ANTIFA AND THE CANING OF CHARLES SUMNER. “Groups like Antifa set a bad precedent when they are violent with few repercussions, and because they get support from the media and academics, they often get away with ‘caning’ others. I just hope the end result of all the violence doesn’t turn out to be like the one with Sumner and Brooks, with Antifa’s batons and bats the symbol of division that led to the tragedy of the Civil War.”
Archive for 2017
September 1, 2017
DA TECH GUY: A Simple Proof of the Insanity of Global Warming Hysteria.
When it comes to Hurricanes we have exact data that can be gleamed in real time of every aspect of a storm as it happens to add to the various computer models. Additionally we have live data dating back to the mid 19th century that has been studied by experts in the field for a century and a half to tell us how hurricanes have acted in the past including information made by first hand observation by the most advanced instruments available at the time.
Furthermore the computers now being used are leaps and bounds over machines of just a decade or two ago and unlike the mid 19th century we many venues all over the world that are a source of training in this information and an even larger pool of potential meteorologists available to allow those tasked with making these predictions to choose the very best.
Yet even with all of this, two weather services each with all the advantages listed, have 850 mile gap between where they think this storm will go over the next 72 hours.
Now as a person familiar with both mathematics and computer science, this variation is not odd, in fact it’s completely understandable. After all a computer model is based on the best possible guesses from the available data and hurricanes are “complex natural phenomena that involve multiple interacting processes” so there is nothing at all odd about there being a 850 mile variation as to where it will it. As we get closer to Sunday and we have true data to input the variation in the models will correspondingly decrease.
Now apply this to climate change models telling us we face disaster in 100 years.
Read the whole thing. A simpler explanation can be found in my old axiom: Hysteria is never whipped up for the benefit of the hysterical.
ANGELO CODEVILLA: Sorry, The 2016 Election Is Not Reversible.
Today, the bipartisan ruling class, which the electorate was trying to shed by supporting anti-establishment candidates of both parties in 2016, feels as if it has dodged the proverbial bullet. The Trump administration has not managed to staff itself—certainly not with anti-establishment people—and may never do so. Because the prospect of that happening brought the ruling class’s several elements together and energized them as never before, today, prospects of more power with fewer limits than ever eclipse the establishment’s fears of November 2016.
But the Left’s celebrations are premature, at best. As I explained a year ago, by 2016 the ruling class’s dysfunctions and the rest of the country’s resentment had pushed America over the threshold of a revolution; one in which the only certainty is the near impossibility of returning to the republican self-government of the previous two centuries. The 2016 election is not reversible, because it was but the first stage of a process that no one can control and the end of which no one can foresee.
Ruling classes seldom go quietly. Plus:
To ordinary Americans, the winds that now blow downwind from society’s commanding heights make the country seem more alien than ever before. More than ever, academics, judges, the media, corporate executives, and politicians of all kinds, having arrogated moral legitimacy to their own socio-political identities, pour contempt upon the rest of America. Private as well as public life in our time is subject to their escalating insults, their unending new conditions on what one may or may not say, even on what one must say, to hold a job or otherwise to participate in society.
As I have argued at length elsewhere, the cultural division between privileged, government-connected elites and the rest of the country has turned twenty-first century politics in America into a cold civil war between hostile socio-political identities.
Sadly, yes.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Latest on Harvey and Much, Much More.
THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED WE’D SEE SHAMELESS CRUSHING OF DISSENT. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Google is coming after critics in academia and journalism. It’s time to stop them. “In recent years, Google has become greedy about owning not just search capacities, video and maps, but also the shape of public discourse. . . . It is time to call out Google for what it is: a monopolist in search, video, maps and browser, and a thin-skinned tyrant when it comes to ideas.”
August 31, 2017
AT AMAZON, save in Disaster Preparedness.
ENDORSED. IF TRUMP REALLY WANTS TO GET TO THE LEFTIES, HE’LL PERSONALLY ORDER IT.
I DUNNO, BUT I STILL THINK WE SHOULD HAVE BUILT THE F-20: Should the Air Force Have Picked the F-23 Instead of the F-22?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CREATING A NEW ARISTOCRACY EDITION: $330,000 in financial aid bought me a slot in the American meritocracy. Now I see its flaws.
AT AMAZON, big savings in Men’s Shaving.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: My latest Observer essay. Trump tells North Korea’s Kim Jong Un all options are on the table.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Maps show what Harvey’s impact would look like in other U.S. states.
JEFFREY SINGER: Let’s Stop the Hysterical Rhetoric About the Opioid Crisis.
If these numbers appear implausible or like they are missing some context, it’s because they are. And the Administration’s resorting to hyperbole creates an atmosphere of panic that is likely to lead to policies that will only make matters worse.
Let’s start with the context-dropping. What does the governor mean by “medicated?” To a practitioner “medicated” means being treated with a medicine in order to achieve a desired result. Does that mean one 5mg oxycodone tablet every 4 hours (6 per day) for 21 days? Some patients are prescribed two 5mg tablets every 6 hours. Or is he talking about 7.5 or 10 mg oxycodone tablets? Maybe he means hydrocodone. That also comes in 5mg, 7.5mg, and 10mg doses and is sometimes prescribed every 4 hours but sometimes every 6 hours. Then there’s hydromorphone (dilaudid), oxycontin, and let’s not forget codeine.
The point is, millions of Americans have genuine, medically necessary reasons to be taking opioids. They make up the vast majority of opioid users and it doesn’t make sense to lump them into the opioid crisis.
No, but big numbers mean big press and big funding.
GROOVES YOU CAN USE: The Best Albums of the Nixon Presidency.
WEIRD, IT’S LIKE THE FIX WAS IN ALL ALONG: James Comey started drafting statement exonerating Hillary Clinton before FBI interviewed her, aides.
YOU LOST ME AT “BIEBER’S TESTICLES:” How Bieber’s Testicles Led to Fired Hospital Worker.
AT AMAZON, save on Power & Hand Tools.
DRIVING THE NEW Bentley Continental GT.
IT’S COME TO THIS: University of Mississippi Ends Fraternity Retreat Early After Participant Threw Banana Peel Into a Tree. “Some students perceived it as a racist act.”
ROD DREHER ON SALLY QUINN, GEORGETOWN’S MADAME BLAVATSKY:
We are long, long past the day when Sally Quinn and her late husband Ben Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor, were arbiters of Washington social life. But Quinn, now in her mid-70s, has found a way to keep her name in public. In this delicious Washingtonian profile by Michelle Cottle, Quinn outs herself as an occultist. No, really. And there’s more:
* * * * * * *
Ouija boards, astrological charts, palm reading, talismans—Quinn embraces it all. And yes, she has been in contact with her husband since his passing. Through a medium. Repeatedly.
Some friends have voiced reservations that Quinn is now showing all her cards, so to speak. “Don’t play up the voodoo too much,” one implored. But Sally does nothing by halves. She reveals that, in her less mellow days, she put hexes on three people who promptly wound up having their lives ruined, or ended.
The first, cast in 1969, was spurred by old-fashioned jealousy. Some exotic beauty at a Halloween party inspired lust in Quinn’s beau at the time—and then killed herself just days after Sally cast her spell.
Her second victim was Clay Felker, the longtime editor of New York magazine who oversaw a brutal profile of Quinn in 1973, just before her catastrophic debut on the CBS Morning News. Quinn hexed Felker not long after flaming out at CBS and returning to Washington. “Some time afterward, Rupert Murdoch bought New York magazine in a hostile takeover, and Felker was out,” she writes. “Clay never recovered professionally. Worse, he got cancer, which ultimately caused his death.”
Target number three: a shady psychic who, the autumn after Quinn Bradlee was born, ran afoul of Sally’s maternal instincts. The woman dropped dead before year’s end.
As Zhou Enlai never said, the outcome of the French Revolution? Too soon to tell. Just a reminder: the Post mocked Richard Nixon for the relatively mild mysticism of talking to the White House paintings, and Nancy Reagan for her interest in astrology. It reported that Hillary talked to ghosts while First Lady. It smeared evangelical conservatives as “poor, undereducated and easily led.” Meanwhile, the wife of the Maximum Editor of the Washington Post was playing with Ouija boards and putting hexes on her enemies. The disparity is reminiscent of a passage in Michael Graham’s Redneck Nation:
After a set at a hotel in Washington State, I was dragged into a long, drawn-out discussion with a graying, balding New Ager who just couldn’t get over my evangelical background. “You seem so smart,” he kept saying. “How could you buy into that stuff?”
Here’s a guy wearing a crystal around his neck to open up his chakra, who thinks that the spirit of a warrior from the lost city of Atlantis is channeled through the body of a hairdresser from Palm Springs, and who stuffs magnets in his pants to enhance his aura, and he finds evangelicalism an insult to his intelligence. I ask you: Who’s the redneck?
Come to think of it, I’m not sure if this guy—who believed in reincarnation, ghostly hauntings, and the eternal souls of animals—actually believed in God. It’s not uncommon for Northerners, especially those who like to use the word “spirituality,” to believe in all manner of metaphysical events, while not believing in the Big Guy. “Religious” people go to church and read the Bible, and Northerners view them as intolerant, ill-educated saps. “Spiritual” people go hiking, read Shirley MacLaine or L. Ron Hubbard, and are considered rational, intelligent beings.
Exit quote from the Washingtonian profile on Quinn: “‘You can’t imagine the number of people who have asked me to put a hex on Donald Trump—I mean, I have got friends lined up,’ she says. ‘This is my biggest restraint now.'”
Well, that’s a relief. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, I’m glad to know that there are at least some limits on those particular visions of the anointed.