PENELOPE TRUNK: Repulsion Is Part Of Diversity. “One thing I have learned from living on a farm is that you are not really experiencing diversity unless you are also experiencing repulsion.”
Archive for 2011
June 18, 2011
INSIDER KNOWLEDGE: Top Stock Holdings Of U.S. Congress.
LIFE LESSON: “Turns out, it was the hormones.”
VIDEO: Failed glitter attack on Michele Bachmann.
UPDATE: Reader Kevin Green writes: “Where are the Republican security personnel? That crazy lunatic could easily have been carrying a knife or gun and she was allowed to get way too close to Michelle Bachmann. How many more Gabby Giffords must there be before Republicans begin to take candidate security seriously?”
And another reader emails: “In a post-Gabrielle Giffords political climate, it’s chilling to watch Bachmann’s fireplug ‘bodyguards’ stand there and take no preemptive action. Genuinely startling, who provided that security?”
I dunno. It’s a fine line between bodyguards who don’t move fast enough, and bodyguards who go all Patti LaBelle on people.
THE ATLANTIC: The 14 Biggest Ideas Of The Year.
AT AMAZON, a sale on swimsuits and shorts. That model who looks like Halle Berry probably isn’t included.
HOW FATHERHOOD made us human.
CHANGE: Will grey hair be a thing of the past? Scientists discover protein that keeps colour in strands. Faster, please: My boyish good looks won’t last forever on their own.
BRINGING AMERICANS TOGETHER: Union, Texas Congressional delegation agree: The EPA is threatening the Texas economy. Well, Texas is showing up the blue states by creating so many jobs. Can’t have that, especially with it sounding like Rick Perry might run for President.
GREG LUKIANOFF: Yale And The New Threat To Free Speech On Campus.
At some point or another, we have all made someone else feel uncomfortable, whether intentionally or not. We have caused someone else emotional distress. And yes, all of us have likely flirted with someone who isn’t interested and may have even made an innuendo. The thinking behind these absurdly broad codes seems to be if you make every student guilty, you can let campus administrators decide who to punish. In the “risk management” industry, which provides legal consulting to universities, this guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality is cutely referred to as “wiggle room.”
Administrators should be punished for threatening free speech.
RON COLEMAN ON THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ANGLE to that iPhone-crippling story.
A SUDDENLY GROWING LIVER DISEASE:
“This is huge. We didn’t even know this disease existed 30 years ago. Now it’s the most common liver disease in America.”
‘We won’t have the ability to treat all these patients’
About a third of the U.S. population has nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, according to Dr. Michael Curry, a hepatologist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Curry said most of those people — about 80% — will not develop significant liver disease. The other 20% will develop a disease called nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH. Of those, about 20-30% will go on to develop cirrhosis and end-stage liver disease, where the only real treatment is a liver transplant.
My advice is to drink heavily. At least then you’ll know why your liver has gone bad. . . .
Or you could try this: “If a patient loses weight, eats better and exercises, he or she can often reverse the disease in its earlier stages.”
TABLOID HEAVEN: A montage of New York Post Anthony Weiner covers.
IN THE MAIL: From Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America.
WAPO EDITORIAL: Hey, you know, the action in Libya looks kinda like war to us. Plus this: “The Obama administration’s depiction of its Libya venture as too halfhearted to be covered by the War Powers Resolution contains an unfortunately large dollop of truth. President Obama’s commitment is sufficiently halfhearted to undermine the NATO alliance. It is sufficiently halfhearted, and confused in its statement of purpose and its connection of ends to means, to give Moammar Gaddafi hope that he can hang on. It is not, however, so halfhearted as to justify the administration’s evasion of its legal duties under the war powers law.”
The Post editorial board has now caught up to InstaPundit on March 23: “Waging war halfheartedly, on the cheap, and by committee is not a formula for success.” Some people (well, Joshua Greenman) criticized me at the time for not understanding Obama’s awesome Libya plan. I don’t think that criticism has been borne out by events.
UPDATE: “Oh, settle down. You’re acting like Obama is a Republican.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Lawmakers mock Obama claim on Libya hostilities.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt: So When Will Those By-Passed Lawyers Be Resigning? “Bypassing the lawyers you don’t like to get to those who agree with you in fact sounds very Nixonian, but the lawyers Nixon overruled had the decency to quit rather than let their offices be downgraded. Will the lawyers in Team Obama stand by their legal judgment or with their increasingly unilateralist boss?”
CLAIRE BERLINSKI: When Syria Explodes. “It’s not a secret that Syria is imploding. But the key thing to grasp is that it won’t stop there: There is a real possibility that this regime will take its neighbors down with it. I’m not sure that the West–which from what I can tell is now completely preoccupied with itself and its economic problems–is sufficiently grasping this.”
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Can This Presidency Be Saved?
RASMUSSEN: 83% of GOP Voters Intend to Vote Republican No Matter Who’s The Nominee. “A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 77% of Likely Republican Primary Voters think that every one of the party’s presidential candidates would do a better job than the current occupant of the White House. Just 14% disagree, with 10% more undecided.”
ATF GUNRUNNING SCANDAL UPDATE: “The Wall Street Journal reported last night that the political fallout from Operation Fast and Furious has the White House looking for a fast and furious way out. The acting head of the ATF, Kenneth Melson, will likely lose his job, perhaps as early as next week, the WSJ’s sources say, in what looks like an effort to contain the damage.”
That won’t be enough, for a scandal that some are calling “worse than Iran-Contra.” “The effort to get rid of Melson looks like an attempt to appease the House, but it’s not likely to work. Had the White House provided more cooperation with Darrell Issa on this and other investigations, a Melson resignation might have sufficed. Instead of cooperating, Melson and Attorney General Eric Holder stonewalled the Oversight Committee for weeks, and when they finally turned over the documents subpoenaed by Issa, the heavy redactions prompted Issa to tell the the DoJ’s Assistant Attorney General that he ‘should be ashamed’ of its conduct in an investigation into the death of one of its Border Patrol agents. . . . Issa now will go after the DoJ for its conduct in the investigation, because Holder and Weich have certainly acted as if they have something to hide. And the sudden desire to throw Melson under the bus seems to indicate that the White House would like to end this probe rather quickly, too. At this point, even a resignation by Weich wouldn’t slow Issa’s probe.”
Bonus quote: “Allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals, this was the plan. It was so mandated.” –Special Agent John Dodson ATF Phoenix Field Division. I retain my suspicions about the connection between a secret ATF operation that allowed thousands of weapons to go from U.S. gunshops to Mexican crime scenes, and a public gun-control campaign by the Obama Administration that stressed the need to limit gun sales in the United States because weapons from U.S. gun shops were turning up at Mexican crime scenes. Call me cynical, but this is an awfully convenient juxtaposition.
TEST-DRIVE: Alex Nunez loves the Toyota Prius V. Alex emails: “Seriously, if they don’t sell like beer at a hockey game, I will be dumbfounded.”
WHY EUROPE No Longer Matters.
UPDATE: British reader Alan Massey sends this link:
The Army is facing an exodus of the next generation of military leaders after nearly 1,000 of its brightest officers and soldiers applied for voluntary redundancy. . . . The Army is expected to lose a substantial number of senior NCOs, who provide the “backbone” of discipline in the field, and it has also been inundated with applications from corporals, sergeants and staff sergeants. Under the defence cuts, the Army is to lose 7,000 troops over the next four years, leaving a force of 94,000.
One decorated officer, who has commanded a battalion with distinction but has now opted to leave, said: “When you know what’s going on at the moment and the amount of money that’s needed to be saved and the impact of that on the Army, what’s the point of staying? People see the writing on the wall and are saying it’s time to go.”
The Army is most concerned by the calibre of the officers who have asked to leave. At least five commanding officers or future battalion commanders have handed in their papers.
Massey adds: “We (in the UK) have had a military that has been continuously shrinking for the last 20 years, despite being sent to fight all over the world. I would hazard a guess that the only reason a lot of them held on at all is in the hope that a change of government would see a change in policy. Therefore it is not at all surprising that we see a collapse in morale and a rise in the number of voluntary redundancies as it has become obvious that the Conservatives are little different from the Labour Party.”
Perhaps some of these retirees will go into politics.