THE RODENT LIBERATION FRONT IS A MENACE: Squirrels: America’s tiny menace. (Oh, and this is when the Rodent Liberation Front that appears in the Shifters’ books started out.)
Archive for 2015
December 6, 2015
THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING THE NYT: America’s paper fishwrap of Winning the Future. The Most Pressing Issue in 95 Years.
THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: Paris attack terrorists ‘had links to extremists in Britain’.
NO, SIR. IT WAS THE PRICE YOU PAID FOR “PEACE IN OUR TIME”: Jeremy Corbyn: Execution of Brit by Jihadi John was ‘the price we pay for war’. And you’ll continue paying it, till people like you are no longer considered leaders of anything. Not even a parade.
INSOMNIA THEATER (STUDENT PRESS EDITION): Recent high-profile threats to student press—including banishment of student reporters from public events and reductions in funding for student newspapers for publishing content like this op-ed—illustrate that it is more important than ever for student journalists to know their rights. That’s why this week’s Insomnia Theater features FIRE’s new video designed to do just that.
In the video, FIRE’s Azhar Majeed gives basic explanations about the rights student journalists hold on campus, such as the differences between student press freedoms at public and private universities. The video also features several recent cases in which FIRE defended the rights of student journalists around the country.
Check out the video below and make sure to share it with anyone you think may be interested, whether it’s student journalists, journalism professors, or even your old alma mater’s student newspaper! You can learn more about student press rights on FIRE’s website.
I TRY TO WRITE PEOPLE, NOT “OPPRESSED CLASSES”: Mostly because I find the oppressed classes boring and slightly insulting*. But a lot of my colleagues disagree, and so do a lot of other creatives. How Multiculturalism Took Over Comic Books. (*And because I hate the Marxist idea that people are widgets within “classes” with the fire of a thousand suns.)
IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS: Planned Parenthood was ‘right wing terror,’ but with Islam suddenly ‘motives don’t matter’.
LOOK, I’M SURE I SAW IT: of course, maybe some blog posted it. Those were early days, but I was on the net. The video of revelers cheering 9/11 that no one got to see.
NOT UNLESS REALITY HAS A PEN AND A PHONE: Now even Obama has to admit San Bernardino was terrorism.
IDENTITY UBER ALLES: This will end in tears. A Footnote on Campus Craziness.
December 5, 2015
C.S. LEWIS ON Today’s College Administrators.
JONAH GOLDBERG: What Proof Is Obama Waiting For? “As has been noted many, many, times — because it’s happened many, many, times — the president hates conceding the obvious when it comes to terrorism. At this point, it’s clear this is a deliberate strategy. By denying or delaying recognition of terror attacks and the terror threat he thinks he can ride out the news cycle and American attention spans and switch to another topic, say, gun control or climate change. One can’t deny that it’s worked for him. It just doesn’t speak well of him.” Nope.
UPDATE: President Weak Horse.
I see the proposal to try to keep guns out of the hands of “dangerous people,” but what’s the proposal for keeping the ideas that make them dangerous out of their heads? We “need to work together to prevent people from falling victim to these hateful ideologies,” but what does this work consist of and how on earth could we do it “together”?
And what’s with the passivity — the idea that these murderers “were radicalized” and that people “fall victim” to the ideologies they come to believe? It almost sounds as though Obama invites us to empathize with the terrorists, to see them as victims of their own thinking processes. A more Obama-friendly way to put that is to say that our focus should be on the larger enterprise that is winning converts. And yet it doesn’t seem aimed at that larger enterprise, because he says “need to work together to prevent people from falling victim,” as if he’s envisioning us reaching out to the potential terrorists among us, enfolding them in neighborly love.
Obama won’t even show love to Republicans.
All it would have taken to keep this from happening was for the people who were in power to take these issues seriously all along.
RACISM: NOWADAYS, YOU GOTTA FAKE IT TO MAKE IT. Bridgeport Officer Who Reported Racist Letter Wrote It: Police. “A former Bridgeport police officer who claimed someone left a racist memo on police letterhead in his mailbox at headquarters in February admitted to writing the letter himself and has been charged with filing a false report, according to police. Former Officer Clive Higgins reported that he found a racist hate letter in his police mailbox the morning of Monday, Feb. 9 and feared for his life because of it.”
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Are Millennials Too Quick To Feel Victimized?
AT AMAZON, deals on Grills and Grill Supplies.
GOOD SALES PITCH: Donate To Reason As Counter-Programming To The New York Times.
Of course, you could say the same thing about InstaPundit.
SOMEHOW, I NEVER LEARNED TO THROW A TOMAHAWK IN MY MISSPENT YOUTH. THAT WAS REMEDIED AT BULLETS & BOURBON.
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(Click to play clip.)
A LOSS FOR YALE: “Yale lecturer whose email ignited a debate about racism has decided not to teach there in the future.” via Business Insider.
Erika Christakis, the faculty member at the center of a racially charged debate at Yale, has decided not to teach at the Ivy League school going forward. “I will not be teaching at Yale in the future,” she told Business Insider in an email Thursday.
Christakis’ decision came after weeks of backlash against the lecturer and administrator over an email she sent to students suggesting that Yale shouldn’t tell them not to wear offensive Halloween costumes.
That backlash included an open letter criticising her signed by hundreds of members of the Yale community.
Recently, 49 faculty members wrote their own open letter defending Christakis against allegations of racism.
FIRE has been following this case since the very beginning. As I wrote in The Washington Post: “If either professor steps down now or in the coming months, it must be understood to represent Yale’s glaring failure to live up to its own glowing promises to protect and honor freedom of speech on campus.”
More on this on Monday.
FOR THOSE ABOUT TO SELF-PROMOTE, WE SALUTE YOU: Just a quick change of underwear, and I’ll be ready for dinner. My first time zip-lining at Bullets & Bourbon today at Rough Creek Lodge in Glen Rose, Texas:
HOWIE CARR: G-men, media don’t dare tell truth about San Bernardino rampage.
What could the terrorists’ motive possibly be? How many times did you hear that absurd question asked? Were you yelling at the TV set too?
And how come no networks replayed Obama saying three weeks ago that ISIS was “contained?” Think they’d have given George Bush that kind of pass?
Neither cops nor the media dared tell the un-PC truth, that this was yet another terror attack by Muslims, one of whom was an alien. Nobody from Boston has any illusions about the FBI — Famous But Incompetent. But they’re worse than ever. Did you see that G-man from the LA office, making like Inspector Clouseau — “I suspect everyone, I suspect no one.”
It was pathetic enough to make you almost nostalgic for the super-sleuths of yesteryear like Zip Connolly, Vino Morris and Agent Orange. I mean, on Dec. 8, 1941, did J. Edgar Hoover announce that there was a possibility that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but that he was keeping an open mind?
But the media were even worse. First they tried to claim it was a Planned Parenthood attack — thanks, Bloomberg! Then somebody said it was probably right-wingers angered by the government helping disabled children.
A New York rag blamed it on the skinhead meth gangs that abound around Berdoo — like your average motorcycle gang cares about a Christmas party. And finally, the inevitable moonbat fallback … workplace violence.
That’s Barack Obama’s favorite excuse for terrorism. And you know the best way to fight terror — I mean workplace violence. Common-sense gun-safety laws. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Common sense — take away the guns from law-abiding people so that they can’t defend themselves against the terrorists and the gangbangers who don’t give a flying bleep about the law.
Common sense indeed.
Telling the truth about this stuff would expose how little they’re doing, and how incompetently they’re doing it. Thus, the search for excuses.
Plus: “Meanwhile, all I want for Christmas is a thousand hollow-point bullets.”
JOHN HINDERAKER: The Times Goes Gaga Over Guns. “The Times pretends to be concerned about violence, specifically homicide. Weirdly, however, the editorial fails even to mention the fact that the homicide rate in the U.S. has been steadily falling for some years, to the point where it is at a historic low, only around half what it was in the early 1990s–you remember, the golden age of the Clinton administration.”
Plus: “You can find a lot more sanity at just about any gun range than you can in the New York Times editorial board room.” Yes.
UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg on the NYT:
Similarly, while very, very, very few people outside the Times’ offices — and media nerds like me — could care less about what is essentially a P.R. gimmick, the Times thinks this is a Very Big Deal. For the staid grey lady this amounts to shouting “Unleash the Kraken!” It shows you how desperate and frustrated the editors — and liberals generally — are with the fact that this country doesn’t agree with them on guns. It also shows that the “national conversation” most Americans want has more to do with Islamist terrorism and less to do with the alleged “gun show loophole.” This alone doesn’t make The Times’ views or their arguments illegitimate or invalid. But it does illustrate how unpersuasive they are to much of the public.
The same can be said for the disgustingly hypocritical new fad of calling Wayne LaPierre a “terrorist.” This from the same crowd who insisted Sarah Palin had blood on her hands because of some cross-hairs on a congressional district map and that Michelle Bachmann should be put in the dock for her “eliminationist rhetoric.” I have no problem with criticizing LaPierre, but the double standard is just so appalling. I mean, seriously, to Hell with these people.
What’s true for lawyers is also true for newspapers: When you’re shouting and pounding the table, it’s probably because you’re losing the argument.
Yes, but it’s also meant to get us talking about guns, instead of Obama’s failure at protecting the country from terrorism.