Facebook Loses Record $119 Billion

Posted on | July 27, 2018 | Comments Off on Facebook Loses Record $119 Billion

Facebook on Thursday posted the largest one-day loss in market value by any company in U.S. stock market history after releasing a disastrous quarterly report.
The social media giant’s market capitalization plummeted by $119 billion to $510 billion as its stock price plummeted by 19 percent. At Wednesday’s close, Facebook’s market cap had totaled nearly $630 billion, according to FactSet.
No company in the history of the U.S. stock market has ever lost $100 billion in market value in just one day, but two came close.
On Sept. 22, 2000, Intel shed $90.74 billion in market value as the dot-com bubble burst. Earlier that year, Microsoft lost $80 billion from its market cap in one day. . . .
Facebook’s enormous loss in value came a day after the company reported weaker-than-expected revenue for the second quarter as well as disappointing global daily active users, a key metric for Facebook. The company also said it expects its revenue growth rate to slow in the second half of this year.

What inspired this was not merely earnings:

Until Thursday, Facebook was enjoying enormous gains. The stock was up more than 23 per cent for the year, before it reported earnings after Wednesday’s close. By Thursday afternoon, all its gains for the year had vanished.
It was the details of Facebook’s report that seemed to spook investors. The company’s quarterly revenue fell slightly short of meeting the expectations of Wall Street analysts. And executives warned that the company would invest heavily in privacy and security, and that revenue growth would most likely slow in coming quarters. . . .
In March, the company’s handling of user data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal contributed to a backlash against the size and reach of the biggest tech businesses and raised concerns that regulators may soon crack down on these firms. Shares of Facebook fell 17 per cent in the days after news broke. By May, the company had erased those losses.

Facebook is a gigantic data-harvesting operation, by which people unwittingly forfeit their own privacy, providing information about themselves to Facebook, which then acts as a market broker. What the Cambridge Analytica story did was to give people a small glimpse into how information shared via Facebook can be exploited.

The fact that Facebook has sought to suppress conservative opinion on the site is also undoubtedly a contributing factor to their losses. The company has pandered to SJWs, and will pay a price.

“Get woke, go broke.”

Category: Economics

In The Mailbox: 07.26.18

Posted on | July 26, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Fishing For False Albacore
Twitchy: SAD! Eve Peyser Writes For Rolling Stone About The “Haunting Emptiness” Of Owning The Libs
Louder With Crowder: Top Five Easy Solutions To Liberal “Problems”

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Afternoon Nap
American Power: Facebook Shares Tumble, Zuckerberg Hardest Hit, also, CNN’s Smirking Gimp Kaitlan Collins Booted From Rose Garden Press Event
American Thinker: A Poisonous String Of Thoughts – Is Anti-White Racism The New Anti-Semitism?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Martian News
BattleSwarm: EU Cries Uncle On Trade Tariffs
CDR Salamander: Diversity Thursday
Da Tech Guy: We Need To Step Up Our Defense Of The Free Market, also, Massachusetts Blows The Trump Boom Windfall
Don Surber: Facebook Fiasco Shows The Wisdom Of Free Speech
Dustbury: A Definite C Word
The Geller Report: Sharia UK – Rapist Who Fathered Three Children On His Own Daughter Gets Just Four Years In Jail, also, French Judge Protects Muslim Murderer Of Elderly Women From “Hostile” Jewish Community
Hogewash: The Need To Know, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
JustOneMinute: All He Was Saying Is “Give War A Chance”
Legal Insurrection: In Gaza, Palestinian Terrorists Used Children To Draw Israeli Troops Into Ambush, also, NYT & AP Seek Work E-Mails Of Brett Kavanaugh’s Wife
The PanAm Post: What Nicaragua Should Learn About Toppling A Tyrant
Power Line: More Mueller Madness, also, Wherein Mitch Dishes
Shark Tank: Rubio Warns Of Civil War In Nicaragua
Shot In The Dark: Food For Thought – But Not At Work
The Political Hat: Colonization – Decolonizing Indigenous Studies, Colonizing Medieval European Studies, & Second Thoughts On Colonialism
This Ain’t Hell: Another Navy Officer Faces Courtmartial Over Fitzgerald Collision, also, Thursday Morning Feelgood Stories
Victory Girls: Cory Booker Tries & Fails To Backpedal His Violent Rhetoric
Volokh Conspiracy: Does The 13th Amendment Ban On Slavery Give Congress The Power To Ban Hate Crimes?
Weasel Zippers: Man Tries To Throw Bomb At U.S. Embassy In Beijing, Blows Himself Up, also, ICE Arrests Illegal Alien Rapist Released by Orange County, NC Sheriff’s Office

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Category: Linkagery

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | July 26, 2018 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous

John Lee Cowell, 27, is an ex-convict with “two prior felony convictions in Contra Costa County, one for second-degree robbery on Oct. 12, 2016, and one for assault with a deadly weapon on May 25, 2012.” According to his relatives, Cowell has “suffered from mental illness most of his life and has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.” Despite this, Cowell was paroled and soon committed a violent atrocity:

An ex-con was charged Wednesday in the brutal murder in Oakland of a black teenage girl, one of three deaths occurring in the last week on Bay Area Rapid Transit, but the only one that has stoked widespread outrage over crime.
That may be because the suspect in 18-year-old Nia Wilson’s brutal murder is white, while the other two men sought in attacks on BART passengers are black.
John Lee Cowell, 27, a white ex-con with a lengthy mental-health history, was charged Wednesday in the murder and premeditated attempted murder of 18-year-old Nia Wilson and her 26-year-old sister Letifah Wilson on the MacArthur station BART platform in Oakland, California.
Nia Wilson’s stabbing death has fueled days of outrage on social media as well as a Monday vigil and protest in Oakland that drew an estimated 1,000 people, backed by groups like the Women’s March, which urged attendees to “show up against white supremacy.”
Meanwhile, Color of Change alleged that Nia Wilson was “killed by a white supremacist emboldened by the racist rhetoric of this administration,” while Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights camp described the suspect as a “white supremacist/terrorist.” . . .
BART police Chief Carlos Rojas said authorities had not connected him to radical or white-supremacist groups.
“We don’t have any information that indicates that, but that’s something that we haven’t taken off the table and we will look into that,” Chief Rojas said at a Monday press conference. “I know there’s been a lot of conversations on social media regarding that, but I don’t have one piece of evidence to suggest this is race-related. But should that be the case we will pursue the appropriate hate crimes.”

There is precisely zero evidence indicating that this deranged criminal was in any way “emboldened” by the Trump administration, but it’s California, the criminal is white and the victims are black, so there is no need for evidence or logic. It may well be, of course, that Cowell is a racist; prisons are breeding grounds for ethnic hostility, with white-supremacist gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood flourishing behind bars. But it is not the Trump administration to blame here. Rather, it is the policy of the Democrat-controlled California state government, which turned a dangerous felon like Cowell loose on the streets.

It is impossible to predict what a mentally ill violent felon will do, when released on parole, and it is also impossible to predict what a mob will do when whipped into a frenzy of identity-politics rage. Bad things tend to happen in both cases, however, and in this case some leftist nitwit spread an Internet rumor that (a) Cowell was a member of Gavin McInnes’s “Proud Boys,” and (b) the Proud Boys were meeting at an Oakland bar. This was not true, but a bunch of Antifa radicals went to the bar and attacked innocent people. Tim Pool reports on the incident:

We’ve gone from “punch a Nazi” to “punch any random guy you think is a Nazi” in the span of about 18 months. Politics is making people crazy and, in case you forgot, Crazy People Are Dangerous.

Category: Crime

Bad Luck or Bad Judgment?

Posted on | July 26, 2018 | Comments Off on Bad Luck or Bad Judgment?

That tweet by Hannah Williams “went viral” and generated criticism that, predictably, Ms. Williams cited as proof of how bad men are:

What is it about women sharing their actual life experiences that leads men to think they can ‘disagree’? I didn’t pluck those categories out my own ass. They are based on years of personal experience, not just mine but friends, family members, colleagues, even strangers on the internet… When something is happening to almost every woman, all across society, that means there is a SYSTEMIC problem. These aren’t ‘a few bad apples’, this is ingrained socialization all across the board, that men will only unlearn if they actively commit to it. . . . Take it from the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Centre: ‘Men have been taught through social roles modeling and the media that they are entitled to the attention and services of women. Women are required to listen, be supportive, enhance their partners’ status with other men, fulfill the man’s sexual needs, and care for their children.’ . . .
So if you’re a man, and my tweet made you angry — you’re part of the problem.

Actually, no, ma’am, I’m part of the solution. Because I’m teaching my sons to avoid women like you. In fact, I’m teaching them to avoid the “dating pool” altogether — just find one smart, sane, decent woman (sorry, Ms. Williams, you don’t qualify) and marry her. Problem solved!

Our oldest sons (25-year-old twins) are both married with children. Our 19-year-old son is quite serious with the girl he’s dated since he was 15. Whatever their problems in regard to being “entitled to the attention and services of women,” etc., our adult sons found women who meet their requirements, and are not part of “the dating pool for young women.” (Our 17-year-old son has duly been warned.)

You see, there is a selection effect involved here. Being a member of “the dating pool” means either (a) you’re a hopeless loser, or (b) your previous relationships all ended in failure. By the time you get to be 25 or so, if you’re still in “the dating pool,” you have done something wrong — your problem is you. Blaming others for your failure to find the love of your life is irresponsible, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re an autistic Canadian “incel” or an embittered feminist. Scapegoating the opposite sex — pretending that the reason you’re still single is because of them, and not you — is a guaranteed formula for continued failure.

Why are some men “emotionally distant,” for example? Wouldn’t it be fair to say these men may just be cautious? Like, maybe if they meet an attractive but obviously unstable woman, they will be “distant” in the sense of they don’t want to make themselves vulnerable to damage? And guess what? The “dating pool” has a lot of unstable women, one of whom might be named Hannah Williams. Oh, I’m sure she’s charming, but using social media to issue anti-male rants? Warning sign.

Speaking of warning signs, Donald Douglas called my attention to a disturbing article by 29-year-old Caragh Poh:

Until we met in June of 2016, I had been casually dating several men for about two years. I went on so many first dates, and even the bad ones were delightful stories. It was enjoyable to meet new people, to discover new parts of the city. I asked each man to choose his favorite first-date spot, which was such a nice way to relearn NYC. It felt freeing and wonderful to f–k without attachment after an awful breakup with a co-worker I lived with for three months in 2014. We both moved to the city the same month in early 2013 — he was a transfer from another office, I was a new hire — and started dating three months later. . . .

(OK, pause and let’s timeline this: Five years ago, Ms. Poh moved to New York at age 24 and, within three months, was dating a co-worker. This relationship lasted about a year and ended in “an awful breakup.” She then started “casually dating several men . . . without attachment” until meeting a new boyfriend who was perhaps the eighth or ninth guy she’d screwed in the span of three years. But continue, Ms. Poh.)

During my last weeks with him [i.e., the co-worker she dated in 2013-2014], he threatened to shoot himself because no one respected him enough — especially you, he said coldly, sitting across from me in our sunken living room. I stayed for another two weeks until he told me I didn’t know how bad I f–ked up, but I’d know it when it hit me — and motioned to the gun he kept in our closet. He threw my kitten off the couch that night because he was angry at me, and drunk. He was always drunk.
He was fired for misconduct at work four months later. . . .

(She can pick a real winner, eh?)

The man I dated after the alcoholic co-worker was a former gang member.

(Like I said, she can sure pick ’em.)

I still refer to him as the most conventionally attractive guy I’ve ever dated in my life. He was fascinating. He knew every man on every street corner in his neighborhood. He had stories and scars — a long, white slash mark from a knife fight on his lower abdomen made my jaw drop the first time I saw him naked. It was above the “BROOKLYN” tattoo arched over his abs. After his mother got sick with cancer, he’d left his old life. He took up boxing. He traveled to Europe once, to box on a sponsor’s dime. He had a six-pack. I will never in my fat f–king life get to date a man with a six-pack ever again. His trapezoid muscles were mesmerizing. He looked like a Costco Trevor Noah. He was hot! I dated a hot man! . . .

Well, you can read the rest of that but — spoiler alert! — he dosed her drink with a date-rape drug and sodomized her after she passed out.

You were dating a Crip, sweetheart. What did you expect? But they never learn, that type. The boyfriend she started dating in June 2016 strung her along for more than year, borrowed “hundreds and hundreds” of dollars from her and then “dumped me over the phone.”

She’s almost 30 now. She’s wasted five years she’ll never get back. Did I forget to mention that Caragh Poh has a Tumblr blog?

She’s “worrying about my eggs dying” and you wonder if maybe she should have started worrying before she dated the Crip who raped her.

You see this kind of stuff and all you can do is laugh, because if you took it seriously — the tragedy of once-promising young women, now doomed to a Crazy Cat Lady future — it would make you cry.

This isn’t bad luck, it’s bad judgment. It’s about young women following a script of being “empowered” by “sex-positive” feminism, believing they can all be Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, and never mind whether their media-scripted life-plan is realistic or practical. Of course, there are plenty of young men following unrealistic scripts provided by Hollywood (or pornography) and wondering why they’re not getting all the thrills and glory they’ve been promised. It’s sad to see someone like Aziz Ansari wreck his reputation over a dimwit like Abby Nierman, but welcome to the age of #MeToo, where your bad date is “rape culture.”

Am I angry? You bet I’m angry. And I’m angry that more people aren’t as angry as I am. We should all be mad as hell at the sorry mess these young people have made of their lives. To quote Rhett Butler: “I’m angry. Waste always makes me angry, and that’s what all this is, sheer waste.”

The alleged glamour of life in “the dating pool” was always a fiction, a cultural commodity purveyed by Hollywood, where the movies and TV shows are written, directed and produced by predatory perverts. How am I, the father teaching his children to avoid all that, “part of the problem”?

It’s not my daughter alone in her New York apartment, shouting obscenities at the walls while “accidentally reflecting” on her regrets. My daughter is living in her own home with her own husband and her own baby. While I don’t remember explicitly telling her, “Never date a Crip,” I’m pretty sure we conveyed the general idea to her.

It is easy to blame others for our own problems, to tell ourselves that life is unfair, to pretend we are victims of society, when in fact our circumstances are the result of our own choices. To say “something is happening to almost every woman, all across society,” as Ms. Williams does, is to suggest that everybody’s following the same script, when even she admits other choices (and other consequences) are possible:

I know that not every guy conforms to the listed behaviours: I have several friends in happy, rewarding, and healthy heterosexual relationships.

OK, sweetheart: Why not you?

What’s the difference between your miserable life in the toxic “dating pool” full of creeps and losers, and the lives of your happy friends? And guys should ask themselves the same question. Why are you even in the “dating pool”? What’s the object of the game? If you could find a good woman, wouldn’t you marry her? So why aren’t you married? You are a Loser, with a capital “L,” and all your Tinder hookups mean nothing.

Worse than that, you’re ruining the game for everybody else, leaving behind a trail of bitter women telling sad stories on the Internet.

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 07.25.18

Posted on | July 25, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #327
EBL: What Happened To Facebook?
Twitchy: Politifact Goes Easy On Kamala Harris And Her “Rent Crisis” Claim
Louder With Crowder: Is Work Ethic A Lost Art?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Incoming Dumbass Comments Alert, also, Podcast #88 – The Mission Episode
American Power: Allie Beth Stuckey Not Apologizing For Hilarious Interview With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also, Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
American Thinker: Black Crime Gets Crazier
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News, also, Animal’s Plastic Straws Bonus Post
BattleSwarm: It’s The Smug
CDR Salamander: Deep Strike Or Distant Standoff?
Da Tech Guy: The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword, also, The NFL, Maxine Waters, & Kirsten Gillibrand – The Gifts That Keep On Giving In 2018
Don Surber: School Banned T-Shirt, Now Must Pay Student $25,000
Dustbury: A Brief Historical Moment
First Street Journal: Elon Musk And Doxxing
The Geller Report: Obama’s Cybersecurity Coordinator Confirms Susan Rice Ordered Him To Stand Down On Russian Meddling, also, ISIS Claims Responsibility For Toronto Attack After Police Deny It’s Terrorism
Hogewash: Spoiled Brat Mode? also, Looking Toward The Center Of The Galaxy
Legal Insurrection: Chris Cuomo Punked – Broke Big Trump Tape Scoop, But Cohen Taped Him Too, also, U. Minn. Alumnus Yanks Support Over Censorship Of Ben Shapiro, Conservative Students
Michelle Malkin: Shared Wisdom On A Silver Anniversary
The PanAm Post: The American Left Still Getting It Mostly Wrong On Russia
Power Line: Trump Makes A Deal, also, The WaPo’s Idea Of A “Good Summer” For Socialists
Shot In The Dark: When You’ve Solved All Your Real Problems
The Jawa Report: Islamic Terrorist Murders Twelve In Canada
The Political Hat: Bible Study Banned On Private Property
This Ain’t Hell: Navy Corpsman Devon Rideout Ambushed, Murdered, also, CPT Christopher Anderson Saving The World
Victory Girls: The Trump-Cohen Tape – Much Ado About Nothing
Volokh Conspiracy: The Dead Can Vote, At Least On The 9th Circuit
Weasel Zippers: Fauxcahontas Promises Dems Will Raise Taxes If They Retake Congress, Doesn’t Think 50% Is Too High, also, Poll Says Dems Less Likely To Know What Socialism Is, Twice As Likely To Support It
Megan McArdle: People Are Getting Fired For Old, Bad Tweets – Here’s How To Fix It
Mark Steyn: The Amalgamated Union Of Known Wolves

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Category: Linkagery

You Need Some ‘Fat Positive Activism’?

Posted on | July 25, 2018 | Comments Off on You Need Some ‘Fat Positive Activism’?

Some readers may remember Ali Thompson, the bisexual queer fat activist who declared, “Just being around men is exhausting.”

Ms. Thompson runs a Tumblr blog called “OK2BeFat” where she offers her readers “fat positive activism,” i.e., sloganeering like this:

“Diet culture is capitalist violence”? What does this even mean? It is a rhetorical appeal to left-wing prejudice — capitalism is bad, and therefore associating “diet culture” with capitalism is a way of demonizing anyone who suggests you eat a salad instead of a double cheeseburger. Fat people are engaged in “a form of resistance” if they eat the cheeseburger with a large order of fries and a strawberry milkshake.

And is it even necessary to say Ali Thompson is a feminist?

The hijacking of civil-rights rhetoric — “discrimination” and “fat rights” — is as obvious as it is offensive. It is absurd to claim that fat people suffer “discrimination” analogous to Jim Crow, and what can feminism do to eliminate the “policing of fat bodies”? The self-evident purpose of this sloganeering is to convince fat people that their misfortunes are essentially political, that they are victims of oppression, in order to mobilize them to do . . . what? Vote Democrat?

The self-declared “Mean Fat Girl” wants to guilt-trip people for their alleged “fatphobia.” Stigmatizing ordinary preferences as irrational “phobia” is a tactic borrowed from gay-rights activists. “Homophobia” is a word coined for political purposes, implying that a preference for heterosexuality is wrong, and you see how Ali Thompson uses “fatphobia” to imply that the mere existence of thin people is oppressive.

The “pain,” “suffering” and “agony” of fat people is “inflicted” by thin people who are motivated by fear, Ali Thompson informs us. You see what extraordinary rhetorical jiu-jitsu is required by this effort to stigmatize thinness, to depict thin people as oppressors inspired by malign motives, responsible for “the pain inflicted on fat people.”

This is the “fat positive activism” that Ali Thompson solicits contributions for via Patreon, but it doesn’t seem very “positive,” does it?

She is now producing videos like this one, accusing critics of “hate” and claiming that “fat haters” are denying her humanity.

When fat activists point out that fat people are routinely discriminated against in our culture, the inevitable response is — well, if you don’t like being discriminated against, why don’t you just lose weight? . . .
I object to the entire framing of the issue that fat people should somehow have to prove to the people who hate us that we don’t deserve to be hated. It’s not my job to prove to you that I’m a person.
To even agree to debate my humanity is to lose, because I would have to agree that fat haters have any right to pass judgment on me.
I absolutely reject that idea. I will never agree to a framing that positions me as less than human or as somehow having to prove my humanity to anyone.

Who is questioning her “humanity”? But never mind — this rhetoric is merely preamble to Ali Thompson’s argument that dieting is futile, that there is no point in fat people even trying to lose weight: “Dieting doesn’t work. That’s simply a fact.” And you see this is essential to her argument that fat people, like gay people, constitute a special political class as victims of unjust discrimination: They’re born that way.

What is actually being targeted here is personal preference. If you think it is better to be thin than to be fat, you’re a “fat hater” and, because this preference is quite general in society, fat people are victims of “very obvious and public suffering,” according to Ms. Thompson. Her logic is entirely analogous to the LGBT lobby’s claim that gay people are oppressed by rampant societal “homophobia.” In both cases, activists seek to shame normal people for entirely normal preferences.

The victimhood mentality of “social justice warriors” (SJWs) is leveraged to bully people into silence. Characterizing a belief as “hate” is a way to make it impermissible to express that belief — a totalitarian project which seeks to prevent people from forming their own opinions and defending their own values, free from political coercion.

SJWS always require scapegoats to blame for their unhappiness.

Who is inciting “hate”? Unless you accept the liberal definition of “hate” (i.e., disagreeing with a liberal), you see that the real hate is coming from people like Ali Thompson, who have embraced an ideology that encourages an attitude of resentment and self-pity. Her entire worldview is based on believing herself to be a victim of “fat haters” and “cis men” with their “rudeness and aggression.” It is no coincidence that this attitude is integral to the identity-politics formula that is the organizing principle of the Democrat Party, whose 2016 presidential candidate has spent the past 18 months blaming everyone else for her defeat.

What’s an angry obese SJW to do?

Y’know, if Ali Thompson started a GoFundMe to leave America — $800 for a one-way ticket to Caracas, Venezuela — I’m sure it would succeed. Hunger is rampant in Venezuela and there’s no capitalism there.

The socialist diet, guaranteed to work: Venezuelans report big weight losses in 2017 as hunger hits https://t.co/Rnq8vZdD0u

— John R Lott Jr. (@JohnRLottJr) February 22, 2018

Only socialism can cure the obesity epidemic — vote Democrat!

* * * * * *

My relentless exploration of the craziest fringes of feminism is funded by the generous support of readers who remember that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!