Archive for 2014
August 1, 2014
CHARLES COBB: Which Cheek You Gonna Turn? “We’d already been stopped by the cops coming into town. They knew where we were staying which meant the Klan knew we were in town and where we were staying. . . . Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were missing and we assumed they were dead. We also thought that there was a statewide plan to get rid of us all or at least to kill as many of us as they could get away with killing. Now I was not an advocate of going out and killing white people but I did know how to use a gun and when it came down to thee or me, you were going to die before me.”
THE HEAVY HAND OF GOVERNMENT: Department of Agriculture cracks down on seed libraries. “She said the department indicated to her that it would continue to crack down on seed libraries that have established themselves in the state.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Many Parents Have to Pay Off Dead Kids’ Student Loans.
GIVEN ITS BEHAVIOR AND CULTURE, I FAVOR THE LATTER: Mark Tapscott: Can The IRS Be Fixed, Or Should It Just Be Abolished? At the very least, there needs to be enough institutional pain inflicted — and felt personally by the worker bees — that no one will risk something like this again.
IN RESPONSE TO YESTERDAY’S CAMPUS RAPE POLICY POSTS, reader Michael Murphy writes:
If my son were accused of rape and not apprehended by the police for lack of evidence but rather placed in an administrative collegiate tribunal I believe I would unleash the hounds of hell on the university and each and every individual participating in the kangaroo court. I would sue them for practicing law without licenses, I would sue them for slander, I would sue them for whatever I could pay a lawyer to think up to sue them for. And then I would sue the parents of the students participating in the kangaroo court and I would sue the accuser and her parents. And of course, the school.
I think a lot of people feel that way, and I think that colleges and universities have only the dimmest understanding of what they face.
NICE TALKING POINT, BUT IT WON’T FIX ANYTHING IF IT HAPPENS: CIA Confirms Staff Inappropriately Accessed Senate Investigators’ Computers; Udall Calls for Brennan’s Resignation. Fire a bunch of underlings and you’ll have a bigger deterrent effect.
JUSTICE: Underage student who was violently arrested by cops who mistook her case of sparkling water for beer gets $200,000 compensation. They should also be tarred and feathered, but this is a start.
ACTUAL HERO: Ebola-Stricken Doc Gives ‘Experimental Serum’ to Coworker.
An American doctor being treated for Ebola in Liberia has “taken a slight turn for the worse overnight,” according to Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical Christian Charity based in North Carolina.
An “experimental serum” to treat the virus arrived for the two infected Americans, but there was only enough for one person, according to Samaritan’s Purse.
Dr. Kent Brantly, who noticed his Ebola symptoms and quarantined himself last week, offered the dose to the other infected American, missionary Nancy Writebol.
I didn’t know we even had an experimental Ebola serum. E1101, or something. . . .
Related: NIH to launch early Ebola vaccine trial in September.
ZOMG! THEY’RE ERASING THE VAGINAS! THEY’RE ERASING THE VAGINAS!!! The New Republic: Don’t Let Republicans Erase Vaginas From Women’s Health.
Actually, I saw The Vagina Erasers open for . . . oh, hell, you can make up the rest yourself.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Greg Lukianoff & Robert Shibley: A Big Year In Campus Censorship.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: IRS Strikes Deal With Atheist Groups To Monitor Sermons And Homilies. Nothing creepy about that. . . .
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION: The Hill: Report finds detention center workers exposed to contagious diseases.
Some Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees have become sick after exposure to contagious diseases at detention facilities housing child immigrants, according to an inspector general report.
The report found “many” of the children detained after crossing the border needed treatment for communicable diseases, including tuberculosis, chicken pox and scabies. . . .
The report was issued Thursday by DHS Inspector General John Roth.
It highlighted one instance at a Del Rio facility in Texas in which Customs and Border Patrol employees reported contracting scabies, lice and chicken pox. At other facilities in Santa Teresa, N.M., and Clint, Texas, employees said they could have been exposed to tuberculosis.
“Unfamiliarity with bathroom facilities resulted in unsanitary conditions and exposure to human waste in some holding facilities,” the report concluded. “Contract cleaners and DHS employees are working to maintain sanitary conditions.”
The nine-page report is based on information gathered from 87 unannounced visits to 63 centers in the first party of July, and is expected to be updated in the coming months.
The facilities include Border Patrol checkpoints and holding facilities, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers and one holding facility in Artesia, N.M.
Along with the illnesses, the report found that the children are being held longer than the maximum three days because permanent shelter is not available. In one instance, a facility was not giving children enough food, but that was quickly corrected.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
LANA DEL REY, advertisement for heterosexuality? “She’s aggressively straight, tragically straight, sometimes even comically so. Where other female pop stars let you silently assume their heterosexuality, Lana sings like she’s marching in the straight version of a pride parade.”
WHAT THE HALBIG CASE SHOWS: Lefty Wonks Just Aren’t Very Good At Their Jobs. “For a movement that so prides itself on being the vanguard of wonky wonkery on wonkiness, Cohn’s admissions are rather stunning. It’s one thing to believe event X is more likely than event Y, but to write off event Y as unimaginable? To ignore entirely a specific provision of law that says event Y is eminently possible? That’s a special kind of wonkery right there. . . . His remarks are important, though, because they reveal the massive gap between what self-styled progressives wonks think they know and what they actually know.”
I’ve found that gap to be quite wide on quite a few subjects.
CROWDFUNDING an Iron Dome anti-missile for Israel.
MICKEY KAUS: How About Plan C? “The latest reporting suggests House Speaker John Boehner thinks a bit of tweaking will save his border bill — after it was (embarrassingly) pulled from the floor Thursday due to lack of majority support. . . . There is an alternative for Republicans worried about “doing nothing” about the border before they head home. That’s to drop all the risky policy provisions in the bill, making it a ‘clean,’ temporary money bill giving the Obama administration the temporary stopgap funding it says it needs.”
REMEMBER THAT POST-TUCSON CIVILITY BULLSHIT? New York Times Reporter: ‘Some People Are Deserving of Incivility.’ Well, Barro sounds a lot like Frank Constanza here: You think you’re better than me? Lots of people are better than you, Josh. Get used to it. I have.
July 31, 2014
BY “TECHNICALLY ILLEGAL,” THE WAPO MEANS “ILLEGAL.” Study: Hundreds of rules passed by Obama administration are technically illegal.
PHILADELPHIA STORY: Six cops charged with robbery, kidnapping, extortion.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Annals of Affirmative Action: NH professor hired for her race loses suit claiming racial discrimination.
HERE YOU SEE THE POWER OF THIS FULLY OPERATIONAL KAUSFILES: House GOP leaders spike border bill rather than see it defeated.
Related: Jeff Sessions, Not Ted Cruz, was crucial to blocking bill.
BLOGGER NEEDS HELP: Kate Berry (better known as Venomous Kate)’s husband has brain cancer. Donate if you’re so inclined. I gave a hundred bucks. Here’s the Facebook page.
NINA BURLEIGH IS NOT SO HOT on #WomenAgainstFeminism. “Women Against Feminism had, last time I checked, 16,013 followers on Facebook. Its tumblr is constructed of selfies of young women, dressed and posed like ads for DIY escort services, holding up bits of notebook paper on which they’ve scrawled screeds against feminism.”
“DIY escort services?” Burleigh is, of course, the journalist who said about Bill Clinton, “I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”
She’s also the authoress of a sophomoric psychosexual analysis of the Tsarnaev brothers. To a certain class of women in the media, it’s always about them, and their various mucous membranes.
Which, speaking of psychosexual theories, may explain Burleigh’s reaction to Women Against Feminism. Just check out the pictures; I’m sure these young women need to check their “prettiness privilege” or something. And I think that’s what’s going on with Nina Burleigh. When she, and her generation of feminists, could exercise sexual power directly (see above) it was all “you go, girl!” Now that they’re getting past that age, they’re falling back on the standard refuge of older women: Slut-shaming younger women who try to do the same. Older women have, of course, always tried to limit the sexual power of younger women, for fairly obvious reasons. This is just more of the same.
Good luck with that, Nina. Meanwhile, the vast majority of women, according to a Huffington Post poll, don’t consider themselves feminists — and only six percent consider themselves “strong feminists.” So outside the fem-journalist bubble, these women aren’t the outliers. You are.
UPDATE: From the comments: “For Burleigh and her crowd I propose a new hashtag: #shrewculture. You know what to do, Internet.”