IT’S COME TO THIS: ‘We Have No Morals, and We Will Attack You.’ Just remember that they lack even a shred of the moral or intellectual authority they claim. Remind them of that to their face. They find it quite traumatic.
Archive for 2013
December 29, 2013
CHANGE: Northern California counties revive an old idea for a breakaway state: Tired of city-centric government control, rural Northern California counties consider separation — just as their forebears did. California is too big, and should be divided into several parts.
FROM EMILY MILLER, A BOLD DEFENSE OF FAT-SHAMING:
Many Americans are making New Year’s resolutions to be healthier with diet and exercise. This is a good thing because obesity is one of the major health crises in America. Yet the political correctness police want us to stop using accurate terms in order to protect the feelings of fat people, which puts their lives at risk. . . .
The host of “America’s Next Top Model” is the queen of the P.C. police. She told Huffington Post that, “I don’t like the label ‘plus-size’ because it “doesn’t have a positive connotation.”
Instead, she insists the term “fiercely real” is used to describe the overweight women on her show.
You know what’s fiercely real? Telling the truth. But if it’s okay to shame people for not recycling, or smoking, or voting Republican — and you know they think that it is — the problem can’t be with the shaming part. So what’s so special about fat? Especially because, under ObamaCare, your weight is everyone’s business:
Overeating and not exercising is a choice that often leads to a multitude of health issues like diabetes and heart disease.
The obese are being coddled, while we all pick up the tab with higher health insurance costs to treat them.
They should be called exactly what they are — fat, overweight, obese — so they learn to make healthy lifestyle changes.
#getcovered.
BLOWBACK: A Republican and a Democrat from the House Intelligence Committee say the NYT got its Benghazi story wrong. “Schiff goes on to say that unlike the Intelligence Committee, the NYT didn’t have access to the things that were said by participants who didn’t know they were being listened to, only interviews with people who shape their story to their own interest. I was surprised that as a Democrat he went as far as he did in saying the NYT got it wrong.”
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS: GOP Establishment Remained Neutral on ‘Duck Dynasty’ Controversy. Not sure I blame them for that, actually, but worth noting who stepped up.
KYLE SMITH: How political correctness took down Navy SEALs.
THE END OF K-25.
THE GODS OF IRONY EITHER LOVE OR HATE AL GORE: Antarctic global warming expeditionists trapped in ice may have to be rescued by helicopter.
PUSHBACK: ‘Completely false’: Sources on ground in Benghazi challenge NYT report.
Fifteen months after the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the narrative of the attack continues to be shaped, and reshaped, by politicians and the press.
But a New York Times report published over the weekend has angered sources who were on the ground that night. Those sources, who continue to face threats of losing their jobs, sharply challenged the Times’ findings that there was no involvement from Al Qaeda or any other international terror group and that an anti-Islam film played a role in inciting the initial wave of attacks.
“It was a coordinated attack. It is completely false to say anything else. … It is completely a lie,” one witness to the attack told Fox News.
The controversial Times report has stirred a community that normally remains out of sight and wrestles with how to reveal the truth, without revealing classified information.
Fox News has learned that the attack on the consulate started with fighters assembling to conduct an assault.
“Guys were coming into the compound, moving left, moving right…and using IMT (individual movement techniques). … That’s not a spontaneous attack,” one special operator said.
“One guy was shooting, one guy was running. There are guys watching the gates. … The bosses on the ground were pointing, commanding and coordinating — that is a direct action planned attack.”
The community of operators in Libya that night and since includes the CIA, FBI, U.S. military, U.S. State Department and contractors working for the United States in a number of capacities. According to multiple sources on the ground that night, all the intelligence personnel in Benghazi before the attack and there now understand Al Qaeda is a significant threat in Libya.
They’ve been sitting on these guys hard to keep them quiet. Not sure it’ll work forever.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reminder: Hillary Clinton lied about Benghazi while standing in front of the victims’ caskets.
MOVIES: A Starship Troopers Do-Over that will hopefully be more faithful to the original.
A READER EMAILS:
Speed skater Kelly Gunther qualified for the Sochi Olympics today, despite suffering what easily could have been a crippling, career-ending injury in 2010. I was one of the folks who took initial care of her, and although she had one of the ruggedest fractures any of us had ever seen, she was one of the coolest, calmest, nicest patients you can imagine. A complete badass. But she’s still paying off her medical debt, and could use some help.
Noted.
OBAMACARE CLAIMS ONE MILLION SIGNUPS AND THE AP GUSHES. But most of those aren’t real enrollments because they haven’t been paid yet. And, of course, even a million is a small fraction of what they expected. But the AP is playing it up as a success, for the benefit of the low-information voters.
UPDATE: The New Republic:
The official enrollment number doesn’t tell us many things. It doesn’t tell us whether these people getting private (or public) coverage had insurance previously—or, if they had insurance, how much they were paying for it. It doesn’t tell us how many of these people have actually paid premiums, which is essential for coverage to take effect. It doesn’t tell us whether insurers have proper data on these people or what kind of access and protection the new coverage will give. It doesn’t tell us how many of the enrollees are in relatively good health or how many are in relatively poor health—or how that mix will affect insurance prices going forward.
In addition, the numbers do not appear to match the Administration’s own targets. According to internal projections, later reported by the Associated Press, officials expected more than 3.3 million enrollments by year’s end, with about 1.8 million of those coming through the federal website.
If they had better numbers, we’d know them.
HOW GOOGLE MADE RAP GENIUS DISAPPEAR. If nearly all of your traffic comes from one place, as they say, it’s not really your traffic.
UPDATE: Related: Edward Snowden doesn’t show up once in Google’s list of top 2013 searches.
MAYBE I SHOULD GET THAT GENERATOR: ‘Military-Style’ Raid on California Power Station Spooks U.S.
“These were not amateurs taking potshots,” Mark Johnson, a former vice president for transmission operations at PG&E, said last month at a conference on grid security held in Philadelphia. “My personal view is that this was a dress rehearsal” for future attacks.
At the very least, the attack points to an arguably overlooked physical threat to power facilities at a time when much of the U.S. intelligence community, Congress, and the electrical power industry is focused on the risk of cyber attacks. There has never been a confirmed power outage caused by a cyber attack in the United States. But the Obama administration has sought to promulgate cyber security standards that power facilities could use to minimize the risk of one.
At least one senior official thinks the government is focusing too heavily on cyber attacks. Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said last month that an attack by intruders with guns and rifles could be just as devastating as a cyber attack.
A shooter “could get 200 yards away with a .22 rifle and take the whole thing out,” Wellinghoff said last month at a conference sponsored by Bloomberg. His proposed defense: A metal sheet that would block the transformer from view. “If you can’t see through the fence, you can’t figure out where to shoot anymore,” Wellinghoff said. Price tag? A “couple hundred bucks.” A lot cheaper than the billions the administration has spent in the past four years beefing up cyber security of critical infrastructure in the United States and on government computer networks.
Maybe it was a dress rehearsal. Maybe it was a message. Maybe I should think again about buying that generator. . . .
More here.
ROBIN HANSON: A Missing Status Move. “Since trying to raise the status of an unaffiliated person below you is the least selfish looking way to try to change the status of others, we might expect this to be the least common variation observed. But we might also expect some people to go out of their way to do it, and to call attention to their act, in order to signal their devotion to the merit principle of status – the idea that we should all work to help make status better track merit. But I hardly ever hear of this.”
I SHALL CALL IT . . . COLOSSUS: Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience.
AT AMAZON, New Year, New You.
MICHAELANGELO’S GROCERY LIST, with illustrations for the benefit of an illiterate servant.
MISINFORMATION: The Devious Ad Campaign That Convinced America Coffee Was Bad for Kids. “Meanwhile, a growing body of research has shown that coffee can be good for your health, and as Smithsonian’s Stromberg reports, virtually none has demonstrated real ill-effects in children.”
A BRIEF HISTORY of the sled.
ACHIEVING THE IMPOSSIBLE: A Princeton Law School Rejection Letter.
ROGER KIMBALL: Benghazi: The New York Times vs. the Truth. “How are we to understand the Times’s latest entry into the contest to rewrite history for ideological fun and profit? My own sense is that it has less to do with salvaging President Obama’s tattered reputation — he is well on his way to winning the prize for the least competent and most destructive president in the history of the republic. No, Barack Obama is yesterday’s news, and unless and until he is impeached and removed from office he will be pretty much forgotten by purveyors of all the Newspeak fit to print. They have their eyes on another player in the Benghazi scandal, namely Hilary Clinton. If anyone emerged from that shameful episode more discredited than Barack Obama, it was Ms. Clinton. But time is passing fast, and there is a lot of remedial work to do if Hilary Clinton is to be suitably repackaged as the Democratic candidate for president. That ambition, I believe, stands behind this elaborate, breathtaking exercise in journalistic mendacity.”