THE DEBRIS OF A BAD IDEA: 14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines Litter the United States.
Archive for 2016
March 6, 2016
FOR EVERY STATEMENT, TURN, TURN, TURN: Another reversal from Trump, this time about giving illegal orders to the military.
HE LOOKS ADORABLE: ‘Casper the ghost-like’ octopus discovered on Pacific Ocean floor.
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD: Greece warns that tens of thousands of migrants cannot be bottled up on its territory.
FROM JOHN VAN STRY: Portals of Infinity: Book One: Champion for Hire.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE: N.C. Teacher, 30, Charged in Lesbian Sexual Affair With Female Student, 17.
FROM AMIE GIBBONS: Evie Jones and the Shadow of Chaos: An Evie Jones Novella.
THE ILL-INTENTIONED LEADING THE MAL-EDUCATED: The Return of Socialism.
March 5, 2016
AT AMAZON, up to 70% off on Premium Denim.
ELECTION NEWS: Cruz takes two Super Saturday contests, Trump projected to win La.
Also: Sanders takes two of three Dem contests on Super Saturday. “Sanders once again performed well in states where the Democratic contests are dominated by white progressives, while Clinton held her dominance in states with large populations of minorities.” Why don’t minorities want to vote for a Jewish candidate?
UPDATE: Trump projected to win in Kentucky. Though it’s a tie with Cruz in terms of delegates, apparently.
BILL MOYERS HAS A SAD: What Happens to Journalists When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore? Moyers, of course, was always a political operative, sometimes with a byline. And that gets to this comment from Thomas Lipscomb that I saw on Facebook:
It’s so simple even a journalist should understand it. Anyone who has been a real reporter does.
Print media are MASS MARKET MEDIA.
When reporters become “journalists” they ignore the market which sustains their economic model and start worrying about their peers in the business and handing one another awards and citations. And the journalists being hired out of the hothouses of American academia today are so deracinated from the market they need to serve that it became chic to have contempt for it as a great mob of the unwashed clinging to its guns and bibles. No more uncredentialed rough-hewn geniuses need apply these days.
And the vital information the mass market used to expect from its newspapers, like the make up of the rioting teenaged crowd that trashed a shopping center yesterday, was carefully kept out of the paper as being possibly “divisive.” This makes it impossible to calculate degrees of shopping risk, so retail sales and advertising dives and Amazon, which doesn’t advertise, thrives.
In fact a lot of the stuff the mass market wants to see in the paper, as we know from a century’s worth of market research has been pruned by elitists wanting to elevate the tone. This isn’t surprising since more than 90% of people in the business are so far left politically from at least 50% of their market that the notion of balanced press coverage today is a bad joke.
Alas, the only award that counts is circulation. Pulitzer, Hearst, and Edward Bernays all understood this.
So now the “journalists” finally have the papers that cater to THEIR tastes and there just aren’t enough journalists buying news papers to support the new business model.
Exeunt omnes pursued by a bear market.
Who could have seen this coming?
AT AMAZON, trade in your old video games for credit.
THIS SEEMS FAIR: Swedish group wants ‘legal abortions’ for men. “Men should have the same right as women to decide not be parents, according to a controversial new proposal from the Liberal Party’s youth wing in western Sweden (LUF Väst). . . . The group believes ‘legal abortion’ for men would promote equality between the sexes in the early stages of a pregnancy, giving men a chance to opt out. Women would also benefit if they knew from the get-go whether a man was willing to commit to parenthood, the young liberals say. . . . Some social media users have welcomed the plan but many have ridiculed it and Nilsen said the group had received a flurry of threats.”
WHEN PETTY TYRANTS BECOME NOT-SO-PETTY: K.C. Johnson On Yale And The Montague Case.
Again, the justification for these denials of basic due process is that no one is accusing the student of rape.
How, then, to reconcile this fiction with posters that blanketed the Yale campus asking the Yale basketball team to “stop supporting a rapist” [emphasis added]?
When the alleged disciplinary offense is the same as a felony, the idea that deny due process serves the interests of fairness is preposterous.
(2) Of the media coverage of this issue, one article handled the issue responsibly. In the New Haven Register, Chip Malafronte wrote: “There is no record of an arrest or court hearing involving Montague on file with the Connecticut judicial branch.”
Every article on this case should contain such a sentence. How can someone be a “rapist” if he hasn’t even been charged with a crime—much less convicted?
Because calling him a rapist makes white, upper-class women feel good about themselves, and making white, upper-class women feel good about themselves is the supreme value in our society today, especially at expensive private schools.
Plus:
Yale has never explained why it chose to redefine a term commonly understood in both culture and the law. And at this stage, it’s not public what specific allegations Montague even faced. But to the extent he faced allegations that don’t fit the definition of sexual assault, and as a result of Yale’s actions he has now publicly been branded a “rapist” in campus posters, it would seem that he has suffered real harm from Yale’s peculiar use of the dictionary. . . . In an official statement, Yale unsurprisingly (and appropriately in this instance) shielded itself behind FERPA and declined comment.
But, incredibly, an agent of the Yale administration took a different course. As quoted by Malafronte, the Yale Women’s Center released a public statement purporting to “speculate” and then adding: “[W]e can comfortably say that, should all of this be true, this is progress. It seems that a survivor felt that coming forward was a viable option and that they got the decisive outcome that they likely fought hard for . . . Though we can only speculate as to the intent behind the basketball team’s shirt protest, the team’s actions appeared to be a dismissal of the very real threat of sexual violence.”
In other words: an official Yale agency all but confirmed that Montague was expelled for “sexual violence.”
Between the publication of the Register article and this morning, someone (Yale’s general counsel, perhaps?) appears to have spoken to the Women’s Center, which released a modified statement “recogniz[ing] that FERPA and Yale policy prohibit Yale from commenting on the exact nature of any specific incident.”
But the Women’s Center has already commented. Its comment all but confirmed the rumors. And that comment, along with the harm it caused, can’t be undone.
He’s only a man. His feelings and life don’t matter.
QUESTION ASKED: Are Those Fresh Food Delivery Boxes Worth It?
My wife has been a big fan of Blue Apron for several years now; the food is tasty, the cooking isn’t too difficult, and typically takes about a 30 to 45 minutes. All the ingredients are included in the box, and each dish include full-color step-by-step instructions — she’s learned some new cooking techniques along the way, and I’ve had fun helping. The proportions are satisfying without being over the top — most of the dishes run 650 to 700 calories. Plus, as with new packages from Amazon, it’s fun waiting for the blue box to arrive each Tuesday when working at home.