HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Dartmouth Students Demand Gay Black Student President Resign For Being Too Conservative.
Archive for 2015
May 7, 2015
TAM: “Seriously, yesterday’s Diane Rehm Show was the scariest thing I’ve heard on the radio since I listened to Mystery Theater on a battery operated boom box sleeping out in a friend’s treehouse when I was twelve. It used to be that if there was one thing you could at least count on liberals for, it was a vigorous defense of free speech; it’s a cause that has found the ACLU in bed with the NRA on at least one occasion I can think of. This new turn is… chilling.”
IF I EVER BUY A TRUCKLOAD OF CONCRETE, I’m buying it from these guys.
More here. “The knives are being sharpened for Labour leader, Ed Miliband.”
AT AMAZON: Featured Deals in Video Games.
ERIK WEMPLE: The week that cable news failed free expression.
“There’s no justification for violence. But…”
“I’m a First Amendment absolutist. But…”
“You have every right to do what you did. But…”
Though perhaps not verbatim, those are the sentiments that have spilled from cable airwaves — and, for that matter, non-cable airwaves — in the days since Sunday’s violent incident in Garland, Texas. Two gunmen were shot dead by a police officer as they attempted to mount a terrorist attack on a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest — an event whose by-product is offensive to many Muslims. The Islamic State terrorist group claimed responsibility for targeting the contest, which was organized by Pamela Geller of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI).
Authorities are investigating ISIS’s claim of responsibility; they’re checking the electronic communication histories of the attackers, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi; the White House has called the episode an “attempted terrorist attack.”
And who’s being treated as the public enemy on cable? The woman who organized a cartoon contest.
Yeah, it’s not just on cable. Check this out:
JON KRAKAUER GOES TO MISSOULA TO GIVE CRITICS A CHANCE TO CONFRONT HIM: When critics appeared, he “became exasperated” and walked out.
IT HAS COME TO THIS: U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) tweets that it’s “not right” that someone must work 50 hours per week to escape poverty. How far we have come, since Booker T. Washington said, “Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.” Senator Booker channels the progressive mindset, which holds nothing is worth working hard for, but should merely be “given” by (redistributed from) others foolish enough spend so much time working. After all, they didn’t build that.
THE IGNORANCE, IT BURNS!: The New York Slimes Times editorializes about “Free Speech vs. Hate Speech.” Versus? Ugh. The progressive stupidity about free speech is actually getting dangerous. So-called “hate speech”–which is defined by progressives as speech they deem “hateful” (i.e., which disagrees with their worldview)–is fully protected by the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court said in the Westboro Baptist Church case, Synder v. Phelps:
Such speech cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt. If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment , it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. Indeed, “the point of all speech protection … is to shield just those choices of content that in someone’s eyes are misguided, or even hurtful.”
Exactly. But the NYT editorial is just the tip of the progressive iceberg to roll back free speech. That’s what totalitarians do.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 5 Ways To Handle Current Events Fatigue. My advice: Read InstaPundit, and let me handle the fatigue for you!
AT AMAZON, $20 off the Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite.
AT ACE OF SPADES, some thoughts on why so many talking heads are anti-Pam Geller even when she’s being targeted by jihadists.
This is about class. This is all about class.
This is about, specifically, the careerist, cowardly, go-along-to-get-along mores of the Upper Middle Class, the class of people whose parents were all college educated, and of course are college educated themselves; the class that dominates our thought-transmitting institutions (because non-college educated people are more of less shut out of this industry).
It is a class which is deathly afraid of social stigma, and lives in class-based fear being grouped with the wrong people, and which is more interested in Career, quite frankly, than in the actual tradecraft of that Career, which is clarity of thought and clarity of expression.
Thus, our institutions of thought propagation are dominated by the very people who can be easily cowed by the Social Justice Warriors, and who will, therefore, adjust their speech in order to not run afoul of the thoughtless — and frequently lunatic — thugs of the censorious left.
The very people we need to be most immune to the menaces of stigma, and the blandishments of career advancement, are, due to the absolute primacy of the Upper Middle Class imperative of advancing one’s career and avoiding scandal, stigma, and controversy, the very people most sensitive to such distortions.
Yes, that’s exactly right.
SO THE INTERESTING THING ABOUT THIS PIECE ON COSMETIC FIXES FOR “TURKEY NECK” — at least to me — is the suggestion that smartphones and texting make the problem worse. Is that really true?
SINGULARITY UPDATE: Nick Gillespie interviews R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell about their new book, Transcendence: The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity.
And, by the way, the Mushroom Planet books are awesome. I introduced the Insta-Daughter to them when she was a kid, and she loved them.
SECOND CIRCUIT HOLDS NSA METADATA COLLECTION ILLEGAL: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued its opinion today in ACLU v. Clapper, a case challenging the legality of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Section 215 allows access to “tangible things,” that are “relevant to an authorized investigation,” and has been interpreted broadly to allow the collection of so-called phone “metadata”–numbers called, time/duration of call–first widely revealed by former NSA employee Edward Snowden.
The Second Circuit’s opinion is an interpretation of the Patriot Act, not a constitutional decision, and hinges upon the court’s interpretation of the word “relevant”:
We conclude that to allow the government to collect phone records only because they may become relevant to a possible authorized investigation in the future fails even the permissive ‘relevance’ test.
The court did not issue a preliminary injunction, however, preferring instead to remand that issue to the U.S. district court. It also noted that if Congress reauthorizes section 215– as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell prefers–it would alter the statutory analysis and may cause consideration of the constitutional issues:
[T]he statutory issues on which we rest our decision could become moot (at least as far as the future of the telephone metadata program is concerned), and the constitutional issues appellants continue to press radically altered, by events that will occur in a short time frame. If Congress decides to authorize the collection of the data desired by the government under conditions identical to those now in place, the program will continue in the future under that authorization. There will be time then to address appellants’ constitutional issues, which may be significantly altered by the findings made, and conclusions reached, by the political branches . . . .
Congress would be wise to get rid of section 215 entirely–as the House Judiciary USA Freedom Act would do–and consider starting from scratch to craft a more thoughtful, appropriately tailored approach to actual terror investigation. Section 215 is just too amorphous.
IT’S PRETTY: Ultra-Rare 1964 Pontiac Banshee Concept Headed to Auction.
In other pretty-car news, there was one of the new Jaguar F-types parked outside the place where I had lunch yesterday. It’s a very nice looking car.
DOESN’T THIS MAKE THEM ALL LOGAN ACT VIOLATORS OR SOMETHING? Senate overwhelmingly approves Iran review bill in 98-1 vote.
UNDERSTANDING MEMORY.
Today, we have advanced prosthetics that can replace limbs with devices of uncanny agility, but when it comes to traumatic brain injuries, scientists and physicians have few options. A memory prosthetic would change that. Deadwyler and Hampson believe it’s possible to create a device that will help individuals with brain injuries and memory loss from Alzheimer’s and other dementias improve their ability to learn and remember. Although they have spent the last decade testing it in rats and monkeys, they hope to test it in humans in the near future.
The idea wasn’t always popular. “It sounded too much like science fiction. People told us they wanted to believe that we could do this, but they just didn’t think we could,” Deadwyler says.
That’s certainly changed in recent years. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA are also working on a prosthetic memory device, which works by boosting our ability to store a memory rather than recall it later, as Deadwyler and Hapson’s device does. Regardless of which aspects of memory affected by the prosthetics, several researchers say it’s an idea whose time has come. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, agrees and has provided $37.5 million to fund the new Restoring Active Memory (RAM) Project.
But memory prosthetics have also caught the attention of ethicists. Helping those with brain injuries is a noble quest, they argue, but altering memory could fundamentally change who a person is. Who should be helped first? What kind of injuries would benefit most? And where do we draw the line?
There are a lot of issues there.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nanoparticles shepherd DNA into cells to regulate immune response.
PAMELA GELLER’S RESPONSE: “This is a war.” Her op-ed response to critics, in Time:
So, why are some people blaming me? They’re saying: “Well, she provoked them! She got what she deserved!” They don’t remember, or care to remember, that as the jihadis were killing the Muhammad cartoonists in Paris, their friend and accomplice was murdering Jews in a nearby kosher supermarket. Were the Jews asking for it? Did they “bait” the jihadis? Were they “provoking” them?
Are the Jews responsible for the Nazis? Are the Christians in the Middle East responsible for being persecuted by Muslims?
Drawing Muhammad offends Islamic jihadists? So does being Jewish. How much accommodation of any kind should we give to murderous savagery? To kowtow to violent intimidation will only encourage more of it.
This is a war.
Now, after the Charlie Hebdo attack, and after the Garland attack, what are we going to do? Are we going to surrender to these monsters?
Read the whole thing. I like her. She fights. And she is asking the right questions.
MORE ON 3-D PRINTED GUNS AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT, from Liz Sheld.