TEACHING A MAN TO FISH: Mayor Comes Up with Simple Way to Combat Homelessness, Panhandling in His City.
Archive for 2017
October 1, 2017
IN THIS CASE, GOOD: Meanwhile, Trump marches on.
ACTUALLY THAT’S A LOWER NUMBER THAN I EXPECTED: Five Times Hollywood Brazenly Colluded With Democrats.
September 30, 2017
THE LIEUTENANT WOULDN’T LIKE IT: Sarah Hoyt on being Heinlein’s child.
WHAT POLITICAL PARTY DO THESE URBAN CENTERS HAVE IN COMMON? Violent Crime in U.S. Rises for Second Consecutive Year. “Violent crime, including homicides, rose for the second consecutive year in 2016, driven by increases in a few urban centers including Baltimore, Chicago and Las Vegas, according to F.B.I. data released Monday. Violent crimes increased nationally last year by 4.1 percent and homicides rose by 8.6 percent, one year after violence increased by 3.9 percent and homicides jumped by 10.8 percent. A total of 17,250 people were murdered in 2016, the F.B.I. said.”
Weird, because when Trump said something about violent crime getting worse all the best people ridiculed him as ignorant. Meanwhile, this piece in the Christian Science Monitor that I noted earlier asks why Americans feel unsafe when crime is still objectively pretty low (though the Brennan Center estimate here seems at odds with the FBI numbers above.)
Let me offer a hypothesis: People worry more about crime when they feel that the authorities don’t have their backs. When they feel confident that the government will make all reasonable efforts to keep them safe, that’s one thing. When they think that the political class has other priorities — or even sees them as expendable in the service of “social justice” goals — they get their backs up. I think it’s also a recognition that things can go from good to bad pretty fast.
THE MEDIA IS MISSING THE REPUBLICAN TAKEOVER IN NEW ENGLAND.
As Salena Zito writes, “If the reverse had happened, and four Democrats had won governorships in deep red states last year, the news would have been treated quite differently, said Brad Todd, a Washington, DC-based GOP strategist. ‘It would have been on the front pages of every major newspaper in the country. And debated for weeks about how it spells the demise of the Republican Party,’ Todd said.”
Just think of the media as Democratic activists with bylines, and it all makes sense.
REMEMBERING THE DAYS BEFORE THE NFL WORE PINK: Reflections In Iron: Mike Webster’s Training Methods.
CHANGE: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S. “The tech industry has been shifting jobs overseas for decades, and other big American companies like Oracle and Dell also employ a majority of their workers outside the United States. But IBM is unusual because it employs more people in a single foreign country than it does at home.”
YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: Trumps Puts Another Nail in the MSM Coffin with NFL’s Help. “The NFL and the MSM should very quickly rethink their strategy. Or, Trump will do to them what Obama did to the coal industry.”
CHANGE: Austria’s burqa ban comes into force this weekend. “Acceptance and respect of Austrian values are basic conditions for successful cohabitation between the majority Austrian population and people from third countries living in Austria.”
THE FUTURE IS HERE, IT’S JUST NOT EVENLY DISTRIBUTED YET: Behind the ‘paradox of fear’: Crime is down, but many Americans don’t feel safe. Also, the Brennan Center for Justice is “non-partisan.”
THE TRAGEDY OF THE PBS-KEN BURNS VERSION OF THE VIETNAM WAR:
My own views on the Vietnam war haven’t changed much in the intervening half-century, since my assignment in Vietnam with Special Forces, but I am called, today, a “revisionist” by some who have never served our country. I have subsequently learned, thanks in part to Burns’s history, that a “revisionist” is anyone who opposes the Communist Party line, so I guess I can live with that. Many of my fellow veterans have succumbed to a constant din of false history. Burns’s documentary film series includes an Air Force general proclaiming that he thought we were fighting on the wrong side. The view from a cockpit at several thousand feet must have been very different from that on the ground.
Related: Kate McMillan of Small Dead Animals tweets, “Four episodes in, and among the things I’ve learned from #KenBurnsvietnam: Lyndon Johnson and the men around had no party affiliation.”
Heh.™ I watched the original PBS Vietnam mini-series in the 1980s. What I remember most about it now is its dour, grating atonal theme song — a sort of aural quagmire, not surprisingly — co-written by the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart, and the Voice of Doom narrator, who would go on to narrate Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World” beer commercials. I’m not sure I’m up for a second round of sermonizing on the glories of socialism.
HUGH HEFNER, GANGSTA RAP & THE EMERGING MORAL MAJORITY. “Moral concerns pop up one decade in right-wing clothes, and, in the next, change into another outfit:”
But as angels sang Hugh Hefner toward his final reward, whatever that may be, I realized very few believe Hefner’s overall effect on the culture was positive. And the anger at him was especially strong on the left. Hef’s pushing of Quaaludes on his “girlfriends” was well-documented going back to the 1970s. (So was Bill Cosby’s. In some rumor mills, the Kennedy family’s use of “poppers” lives on.) But fresher reports about Hefner’s abusive behavior, ornamented with decidedly embarrassing and unsexy details, have circulated in recent years. And he got far more of the “Good Riddance” treatment than any social conservative could have expected ten or even 15 years ago.
If you look for it, you see signs everywhere. A recent, and largely well-done, HBO documentary on the parallel careers of music producer Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre was noticeably squeamish about the details of the early 1990s “gangsta rap” scene. Conservative moral figures such as Bill Bennett and Tipper Gore were trotted out and given a perfunctory whipping for their role in trying to suppress the free expression of artists. But the subjects of the documentary showed little hints of remorse, embarrassment, or shame at their treatment of women, their friends, and the law itself. In the one truly plaintive moment, Jimmy Iovine recalls that, amid the violence between East and West Coast rappers and after Snoop Dogg’s arrest in connection with a murder, he stopped to ask himself, “Am I standing up for free speech, or was I funding Hamas?”
Of course, none of the violence or misogyny troubled the gangsta rappers enough to give back all the money they made and dedicate their lives to moral improvement and uplift. Slowly, however, the elite of our culture seem to be drifting toward a new, far-more jaundiced and suspicious view of popular culture from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Read the whole thing.
Related: “It’s a tough time to be a male feminist, especially in Hollywood.”
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Former kindergarten teacher and mother-of-two, 38, who had sex with at least six high school students after grooming them on Snapchat is jailed for 10 years and will register as a sex offender for the rest of her life. “Robertson would have faced up to 240 years in prison if she was convicted of all her charges, which included six charges of sexual assault of a child and six counts of having an improper relationship with a student.”
SPANISH GOVERNMENT “DISMANTLING” CATALAN SECESSION VOTE’S INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS: That’s what Fox News reported within the last 90 minutes. Spanish authorities had threatened to do this. They seized paper ballots earlier this week.
Authorities have already confiscated 10 million paper ballots in the last few days — which will make it much more difficult for Catalan officials to carry out an effective vote.
MORE:
The Catalan government has pledged to declare independence from Spain within 48 hours of Sunday’s vote if the `yes’ side wins, no matter what the turnout is.
Is the vote illegal? I think so.
The Catalan regional government of Carles Puigdemont is preparing to hold a unilateral referendum on seceding from Spain on October 1st, which it says will be legally binding. Catalans will be asked whether they want to form an independent republic. But there is a problem: Spain’s democratic constitution of 1978, which was approved by more than 90% of Catalan voters, gave wide autonomy to the regions but affirmed “the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation”. Only the Spanish parliament can change the constitution. Mr Puigdemont’s referendum is therefore illegal, and Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s conservative prime minister, is determined to prevent it taking place.
(If you’re blocked by The Economist paywall the quote contains the gist.)
I’ve previously linked to this column I wrote on Catalan and Kurdish secession referendums. Though it was published last Tuesday evening when the Kurdish vote wasn’t official, it adds some perspective.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Harvard Students Brand Betsy DeVos a ‘White Supremacist’ — in the Middle of Her Speech!
Declaring a person racist lost much of its career-destroying sting due to its massive overuse against any and all of Obama’s critics to his right (including Hillary in 2008). In the Trump era, the left seems determined to make the phrase “White Supremacist” a similarly meaningless cliché.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Do You Need A Blockchain?
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THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: 110 Million Americans Have an S.T.D.
GREATER LOVE HATH NO CELL: Confronted with bacteria, infected cells die so others can live, study finds.
INSIDE THE CLINIC OFFERING YOUNG BLOOD TO CURE AGING. “I am led to a booth where I find him drinking a glass of wine, wearing the blazer-and-T-shirt uniform common among venture capitalists. His youthful looks have an enhanced, slightly uncanny cast, but I am still shocked when he tells me he is 65.”
THE IPHONE 8 AND 8 PLUS: Who are they for?
But here’s how they do on one of my most important metrics: “We tested the battery life in both the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus and were not encouraged by the results.”
Can’t Apple just make the damn things 1/16″ thicker and double the battery life?