AT AMAZON, New Year, New You!
Archive for 2016
January 17, 2016
ROGER KIMBALL: Thucydides on Donald Trump & “New York Values.”
DON SURBER: Enjoy Your Hijab, Feminists.
PAUL SPERRY: Don’t be fooled by Bernie Sanders — he’s a diehard communist. “If Sanders were vying for a Cabinet post, he’d never pass an FBI background check. There’d be too many subversive red flags popping up in his file. He was a Communist collaborator during the height of the Cold War. . . . While it may be hard to hate the old codger, it’s easy — and virtuous — to hate his un-American ideas. They should be swept into the dustbin with the rest of communist history.”
SPEAKING OF CARS IN THE WINTER, last year when the Insta-Daughter got back to college after Christmas Break, the Toyota — despite having a new battery — was dead as a doornail from sitting in the cold for 5 weeks. Maybe because it’s a hybrid, the computer draws a significant amount of power even when it’s turned “off.” This year, I got her this Noco solar battery charger and when she got back it started right up.
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH: In Sweden, Crimes Involving Refugees Are Now Classified.
UM, EVERYTHING? What E.J. Dionne Doesn’t Get About Conservatism.
In “Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond,” progressive Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. argues that not only has conservatism lost its way by jettisoning moderation, but in the process it has inflicted great harm on the country. “The breakdown in American government and the dysfunction in our politics are the result of the steady radicalization of American conservatism,” he writes. In Dionne’s telling, President Obama’s only notable contribution to the crisis has been his “failure to anticipate” conservative extremism, “and his tardiness in dealing with it.”
There are several problems here. One is contemporary progressivism’s own repudiation of moderation. Another is Dionne’s view, commonplace on the left, that the proof of the right’s immoderation is somehow found in conservatives’ refusal to embrace progressive goals.
There’s no contradiction here, once you realize that a “moderate” conservative is one who gives Democrats whatever they want.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE “WINTER BEATER” CONCEPT: If you’re going to drive an unreliable car, is winter really the best time?
I SAW THIS YESTERDAY, AND IT’S GOOD ADVICE: General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis Email About Being ‘Too Busy To Read’ Is A Must-Read. “The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men. . . . Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun.”
IF IT WERE EASY, SOMEONE WOULD HAVE ALREADY DONE IT: SpaceX still can’t land a rocket on its floating landing pad.
Related: SpaceX’s Rocket Didn’t Quite Stick Its Barge Landing, But the Satellite is Good!
AT AMAZON, Warehouse Deals in Pet Supplies.
FAST-FOOD CONDIMENT PACKETS don’t actually last forever.
COLD WAR HISTORY: The Myth Of The Cobalt Bomb. “The myth of On the Beach, like Jonathan Schell’s myth, is technically flawed in many ways. Almost all the details are wrong: radioactive cobalt would not substantially increase the lethality of large hydrogen bombs; fallout would not descend uniformly over large areas but would fall sporadically in space and time; people could protect themselves from the radioactivity by sheltering under a few feet of dirt; and the war is supposed to happen in 1961, too soon for even the most malevolent country to have acquired the megaton-nage needed to give a lethal dose of radiation to the entire earth. Nevertheless, the myth did what Norway intended it to do.”
CHANGE: OHIO AND CALIFORNIA TEACHERS READY TO SHOOT TO KILL. “Students in Anderson Union High School District in California are not only OK with their teachers carrying guns to class, they told KRCR-TV they felt safer knowing the adults were armed. Anderson Police Chief Mike Johnson doesn’t get a vote on the school board, so he didn’t share in the decision to arm teachers. But he thinks it is a good idea.”
Related: California’s rural residents discuss how Democrat-dominated Sacramento has ignored their issues.
SPACEX’S LAUNCH WAS SUCCESSFUL; now watch here as they attempt a landing on a drone ship.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Flexible Nanocomposite Film Could Yield Handheld Cancer Detector.
THE GOP UNDERESTIMATED TRUMP IN PART BECAUSE IT OVERESTIMATED THE CONSERVATISM OF ITS OWN SOUTHERN, RURAL NORTHERN, AND MIDWESTERN BASE: “It underestimated the extent to which many of its voters hadn’t so much embraced the corporate conservatism of the Chamber of Commerce or the constitutional conservatism of the Tea Party as much as they had rejected the extremism of the increasingly shrill and politically correct Left. And, yes, the size of this population calls into question the very process of building a national Republican electoral majority, but it also threatens Democrats who seem intent on drumming every blue-collar white male straight out of the party.”
Read the whole thing.
CLINTON SURROGATE DAVID BROCK TO DEMAND SANDERS RELEASE MEDICAL RECORDS: “This is what panic looks like.”
Like Exeter from This Island Earth?