ON THE OLD ROW PODCAST, I talk about higher education, free speech, and how the campus Greek community should “punch back twice as hard.” My part starts at 36:00.
Archive for 2017
June 7, 2017
USEFUL FOR PEOPLE WHO AREN’T ON STEROIDS: Training Advice from Old-Time Bodybuilders.
DRUNK PHILLY REPORTER HAD JUST ONE DRINK. OKAY, MAYBE FIVE:
Campbell was apparently concerned she may have been drugged—how else to explain her belligerent behavior on the street? Because those multiple drinks and shots couldn’t have possibly caused her to hurl those insults at law enforcement, could they? Without knowing what chemicals were in Campbell’s system, I am going to agree with her theory. Someone did put something in her drink. And that something was alcohol.
Unless your name is Steve Green, don’t try this at home, kids. Bad things can happen — very bad things. (Language warning, needless to say):
AND I HAD THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Scientists Have Found the Oldest Known Human Fossils.
It’s not just when these people died that matters, but where. Their presence in north Africa complicates what was once a tidy picture of humanity arising in the east of the continent. “What people, including myself, used to think was that there was a cradle of humankind in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, and all modern humans descend from that population,” says Philipp Gunz from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who was involved in the new excavation. “The new finds indicate that Homo sapiens is much older and had already spread across all of Africa by 300,000 years ago. They really show that the African story of our species was more complex than what we used to think.”
Very interesting.
OVER AT THETRUTHABOUTKNIVES, lots of coverage of the BLADE Show. Just keep scrolling.
TEST DRIVE: 2017 Ram 2500 / 3500.
HERE COME THE JUDGES, AGAIN: Trump announces 11 new picks.
Related: Jonathan Adler: President Trump continues to make sterling judicial nominations.
I should note that University of Pennsylvania lawprof Stephanos Bibas, nominated by Trump to the 3d Circuit, has a book coming out with my Tennessee colleague Ben Barton: Rebooting Justice: More Technology, Fewer Lawyers, and the Future of Law. I’ve read it in manuscript and it’s excellent.
ROD DREHER: The Storm Before The Storm. “The rising Left is bound and determined to crush or at least permanently sideline people it deems heretics — in particular, whites, males, orthodox Christians, and skeptics of the LGBT project. It does not want a pluralistic modus vivendi; it wants total domination. The establishment Left lacks the will to stop them. Its members are terrified of appearing un-woke. . . . The establishment Right lacks the will to stop them either, for fear of being called bigots. And it lacks the will or the imagination to stand in any way against corporate interests. . . . Bottom line: Identity politics will dissolve the traditional bonds that have held Americans together, and re-bind forces of the Left and forces on the Right to each other.”
The thing is, you don’t get Hitler because of Hitler — there are always potential Hitlers out there. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the liberals are too corrupt and incompetent to maintain a liberal polity.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Messages indicate UTexas Greek Life feels targeted after stabbing spree on campus. “Various anonymous messages that have popped up after a stabbing spree on campus that left one student dead indicate some members of the University of Texas Greek Life community may feel unsafe and targeted at the school. The murder, in which a knife-wielding black student, 21-year-old Kendrix White, stabbed several white peers before being arrested by police, came on the heels of repeated vandalism targeting Greek Life houses near the Austin campus, such as graffiti stating ‘racist rapists.'”
Well, it can’t be any comfort knowing that the administration would be making a much bigger deal of thing if the races were reversed.
UMM: Mozambique bald men ‘targeted for attack.
“The belief is that the head of a bald man contains gold,” said Afonso Dias, a police commander in Mozambique’s central Zambezia province.
Albino people have also been killed in the region for ritual purposes.
The suspects are two young Mozambicans aged around 20, the AFP news agency reports.
“Their motive comes from superstition and culture – the local community thinks bald individuals are rich,” Commander Dias is reported as having told a press conference in the capital Maputo.
Glenn, Austin, and I all feel safe, but we’re a little worried about Ed.
SHOCKER: Law Professor: I don’t see obstruction of justice in Comey’s testimony.
UPDATE: Jim Comey Backs Up Trump’s Story, But It’s Not All Good News for Trump.
Also: James Comey’s Latest Statement Is An Indictment Of Comey, Not Trump.
While it’s clear that Comey and his allies believe the statement is proof that President Donald Trump acted inappropriately, and perhaps even illegally, the statement itself is a much bigger indictment of Comey’s own behavior over the last six months. Not only does Comey’s statement corroborate Trump’s claim that the former FBI director told him three times that the president was not being investigated by the FBI, it also reveals the Beltway game Comey was playing with the investigation.
In his statement, as my colleague Mollie Hemingway noted earlier today, Comey acknowledges the accuracy of Trump’s claim — included in the letter announcing Comey’s firing — that Comey had on three separate occasions informed Trump that he was not being investigated by the FBI. The corroboration of the claim by Comey himself is by far the most newsworthy nugget from the lengthy statement. But several other claims from Comey also do far more to indict Comey than they do to implicate Trump.
The most damning aspect of Comey’s prepared testimony is his admission that he deliberately refused to inform the public that Trump was not being personally investigated by the FBI. Comey’s justification for this refusal to publicly disclose material facts — that those facts might change — is laughable, especially in light of Comey’s 2016 two-step regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton.
But hey, the other shoe is going to drop:
Don’t say you weren’t warned. . .
REALITY WINNER’S PARENTS: SHE’S AFRAID SHE’LL BE DISAPPEARED, Ed Morrissey writes:
No one wants to denigrate the Davises, who are clearly in pain for their daughter, and who are trying to demonstrate loyalty to her in a crisis, but most of this is sheer nonsense. The US does not “disappear” criminals; that’s something that regimes like Iran do on a regular basis. Perhaps Winner should have kept that in mind when pledging her own loyalty to Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif on Twitter. Her stepfather claims in this interview that Winner’s a “patriot,” but pledging support to a regime that regularly declares “death to America” and exposing top-secret material to serve one’s own petty political passions are not the acts of patriots.
Disappeared? “Au contraire,” Jonah Goldberg tweets. “Most likely outcome is we’ll know **exactly** where she is for 5-10 years.” And that’s a good thing, Morrissey adds:
As for making an example of Winner, that’s precisely what the government needs to do, especially in this instance. There may be times when a whistleblower needs to go outside the chain of command with classified information to expose a specific instance of government wrongdoing, but Congress is still a much more legitimate option than the media. Even if that is true in principle, that has nothing to do with what Winner did. She wasn’t exposing government wrongdoing after trying to raise red flags internally — she exposed Top Secret information to satisfy her own sense of outrage over the results of an election. If Winner goes unpunished for that, we’ll have a deluge of leaks for similar reasons in every administration from here on out, and every president will serve at the whim of 25-year-old extremists in the intelligence agencies or their contractors. That’s not just untenable, it’s undemocratic — and at its core, un-American.
Read the whole thing.
AT AMAZON, Balega Enduro V-Tech Quarter Socks.
WITNESS COACHING? Comey testimony ‘closely coordinated’ with special counsel, source says.
MARC THIESSEN: The New York Times recklessly exposes a CIA operative’s identity. All they care about is weakening Trump. The country? Phooey.
MEET CUTE AND DIE: Feminist YouTube Star Harassed for Dating Political Opponent.
‘I KNOW A RAT WHEN I SEE ONE:’ Rocker Courtney Love Cobain Torches ‘fraud’ Linda Sarsour.
ELIZABETH SCALIA: Oh, for the good old days of Twitter.
You’d think at least the chugging hysteria born of the daily headlines would keep it interesting, but you’d be wrong. Unless one is entertained by the possibility that the nation may have a collective stroke in mid Re-Tweet, which I am not, there is precious little new thinking or creative expression coming through the threads. It is not interesting to see the same people, saying the same things. It is not entertaining to witness such a dismaying contempt for curiosity, or to comprehend my own. There is a busy-ness of words, many of them issuing from people whose faces have been before ours for decades, but the messages are rote or kneejerk, and all of them seem to reduce discourse down to, “Oh, shut up, and get away from our lunchroom table.”
It’s a tribal thing, really, but on social media it feels like everyone is on auto-pilot, so long enthralled to the idol of their own ideology that they aren’t even really thinking about it anymore, they’re just moving with the mob, and they can’t tell you why. Or they can, but only because, as I wrote in Strange Gods, “We can always give a million reasons to justify our hatreds, but our love? Often we cannot explain our love at all, except as an open and full-hearted mystery…”
I miss the old Twitter, too, before the company discouraged honest give-and-take by going Full SJW.
PENTAGON: China’s South China Sea military build-up continues.
China is expanding its presence in the South China Sea with new buildup on disputed islands, according to the Pentagon’s 2017 survey of the Chinese military…
MORE:
The defense paper states China added 8,800 feet of runways on new airfields, after adding more than 3,200 acres of land across the Spratlys, including the Fiery Cross, Subi and Mischief Reefs.
“China was constructing 24 fighter-sized hangars, fixed-weapons positions, barracks, administration buildings and communication facilities at each of the three outposts,” the report states.
Three regiments of fighter aircraft can be housed in the facilities.
VERY MUCH RELATED: SecDef Mattis addresses Asian defense in Singapore. (My latest Creators Syndicate column.)
WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF: Slapping a Supercharger on a Stock Chevy Camaro Somehow Doesn’t Ruin It.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Bat-Wielding Mob of Left-Wing Students Are ‘Community Policing’ Evergreen College.
UPDATE: “If a group of alt-right frat boys took up bats and started patrolling a campus to intimidate ideological dissenters, as is happening with left-wing militants at Evergreen, it would be treated as a national crisis by the media,” Rod Dreher writes. “Mostly, though, there has been silence. More generally, the spate of militant left-wing campus illiberalism has been downplayed, in my view, by the mainstream media. If it’s noticed at all, it is generally taken as a one-off event, and in no way indicative of left-wing thought and practice.”
Of course, as Dreher notes, the screaming campus garbage bullies (to paraphrase Iowahawk) are but one group in the left’s “Herd of Sacred Cows.”
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Freed from the circus, lions killed by poachers.