PRAISE for the Breville Hot Wok. Plus this: “It is apparently useful for deep frying, though I haven’t tried that yet.”
Archive for 2011
February 12, 2011
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Mubaraks, Mamelukes, Modernizers and Muslims.
BABY MONITORS LACK SECURITY: “We connected our monitor, which acts as a receiver, in our car, and then drove around the city. Within moments, we started seeing nurseries, bedrooms, and hearing people’s conversations. One baby’s image we picked up from almost half a mile away.”
RANDY BARNETT FISKS A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL on the constitutionality of the Individual Mandate.
HMM: Autopsy: Lobbyist was drunk at time of fatal accident in garage. “Ashley Turton, a former senior aide to Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), was intoxicated when she died in an accident last month, according to an autopsy report. Turton, who was working as an energy lobbyist at the time of the accident, died from the ‘inhalation of products of combustion and thermal burns,’ according to Beverly Fields of the D.C. Chief Medical Examiner’s office. ‘Acute alcohol intoxication’ was a contributing factor in her death, Fields said.” This seems quite odd.
TODAY ONLY: Elliptical Trainer sale.
LOOKING BACK AT Ronald Reagan, Taxes, and Inflation.
STEVEN HAYWARD: “The incandescent light bulb ban is this decade’s version of the old 55 m.p.h. speed limit.”
Plus this: “Along with mailing in tea bags to members of Congress, we should send them our compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) for proper disposal in hazardous-waste landfills, since they contain mercury.” Probably some sort of environmental crime.
SURVIVING A NUCLEAR ATTACK: The TED Lecture.
REASON TV REPORTS FROM The “Big Gay Party” at CPAC.
“Has the conservative movement become a champion of gay rights? Is gun-owning, lesbian singer Sophie B. Hawkins of ‘Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover’ fame a liberal in bed and conservative in the head?”
LAWYERING: Larry Tribe Caught Up in Post-Employment Restrictions in AEP Case. “The most interesting fact to me is that the government apparently acted to have his name striken from the brief. Clearly, by that point, DOJ knew of the the brief and his role in it, so it would seem that any violation would have occurred. Taking his name off the brief at that point wouldn’t seem to make it any more or less of a violation.”
February 11, 2011
MULLAHS NOT AMUSED: Iranian Tries To Walk Like An Egyptian. “Mr Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, another opposition leader, had called for a rally on Monday to support the popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.”
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, we’d have a White House claiming the FBI could eavesdrop without any oversight. And they were right! “The Obama administration’s Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy.”
AT AMAZON, Markdowns On Blu-Ray.
FIRST TEA PARTY CANDIDATE ANNOUNCES AGAINST OLYMPIA SNOWE IN MAINE, and John Hawkins has the interview.
PETER WOOD WRITES ABOUT THE BECK-PIVEN CONTROVERSY in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and I was glad to see this right up front:
The strikes and riots in Greece ended up destroying a great deal of property and costing lives. In one instance, protesters threw a Molotov cocktail through the front window of Marfin Bank in central Athens. Three people inside died from asphyxiation and four others were badly injured. There were other atrocities.
A lot of Piven’s defenders in the academy have been trying to distract from this. He continues:
The consistent theme of Piven’s work has been the desire to set Americans against one another in the hope that out of the resulting conflict will come a more organized and energized movement of the poor and disenfranchised. Thus Piven’s recent invocation of riots in Greece and protests in England is nothing especially novel. . . .
For the record, I have been unable to locate any instance in which Beck called for Piven’s death or incited violence against her. As many others have pointed out, however, Piven herself has long extolled the value of civil unrest up to and including riots, which would seem to put her own academic discourse in a place other than “responsible criticism and debate.” Her belief in the salutary character of some kinds of violence is, of course, not an isolated case in academe. Frantz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth, long a staple in American college reading lists, luxuriates in the idea of the liberating quality of killing the oppressor. The academy has its share of men and women who theorize on the utility of revolutionary violence—and a few who have actually practiced it. On that scale, Piven is something of a moderate. She is attracted to the idea of violent social disruption but doesn’t apotheosize killing for its own sake.
Read the whole thing. Wood’s quite hard on the American Sociological Association, and rightly so. And Ann Althouse has related thoughts.
UPDATE: Reader Jeff Johnson emails: “The comments and defense by sociologists of Piven really knocks down their position of saying that there are hardly any conservatives in the social sciences since they aren’t as intelligent as liberals. If this type of thinking is their idea of intelligent, then that word doesn’t mean what they think it means.”
DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION IN EDUCATION: KHAN ACADEMY PARTNERS WITH BITTORRENT TO DISTRIBUTE COURSES. The missing element here is back-end certification that students have learned. Provide that, and the higher education bubble will burst even faster, I suspect.
UPDATE: I had some related thoughts here. And reader Matthew Thornton writes: “With clenched, upraised fist and the best Shatner imitation they can muster, are the higher education types screaming, ‘KHAAAAAAAAANNN!!!!!!‘?” That would be cool.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ on what’s next: “Recent events may have convinced the Army officer corps that Mubarak had to go, but it probably still believes the Army has to remain in charge. The role of opposition groups in this context will be to take sides with factions in the Army.” If I had to guess the Islamists’ plan, it would be to emulate Turkey, and gradually weaken the Army without provoking a direct confrontation until the Army is too weak to win.
CLIVE CROOK: Why Intellectuals Are Not Conservatives: “Paul Krugman wearily observes that stories about liberal bias in the academy surface on a regular basis. They do, but that does not make them untrue. He’s right, too, that ideological discrimination is not the same thing as racial discrimination. But that does not make it a good thing, does it?”
Crook quotes Nozick: “Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.”
WELL, GOOD: U.S. Oil Producers Ramp Up Bakken Shale Output. We need the oil. It’s also nice to know that many environmental complaints against “fracking” are largely bunk.