FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY ROBERT GATES BRINGS THE PAIN: Ex-Pentagon chief calls for ‘not-Obama’ as next president.
Archive for 2015
December 10, 2015
TOO DUMB FOR COLLEGE: Ashe Schow: Student protesters jump the shark: Can’t even handle the name ‘Lynch.’
Student protesters at Lebanon Valley College have managed to encapsulate everything outsiders see as wrong with the current campus “revolution”: privileged students finding outrage in mundane things.
Students are demanding that (among other things) LVC administrators remove or modify the name of the “Lynch Memorial Hall” — not because the man it was named after was a racist, but because these students cannot handle the word “lynch.” Lynch, of course, is a term that means to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction. Thousands of African-Americans were lynched over three centuries.
But it is also the last name of about 130,000 people in the United States. Do these students faint when they come across “Twin Peaks” on Netflix (directed by David Lynch)? Do they have a panic attack whenever the U.S. attorney general (Loretta Lynch, who is also African-American) makes a statement? Do they crash their cars when they see a sign for a town named Lynchburg?
We mock the Victorians for their delicate sensibilities, but this is worse. And stupider.
TRUMP AND THE OVERTON WINDOW: “A boorish and crude demagogue, but useful for smashing the walls of the leftist prison all political debate is had inside.”
Speaking of which…
Shot: “Liberal Media Mock Europe’s Islamic ‘No-Go Zones’ Which Are All Too Real.”
—NewsBusters, January 24, 2015.
—The London Daily Mail, yesterday.
MARK ZUCKERBERG OVERCOME BY URGE TO REASSURE MUSLIMS THAT FACEBOOK IS A SAFE SPACE: “Did I miss a recent national outbreak of violence against Muslims in America? I know about the terrorist attacks by the none-too-secret Jihadis in San Bernardino, but I’ve missed the massive backlash of ‘Islamophobia’ that the media is always warning us about.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, EXPLOITATION OF THE WEAK EDITION: As Adjuncts Proliferate, University Presidents See Rising Paychecks. As I keep saying, the reason why academics think that business is cruelly exploitative is because academia is.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Nat Hentoff: ACLU Silence Enables Campus Anti-Free Speech Movement.
The Radio Television Digital News Association recently presented its new First Amendment Defenders Award to Tim Tai, a student journalist who was hired by ESPN to cover the anti-racism protests at the University of Missouri.
“Tai was confronted by University students, faculty and staff, threatening him with violence if he did not abandon his efforts,” the award citation reads. “Instead, he stood his ground and patiently asserted his First Amendment Rights to stand in a public place and report on the events around him.”
One would hope that the ACLU of Missouri issued a statement of support for Tim Tai at the time the video of this highly publicized event went viral on the Internet. But the ACLU of Missouri didn’t even acknowledge that the incident occurred. Instead, they issued a statement that “the ACLU of Missouri honors the University of Missouri students and faculty who displayed courageous and creative leadership …”
The next day, when MU’s student body vice president suggested on national television that the exercise of First Amendment rights creates a hostile and unsafe learning environment, the ACLU of Missouri remained silent. Two days later, when a Christian street preacher was physically assaulted by anti-racism protesters while speaking inside MU’s designated “Free Speech Circle,” the ACLU of Missouri remained silent.
The same pattern repeated itself in Connecticut during the same month. When Yale University student protesters interrupted a free speech symposium on campus, and spat on attendees trying to leave the venue, the ACLU of Connecticut remained silent. When Yale instructor Erika Christakis urged tolerance of offensive viewpoints, and was verbally abused and harassed until she resigned her teaching position, the ACLU of Connecticut remained silent.
The ACLU, these days, is only about civil liberties for leftists.
December 9, 2015
AT AMAZON: Deal Of The Week: Outlander Season One: The Ultimate Collection on Blu-Ray. It comes with a flask.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Choose The Form Of Your Destructor.
JAZZ SHAW: While we fight over Trump, France closes 3 mosques, finds hundreds of weapons. They’re a year or so ahead of us.
HE MEANS HORMONAL BIRTH CONTROL: Milo Yiannopoulos: Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.
SOME GOOD ADVICE HERE: 5 PR OPPORTUNITIES IN WAKE OF UT DIVERSITY CRISIS. The trouble is, the reason why people perceive diversity offices as havens of micro-controlling types akin to a left-wing version of the preacher in Footloose is because, well, they generally are.
FBI DIRECTOR: Obama’s Full Of Crap.
President Obama does not receive briefings about the FBI’s investigation into the personal email setup Hillary Clinton used as secretary of State, bureau Director James Comey said on Wednesday.
As a result, Obama should have no way of knowing how the inquiry is proceeding, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee, despite the president’s apparent dismissal of concerns about impropriety.
We all know that Obama says whatever he wants, without worrying about the facts. If the facts turn out differently, well . . . expiration date reached!
WHAT IN THE WORLD is happening to Chipotle?
AUSTIN BAY: Finding The Assassin Dagger In The Haystack:
Six years ago, a retired FBI agent told me that some of the best sources for stopping a domestic terror attack are tips from citizens. American Muslims provide good tips on potential Islamist-inspired terrorists. They know their community. Counterterrorism isn’t cops on the beat, but there are similarities.
That made sense to me. In 2003, I had a cup of coffee with an Arab Muslim friend of mine. I asked him for an update on The Quest — his long pursuit of a permanent resident green card. He sighed and then said, softly, “There are 25,000 Arab Muslim men in my group (green card applicants), (and) 24,991 of them are like me, Austin. We know what it is like — to live in fear of terrorists, criminals, dictators. We left to come here … to get away from them. But the other nine? They are very dangerous people.” He paused and then added, with unmistakable resignation, “I guess that’s just my lot in life.”
I heard the resignation and told him I could vouch for him. No need. His attorney told him to continue to work hard and wait.
I asked him where he got the number “nine.” I knew he meant potential terrorists and spies. He thought for a moment and then replied: “Well … it seems about right. There are not many (violent Islamist extremists). … They’re crazy, you know.” We explored his gut estimate. If nine out of 25,000 is right, then we’ve got 90 in 250,000. Ninety heavily armed fanatics can seize a city. Yes, “very dangerous people.”
He eventually secured his green card. Then he went to Iraq as a translator. He is very proud of that service. A few weeks ago, he wrote me an email and said he expects to become a citizen at some time next year.
We need to do a better job vetting immigrants. That isn’t bigotry; that’s sanity. However, loyal, responsible immigrants strengthen America. Americans who happen to be Muslims are — like my friend — a key line of defense in stopping Islamic State-influenced terror attacks.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing much about this administration — or the Homeland Security administration generally — that inspires the necessary confidence.
“NO SECRET REMAINS FOREVER:” Wired seems to have identified the mysterious creator of Bitcoin as Australian polymath and autodidact extraordinaire Craig Steven Wright, in part using documents he may have leaked himself. (Gizmodo, which also received some documents, concurs.) No sooner had the Wired story hit the web than Australian police hit Wright’s house, in what they said was an ongoing tax investigation. Read the Wired story here.
SCOTT WEILAND’S EX-WIFE IN ROLLING STONE: ‘DON’T GLORIFY THIS TRAGEDY:’
We don’t want to downplay Scott’s amazing talent, presence or his ability to light up any stage with brilliant electricity. So many people have been gracious enough to praise his gift. The music is here to stay. But at some point, someone needs to step up and point out that yes, this will happen again – because as a society we almost encourage it. We read awful show reviews, watch videos of artists falling down, unable to recall their lyrics streaming on a teleprompter just a few feet away. And then we click “add to cart” because what actually belongs in a hospital is now considered art.
It’s a powerful article — and I wonder if the editors at Rolling Stone understand what a rebuke it is to the entire culture they’ve been promoting since their launch, from former contributors and drug fiends Hunter Thompson and William S. Burroughs to regular cover stories on self-destructive poster children such as Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse and Keith Richards (who’s staggeringly lucky to still be alive and performing) to covers in which rock star looks and death wish urges combine to glorify something far worse than mere self-destruction:
It’s Jann’s world; we’re just living (and in Weiland’s case dying) in it.
DOES EXERCISE help keep our brains young?
The fittest men showed little or no activation in their right hemispheres; they needed only their left hemisphere for the task.
In terms of attention and rapid decision-making, their brains worked like those of much younger people. They also were quicker and more accurate in their keystrokes, indicating that they attended and responded better than the less-fit volunteers.
Over all, Dr. Soya said, the results suggest that “higher aerobic fitness is associated with improved cognitive function through lateralized frontal activation in older adults.” Fit older people’s brains require fewer resources to complete tasks than do the brains of older people who are out of shape.
Of course, this study was observational and does not prove that fitness changed the men’s thinking, only that fit men had different brain activation patterns.
The study also did not look at exercise habits, only aerobic fitness.
Next, do a correlation with leg strength.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Former U.S. State Department Employee Pleads Guilty to Extensive Computer Hacking, Cyberstalking and “Sextortion” Scheme.
JERRY BROWN: ‘NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE COERCIVE POWER OF THE CENTRAL STATE:’
PARIS—One of the goals of Californians who traveled to Paris for climate talks this week was to showcase green-energy businesses that are succeeding in the state.
But on Monday it was the “coercive power” of government for which Gov. Jerry Brown was seeking credit. . .
“You do have to have, at the end of the day, a regulation, a law,” he said. “Progress comes from well-designed regulatory objectives that business then follows.”
Because government is always so much smarter than everyone else.
It gets better:
Later, at the site where world leaders are meeting to negotiate a climate pact outside of Paris, Brown urged a small crowd to “never underestimate the coercive power of the central state in the service of good.”
“You can be sure California is going to keep innovating, keep regulating,” the Democratic governor said. “And, shall I say, keep taxing.”
Controversially, many green-energy businesses benefit from government subsidies or policies to reduce greenhouse gases.
At a news conference Monday evening, business owners chuckled when asked if their companies would be viable without government support.
K.R. Sridhar, chief executive officer of the fuel cell company Bloom Energy, said, “There’s almost nothing in the post-industrial age, no business, no industry that ever got started or ever flourished without policy support, without subsidy and without federal support.”
Remember: You didn’t build that.
But at least for now, you can flee:
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Choose The Form Of Your Destructor.
ANGELA MERKEL NAMED TIME MAGAZINE’S ‘PERSON OF THE YEAR,’ AP reports:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been named Time’s Person of the Year, praised Wednesday by the magazine for her leadership on everything from Syrian refugees to the Greek debt crisis.
“Not once or twice but three times there has been reason to wonder this year whether Europe could continue to exist, not culturally or geographically but as a historic experiment in ambitious statecraft,” Time editor Nancy Gibbs wrote. “You can agree with her or not, but she is not taking the easy road. Leaders are tested only when people don’t want to follow. For asking more of her country than most politicians would dare, for standing firm against tyranny as well as expedience and for providing steadfast moral leadership in a world where it is in short supply, Angela Merkel is TIME’s Person of the Year.”
In response, Donald Trump snarked:
“I told you Time Magazine would never pick me as person of the year despite being the big favorite,” Trump tweeted. “They picked person who is ruining Germany.”
And he’s right on that — Merkel is taking Germany “Down a Suicidal Path,” as Victor Davis Hanson wrote in late October:
In terms of tough leadership, Germany’s iron lady, Merkel, had trumped even the reputation of Britain’s late former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. In world opinion, Merkel was deemed just as decisive as Thatcher, but with a far stronger global hand to play and with a more popular embrace of social justice.
In sum, the new post–Cold War Germany was evolving into the leader of the West, especially during the American recessional from world affairs orchestrated by President Barack Obama.
No more. In just the last six months Germany in general, and Merkel in particular, have imploded.
Merkel’s disastrous decision to open the borders of Germany — and with them Europe’s as well — is proving both selfish and suicidal.
Hordes of migrants are swarming into Europe. Merkel’s naïveté cannot be dressed up in her professed humanitarianism, given that many of the migrants are young, single men from the Middle East who pour into Europe not as political refuges but as opportunists eager for European social largesse.
Aside from the costs, and the religious and social tensions that hundreds of thousands of young unemployed Muslim males will create in Europe, there are lots of other hypocrisies in the German migrant situation.
Germany was far tougher in its fiscal negotiations with kindred European nation Greece than it has been with Middle Eastern migrants.
Merkel logically lectured Greece that its reckless borrowing could not be allowed to undermine the European Union. But isn’t that selfishness similar to what Germany is now doing? With Merkel urging other European nations to take in waves of migrants and thereby inviting a flood of refugees across the borders of its neighbors, Germany’s far poorer neighbors will bear much of the cost.
All of which can be summed up in a single word that was on everyone’s lips last month: Paris.
Which Merkel — or at the very least those with her “what could go wrong?” mindset — deserve more than a little blame for. In the 1920s, Henry Luce, the center-right founder of Time magazine, originally conceived his “Man of the Year” category as a way of recognizing that individuals making choices drive history, and sometimes via quite disastrous decisions, as Jonah Goldberg noted in 2006, after Time wimped out by choosing you! — and me! — and everyone! — as their “Person of the Year,” rather than plastering Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on their cover:
The intellectual flubber of Time’s decision is manifest on many levels. Though some argue that Time was patting the American people on the head for voting the way they wanted in the last election, the more obvious explanation is that Time’s editors didn’t want to offend anybody. “If you choose an individual, you have to justify how that person affected millions of people,” Richard Stengel, Time’s newly vintaged managing editor, told the Associated Press. “But if you choose millions of people, you don’t have to justify it to anyone.”
Well, isn’t that convenient. Heaven forbid a news editor do something controversial that would have to be defended on the merits. Spare the delicate flowers such hardship!
Stengel added that if Time had to choose a real person to be Person of the Year, it would likely have been Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “It just felt to me a little off selecting him,” Stengel said.
One might wonder if it felt “a little off” to past Time editors who awarded the Man of the Year award to Hitler in 1938 or to Stalin — twice, once in 1939 and again in 1942 — or to the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.
But the answer is that it didn’t bother the old editors, not really. Because Time’s Man of the Year award was originally conceived as something other than the Mother of All Puff Pieces.
Time founder Henry Luce swam against the stream of Marxist determinism which held that history unfolded according to cold, impersonal forces. He believed individuals — i.e. great men and women — matter. He said the original award should go to the person “who most affected the news or our lives, for good or ill, this year.” That was the point of picking Charles Lindbergh as the first Man of the Year — because he, and he alone, seemed to be ushering in a New Age. Hitler was MOY in 1938 because he might have been ushering in a Dark Age. You are Person of the Year because the editors of Time want to live in a Feel-Good Age where everyone is empowered (hence Time’s rationalizations about the people-power of the Internet).
Of course, Time has punted many times before. For example, in 1988, beating the fierce competition, Earth was named “Planet of the Year.” No doubt that choice sounded very clever in the editorial-board meeting.
Time’s 2001 decision, naming Rudy Giuliani person of the year, was even more telling. This was a true profile-in-cowardice moment. There was no intellectually defensible standard for suggesting that the able mayor affected the news or our lives more than Osama bin Laden, who at the time seemed at least to be the Gavrilo Princip of the 21st century. (Princip was the fellow who launched World War I, which in turn launched World War II and the Cold War.)
While Henry Luce wouldn’t recognize very much these days at the magazine he founded other than its logo, give Time credit for getting their choice this year right, even if they can’t see the reasons why themselves. And for passing over the massive PR blizzard that would have come from putting The Donald on there. Or to bring this post full circle:
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BEFORE SCOTUS AGAIN: Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the second round of litigation in Fisher v. University of Texas. As Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog explains:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has twice upheld the Texas policy — once before the Supreme Court examined it in 2013, and once on the orders the Court gave it in that decision. Each time, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the program makes only limited use of race, and serves the university’s interest in a racially and culturally diverse student body in a way that obeys Supreme Court mandates.
In this second time around, Fisher has put forward both a quite modest claim, and a more ambitious — even momentous — claim.
The simpler challenge is that the Fifth Circuit disobeyed the Supreme Court’s 2013 order to reconsider the Texas policy using a rigorous “strict scrutiny” approach. The majority in the two-to-one ruling, the new petition argued, gave the university a pass, allowing it to control the defense of the admissions program on the university’s terms, without the majority boring deeply into the actual use of race. . . .
The case may well turn on the narrow meaning of just how strict “strict scrutiny” really is, in the context of race-conscious affirmative action programs. Fisher’s more interesting substantive claim is that UT-Austin’s affirmative action program cannot survive “true” strict scrutiny because it is not “narrowly tailored” to further the “compelling” government interest in diversity.
More specifically, she asserts that the State of Texas’s “Top Ten Percent Law”–which grants automatic admission to UT-Austin to anyone graduating in the top ten percent of their high school class–is sufficient, alone, to further the University’s goal of achieving racial diversity. But UT-Austin does not stop there; it also additionally considers race as a “plus factor” in its decision whether to admit students who do not graduate in the top ten percent of their class. Is this additional, race-conscious admissions program truly “necessary” to further the university’s interest in having a racially diverse class, or is the race-neutral Top Ten Percent Law sufficient to achieve such racial diversity?
According to Denniston’s post-oral argument analysis:
The case, it would appear, now comes down to three options: kill affirmative action nationwide as an experiment that can’t be made to work, kill just the way it is done at the Texas flagship university because it can’t be defended, or give the university one more chance to prove the need for its policy. . . .
There was no doubt on Wednesday that there are three and probably four Justices who have grown deeply skeptical, if not hostile, to affirmative action in general. That would include, for sure, Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. (Although Thomas did not ask any questions today, his views on the issue are well known.). A fourth could be Chief Justice John J. Roberts, Jr., who openly fretted about whether the time would ever come when race would no longer be used in affirmative action on college campuses. He noted that, twelve years ago, the Court had predicted that there would be no need to use race in college admissions within twenty-five years, but about half of that time is now gone.
Equally, there was no doubt that there are three Justices clearly on the university’s side — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would have upheld the plan two years ago and was the lone dissenter in that ruling, and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
As Justice Kagan has recused herself from the case (due to her past involvement in the Solicitor General’s office), the deciding fifth vote–to prevent a 4-4 tie (which would effectively affirm the Fifth Circuit’s opinion)–is once again Justice Anthony Kennedy, who held his cards close during oral argument.