Archive for 2013
July 24, 2013
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Quick Cures, Quack Cures: Don’t Let Stomach Trouble Spoil Vacation.
AT AMAZON, Up to 50% off on Bushnell Binoculars.
WHEN’S THE LAST TIME YOU HEARD SOMEONE SLAM DOWN A TELEPHONE? Say Goodbye to the Tech Sounds You’ll Never Hear Again.
THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING: How Academia Turned George Zimmerman Into A Racist.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Six Reasons To Worry About NSA Surveillance. Key bit: “When surveillance programs are secret and the government lies about them, it is hard to have a debate about their value and their compatibility with civil liberties.”
THE ANCHORESS: Is Thinking What Makes Babies? Melissa Harris Perry Says So. “I’m sorry, but something about this woman just creeps me out.”
THE LAW SCHOOL JOB SEARCH: DESPERATE TIMES, DESPERATE MEASURES. Lawyer Begs For Job Via Mass Email, Includes Picture of His Toned Arms — Because Why Not?
I’M IN: Here’s What Your $5 Billion Space Yacht Could Look Like. But about five billion of you need to hit the tipjar first. . . .
A READER IN THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMUNITY SENDS THIS: Would Obama Use A Drone On Trayvon Martin? “It is striking to compare Obama’s deliberate and thoughtful commentary about the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin with the military tactic that will forever characterize his presidency: killing people with drones. The president posits that it is wrong to profile individuals based upon their appearance, associations, or statistical propensity to violence. By extension, he believes that, just because those characteristics may seem threatening to some, the use of lethal force cannot be justified as self-defense unless there are reasonable grounds to fear imminent bodily harm. But that very kind of profiling and a broad interpretation of what constitutes a threat are the foundational principles of U.S. ‘signature strikes’ — the targeted killings of unidentified military-age males.”
Obama doesn’t wait until somebody’s head is being pounded into the concrete, either.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What Guy Fieri and Jay Leno Have in Common.
“I COULD TELL SHE WAS A LEFTY FROM THE WAY SHE WROTE THE AMPERSAND:” Ann Althouse on “Proud Racist” Renee Vaughan of the Texas Campaign for the Environment:
It’s a harsh consequence to become — for all time, on the web — Renee “Racist and Proud” Vaughan. She’s apologized — sorry she got busted. You know how apologies are. But I doubt that she’d be sorry if her trick had worked and amplified the legend of the racism of Zimmerman and his defenders.
It’s entirely fitting that her name should be forever linked to the motto “Racist and Proud,” because that isn’t a lie. It’s true. It is racist to press the racism template onto the Zimmerman story, and it is done with full intent to stimulate feelings of race-based anxiety in vulnerable minds. That is heartless and evil.
Indeed.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
You just posted the link to Althouse about “Proud Racist” Renee Vaughan, and already her name has been pulled from the Texas Campaign for the Environment staff page. But you can still see her listed at this cached copy from earlier. That was quick!
Indeed. Perhaps they’ve let her go, as someone who’s publicly “Racist And Proud” might reflect poorly on their brand.
ANNALS OF “SMART DIPLOMACY:” Our Iraqi al-Qaeda Enemy Springs Our Syrian al-Qaeda Ally From Prison.
A BETTER QUESTION IS WHY THEY AREN’T LOWER ALREADY: Why Are Obama’s Poll Numbers Crashing?
FOUAD AJAMI on Egypt.
IN THE MAIL: A Failure of Civility.
CHARLIE MARTIN BUSTS FACEBOOK FOR HYPOCRISY. “Is saying ‘chigger’ really more offensive than the ‘Kill Zimmerman’ page that Facebook refuses to remove?” Chiggers are offensive — their bites itch — but the word chigger is only offensive to idiots. Of whom Facebook has a lot, apparently. Between their multiple privacy issues, their cooperation with NSA and the Obama Campaign, and this kind of crappy behavior, Facebook’s brand is fading, I think.
JAMES O’KEEFE KEEPS HIS EYE ON VOTER FRAUD: “I’m going to come to the 2016 presidential primary here in NH. And I’m going to expose the fact that I can be voting the names of dead people AGAIN.”
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Note to Paul Krugman: It Took More Than Markets to Ruin Detroit.
Does Krugman think that conscious deceit and fraud in the administration of the pension systems on which tens of thousands of people depend are just impersonal free market forces?
City and union officials and investment advisers have already been charged with fraud in the management of Detroit’s pension funds. The news that officials are also guilty of idiotic and irresponsible investment decisions should come as no surprise to emergency manager Kevyn Orr, or even to New York Times pundits.
Krugman is right that Detroit is essentially Ground Zero of the disruptive changes wrought by an economy in transition. But as this story and others like it show, it’s difficult not to conclude that the city is also the victim of rampant fraud and stupidity on the part of an all-Democratic political machine. Officials decided time and again not to fund the promises they made to city pensioners, and feds and regulators just as often declined to do anything about it. If something this egregious and destructive were happening in the private sector, Mr. Krugman would (rightly, in our view) be all over it, demanding that people go to jail and regulations be tightened. He would want to investigate the ties of influence that allowed serious financial wrongdoing to go on for years without serious oversight. He’d name names and pin shame on the wrongdoers and their political allies.
Detroit didn’t just wither in the face of changing economic conditions. It failed to adapt. Motor City is littered with dumb “recovery” ideas like the grandiose and badly named “Renaissance Center” in the dead heart of downtown. Race baiting politics by corrupt hacks who cynically invoked racial stereotypes and stoked hatred to build popular support for criminal rule (a milder, home-grown style of the politics of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe) made a bad situation much worse. The soft bigotry of low expectations meant that neither federal nor state prosecutors intervened until very late as the thieves looted the ruins. The civil rights establishment kept its eyes devoutly averted and its lips firmly sealed as a generation of fraudsters ruined the city, wrecked the pension system, turned city administration into a swamp of ineffective and corrupt failure, and denied a generation of schoolchildren any serious educational opportunity.
Is all this really “just one of those things?”
If the alternative is examining your premises and arriving at conclusions that New York Times readers may find uncongenial, then yes.
MEGAN MCARDLE: When Law School Is No Longer A Safe Bet. “In other words, the safe backup is no longer safe. In this, lawyers are going through what rust belt manufacturing workers experienced in the 1970s, middle management in the 1980s, secretaries in the 1990s, and journalism in the 2000s. I once sat on a panel with a man who had worked for the Los Angeles Times for many years. He fondly recalled the day he got the job. ‘And the best part,’ he told his brother, ‘is that I never have to look for a job again.’ I think he either got laid off, or took a buyout, in the early aughts. . . . Are we living in a society in which all but the most ruthless go-getters will be economically insecure? Well, probably. But welcome to the world most people live in — and have always lived in.”