FUNNY HOW WHEN THEIR BIASES PEEP OUT, THEY’RE ALWAYS LEFT-LEANING, ANTI-ISRAEL, ANTI-AMERICAN BIASES: Senior CNN Man in Bizarre Anti-Israel Tirade after Paris Attack.
Archive for 2015
January 9, 2015
PHIL HAMBURGER: HHS’s Contribution to Black Death Rates.
Although there is no scientifically serious empirical evidence that IRBs save any lives by overseeing research under the human-subjects research regulations, it is abundantly clear that they suppress vast amounts of medical knowledge, and they thereby leave large numbers of individuals without the information they need to live.
Put simply, IRBs kill. Whenever the government suppresses life-saving medical knowledge, it predictably kills those who need it. And nothing is more effective in suppressing such knowledge than the licensing of speech and the press.
This general assault on medical knowledge is probably especially hard on blacks because HHS deliberately discriminates against them. Of course, it does so in the name of protecting them and ensuring that research is “equitable.”
Read the whole thing.
A VALUABLE EXPERIMENT: More Good Outcomes from NYPD Arrest Slowdown—Less Harried Public Defenders.
The massive reduction in the number of arrests and citations by the New York Police Department has lasted long enough now to filter down to the courts. As a result, New York City courts are a lot less busy. The New York Times focuses on idle clerks fiddling with smartphones and courtrooms shutting down early, but buried further into the story is good news for those the police do arrest. Public defenders now have more time to spare for them. . . .
One public defender finished with her work “early” at 11 p.m. and noted that she was normally overbooked. We can only hope that the drop in clients also means each client’s case gets a more thorough review, and poor defendants who can’t afford lawyers are less likely to be pushed to take possibly bad plea deals. The Times ends its story noting that because of the NYPD slowdown, the silly arrests are now particularly notable.
The justice system should focus on serious crimes against persons and property, not on “revenue offenses.”
ROBBY SOAVE: Congress, End the Hangover: Abolish the Federal Drinking Age.
Activists, administrators, and national policymakers concerned about a supposed epidemic of rape on college campuses should stop trying so damn hard to regulate students’ sex lives. Instead, their efforts would be better spent lobbying Congress to abolish a law that puts students at risk of sexual assault by encouraging them to consume alcohol recklessly: the National Minimum Drinking Age Act.
Just over thirty years ago, in response to public concerns about teen drinking and driving, Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which punished states for failing to raise the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 by taking away their highway funding if they refused. Within a few years, all 50 states and D.C. had fallen in line, making the U.S. one of only four countries with a drinking age higher than 18 (the others are Japan, South Korea, and Iceland).
Did the law decrease drunk driving? Many experts doubt it. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard University economics professor and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, has argued that the law had “little or no life-saving effect.” While a few states that adopted a stricter drinking age on their own saw limited, temporary success, the vast majority of states that prohibited teen drinking in response to federal bullying had little to show for it—other than the federal dollars they got to keep.
There is some evidence, however, that raising the drinking age might have actually worsened the teen binge-drinking problem. It’s easy to imagine why that might be the case: if drinking any amount of alcohol is illegal for 18-year-olds, those who want to drink anyway have every incentive to down as much booze a quickly as possible, thus minimizing the amount of time they could be caught by the cops holding a beer in their hands.
Yep.
YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: Ostracized by Cowardly West, Charlie Hebdo Faced the Islamists Alone.
January 8, 2015
MEMO TO SELF: BUY MORE GUNS. Britain’s MI5 chief warns al Qaeda in Syria planning mass attacks on West.
How should we respond? Imagine Gen. Curtis LeMay, under the command of President Andrew Jackson.
POLICING: “This is the level of service that makes people very upset and distrustful of law enforcement.”
Reporters for cleveland.com obtained extended footage of the killing of Tamir Rice. The full video demonstrates police officers’ callous indifference to the boy they had wrongly shot. The two cops allowed him to bleed for several minutes; the first person to administer aid to Rice was actually an FBI agent who happened upon the scene while the officers stood around doing nothing.
Well, that’s not quite right. They did something—they intercepted Tamir’s sister as she ran to help him, knocked her on the ground, wrestled with her, held her down, handcuffed her, and placed her in the squad car a mere 10 feet away from her mortally wounded brother. And it was there that she waited, according to cleveland.com.
Disgraceful.
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SARAH HOYT SHOWS SOME BACKBONE: Je Suis Charlie. “The brave social(ist) justice warriors are ever ready to speak truth to the power that will not hurt them. Towards Islam, otoh they adopt the crouching position and kiss the terrorists’ gangrenous blood-soaked pudenda.”
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE! (CONT’D): UMSL says reported rape on campus did not happen.
The University of Missouri-St. Louis has determined that a rape reported on campus in December did not happen.
A student who reported she was raped last month has now changed her story, university spokesman Bob Samples said.
The university sent a message to students on Thursday informing them of the new development.
“Following a thorough investigation, which included the reporting party meeting with and informing the police investigator that the incident did not occur, the UMSL Police Department has determined that the incident (in a Dec. 18 warning to students) was unfounded,” the message says.
The student originally reported to police that on Dec. 17 she’d been forced into a car parked on West Drive and raped in the backseat by a man she didn’t know.
And yet, as I understand it, this never happens.
CLOSING THE SCHOOLS so that Obama can talk about education.
KINDA THINKING THAT BRANDEIS SHOULD HAVE ITS ACCREDITATION REVOKED. IT’S NOT ACTING LIKE A UNIVERSITY: Brandeis Student Journalist Slapped With “No Contact” Order.
A Brandeis University student journalist unsuccessfully prosecuted for “harassment” by university officials has now been slapped with a “no contact order” restricting his movement on campus, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The latest punishment against Brandeis senior Daniel Mael follows an article he wrote drawing attention to tweets by another student leader who endorsed on Twitter the recent murder of two New York City police officers and declared that “amerikkka needs an intifada.”
The “no contact order” forbids Mael from being in the same physical location on campus as student Michael Piccione, who launched a campaign to convince the Brandeis administration to punish Mael for writing the article.
The latest action against Mael appears to contradict an assertion in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal by school president Fred Lawrence that Brandeis maintains an “unyielding commitment to free speech.”
Somebody should occupy Lawrence’s office. They need to start a student group. They could call it the “Free Speech Movement.”
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Swarms of DNA nanorobots execute complex tasks in living animal.
“HEALTHY OBESITY” not so healthy.
FROM STACY MCCAIN, YOUR NUANCED HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Muslim Fanatic Defends Savage Murders by Fanatical Murderous Muslim Savages. “We should be grateful to the editors of USA Today for allowing Anjem Choudary to tell us the truth.”
PROFILES IN COWARDICE: A Financial Times Charlie Hebdo flipflop.
HOW EXERCISE Keeps Us Young.
Active older people resemble much younger people physiologically, according to a new study of the effects of exercise on aging. The findings suggest that many of our expectations about the inevitability of physical decline with advancing years may be incorrect and that how we age is, to a large degree, up to us.
Aging remains a surprisingly mysterious process. A wealth of past scientific research has shown that many bodily and cellular processes change in undesirable ways as we grow older. But science has not been able to establish definitively whether such changes result primarily from the passage of time — in which case they are inevitable for anyone with birthdays — or result at least in part from lifestyle, meaning that they are mutable.
This conundrum is particularly true in terms of inactivity. Older people tend to be quite sedentary nowadays, and being sedentary affects health, making it difficult to separate the effects of not moving from those of getting older.
And if you feel bad already, you’re more likely to be sedentary.
TEST-DRIVING THE Toyota Camry Hybrid.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: I Rode 500 Miles in a Self-Driving Car and Saw the Future. It’s Delightfully Dull.
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IF YOU CAN’T STAND UP FOR FREE SPEECH UNDER PRESSURE, WHY ARE YOU IN THE MEDIA? Charlie Hebdo Massacre Reactions: “I’m All for Free Speech and Murder is Wrong, But..” Show some freaking backbone.
FRONTIERS IN ACOUSTIC LEVITATION.