WAIT, YOU’RE REALLY TELLING ME HILLARY LIED AGAIN? Inconceivable! Hillary’s outrageous effort to whitewash the VA hospital crisis. (You’d think with all the practice she gets she’d be better at it, no?)
Archive for 2015
October 28, 2015
IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS: They’d have no standards at all. Everyone Freaked Out When the Bush Sisters Did It. Here’s the Response to Malia Obama Partying…
SO, WAIT, YOU’RE SAYING HILLARY LIED? Bill Clinton’s Confession to Friend: ‘I Thought DOMA Was Right at the Time’.
ONE OF THE CLASSICAL BLUNDERS: The other is never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Obama just fell for a classic Russian ruse.
MORE STEAK FOR ME: Bacon Panic + Poor Math Skills = Easy Money. Brought to you by the same jokers who pushed “Diet for a Small Planet.”
THIS, OTOH, LOOKS LEGIT: Study: Red Meat Takes Years Off Of Cow’s Life.
October 27, 2015
TEACHING CONSENT, POLICING INTIMACY: Consent classes turn relationships into business transactions. This insertion of government-directed meddling into adult sexual relationships violates Lawrence v. Texas.
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Plus, big savings on cleaning supplies and store fixtures at Amazon Industrial.
THE PERILS OF “CONSENT ACTIVISM:” Telling potential date you’re a “consent activist,” know Chief of Police, and “don’t get creepy” inexplicably produces loss of interest:
Keenan herself, though, sometimes finds it hard not to go on the offensive. She’s so used to laying down the nitty-gritty details of consent that she’s been known to open romantic interactions with a spiel that feels straight out of a student handbook.
She animatedly tells a story about a recent Tinder rendezvous: “One time, I agreed to meet with this guy at 8 or 9 at night. Before we met, I said to him, ‘This is the work I do, I know the chief of police … so, don’t try and get creepy; I know all my rights.’ And five minutes later, he was like, ‘Actually, I’m really not OK with how you just assume I’m a bad guy. And I get very bad vibes from that, so we shouldn’t hang out anymore.’”
“I was in a rage. He was a total fuckboy about consent,” she said.
No. You were. Also, “fuckboy” is sexist hate-language. Report yourself to the Office Of Equity and Diversity immediately.
UPDATE: From Ashe Schow, some backstory. “It is easy to misinterpret text messages. Both sides here might have misinterpreted what the other was saying. Ultimately, as Keenan said, it was best they didn’t meet up — no harm, no foul. But it is another example of the importance of openly questioning what is being presented in the media, as even though New York Magazine was trying to write a positive story about these women, this quote still came across much differently than Keenan intended.”
THE CRONYISM CAUCUS WINS ANOTHER ONE: Ex-Im Bank gets boost in rare floor vote that flouts GOP leadership.
Lawmakers voted 313-118 to reauthorize the bank, which was blocked from taking on new business on June 30 after conservatives blocked a measure to keep it operating. The House vote occurred after a bipartisan group of lawmakers garnered 218 votes on a discharge petition, which forces a floor vote on a bill even if the House Speaker won’t call for one.
“We showed that Democrats and Republicans can work together to overcome the obstruction caused by an ideologically driven minority that put its own uncompromising principles over the needs of the American people,” said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who is the ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee.
Everybody who voted for this should be primaried.
TEETH WHITENERS: NOT BAD FOR YOUR TEETH, BUT ADDICTIVE?
Dr. Kinane said his only concern with whiteners is that many people – including his daughter – seem to get “addicted” to super-white teeth.
“Pure white is not what natural teeth look like,” he said.
I’ve noticed this. Now half the world looks like Ross in that episode of Friends.
WELL, GOOD: How Yelp plans to clean up one of the restaurant industry’s most dangerous flaws.
Yelp, the popular Web site that lets consumers review everything from bistros, to body shops to yoga studios, quietly began running an experiment in San Francisco over the past week. The pages for a small fraction of the city’s restaurants on the site now bear a new consumer alert.
“Following a recent inspection,” the pop-up box says, “this facility received a food safety rating that is in the bottom 5% locally, and is categorized by inspectors as ‘poor.'”
The notice is modeled off warnings that Yelp virtually slaps on businesses it suspects of soliciting fraudulent reviews. But this one, targeting all of the restaurants in that bottom 5 percent according to San Francisco health inspectors, could have a more far-reaching effect.
Harvard Business School’s Michael Luca is tracking what will happen next. With Yelp’s cooperation, he’s looking for two effects: change in how consumers behave, and change in how restaurants do. Will diners shy away from these places, even when their poor health grades clash with tasty reviews? Will the restaurants themselves be shamed into upping their scores? The latter result would be much more significant.
Here in Knoxville, local media cover bad health inspections, and it definitely has an effect.
ACTUAL WASHINGTON POST HEADLINE: “As large animals disappear, the loss of their poop hurts the planet.”
I’m not sure which James Taranto-approved category this should be filed under: “With DNC In Mind, City Bans Urine, Feces,” or “Everything Seemingly is Spinning Out of Control.” Or perhaps James Lileks’ observation that “When art contains shit, we should take it at its word.” But in any case, I hope Jeff Bezos is proud of the current state of his newspaper.
HOW TO BE MORE ATTRACTIVE TO WOMEN: Have An Attractive Girlfriend. “Because physical attractiveness is an important cue for female mate-value (link is external), the perceived quality of a man’s female partner can be determined to a large extent by how physically attractive she is. Due to positive assortative mating, this can have a bearing on a man’s own mate-value. Some studies have demonstrated that mate copying effects are stronger when the female partner of a man is physically attractive than if she is less attractive or perceived as unattractive (link is external). In some research I personally conducted, a man’s mate-value was elevated simply by having physically attractive female friends. . . .Based on the research presented above, a man looking to romantically attract women might do well to surround himself with beautiful women. And if one (or all) of them behaves favorably toward him, all the better.”
‘HALLOWEEN’ AND THE DEATH OF THE SLASHER FILM: At Acculturated, Sonny Bunch posits that the young people in a dystopian future genre has largely displaced the teen slasher movie at the box office:
The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent: These are all series in which teenagers are thrown into horrifying, life-or-death experiences not because they are bad or immoral but because their parents have created a world that’s not worth living in. If the slasher flick exists as a way for adults to express their concern over the uncontrollable behavior of the nation’s kids, then the teen dystopia serves as a means for adults to worry about the world they’re leaving behind.
Whereas the slasher flicks concerned themselves with adolescent issues—who’s screwing who; who’s getting the beer—the teen dystopia concerns itself with a much more middle-aged host of concerns: economic inequality and environmental degradation and class structures, oh my!
To be fair, Meryl Streep’s Hillary-esque answer at the climax of last year’s dystopian film The Giver sums up both genres rather well: “When people have the power to choose, they choose wrong. Every single time.”
MISSION (NEARLY) ACCOMPLISHED:
Shot:
PALO ALTO, Calif.— At Stanford University, they still talk of the day nearly a year ago when some 500 students, on a march with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, came up with a slogan for the next generation.
The students were celebrating a new course at Stanford, one that would stress the contributions of minorities and women to Western culture, and, they chanted: ”Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go.”
—”In Dispute on Bias, Stanford Is Likely To Alter Western Culture Program,” the New York Times, January 19, 1988.
Chaser:
Tens of thousands of migrants — reminiscent of the great southward and westward treks of Germanic tribes in the late fifth century, at the end of the Roman Empire — are overwhelming the borders of Europe. Such an influx should be a reminder that the West attracts people, while the non-West drives them out, and thus should spark inquiries about why that is so. But that discussion would be not only impolite, but beyond the comprehension of most present-day Westerners, who take for granted — though they cannot define, much less defend — their own institutions.
No one claims that such mass immigration into Europe is legal. No one wonders what happened to the fossilized idea of legal immigration, much less the legal immigrant who went through what has now been rendered the pretense of bureaucratic application for legal entry into Europe. Germany, which lectures others on law, is lawless.
In theory, Westerners have the power to stop the mostly young males from the Middle East from swarming their borders, but in fact they apparently lack the will. Or is it worse than that? Without confidence in their own values, much less pride in their accomplishments, are they assuaging the guilt over their privilege by symbolic acts of undermining the foundations of their own culture?
—“Is the West Slip, Slip, Slipping Away?”, Victor Davis Hanson, yesterday, adding, “Infrastructure, the rule of law, and civility erode — and yet people are not sure why and how their own changing (and pathological) individual behavior is leading to the collective deterioration that they deplore.”
Whatever happens to Europe facing not just a massive influx of “refugees,” but also Vladimir Putin’s concurrent saber rattling, the battle-hardened image of Europe’s defense ministers certainly inspires confidence that they’re more than ready to face the Continent’s looming existential struggle.
TEXAS CONCEALED HANDGUN ASSOCIATION JOINS LIST OF BULLETS & BOURBON SPONSORS: If you haven’t signed up yet — and with the event in early December, the clock is ticking — here’s all the information you need to do so.
THE NEW YORK TIMES’ NAIL SALONS SERIES WAS FILLED WITH MISQUOTES AND FACTUAL ERRORS. Reason magazine’s Jim Epstein explains why it matters:
A two-part series in The New York Times on nail salons has brought sweeping changes to an industry dominated by Korean and Chinese immigrants. Written by reporter Sarah Maslin Nir, the series, which ran in print on May 10 and 11, focused on the plight of nail salon manicurists in New York City and Long Island. It depicted a community of immigrant workers paid shockingly low wages to beautify the fingers and toes of affluent New Yorkers while inhaling toxic fumes that cause miscarriages and cancer.
Nir, who spent 13 months on the project, said in an interview that she initially pitched the story as an “expose,” adding that the “great lesson” readers should come away with is that there’s “no such thing as a cheap luxury.” The only way “you can have something decadent for a cheap price is by someone being exploited.” (My Reason colleague, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, wrote a critique of Nir’s series shortly after it was published.)
The “great lesson” here is actually something different. I’ve spent the last several weeks re-reporting aspects of Nir’s story and interviewing her sources. Not only did Nir’s coverage broadly mischaracterize the nail salon industry, several of the men and women she spoke with say she misquoted or misrepresented them. In some cases, she interviewed sources without translators despite their poor English skills. When her sources’ testimonies ran counter to her narrative, she omitted them altogether.
Read the whole thing, which is a classic example of the late Michael Crichton’s Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect in action. If the Times has botched this story as badly as Epstein writes, imagine what other stories its hard left biases have muddled.
LESSONS FROM a decade of IT failures.
AT AMAZON, Sale on Kitchen & Bath Fixtures.
BEN CARSON: THE PLOT AGAINST THE DOCTOR IS ABOUT TO BEGIN, Roger Simon warns:
As Ben Carson continues to rise in the polls, ahead not just in Iowa but now nationally, there is one thing you can bank on. A round of attacks on Dr. Carson are about to begin and they will be vicious, not to the extent of Stalin’s famous plot against the doctors perhaps, but the plot against this particular doctor will be pretty bad. And as with Stalin’s plot, it will be filled with lies and innuendo aimed at destroying the subject.
Donald Trump has already given us a hint with his cheesy, supposedly innocent, question about Carson’s religion. But that’s only the beginning. The media will have a field day. They have already shown an eagerness to quote Carson out of context, thereby skewing what he is really saying (i. e. his comments about guns and the Holocaust and the presidency and Sharia law) in an obvious attempt to “get him.”
It will be interesting to see how Carson holds up against this barrage. Several factors are in his favor: his intelligence, his honesty and that these attacks were to be expected (even by a political neophyte like Carson). Although it will give him problems in the short run, his style of speaking, deliberate and thoughtful, rarely in sound bites, will also redound in his favor.
It will be a good test for him — if Carson can’t survive attacks led by Trump, how will he hold up under the full weight of the Hillary-Democrat-Media Industrial Complex pressing down on him should he win the nomination?
KURT SCHLICHTER: ‘The Martian’ Was Our World Just 50 Years Ago. “‘The Martian’ is superficially about space travel, but it is really about time travel. The plot may focus on characters leaving Earth to explore the red planet, but the strange world the movie depicts is really our own world just over 50 years ago. The can-do, optimistic liberalism it depicts is utterly alien to today’s sobby, whiny, excuse-laden version. . . . Just think of all the food-stamp cards that could be recharged if we only gave up on our silly striving toward the stars! Oh wait, we already have given up.” Well, for some values of the word “we.”