IT’S COME TO THIS: Italian Government Says: We Must Bomb Libya To Make Sure Muslims Don’t Make Havoc In Italy. “Italy’s foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, is now calling for military airstrikes strikes against the Libyan coast in order to protect Italy from Muslim terrorists who want to enter the country through the coastal border, or bombard Italy with some sort of attack.”
The biblical references, however, would be better in PowerPoint.
SEE, FOR THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW ABOUT SMART DIPLOMACYTM THIS MAY SEEM LIKE A SERIOUS RISK: Russia and America: Stumbling to War. But for those of us who are familiar with Smart DiplomacyTM . . . it looks like a really serious risk.
AT AMAZON, deals galore in Training & Fitness.
And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals. When bad things happen, it’s good to have food.
Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Just remember, when winter storms are over, spring and summer storms are on the way.
SARAH HOYT: Take Your Nose Off My Fist. “If your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose, what if I move my nose and rest it on your fist, so you can’t move?” Well, that’s the whole point of “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and the like.
SO, POPULAR SCIENCE BASICALLY PUBLISHED THE SAME ARTICLE ON THE HUGO FIGHT THAT ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY HAD TO RETRACT: Now Vox Day is threatening libel and demanding a retraction. Is it reckless disregard to publish claims that another publication already had to retract?
UPDATE: From the comments: “I thought the demand was a joke. Then I read the PopSci article and couldn’t believe that such a thing was printed. It’s the type of batshit crazy stuff you’d see in a Berkeley alternative paper, not a science magazine.” The decline of Popular Science into a PC opinion mag has occasioned a mixture of dismay and schadenfreude among the PopMech crowd for several years, but this is a new low, I believe.
I WOULDN’T CALL HIM ANGRY, I’D CALL HIM DETERMINED: Justified star Nick Searcy: Hollywood’s angriest conservative. I met him in LA a couple of years ago and he seemed like a very nice fellow.
Meanwhile, Justified is on the DVD/Blu-Ray deal of the week at Amazon.
GYROCOPTER STUNT SHOWS GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE: When a left-wing, postal civil servant nut-job lands a gyrocopter on the Capitol Hill lawn to publicize the supposed need for campaign finance reform (i.e., to oppose Citizens United and free speech under the First Amendment), it seems pretty clear that D.C.–and the country in general–isn’t being adequately secured.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz is demanding a Secret Service briefing.
It’s good to have a hearing–especially about national security matters–but it seems to me that the Secret Service scandals under Obama’s watch are indicative of a larger theme of government incompetence/rulebreaking, and excessive liberal/progressive tolerance thereof, from the VA scandal to the DEA sex parties to the GSA Las Vegas parties to the EPA porn addict.
Congress would be better advised amending the Civil Service Act of 1978 to make it easier to fire incompetent employees and vigorously enforcing existing security measures, such as the Air Defense Identification Zone, rather than holding a bunch of dog-and-pony show hearings. It’s the toleration of lawbreaking and bad behavior that sends a signal that the U.S. government will look the other way.
This liberal attitude toward lawbreakers also helps embolden Iran and other bad actors around the globe.
35 YEARS LATER, an oral history of Airplane.
AT AMAZON, fresh deals on bestselling products, updated every hour.
Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.
Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.
And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal. The deals are brand new every day, so browse and save!
TAR AND FEATHERS MIGHT HELP, BUT SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE: ‘Free-range’ flap in Maryland fans flames of national debate on parenting. As with sexuality, we’re regulating parenting according to the obsessions of neurotic upper-middle-class white women. And that’s not working out very well.
HUH. I WONDER WHAT HE’S TRYING TO SAY WITH THAT? NY Times Frank Bruni: Huma “Clings” To Hillary “So Tightly, Their Relationship Could Be Called Marsupial.”
IN THE DOG-EAT-DOG OBAMA ECONOMY, PEOPLE WILL TRY ANYTHING TO SURVIVE: Workers Seeking Productivity in a Pill Are Abusing A.D.H.D. Drugs.
Reliable data to quantify how many American workers misuse stimulants does not exist, several experts said.
But in interviews, dozens of people in a wide spectrum of professions said they and co-workers misused stimulants like Adderall, Vyvanse and Concerta to improve work performance. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs or access to the medication.
Doctors and medical ethicists expressed concern for misusers’ health, as stimulants can cause anxiety, addiction and hallucinations when taken in high doses. But they also worried about added pressure in the workplace — where the use by some pressures more to join the trend.
“You’d see addiction in students, but it was pretty rare to see it in an adult,” said Dr. Kimberly Dennis, the medical director of Timberline Knolls, a substance-abuse treatment facility for women outside Chicago.
“We are definitely seeing more than one year ago, more than two years ago, especially in the age range of 25 to 45,” she said.
Elizabeth, a Long Island native in her late 20s, said that to not take Adderall while competitors did would be like playing tennis with a wood racket.
Well, there you have it.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE to get out of shape?
FROM CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’ TO CALIFORNIA NIGHTMARE: Joel Kotkin over at Daily Beast has a great piece explaining how California’s drought crisis illustrates the State’s devolution into a feudalistic society dominated by an oligarchy of super-rich liberals who’ve handcuffed the State’s ability to grow and prosper:
But ultimately the responsibility for California’s future lies with our political leadership, who need to develop the kind of typically bold approaches past generations have embraced. One step would be building new storage capacity, which Governor Jerry Brown, after opposing it for years, has begun to admit is necessary. Desalinization, widely used in the even more arid Middle East, notably Israel, has been blocked by environmental interests but could tap a virtually unlimited supply of the wet stuff, and lies close to the state’s most densely populated areas. Essentially the state could build enough desalinization facilities, and the energy plants to run them, for less money than Brown wants to spend on his high-speed choo-choo to nowhere. This piece of infrastructure is so irrelevant to the state’s needs that even many progressives, such as Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, consider it a “ridiculous” waste of money.
And there needs to be, at least for the short term, an end to dumping water into San Francisco Bay for the purpose of restoring a long-gone salmon run, or to the Delta, in order to save a bait-fish, the Delta smelt, which may already be close to extinct. This dumping of water has continued even as the state has faced a potentially crippling water shortage; nothing is too good for our fish, or to salve the hyper-heated consciousness of the environmental illuminati.
Kotkin concludes:
What we are witnessing the breakdown of a once-expansive, open society into one dominated by a small group of plutocrats, largely in Silicon Valley, with an “amen” crew among the low-information donors of Hollywood, the public unions, the green lobby, and wealthy real estate developers favored by Brown’s pro-density policies. This coalition backs Brown and helps maintain the state’s essentially one-party system. No one is more adamant about reducing people’s carbon footprint than the jet set of Silicon Valley or the state’s planning elite, even if they choose not to live in a manner that they instruct all others.
Yep–pretty much sums up the progressives’ approach to problems: Political correctness+ignorance+crony capitalism= preferred “solution.” Read the whole thing.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 710.
NEWSWEEK: The Bar Exam Is Unfair And Undemocratic. Actually, the requirement for three years of law school prior to taking the bar exam — which was quite consciously put in place to keep out the poor, and in particular Jewish immigrants — is what’s really unfair and undemocratic.
LIYA PALAGASHVILI: U.S. Regulations and Taxes Stifling Entrepreneurs. “According to a Gallup article, the U.S. has dropped to 12th among developed nations in terms of business startups. Economists also recently found evidence for this downward trend in business activity and attribute it to diminished incentives for entrepreneurs to start new firms.”
IS THAT REALLY A SPIDER, OR ARE YOU BEING MONITORED?: Today’s Wall Street Journal oped by a Harvard Law prof and a Brookings Institution fellow assert that we need a “new social contract” to handle the coming privacy and security threats:
You walk into your shower and see a spider. You don’t know whether it is venomous—or whether it is even a real spider. It could be a personal surveillance mini-drone set loose by your nosy next-door neighbor, who may be monitoring the tiny octopod robot from her iPhone 12. A more menacing possibility: Your business competitor has sent a robotic attack spider, bought from a bankrupt military contractor, to take you out. Your assassin, who is vacationing in Provence, will direct the spider to shoot an infinitesimal needle containing a lethal dose of poison into your left leg—and then self-destruct.
Meanwhile, across town, an anarchist molecular-biology graduate student is secretly working to re-create the smallpox virus, using ordinary laboratory tools and gene-splicing equipment available online. Not content to merely revive an extinct virus to which the general population has no immunity, he uses public-source academic research to make it more lethal. Then he infects himself and, just as his symptoms start, strolls around the airport to infect as many people as he can.
They’re undoubtedly right about the nature and extent of these threats, but their proffered solution is itself quite frightening:
All this challenges our security—and the way we think about the state itself. The liberal state was predicated on a social contract: We give up a certain amount of liberty to a government, which promises in turn to protect us. But that promise is becoming increasingly difficult to keep as more Big Brothers—and lots of Little Brothers too—come to command awesome technological powers.
For the state as we know it to endure, we’ll have to adapt some of the most basic organizing principles of governance, both domestic and international. . . . Still, today’s international legal order remains very much boundary-centered. It gives countries the power to legislate and enforce laws within their territories but allows relatively little latitude to regulate the conduct of foreign subjects abroad—and even less latitude to actually enforce their laws beyond their borders.
Threats that routinely span borders will force states to routinely reach across their borders through legislation that governs foreign conduct, surveillance of citizens in foreign countries, and even targeted killings. A growing number of states are already claiming that more of their laws should apply beyond their territories—for instance, by unilaterally defining cyberattacks or cybercrimes and by enforcing their domestic laws against foreign offenders acting overseas. To avoid turning the world into the Wild West, we must ensure that this increased unilateralism is checked by greater international cooperation: better governance for fragile states, more information-sharing among states and more effective means of enforcing laws where jurisdictions are unclear.
In other words, the liberal/progressive solution to this growing privacy/security threat is more government, more and greater transfer of power away to international bodies such as the U.N. They seem to have something in mind like a beefed up International Criminal Court, in which the U.S. has thus far wisely declined participation. One World Government, anyone?
No thanks. The last thing the U.S. needs to do is relinquish sovereignty over privacy and security matters.
How about this alternative solution: Beef up our military and national security surveillance, improve (voluntary) information sharing with our Allies, encourage the development of enhanced privacy and security devices for individual use, and enact tougher privacy laws to make sure that your nosy neighbor with that spider drone gets some time in the pokey.
MICHAEL WILLIAMSON HAS a new book coming out, set in the distant past.
Here is a post on his research.
HEY, MAYBE UNIVERSITIES SHOULD TRY THIS: Wal-Mart Cutting Layer Of Management, Raising Wages. I wish I could run a higher education bubble update with that.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Checking Charlie Hebdo’s Privilege. “Trudeau did not exactly say they had it coming, but he passed judgment on their sins — not the sin of blasphemy, but the sin of picking a politically unsuitable target for their jabs. . . . But on the contemporary left, the theory’s simplicity is becoming a kind of intellectual straitjacket. The Hebdo massacre is just one of many cases in which today’s progressives, in the name of overthrowing hierarchies, end up assuming that lines of power are predictable, permanent and clear. Which they are not, for several reasons.”
Yeah, if mocking savages who murder “blasphemers” is “punching down,” then I’m fine with punching down. Also shooting down, bombing down. . . .
Plus: “The terrorist’s veto on portrayals of Islam is itself a very real form of power, and as long as journalists who challenge it end up dead, the idea that they are ‘up’ and their targets are ‘down’ reflects a denial of life-and-death reality. Or, to take a related example, the hundreds of white women recently raped by Pakistani gangs in England’s industrial north were theoretically higher on a ladder of privilege than their assailants. But the gangs’ actual power over their victims was only enhanced by that notional ladder, because multicultural pieties were part of what induced the authorities to look the other way.”
Multicultural pieties are an ideological weapon, designed to paralyze societal defenders. They are not the unintended consequences of goofy good intentions, but deliberately honed tools of political power, wielded without good intentions of any sort.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.