JESUS, HE’S AN IDIOT: David Boren: ‘Zero Tolerance Is the Only Way to Stop the Cancer of Racism.’ When he was a Senator he took an oath to uphold the Constitution, apparently without bothering to learn anything about it.
Archive for 2015
November 14, 2015
MICHAEL WALSH: Meet The Next President Of France: Marine LePen.
TO BE FAIR, THE ONE WE’VE GOT NOW STINKS PLENTY: Bernie Sanders: We Don’t Need No Stinking Foreign Policy!
WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL: At U. of Missouri and Yale, obstruction of free speech.
“Hey hey, ho ho, reporters have got to go” was the chant Monday as protesters surrounded and harangued Tim Tai, a student photographer on assignment for ESPN. Mr. Tai was trying to chronicle the protests of alleged racism that forced the resignation of two top university officials. “This is the First Amendment that protects your right to stand here and mine. . . . The law protects both of us,” said Mr. Tai as he tried to reason with the crowd. Incredibly, among those trying to bully Mr. Tai were university staff members. As another student videoed the events, an assistant professor of mass media (no, we are not making that up) asked, “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”
No one has been able to explain how the media — earlier sought out by protesters wanting to publicize their complaints — became the enemy. But it was clear from the video , which went viral, that at least some students believed that their rights and views should trump the rights and views of others. Similar disturbing behavior was on display in another recent video, also gone viral, of college students exercising their rights. This time the scene was Yale University, where a professor was shouted down and bullied as he tried to express his views about a controversial e-mail written by his wife, a lecturer at Yale. Among the insults hurled at him: “You should not sleep at night! You are disgusting.” And “Walk away, he doesn’t deserve to be listened to.” Punishing dissent became far more than just a threat when the student government at Wesleyan University last month voted to cut funding for the 150-year-old campus newspaper because it had the temerity to publish an opinion piece by a conservative writer questioning the tactics (but not the message) of the Black Lives Matter movement.
It’s all about power. And they don’t care about the Constitution, or social norms of free speech and academic freedom, or campus talk about civility. Because it’s all about power. There is nothing admirable about this, it is not simply overzealous well-meaning people. It is mob violence. Because it’s all about power.
The WaPo editoral concludes: “Good for students for speaking up and urging action when they see unfairness. But in not respecting — in attacking, even — the free speech of others, they undermine the cause of acceptance and tolerance. That runs the risk of making universities a place not of learning but of conforming.”
That’s not a “risk,” it’s the goal. These universities need outside supervision, from legislatures, alumni, and trustees. And donors.
Related: Eugene Volokh: The Anti-Free Speech Movement At The University Of Missouri.
ANGELO CODEVILLA: Mindless security doesn’t help:
Angelo Codevilla, a professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, said he expects the Paris attacks to revive the conversation around domestic surveillance — but he doubts the debate will do much good.
“What I expect is there will be more mindless calls for tight security on the general population rather than a focus on the people who are likeliest to do these things — on the people who shout ‘Allahu Akbar’,” he said.
Codevilla’s case in point is France itself, where blanket surveillance and wiretapping is commonplace.
“There is no such thing as privacy of communication in France — I mean no such thing,” he said. “The implication here is we can multiply by an order of magnitude the amount of intrusive surveillance and we will have results no better than what they have in France.”
But blanket surveillance is more politically useful.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. A lot of what passes for security at airports is more theatrical than real.
The growing certainty that the mid-air destruction of a Metrojet airliner flying from Sharm el-Sheikh to St Petersburg was caused by a bomb placed in the baggage hold has led to predictable calls from politicians for tighter airport security across much of the world. “What we have got to do is ensure that airport security everywhere is at the level of the best,” said Philip Hammond, Britain’s foreign secretary. “That may mean additional costs; it may mean additional delays at airports as people check in.” The deaths of 224 people aboard the Airbus A321 is a tragedy. But if passengers groan at ever more intrusive security screening, they are right. . . .
Two things are striking about these events. The first is that, despite the terrorists’ fascination with blowing up airliners, attempts to do so are actually rather rare. Unless the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared last year was brought down by terrorists (the most probable theory remains pilot suicide) the explosion of the Metrojet A321 over Sinai is the first major success they have had against an airline since 2004, when two Russian planes were blown up. The second striking thing is that the enhanced airport security introduced after the terrorist attacks of 2001 played no role in thwarting any of these attacks.
It’s a waste of time and money.
OLD MAN WISHES TO CONTINUE YELLING AT CLOUDS: “Sanders campaign threw fit about changes to debate to make it more RE foreign policy, aka topic of the moment,” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tweets, linking to this Yahoo article: “Sanders aide pushes back against CBS switch to foreign policy focus for debate.”
Annie Karni of the Politico adds, “Sanders campaign manager says his team prevailed in talks with CBS and the debate format is not changing tonight.”
So it will be a show about nothing, to coin a phrase.
Update: “Worried that people may think that he’s incompetent on foreign policy, Sanders decides to erase any possible doubt.”
AFTER PARIS, 10 DEBATE QUESTIONS FOR HILLARY CLINTON: Start with the last one.
WHAT DOES ISLAMIC STATE THINK IT’S DOING? “Why did striking out at foreign powers suddenly become a higher priority?”
AT AMAZON, Handmade Living Room Furniture.
I’D BET THEY’RE ASLEEP IN BERKELEY. I’D BET THEY’RE ASLEEP ALL OVER BLUE STATE AMERICA: Greg Gutfeld asks what part of ‘never forget’ we all forgot.
Pretty much all of it. Earlier this year, Mark Steyn said, “Our generation will be treated far more brutally by history because these guys are all standing up there at the big ‘Never Again’ ceremony slapping each other on the back and saying what marvellous fellows they are, that’s on page 1, and on page 37 there’s the story of this weeks’ Kosher grocery bombing. It’s disgusting…What people don’t understand, I think, is when countries transform, is that you not only lose your future, you lose your past too.”
Or as Gutfeld tweets today, “#MTVStars is top US [Twitter] trend. Never forget indeed.”
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: First genetically modified humans could exist within two years.
Humans who have had their DNA genetically modified could exist within two years after a private biotech company announced plans to start the first trials into a ground-breaking new technique.
Editas Medicine, which is based in the US, said it plans to become the first lab in the world to ‘genetically edit’ the DNA of patients suffering from a genetic condition – in this case the blinding disorder ‘leber congenital amaurosis’.
The disorder prevents normal function of the retina; the light-sensitive layer of cells at the back of the eye. It appears at birth or in the first months of life and eventually sufferers can go completely blind.
The rare inherited disease is caused by defects in a gene which instructs the creation of a protein that is essential to vision.
But scientists at Editas Medicine in the US believe they can fix the mutated DNA using the ground-breaking gene-editing technology Crispr.
Katrine Bosley, the chief executive of Editas Medicine, told a conference in the US that the company hopes to start trialling the technology on blind patients in 2017.
It would be the first time the technology has been used on humans. Gene editing is currently banned in the US, so the company would need special permission from health regulators.
Or they’ll have to move to a friendlier jurisdiction.
DAVID BERNSTEIN REVIEWS PHILIP HAMBURGER’S BOOK, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Increasingly, the answer seems to be yes.
Most scholars believe that administrative law began with the rise of administrative agencies in the late nineteenth century. Hamburger, by contrast, suggests that administrative law — by which he means legally binding rules that are developed through unilateral actions by the executive branch — has existed since colonial times and beyond, and that claims of administrative autonomy are direct descendants of the claims of the English monarchy to executive omnipotence. The Framers of the Constitution were well aware of such claims, and utterly rejected them. Yet, Hamburger argues, modern administrative law embodies precisely the evils that the Constitution and its separation of powers sought to prevent.
That seems to be the case.
FREUD CALLED IT DISPLACEMENT: Frank Bruni of the New York Times tut-tuts against “The Exploitation of Paris,” in a piece that could easily have been written by doing a find-and-replace search of a thousand different Times articles written immediately after 9/11. (A period in which the Times was utterly obsessed with the terrorist dangers of all-male golf courses). Along the way, Bruni name-checks Roger Simon, PJM’s boss emeritus:
I woke Saturday morning to Paris-pegged commentary about not just gun control and free speech on American campuses but also climate change—yes, climate change—and of course immigration, albeit to the United States, not France.
What does Paris have to do with climate change?
Well, apparently President Obama’s justly profound concern about rising temperatures is proof of his inadequate attention to terrorism and an indictment of his ability to do triage overall.
Or so I gather from a column written by Roger L. Simon for PJ Media. Simon characterized Obama as “a ludicrous man who thinks the world’s greatest problem is climate change in the face of Islamic terror.”
Does battling the latter prohibit battling the former?
Pretty much, yeah. As Julia Gorin explained nearly a decade ago in the Christian Science Monitor, “Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can’t deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it’s Kyoto that’ll save you:”
While the hawks among us worry about preventing the Armageddon that’s coming, our modern-day hippies just want to make sure the planet is pristine when it does. In fact, the more menacing terrorism becomes, the more some people seem to worry about the weather. Scared and unsure how to fight terrorists, they confront “climate change,” which only requires spending trillions of other people’s dollars on something that may not need fixing or may not be fixable. No wonder some of these people chain themselves to trees – they think money grows on them.
Actually, they were right about that last item, at least in terms of fleecing taxpayer money for implausible crony socialism projects, as we would discover starting in 2009:
In a video appearance from 2009, venture capitalist Paul Holland — who had given the maximum legal contribution to Obama, and whose companies received over 6 million in government dollars — described his feelings when heard about the billions up for grabs.
“He came in to do his talk and opened his talk with, ‘I’m Matt Rogers I am the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Energy and I have $134 billion that I have to disperse between now and the end of December,’” Holland told the audience. “So upon hearing that I sent an email to my partners that said Matt Rogers is about to get treated like a hooker dropped into a prison exercise yard.”
Holland continued: “And I had the lack of judgment to go up and share that with him and the other people who were all standing around him…Fortunately for me they all laughed and thought it was funny.”
As Red State’s Moe Lane wrote at the time in response: “Oh, I’m sure that it was hysterical:”
I always enjoy it myself when parasites talk so cavalierly about the government urinating away billions of tax dollars that my two kids are going to have to figure out eventually how to pay for. Particularly when it involves ‘supporting’ ‘green’ ‘initiatives;’ although I am forced to admit that, based on Obama’s current track record, the very word ‘green’ will be as about as popular a political adjective by the time the man leaves office as ‘liberal’ is now.
Seriously, if you encounter the President and he wants to help you out on a public relations exercise, run. One of the things that they don’t mention about the Midas touch is the radioactivity…
Back in 2000, Bruni’s New York Times sniffed, “it does not take a scientist to size up the effects of snowless winters on the children too young to remember the record-setting blizzards of 1996. For them, the pleasures of sledding and snowball fights are as out-of-date as hoop-rolling, and the delight of a snow day off from school is unknown.” 11 years later, when New York City snowplows were caught unprepared for about ten feet of — insert clip of Wallace Shawn’s Vizzini shouting “inconceivable!!! here — white powdery global warming, Victor Davis Hanson coined the phrase “The Bloomberg Syndrome:”
It is a human trait to focus on cheap and lofty rhetoric rather than costly, earthy reality. It is a bureaucratic characteristic to rail against the trifling misdemeanor rather than address the often-dangerous felony. And it is political habit to mask one’s own failures by lecturing others on their supposed shortcomings. Ambitious elected officials often manage to do all three.
The result in these hard times is that our elected sheriffs, mayors, and governors are loudly weighing in on national and global challenges that are quite often out of their own jurisdiction, while ignoring or failing to solve the very problems that they were elected to address.
Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.
And presidents announcing that ISIS has been contained on national TV only hours before they attack a major European city — because he doesn’t consider them as big a threat to the world as global warming.
No really — just ask him: “No challenge poses a greater threat to our future than climate change,” he’s claimed on numerous occasions.
Incidentally, doesn’t “exploiting” Paris have the presidential seal of the approval? After all, a month and a half ago, as a headline at Democrat house organ The Hill noted, Obama trumpeted that “Mass shootings are ‘something we should politicize.’”
Fair enough – and since, as legendary sociologist Piers Morgan observed last night, the terrorists aren’t “real Muslims,” shouldn’t we take up the president’s advice as well?
DESPITE HORROR, ‘KLIMATE-CHANGE’ KOOKS TO FORGE AHEAD WITH PARIS CONFERENCE.
Freud called it displacement.
JACK HANDEY PRESENTS DEEP THOUGHTS ON COUNTERTERRORISM: Time magazine: ISIS Attack on Paris Suggests a Change in Strategy.
But that won’t happen until January of 2017, and Time may very well not like the result.
(Besides, Isis is contained, President Obama and George Stephanopoulos assured us all yesterday morning.)
KNOWN WOLVES: One Paris Attacker Was Previously Known to French Authorities, Marks Fifth ‘Known Wolf’ Attack in France This Year.
Related: Enough Is Enough: Paris Terror Attacks Prove the Borders Have to Be Closed.
More: Reports: Greek Government Says Two Terrorists Were Refugees Who Passed Through Their Asylum Centers.
Tonight’s Fantasy Island rerun Democratic debate segment on this topic should be truly fascinating to watch.
IT’S COME TO THIS: French Officials Criticizing ‘Absence of US Leadership’ Against Terror.
Related: “France Celebrates Obama’s Big Win.”
—Headline, the Huffington Post, December 6, 2008.
CHILLING VIDEO SHOWS ATTACK IN PROGRESS ON BATACLAN CONCERT HALL.
Related: Andrew McCarthy on How France Became an Inviting Target of the Jihad.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: American Lawyer: Congressional Showdown Over Law Student Loans Is Inevitable, With Law Schools The Likely Losers. “The Post’s editorial cites with approval a law reintroduced by Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), dubbed the Financial Aid Simplification and Transparency (FAST) Act, which would drastically rein in federal lending to college and graduate students. The law would fix annual lending to undergraduates to $8,000 per year with a $37,500 aggregate limit, but graduate and professional students would only receive $30,000 per year in total, with a lifetime cap of $150,000. As of now, graduate students can borrow as much as their schools charge them, on top of $20,500 per year in unsubsidized Stafford loans.”
This will be a big blow to legal education, though it will probably be unevenly felt. The University of Tennessee College of Law, for example, is one of the ten schools where students graduate with the least debt already, so I imagine borrowing limits, etc., would hurt us less than schools at the other end of the list. They might even help.
TODAY ONLY AT AMAZON: $19.99 Cozy Women’s Boots. Winter is coming.
Plus: Cusinart 14-piece Stainless-Steel Grill Set, $19.99 (60% off).
And: Memorex MKS-SS2 SingStand 2 Home Karaoke System, $49.99 (38% off).
WIRED: 60-YEAR-OLD FRENCH APARTMENTS LOOK LIKE A UTOPIAN DREAM. Well, that’s one way to describe these crumbling giant brutalist concrete corncobs. Though considering the word “utopia” was coined by Thomas More “as a Greek pun, because it translates to ‘no place,’” Wired’s headline is more appropriate than their editors realize. Or as James Lileks wrote a couple of years ago regarding François Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, “Here’s what I find interesting: whenever the sci-fi movies of the 60s and 70s wanted to set something in a horrible totalitarian world, they just shot on location at a government housing project.”
Speaking of which, considering the Wired article went up on Thursday, this is the architecture of the Banlieues, which in the past decade have worked out for France even worse than our own Corbusier-inspired housing projects did in the 1960s – as Theodore Dalrymple warned in August of 2002.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
IDIOCRACY IS NOT A HOW-TO GUIDE: Massachusetts woman wins fight to wear colander in driver’s license by citing ‘pastafarian’ religion.