OBAMA: MOST LEAK PROSECUTIONS. “Scott Shane notes that the president has taken actions that might have provoked sharp political criticism for his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was often in public fights with the press.”
Archive for 2010
June 12, 2010
AYAAN HIRSI ALI: On why Christians should try to convert Muslims. Plus, living under a fatwa. “I think, look, they can kill me physically—or I could die of a heart attack or whatever. Life is short. What they cannot kill are my ideas. The fact my books have been published and are out there—there are limits to silencing. . . . The liberal psyche wants to protect minorities, to apologize for imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and the appalling treatment of black people during the civil rights movement. At the same time, they want to continue to defend the rights of individuals. They’ve convinced themselves that the best way to do that in general is to defend the cultures that are non-white. But what they forget, and what they’re being confronted with, is that non-white cultures contain misogynistic, collectivist, tribal, gay-unfriendly and female-hostile traditions. And so they’re confused: on the one hand, they’re looking at minorities as groups they need to save and speak up for, and on the other hand, they’re confronted with the ideas and practices of individuals within those minorities that are very undemocratic and appalling, really.”
June 11, 2010
“SMART DIPLOMACY?” “When Obama continually refers to BP as ‘British Petroleum’, which is no longer its formal name, he is saying something revealing about himself, and his Anglophobic spite will come as no surprise to those who have followed his career, and read his memoir Dreams From my Father. He seems to have made up the part about his father being tortured by the British in Kenya, but there’s no question that Obama nurses a disdain for and even dislike of this country.”
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? A Fannie and Freddie for Food?
STEPHEN SPRUIELL on Crying Wolf.
ALLEN: Uh, no one told me about Maine boom company. The country’s in the very best of hands.
STUART SCHNEIDERMAN: The American Man: R.I.P.? “If so, this development seems less a natural socio-economic progression and more the effect of decades of social engineering.”
“ONLINE DATING ASSISTANTS” — another reason to be glad I’m not single.
MARKDOWNS ON Gladiator garage gear. My workbench, tool cabinets, etc. are all Gladiator stuff, I’ve had ’em for years, and I’ve been very happy with them.
KRUISER CONTROL: It’s Flashback Friday.
BOAT GIRL’S PARENTS: Negligent, or Noble? I think modern kids are mostly overprotected.
UPDATE: Reader Kelly Summers writes:
Thanks for the link to Helen’s post regarding young sailor Sunderland. In reading news accounts since her distress signal, I didn’t share the view that her parents were irresponsible and found those arguments, frankly, annoying. I applaud the parents — they were brave to let her go, and Abby will forever be confident in herself for this attempt and her survival is a major achievement! I wish I were surrounded by more people like the Sunderlands. Gutsy & unafraid.
The next article I read talked about how the new health care bill has kids being on parent’s insurance policies until they’re 26. Twenty-six! Good grief. If this thinking keeps up, we’re all going to be looking to some outside authority for permission to pee, in which case I’ll take being stranded in the Indian Ocean any day.
Indeed.
BYRON YORK: AmeriCorps scandal figure un-invited from AmeriCorps conference. “On Thursday I reported that Kevin Johnson, former NBA star, mayor of Sacramento, California, and friend and political ally of Barack and Michelle Obama, was scheduled to speak at an AmeriCorps conference in New York at the end of this month. . . . Now comes word that Johnson will not be speaking at the conference after all. On Thursday afternoon, his picture and biographical sketch disappeared from the conference website, and today the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), which oversees AmeriCorps, confirmed that Johnson will not be there.”
HOW TO DESTROY A BLACK HOLE: “The puzzle is what such destruction would leave behind.” I’m not sure I want to find out, but didn’t Steven Hawking have a paper on this back in the 1970s? As I recall (and this story seems to repeat), you get a naked singularity, with all kinds of problems for physics and causality, but I haven’t followed that stuff at all closely since college. I do remember, though, that Hawking referred to the breakdown of physics, and then struck it out to read “physicists” in the vicinity of rapidly rotating supermassive black holes. That seems to be what this story is talking about, too. So is this really news now?
AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.
WHY DO EMPLOYEE RELATIONS make everyone want to litigate? All I know is that litigation has led to the rise of HR departments, which has hardly been a boon to the American economy. . . .
UPDATE: A reader emails:
am taking umbrage to your comment about us HR folks
Don’t blame us! (I have been doing this for more than 30 years) … without resorting to stereotypes, you lawyers keep throwing these PC based federal, state and local statutes over the wall that we have to enforce and decipher … I just spent the better part of the afternoon going through my annual update on red-yellow-green light behaviors and maybe I’ll finish up the evening by kicking back and read another chapter of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act … remember the more laws the less justice!
No argument there.
A PAPER TEST FOR LIVER DAMAGE: “Diagnostics for All, a nonprofit startup in Cambridge, MA, has designed a cheap, disposable blood test for liver damage. The device uses a stack of paper the size of a postage stamp for a test of toxicity for drugs to treat HIV and tuberculosis.”
ADVICE TO DUTCH WOMEN: Don’t find a job, find a husband!
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MCCAIN, WE’D SEE BLUENOSES TRYING TO SCORE CHEAP POLITICAL POINTS OVER PORN. And they were right! “Porn-busting isn’t just for Republicans anymore –and Democrats hope preventing sexual predation and dirty pictures in the world of federal mortgage insurance will give them a little lift at election time.”
BEN BERNANKE: “Of course” Congress could cut spending. “The real story of the deficit is that the budget has grown by almost double in the space of 10 years, from $2 trillion in FY2000 to almost $4 trillion today despite inflation being practically nonexistent the entire time. We’re not in deficits because the American taxpayer doesn’t shove enough money into Washington’s Leviathan maw; we’re in deficit because Washington can’t stop spending more and more money.”