Archive for 2015
December 1, 2015
November 30, 2015
OBAMA’S CHIEF POSITIVE LEGACY: SPACE? My USA Today column: Cashing In On The Final Frontier.
UNEXPECTEDLY: The Hill Deliberately Lies About Ted Cruz Comments Regarding Colorado Shooter.
They’re probably still bitter that their efforts to draft John Cougar Mellencamp for the Senate never caught fire.
PAUL MIRENGOFF: Behind the left’s selective treatment of tragic violence.
WEIRD SIDENOTE TO MY EARLIER PITCHFORKS POST: When you search for pitchforks on Amazon, the search results come back “excluding Adult items.” No, I don’t know what that leaves out, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: List Of Law School Faculty Buyouts.
Related: Law Prof Accuses Associate Dean Of Retaliation For His Lawsuit Seeking Access To Admissions Data.
THAT’S BECAUSE THE PRESS IS CONSTANTLY PUSHING THE “CRISIS” BUTTON TO SELL GUN CONTROL: Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware.
BULLETS & BOURBON UPDATE: Not only is the weather expected to be pretty darn awesome for Bullets and Bourbon coming up this weekend, our wonderful Venue, Rough Creek Lodge has freed up an additional room, so there is still time to join the festivities. Please call 770-952-1959 or 800-707-1634 and ask to speak with Cindy.
THREAT THAT SHUT DOWN UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO was threat to shoot white people, cops.
But now they’ve arrested the threatener, though his race is unreported. His name is Jabari Dean.
UPDATE: The FBI Just Arrested a Black College Student After What He Said He’d do to 16 White Men.
PARODY? THESE DAYS, WHO CAN TELL? Before we set up colonies on Mars, we need to discuss renaming its moons: Keeping Phobos and Deimos, which means ‘fear’ and ‘terror’, implies it’s totally cool to demonize our neighbor in the sky.
The naming of celestial bodies is currently highly regulated, overseen by the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature, a branch of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). But back before the IAU there was a wild and wooly era of naming essentially by whim, the whim of whoever was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.
In the case of Mars, that was Asaph Hall, the American astronomer who discovered the moons, cracked open a bottle of Champagne and decided on a pair of deities who embody panic/fear (Phobos) and terror/dread (Deimos).
These names strike very dark chords. Anyone at all familiar with epic poetry (the kind written here on Earth), knows what I mean. The words behind the names of the deities – phobos and deos (deimos is a poetic form of deos) – crop up hundreds of times in Homer’s Iliad, usually in depictions of brutal combat, explicit and grotesquely violent depictions in which, for example, a spear takes out an eye, the eye falls to the ground, the warrior topples onto his own eye. Whoa.
The words essentially form the infrastructure for the barbaric violence in the Iliad. And names matter. Is it really possible that we haven’t complained about the names? That no petitions are circulating demanding a softening of the names? We are basically implying, by doing nothing, that panic and terror are perfectly acceptable as appellations for our next-door neighbors in the sky.
If nothing else, we should be thinking of the children who will someday grow up to be Mars colonists. No one currently bats an eye when an adult leads a child out into the backyard to admire a planet orbited by panic and terror.
Most amusingly, the piece never mentions that Mars is named after, well, Mars.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH HELLHOLES OF CORRUPTION, RACISM, AND VIOLENCE? “Republicans Must Save the Cities,” Kevin D. Williamson writes:
This is where progressive urban governance leads: The combination of over-promising and under-delivering, corruption, institutional ineffectiveness, and clientelist politics ruptures the relationship between so-called public servants and the public they purport to serve. Chicago isn’t Detroit or Cleveland: It isn’t some lost city that has in effect been left to weed over. But employing the same kinds of institutional approaches with the same values and the same assumptions will produce — surprise — the same results. The Jesse Jacksons of the world instinctively respond by threatening to immiserate the functional parts of Chicago. But Jackson et al. shouldn’t be leading a march on the high-end retail district — they should be leading a march on the Democratic-party headquarters, which is the actual locus of malice in this sorry affair.
Republicans for the moment are pleased to be a non-factor. But that eventually is going to have to change. There is no city in the United States larger than San Diego with a Republican mayor. A Republican and a pseudo-Republican were, for a time, able to thrive politically in New York owing to the unusual character of Rudy Giuliani and the fact that the millionaire residents of an economically resurgent Manhattan wanted to be able to travel from a Broadway theater to a Soho restaurant without passing through Beirut. (New Yorkers, alas, have short memories, and thus have turned the city over to Bill de Blasio, with predictable results.) Conservatives as such are not players in the real-world politics of our largest cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia. They are a relatively minor factor in some large metropolitan aggregates such as greater Houston and the DFW metroplex, but as for the cities themselves — not really. Consider that even in conservative Texas, the big urban political fight this season was whether Houston’s crusading lesbian mayor could subpoena church sermons as part of her campaign to pass a city law guaranteeing certain toilet privileges to men who pretend to be women. That bespeaks a certain battiness, to be sure, but it also suggests an operative political model that should not be that hard to beat: Houston, which is largely working-class and overwhelmingly non-white, rejected that ordinance by a wide margin.
Obviously, it’s long past time for a change:
But if the GOP wishes to seriously get in the game in those cities, as Scott Walker, Rick Perry and Lois Lerner’s victims have all discovered, Republican mayoral candidates are going to have to be prepared to go to war against “the Deep State,” which will maintain the left’s entrenched power and free-flowing graft “by any means necessary,” to coin a phrase.
OBAMACARE CRUMBLING? PALACE GUARD TO THE RESCUE! “President Obama’s signature health care overhaul is crumbling, and his lead from behind foreign policy is paying ominous dividends. Good thing he has his unofficial Hollywood SuperPAC to lend him a hand.”
As Christian Toto notes, “Funny or Die” will likely be pivoting towards Hillary’s defense next year, as the DNC’s Hollywood SuperPAC rolls on.
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: There Aren’t Enough Specialists To Treat Our Growing Obese Population.
FASTER, PLEASE: “British technology company to ‘transform’ air and space travel with pioneering new engine design. Reaction Engines says its invention will allow airliners to fly at five times the speed of sound.”
Good luck to them; I fear though that they’ll be added to the next update of the story that Glenn linked to last week: “11 Outlandish Attempts To Build The Next Concorde.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What happens if you actually go along with the person on the other end of the “Windows Technical Support” scam calls?
(Answer: “cancel your credit cards and talk to the credit card company to arrange a refund as the money has been paid fraudulently. You should also take to Facebook, and let as many of your contacts, friends and family in the local area, know that the scam is targeting your region.”)
We get these calls about once a week, sometimes more frequently. Since they claim they can “see” my computer has been “infected,” I simply ask them which version of Windows I’m using, how much RAM I’ve installed, etc.; they hang up pretty quickly.
THE SELECTIVE ARGUMENT THAT POLITICAL RHETORIC LEADS TO VIOLENCE: Jim Geraghty lists “The On-Again, Off-Again Arguments About ‘Dangerous Rhetoric’ Leading to Violence,” before concluding:
Do I have all that right? And does that make sense to anyone?
Wouldn’t Occam’s Razor suggest that those already driven by a desire or compulsion to kill other people are going to do so, and will merely latch on to whatever “reason”, justification or excuse is at hand or is most convenient? Isn’t it ridiculous to expect sane people to watch what they say and restrict what thoughts they express in order to prevent a rampage by someone with an inherently illogical, literally unreasonable, not-sane thinking process?
Isn’t “don’t say what you think, because it might set off a crazy person” the most insidious form of censorship, because none of us can really know what prompts a crazy person to go on a violent rampage?
Ace of Spades adds:
The Colorado governor says that the Planned Parenthood shooting is due to the rhetoric of “talk radio” and “bloggers.”
Ed Morrissey catches the Washington Post saying the same thing.
He notes an example where the left does not find its own hot rhetoric linked to a murderer’s rampage — the Family Research Council shooter. I can name another one — the Discover Channel Shooter, a shooter the left seized upon initially because they assumed he was rightwing, then discarded quickly when his manifesto indicated that he was so left-wing on climate change he thought the Discovery Channel was too soft in its climate change propaganda.
Gabriel Malor has documented the left’s “incurable” disease of blaming shootings on right-wing speech.
But never, ever on leftwing speech — obviously! Leftwing speech never inspires violence. Except when it does. And there’s an interesting argument to explain why, and that argument is complete media silence.
I find this part of the left’s broader mission of shutting down any thought of which they don’t approve. The left routinely — reflexively — links any sort of political thought they don’t like into a dire real-world consequence or crime.
If you deny the fake 1-in-5 claim, you’re encouraging rape.
If you publicize the fact that baby organs are in fact being harvested at Planned Parenthood, you’re encouraging shooting.
If you call a woman “bossy,” you’re both fostering an anti-woman “atmosphere” and encouraging violent crimes against women.
And so on. As I say, the left’s own hot rhetoric — that we need to reduce the human population to save us from global warming; that anyone who disagrees with this is a “denier” like a Holocaust denier; etc., etc. — is never, apparently, linked to any violence.
Well, that doesn’t help advance the DNC-MSM narrative; when it comes to their coverage of the other side of the aisle, as Andrew Klavan noted in 2009, all of their memes can be boiled down to two words:
Related: “These are some astounding facts about violence this year in Chicago,” Betsy Newmark notes:
As of November 23, there had been 2703 shootings which resulted in 440 deaths year-to date in heavily gun-controlled Chicago.
That is an increase of approximately 400 shootings over the same time last year.
And remember that Chicago has some of the most stringent gun control measures in the nation in a city that has been under totally Democratic control for decades.
Doesn’t fit the narrative; makes Obama and Rahm look bad. Thus memory holed in order to continue “defining deviancy downward,” to coin a phrase.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Namaste, Bitches is the Girls of Yoga.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Cashing In On The Final Frontier. You know, space development may turn out to be Obama’s main positive legacy.
PC RUINS EVERYTHING, EXAMPLE 9,327,263: A Pirelli calendar with NO nude models? Serena Williams, Patti Smith and Amy Schumer pose for iconic calendar as it abandons naked supermodels for, er, naked ‘women of achievement.’
Much like the NFL donning pink shoes in October, that should go over well with their core demographic.
PRESIDENT OBAMA PUBLICLY DECLARES THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS OF HIS PRESIDENCY A FAILURE:
● COP21: Obama on risk of ‘submerged countries, abandoned cities.’
—Headline, the BBC, today.
● “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
—Then-Sen. Obama, as transcribed on 11/05/2008 in “Obama’s Nomination Victory Speech In St. Paul” at the Huffington Post.
Related: “The Paris Climate Talks Will Emit 300,000 Tons of CO2, by Our Math. Hope It’s Worth It,”
—Wired magazine, broadcasting from Condé Nast’s giant air-conditioned server farm, which apparently they haven’t yet voluntarily shuttered as an example for the rest of us as to how serious this all is.
BIRTH CONTROL: The IUD: Can Birth Control Be Too Good?
AT THE MOVIES WITH FRANÇOIS AND HITCH: The New York Times looks back at a landmark book on movie production:
Culled from six days of interviews that the French director François Truffaut conducted with his idol Alfred Hitchcock, the book “Hitchcock” immediately stood out from other books about movies when it was published in an English translation in 1967.
“There is not another instance of one practicing director paying homage to another in the entire history of books on cinema,” the critic Andrew Sarris, one of America’s earliest Hitchcock champions, wrote in a review in The Chicago Tribune in January 1968.
In The New York Times, Eliot Fremont-Smith called it “one of the most revealing and engrossing books on film art, technique and history ever put together.” And the critic Charles Champlin of The Los Angeles Times offered a suggestion: “It’s one book that would absolutely make a heck of a movie.”
Now it has. The documentary “Hitchcock/Truffaut,” which opens Wednesday, Dec. 2, and takes its name from the informal title of Truffaut’s book, is both a companion piece to the text and an extension of it. Directed by Kent Jones, the movie draws heavily on Hitchcock clips, the original interview audiotapes, stills taken of the encounter by the photographer Philippe Halsman and interviews with current filmmakers.
Plus this very droll moment:
To Whit Stillman, director of “Metropolitan,” the book was so readable in part because of the familiarity of the films but also because of the tome’s graphic design: “the high-water mark of sans serif lettering,” he said by Skype of the cover.
To be fair, it seemed like all books published during that period looked like that, as Helvetica seemed omnipresent. But few books contained the knowledge of a master showman telling the world how it was done. Read the whole thing.
NARRATIVE UBER ALLES: Ann Althouse: Chuck Todd was heavily pushing the politicization of the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting. The goal here is to discredit the videos — to be achieved, it seems, simply by calling them “discredited videos,” without doing any, you know, actual discrediting — and then rehabilitate Planned Parenthood and Hillary’s #waronwomen campaign theme.
HISTORY’S 7 Greatest Flying Aces.