Archive for 2017
April 18, 2017
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Student Sues College, Ex, and NYPD for Acting on Spurious Rape Claim.
OUR HOMES: Too Clean For Our Children’s Good? It wouldn’t matter so much if kids could play outside.
RAHM’S KIND OF TOWN: The Murder Rate Jumped Again In 2016. A Handful Of Cities Are Largely Responsible.
The report finds that just a few U.S. cities played an outsized role in the nationwide uptick in the murder rate in recent years and had a distorting effect on the overall murder rate. Three cities ― Baltimore, Chicago and Houston ― “account for around half of the increase in murder in major cities between 2014 and 2016,” the report says.
In the 30 largest cities in the country, the murder rate increased by about 14 percent from 2015 to 2016, but Chicago alone “was responsible for 43.7 percent of the rise in urban murders in 2016,” according to the report.
Damning.
NORTH KOREA ENCOUNTERS THE TRUMP ERA: Mike Pence explains:
“My presence here … is really to deliver that message that we’ve really moved beyond the era of strategic patience, we’ve moved beyond the failed dialogues of the past. And now we’ve moved into an era when President Trump is absolutely committed to marshaling the energy of the world community, in countries in the Asian pacific, to use economic and diplomatic power to isolate North Korea and achieve a goal of a denuclearized Korean peninsula.”
RELATED: Here’s the background history of Korea’s frozen war and the failed dialogues Pence mentions.
(Link has been fixed!)
WHEN YOU’VE LOST PAT BUCHANAN… THAT MIGHT NOT BE SUCH A BAD THING: War Cries Drown Out ‘America First’
WE DROVE BEHIND AN IRREGULARLY-FLICKERING ONE THE OTHER NIGHT THAT LOOKED DESIGNED TO PROVOKE AN EPILEPTIC FIT: The Best Bike Lights To Help See and Be Seen.
ONE WOULD NEED A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH: The night Clinton said what she never expected to say: ‘Congratulations, Donald.’
It’s a review of the new campaign history, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign
Here’s another review.
DISPATCHES FROM THE FALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: Dove Soap Goes Full SJW.
If the highlighted text is too small for your screen, the Berkeley Police Department’s “Event Planning Checklist” asks protestors:
• Would you like symbolic arrests?
• If so, where and when?
Even the local police are costars in Berkeley’s never-ending Theater of the Absurd.
(Hat tip: Will Collier.)
IN THE MAIL: Writers of the Future Vol 33 (L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future).
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ROGER SIMON: The Republican Congress Must Get Its Act Together Now.
As a wise community organizer once warned a congressman, don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother.
QUESTION ASKED: Are we on the brink of a second Korean War?
YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP. Cashman: Flag flap shows reporter’s out in left field. “This is how crazy 2017 has become. The American flag is now, according to one NBC Sports baseball writer, a political statement. Delicate NBC snowflake Craig Calcaterra was triggered Sunday when a giant American flag covered the field at an Atlanta Braves game, with Old Glory gracing the Jumbotrons, and a stirring military flyover to cap it all.”
WHERE FREE SPEECH GOES TO LIVE: The University of Chicago has issued another warning to snowflakes. When a high school student is accepted, the first thing he or she sees on the school website is a video reaffirming Chicago’s commitment to let anyone on campus speak freely even if others are offended. It’s an impressive video — one of the few inspiring things to be found on any campus these days — devoted to the motto, Audiatur et Altera Pars (Listen Even to the Other Side).
This should solidify Chicago’s hold on the number one spot in Heterodox Academy’s ranking of universities according to their commitment to free speech and ideological diversity. The next best schools in the rankings are Purdue, Washington University in St. Louis, Carnegie Mellon and William and Mary.
The worst schools — in a tie for last — are Georgetown, Harvard, NYU and Mizzou. It’s been a hotly contested battle for the cellar, thanks to the efforts of aggrieved social-justice warriors and spineless administrators at Yale, Northwestern, Berkeley, Emory, Notre Dame, Rice, Penn, Georgia Tech and a depressingly long list of other schools.
SEPARATION: Keep an Eye on the Blue City-Red State Showdown.
The jurisdictional turf war that has gotten the most press since the Presidential election is the one between the unified Republican government in Washington and the blue states along the coasts. But red states, mostly in the South, are engaged in a struggle for authority of their own as they try to put the brakes on progressive legislation in their own rebellious blue cities. . . .
The state vs. local showdown is even more intense in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott recently said, “for us to be able to continue our legacy of economic freedom, it was necessary that we begin to speak up and to propose laws to limit the ability of cities to California-ize the great state of Texas,” according to Governing magazine.
As geographic polarization becomes more pronounced, with Democrats dominating metropolitan centers and the GOP becoming increasingly uncontested in the countryside, conflicts between red states and progressive cities within their borders are likely to become more frequent.
But while states like California that challenge the U.S. government in the age of Trump actually have a chance of winning some victories under America’s federalist architecture, localities are not sovereign and don’t have the same kind of legal or political recourse. That means that in the long run, big cities in red states, no matter how liberal their populations, will be prevented from moving as far to the Left as their counterparts in places like New York and Illinois.
Well, notwithstanding Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims, I think Congress has the power to require states to introduce countermajoritarian measures. But will it?
OUR POSTMODERN CINCINATTUS: The Obamas just took a luxurious cruise with Oprah and Bruce Springsteen on this billionaire producer’s yacht.
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Shattered’ Picks Through The Broken Pieces Of Hillary Clinton’s Dream.
What’s interesting about Ron Elving’s review is that it reads as though he’s almost as willing to deflect blame away from Hillary Clinton as Hillary Clinton is.
THE OBAMAS PARTY ON BILLIONAIRE’S SUPER YACHT: Gee, Barry snapped Michelle’s picture. How nice. They’re hanging in French Polynesia. Meanwhile, back in Syria, people continue to die.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON’T DELIVER: Pew: Paul Ryan’s approval as Speaker now lower than Boehner’s, Pelosi’s, or Newt Gingrich’s.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Arizona State U Lets Students Organize Anti-Trump Protest Instead of Taking Final Exam. Higher education has chosen sides, but will be shocked and outraged — and genuinely surprised — when the people who fund it do the same.
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