NOTE TO PRO-LIFE MEN: Feminists will still date you if you’re hot. And if you’re not hot, they won’t date you anyway.
Just don’t have the wrong opinion on global warming.
Archive for 2011
April 23, 2011
MIKE MCNALLY on Libya and the Liberal Way Of War.
HEH: Taco Bell Demands an Apology After Beef Lawsuit Dropped. “Love may mean never having to say you’re sorry, as the old Love Story theme goes, but lawsuits are another thing. Taco Bell would like an apology from the folks who brought (and then withdrew) the lawsuit against them that claimed their meat mixture was less than 35 percent beef.”
An apology is getting off light: Bratz wins $88.4 million from Mattel… and Mattel started the legal battle.
FREE-SPEECH UPDATE: Koran-Burning New Jersey Transit Employee Gets Job Back + Back Pay + $25,000 Settlement.
Related: Terry Jones Jailed, Apparently for Refusing to Promise Not to Demonstrate in Front of a Mosque.
Another take: A Michigan Jury Finds That Muslims Can’t Be Expected To Control Themselves and Pastor Jones Gets His Birmingham Jail Moment.
THE NEW CIVILITY: Paul Krugman says “So, let’s try another shot to the head.”
STACY MCCAIN DECRIES the new climate of hate.
JOHN HINDERAKER: “We are living in a bizarre moment in history. Our establishment–the press, the academy, all unions, most politicians, many in business who have skin in the Ponzi game–assure us that borrowing trillions of dollars to finance wasteful spending, while sticking our children with the tab plus interest, is perfectly sensible. On the other hand, believing that we should live within our means is? Crazy!”
THE “NEW CIVILITY” FACES another grim milestone.
April 22, 2011
VIDEOGAMES: Buy One, Get One Free.
CAITLIN FLANAGAN engages in stereotyping and collective guilt. Because if you have a few bad anecdotes about a group, it justifies acting against every member of the group. So long as . . . well, you can guess the rest.
UPDATE: From the comments: “I had a bad date in college one time. I think that sororities should be shut down.” Let me just say: Caitlin Flanagan should be ashamed to have put this out under her name. It’s a joke. She’ll never again have the credibility that she had before this sad piece of work was published. Not only is it sexist. It’s dumb.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Mr. Bingley emails:
I was a student at UVa during those exact years (82-86). What happened to poor Ms. Securro was disgusting, horrific and inexcusable and I’m glad that there is justice being served, however belatedly and yet I’m fully aware that it can in no way right the wrong that was committed. I also should point out that I did not belong to a fraternity and never attempted to join one; hell, I think that in my 4 years at Virginia I maybe went to three fraternity parties (I hated how they spilled so much beer over the floors of those gorgeous houses they had and they were too noisy and loud for my taste). Also, as only about 1/3 of students belonged to fraternities, one could quite easily have a wonderful and social four years at UVa and basically never step into one.
But this article isn’t at all about Ms. Securro, is it? It’s about the demons that inhabit dear fragile Miss Flanagan’s mind. The key sentences (“They are built of the same Jeffersonian architecture as the rest of the campus. At once august and moldering, they seemed sinister, to stand for male power at its most malevolent and institutionally condoned.”) speak of that same sort of Andrea Dworkin mindset that was all too prevalent in that era: “Every! Telephone! Pole! Is! A! Penis! And! Wants! To! Rape! Me!”
Virginia is currently 56% women and 44% male. If someone is being “robbed” of a chance at an education I would politely suggest it isn’t the young ladies.
I write this as the father of a rising HS senior Daughter who just completed a week of visiting colleges, including Virginia, and I have no out-of-the-ordinary qualms about her attending there or any of the other fine institutions we visited last week (sadly, UT was not on her list).
Yes, the whole piece had a rather musty quality, in addition to its other flaws.
UPDATE: More criticism from Ann Althouse. “Why don’t women claim the power they have instead of running to Daddy (i.e., the government)?”
MASSIVE TORNADO strikes North St. Louis.
FOND REMEMBRANCE OF THE RECENT PAST: “Which looks better and better every day, when compared to 2011. Hey, remember when gas was $2.20 a gallon and the unemployment rate was 4.4%? What happened with that? …Oh, right, the Democrats won the 2006 Congressional elections.”
I think the GOP has found its 2012 message . . . .
“I HAVE TWO GUNS, ONE FOR EACH OF YOU.” Really, his best role ever.
THREE REASONS WHY WONKETTE SELF-DESTRUCTED. Besides the obvious, which is that it was an Ana Marie Cox vehicle, and she’s been gone from Wonkette for a long time.
DRAINED AT THE GAS PUMP. “With gas prices above $4 in some states, Americans are canceling spring break plans and rethinking summer vacation, and some tourist destinations are offering gas vouchers of as much as $50 to talk people out of giving up and staying home.”
MICKEY KAUS NOT IMPRESSED with the New York Times’ claim of 100,000 new digital subscribers:
The New York Times claims 100,000 people have paid for digital subscriptions that go behind the paper’s new Maginot-like paywall. Howard Kurtz say this is “not a bad start.” Really? You’d think the Times would get most of the people who are going to subscribe right away, and that adding to that initial haul would be relatively difficult. Remember TimesSelect? That was the Times’s early attempt to charge only for its marquee opinion writers. It was launched in September of 2005. By June of 2006 it had 175,000 exclusively-online subscribers. More than a year later, that figure had risen only a bit–to 221,000, and the Times soon pulled the plug.*
Why isn’t the paywall set to follow a similiar trajectory? Kurtz says, “If the figure triples this year, the company may have a viable business plan.” Is there any reason to think the figure will triple this year?
I wish them luck.
HAPPY EARTH DAY: “President Obama declared today’s 41st annual Earth Day proof of America’s ecological and conservation spirit—then completed a three-day campaign-style trip logging 10,666 miles on Air Force One, eating up some 53,300 gallons at a cost of about $180,000. And that doesn’t include the fuel consumption of his helicopter, limo, or the 29 other vehicles that travel with that car.”
Related: “Earth Day is now a joke.”
UPDATE: The headline of the day is from MSNBC, believe it or not: Earth Day Co-Founder Killed, Composted Girlfriend.
I don’t think that’s what they mean by an Eco-Friendly Love Life.
THE NEW CIVILITY (CONT’D): Ugly Ivy Politics Preceded Suicide Of Popular Princeton Teacher: Friends.
He wasn’t PC enough for Princeton.
A vicious campaign to end the unblemished 10-year career of a popular but often politically incorrect Princeton teacher left him so despondent that he took his own life, brokenhearted pals said yesterday. Spanish teacher Antonio Calvo, 45 — who stabbed himself to death in his Chelsea apartment on April 12 — believed at least two graduate students and another lecturer were behind a poisonous political maneuver that robbed him of a contract renewal, two friends told The Post.
More here.
UPDATE: Princeton’s Spanish professor ‘killed himself after he was forced from job for being politically incorrect.’ “Devastated colleagues and students are blaming a campaign by another lecturer and several students for his death, saying they launched a hate campaign against him to get him ousted from his job.”
So is someone guilty of a hate crime, then?
BRIDGE TO FUSION? Four Advanced Nuclear Fission Technologies.
NEW RELEASES on DVD and Blu-Ray.
THE ECONOMIST: EUROPE’S PROBLEMS IN A NUTSHELL: “When we talk about the debt crisis in Europe, we tend to focus on the specific details—a relative loss of peripheral European competitiveness, accumulation of debt, rising bond yields and contracting economies. But the bigger story is a simpler one: The euro zone’s political institutions did not keep up with its economic institutions.”
DEATH TOLL RISING IN SYRIA: “At least 90 people were reportedly killed and dozens were injured when Syrian security forces fired live bullets and teargas to disperse ‘Good Friday’ protests in several cities, witnesses reported. The death toll seemed to be rising late Friday.”