NO, CUPCAKE: There is no right not to be offended!
Archive for 2015
August 29, 2015
THE REAL PROBLEM IN SCIENCE FICTION: The Real Problem In SFF.
UNEXPECTEDLY: The Green Energy Scam Exposed by . . . Berkeley!?!
POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Katrina Now a Metaphor For the Liberal Project.
COCKROACHES: ‘Like Many from the Left’s Dark Corners’ .
GOVERNMENT AGENTS AS PERVS: Student ‘molested’ by TSA agent in LaGuardia bathroom.
THE GOVERNMENT AS PIMP: Thoughts from the ammo line.
August 28, 2015
YES, THIS IS EMBARRASSING NATIONAL PUBLICITY: University of Tennessee tells staff and students to stop using ‘he’ and ‘she’ – and switch to ‘xe’, ‘zir’ and ‘xyr’ instead No, I won’t be using these terms in my classes, though this is just some stuff on a website, not a directive sent to the faculty or anything as some seem to think. And yes, the University of Tennessee seems to have imbibed a huge dose of PC Kool-Aid all of a sudden. Faculty speculation is that it has something to do with pressure from the Obama DOJ, but I don’t really know. One suspects, however, that this will produce budgetary skepticism from the state legislature, which will probably wonder if we don’t have more administrators than we have useful work for them to do.
UPDATE: It’s already being mocked by an influential State Senator.
Plus:
State Sen. Paul Bailey, R-Sparta, wrote on Facebook: “First it was eliminating the Lady Vols. Now this? I doubt if parents spending over $15,000 a year expect this kind of nonsense education from the University of Tennessee. My advice would be find something better and more productive to do.”
Yeah, I think there will be questions asked about budgets and priorities.
SHOCKINGLY, IT APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, OF ALL PLACES: A Misleading Story About Justice Clarence Thomas.
OUT: THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND. In: An England That No Longer Exists.
MORE WEIRD BEHAVIOR FROM THE WACO POLICE: “Plaguing the Twin Peaks shootout are two twin evils. End up with nine dead bodies and surely someone must have killed them. There is a strong contention that the ‘someone’ was police, who may well have killed and wounded them all, or most, or at least some, but turning an eye inward would make the police look awfully bad, stupid and venal.”
FOUR YEARS OF IMPRISONMENT BY IRAN: Our Family Won’t Stop Fighting to Bring Amir Home.
IMMIGRATION: Italy: Muslim mayor refuses to take in refugees.
Centre-right mayor Arturo Cerulli has openly rejected growing political pressure for councils to do more to welcome the thousands of asylum seekers landing in Italy and help to ease the worsening refugee crisis.
“We don’t want refugees here, we don’t have the facilities for them,” Cerulli told The Local on Friday. “We don’t know where to put them, we don’t know what to do with them.”
Cerulli, 60, is a former nuclear engineer and aligned with the New Centre-Right party (NCD) of interior minister, Angelino Alfano.
During his engineering career he travelled extensively to countries including Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and the US, and is married to an Indonesian woman.
He converted to Islam 27 years ago but insists his refusal to welcome asylum seekers is unaffected by his religion.
“Religion has nothing to do with it,” Cerulli said. “I am speaking as the mayor, not as a global citizen. I have to take care of my area, my citizens. I would not know where to put refugees.
“If we accept six people, then they will send another six and then 20 more.”
He’s obviously read Camp Of The Saints.
A NEW THEORY OF WHY NEUROTICS ARE CREATIVE. “A wandering mind might explain why creative leaders tend to be neurotic.”
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Italian woman locks up man for refusing sex.
The pair reportedly met this summer and enjoyed a fling, Il Messaggero reported.
But the man soon grew weary of the amorous adventure, and refused to have any more intercourse with the woman, who is separated from her husband.
Unhappy with the rejection, she then allegedly locked him in the basement of her home in Arzano, a town north of Naples.
It is unclear from the reports just how long the man was kept in the room, but he somehow managed to alert a passerby to his presence.
“The young man, visibly frightened, managed to seek help from a passerby, who told the police immediately,” Il Messaggero reported.
I blame our pervasive culture of female sexual entitlement.
SHARK SANDWICH: “2016: The Coming Train Wreck,” as spotted by “Comrade” Robert Kuttner (as Mickey Kaus likes to call him) at the Huffington Post, mixing his metaphors in Dan Aykroyd’s Super-Bass-O-Matic ’76 blender as he flails about to warn his fellow lefties of the danger on the horizon:
And a self-declared socialist [curiously, Kuttner sounds like he doesn’t mean that as a compliment — Ed] could defeat her in Iowa and New Hampshire. Even as she tacks left to excite the base, there is no way she can out-Sanders Sanders.
If she could just vault over the rest of the pack and claim the nomination, as she hoped when she declared her candidacy, Hillary Clinton might still be a strong nominee. But that’s not going to happen. As best, the fight for eventual nomination will be a long slog, with Clinton in the role of piñata.
As sharks are drawn to blood in the water, Hillary’s miseries are attracting other candidates. The latest is Joe Biden.
There is much that is admirable in Biden; but if anyone will be a weaker candidate than a wounded Clinton, it has to be Biden.
The man will be 74 years old on Election Day. That’s five years older than Ronald Reagan was at the time of his first election, and Reagan’s age was a liability in the campaign. Clinton, like Reagan will be 69 — youthful next to Biden.
Worse, Biden has proven himself on two occasions, 1988 and 2008, to be a dreadful presidential candidate. He has been a competent vice president, but that is no reason to think that he will be a more effective candidate now than in his previous outings. But he could well draw off enough of the anybody-but-Hillary support to make the nomination quest even more of an ordeal.
And if Biden gets in, others may. Well-placed sources say John Kerry is tempted. He’s been a surprisingly good secretary of state. But he blew a very winnable election in 2004. Like Biden, he’s a better public official than a candidate.*
Can you imagine the geriatric Democratic field? Sanders and Biden at 74, maybe Kerry at 73, and the young sprite of the pack, Hillary Clinton at 69. Jesus wept!
Gosh, how did that happen? As Jeff Greenfield warned last week at the Politico, “Barack Obama will leave his party in its worst shape since the Great Depression—even if Hillary wins.” And the Huffington Post went all in to nominate him in 2008.
Speaking of which, going forward, why would anyone want to vote for a woman whom the Huffington Post described as a stone cold racist in 2008, along with her core Democrat supporters?
* Kuttner really is a vicious man, isn’t he?
(Via James Taranto and Iowahawk who add, “If someone offers you the role of piñata in a hard slog, beware of sharks.” “Especially when you’re a shark slog piñata in a coming train wreck.”)
MARK RIPPETOE: Exercise: Government Style. “The National Institute for Health operates a subdivision they call the National Institute on Aging, apparently charged with, among other very important things, the task of amusing us with their ideas about exercise for older people.”
As an alternative: “Here is the Starting Strength version of endurance work for older people.” The contrasting photos are very amusing, proving that even when it comes to amusement, Rippetoe outperforms Uncle Sam. But there’s a serious point: “Now, here is the important question: Why are older trainees using Starting Strength methods getting stronger, with better flexibility, endurance, and balance, using barbells, while the federal government’s older trainees are restricted to waving their arms and legs around in the air, activities that cannot possibly make anyone stronger? Seniors that have worked with Starting Strength Coaches have increased their strength, retired their walkers, tossed their canes, and decreased their insulin requirements. For both athletes and older people, an approach that is so conservative that it fails to make anything change is a waste of time, and time is much more precious a commodity to an older person.”
HILLARY: THESE REPUBLICANS WANT TO ROUND UP ILLEGALS AND PUT THEM IN “BOXCARS:” Say, is this first Godwin’s Law violation of the 2016 campaign? It won’t be the last:
Via Mediaite, a little Nazi allusion to go with yesterday’s terrorism slur from someone who once said, as a United States senator, “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants.” Not only was she adamantly against illegal immigrants, she called for creating a national entry/exit ID card to keep track of people who’ve been admitted to the country legally — and maybe not just those people. Quote: “Although I’m not a big fan of it, we might have to move towards an ID system even for citizens.”
Hillary’s prior support for cracking down on illegals will come up during this campaign, rest assured, although we’ve learned from the gay-marriage debate that Democratic voters have a seemingly limitless capacity for forgiving ideological heresies. (Then again, as we’re seeing with Trumpmania, so do Republican voters.) Here’s a Daily Beast reporter watching an RNC oppo researcher hard at work sifting through archives in the Clinton Library:
Today is already a good day.
He found something while perusing through the first lady’s press office records: an old interview in which she appears to talk about the importance of keeping undocumented immigrants out of the country.
“It’s a complete change from what she’s trying to do now where she wants everybody to come in—it’s just something we could possibly hit on,” he says.
So for our Orwellian would-be next president, Republicans have gone in short succession from being “terrorists” on abortion because they’re pro-choice to Nazis on illegal immigration. This flailing about is not the look of someone who knows she has the election locked up.
What’s next, ISIS comparisons? Oh right:
RELATED: Did I say “locked up?” Perhaps I wasn’t referring to the Democratic nomination: “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Stray Voltage: Hillary Clinton Now Being Investigated Under the Espionage Act.”
JUNK SCIENCE ISN’T ANY LESS JUNKY WHEN IT WAGS ITS TAIL: The latest: Porn-sniffing dogs for police.
AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, updated every hour.
LIBERAL MEDIA REFUSES TO REPORT TRUTH ABOUT TRUMP’S EVENT… SO TRUMP SHOWS THEM UP WITH VIDEO: And note that Hillary is now starting to publicly humiliate reporters as well, following the Trump model. But since most of them are her non-official campaign staff – to borrow from the phrase used on Ezra Klein’s JournoList in 2008 when the media went all in to elect Obama, they’ll happily go along with the kabuki.
DOES HILLARY CLINTON THINK BILL CLINTON’S PRESIDENCY WAS A DISASTER? That’s a quite a needle she’s going to have to thread — appealing to moderate voters by running on the happy fun time memories of the 1990s, while denouncing all of her husband’s relatively centrist policies that helped make them happen, in order to placate her hard left base.
GOOD MANNERS: Hero Professor Mark Moogalian Thanks Airman Spencer Stone for Saving Life on Train. “A French-American academic shot by the Amsterdam-to-Paris train gunman has telephoned a U.S. airman who stopped his bleeding to thank him for saving his life, his wife told TODAY on Friday. Mark Moogalian, 51, was shot in the back after trying to apprehend the attacker who had just emerged armed with an assault rifle from the train’s toilet. Moments later, 25-year-old Ayoub El-Khazzani was subdued by three vacationing Americans, including Airman Spencer Stone, who also attended to Moogalian’s injuries.”