REALLY? THEN HOW COME WE HAD MUCH FASTER GROWTH DURING THE “MAD MEN” ERA, AND ARE STAGNATING NOW? How Sexism Holds Back The Economy.
Archive for 2016
June 17, 2016
THESE ARE THE CRAZY YEARS: #BodyPositive Gym Is Covering Up Mirrors And Serving Pizza.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Gift Ideas for a Firearms Father’s Day.
Trust me – he’d love a pair of tickets to Bullets & Bourbon in the Dallas area this December.
IN RELATED NEWS, FISH TURN OUT TO ENJOY BICYCLING: The job that makes us happiest? Housewife! Survey finds stay-at-home mothers are more satisfied than any other profession. “Only one in seven stay-at-home parents say they are dissatisified with their role, a level of unhappiness that is less than half that found among civil servants or salesmen and women.”
WEAPONIZING BOLLYWOOD: “It’s not just ISIL that hates music. Conservative Arab Moslems have a particular distaste for all music and especially ‘Bollywood’ (hit tunes from Indian movies) music. Early Moslems were particularly hostile to Hinduism (for reasons too complex to explain here) but young Moslem men in Arabia and throughout Asia find Bollywood films, especially the many musicals and their memorable melodies, irresistible. The images of pretty young women dancing with handsome young men added to the appeal but all of this stuff was strictly forbidden by Islamic radicals, like those running al Qaeda and ISIL. Worse, when this music is used as a ‘weapon’ some of the young men on the receiving end find they do like it but have to conceal that lest they be accused of apostasy and executed.”
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Plus, save on Gerber Blades.
FOREIGN POLICY DISARRAY: Austin Bay: As Assad Continues to Wipe Out Syria, State Dept. Dissenters Confront Obama.
Dissenting State Department officials are demanding President Barack Obama wage war on the Assad dictatorship—which is a short step away from demanding regime change.
Late on June 16 The Wall Street Journal reported that the “near collapse” of the current ceasefire had spurred 51 “mid-to high-level State Department officers involved with advising on Syria policy” to sign a “dissent channel cable” calling on the Obama Administration to target Syria’s Assad regime with repeated “military strikes.”
The President isn’t doing his job. People are starting to point that out.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: This Woman’s Life Is Better Than Ever Now That She’s Stopped Shaving Her Beard.
NORTH KOREA: Let Them Eat Nothing. “North Korea is trying to avoid food shortages by ordering more people to leave their regular jobs and spend 30 days (May 15- June 15) helping out with planting the rice crop. This year it includes university students. If you have the money, you can bribe your way out of this chore. About a third of the students manage to pay the bribe. That is annoying enough but then about a third of the students who go to the farms get out of about half the work because they are those who work as informers for the government.”
Remember, they sell communism on the basis of equality. But, of course, it doesn’t work out that way. And to be honest, it was never actually meant to.
WHY WOULD HE LISTEN TO THEM WHEN HE HAS FOREIGN POLICY MASTERMIND BEN RHODES TO GUIDE HIM? As Assad Continues to Wipe Out Syria, State Dept. Dissenters Confront Obama.
From Austin Bay in the New York Observer.
AND NOW HE’S THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: How a Baby Born With His Brain Outside His Skull Was Saved.
IT’S NOT TOO LATE: 50% Off Father’s Day Gifts. Or just buy something nice for yourself!
QUIET AND EASY TO MAKE: Forgotten Weapons: The Spy Pistol Used to Resist Nazi Occupation. “Having shot a Welrod myself, I can attest to the very effective nature of the silencer—the loudest part of the experience by far was the “thwack” of each bullet hitting the wooden beams of the backstop at the range.”
FASTER, PLEASE. On the Brighter Side: Hezbollah Getting Hammered.
THIS SEEMS LIKE A NON SEQUITUR — THERE WERE SO MANY PEOPLE LINING UP TO DONATE, THE BLOOD BANKS WERE FULL: Orlando Shooting Renews Debate Over Limits on Gay Men Donating Blood.
READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Patrick Wayland, The Nialhaus Proxy: This Silicon Valley startup has a killer idea that it’s willing to murder for.
TOO BAD PENNIES CONTAIN HARDLY ANY ACTUAL COPPER: Stop your computer from overheating by stacking copper coins on it.
GARRISON KEILLOR IS RETIRING FROM NPR’S THE PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION: “Public radio always wondered what it was going to do when Garrison leaves,” [Eric Nuzum, former vice president for programming at NPR] said. “It’s about to find out.”
Near the end of a fawning New York Times profile on the 73-year old Keillor, the mask is lowered, and the real man begins to emerge:
Curiously, Mr. Keillor has always found it difficult spending so much time with the strong, good-looking, above average people of Lake Wobegon, which he based on his relatives, past and present.
In “The Keillor Reader” (2014), he complained bitterly about “their industriousness, their infernal humility, their schoolmarmish sincerity, their earnest interest in you, their clichés falling like clockwork — it can be tiring to be around.”
Speaking on his porch, Mr. Keillor said of Lake Wobegonians, i.e., his relatives, “I am frustrated by them in real life.” They were too controlled by good manners, he said, and “have a very hard time breaking through.”
So why devote so much of his professional life ruminating about them? “It’s the people I think I know,” he replied.
Will he miss them, and the weekly jolt of the show?
“No,” he replied. “No.”
As with many on the left, in the wake of 9/11, Keillor emerged as a vicious partisan, describing President Bush’s supporters thusly in 2004:
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
As Christopher Caldwell memorably put it that same year: “At some point, Democrats became the party of small-town people who think they’re too big for their small towns…For these people, liberalism is not a belief at all. No, it’s something more important: a badge of certain social aspirations. That is why the laments of the small-town leftists get voiced with such intemperance and desperation. As if those who voice them are fighting off the nagging thought: If the Republicans aren’t particularly evil, then maybe I’m not particularly special.”
I’M NOT SURE THE JOKE IS ON THE FROGS: Indian Frogs Discover Gross New Way to Have Sex: It’s called the dorsal straddle, and researchers spent 320 hours filming it.
Plus: “All that work—and sexual innovation—was largely for naught, as 12 of the 15 fertilized egg clutches recorded by researchers were promptly eaten by other animals.” Think of it as birth control, I guess.
ROGER SIMON: They call Trump a narcissist, but his enemies are worse.
Roger’s new book, which hit the streets (and Amazon’s Kindle servers) earlier this week is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already.
In addition to his ongoing promotional tour, Roger will be discussing his new book in person this December at Bullets & Bourbon in Texas.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON AMERICA IN FREE-FALL:
This election year so far has emblemized the perfect storm of unrest and confusion—and an even more worrisome response to it. In the past, when 51 percent of societies no longer believed in or wished to defend their collective values and traditions, there were no longer reasons for them to continue. And so they did not—a warning we should heed.
Read the whole thing.
BECAUSE HE’D RATHER DISARM AMERICA THAN ISIS: Obama has turned jihadist terror attack into personal gun war.
It’s alternately terrifying and fascinating to watch a president who’s far angrier with the American Midwest than the Islamic Middle East.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF LAWLESSNESS? This gun crime must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.