spouses or paramours, “I’m now a woman, and that makes you a lesbian.”

Wax notes that the declaration of this new reality — with the expectation that spouses comply and conform — “destabilizes some of the foundational elements of LGBT theory on homosexuality.” Well, yes. But the true “foundational element” of LGBT theory isn’t so much “born this way” as it is “I do what I want.”

Even on the Left, saner minds are figuring out what I pointed out some time ago, which is that we laugh at and despair over all forms of body mutilation except for the gender type, which is wrongly celebrated. Daniel Harris, a hard Left gay man who hates Republicans, wrote a much-talked-about article for The Antioch Review stating the obvious, which I’ll summarize here in my own words: Body mutilation is always a sign of some sort of mental disability and that the LGBT world and its fellow travelers cannot say “All body mutilation is a tragic joke, except for gender mutilation, which is a wondrous thing.”

Or, to quote from Harris himself:

. . . TGs have ambushed the debate and entangled us in a snare of such trivialities as the proper pronouns with which to address them, protocol as Byzantine and patronizing as the etiquette for addressing royalty.They insult us with the pejorative term “cisgender,” which they use to describe those of us who accept, however unenthusiastically, our birth gender, as opposed to the enlightened few who question their sex. Moreover, they shame us into silence by ridiculing the blunders we make while trying to come to grips with their unique dilemmas, decrying our curiosity about their bodies as prurience and our unwillingness, or even inability, to enter into their own (often unsuccessful) illusion as narrow‑mindedness.
[snip]


Much more at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Victor Davis Hanson with The Pajama Boy White House submitted by Stately McDaniel Manor.

It's Dr. Hanson's interesting look at what he sees as a real commonality in a number of the young, 30-something men who appear to run the White House...and their similarities with the star of certain ad put out by the White House to sell ObamaCare.


Here are this week’s full results. Only Fausta was unable to vote this week but was not subject to the usual 2/3 vote penalty:

Council Winners

• *First place with 2 1/3 votes!-Bookworm Room – Sex and State Power — What’s Behind Obama’s Transgender Push


• Second place with 1 1/3 votes –Puma By Design – Rice to College Grads: There Are Too Many Whites in Top Gov Jobs


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Stately McDaniel Manor – The Obamite Transgender Toilet Fixation: They Will Be Made To Care


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –VA Right! - Original Music: The Girl With the 5 O’clock Shadow


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Fausta's Blog – Venezuela: Digging in, for gold


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Joshuapundit-The Fire And The River - A Parable


• Fourth place t*t with 2/3 votes –The Glittering Eye -Slave Labor


• Fourth place t*t with 2/3 votes –The Razor – On Dublin's Rocky Road

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 1/3 votes! –Victor Davis Hanson –The Pajama Boy White House submitted by Stately McDaniel Manor


• Second place with 2 votes – Jason Hill/The Federalist-Loveless, Narcissistic Sex Addicts: A Gay Man Critiques His Communitysubmitted by Bookworm Room


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Joel Christ's Blog – But They Don't Do Math submitted by The Glittering Eye


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –David P. Goldman(Spengler) – In Alien vs. Predator, I'm for Predator, Because He's OUR Predator submitted by Joshuapundit


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Marion Tupy/Reason.Com –Venezuela the Victim of Decades of Losses in Economic Freedom submitted by The Razor


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Aviation Week – China Makes Visible Strides In Stealth Air Ops submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD

Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Indyfromaz’s Blog –Stall Wars submitted by Puma By Design

• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes - David Horowitz/Breitbart – Bill Kristol, Republican Spoiler,Renegade Jew submitted by The Watcher

See you next week!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum. and every  Tuesday morning, when we reveal the weeks' nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council, and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere, and you won’t want to miss it...or any of the other fantabulous Watcher's Council content.

And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter..’cause we’re cool like that, y'know?

The Council Has Spoken!! Our Watcher's Council Results

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week's Watcher's Council match up.

"The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority." - Will Durant

"Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation." - Virginia Woolf

“Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness,/ Wherein the...enemy does much.” - William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night




This week's winning essay,Bookworm Room's The broken windows theory of public bathrooms and gender identity Is her look at the realities of the controversy over transgenders using women's bathrooms. Here's a slice:

The social justice warriors have been busy on my “real-me” Facebook page, ridiculing the concerns of ordinary Americans who cannot understand why, out of the blue, they are suddenly being told that gender isn’t a biological reality but is, instead, a mere social construct that a person can socially reconstruct on a daily basis — and, moreover, that this sudden gender fluidity means that it’s an act of gross discrimination to contend that public bathrooms should be limited to reflect a person’s basic biology (i.e., penis or no penis).

Despite disagreeing strongly with the whole “gender fluidity” claim, even I must admit that the social justice warriors have come up with what I consider are two good arguments to support their case. Conceding that these arguments have some validity, though, does not erase the fact that the SJWs are still completely wrong to demand that America abandon long-standing laws and practices respecting gender differences.

The first valid argument is that true transgender women (by which I mean people who completely identify as women but who are biologically men) are almost never violent towards others:


The second argument is that these true transgender women, the ones who dress and act like women, often to the point of being indistinguishable from women, are already using women’s restrooms and have been doing so forever, without anyone being the wiser:

I’ll add one more argument:  Long before the bathroom wars heated up and women suddenly got concerned about men in their bathrooms and locker rooms, sexual perverts have been trolling women’s bathrooms:



So, if true transgenders aren’t violent, if this bathroom sharing has been existing sub rosa forever, and if perverts have been using women’s bathrooms long before transgender rights became an issue, why do I still believe that it’s important that we continue our current biologically-based gender segregation in bathrooms and changing rooms? It’s important because of what I think of as the “broken windows” theory of public bathrooms.

Much more at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Terra Incognita-Endemic Hatred of Jews submitted by Bookworm Room . Seth Franzman does a fine job here in exploring that age-old subject 'Why the Jews?'


Here are this week’s full results. Only Fausta and The Daley Gator were unable to vote,but neither was subject to the usual 2/3 penalty for not voting. One of the Victor Davis Hanson pieces was submitted by two members under different titles (which yours truly didn't catch). So I combined those votes:

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 votes!-Bookworm Room – The broken windows theory of public bathrooms and gender identity


• Second place with 1 2/3 votes – Joshuapundit-Indiana,The End Of The Beginning


• Third place with 1 1/3 votes –The Noisy Room – Trump’s Incoherent, Inconsistent, Russian-Loving Foreign Policy


• Fourth place with 1 vote –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – North Korea's EMP Threat


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Glittering Eye -The American Experience 2016


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Puma By Design – Black Trump Supporter Calls Out Racist Protesters As Propaganda Victims
  


• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Nice Deb – Saturday Movie Matinee: The Triggering


• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –VA Right! - Cruz Moving to Suspend His Campaign With Indiana Loss Today? Here’s Why
  


• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Stately McDaniel Manor – The Freddie Gray Case, Update 33.7: The Ferguson Effect--Baltimore Version


• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Fausta's Blog – Cuba: The dotty old Brit and the NBC apologist

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 1/3 votes! –Terra Incognita-Endemic Hatred of Jews submitted by Bookworm Room

Second place *t* with 2 votes –National Review –Something New Under The Political Sun submitted by Stately McDaniel Manor and The Noisy Room

Second place *t* with 2 votes –Thomas Lifeson/American Thinker – It’s Trump. Get over it submitted by The Watcher

• Third place *t* with 1 vote – Aaron M. Renn/City Journal – Black Residents Matter submitted by The Glittering Eye


• Third place *t* with 1 vote –War On The Rocks – The Catastrophic Success Of The U.S. Air force submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD


• Fourth place with 2/3 votes -Victor Davis Hanson – The Nihilism of Sanctuary Cities submitted by Puma By Design


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Richard Fernandez/PJ Media – The Death Of A Nation submitted by Fausta's Blog


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Ilya Somin/WAPO -Victims of Communism Day submitted by Nice Deb


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote - The Algeimeiner – 13-Year-Old Israeli Girl Develops Satellite System for Producing Oxygen in Space submitted by The Watcher

See you next week!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum. and every  Tuesday morning, when we reveal the weeks' nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council, and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere, and you won’t want to miss it...or any of the other fantabulous Watcher's Council content.

And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter..’cause we’re cool like that, y'know?

The Council Has Spoken! Our Watcher's Council Nominations

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week's Watcher's Council match up.

"As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself." - Best selling author Pat Conroy

"Those who make conversations impossible, make escalation inevitable." - Stephen Molyneux

“The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.” - John Cleese



This week's winning essay,Staely McDaniel Manor's Progressives: Bayoneting Their Wounded is his account of exactly what goes on in academia at your typical Orwellian White Privilege and Male Bashing conference, this one ironically held in Philadelphia where our freedoms began! Here's a slice:

As regular readers will doubtless remember, I have often written about leftist ideology. Paramount in leftist thought—such as it is—is the principle that leftist policies, no matter how idiotic on their face, no matter how spectacularly and often they fail, can never be wrong. They’re not wrong; the people who thought they were wrong were mistaken. This unfortunate tendency to double down on disaster was nowhere in greater evidence of late than at the 17^th annual White Privilege Conference held in Philadelphia.

I was not aware that there had been 16 prior conferences, but that omission is no doubt due to my white privilege. And to think: I’ve been missing out on 16 years of self-flagellation for working my buns off my entire life and believing the world owed me nothing at all, despite my general blue-eyed, pale-skinned whiteness.

One would think such a conference would be a safe and diversity-friendly place, however, as John Belushi used to say: “but noooooooooooooo! Consider the horrific reality from participants of the conference, courtesy of heatst.com:

Even at the White Privilege Conference, blatant, brutal racism runs amok! It’s just like Democrat-controlled cities: they’re all cesspools of racism, sexism, and violence. And imagine the horror of this:
 
Certainly no white person of the same gender and approximately the same size, shape and hair color—brown—has ever been mistaken for another white person. And imagine the unimaginable horror of this:
 It’s almost unfathomable. POC and indigenous ppl come to their very own white people bashing conference and find themselves unsafe! Who coulda thunk it? But the horror was just beginning:

The disaster of understanding culminated in the keynote speech, delivered by Jim Loewen, a demonstrably progressive sociologist, respected professor of African American Studies and perhaps the country’s leading expert on racism in the deep south during the Confederacy and beyond. Little did Prof. Loewen know, as he was delivering his speech, that his very act of speaking to the audience was cause for concern.

 Imagine the consternation of poor Professor Loewen, a man who doubtless imagined himself an intolerant, politically correct, perpetually outraged progressive, a man ashamed of his own privilege and whiteness, when people at the White Privilege conference, a conference whose premises he unquestionably believed and took to heart, was accused of white supremacy. And for what? Allegedly running over the time allotted for his speech about white supremacy:

But wait a white privileged moment! He didn’t go over his allotted time; so what’s the problem?

Of course. The facts don’t matter. The accused must lay down and accept the death sentence. Aeriel A. Ashlee was completely wrong, but because she’s non-white, she has absolute moral authority and can’t possibly be wrong. The issue is that Professor Loewen is demonstrating his white privilege defensiveness instead of accepting responsibility for what he didn’t do wrong. Progressive ideology cannot possibly be wrong!

But it’s even worse, gentle readers, than we, with our white privilege, can possibly imagine. Professor Loewen used the “N” word!

More at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Andrew McCarthy with First, Let’s Get the Facts on Saudi and Iranian Involvement in 9/11 submitted by Joshuapundit. Commenting about the pending bill in congress to allow the families of victims of 9/11 to sue the Saudi government for what appears to be it's obvious complicity, he comments that great nations do not address acts of war with lawsuits. That is, unless your president is George W. Bush. He wants us to get the facts about Iranian and Saudi complicity and then decide how to proceed.

For what it's worth, Iranian complicity in the 9/11 attacks is already proven fact and verified by a US federal court decision, something I wrote about some time ago. That two U.S. presidents, including our current one knew about this and did nothing about it is a clue as to why Iran has no respect for America anymore. Especially when that attitude was underlines by President Barack Hussein Obama's blatant appeasement of the islamo-fascist regime in Teheran.


Here are this week’s full results. Bookworm Room, GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD, the Noisy Room, the Razor, and The Right Planet were unable to vote this week, but all were not subject to or not affected by our usual two thirds vote penalty for not voting :

Council Winners

• *First place with 2 2/3 votes!-Stately McDaniel Manor-Progressives: Bayoneting Their Wounded


• Second place with 2 votes – Joshuapundit-When The Cannibals Eat Their Own...


• Third place with 1 2/3 votes –Bookworm Room – The infantile Left


• Fourth place with 2/3 votes –Fausta's Blog – Mexico: Investigators call it quits


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Puma By Design – Parents demand privacy protection after school approves transgender bathroom use


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –The Right Planet – Baofeng UV-5R Counterfeit Cable Madness


• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Nice Deb – Bizarre New Super PAC Ad Has Kasich Winning the Nomination at Convention

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 votes! –Andrew McCarthy – First, Let’s Get the Facts on Saudi and Iranian Involvement in 9/11 submitted by Joshuapundit


• Second place with 1 2/3 votes –PJ Media: Klavan On The Culture –UnAmerican ESPN submitted by Stately McDaniel Manor


• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Ben Shapiro/The Daily Wire -10 Signs You've Joined The Trump Cult submitted by Nice Deb


• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –38 Pitches/Curt Schilling-The hunt to be offended…submitted by The Watcher


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Richard Fernandez/PJ Media – The Surprising Weakness of Invincible Institutions submitted by Fausta's Blog


• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Carolyn Zelikow/Market Urbanism – Richard Florida Should Replace The Term ‘Creative Class’ With ‘Country Club submitted by The Glittering Eye


• Fifth place with 1/3 votes – The Other McCain –Feminism: It's about SCIENCE submitted by The Razor

See you next week!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum. and every  Tuesday morning, when we reveal the weeks' nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council, and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere, and you won’t want to miss it...or any of the other fantabulous Watcher's Council content.

And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter..’cause we’re cool like that, y'know?