YEAH, BUT I STILL WISH WE HAD ONE OF THOSE: Ta-Nehisi Coates: The United States needs more than a good president to erase centuries of violence. Instead, we’ve got Obama, the Worst President Ever.
Archive for 2015
September 13, 2015
ANALYSIS: MOSTLY TRUE. The Arab Press Reacts to the European Refugee Crisis: “We are a nauseating nation.” “We too could be like them and our countries could be like their countries, which do not persecute the citizens and do open their arms to the victims of natural and political disasters. Yes, we could be like them if we thoroughly examined our barbaric political regime, our backwards social order, our obsolete curricula, our media that operates without professional norms, and our religious establishment that interprets the texts in a barbaric fashion, inciting to hatred and to abuse of the other, even members of the Islamic faith! This situation clearly mandates a velvet revolution that the educated [sector] must launch.”
EVERYTHING IS POLITICIZED NOW: Secretary of the Navy Insults Marines, Dismisses Study on Gender Integration.
THE ENTERTAINMENT VALUE WOULD BE HIGH: Embrace the Suck: Real Possibility of a Trump vs Sanders Race in 2016. And either would be better than Obama has been. But then, so would my cat, and I don’t own a cat.
I LIVE OUT IN THE COUNTY, SO SHE’S NOT MY MAYOR, but Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero says that Chilhowee Park isn’t a park, so the guns-in-parks law doesn’t apply:
State law states that someone with a gun carry permit can bring a weapon to a state or city park, if it’s not close to a school.
The Tennessee Valley Fair, however, is making it clear: No weapons will be allowed at the annual event, which begins Friday and runs through Sept. 20. The ban at Chilhowee Park will include permit-holders.
The city of Knoxville and the fair operators argue the law, which Gov. Bill Haslam signed into law in April, does not apply in the case of the fair. Despite the objection of some cities, including Knoxville, lawmakers chose to over-ride local bans to keep guns out of city parks.
According to the city, the park is an “entertainment and public assembly” facility to which the law doesn’t apply.
Besides being kind of cheesy, this is also indicative of an unwholesome prejudice. People with carry permits are very law abiding, and demonstrably less likely to shoot someone improperly than are cops. I suspect that Rogero, who’s a Democrat, is just playing politics here. I don’t know if a court would grant a TRO or not; she probably waited until the last moment with that in mind.
Just remember this when you hear that elected officials have to follow the law. In practice, they pick and choose.
AS DIVERSE AS AN OBAMA SENIOR STAFF MEETING WHEN VALERIE JARRETT IS BUSY ELSEWHERE: Stephen Colbert’s Writing Staff: 17 Men, 2 Women. And all 19 of the Late Show’s writers are white. As racially diverse as a Bernie Sanders rally!
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Of course, separation of church and state, which ‘Progressives’ love to proclaim, gets a little tricky when the state is your church, and the head of State your God.”
—Scott Ott, in the latest edition of PJTV’s Trifecta.
SO MY AUGUST COLUMN ON the European immigration mess was ahead of the curve. Let me just repeat: “The good news is that immigration concerns aren’t just a problem for the United States. The bad news is that they’re a problem for the entire First World. What to do about it? Nobody seems sure. But although open borders are a nice idea, the fact is that countries differ in economics, in culture and in politics. No country can accept and assimilate an unlimited number of outsiders, and when the number exceeds a threshold, a backlash is certain. Thresholds are being exceeded, and backlashes are building, all over the world.”
UPDATE: Germany Creates A Disaster.
THE INSTA-WIFE: A Brilliant Plan Or A Piece Of Crap? You Decide.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: With Website to Research Colleges, Obama Abandons Ranking System.
President Obama on Saturday abandoned his two-year effort to have the government create a system that explicitly rates the quality of the nation’s colleges and universities, a plan that was bitterly opposed by presidents at many of those institutions.
Under the original idea, announced by Mr. Obama with fanfare in 2013, all of the nation’s 7,000 institutions of higher education would have been assigned a ranking by the government, with the aim of publicly shaming low-rated schools that saddle students with high debt and poor earning potential.
Instead, the White House on Saturday unveiled a website that does not attempt to rate schools with any kind of grade, but provides information to prospective students and their parents about annual costs, graduation rates and salaries after graduation.
On the one hand, this is probably a better approach. On the other, this change is almost certainly because the higher education industry is a key core constituency for the Democrats. And, one suspects, a key source of six-figure speaking fees in Obama’s post-presidency.
JONAH GOLDBERG: In the Left’s Story Of Government, The State Is Always The Hero.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Cancer patient gets 3D printed titanium ribs and sternum.
I HAVE RAISED A SWEET, THOUGHTFUL, ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS MONSTER—AND SOON I WILL BE FREE: Glenn already linked to the jaw-dropping article titled “Bidding My College-Bound Son Good Riddance,” written by a veteran Bay Area journalist/environmentalist activist last night, but it’s worth another look for a variety of reasons.
First, modern-day radical environmentalism isn’t that modern anymore — RFK ran on doomsday environmental ads in 1968, and the first “Earth Day” in 1970 was chockablock full of nightmare predictions that never came to pass. As Fred Siegel wrote in 2010 at City Journal in “Progressives Against Progress,” as a result of Earth Day and the like:
Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim.
And beginning in 1970 with Walter Cronkite and CBS, environmentalist crankery has been very much approved by Big Business for decades. In 2007, GE, which makes a considerable amount of money selling light bulbs, urged its customers for the sake of Gaia to turn off the lights in their homes via the TV network it owned at the time – during halftime of a Sunday night Cowboys-Eagles NFL game whose stadium was bathed in a zillion watts of klieg lights. A couple of years later, American Express was praising would-be California “Dam Busters,” AKA, the people who helped bring you California’s current water crisis. In 2009, James Lileks linked to the following jaw-dropping MasterCard ad:
If they’d intimated that Mastercard can be used to placate your humorless little eco-scold, no one would have minded much. But no: the child is making his father a better man. It’s nice to see that Dad exists in a state of such unearthly perfection that the only means of betterment consist of abjuring incandescent lighting for pig-tailed CFLs, right? Alas: dad is a scoff-law who lets the tap run, uses doubleplus ungood bulbs, and doesn’t correct the clerk when the food is put in a cornstarch bag, perhaps because he’s thinking about his job, the cutbacks and layoffs, the tiresome daily scrum of adult life. He works hard, but of course he could work harder – he has a part-time job so he can stay at home with his son. Mom’s full-time. He downshifted so someone would always be there when Ethan came home from school. This makes him an okay man, I guess.
But he could be better. He could buy a florescent bulb. On credit.
If I had a Mastercard, I’d print this ad out frame by frame and sent it along with my shredded card.
Afterwards, Lileks embedded a frame from the film version of 1984, in which early on in the movie, a nine-year old uniformed “Youth League” member whose father works alongside Winston in the Ministry of Truth blurts out to Winston, “You’re a thought criminal!” Later in the book, after his sister turns in dad for being a thought criminal, he and Winston sit in the white porcelain abattoir-like Ministry of Love awaiting their fates. As dad ponders how many years in a prison camp he faces, he’s proud that he raised that he raised such a good little citizen of Oceania!
‘It was my little daughter,’ said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. ‘She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.’
How many parents allow their kids to hector them over environmentalist minutia without reminding them who is in charge of the family? Even if you do, how do you raise a kid knowing that they’ll be sent off to school where they’ll hear endless variations of Al Gore-style eco-crankery from their teachers? And assuming you don’t personally buy into the corporatist mantra that “we only have [fill in number of years] to save the planet” — or eco-doomsday is sure to follow — how does a parent counteract such programming?
WAIT, SO HOW WILL I PAY MY TAXES? IRS To Refuse Checks Greater Than $100 Million Beginning In 2016.
AT AMAZON, Fall deals on Men’s Jeans and Clothing.
MORE BLOWBACK FOR REP. JARED POLIS (D-CO): His local paper calls his idea to expel innocents a “spectacularly bad idea.” Well, yes. Plus, an actually good idea:
Far from making college campuses less rigorous in their adjudication of such allegations, we propose making them more rigorous by referring all sexual assault allegations to local police and prosecutors for adjudication by the criminal justice system. If a student is guilty of sexual assault, that student should face a penalty worse than expulsion — that student should be subject to all the sanctions of the criminal justice system.
Over and over, college campuses have demonstrated a lack of expertise in pursuing such allegations. It is not, after all, what faculty and administrators are trained to do. Tales abound of athletic departments covering up for star players.
Sexual assault is a serious problem, in society and on college campuses. The answer is not to throw up our hands at the prospect of adjudication and delete all the messy steps between allegation and punishment. The answer is to preserve individual rights through due process, assign such cases to institutions trained to investigate and prosecute them, and punish those found guilty to the fullest extent of the law.
Yes, but that doesn’t support a Hillary-friendly “war on women” narrative, or create more jobs and power for campus (and federal) educrats.
NUCLEAR POWER DOESN’T DEPEND ON WEATHER. I’M JUST SAYIN’. Low Winds In America Cut Wind Power Output. “In the future we won’t just have drought years and hot or cold years. We will also have low wind years. Wind drought? We need a term for it.”
THIS HEADLINE IS DECEPTIVE: One-Third of Americans Would Be Fine with the Military Taking Over.
Here’s the actual question: “Is there any situation in which you could imagine yourself supporting the U.S. military taking over the powers of federal government?”
Is there any situation in which you could imagine yourself supporting is not really the same as would be fine with. Also, it’s an online poll. But the story, by Claire Landsbaum, seems mostly about taking shots at Republicans.
Meanwhile, I’m reminded of The Anchoress’ thoughts on a different kind of coup.
SPYING: Library Will Vote On Giving Patrons Access To Anonymous Tor Browsers.
Hiding from surveillance is a good way to get noticed by law enforcement in the US. Tor, is a free browser tool that sends traffic from a users’ computer through several different servers and machines, making it unclear where the request originated. In light of the revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about massive government surveillance of the internet and telecommunications, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire became part of the Tor network. This meant some traffic from anonymous users on the Tor network would pass through the computers in New Hampshire, regardless of their point of origin. The Kilton library joined Tor in July. Shortly thereafter, the received an email from the Department of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security contacted the local police department, and police and city officials had a meeting with the library in mid August. In response, the library shut down its Tor nodes. Next week, on September 15th, the Library is voting whether to turn its nodes back on. Apparently, when making their case, police officials discussed the benefits that anonymous browsing can provide to criminals.
First, that’s stupid. Second, so is relying on Tor for any sort of serious anonymity, as it’s not trustworthy.
WELL, THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: Germany ‘to reinstate border controls’ as country struggles with influx of refugees.
“At this moment Germany is temporarily introducing border controls again along (the EU’s) internal borders. The focus will be on the border to Austria at first,” he says. “The aim of these measures is to limit the current inflows to Germany and to return to orderly procedures when people enter the country,” he said, adding that this was also necessary for security reasons.
Two thoughts: First, when you tell people from poor countries that the doors are open to rich countries, a lot more will show up than you expect. Second, when your foreign policy is dominated by virtue-signaling and conspicuous displays of “compassion,” it will end badly.
Related: The consequences of Merkel.