| What a bore. Are you a Tesla fanboy? So much so that you pressure your friends into buying one of the heavily subsidized electric sports cars so you can get referral points? (They are expensive!) Well, you're in luck. The fine minds at Tesla have launched a new incentive to further motivate you: Being able to drive Elon Musk's tunnel boring machine. Annoying your friends has never paid off like this. What an opportunity! Down Syndrome Speaks. At Commentary, Sohrab Ahmari has a powerful interview with Charlotte Fien, a British anti-eradication advocate with Down Syndrome. On the heels of the disgusting CBS news report about Iceland's near-eradication of Down Syndrome, it couldn't come at a more important time. "Too often, the nondisabled make false assumptions regarding the subjective experiences of people with disabilities and chronic illness to justify their own policy preferences. Icelandic pregnancy counselor Helga Sol Olafsdottir told CBS, for example, that 'we look at it as a thing that we ended. We ended a possible life that may have had a huge complication … preventing suffering for the child and for the family.'" Iceland, rightly depicted as villains in D2: The Mighty Ducks, continues its villainy, but in far more gruesome and inhumane ways. Trump goes to Paramus. Warren Henry has an insightful take on President Trump's late night jamboree in Phoenix. "Paramus?" you ask, "I thought it was in Phoenix!" Henry explains: "Like Sally Field’s aging TV diva in Soapdish, when the going gets tough, the President goes to Paramus [a fictional mall] to have his ego massaged by his adoring fans." Henry continues: "Once the media douses the fire in its collective hair, one likely news hook for this speech will be Trump’s quasi-threat to shut down the government over the likely inadequate-to-Trump funding for The Wall™. But how much of this is Trump recognizing that The Wall™ is Number One on the Rally Hit Parade? A Trump rally without The Wall™ is like a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert without 'Freebird.'" And you can't have that! This site monetized social justice, but you'll never guess what happens next! Over at the left-leaning blog The Outline, there's a great live autopsy on the slow death of Mic.com, sort of a .gif and video reduced version of UpWorthy, only with more words. You know, the sort of juicy clickbait like “In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti-Muslim Bigotry.” The Outline is sad because Mic.com is, according to them, selling out and following all the other media lemmings into video: "In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry." (To wit, our own Andrew Egger caught the mixed metaphor. Can you?) They came pre-smoked. The Internet is in a tizzy about this adorable story in the U.K. where firefighters saved a bunch of piglets from a burning barn. The farmer rewarded the firefighters with sausages, made from the piglets they rescued. What did people expect would happen to the piglets? They'd become pets? Live at a petting zoo? Is America's cultural revolution paralleling China's? At the Federalist, Helen Raleigh argues that "America is clearly undergoing a Cultural Revolution that is eerily similar to Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which took place in China in the 1960s." Raleigh reminds that the Red Guards "traveled around the country, eradicating anything representing China’s feudalistic past: old customs, old cultures, old habits, and old ideas. Museums, temples, shrines, heritage sites, including Confucius’ tomb, were defaced, ransacked, or even totally destroyed." Sound familiar? Video of the day: An anti-Trump protester donning a gas mask kicks a can of tear gas back at police, but can't dodge the pepper ball. —Jim Swift, Deputy Online Editor Please feel free to send us comments, thoughts and links to dailystandard@weeklystandard.com. -30- |
