Archive for 2016
June 25, 2016
WHY IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUCH A CESSPIT OF CORRUPTION AND WEAPONS TRAFFICKING? Ex-Calif. State Sen. Leland Yee, gun control champion, heading to prison for weapons trafficking.
NO, BUT OTHER PEOPLE’S CARS SHOULD KILL THEM TO SAVE ME: The Self-Driving Dilemma: Should Your Car Kill You To Save Others?
THE PERSISTENCE OF WASHINGTON DELUSION: “Calm down, Jonathan. Now’s not the time for fear. That comes later.”
THE PAST DECADE IN A NUTSHELL:
AHH, BUT THE MUSHROOMS, THAT’S WHERE I HAD THEM! THEY LAUGHED AT ME AND MADE JOKES BUT I PROVED IT BEYOND THE SHADOW OF A DOUBT AND WITH GEOMETRIC LOGIC! Zoe Quinn and Horde of SJWs Enraged at Nintendo Over ‘Paper Mario’ Mushroom Pun.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE ON #BREXIT:
For a long time, Britons who wanted their country to leave the European Union were regarded almost as mentally ill by those who wanted it to stay. The leavers didn’t have an opinion; they had a pathology. Since one doesn’t argue with pathology, it wasn’t necessary for the remainers to answer the leavers with more than sneers and derision.
Even after the vote, the attitude persists. Those who voted to leave are described as, ipso facto, small-minded, xenophobic, and fearful of the future. Those who voted to stay are described as, ipso facto, open-minded, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking. The BBC itself suggested as much on its website. In short, the desire to leave was a return to the insularity that resulted in the famous—though apocryphal—newspaper headline: fog in the channel: continent cut off.
As with our own media, Brexit has certainly been a clarifying moment in terms of seeing how much England’s largely socialist pundit class utterly despises over half of its citizens.
ROGER KIMBALL ON WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE #BREXIT EARTHQUAKE.
READY TO BE A COMPROMISED PRESIDENT FROM DAY ONE: Disabling security for Clinton server laid out ‘welcome mat’ for hackers.
IN THE MAIL: From Senator Mike Lee, Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document.
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QUESTION ASKED: Is Brexit A Harbinger of the Future or the Last Gasp of the Nation State?
My money’s on the former, if only because the latter is too depressing an future to ponder.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1143.
TO AVOID THIS SORT OF THING, “TRUSTED INSTITUTIONS” MUST BE TRUSTWORTHY, AND LEADERS MUST BE COMPETENT: So it’s a real possibility. “This referendum campaign, as I wrote a few days ago, was not fought on the issues that are normally central to British elections. Identity politics trumped economics; arguments about ‘independence’ and ‘sovereignty’ defeated arguments about British influence and importance. The advice of once-trusted institutions was ignored. Elected leaders were swept aside. If that kind of transformation can take place in the U.K., then it can happen in the United States, too. We have been warned.”
Maybe a start would be to have a political class that didn’t put “independence” and “sovereignty” in quotes, as if they were alien concepts.
THOUGHTS ON the sociology of Brexit.
THAT’S THE CHICAGO WAY: Drug Suspect Violently Resists Arrest, Released from Jail Without Charges, writes Jack Dunphy.
Read the whole thing.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Brexit And The Weakness Of The West.
The vote, and weakening of the West that it heralds, will diminish President Obama’s foreign policy legacy. American policy toward Europe under his leadership has been an abject failure. His most obvious failure, and one that historians will view severely, is his failure to prevent the meltdown of Syria. The millions of desperate refugees fleeing for their lives are much more than a humanitarian disaster; they are a political disaster, and the strain of coping with the refugee flow on top of Europe’s other problems stoked suspicion and fear across the continent and greatly strengthened the power of the Leave campaign in the UK.
But beyond the horrors of Syria, Obama has done less for Europe than any American president since the 1930s. The American response to the euro crisis and its long and bitter aftermath was both shortsighted and feeble.
To be fair, that’s pretty much the nature of Obama’s response to everything, except for domestic political opposition and golf, which receive his full attention.
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THE DANGER OF LOOKING AT HISTORY THROUGH A CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL LENS, Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia’s latest video:
At Commentary, Daniella J. Greenbaum lists one antidote, in a post titled “How to Think About the Past:”
Mark Carnes, professor of history at Barnard and Columbia, and author of Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Harvard, 2014) is that glimmer. In the 90s, he created a history seminar called Reacting to the Past which thoroughly and successfully separates the solipsistic focus of and on students from the material they are ostensibly studying.
In a Reacting seminar, students must leave the totality of their identities at the classroom door. They are assigned a role within a specific plot point of history, and all their behavior—oral presentations, papers, etc.—must be exercised through the lens of that given role. If the year is 1600, the American Revolution has not occurred. Its leaders have not been born, its literature unwritten. If students want to utilize the ideas and values it popularized in order to argue for a different cause, they must be able to root them in an earlier, different period of history. They cannot use concepts or writings (or new terms) that had not yet been conceived before or during the time period into which they’ve been dropped. What a student believes, or thinks he/she believes, is irrelevant; what matters is only their ability to best represent and argue the position and identity that they’ve been handed.
It seems like an excellent workaround to the dead-end that is leftist academia’s Black Armband History.
SOME OF US ARE BETTER ADVOCATES THAN OTHERS: George Leef: Law Professor Demands Repeal Of ‘Outdated’ Second Amendment, Makes Very Weak Case.
SO I GUESS OUR NAVY’S BEEN “FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED,” TOO: “When the order was given to evade the Iranian forces, the helmsman refused the order.”
ARE HOUSE GOP LEADERS SUBVERTING THE IRS IMPEACHMENT EFFORT? There was a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee this week to consider whether to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. After all, Koskinen misled – out in the real world, that is pronounced “lied” – to Congress about Lois Lerner’s email.
Rep. Jim Jordan, the indefatigable Ohio Republican leading the impeachment effort, has determinedly made the case at every opportunity before colleagues and the American people via the media. Even so, it increasingly appears that House GOP leaders are balking at the idea of actually doing something consequential – rather than merely symbolic – on behalf of the constitutional integrity of Congress.
Take Thursday’s judicial panel hearing, for example. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, said he favors censure of Koskinen, even as Judiciary panel chief Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, conspicuously refused to call the hearing by anything involving the word “impeach.”
Chaffetz told Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group, who covered the hearing, that he believes Goodlatte favors censure and that he views it as a step in the impeachment process. That apparently is supposed to satisfy Jordan and others who think the time to act is obviously now, not later.
“Right now, the rights of the legislative branch are being trampled on,” Jordan told TheDCNF. “And one of the best ways we can reassert that is by moving forward.”
CHRISTIAN ADAMS: R.I.P., Mike Flynn. “Had Mike Flynn been born a couple of centuries earlier, he’d be the fellow deciding behind which stand of trees Americans would hide to pick off redcoats.”
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