WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY: Online Belly Dance Classes.
Archive for 2012
February 7, 2012
TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: A kid with a gun saves a life. “If he’d shot his grandmother, it would be all over the news as a cautionary tale. Since he shot a knife-wielding drug dealer and thus saved her life, it barely makes the South Bend Tribune. Happily, the boy isn’t plagued by guilt. He feels proud of himself. And he should.”
LIST: Zombie Preparedness. I certainly agree that you can never have too much duct tape.
NRC’S PUBLIC FUKUSHIMA ASSURANCES contradicted by internal emails.
DON SURBER: Mitt Did It All Wrong.
No matter who you support this year, you have to admit Mitt Romney went about becoming president the wrong way. Instead of wasting his time learning how business works and building a multi-billion-dollar company that really did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mitt should have lived off his daddy’s fortune like Jack Kennedy. Chasing skirts and molesting teenage virgin is a lot more fun than figuring out how to revive an old business.
Instead, Mitt Romney gave his inheritance to charity. Who does that anymore?
The press loves the kids of privilege — Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller and the rest of the trust fund babies — but only if they support huge government programs that transfer wealth from workers to non-workers. Remember, the press says liberals win despite their wealth while the press says conservatives win because of their wealth. The press never inquires into the manipulation of the tax code that allows wealth to transfer on to the fifth generation of a 19th century robber baron or 20th century bootlegger.
Read the whole thing.
ARMAGEDDON AT THE STRIP MALL.
MAYBE IT’S THE ARICEPT: Chris Matthews has a moment of clarity.
SANTORUM WINS IN Missouri.
UPDATE: Missourian Prof. Stephen Clark writes: “Don’t put too much stock in the Missouri primary. Turnout was low. Even the candidates showed good sense in ignoring it: No tv ads or robocalls. Pretty much a farce, but an expensive one: Our little town spent $58K for nothing. Another bureaucratic boondoggle.”
HALFTIME IN AMERICA: Remy Chrysler Ad Parody.
If you’re not with us, you’re against us. President Bush popularized this expression after 9/11 to describe his foreign policy doctrine: Countries couldn’t support or indulge terrorists and be our friends at the same time. But his detractors quickly turned it into a fairly paranoid vision of domestic political life, as if Bush had been talking about domestic opponents and dissenters.
The irony is that few worldviews better describe the general liberal orientation to public policy and the culture war. The left often complains about the culture war as if it’s a war they don’t want to fight. They insist they just want to follow “sound science” or “what works” when it comes to public policy, but those crazy knuckle-dragging right-wingers constantly want to talk about gays and abortion and other hot-button issues.
It’s all a farce. Liberals are the aggressors in the culture war (and not always for the worse, as the civil rights movement demonstrates). What they object to isn’t so much the government imposing its values on people — heck, they love that. They see nothing wrong with imposing their views about diet, exercise, sex, race and the environment on Americans. What outrages them is resistance, or even non-compliance with their agenda. “Why are you making such a scene?” progressives complain. “Just do what we want and there will be no fuss.”
Kind of like an abusive spouse.
UPDATE: Somewhat related item here.
SPECIAL TREATMENT?
Suspected marijuana was found by three police officers at the home of the director of the state Alcoholic Beverage Commission, whose mission is to eradicate marijuana.
A Channel 4 I-Team investigation found the drugs were never seized or investigated.
An employee of the ABC, who agreed to speak with the Channel 4 I-Team if we hid his identity, said if suspected drugs were found at his house, he would expect to be arrested or at the very least, interrogated.
“I grant you, if that had happened to any of us (ABC employees), we would have been made an example of. We would have been in headlines in the papers, the news, and everywhere else,” the ABC employee said.
Hmm.
CONSERVATIVE LESBIAN CYNTHIA YOCKEY is asking for help getting to CPAC.
DAN BURTON FALLS VICTIM TO the Campaign For Primary Accountability.
NAZI FAMILY VALUES: Totalitarian regimes readily embraced art, propaganda, and cinema, turning them into veritable weapons of mass destruction. “Many Nazi officials came from the educated middle class of German society, and in his comments on the trial of Einsatzgruppen members in Nuremberg after the war, the British historian Gerald Reitlinger (author of The SS, Alibi of a Nation, a superb study of the SS) observed of the defendants that ‘the only common denominator was that nearly all had been to a university and the majority had achieved the doctorate so dear to the German middle class.’ The idea of Nazi intellectuals may be troubling to some, but as has long been known, intellectuals rose to power in the systems of both fascism (meaning both Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy) and the Leninist-Stalinist version of communism. Hitler and Stalin required the talents of writers, organizers, and, yes, artists to accomplish their ends.”
WHY BANK WEBSITES are suddenly less secure:
Throwing another lock on seems like the most logical way to secure an apartment—or a website. But a new attack called “Man in the Browser” allows attackers who have infected a computer with malicious software to get around the bank website security systems that demand, for example, a pin in addition to a password.
I only access my accounts through an old Macbook Pro that I don’t use for anything else. But that’s probably overkill.
DOOMSDAY FLU decision time. “Last year, two flu research groups created what could be extremely dangerous viruses through their research into bird flu. Both studies will be censored when they are published, and all similar work has been put on hold – unprecedented actions in biomedical research. Ahead of a World Health Organization meeting to plot a way ahead, New Scientist explains how we have arrived in these uncharted waters.”
UPDATE: Reader Patrick Anders writes:
Frank Herbert’s The White Plague, written over 30 years ago, predicted that some day all it would take would be one mentally disturbed scientist and a small lab to create a disease capable of wrecking civilization. That day is now, or ten years from now. If A.Q. Khan could run a covert network teaching the North Koreans how to create nuclear weapons, why haven’t we had a plan to deal with research into genetic modification of diseases since, I dunno, the minute A.Q. Khan was discovered?
Perhaps we could do with fewer Georgetown Foreign Service grads in the government, and more science fiction readers. The notion has been out there for decades, and yet the powers that be were caught with their pants down by a medical paper.
Obligatory Amazon link.
Well, it’s not obligatory, but it’s appreciated. And yeah. I think we’re seriously underprepared for this kind of thing.
BRIAN NOGGLE: It’s Not Takers vs. Makers, It’s Fraggles vs. Doozers. Not so sure I buy this analogy, but it’s cute.
SHATTERING PYREX to show a massive weakness in trademark law.
SCIENCE: Entire genome of extinct human decoded from fossil. “The genome represents the first high-coverage, complete genome sequence of an archaic human group – a leap in the study of extinct forms of humans.”
AT AMAZON, markdowns on Swarovski jewelry.
SCIENCE: Fallout From Fatigue Syndrome Retraction Is Wide. “As the published evidence for the hypothesis fell apart, a legal melodrama erupted, dismaying and demoralizing patients and many members of the scientific community. Dr. Mikovits was even briefly jailed in California on charges of theft made by the institute.”
NEW MEDIA: Matt Continetti’s Washington Free Beacon.
CHANGE: Obama Girl Amber Lee Ettinger says she’s not sure how she’ll vote this time. “I want what this country wants. I want this country to be better. I want everyone to have jobs and for gas prices to go down.” Plus, he never calls.