TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Britain’s Failed Gun Confiscation. “Hand guns were outlawed in Britain in 1997 after the massacre of 16 children and a teacher at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland. Some 160,000 handguns were surrendered to police. Dave Rodgers, vice chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said the ban made little difference to the number of guns in the hands of criminals. According to a recent survey, the number of crimes in which a handgun was reported increased nationally from 2,648 in 1997-98 to 3,685 in 1999-2000. ‘The underground supply of guns does not seem to have dried up at all,’ he said.” My comment: “Gee, go figure.”
Archive for 2012
January 9, 2012
RICK SANTORUM: IF OBAMA ISN’T DEFEATED, THEN THE AMERICA WE KNOW WILL BE GONE: An update on New Hampshire with photos and videos from PJM’s Bryan Preston, complete with the now obligatory Vermin Supreme sighting.
Elsewhere in New Hampshire, the new media streams get seriously crossed.
ISSA SCHEDULES HEARING TO LOOK INTO EGREGIOUS SOPA BILL: “Folks anything that can get Google, Mozilla (Firefox browser) and Microsoft to agree it’s a bad idea as there probably is. Contact your congressmen and senators and urge them to vote against this bill.”
RELATED: Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA.
JAMES LILEKS ON THE GLORIES OF MIAMI VICE: “Here’s the thing: no one else was doing this. No one else ever had. And no one can ever do it again, because they’ll never be the first.”
THE DALEY RESIGNATION: “Don’t make no waves, don’t back no losers.”
LESSONS FROM FOLDING MARILYN MONROE’S CAPRI PANTS: “Marilyn was shockingly and unimaginably slender. She was sort of like Kate Moss but fleshier on top. Didn’t see that coming, did you? . . . Conventional wisdom says that the camera adds five pounds. After my Marilyn experience, I would say it’s more like 500 pounds.”
CNN’S SOLEDAD O’BRIEN REFUTED BY HER OWN NETWORK’S REPORTS, on the 2009 Obama In Wonderland Halloween party.
This isn’t the first time that’s happened to her.
RELATED: Zombie adds more photos from the heretofore little-known party.
GENERAL ELECTRIC SUBSIDIARY ASKS How Much Will Romney’s Business Experience ‘Hurt’ Him in ‘Anti-Wall Street Occupy Climate?’
Elsewhere in the wonderful world of NBC, MSNBC Boss Hints Pat Buchanan’s Been Banned.
Likely too much job overlap there with Al Sharpton.
UPDATE: Insta-Reader Joe Tetreault emails, “Isn’t the idea of trimming government firing people who are not accomplishing what they are being paid to do? Seems Romney’s is exhibiting a feature not a bug. Trust but verify and all that…”
JENNIFER RUBIN: Daley and any pretense of moderation are out at the White House.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Badges’ Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas.
The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today’s fast-changing job market. . . .
Employers might prefer a world of badges to the current system. After all, traditional college diplomas look elegant when hung on the wall, but they contain very little detail about what the recipient learned. Students using Mozilla’s proposed badge system might display dozens or even hundreds of merit badges on their online résumés detailing what they studied. And students could start showing off the badges as they earn them, rather than waiting four years to earn a diploma.
“We have to question the tyranny of the degree,” says David Wiley, an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University. Mr. Wiley is an outspoken advocate of so-called open education, and he imagines a future where screenfuls of badges from free or low-cost institutions, perhaps mixed with a course or two from a traditional college, replace the need for setting foot on a campus. “As soon as big employers everywhere start accepting these new credentials, either singly or in bundles, the gig is up completely.”
The idea is already well established in some computer-programming jobs, with Microsoft and other companies developing certification programs to let employees show they have mastered certain computer systems.
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
#OCCUPYFAIL: Rat population has ‘exploded’ around Occupy D.C. camps.
ROMNEY: I LIKE BEING ABLE TO FIRE PEOPLE WHO PROVIDE SUBPAR SERVICES. Huntsman, Perry pile on.
Or as Jay Nordlinger writes at the Corner on Conservatives vs. Capitalism, “Over and over, Romney defends and explains capitalism. And he’s supposed to be the RINO and squish in the race?”
RELATED: Allahpundit tweets that it’s come to this: “Capitalism Comes Under Fire in Republican Primary Campaign,” a headline that truly is “unexpected” in 2012.
NEVADA BROTHEL BACKS RON PAUL.
However, this Nevada brothel is still firmly in the camp of Senator Palpatine.
LIGHT A CANDLE AND CARRY A GUN TO STOP VIOLENCE? SayUncle comments: “I don’t think people posting crappy cell phone pics of candles will do much. But carrying a gun helps.”
THE FALLEN ANGELS SCENARIO GETS ANOTHER BOOST: Human CO2 Emissions Could Avert the Next Ice Age, Study Says. “Earth could be entering a new Ice Age within the next millennium, but it might not, the deep freeze averted by warming from increased carbon dioxide emissions. Humans could be thwarting the next glacial inception, a new study says. Even in the comparatively long time scales of Earth history, we’re kind of overdue for another ice age — our current Holocene era has lasted about 11,600 years, roughly 600 years longer than the average interglacial (between-ice-age) periods of the past. If atmospheric CO2 levels were lower, the next ice age might have started sometime within the next 1,000 years, according to researchers from University College London and Cambridge University.”
Related thoughts from Walter Russell Mead.
UPDATE: Mead link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? “The soaring national debt has reached a symbolic tipping point: It’s now as big as the entire U.S. economy.”
FLASHBACK: Video of Jack Lew, currently tapped to replace William Daley: We’re not adding to the debt. “Even Politifact couldn’t spin that one.”
PYONGYANG FATS: “North Korea has praised its young new leader as ‘the genius among the geniuses,’ in military strategy in a film aired on his birthday today, the first since he took command after his father’s death,” AFP reports, along with the video. Or as Tim Blair quips, “Commie tubster Kim Jung-kg gets the full Riefenstahl treatment.”
Perhaps the North Koreans simply took their cues from this gushing CNN report on Kim Jong-un two years ago.
RELATED: The bears are who we thought they were.
COVERING ALL THE BASES: Video at the Tatler: Newt Gingrich Slams ‘Saul Alinsky Radical’ President Obama. But meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh comments, Newt using language of the left targeting Bain makes me uncomfortable.
Romney isn’t immune, either. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell tells Breitbart.tv’s Larry O’Connor, “Romney is the one they don’t want. They know they can beat anybody else. Romney, they think they can beat, but it’s a harder road.” But as Michael Walsh notes in the New York Post, “Lost in the weekend’s back-to-back debates in New Hampshire was this illuminating remark by Democratic strategist Donna Brazile after Saturday night’s soporific contest in Manchester…’we believe that the weakest candidate is the candidate that the Republicans are not attacking. And that’s Mitt Romney.'”
TO ANY OF MY CAYMANIAN READERS, I’m on the Island and will be giving a speech tomorrow. Here are the details.
And here’s the Cayman Financial Review.
MEDIA BIAS, STAGE TWO: “Stage two comes when Democratic Party activists posing as journalists report on the proceedings,” John Hinderaker writes at Power Line. “From now until November, the leading offender likely will be the Associated Press.”