MY CATS SAY THIS WAS FINANCED BY BIG CANINE: Dogs really, really want us to be happy: study. And besides they want me to be happy too. In my free time. After I cater to their needs.
Archive for 2017
November 23, 2017
WHERE DID I PUT MY SHOCKED FACE? Newsweek Shocker: Women, Gay Men Like Guys With Money, Muscles. I tell you, Newsweek was way overpriced at $1.
SHE MADE HER BED: Lena Dunham Experiences the World She’s Helped Create.
OF COURSE SHE DOESN’T: Feminist Emily Lindin Doesn’t Care if Men Lose their Jobs over False Allegations. That’s because she’s androphobic. And probably amoral.
ARE YOU GUYS ALSO STARTING TO WONDER WHAT KIND OF FAMILIES LIBERALS GREW UP IN? A New Girl Scouts Ruckus: People React to Message “Parents Shouldn’t Force Daughters to Give Hugs During Holidays”.
OR WE COULD ENGRAVE TANSTAAFL ON EACH POLITICIAN’S FOREHEAD? Taxes, Subsidies and “Basic Income”.
CREATING SERFS FOR THE STATE: EU Game Tells Kids to Collect More Taxes.
WHAT WAS AL FRANKEN DOING IN WISCONSIN? Clown Faces Sex Raps For Haunted House Groping.
November 22, 2017
SARAH HOYT: You can’t be safe by making people unsafe.
AT AMAZON, deals galore in Black Friday Deals Week.
CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER, 87, SAYS HE’LL NEVER RETIRE.
Of course — digitally replacing Kevin Spacey and other Hollywood actors accused of sexual harassment should keep him employed for years.
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Even seven cups of coffee a day cuts risk of early death, study suggests.
Now that’s my kind of “woke.”
BOB MCMANUS: Wild Blue Yonder: A general’s overwrought response to a race hoax at the Air Force Academy was off-base. “It was a textbook social-justice-movement moment—judgment first, facts afterward—insofar as Silveria had no clue who had scrawled the slur, no apparent interest in finding out, and no hesitation in spreading responsibility for it as widely as possible. And when the ‘hate crime’ turned out to have been a hoax—the perp was a black student enrolled in an academy-preparatory program and one of five alleged ‘targets’ of the slur—that didn’t slow down the academy’s virtue-signaling. . . . Personal responsibility, accountability, and loyalty are laudable attributes in civilian life. In the military, they are the stuff of life and death. The service academies have personal honor codes—observed in the breach, in this case—precisely to promote trust in the ranks and confidence at the command level. That’s how wars are won—or, unhappily, sometimes lost. Silveria trashed this principle without the faintest notion of who had done what. And when an investigation revealed the truth, he showed no contrition—if anything, he doubled down. This wasn’t strictly partisan politicking, but the general deliberately inserted his institution into an ugly national political controversy.”
Virtue-signaling is what you do when you’re short of actual virtue.
WAR ON WOMEN UPDATE: Two More Women Accuse Al Franken.
Related: In ‘99, Franken Told the Howard Stern Show He Groped Kathie Lee Gifford — Then Recanted.
NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE: How to Have a ‘Woke’ Thanksgiving According to Newsweek.
Why on earth would Newsweek ask that its readers argue with their less “woke” relatives, when the publication assured us in 2009 that “We Are All Socialists Now?”
And if you’re on the receiving end of the said wokeness, Ace of Spades has you covered: Thanksgivingship: How To Survive Your Dull-Witted Progressive Adultchildren Relatives Who’ve Been Reading Vox and Buzzfeed Articles About How to Survive You. Exit quote:
However, for the zealous Thanksgivingman, even an apology can be exploited for further Thanksgivingmanship points.
For example, if the childanimal you are speaking with declares:
“You’re micro-aggressing me.”
…then be sure to respond,
“Ah, then please sincerely accept my most micro apologies.”
Heh, indeed.™
WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Homeless people defecating on LA streets fuels horror hepatitis outbreak, as city faulted.
NRA TV’s Cameron Gray describes the link to the above article as “The Democrat Party in one tweet.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: UC-Hastings Law Dean Calls Bar Exam Failure For Top Schools ‘Unconscionable.’
LOOK BACK IN WRY BEMUSEMENT: James Lileks flashes back on a 1977 book titled How to Look Punk.
AKA, the Gallery of Regrettable Safety Pins.
IN THE CLOSING OF THE CANADIAN ACADEMIC MIND, Rod Dreher writes:
If you have ten minutes, it would be well spent listening to this secretly recorded meeting between Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, and unnamed faculty and administration officials there. She was being disciplined for airing in a class a video by the controversial Canadian academic Jordan Peterson, who insists on the traditional pronoun usage “him” and “her,” and has become a pariah in Canadian academia because of it.
* * * * * * * *
Shepherd is accused of “transphobia.” She asks her inquisitors how many complaints were filed against her. They told her that’s confidential. She is incredulous, not believing that they can’t even say how many students complained. They won’t budge.
It’s worth listening to the clip to hear how nicey-nice and bland the inquisitors are. These people are destroying academic freedom and the purpose of a university, and they’re doing so in anaesthetic tones that conceal the act of real violence to the core values of a university.
If this is how things are at Wilfrid Laurier University, why would any student in their right mind want to study there? This is not education; this is dealing with the complexity of the world by castrating one’s mind to free oneself from the temptation to think incorrect thoughts.
David Thompson, in a post titled “The Absurd And The Sinister Aren’t Mutually Exclusive,” describes the encounter as “That feeling when you’re a teaching assistant and in your communications class you play a Jordan Peterson clip about pronouns and freedom of speech, hoping to spur discussion, and you then get reported and hauled in front of faculty and the manager of the university’s Gendered and Sexual Violence Prevention and Support Office for a ritual scolding, during which you’re accused of remaining politically neutral, which is deemed both a ‘problem’ and in itself ‘threatening,’ before being accused of ‘gender-based violence.’”
Dreher adds that “The president of Wilfrid Laurier, after listening to the recording of the meeting, has apologized to Lindsay Shepherd. Good — but what if she had not recorded the meeting? As a grad student in ANY university, I would never go into a meeting like this without a recording device.”
WAPO REPORTER GOES ROGUE, GIVES STRATEGY BRIEFING TO SECRET DEM DONOR CONFERENCE.
Washington Post reporter Janell Ross, “whose panel was sandwiched by a talk with liberal billionaire George Soros and a message by Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) on Russian interference in the 2016 election, helped attendees explore questions such as: ‘What do progressives stand for?’”
Ross is really taking our whole “Democratic operative with a byline” meme far too literally.
NORTH KOREAN PARASITES: I know, “parasites” was a common Stalinist Communist accusation. But this article is about real parasites — parasitic worms in human intestines, specifically unfortunate human beings living in the Stalinist Communist hellhole of North Korea.
“An estimated 5 million people in North Korea have intestinal roundworms. That’s 20 percent of the population,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor.
Here’s the sensational news hook: Doctors found worm parasites “while repairing intestinal damage from multiple bullet wounds” sustained by a 24 year old North Korean soldier as he escaped from North Korea. The defecting soldier was apparently in a unit assigned to the UN’s Joint Security Area — which means he is supposed to be getting decent food and better health care. By the way, Stalinist Communist North Korea has centralized national health care. Bernie Sanders, take note.
MORE FOR SENATOR SANDERS: North Korea has “songbun.” Songbun is “a system of ascribed status…Based on the political, social, and economic background of one’s direct ancestors as well as the behavior of their relatives, songbun is used to determine whether an individual is trusted with responsibilities, is given opportunities within North Korea, or even receives adequate food.”
Like, hey Bernie, Kim Jong Un starves deplorables, at least people his regime deem deplorable, so to speak. Does this callous destruction of human lives lead you rethink socialism?
This complex topic is “To be continued.”
OH, WHAT THE HELL, LET’S JUST BE EVIL: Google is locking people out of documents, and you should be worried.
MONSTER FROM THE ID: In “Charles Manson’s Race War Fever-Dream,” Henry Allen of the Weekly Standard is “Remembering what it was like when Southern California went mad.”
There’s a banality here: The agent could have been anyone, when you consider that Manson was a 5-feet-2, semi-literate jail-raped punk still dreaming of becoming a rock star in his mid-30s in a city where, as Dionne Warwick sang in 1968:
All the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas.
Manson had the knack of appealing to Hollywood celebrities. Back then, madness seemed like a kind of super-truth and so he bore an air of prophecy. Imagine his bitterness when they did his music career no good at all. He turned to the ultimate banality of the age: revolution. Manson took “Helter Skelter” and other Beatles songs as the foretelling of a race war soon to come. He predicted that the blacks would kill all the whites, then find they were unable to govern themselves.
Manson and his “Family” would arise from hideouts in Death Valley and take power. All he had to do was get the race war started.
He ordered his followers to go on a killing spree, leaving fake clues that the killers were black militants. The most famous of their victims was the impossibly beautiful Sharon Tate, eight-months pregnant and the wife of Roman Polanski (living now in Europe to avoid charges of raping and sodomizing a 13-year-old in Los Angeles).
In that summer of 1969, there was the vast but momentary promise of Woodstock, a music festival, all peace and love. Joni Mitchell compared it to Eden.
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the Garden.
The bible was The Whole Earth Catalog, which preached the odd combination of communes and rugged individualism. Its opening line and motto was “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Did the editor, Stewart Brand, hear the echo of the serpent tempting Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit? Ye shall be as gods.
Read the whole thing — as William F. Buckley liked to say, quoting political philosopher Eric Voegelin, “Don’t immanentize the eschaton.”
(Classical reference in headline.)