A GLOBAL Evangelical elite?
Archive for 2012
March 1, 2012
FIVE SMARTPHONE APPS to help your mental health.
AT AMAZON, Home Improvement Deals. I never thought of a tomahawk as a home improvement tool myself, but I guess it depends on where you live . . . .
ANDREW BREITBART HAS DIED. “Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love.” (Bumped).
UPDATE: A Whirlwind Dies.
Plus this: 
ANOTHER UPDATE: Matt Yglesias shows his true colors, along with a lot of other people. Schmuck.
Related: Twitter Hate: The Left’s Breitbart Memorial. Retweet all the nasty stuff they say — it’s what Andrew would have wanted. He liked to expose these people for who they were, rather than who they pretended to be. He continues to do that even in death.
And reader Jonathan Rubinstein writes: “The outpouring of ghoulish and sophmoric hatred at the death of Andrew Breitbart is a warning to us all that the remaking of America is not a conversation over coffee in the late afternoon. The real struggles that are ahead have hardly begun. Politics is ruthless and the failed political class will not go quietly. The disgusting comments are not a tribute to the decline not of civility — there has never been much in America — but the complete disintegration of self-respect. We will engage, we will remake America, we will miss Breitbart but there will be many more joining the struggle.”
Plus, a very moving tribute from Greg Gutfeld.
And a nice remembrance from Josh Marshall.
MORE: Prof. Jacobson: “I’ve often wondered where to go with this blog. I now know.”
We Are All Andrew Breitbart Now.
Christian Science Monitor: A “Happy Warrior.” “Taken as a whole, his short but brazen career as a journalistic pugilist dug at something deeper and uniquely American, friends said: that humor leavens, confrontation works, and free speech is worth making enemies over.”
Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone: “Good! Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead.”
Remember this stuff the next time one of these people tries to play the “Have you no decency?” card. As I said, even in death Andrew is exposing them.
OH, DARN: Rise in Citizen Cellphone Video Makes Police Officers Uneasy. “Law enforcement personnel are still grappling with the idea that ordinary citizens have the right to take images, whereas previously such photographs and videos were taken by professionals employed by traditional media companies.”
Apparently, the Police Academy skipped the Constitution. They need to read Morgan Manning’s article, as well. I should note, too, that John Steakley and I have a piece coming out in the Washington University Law Review arguing that there is not only a First Amendment right to record the police, but also a due process right to do so.
OKAY, I GOT A COLONOSCOPY TODAY. I won’t report on it, but will instead refer you to Dave Barry, and encourage you to have one if you’re a candidate. And thank God for scheduled posts. But I got home at 10:30 to find out that Andrew Breitbart had died. I was up to rounding up links, but I’ll write something more substantive when the drugs have fully worn off.
PHONE CALL LINE NOISE COULD PROVIDE I.D.:
Just as people’s voices betray hints of the region they originate from, so, it turns out, do phone calls. Handsets, telephone exchanges, and other call-routing infrastructure imprint subtle and almost unique fingerprints onto the audio of any phone call, a phenomenon that security company Pindrop hopes to use to prevent fraudsters from using stolen credit cards over the phone.
“We can identify whether a person is using a landline or cell phone, or when a call supposed to come from a mobile in Atlanta comes from a landline in Nigeria,” says Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO and cofounder of Pindrop. The “secret” answers and words used to protect bank and other accounts are often easily compromised, particularly using data gleaned online, or through tactics like phishing. Spoofing a caller ID to match a victim’s number when calling their bank has also become commonplace, says Balasubramaniyan. . . .
Pindrop’s software has been trained to extract specific information from the line noise on a call. It can even estimate a caller’s location, thanks to the patchwork of different telecommunications equipment that links up the globe. “The telephone network has been around for a long time, so there are very different fingerprints for different regions,” says Mustaque Ahamad, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and chief scientist and cofounder of Pindrop.
Very interesting.
READER DAVE PARMLY sends this review of Act Of Valor: “Balls to the wall. It helps to speak their language, but I understood everything! The brass fountains on the slicks gave me a very warm feeling. Not the same as a main gun on a tank, but close. HIGHLY recommend.”
GORDON GEKKO: Unintended Role Model? Well, who are men more likely to emulate — a fearless leader, or a guy who’s thrown into an agony of introspection because he just slept with Darryl Hannah? I’m just sayin’ . . . .
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Are Unhappy Law School Graduates Just A Bunch of Whiners?
COLOR CUES: Study: Men Think Sex After Seeing Red Dress. I think women know this already.
A WEBSITE WHERE YOU CAN learn CPR.
HOW TO GET ORGANIZED in 5 easy steps.
ANNOUNCING THE PJM Nostradamus II Contest — Super Tuesday Edition. Win cool prizes! Impress your friends!
ECONOMISTS ON Deregulation Of The Legal Profession.
IN THE MAIL: Governing America: The Revival of Political History.
CBS NEWS: INFLATION: NOT AS LOW AS YOU THINK. “Forget the modest 3.1 percent rise in the Consumer Price Index, the government’s widely used measure of inflation. Everyday prices are up some 8 percent over the past year, according to the American Institute for Economic Research.”
I wanted to hate Obama’s UAW speech, but it’s undeniably powerful–aided by the White House policy of not dropping “g”s in the transcript, thereby eliminating one of the President’s most annoying, condescending tics. Note, however, Obama explicitly boasts that he’s helped fix Chrysler and GM “in the long term,” so they won’t “run out of money” in the future. Doesn’t that mean we can’t judge whether his bailout is a success based on current short-term appearances? You’d be successful in the short run too if the government gave you $80 billion dollars.
Toyota and Honda are coming back online after the tsunami and Southeast Asia floods crippled production. VW is building roomy American-style cars in Tennessee using $14.50/hour non-union workers instead of $28/hour UAW workers. Hyundai is expanding rapidly. Competition is going to be vicious–it’s widely believed there’s still overcapacity in the industry. A new oil price spike could crimp sales of high-profit trucks. Will GM still be making money in 5 years? Or, I should say, will GM still be making money building cars in the U.S. (as opposed to importing them from China) in 5 years? I’m skeptical. I don’t think deficient corporate cultures change that easily. Normally we rely on the market to simply kill them off.
That’s very old-fashioned. Now we place enlightened members of the apparat at the helm!
VIDEO: Dear 16-Year-Old Me: Don’t Go To Law School!
On the other hand, there’s this counterargument.
A STRIKING NUMBER, REALLY: Gallup: 72% of Americans Believe the ObamaCare Mandate is Unconstitutional. “Even a majority of Democrats, and a majority of those who think the healthcare law is a good thing, believe that provision is unconstitutional.”
PREDICTION: Why The U.S. & China Are Destined To Clash.
AT AMAZON, IT’S THE Kindle Daily Deal.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Rotten Economic News Continues to Stream Out of India.
WHAT CUTTING HEALTHCARE COSTS looks like. “The web is full of people who are at their wits end because the hospital just dumped Mom on them even though Mom can’t really walk or use the toilet. . . . One way to think about it is that we made a policy choice to save money by turning family and friends into parahealth professionals.”