OUR LAWLESS GOVERNMENT: Report: Judge unimpressed by Obama DOJ’s dive on non-citizen voting.
Archive for 2016
February 23, 2016
THERE IS MY SHOCKED FACE: OPM tech head resigns before having to testify.
I’VE SAID FOR YEARS TELLING GIRLS THEY’RE BOTH INVINCIBLE AND INCREDIBLY FRAGILE (NOT TO MENTION THAT MEN CAN DESTROY THEM WITH A LOOK) IS GIFTING US A GENERATION OF NEUROTICS: Why Do We Teach Girls That It’s Cute to Be Scared?
#FREESTACY: Larry Correia, shadow-banned, abandons twitter. RIP Twitter.
February 22, 2016
PREFERENCE CASCADE? Jon Huntsman: I could get behind Donald Trump.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: U.S. Marines Pre-Positioning Tanks, Ammunition In Secret Norway Caves Against Russian Invasion. “In 2015, it was revealed that Russia rehearsed military takeovers of northern Norway, the Swedish island of Gotland and the Danish island of Bornholm.”
Related: U.S. Sends 5,000 Tons Of Ammunition To Germany. “Recent moves in response to Russia’s sending troops into Ukraine have seen the US reverse some of its gradual reduction in numbers in Europe, especially Germany where it has had large bases since the end of the Second World War.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What I Learned As A Former Hooters Girl.
AT AMAZON, take 30% off Contemporary Jewelry.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Futuristic Data Security With A Pen And A Pad. “If I were running an intelligence agency, I’d have all my important stuff done in handwriting or on mechanical typewriters (the old kind that type over the same fabric ribbon multiple times) and distributed in sealed envelopes. If I were setting up a voting system, I’d use paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines. And if I were running a hospital, I’d seriously consider doing everything on paper.”
REVEALED! The Tragic Infant Trauma That Turned Leonardo DiCaprio into an Eco Loon.
Also revealed, DiCaprio has no idea what the word “schadenfreude” actually means.
SO LOOKING AT THIS GALLERY OF PHOTOS FEATURING FAMOUS BOMBSHELL JAYNE MANSFIELD, I was struck by how much photoshopping such photos would have to have to pass muster today.
OUCH: The same old Francis: Neither Cuba’s repressed nor victims of sexual abuse receive Pope’s support. “Cubans recognise this Pope perfectly: he is the same man who refused to receive the ‘Ladies in White’ and who failed to condemn the circumstances under which people languish on the island. He is the same Francis who forgets about these victims, but is quick to pardon those who wronged them.”
ACTUALLY, I THINK SOCIAL-JUSTICE ACTIVISM IS A SIGN OF PRE-EXISTING MENTAL ILLNESS: Robby Soave: Liberal Activism Is Giving Students Panic Attacks, Depression, Failing Grades. Life outside the safe space is even harder, though. “I don’t begrudge students choosing activism over classes. If that’s what they want to spend their time on, fine. But their anguish seems grossly disproportionate to their situation.” Well, that absence of any sense of proportion is a hallmark of neurosis. And actually, given that students at universities — whether public or private, it doesn’t really matter — receive massive taxpayer subsidies, maybe they have a duty to actually focus on their education. Otherwise they’re just privileged top-percenters, living off the toil of the less fortunate.
ARCHITECTS OF FORTUNE: James Lileks links to a photo of the sleek white, Corbusier and Bauhaus-influenced, moderne NBC building that existed from 1938 until the mid-‘60s on the corner of Sunset and Vine in L.A. and writes:
In 1931, nothing in the vicinity looked as modern as this. Nothing could. So you had this bright technological future appearing like an iceberg floating out of the fog, and around it was tired brick with a few historical pastiche-details. Here’s the future, citizen-units! But the future was stalled; the economy had crashed, the engine had sputtered, and clumsy hands were under the hood trying to rewire it all without realizing quite what they were doing. The very idea these buildings embodied — the bright, rational, technocratic future — were the very ideas that kept it from happening, because the technocrats were busy trying to reshape the economy* instead of let it work.
That’s a great observation; in Europe, as art historian Jonathan Petropoulos wrote last year in Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany, both Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, the founder and the last director of the Bauhaus, respectively, were heavily involved in German socialist politics during the hothouse Weimar era of the 1920s, and would have happily built buildings for the successor National Socialist regime. It wasn’t until 1937 when Hitler’s very public attendance at the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich sealed the fate of modern art in Germany, and both men fled to America. Le Corbusier, their counterpart in France would go on to collaborate with Vichy, the Nazis’ puppet French Government, during World War II.
As Tom Wolfe wrote in From Bauhaus to Our House, Gropius’s postwar American architectural firm, which he ran while simultaneously teaching at Harvard, “was not called Walter Gropius & Associates, Inc., or anything close to it. It was called ‘The Architects Collaborative.’” He would end his career designing the monolithic Pan Am building on Park Ave. (Thus aiding not only capitalism but unfettered “binge flying” to boot. Doubleplus ungood, Walter!) And while architectural historians Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst give little discussion of Mies’ politics after emigrating to America in their otherwise extremely well-researched recent biography, I’d love to know what was going through his mind in the 1950s, when his career as a working architect, largely left for dead outside of designing the Chicago campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology was revived in the 1950s through office buildings for the Seagram and Bacardi liquor corporations, and Toronto-Dominion Bank.
*QED.
ACE SHELVES TWITTER: “If you want to see my content you’ll just have to go to my site. I’m not providing it to Twitter any longer.”
His site is at Ace.mu.nu.
CLIMATE ALARMISTS CAUGHT BEING HYPOCRITES ABOUT ‘BIG OIL’ MONEY: Over 100 alarmists demand AGU cut ties with ExxonMobil … which funds most of their own institutions.
Wait, climate alarmists are still a thing? Didn’t Al Gore declare “Mission Accomplished” on radical environmentalism at the start of 2013, when he sold Current TV for $500 million to the ultimate example of Big Oil, the petro-state of Qatar?
#FREESTACY: TWITTER DOUBLES DOWN; STACY MCCAIN’S @SEXTROUBLEBOOK ACCOUNT BANNED.
Related: Stacy posts an email from Twitter stating that his primary account “will not be restored.”
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What is Crony Capitalism?
(Video featuring Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard, at PragerU.)
TEST DRIVE: The 2016 Audi RS7 Performance.
I tested the 2014 RS7; here’s my review. The new model has 605 horsepower, up from the anemic 560 of the one I drove.
AT AMAZON, Save $15 on Fire TV. I like mine.
Also, pre-Spring deals on Men’s Running & Athletic Shoes.
ALOE VERA NOW CAUSES CANCER IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA: For those of you not familiar with California’s Proposition 65, this 2009 L.A. Times article is a reasonable introduction:
Whether you are pumping gas or buying a fillet of salmon, your eyes have no doubt landed on an ominous sign documenting the presence of “chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.”
Such alarming notices began appearing in the state in 1986 thanks to Proposition 65, otherwise known as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, which prohibits businesses from discharging potentially harmful chemicals in drinking water and requires them to disclose the presence of such chemicals on their premises. The 19-page list of hundreds of potentially dangerous chemicals kept by the state is updated annually.
Today, the warnings are everywhere: parking lots, hardware stores, hospitals and just about any decent-sized business including, as of May, those of medical marijuana suppliers — because marijuana smoke is now on the list of known carcinogens.
Flash-forward to 2016, when as the California Political Review notes, Aloe Vera has been added to the state’s Prop. 65 List:
You read that correctly: Aloe vera. In December of last year, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) published its intent to list Aloe vera, whole leave extract to the Proposition 65 list of chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer. Despite the widely accepted extensive health benefits of Aloe vera, an unelected regulator in Sacramento can now tell you and all consumers it will cause cancer, even if no cases of cancer from Aloe vera exposure exist.
The problem is that the 800+ chemicals listed in Proposition 65 are not devised to protect consumers, but rather serve as a cash cow for private trial lawyers to sue small business and reap the hefty settlement payout. Since 1986, nearly 20,000 lawsuits have been filed, adding up to over half a billion dollars in settlement payments by business owners.
Unfortunately, the most profitable thing regulators give to trial lawyers at the expense of job creators is confusion. Recent Proposition 65 proposed regulatory revisions create compliance difficulties, increase frivolous litigation, and add consumer confusion.
Which for trial lawyers, is a feature, not a bug. Or as Ayn Rand wrote a half century ago in Atlas Shrugged, “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of law-breakers — and then you cash in on guilt.”
GAME OVER: JOE BIDEN SAYS IN 1992 THAT THE PRESIDENT SHOULDN’T NAME A SCOTUS NOMINEE “ONCE THE POLITICAL SEASON IS UNDERWAY.” “If you’re keeping score, this means that the current president, current vice president, current Senate minority leader, and incoming Senate minority leader have all gone on record in the past in favor of obstructing a Supreme Court nominee.”