BILL CLINTON FLUSTERED WHEN ASKED WHETHER PAST IS FAIR GAME (VIDEO): “An ABC News reporter asked Bill Clinton whether his past is fair game in the 2016 presidential election. Clinton appeared flustered and unsure what to say.”
Hey, the past is only fair game when it’s a Republican. Mitt Romney teasing a student when he was a high school senior – unfit for the presidency. Obama doing drugs and Clinton abusing women in their younger days? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
WHO’S SHE KIDDING? Hillary Clinton Promises She’ll Investigate Area 51, UFOs.
Just another case of a Clinton covering up an affair.
WE SHOULD PROBABLY FIND A WAY TO BAN THIS, SINCE INCOME INEQUALITY IS OUR GREATEST PROBLEM, EXCEPT MAYBE FOR GLOBAL WARMING: The Marriages of Power Couples Reinforce Income Inequality. “These days, an investment banker may marry another investment banker rather than a high school sweetheart, or a lawyer will marry another lawyer, or a prestigious client, rather than a secretary. Whether measured in terms of income or education, there are more so-called power couples today than in the past, one manifestation of a phenomenon known as assortative mating, or more generally the pairing of like with like. These matches are great for those individuals who can build prosperous and happy family alliances, but they also propagate inequality across the generations. Of all the causes behind growing income inequality, in the longer run this development may prove one of the most significant and also one of the hardest to counter.”
Well, I’ve offered some reform proposals that would help.
21ST CENTURY WARFARE: Russia and China’s “Enhanced Human Operations” Terrify the Pentagon.
U.S. adversaries are already working on something America is reluctant to: Enhanced Human Operations (EHO).
EHOs entail modifying the body and the brain itself, creating what some have called “super soldiers.” At a press conference laying the Defense Department’s future research and development strategy on Monday, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work warned that America would soon lose its military competitive advantage if it does not pursue technologies such employing artificial intelligence.
“Now our adversaries, quite frankly, are pursuing enhanced human operations, and it scares the crap out of us,” Work said.
Altering human beings from the inside to more effectively fight in combat presents ethical dilemmas for American scientists and military planners. Work says those ethical concerns typically don’t apply to authoritarian governments like Russia’s or China’s, but their lack of hesitation in developing EHOs may force America’s hand.
That’s usually how these things work.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Be A Moderately Successful Person.
“CAMPUS FREE SPEECH HAS BEEN IN TROUBLE FOR A LONG TIME”: I’m pleased to announce that the Cato Institute has just released my new essay as the lead essay in its January 2016 issue of Cato Unbound.
Here’s a little info about Cato Unbound, in case you aren’t familiar with it:
Each month, Cato Unbound will present an essay on a big-picture topic by an important thinker. The ideas in that essay will then be tested by the comments and criticism of equally eminent thinkers, each of whom will respond to the month’s lead essay and then to one another. The idea is to create a hub for wide-ranging, open-ended conversation, where ideas will be advanced, challenged, and refined in public view.
My essay gives a brief overview of the history of campus free speech over the last few decades and examines the recent cases of speech suppression on college campuses that have captured the media’s attention. It is live now on Cato Unbound’s website.
Replies from law professors Eric Posner and Catherine J. Ross are to come, and discussion will follow through the end of the month.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Man Infuriates Ex-Girlfriends By Putting Them All Into A Group Chat. Hilarity ensues, and one of them sets up a date with him.
NOBODY RESPECTS A “MALE FEMINIST” ANYMORE, NOT EVEN FEMALE FEMINISTS: Planned Parenthood to male allies: You suck.
Actually, it’s probably especially female feminists.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: A Starfish-Killing, Artificially Intelligent Robot Is Set to Patrol the Great Barrier Reef.
GOOD: University of Missouri’s Efforts To Placate Protesters Have Created Backlash. “Kurt Bahr, a Republican state representative, says some of his constituents have told him that they regret attending Mizzou and do not want their children to go there, because they do not trust the new leadership of the university. One of his constituents even said that he feared for the safety of his daughter on campus thanks to the ‘instability’ there.”
Plus, this disturbing bit: “Yet the First Amendment does not give people a free pass to go round saying hateful things, points out Mr Henson.”
Um, yes, actually, it does. Perhaps lawprof Henson was misquoted by The Economist, which seems a bit weak on the First Amendment generally these days. But given what’s happened at Mizzou this year, it’s distressingly likely that he actually said this.
INSIDE THE GREAT BRITISH RECORDING STUDIOS: I have a review of veteran music journalist Howard Massey’s excellent, heavily-illustrated new book at the PJ Lifestyle blog.
(And no, that’s not my Telefunken U47 — but I wish it was!)
IN THE MAIL: The Year’s Best Military SF and Space Opera (BAEN).
Plus, today only at Amazon: 40-70% off Lilly Pulitzer Women’s Clothing.
And, also today only: Perfect Fitness Ab Carver Pro and Ab Arch.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 970.
ERIC S. RAYMOND: Why I Joined The NRA.
After 20 years of evading joining the NRA, I finally did it last week.
I’ve never been a huge fan of the NRA because, despite the fearsome extremist image the mainstream media tries to hang on it, the NRA is actually rather squishy about gun rights. A major symptom of this is its lack of interest in pursuing Second Amendment court cases. Alan Gura, the civil-rights warrior who fought Heller vs. DC and several other key cases to a successful conclusion, was funded not by the NRA but by the Second Amendment Foundation. Also, in the past, the NRA has been too willing to acquiesce to unconstitutional legislation like the 1986 ban on sales of new automatic weapons to civilians.
So, you might well ask: why am I joining an organization I’m dubious about now, when the gun-rights cause seems to be winning? Popular support for Second Amendment rights is at record highs in the polls, a record seven states now have constitutional carry (no permit requirement), Texas just became the 45th state to legalize open carry last week…why am I joining an organization I’ve characterized as squishy?
I joined because the state-worshiping thugs on the other side are doubling down, and they still own most of the media and the machinery of the Federal government. After decades of pretending that they only wanted soi-disant “common-sense” legislation aimed at specific problems around the edges of gun policy, the Democratic Party is now openly talking of outright gun confiscation. The usual suspects in the national press are obediently amplifying their propaganda.
Some things you do for substantive effect – giving money to the SAF so Alan Gura can win another case is like that. Some things you do less for effect than as as a signal of pushback intended to create political momentum and demoralize the other side; joining the NRA is like that.
Yep. I went life-member this fall for the same reason.
SHOT: What grocery shopping in the USSR was like (video).
Chaser:
It was September 16, 1989 and Yeltsin, then newly elected to the new Soviet parliament and the Supreme Soviet, had just visited Johnson Space Center.
At JSC, Yeltsin visited mission control and a mock-up of a space station. According to Houston Chronicle reporter Stefanie Asin, it wasn’t all the screens, dials, and wonder at NASA that blew up his skirt, it was the unscheduled trip inside a nearby Randall’s location.
Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement,” wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.”
* * * * * * *
“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”
—“When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake,” the Houston Chronicle, April 7, 2014.
Incidentally, just compare the photos atop the two articles to understand Yeltsin’s amazement.
BILL IS BACK: What ‘buy one, get one free’ really means with the Clintons. “When Paula Jones, an Arkansas state worker, and Kathleen Willey, a Democratic volunteer at the White House, accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment, minions of the Clintons systematically set out to discredit them. Ditto with Juanita Broaddrick, the owner of an Arkansas nursing home, who said Bill Clinton raped her when he was Arkansas attorney general in 1978. Indeed, Errol Louis of the New York Daily News stunned a CNN interviewer last week by noting that 14 women have accused Bill Clinton of some form of sexual abuse. That’s not up to the numbers of women accusing comedian Bill Cosby of abuse, but Bill Clinton does get his own Wikipedia page listing his accusers. . . . To the extent that Hillary Clinton accuses Republicans of waging a ‘war on women,’ the history of her husband’s record with women will blunt the effectiveness of her attack. Voters may have extended sympathy to Hillary as a wronged spouse back in the 1990s, but the one-third of voters who don’t remember the impeachment of Bill Clinton well may be surprised to learn just how big Hillary’s role in discrediting Bill Clinton’s accusers has been.”
IT’S AS IF MODERN LEFTISM IS ACTUALLY ABOUT RE-CREATING THE OLD ARISTOCRATIC CLASS: The dangerous separation of the American upper middle class. “For many, the most attractive class dividing line is the one between those at the very, very top and everybody else. It is true that the top 1 percent is pulling away very dramatically from the bottom 99 percent. But the top 1 percent is by definition a small group. It is not plausible to claim that the individual or family in the 95th or 99th percentile are in any way part of mainstream America, even if many of them think so: over a third of the demonstrators on the May Day ‘Occupy’ march in 2011 had annual earnings of more than $100,000.”
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KARMA: LA Renters Rat Out Airbnb Users, Get Evicted Instead. “This doesn’t quite rise to the level of seriousness evinced by, say, The Lives of Others, the German film about ubiquitous spying in the old GDR. But there’s a level of irony here that seems lost not just on Phyllis Murphy but the [L.A.] Times‘ reporter, too.”
HOWARD WOLOWITZ, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Willy do it? Man with bionic penis to finally lose his virginity at 43:
Mohammed Abad will pop his cherry in the next few days with sex worker Charlotte Rose after a dinner date.
Mo, who lost his penis when he was six in a car accident, said: “I have waited long enough for this — it’ll be a great start to the new year. My penis is working perfectly now so I just want to do it. I’m really excited. I can’t wait for it to finally happen.”
Mo first had surgery to fit the eight-inch bionic penis in 2012, but it has only been fully functional for a few months.
It has two tubes running along its length which inflate when he presses a button on his testicle.
Charlotte, 35, will not be charging Mo when they meet up in London.
It’s too bad Bob Guccione isn’t alive to read this story, which reads like the long-awaited convergence of articles from his old publications Penthouse Forum and Omni.
OSWALD SPENGLER, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Our spoiled, emasculated, de‑spiritualised societies in the West are in terminal decline.
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