THIS IS SERIOUSLY GETTING UGLY: Boko Haram commits another mass abduction of girls in Nigeria.
Archive for 2014
May 6, 2014
YUPPIE, GET YOUR GUN: Harking back to the partisans of World War II, young Ukrainians train for irregular combat against the Russians.
MAYBE IT WASN’T A WITCH HUNT: Could It Be that J Edgar Hoover Wasn’t as Paranoid — or as Despotic — as the Former FBI Director Is Commonly Depicted?
FROM L NEIL SMITH:a request for help for a production of 1776 which is one of my favorite musicals. (And touchstones — regular commenters at According to Hoyt often tell me to “Sit down, John.”)
Help Independency Productions take the best stance we can against the onrush of statism, and turn the 21st century into the century of the Bill of Rights, by financially supporting our production, this June, of the musical comedy/drama _1776_, directed by Giovanni Angelo Martelli. Donate via PayPal at or if you prefer, send checks and money orders to Rylla Cathryn Smith, 736 Eastdale Drive, Fort Collins, CO 80524. All contributions gratefully received.
DEMOCRATS ADMIRE THIS RACIST & EUGENICIST: A newly rediscovered video of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger is revealing just how racist this pioneering eugenicist and hero of the political left was. Concludes Arina Grossu in her Washington Times op-ed, “a total of 64 percent of U.S. abortions [are] tragically performed on minority groups. Margaret Sanger would have been proud of the effects of her legacy.”
Hillary Clinton received the Margaret Sanger Award in 2009, declaring enthusiastically, “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously . . . . I am really in awe of her.”
But of course it’s the Republicans who are waging the War on Women, particularly minority women, at least according to the DCCC.
DREAM MACHINES: The concept cars that helped shape the future.
UP IN THE SKY, IT’S: New ‘Meteor Storm’ from Comet May Light Up Night Sky This Month.
NATIONS UNDER STRESS REVERT TO TYPE: “Turning Back the Clock” in Russian.
DESTROYING OUR RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY: Sober woman arrested for drunk driving after deputy falsifies report. When we can no longer trust figures of authority to be honest (and we’re getting there) we’ll be just like every banana republic.
DO WE NEED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR JOURNALISTS?: Apparently so. Only a paltry seven percent of journalists surveyed are Republican. I’m sure Eric Holder or the EEOC will be appalled by this lack of diversity and initiate disparate impact threats forthwith. Unfortunately, as much of a discrete and insular minority Republican (or conservative) journalists are, they aren’t a “protected class” under our Constitution or civil rights laws. Ideological diversity isn’t the “kind” of “diversity” our civil rights laws protect– as Condoleeza Rice and other conservatives on campus have found out.
WHY BENGHAZI MATTERS: “Benghazi matters because it was and is a matter of national honor,” Michael Walsh writes. “And the men and women currently in charge in Washington have no honor.”
Read the whole thing.™
THE IDEA ALL CULTURES ARE EQUALLY TO BE RESPECTED IS INSANE: Pakistani Girl Forced to Marry as Compensation for Uncle’s Crime. Real war on women. And little girls.
WHERE DOES DEEPA KUMAR, THE RUTGERS PROFESSOR who led those First Amendment-crushing protests against Condoleeza Rice, go to celebrate her victory? Why, the Kremlin’s favorite TV outlet in the U.S., Russia Today, of course. Kumar teaches journalism and “media studies” (whatever that is) at Rutgers and is the author of “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire.” Can you guess which country is the villain in Kumar’s rendering? That’s just one of the Kumar gems unearthed by my Washington Examiner colleague, Chuck Hoskinson, who humbly refers to himself as a “student of the Middle East.” Don’t believe him, he’s an expert.
DURANTY PRIZES AWARDED: Roger Simon has the initial breakdown of the MSM “winners” this year, included the coveted Rather Award for “lifetime achievement in mendacious journalism.” I have video and audio of the PJM/New Criterion-sponsored event last night, which I’ll be editing this weekend with the goal of appearing sometime next week at Ed Driscoll.com.
RECOMMENDED READING: My old friend and award-winning author Scott William Carter has published ten books, and he really outdid himself with his neo-noir novel Ghost Detective. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t like it. Somebody in Hollywood should snap up the film option.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
The rise in suicide has been accompanied by a loss of the moral questions that once surrounded it. G. K. Chesterton was one of our last full-throated critics of suicide. His insistence that suicide is immoral sounds strange to our individualistic ears: “Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin,” Chesterton wrote: “It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.” Chesterton goes on to say that the act of suicide is selfish: “A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything.” It would be difficult to imagine anyone writing such a polemic today. We do not consider suicide the moral catastrophe that people like Chesterton once thought it was.
— “The Catastrophe of Suicide,” by Emily Esfahani Smith in the New Criterion. Read the whole thing.
U.S. JOURNALISTS LESS SATISFIED, SEE NEGATIVE TREND, reports Agence France-Presse:
American journalists have become increasingly dissatisfied with their work and see the industry moving in the wrong direction, a new survey shows.
The Indiana University survey, which follows up on research first conducted in 1971, found that as newsrooms are shrinking, journalists see themselves having less autonomy and that job satisfaction is on the decline.
The 2013 survey shows that, compared with a decade earlier, “the updated demographic profile of US journalists reveals that they are now older on average, slightly more likely to be women, slightly less likely to be racial or ethnic minorities, slightly more likely to be college graduates (and) more likely to call themselves Independents politically.”
Released late last week, it found 59.7 percent say that journalism in the United States is headed “in the wrong direction.”
The median age of full-time US journalists increased by six years from 2002 to 47.
As Virginia Postrel has mentioned several times over the years, the Web-induced contraction of old media, coupled with journalists’ near-monolithically left-leaning politics, can sharply skew their reporting on other issues, particularly those which are economic-themed.
SO MUCH FOR SAVING $2,500 PER YEAR: John Merline over at IBD breaks down the high cost of getting Obamacare up and running:
Add it all up, and ObamaCare’s startup cost is at least $6.7 billion. Even if every one of the 8 million enrollees pays their premiums all year, the cost is more than $837 per sign-up.
And if recent surveys are correct that just a third of enrollees previously lacked coverage, ObamaCare will have cost $2,500 for each newly insured person.
Yikes. And this doesn’t even count the double-digit increases in health insurance policies fueled by Obamacare’s cornucopia of benefit mandates.
A DEFINITE LACK OF WORKPLACE DIVERSITY: Just 7 percent of journalists are Republicans. That’s far fewer than even a decade ago.
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THE ROAD TO SERFDOM – NOW WITH E-Z PASS! Obama’s highway tolls take cash, time and privacy, Glenn Reynolds writes in his latest USA Today column.
THE TEA PARTY, REVISITED: Sean Trende’s interesting take over at RealClearPolitics. I tend to agree with his assessment. Division within the Republican ranks isn’t a new phenomenon (we are a diverse bunch, after all), and tea party candidates have been about as good as establishment candidates, in terms of avoiding gaffes. Plus tea party candidates have the benefit of being outsiders, not professional politician-wanna-bes, which is always refreshing.
STEINBECK’S DUST BOWL GNOMES: Making sense of Depression-era folk-Marxist myths.