YEAH, THERE ARE PROBLEMS IN THE COMMENT THREADS. We’ve got a solution coming.
Archive for 2015
August 3, 2015
KURT SCHLICHTER: Time For Conservatives To Get Medieval On The Liberal Establishment.
DONALD TRUMP: Harvard students ‘fraudsters and liars.’
I’M TAKING CREDIT FOR THIS: Obama Fires AFFH Warning Shot Over Hillary’s House. “Hillary Clinton’s suburban hometown of Chappaqua, New York has just become ground zero in the Obama administration’s efforts to nullify local control over America’s housing. Obama’s Justice Department has fired a powerful warning shot at Westchester County, New York, where the administration is conducting a dry run of its new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation.”
Dance, Obama, dance.
LOUISE MENSCH: How The BBC Smeared Tim Hunt.
LOVING ANIMALS, LOVING PEOPLE: “Narcissism or the golden rule; Cecil the lion or America’s murdered babies; to dance round the golden calf of our own egos or to worship in the temple of true love,” Andrew Klavan writes. “In the media these last couple of weeks, we’ve seen what choice the powers-that-be would have us make. Let’s make another.”
Read the whole thing.
EVERYTHING THAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICA IN ONE PHRASE: “While New York City riders have increasingly more choices in how to get from here to there with the rise of e-hailing apps — and lawmakers grapple with how to regulate the booming industry — the drivers who keep cars moving are stuck in the middle.”
As Michael Walsh writes “regulate” is the AP’s dog whistle for “how to put Uber out of business or, at the very least, fork over large sums of money to the city’s graft merchants in exchange for being allowed to operate a private business within the borders of the United States of America.”
RELATED: Tim Cavanaugh at City Journal on “California’s Uber Hunt:” “Uber’s very existence is an advertisement for the free market. It’s an obviously less-regulated initiative that has produced measurable, positive outcomes across a wide spectrum. No wonder people hate it so much.”
COLLEGE: AN OASIS OF TOTALITARIANISM IN A DESERT OF FREEDOM: Christina Hoff Sommers explains “How to survive the wacky gender politics on campus,” a survival guide for young people of all ideologies in a new five-minute long “Factual Feminist” video.
For a more detailed explanation of the campus reality lacuna and its origins, don’t miss Sommers’ new hour-long video interview with Bill Kristol on “how feminism went awry,” which concludes with an easy-to-follow introduction to the labyrinthine battles of GamerGate.
(Headline via Iowahawk.)
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Woman allegedly lures 11-year-old boy on Xbox.
CECIL VERSUS CECILE: HUMANENESS, BUT NOT FOR THE HUMAN: Or as G.K. Chesterton warned in 1920, “Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice. That is, both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience.”
THE NATION IS RUN BY KNAVES AND FOOLS: Video: Navy won’t rule out charges against Chattanooga defender.
RUNNING OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Moody’s: Puerto Rico in default after measly payment.
PHOTO ESSAY: THE BLEAK AND BLAND STORE FRONTS THAT CAPTURE THE GRIM REALITY OF LIFE BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN IN THE 1980s. In the 1980s, as Reason noted, Democrat house stenographer Arthur Schlesinger returned from a trip to Moscow in promptly went full Duranty:
“I found more goods in the shops, more food in the markets, more cars on the street — more of almost everything,” he said, adding his contempt for “those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink.” (By the way, Schlesinger, who has spent his life in praise of JFK’s adventures in Vietnam and Cuba but foamed at the mouth over every other American military action of the Cold War, proves Isaiah Berlin wrong: In addition to foxes and hedgehogs, there are also chameleons.)
Well, that’s one way to describe him. (Needless to say, never go full Duranty.)
FROM TIMOTHY SANDEFUR, more on that White House occupational licensing report, with some suggestions on concrete steps to take.
See also my USA Today column on the topic.
VIDEO: ANDREW KLAVAN AND BILL WHITTLE ASK, ARE THERE TOO MANY REPUBLICANS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT?
And who is being squeezed out by Trump sucking the oxygen out of the room?
SO IF WE’RE LIVING IN A SIMULATION, HOW DO I GET MY HANDS ON THE CHEAT CODES? Is Our Universe a Fake? “If you take seriously the theory of all possible universes, including all possible variations, at least some of them must have intelligent civilizations with enough computing power to simulate entire fake worlds. Simulated universes are much cheaper to make than the real thing, and so the number of fake universes would proliferate and vastly outnumber the real ones. And assuming we’re just typical observers, then we’re overwhelmingly likely to find ourselves in a fake universe, not a real one.”
Actually, if you live in a simulation, then there might genuinely be bugs, cheat codes, or Easter eggs to exploit. That might even provide a “scientific” foundation for things that look an awful lot like magic or religion.
UPDATE: Jim Bennett emails:
The real universe has all been converted to Type III Kardashev civilizations. We are in a sim, and the night sky is old wallpaper from before the stars were tamed. They don’t want to confuse us.
No matter how many resources they have, there will still be competition for them and a need to se them efficiently. Most of the people you see around you are wallpaper, too. They only have enough of a virtual computational capability to walk around. If you stop and ask a random stranger a difficult question, you notice they will look blank and pause a bit before answering? They are waiting to have the full personality kit downloaded to them.
Frighteningly plausible.
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Plus, deals on Hunting & Tactical Knives.
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I LIKE THIS APPROACH: PM Harper Appoints Conservative Blogging Law Professor to Canadian Supreme Court.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Clinton aide may have ‘delivered favors’ for friends, IG finds. “An inspector general probe suggested Huma Abedin leveraged her State Department job to benefit her two other employers at the time: the Clinton Foundation and a consulting firm called Teneo Strategies. Teneo Strategies was founded by a longtime aide to Bill Clinton, Douglas Band, and boasted the former president as a paid board member when it first launched in 2011.”
3 THINGS I LEARNED FROM THE NEW YORKER ABOUT FREE SPEECH: In an article published in the latest issue of The New Yorker, “The Hell You Say,” I learned:
1) “For many modern free-speech advocates, the First Amendment is irrelevant.” That’s news to me! The First Amendment sure seemed to help in this case settled less than two weeks ago for nearly a million dollars that the author didn’t seem to know about.
2) “Speech nuts, like gun nuts, have amassed plenty of arguments”—which I guess means we “speech nuts” are wrong? Because, what, we have a lot of arguments for free speech? How does that work, again? Interesting thinking from a journalist who relies on free speech for his living.
3) Since the ’90s, “restrictive campus speech codes have been widely repealed.” Wow, that’s an interesting and totally false claim. I guess the author missed the ten lawsuits brought by my organization in just the last year and half? Or that 55% of universities maintain wildly unconstitutional codes? Did he miss that Cal Poly Pomona settled with an animal rights activist less than two weeks ago after not only trying to restrict him to a tiny free speech zone, but also making him wear a speech badge even within that free speech quarantine?
Do the writers at The New Yorker not have access to Google?
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: In Pregnancy Announcement, Zuckerberg Opens Up About Couple’s Past Miscarriages.
