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Archive for 2014
August 31, 2014
IT’S COME TO THIS: Baby Boomers Shocked To Discover They’re Old Now. I think there are still fresh wellsprings of denial waiting to be tapped, though.
A FITTING EMBLEM OF “SMART DIPLOMACY:” Libyan militia uses vacated U.S. Embassy in Libya as swim club.
WE MUST CLOSE THE TWITTER-ABUSE GENDER GAP: Men get more than twice as much abuse as women on Twitter.
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Also, deals on bestselling Beauty Products.
A LOOK INSIDE the secret compartments on airliners. Okay, this wasn’t news to me.
IN 2014, THIS IS PRETTY UNFORGIVABLY STUPID: Attorney Mike Meier Meets The Streisand Effect, Does Not Enjoy Experience. “Mike Meier’s legal threat was not foolish just because it exposed his behavior to more readers. It was foolish because it exposed him widely as a fool. People hire lawyers they trust. They want to be able to rely upon their lawyer’s advice, and to make difficult decisions based upon that advice. But who would trust the advice of a lawyer who would engage in a legal tactic that is so foreseeably self-destructive? If Meier had sent the DMCA notices on behalf of a client, I would call it rank malpractice and tell his client to consider suing him. In 2014, minimal legal competence requires an attorney to anticipate and understand the Streisand Effect.”
Here’s some remedial reading. Here’s the short version.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Seeing and touching a single synthetic molecular machine.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Watch A Robot Ride A Hovercycle.
IS A GREAT COMPANY a conspiracy to change the world?
Some thoughts on Peter Thiel’s new book, Zero To One: Notes On Startups, Or How To Build The Future.
YOUR FEEL-GOOD STORY OF THE DAY: Armed & dangerous: 89-year-old World War II veteran shoots armed robber.
The 89-year-old decorated World War II veteran foiled an armed robbery attempt Saturday afternoon at his Lake Park jewelry business that left a 44-year-old suspect with six gunshot wounds, but no loot.
Lewis was working behind the counter at The Jewelry Exchange at 900 N. Federal Highway when he was approached by a gun-wielding man around 3 p.m., according to an arrest report from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. Lewis said he immediately grabbed the suspect’s revolver and pulled out a .38-caliber handgun from his own pocket.
The two men wrestled for several minutes and fired shots at each other. Despite battling someone half his age, Lewis got the best of it. A man identified by the sheriff’s office as Lennard Patrick Jervis, a Miramar resident, was shot six times by Lewis, including four times in the chest. Lewis’ left arm was grazed by a bullet, but he was otherwise unscathed. . . .
Lewis said Jervis continued to fight with vigor, even with four gunshot wounds to the chest and one each to the wrist and leg. Large bullet holes remained in the store’s walls Monday and the area behind the counter where Lewis and Jervis fought hand to hand was trashed.
“People think because he’s 89, he’s frail,” said Vivien Bresnahan, Lewis’ girlfriend. “That irritates me because he’s anything but (frail).”
Often, the best defense is a good offense. But maybe Lewis should upgun to a .44? Plus: “Court records show that Jervis has been arrested 20 times in Miami-Dade and Broward counties since 1989.”
BUT YOU CAN TRUST THEM WITH YOUR MEDICAL RECORDS: Hackers stole security check info on at least 25,000 DHS employees. Good way to find promising candidates for subornation.
IN THE MAIL: Shattered Shields.
Also, today only at Amazon: Select Magazine Subscriptions for $5.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 479.
A FACEBOOK FRIEND WHO’S TOO MODEST TO WANT CREDIT HERE POSTED THIS:
Let’s accept, arguendo, that the outgoing DIA chief is right, and that we are now in an era of danger similar to the mid-1930s. How did we get here? It’s worth looking back into the mists of time — an entire year, to Labor Day weekend 2013. What had not happened then? It’s quite a list, actually: the Chinese ADIZ, the Russian annexation of Crimea, the rise of ISIS, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fall of Mosul, the end of Hungarian liberal democracy, the Central American refugee crisis, the Egyptian-UAE attacks on Libya, the extermination of Iraqi Christians, the Yazidi genocide, the scramble to revise NATO’s eastern-frontier defenses, the Kristallnacht-style pogroms in European cities, the reemergence of mainstream anti-Semitism, the third (or fourth, perhaps) American war in Iraq, racial riots in middle America, et cetera and ad nauseam.
All that was in the future just one year ago.
What is happening now is basically America’s version of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The President of the United States — supported to an exceptional extent by an electorate both uncomprehending and untrusting of the outside world — is Clarence the Angel, and he’s showing us what the world would be like if we’d never been born, Unsurprisingly, Bedford Falls is now Pottersville, and it’s a terrible place. Unfortunately we do not get to revert to the tolerable if modest status quo at the end of the lesson: George Bailey will eventually have to shell the town and retake it street by street from Old Man Potter’s Spetsnaz.
But the larger point here is not what’s happening, because what’s happening is obvious. Things are falling apart. The point is how fast it’s come. It takes the blood and labor of generations to build a general peace, and that peace is sustained by two pillars: a common moral vision, and force majeure. We spent a quarter-century chipping away at the latter, and finally discarded the former, and now that peace is gone. All this was the work of decades.
Look back, again, to Labor Day weekend 2013, and understand one thing: its undoing was the work of mere months.
You know, I was going to do a column with a John Birmingham reference in place of It’s a Wonderful Life, but it’s the same point, isn’t it? (Bumped).
OF COURSE. JERRY BROWN IS OWNED BY THE UNIONS. California appeals teacher tenure ruling.
Gov. Jerry Brown appealed a court ruling that struck down tenure and other job protections for California’s teachers, setting himself apart from leaders in some other states who have fought to end such protections or raise the standards for obtaining them. . . .
The move came a day after Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu finalized his June ruling that found five laws violated the California Constitution by depriving some of the state’s 6.2 million students of a quality education. He’d earlier said the system “shocks the conscience.”
Yeah, but for that to matter you have to have one.
YES, BUT POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS MEANT TO PREVENT JUST THAT: Louise Mensch: We have to face the truth to deal with Rotherham hell.
MICHAEL BARONE: Obama’s segue from constructive tax proposals to low-grade demagoguery. He used to at least manage the high-grade stuff.
AT AMAZON, the Labor Day Sale isn’t quite over yet.
RAMESH PONNURU: Republicans Misread Their Gender Gap Problem. “Women are slightly more liberal than men on issues of social welfare and war, and always have been. But gender influences voting much less than ideology, religiosity or marital status, as the survey itself confirms. And Republican candidates who win tend to have gender gaps about the same size as Republican candidates who lose. . . . In recent years, voters have thought Democrats had more to offer the middle class than Republicans did. If that changed, Republicans would find themselves doing better among both men and women. They’d almost certainly still have a gender gap, but they’d be more likely to win elections.”
TEXAS: Wendy Davis campaign tries, fails to deflect tax criticism. What difference, at this point, does it make?