VIDEO: KURT SCHLICHTER ON “HIGH TECH AND THE CONSERVATIVE INSURGENCY” at the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley earlier this week.
Archive for 2015
November 14, 2015
THE RISE OF THE COLLEGE CRYBULLIES, as charted by Roger Kimball in the Wall Street Journal. “For more than a week now, the country has been mesmerized, and appalled, by the news emanating from academia. At Yale the insanity began over Halloween costumes. Erika Christakis, associate master of a residential college at Yale, courted outrage by announcing that ‘free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society’ and it was not her business to police Halloween costumes:”
In another shocking video, a student photographer is shown being forced back by an angry mob while Melissa Click, a feminist communications teacher at Mizzou, shouts for “muscle” to help her eject a reporter.
What is happening? Is it a reprise of the late 1960s and 1970s, when campuses across the country were sites of violent protests? In my book “Tenured Radicals: How Politics Have Corrupted Our Higher Education,” I showed how the radical ideology of the 1960s had been institutionalized, absorbed into the moral tissues of the American educational establishment.
As one left-wing professor wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn’t just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while—to the unobservant—that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.”
Read the whole thing.
MORE ON THE MAOISTS AMONG US: Amherst Students Protest ‘Free Speech,’ Demand ‘Training’ for Offenders.
SO THE “SHOW ME” STATE IS NOW THE “SHUT UP” STATE? Missouri state senator seeks to block University of Missouri student’s dissertation on abortion regulations.
Sen. Schaefer argues that the dissertation is a “marketing aid” for Planned Parenthood because the study will, among other things, document the effects of a recently enacted 72-hour waiting period law in the state. Missouri law currently prohibits the use of tax dollars to encourage a woman to have an abortion unless it is “necessary to save her life.” Sen. Schaefer seems to believe that the dissertation may violate this prohibition.
Two thoughts: (1) That’s as dumb as the campus anti-speech stuff from the left; and (2) Dumb or not, Mizzou, and other universities, should look forward to a lot more scrutiny from state legislatures in coming years.
WHO ATTACKED PARIS? HOUSE CHAIRMEN SAY IT’S STILL UNCLEAR, writes Bridget Johnson:
Congressional leaders said Friday night that it still wasn’t clear which terrorist group was responsible for coordinated terror attacks that killed more than 150 people.
Al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula was behind the January attacks in the city on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a grocery store. The terror group talked about their operation in the summer issue of Inspire magazine and threatened new attacks on France, “the party of Satan.”
“It is France that has shared all of America’s crimes. It is France that has committed crimes in Mali and the Islamic Maghreb. It is France that supports the annihilation of Muslims in Central Africa in the name of race cleansing,” said the magazine. “They are the party of Satan, the enemies of Allah the Almighty and the enemies of His Prophets – peace be upon them.”
No group has claimed responsibility yet and intelligence officials were still trying to piece together the events. The attacks at seven sites included a mix of methods: gunmen, suicide bombers and drive-by shooters.
One of the gunmen, at the Bataclan concert venue, reportedly shouted in French that they were conducting the attack because of what was happening in Syria.
It could also be another terror affiliate that has a big beef with France: al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Five terrorists were reportedly “neutralized,” possibly leaving several at large.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said “we do not yet know what specific group is responsible, but their strategy of attacking soft targets, spreading terror and uncertainty, and using the fear they create to further radicalize and recruit is one we will have to get much better at confronting.”
On one level, CNN knows who the suspects are – “extremists:”
(To be fair, the article the Tweet links to actually uses the T-word, astonishingly enough, given CNN’s lifetime of moral equivalency.)
November 13, 2015
MARK STEYN: The Barbarians Are Inside, And There Are No Gates:
Among his other coy evasions, President Obama described tonight’s events as “an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share”.
But that’s not true, is it? He’s right that it’s an attack not just on Paris or France. What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world – an attack on one portion of “humanity” by those who claim to speak for another portion of “humanity”. And these are not “universal values” but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were kinda sorta “universal” when the great powers were willing to enforce them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and those “universal values” are utterly alien to large parts of the map today.
And then Europe decided to invite millions of Muslims to settle in their countries. Most of those people don’t want to participate actively in bringing about the death of diners and concertgoers and soccer fans, but at a certain level most of them either wish or are indifferent to the death of the societies in which they live – modern, pluralist, western societies and those “universal values” of which Barack Obama bleats. So, if you are either an active ISIS recruit or just a guy who’s been fired up by social media, you have a very large comfort zone in which to swim, and which the authorities find almost impossible to penetrate.
In his post titled “Le Kobayashi Maru,” Richard Fernandez writes that “The dream of a ‘borderless Europe’ has taken a body blow:”
The dilemma the West now faces is that it cannot survive on basis on the platform which its elites have carefully constructed since WW2. They are being beaten to death with their own lofty statements. They must either continue to uphold the vision of open borders, multiculturalism, declining birthrates, unilateral disarmament and a growing state sector at all costs — in other words continue on the road to suicide — or retreat. As recent events at American campuses have shown, when faced with the choice of saving the Left and saving the actual world the odds are that “the world” goes over the side first.
In attempting to survive on its own terms the Left will tear itself apart. In its agony it will destroy much else. It maybe that Europe will rediscover its culture; possible it will develop the will to defend itself; conceivable it will hold off extreme fascist movements; even plausibly reconstruct its demography. But it cannot do this without an upheaval that will leave nothing unscathed.
The good news is that the West must soon squarely face choices it has been avoiding until now. The bad news is that nothing will escape unscathed.
Radical Islamism’s greatest challenge is it that ruthlessly exposes a fatal flaw which has existed in the ideology of the West for the last 70 years. It is representative of a question that won’t go away. Can it face the facts just as they are and think its way out of a jam? What Samantha Power called the Problem from Hell is really the Kobayashi Maru test of European civilization. Faced with a no-win situation, will the West find a path through?
Based on Europe’s current political leaders and their wannabe cousins in America, I’m not especially optimistic; tomorrow night’s Democratic presidential debate will likely resemble a round-robin reading of Jimmy Carter’s infamous “Malaise speech,” which signaled that Great Society-era liberalism had reached its intellectual cul-de-sac, in much the same way that Clinton-Obama-era “Progressive” has as well.
As Steyn asks, “What’s the happy ending here?” It won’t be coming from Europe’s leaders, and it certainly won’t be coming from America’s president, nor his designated successor.
JIM GERAGHTY: Is Left’s Campus Meltdown Driven By Sense That Higher Ed Bubble Is Bursting?
There’s good reason to look at what’s going on in America’s college campuses with incredulity, befuddlement, anger, disdain and repulsion. But what if the Leftist temper-tantrum that we’re witnessing is in fact something of a last gasp, a sudden recognition that their long-awaited nirvana is never going to come? Deep down, they must realize that the only real career paths for the campus radical are to join some leftist organization in a professional capacity or to stay on campus and attempt to become a professor.
Corporate America may pay off an agitator, but they aren’t terribly eager to hire them or give them any real responsibility. The audience for Leftist agitprop is pretty limited, while works they see as trigger-inducing right-wing propaganda, like American Sniper, finds large audiences. . . .
In fact, radical leftists are taking over colleges and universities just as the higher education bubble is bursting. What’s the point of controlling the world’s most distinguished schools at the precise moment many Americans decide they’re not worth the debt to attend them?
Well, this craziness will certainly accelerate that process.
UPDATE: Sorry, I had wrongly credited this piece. Fixed.
WHO KNOWS, MAYBE THIS TIME THEY MEAN IT:
Shot:
French President Francois Hollande promised early Saturday morning that France would respond to terrorist attacks that killed more than 120 people with a “pitiless” war against the group responsible.
“We are going to lead a war which will be pitiless,” he said at the Bataclan, the site of one of the attacks, according to the Guardian.
“Because when terrorists are capable of committing such atrocities, they must be certain that they are facing a determined France, a united France, a France that is together and does not let itself be moved, even if today we express infinite sorrow,” Hollande added.
—“Hollande: ‘We are going to lead a war which will be pitiless,'” the Washington Examiner, tonight.
Chaser:
Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared Saturday that France was at war with radical Islam after the harrowing sieges that led to the deaths of three gunmen and four hostages the day before. New details emerged about the bloody final confrontations, and security forces remained on high alert.
“It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity,” Mr. Valls said during a speech in Évry, south of Paris.
—“French Premier Declares ‘War’ on Radical Islam as Paris Girds for Rally,” the New York Times, January 10, 2015.
Second headline via Allahpundit, who tweets, “Exhibit A in why I keep saying nothing will change. War has already been declared. And?”
MAINTAINING A SENSE OF PROPORTION, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Mizzou protesters are angry Paris terror attacks stole their media spotlight.
Related: “a swastika drawn in poop in a shower now finds its appropriate place in the ladder of moral priority” — Greg Gutfeld places the week into perspective. Read the whole thing.
ROGER SIMON ON ‘WHY PARIS HAPPENED:’
I am not going to blame Barack Obama entirely for what happened in Paris Friday – but mostly. And that’s not just because he famously called ISIS the jayvee team, when they are now unequivocally the New York Yankees or the Manchester United of terror, repellent as that analogy may be (he started it).
But what is clear from the carnage at the Bataclan Theatre and elsewhere in Paris that we will be studying for weeks or months to come is that the West has no leader in our evident civilizational war – no Churchill, no Roosevelt, no DeGaulle, not even a George W. Bush. It’s certainly not Barack Obama, a ludicrous man who thinks the world’s greatest problem is climate change in the face of Islamic terror. This is the same man who oversaw, indeed instigated, a large scale American démarche for the first time since World War II.
And look what happened. Well, we all know. We are living at a time when the Islamic world is having a nervous breakdown, actually more like a violent psychotic break, in its encounter with modernity and is determined to bring us all down with it.
Plus a suggestion: “if you want to prove you are the right commander-in-chief, here’s an idea for you, Donald. Get on one of your private jets and fly to Paris. Act presidential, even if the actual president doesn’t.”
Read the whole thing — incidentally, I wonder if anyone is giving Hillary the same advice?
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “We Have Contained Them.”
—President Obama regarding ISIS, speaking with George Stephanopoulos on today’s edition of ABC’s Good Morning America, in an interview videotaped yesterday.
THE VERY DEFINITION OF BAD TIMING: Al Gore, who has been comparing global warming to Kristallnacht and World War II for over a quarter of a century before cashing out to the oil-rich Middle Eastern nation of Qatar is in France this weekend to host a “climate telethon from Paris’ Eiffel Tower,” AP reported earlier today. Gore’s Website, which was apparently still live-streaming video even after the terror attack began (the video portion appears to have since gone black) is titled “24 Hours of Reality: The World is Watching.”
Back in August, the Obama White House tweeted, “No challenge poses a greater threat to our future than climate change,” echoing a near identical statement from the president in April and in February.
Freud called it displacement.
Related: “Tomorrow’s Democratic debate tragically just got more interesting,” John Podhoretz tweets.
FRENCH POLICE END CONCERT HALL SIEGE, according to WGHP-TV:
At least 40 people are dead [see below — Ed] and 60 are wounded in the attacks, Fox News reports. As many as 100 people were being held hostage in the Paris Bataclan concert hall, according to Fox News.
French President Francois Hollande, in an address to the nation, said he had declared a state of emergency, meaning borders will be closed. A mandatory curfew has been imposed in Paris, Fox News reports. It is the first since 1944.
People from inside the concert hall were posting on social media begging the police to come in, saying they are slaughtering people one-by-one, CNN reports.
A witness inside the concert hall told CNN, “It was a bloodbath,” saying the attackers would just look at people and then shoot them without remorse. Five explosions were heard in the concert hall, according to reports.
One person was arrested and that person told police he was from Syria and recruited from ISIS, according to Fox News, citing French sources.
Twelve people have been rescued from the concert hall and taken to safety as authorities stormed the hall, according to Fox News.
The scene at the concert hall has since ended and police gained control of the situation. Two attackers are dead, according to Fox News.
Seven attacks took place in Paris, according to Fox News, citing French sources. Three explosions took place at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis late Friday, BFMTV said. Two or three gunmen entered the Bataclan concert hall while opening fire on law enforcement, BFMTV reported.
Found via the NRO Corner, which is also live-updating the terrorist attack. AP is currently reporting, “Another official said at least 100 people died inside the hall. A police assault on the venue finished early Saturday, leaving at least two attackers dead, officials said.”
UPDATE: Allahpundit adds, “Sky News is estimating 140 dead now in all, which seems conservative given the reports from the concert hall.” Earlier in his post, he speculated, “Whether most of [the hostages inside the concert hall] were killed by execution, bombing, or crossfire between the jihadis and cops remains to be seen. If that’s true, though, then it seems a cinch that the total death toll will pass the Mumbai attacks,” in which over 160 victims were killed.
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PROGRESS: Brazil Seeks to Copy U.S. Gun Culture.
Congressmen in Brazil, one of the most violent countries in the world, are proposing to dramatically loosen restrictions on personal gun ownership, bringing the country much closer to the American right to bear arms.
The politicians say the measures are necessary to allow embattled citizens the right to defend themselves from criminals armed with illegal weapons. But opponents say the move will only increase the country’s toll of nearly 60,000 murders in 2014.
The draft law, which is set to be voted on by the lower house of congress this month, introduces a right for citizens to own firearms for self-defense or the protection of property. Currently, citizens must apply for a gun permit and justify why they need a gun, meaning that applications can be easily denied. . . .
“Brazil is an extremely violent country and the state has failed to resolve this problem,” the law’s author Laudivio Carvalho of the powerful Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, says in a telephone interview. “The population needs the right to defend themselves, their family and their property as they are the ones being attacked. Ninety percent of assaults are being carried out with illegal weapons.”
Funny, that.
FIRST #VIDEO FOOTAGE OF EXTREMELY INTENSE GUN FIRE IN #PARIS STREETS TONIGHT; click to watch.
Plus reports that “BLANKET curfew (as opposed to a few streets) has just been imposed in Paris for first time since Allied Forces were fighting Nazis in WWII,” and “First time a state of emergency declared in France since Algerian War,” along with a CNN tweet that France’s President Hollande “takes extraordinary step of closing French borders in response to” the attacks.
UPDATE: “A witness told CNN that the theater is a ‘total bloodbath’ and he saw about 20 bodies (dead or badly wounded). He said the gunmen were calmly killing people, reloading, and killing more. There are as many as six or eight shooters at the venue,” Bridget Johnson writes in her updated post at PJM, adding “Agence France-Presse and Le Monde are reporting seven separate attack sites across Paris tonight.”
Allahpundit adds, “Surprising and unsurprising news from Fox. The surprise: A terrorist was somehow taken alive at the concert hall. Not so surprising: He supposedly told police he’s with ISIS. Whether that’s literally true, i.e. trained and equipped by ISIS, or ‘spiritually’ true remains to be seen.”
WHEN THE NEST IS EMPTY NO MORE: It’s Not All Bad.
Keeping multiple generations under one roof has its costs, which are well (perhaps excessively) documented in mid-century novels. But it also has its compensations, emotional and economic. More family members means more people around to take care of you if something goes wrong, more economic stability for the household. It also means that the money that you’re not spending on four walls and a set of appliances can be put to some other use, such as going to college.
When the “kids back in the basement” story first surfaced after the financial crisis, it was the subject of much hand-wringing by kids and parents alike. But we may simply be rediscovering the benefits that our grandparents already understood.
My grandmother had a lot of family under one roof until well after my mother was born. She loved her nuclear-family-in-the-suburbs life, as sterile and isolating as it supposedly was.
MULTIPLE ATTACKS STRIKE PARIS: There’s a rising death toll in Bridget Johnson’s updates at the PJ Tatler, which multiple early sources list at 60. Bridget adds “ISIS backers have started a Twitter hashtag in Arabic that translates to ‘Paris burns’ to celebrate the attacks. They’re also using #FranceUnderAttack,” along with a video in which you can hear an explosion in the audio of the French-German soccer match.
Early details according to CNN:
— At least 60 people have died in the attacks, CNN affiliate BFMTV reported.
— United States security officials are communicating through secure conference calls, sources tell CNN. The assistant to the president for Homeland Security has briefed President Barack Obama on the situation. The president is about to speak.
— At least six shootings took place in Paris and three explosions took place at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis late Friday, CNN affiliate BFMTV said. Two or three gunmen entered the Bataclan concert hall while opening fire on law enforcement, BFMTV reported. A source earlier told CNN there were six to eight hostage takers, citing a person they were talking to inside the venue.
— Paris police tell CNN there were three attacks. Attackers reportedly used AK-47 automatic weapons.
— CNN’s Jim Bittermann, who is based in Paris, reports a producer who is at the Bataclan tells him that police are firing at a rooftop position near the venue.
— President Francois Hollande was evacuated at halftime of the France-Germany soccer match.
More as it comes in.
Update: “Multiple media sources are reporting (so far, unconfirmed) that witnesses in Paris heard the as of yet unidentified terrorists shouting ‘Allah Akbar’ during the attacks.”
ANOTHER REASON TO DO SQUATS: Strong legs contribute to a healthier brain in old age, study finds. It’s a study of identical twins.
BREAKING: 18+ Killed in Multiple Paris Attacks, Daily Beast claims.
UPDATE: More early reports spotted by Daily Pundit and Ace of Spades. Allahpundit adds:
The Telegraph has a nightmarish update:
Gregory Goupil of the Police Union Alliance has told the LCI News channel that the two explosions near the Stade de France were suicide attacks.
LCI also reporting that hostages have been taken at the Bataclan concert venue near the Place de la Republique.
Update: The EU’s refugee policy will change after this, whether it turns out to be jihadis or not.
Update: Paris police are telling French media that hostages have indeed been taken at a city concert hall, which reminds me of Beslan. A lot of police forces on more than one continent are scrambling right now in case the coordination of the attack isn’t limited to Paris.
More as it comes in.
MIZZOU AND THE MASTER OF OUR UNIVERSE: “Ironic his name is Wolfe. The incidents surrounding University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe’s resignation following protests of racial insensitivity on campus might as well be plot points in a novel by Tom Wolfe. They are certainly as funny,” Matthew Continetti writes at the Washington Free Beacon:
The graduate student on hunger strike against oppression is the son of a millionaire railroad executive. The administrators who gave in to the radicals’ demands did so not out of sympathy or solidarity but out of fear of a football strike. The professor who called for “muscle” to help her expel a reporter from a protest held a “courtesy post” in the department of journalism. The details of the saga—including, and I am not making this up, a “poop swastika”—read like a missing chapter of Wolfe’s 2004 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons.
I don’t know if he invented it, but it was through Tom Wolfe’s 1973 anthology The New Journalism that I discovered the phrase “Muggeridge’s Law,” named after British author Malcolm Muggeridge. As Wolfe wrote, “We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.”
And that’s happened to Wolfe as well. As he noted a couple of years after Bonfire of the Vanities was published in the fall of 1987, Al Sharpton, who became notorious almost concurrently with Bonfire’s release for ginning up the Tawana Brawley fable makes Bonfire’s fictitious press-hungry shakedown artist Rev. Bacon look like “a little divinity student” in comparison.
Similarly, having reread 2004’s I Am Charlotte Simmons a few months ago, I was struck by how its nonstop sex and booze debauchery now almost reads like the good ol’ days of “higher learning,” in comparison to the past couple of years. Not the least of which, the false rape accusations by Rolling Stone, followed concurrently by Emma Sulkowicz wandering around the Columbia campus with a mattress — all the way to graduation! — before releasing her own sex tape; a real life walking self-satire Wolfe would have never dared to have dreamed up.
Charlotte also contains this mock “Who’s Who”-style biography on one of that novel’s fictitious professors, which helps to describe one aspect of today’s college craziness:
Victor Ransome Starling (U.S.), Laureate, Biological Sciences, 1997. A twenty-eight-year-old assistant professor of psychology at Dupont University, Starling conducted an experiment in 1983 in which he and an assistant surgically removed the amygdala, an almond-shaped mass of gray matter deep within the brain that controls emotions in the higher mammals, from thirty cats. It was well known that the procedure caused animals to veer helplessly from one inappropriate affect to another, boredom where there should be fear, cringing where there should be preening, sexual arousal where there was nothing that would stimulate an intact animal. But Starling’s amygdalectomized cats had gone into a state of sexual arousal hypermanic in the extreme. Cats attempted copulation with such frenzy, a cat mounted on another cat would be in turn mounted by a third cat, and that one by yet another, and so on, creating tandems (colloq., “daisy chains”) as long as ten feet.
As Mickey Craig and Jon Fennell wrote in “Love in the Age of Neuroscience,” their review of I Am Charlotte Simmons in the New Atlantis in 2005:
The setting of I Am Charlotte Simmons is truly “postmodern” — a world dominated by Nietzsche and neuroscience, a world which has jettisoned the moral imagination of the past. Not only is God dead, but so is reason, once understood as the characteristic that distinguishes man from the rest of nature. We now understand ourselves by studying the behavior of other animals, rather than understanding the behavior of other animals in light of human reason and human difference. We learn that it is embarrassing for any educated person to be considered religious or even moral. Darwin’s key insight that man is just another animal, now updated with the tools and discoveries of modern biology, has liberated us from two Kingdoms of Darkness. Post-faith and post-reason, we can now turn to neuroscience to understand the human condition, a path that leads to or simply ratifies the governing nihilism of the students, both the ambitious and apathetic alike.
And the rush to nihilism really has been this week’s leitmotif hasn’t it? Welcome to “A New Age of Antiquity,” as John O’Sullivan of National Review dubbed the 21st century, based upon his perceptive reading of Back to Blood, Wolfe’s most recent novel.
PUT IT TO REST: Yes, Ted Cruz Is a Natural Born Citizen.
“YOU STUPID SCHMUCKS, LOOK AT YOU NOW:” Jonah Goldberg takes a Scarface-style chainsaw to this week’s virulently expanding campus contagion:
Because this “crisis” is 100 percent liberalism’s fault. Sure, sure, you can divvy up the slices of blame in different ways, but those guys tailgating in the parking lot drinking beers and eating bratwurst? Those are the conservatives and libertarians enjoying a day off, because they don’t have to wait in line for even a morsel of blame.
* * * * * * * *
For several years now, whenever I’ve visited a college campus, I’ve tried to make the following point. It basically goes like this:
You kids think it is somehow rebellious to be liberal. So let me see if I get this right. The administrators at this school are liberal. The professors are liberal. Your high-school teachers were probably liberal. Your textbooks are, for the most part, liberal. Hollywood is liberal. The music industry is liberal. The fashion industry is liberal. Publishing is liberal. The mainstream media are liberal. Silicon Valley is liberal. Believe it or not, most corporations and the overwhelming majority of charitable foundations are liberal.
And yet, you think you’re sticking it to the man by agreeing with them?
Moreover, it’s been like this for generations. It was true when most of these administrators and faculty were born — they have grown up inside a universe where this fact was simply taken for granted. With the Left given total control of these oases of tolerance and citadels of progressivism, what do we get?
We get pampered and coddled students screaming that these institutions are hotbeds of racism, homophobia, sexism, and the rest of the 31 Flavors of Oppression.
I’m sorry, but over here by the hibachi in the parking lot, that’s just frick’n hilarious.
Fire up the hibachi, crack open a beer, and read the whole thing.