REALLY, JEB? REALLY? Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush apologized to the people of France on Tuesday for making fun of their work week during last week’s Republican debate.
Nothing excites Republican primary voters like an apology to the French!
Archive for 2015
November 3, 2015
UH OH: Huge Crack Discovered In Earth In Wyoming.
John Manchip White, call your office!
WELL, THAT’S SAD: Guinness Tweaks 256-Year-Old Recipe — to Appease Vegans.
THIS WILL PREPARE THEM FOR BEING PLUGGED INTO THE MATRIX IN THEIR 20S. Many Children Under 5 Are Left to Their Mobile Devices, Survey Finds. I’d say this is better, because less passive, than being plopped in front of the TV. Playing outside would be better, of course, but children aren’t allowed to do that now because there’s a pedophile behind every bush.
AT AMAZON, gifts for the Organized Cleaner.
NOTICE WHAT PAUL EHRLICH IS COMPARING TO GARBAGE, Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal:
From “The Population Bomb” there came Zero Population Growth, an NGO co-founded by Mr. Ehrlich. Next there was the United Nations Population Fund, founded in 1969, followed by the neo-Malthusian Club of Rome, whose 1972 report, “The Limits to Growth,” sold 30 million copies. In India in the mid-1970s, the Indira Gandhi regime forcibly sterilized 11 million people. Then-World Bank President Robert McNamara praised her for “intensifying the family planning drive with rare courage and conviction.” An estimated 1,750 people were killed in botched procedures.
Power is seductive, as are fame and wealth, and it’s easy to see how being a scientific prophet of doom afforded access to all three. So long as the alarmists fed the hysteria, the hysteria would feed the alarmists—with no end of lucrative book contracts and lavish conferences in exotic destinations to keep the cycle going. It’s also not surprising that someone like Mr. Ehrlich, trained as an entomologist, would be tempted to think of human beings as merely a larger type of insect.
“My language would be even more apocalyptic today,” an unrepentant Mr. Ehrlich told the New York Times earlier this year. “The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is to me exactly the same kind of idea as, everybody ought to be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.” Notice what Mr. Ehrlich is comparing to garbage.
Meanwhile, Neo-Neocon spots Princeton’s Peter Singer, another utilitarian philosopher with otherwise similarly coldblooded Malthusian views blinking when confronted with a decision regarding someone close to him facing the end of life:
When Singer’s mother became too ill to live alone, Singer and his sister hired a team of home health-care aides to look after her. Singer’s mother has lost her ability to reason, to be a person, as he defines the term. So I asked him how a man who has written that we ought to do what is morally right without regard to proximity or family relationships could possibly spend tens of thousands of dollars a year for private care for his mother. He replied that it was “probably not the best use you could make of my money. That is true. But it does provide employment for a number of people who find something worthwhile in what they’re doing.”
…Singer has responded to his mother’s illness in the way most caring people would. The irony is that his humane actions clash so profoundly with the chords of his utilitarian ethic.
That doesn’t surprise Bernard Williams. “You can’t make these calculations and comparisons in real life. It’s bluff.” Williams told me, “One of the reasons his approach is so popular is that it reduces all moral puzzlement to a formula. You remove puzzlement and doubt and conflict of values, and it’s in the scientific spirit. People seem to think it will all add up, but it never does, because humans never do.”
Singer may be learning that. We were sitting in his living room one day, and the trolley traffic was noisy on the street outside his window. Singer has spent his career trying to lay down rules for human behavior which are divorced from emotion and intuition. His is a world that makes no provision for private aides to look after addled, dying old women. Yet he can’t help himself. “I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult,” he said quietly. “Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it’s your mother.”
“‘It’s different when it’s your mother.’ Duh,” Neo deadpans in response. “Singer’s ethics is an ethics for robots. And you better be careful, even when you design an ethics for robots, that you don’t end up creating something that makes things worse.”
As Stephens writes, “Modern liberals are best understood as would-be believers in search of true faith.” He’s not the first to notice the connection.
OBAMA CALLS SENATE ENVIRONMENT CHAIRMAN ‘CRAY’ FOR DOUBTING CLIMATE CHANGE:
Obama rattled off his standard policy stump, with special aim at Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) for bringing a snowball onto the Senate floor in February to argue that terrorism is a greater risk than climate change.
“And the planet is warming; 99 percent of scientists have said it’s warming. And we’ve got the Republican chairman of the Senate Energy and Environment Committee carrying a snowball into the Senate chambers to show that there is still snow and that climate change isn’t happening. I am not making that up. That’s what happened. That’s what happened. That’s crazy,” Obama said. “I was going to quote Kanye, but I can’t because this is a family audience. But it’s cray.”
That’s a reference to a lyric in Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “N*ggas In Paris”: “
that shit cray.”
President Camacho, call your office — and you too, Donald Trump; your presidency really would make the White House a classier place than it is now.
THE PERILS OF BAD GOVERNMENT: “The Peronists (named after former dictator Juan Peron) have had political control much of the last 70 years, and it has been a disaster for the country. In 1900, Argentina was one of the 10 highest-income countries in the world, having an estimated gross domestic product per capita of roughly 80 percent of that in the United States. Successive Argentine governments have squandered much of the wealth and potential of the economy, so now Argentina ranks approximately 57th in per capita income.”
As with all variants of socialism, impoverishing the nation to enrich cronies — all in the name of “fairness” and “equality.”
KATHY SHAIDLE: Nobody needs to tell me to boycott Quentin Tarantino:
Okay, it was faintly amusing, but Tarantino’s admirers insisted that this “meta” conceit—pop culture entities arguing about other pop culture entities—was somehow sui generis, and Tarantino, a genius.
I was the bore at every party pointing out that, in fact, the pilot for Cheers a full ten years earlier saw the soon-to-be-beloved bar regulars similarly quarreling about “the sweatiest film of all time.” (Cool Hand Luke won out, as I recall.)
And literally the same movie buffs who’d spent twenty years slagging Brian De Palma for ripping off Hitchcock were now hailing naked serial plagiarist Tarantino as the savior of cinema, knowing full well that he’d lifted entire scenes in Reservoir Dogs from Hong Kong director Ringo Lam’s City on Fire. “Isn’t that, er, ‘cultural appropriation,’ you guys?” I’d ask. “Even maybe a kind of ‘colonialism’?”
When cornered, I’d spit out a Tarantino-themed variation on David Lee Roth’s (unfair in retrospect) line about why rock critics loved Elvis Costello so much.
Oh, well. Good thing I never much liked parties anyhow…
Heh. I tuned out Tarantino after Jackie Brown in 1997 — but it was fun watching him make the rounds back then saying that he had grown up and decided to be a man before he began shooting that film.
Well, it must have sounded good at the time.
Update (11/4/14): At some point in the night, the article’s URL was apparently changed; link should be working now.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): P.E. teacher arrested on suspicion of sexual relationships with 2 students. “Lindsay Himmelspach, 33, was arrested Friday on suspicion of having unlawful sexual intercourse with two minors, communicating with them for the purpose of committing sexual acts and communicating with them to commit a lewd or lascivious act, according to the Butte County Sheriff’s Office.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON IN THE L.A. TIMES on How the widening urban-rural divide threatens America:
How did the new Californians deal with the drought? Not as in the past. Enthralled by a fantasy of a pristine 19th century California that has it all — from daily fresh organic tomatoes to schools of fish jumping amid white water, without understanding what it takes to grow those tomatoes — urbanites have argued that farmers can make do with less but wildlife needs ever more. Millions of acre-feet of precious stored water were released out of rivers as urban environmentalists hoped to increase the population of 3-inch delta smelt and to restore salmon to the upper San Joaquin River. Despite millions of acre-feet of released water, both fish projects have so far failed. Meanwhile, under pressure from environmental groups, the state canceled water projects such as the huge Temperance Flat reservoir on the San Joaquin River.
Common sense would have warned that droughts are existential challenges, the severity and duration of which are unpredictable. Droughts are times to bank water, not to release it for questionable green initiatives. Such common sense would assume, though, that millions of Californians had seen a broccoli farm or a Flame Seedless vineyard and had made the connection that what they purchased in supermarkets was grown from irrigated soil.
The founders and early observers of American democracy, from Thomas Jefferson to Alexis de Tocqueville, reflected a classical symbiosis, in which even urban thinkers praised the benefits of life in rural areas. Jefferson famously wrote: “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”
Read the whole thing — and then ponder how the typical bobo Los Angeles Times reader would respond to VDH’s harsh truths.
TRUTH REVEALED ABOUT ‘RAZOR BLADE’ FOUND IN LITTLE GIRL’S HERSHEY BAR:
It appears as though the little girl was not the only one to make a false report about dangerous objects in their candy bars.
In the greater Pennsylvania and New Jersey area, numerous reports were made to police, stating that sewing needles were found lodged inside Halloween candy:
t turns out that Robert Ledrew of Blackwood, who made the initial report, had fabricated the story as well, reports CBS3.
Ledrew, who posted needle-filled candy bars to his Facebook, claimed he was trying to teach his children a lesson to be careful with their candy. He was later arrested and charged with making a false police report.
Unexpectedly.
HOME RECORDING FLASHBACK: Recreating The ’80s Home Studio Experience.
To celebrate its 30th anniversary, England’s Sound on Sound magazine recreates the typical 1985-home recording studio, with a reel to reel analog recorder that record eight tracks of audio, a Roland drum machine, hardware synthesizers and a pair of Yamaha digital reverb units. (The article also includes a clip of a demo recorded on that gear. It doesn’t sound too bad!) Even if home recording isn’t your bag, baby (as legendary Ming Tea frontman Austin Powers would say), reading the article gives a real sense of how far technology has advanced in 30 years. Today a PC with software such as Cakewalk’s Sonar, Propellerhead’s Reason or Avid Pro Tools can record as many tracks as the PC’s RAM can handle (and that’s a lot), software synthesizers can replicate virtually any hardware synthesizer, and post-production tools such as Melodyne’s pitch correction program or Izotope’s RX5 audio restoration software would have seemed like science fiction in 1985.
I know — I was there; I had the same Roland TR-707 drum machine the Sound on Sound authors used, a pair of Yamaha SPX-90 digital reverb and processing units, and my hardware synthesizer was Yamaha’s CX5M music computer — which was an absolute beast to program, but was capable of some decent sounds; it was basically a Yamaha DX-9 synthesizer with a (very) rudimentary computer attached, and which used an existing TV as a monitor, Altair 8800 style. (Which isn’t pictured in this circa-2000 photo I took of the unit for a magazine article while it was in storage in my parent’s home):
Now if only songwriting and melodies had kept pace with the remarkable advancements in technology…
RECIPE: A Sandwich Straight From Heaven.
INSIDE THE DEVIL’S PLEASURE PALACE: My interview with Michael Walsh on his new history of the socialist Frankfurt School and its incalculable damage to America and the arts is online at Ed Driscoll.com.
MUGGERIDGE’S LAW BUSTS ZOMBIE: “I Predicted Europe’s Future — and Now I’m Depressed,” veteran Bay Area blogger Zombie writes today at the PJ Tatler:
Back in 2004, eleven long years ago, I made a satirical map of what Europe might look like in 2015, and posted the map on my site zombietime, along with a short satirical “news” article about how the EU was planning to intentionally hand the continent over to Muslim immigrants…Looking at it now for the first time in 11 years, I am disturbed at how I somehow managed to predict (albeit even as a joke) what would happen to Europe in 2015.
Of course I got many details wrong: I didn’t foresee that each nation would no longer merely import their own pet Muslims (Turks to Germany, Pakistanis to Britain, Algerians to France, etc.), but that it would turn into a pan-Islamic colonization of the whole continent en masse. Also, having started assigning humorous new names to the nations in central Europe, I ran out of ideas after a few minutes and just abandoned the theme halfway through, leaving most of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia with their original names. But interestingly, I did predict that it would be the Hungarians and the Swiss who, among all central European nations, would most actively resist the immigration — exactly as is playing out today. How could I have known that?
What was a joke in 2004 is a brutal reality in 2015, and even the progressive elites who encouraged this continental suicide now concede that the immigration crisis is only going to get worse, with no end in sight, as seemingly half the population of the Middle East is now in the process of relocating to a new homeland in Europe.
As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1989 article “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” the liner notes to his first novel, the Bonfire of the Vanities:
While Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn process of a state visit. Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.
And as Mark Steyn asked a decade ago regarding Europe’s future — and/or the distinct lack thereof in his London Telegraph article, “The strange death of the liberal West,” “The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what’s the point of creating a secular utopia if it’s only for one generation?”
A reminder that ultimately, the joke is on the EU — and as Zombie writes, it’s a very grim one at that.
Related: Steve Green proffers a timely juxtaposition, with both a new Star Wars and potential EU war on the short-term horizon:
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
● “How much is liberalism like a religion?”
—The subhead of Tyler O’Neil’s new article today at PJ Media exploring “The Theology of Liberalism.”
● “And since every good religion needs a devil, [the World Health Organization] has chosen bacon.”
The last sentence of Robert Tracinski’s new article today at the Federalist on “The WHO’s Bacon Fatwa And The New Puritanism.”
As H.L. Mencken famously defined the term, “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” which sums up the worst inner demons of the political correct, the socialist bureaucrat, and SJW rather well, doesn’t it?
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Meet The Most Popular Straight Woman On OKCupid.
She has a book out on online dating. But I think her secret is that she looks like Bettie Page.
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. Winter is coming.
T-MINUS 30 DAYS UNTIL BULLETS AND BOURBON IN TEXAS: We’ve sold out the suites, and only have one cabin left. We have a small number of rooms with king beds, and one room with two queen beds. Our sponsors have started to send us some terrific drawing items and I’ve just gotten my Texas TABC Server-Seller Certificate which will allow me to help Steve with his How to Make the Perfect Old Fashioned demonstration (plus it’s always good to have a fallback trade if this whole Internet media thing doesn’t work out…):
So with a month to go, click here to learn how to join Glenn, Roger L. Simon, Steve Green, Ed Morrissey, Kevin D. Williamson, Dana Loesch, and Mark Rippetoe December 3rd through 6th in Texas:
READER PEN PLUG: Let me put in a good word for reader Greg Shea’s Pen Company Of America. They make good pens.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: AALS, Law School Deans, Bar Official Respond To New York Times Editorial On The Law School Crisis.
I HOPE IT SPREADS TO AMERICA: A New Sexual Revolt Is Underway at British Universities; Could this be the start of an uprising?
George Lawlor, a student at Warwick University, started a firestorm when he wrote a piece for a student newspaper called The Tab, headlined “Why I Don’t Need Consent Classes.” Not only did he tell the “self-appointed teachers of consent” to “get off your fucking high horse”—even worse, in the eyes of the raunch-allergic feminists who staff Britain’s students’ unions, he posted a photo of himself holding a sign saying: “This is not what a rapist looks like.”
Cue global media outrage. Pretty much every liberal broadsheet in Christendom asked, “Well, what DOES a rapist look like?,” hinting that Lawlor, by virtue of the fact that he has XY chromosomes, does look like a rapist. A Guardian writer suggested every man in the world, including the Dalai Lama, should post photos of themselves holding a sign that says “This is what a rapist looks like.” Because, yep, any man might be a rapist. Maybe every woman in the world should post a pic of themselves with a sign saying, “This is what someone who commits infanticide looks like”? No, best not — the women who do that are a tiny minority, as are the men who rape.
A few days later, another Warwick student, Jack Hadfield, announced that he, too, would not be attending campus consent classes. We are witnessing “the demonisation of men,” he said, the promotion of the idea that “men are dangerous sex pests.”
Then came The Tab’s poll on consent classes. Sure, readers of The Tab, Britain’s spunkiest student newspaper, which often raises a very arched eyebrow at the buzzkilling shenanigans of student unions, might not be completely representative. Yet it’s striking that of the 4,440 people who voted in its poll, 2,708 said they were against consent classes, with 1,732 in favour. That’s 61 percent who don’t think they need to be told how to have sex.
The big question is: Why didn’t this happen earlier?
In a just society, the first administrators to roll out these policies would have been tarred and feathered.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Every Job Is A Public Service.
Two students borrow to earn nursing degrees. The one who works at a public hospital can pay an “affordable” percentage of his income for 10 years, then erase the rest of the debt under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF). The other works as a nurse at a private hospital. That’s not considered public service, so the debt has to be repaid in full. Every job is a public service, argues Alexander Holt on EdCentral. Under PSLF, anyone who works for a government agency or non-profit — payroll supervisor, computer tech, accountant — is a public service worker. About a quarter of the workforce qualifies. Nobody who works for a for-profit company — no matter what they do — can get the same debt forgiveness deal.
It’s as if it’s just a subsidy for groups of people who overwhelmingly vote Democrat or something.