CULTURE OF COWARDICE: Would Anyone Publish The Satanic Verses Today?
Archive for 2016
September 4, 2016
CLAUDIA ROSETT ON OBAMA’S CLIMATE KOW-TOW AND CHINA’S INSULT.
Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but man, China just treated Obama almost as rudely as Obama treats Republicans.
OFF-DUTY CHICAGO POLICE OFFICER ROBBED AT GUNPOINT IN CHICAGO.
To borrow from the classic riff in Kentucky Fried Movie, Chicago isn’t quite “worse than Detroit” yet – but it’s achieving parity very quickly.
“WE HAD TO TAKE A DELAY OF GAME, WEREN’T ABLE TO GET ALL 11 GUYS OUT TO PUNT IN TIME. MISSING ONE OF THEM.”
UPDATE: Sam Foltz’s brother says home was robbed while he was at Nebraska tribute.
(Hat tip: Dan Riehl.)
GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE: Obese patients and smokers banned from routine surgery in ‘most severe ever’ rationing in the NHS. “I think we are going to see more and more decisions like this.”
You are surplus to the needs of the State.
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NOBODY DOUBTS THAT, BUT UNFORTUNATELY THEY OFFER INSUFFICIENT OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT: The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice.
BECAUSE THEY COME FROM A CULTURE OF SMUG ENTITLEMENT, AND DEMOCRACY GETS IN THEIR WAY: Why Do Our Politicians Hate Democracy So Much?
GAFFE FOR THE AGES: GREEN PARTY CANDIDATE JILL STEIN LATE FOR RALLY BECAUSE SHE WENT TO THE WRONG CITY: “The campaign of the Green Party candidate for president, Jill Stein, made one of those gaffes for the ages. The candidate was scheduled to speak in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday but she arrived two hours late because her staff had booked her on a flight to Cincinnati…This is entirely understandable. After all, most Stein staffers are of the coastal elite variety. They probably don’t know that Columbus and Cincinnati are different cities. They both begin with a ‘C,’ right?”
Well I guess Hillary can breathe a sigh of relief — she’s not the only far left presidential candidate who has a great deal of difficulty understanding what (C) stands for. As for Stein, you’d think the face of an ideology that professes to believe that plane travel is destroying the planet would be much more careful about this sort of thing.
SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU REVIEW: “Hagiographic retelling of Obama’s first date likely to disappoint those uninitiated into his cult of personality,” Sonny Bunch writes at the Washington Free Beacon, noting that the film comes complete with a funhouse mirror version of John Galt’s lengthy stemwinder near the end of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:
Like Galt’s rambling ode to the Makers-Not-Takers Class, Obama’s vision of a world that works best when compromise is prized bears little relation to the world we’ve seen for the last few years.
The rest of the film is less annoyingly, but rarely more artfully, put together. It’s a lot of shot/reverse shot and slow walk-and-talks, with Barack and Michelle’s faces all-too-often draped in shadows. Oddly, the movie often works better when Michelle and Barack are not on screen together, as in the early going when the two of them discuss the evening’s events with their respective families.
There’s an interesting film to be made about Obama’s relation to his father, but director Richard Tanne doesn’t make much use of this fertile territory.
That’s OK. Bill Whittle already made it five years ago, in a video that moves at a much brisker pace than the 84 minute running time of Southside With You:
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LAUNDER KIDS: Police: N.C. mom, her boyfriend put child in dryer.
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WELL, IF THE TIMES HAD TO TELL THE TRUTH, ITS POLITICAL OPTIONS WOULD BE SHARPLY LIMITED: Greg Lukianoff: “This morning, readers across the country woke up to a New York Times op-ed by Yale University lecturer Jim Sleeper that contains patently false charges about FIRE and me.”
IT’S COME TO THIS: “What Religion Would Jesus Belong To?”, Timesman in search of cheap clickbait asks.
(Link safe, goes to Twitchy.)
Baby steps, Gray Lady, baby steps. I’d be happy if the Times simply got the faiths of the Republican presidential candidates right (and didn’t viciously mock them) before tackling the Big Guy.
CNN PANEL LAUGHS AT KAINE: WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE IF HILLARY DOESN’T HOLD A PRESS CONFERENCE?
The MSM could do far more than this — if they really wanted to. As to why they don’t, just think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines – and in CNN’s case, financial contributors to the Clintons’ slush fund – and it all makes sense.
OBAMA FINDS AN ALLY IN WAL-MART, WHOSE STORES HE ONCE SHUNNED, Bloomberg notes. And since it’s Bloomberg, it’s worth adding the “Unexpectedly!” — or as Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute tweets, Bloomberg’s article is “A classic of the ‘corporatism, how does it work?’ genre:”
As a freshman senator with his eye on the presidency, Barack Obama said he’d never shop at a Wal-Mart and held the company up as an emblem of corporate greed.
Today, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is one of Obama’s most reliable corporate allies, a go-to partner that’s backed the White House on more than a dozen business initiatives, particularly Obamacare and climate change.
And speaking of “unexpectedly,” a flashback to 2011, when Wal-Mart went ‘Back to Basics’, which Richard Pollock, then with PJM dubbed “A Cautionary Tale for the Left:”
The failure, in large part, can be pinned to Leslie Dach: a well-known progressive and former senior aide to Vice President Al Gore. In July 2006, Dach was installed as the public relations chief for Wal-Mart. He drafted a number of other progressives into the company, seeking to change the company’s way of doing business: its culture, its politics, and most importantly its products.
Out went drab, inexpensive merchandise so dear to low-income Americans. In came upscale organic foods, “green” products, trendy jeans, and political correctness. In other words, Dach sought to expose poor working Americans to the “good life” of the wealthy, environmentally conscious Prius driver.
Dach’s failure should be a cautionary tale for President Obama: last week he scolded a blue collar man in Pennsylvania for driving an SUV, and he has previously admonished Americans to get out of their gas-guzzlers and into electric cars. Dach’s failure should also put Michelle Obama on notice; she has been pushing her White House organic vegetable garden as a model for working Americans.
Like other real-world experiments, the Wal-Mart story exposes the failure of progressivism in the marketplace, as the Dach strategy has been a fiasco: the merchandising turned off low-income (and largely Democratic-leaning) customers. Says former Wal-Mart executive Jimmy Wright:
The basic Wal-Mart customer didn’t leave Wal-Mart. What happened is that Wal-Mart left the customer.
First being in bed with Hillary, then Al Gore, then Obama. I’m not sure how those associations help Wal-Mart stay focused on its core business, but I guess it’s worth it for the cocktail parties and the protection from what Michael Walsh has described as a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.
READER BOOK PLUG: From Manuel Fliguer, Cooking With Lovecraft: Supernatural Horror In The Kitchen.
FASTER, PLEASE: The Impossible Propulsion Drive Is Heading to Space: Enough argument. It’s time to actually test this crazy thing. “The EmDrive, a hypothetical miracle propulsion system for outer space, has been sparking heated arguments for years. Now, Guido Fetta plans to settle the argument about reactionless space drives for once and for all by sending one into space to prove that it really generates thrust without exhaust. . . . One way to cut through all the technical arguments about torque balances and eddy currents is to actually test the drive in space. If it fails, it fails. If it works, then physicists will have some explaining. . . . On August 17, Cannae announced plans to launch its thruster on a 6U cubesat. Each unit is a 10-centimeter cube, so a 6U satellite is the size of a small shoebox. Approximately one quarter of this will be taken up by the drive. Fetta intends the satellite to stay on station for at least six months, rather than the six weeks that would be typical for a satellite this size at a altitude of 150 miles. The longer it stays in orbit, the more the satellite will show that it must be producing thrust without propellant.”
NEWS YOUR DM CAN USE: So You’re Going to Playtest a Roleplaying Game Adventure.
