I JUST USE JET TURBINE OIL: Gun Lube: How Much Is Too Much.
Archive for 2018
September 10, 2018
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Obama Treated Press Worse Than Trump Does, But Media Didn’t Care.
“That is is not my recollection of the eight years under President Obama,” Hemingway said. “He blamed many bad things in the country on people watching Fox News. He claimed it was on every bar in the country why Democrats were hurt. He tried to freeze out Fox News in multiple instances. He spied on reporters. He’s one of the worst presidents when it comes to actual actions when it comes to the media.”
“President Donald Trump speaks against the press in a way that does not live up to what we would hope to hear in terms of freedom of the press,” she continued. “But when it comes to actual actions taken against the media, the Obama administration was bad and the media didn’t care. When Donald Trump lightly criticizes the press, they boycott him, they freak out about the White House press dinner, and it’s that difference in how they reacted to criticisms by President Obama toward press to how they reacted to criticism from Trump is frustrating.”
It’s different now because shut up.
IMPORTANT NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: New Research Says Lack Of Sex Makes Your Vagina Depressed.
THE INTERNET OF THINGS IS AN AWFUL IDEA: For safety’s sake, we must slow innovation in internet-connected things.
ROBERT SPENCER: Trump Is Right to End U.S. Aid to UNRWA. “Refugee status is not some heirloom passed from generation to generation.”
ANNIVERSARY OF THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS: It was this week in history that Dwight Eisenhower signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Among other things, it created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
In 2007, I was asked to testify at a Senate hearing celebrating the Act’s 50th anniversary. (The Chairman couldn’t make it, so I was the rookie substitute.) I had just recently been appointed to Commission and was more optimistic about the Commission’s ability to produce quality reports than I am now. It reads pretty cheerily.
Since then I suffered disappointments. Here are just two examples:
(1) The 2015 report on immigration detention centers: The Commission members who sponsored it set out to prove that these detention centers were hellholes. But when we visited two such centers they were nicer than expected … so the report barely mentioned our visit and instead did things like repeat a very old (and pretty much discredited) rumor that once a detention center served maggots with a meal. I dissented from the report.
(2) The 2016 report on environmental justice: The Commission members who sponsored this one set out to prove empirically that coal ash dumps are more likely be located near African Americans. But the data ended up pretty much proving the opposite … so the results got buried. I dissented again.
I haven’t entirely given up on the Commission’s ability to do bipartisan research that (as LBJ put it) will “sift out the truth from the fancies” and “be of assistance to reasonable men.” But it’s not an easy task.
Feel free to excoriate me for my remaining optimism in the comments. But don’t spend too much energy on it, because I’m pretty sure I won’t have the heart to read them. Sad!
KEEP AN EYE OUT: Possible Hurricane in Gulf of Mexico.
ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Veteran Broadway actress asks: ‘Where’s John Wilkes Booth when you need him?’
LET THEM EAT KALE: A few years ago it was fashionable to ask, “Are we Rome?” Martin Hutchinson suggests a far better parallel would be 18th Century France:
Today’s intellectual Ivy-educated elite is wandering around the Petit Trianon playing at being a shepherdess, not playing cricket and hunting with ordinary folk.
In its economic attitudes, the U.S. elite is also 18th Century French. It sees essentially no limit to its ability to make economically damaging regulations if some pet cause is at stake. It takes a far greater interest in the theoretical possibility of global warming a century hence and in theoretical dangers to the environment from coal extraction than in the practical problems of generating electricity from wind power on a calm day or from solar power on a cloudy day.
Bien sur.
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What Makes Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” a Great Song?
BECAUSE, LIKE HILLARY, SHE HAD BEEN ORDAINED: Why is it supposed to be sexist and racist that 20-year-old half-Haitian Naomi Osaka wiped the floor with 37-year-old Serena Williams? A 37-year-old woman winning over a 20-year-old makes middle-aged women feel good about themselves, and that is the highest value in today’s media culture. A 37-year-old woman losing to a 20-year-old woman, well, that just plays to their deepest fears and insecurities. . . .
DIVERSITY IN EVERYTHING BUT THOUGHT: Resistance fave Benjamin Wittes quits Twitter as libs pounce on his pro-Kavanaugh tweets.
IF YOU HAVEN’T STARTED PREPPING, YOU BETTER GET GOING: ‘Extremely Dangerous’ Florence On Track to Hit East Coast As Major Hurricane. And if you’re inland, you still need to be ready for heavy rains, flooding, and power outages.
IN THE MAIL: From Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution.
Plus, Today’s Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
ROGER SIMON: End the Term ‘Resistance’ for Rosh HaShanah.
Read the whole thing.
CHANGE: Sweden’s Nationalists Fall Short of Expectations, But Still Make Big Gains. “The vote for Sweden Democrats was big enough that it will deny the traditional left and right parties a majority.”
CRYING WOLF: Dick Durbin (D-IL) Says He Hears ‘the Silence of the Lambs’ from GOP on Trump’s ‘Unstable Behavior:’
“It’s inescapable that the president bears responsibility. He’s the one who gathered this team,” he added. “He’s the one who tries to keep them together, and yet there is genuine fear, obviously, among some of them that his behavior is going to result in some terrible things for America.”
Things so terrible, they “must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings,” no doubt.
HEALTH: ‘A drink or two a day won’t kill you.’
In this study, the claim that there’s no safe level of drinking is the weakest part. The authors produce a nice curve showing the relative risk of an alcohol-related problem, which steadily increases for how much you drink. But the bottom of the curve stays very low when you’re drinking one to two drinks a day. Not only that, the authors’ uncertainty interval [margin of error] is just one drink. So the evidence that one drink is harmful, beneficial, or has no effect is statistically weak. The focus on light drinkers and the possible risks to them is therefore inappropriate.
Plus: “Anecdotally, I hear of many people seeing stories like this and then becoming sceptical, if not cynical, about public-health advice.”
THERE’S GROWING MOMENTUM FOR SOME SORT OF BIG TECH TRUSTBUSTING: Is Yale Law Student Note (‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox’) Seminal Reframing Of Monopoly Law Or ‘Hipster Antitrust’?
THE ANGLOSPHERE: New India-U.S. Arms Agreement, Expanded Exercises Illustrate Growing Security Cooperation.
“We will continue working together to enhance and expand India’s role as a primary major defense partner to elevate our relationship to a level commensurate without closest allies and partners,” said Secretary of Defense James Mattis speaking at a press conference in New Delhi
A visible part of the stronger military ties will be coming next year when India’s and the U.S. ground, air and naval forces will exercise near India.
“To enhance our synergies in this area, we have decided to carry out for the first time a tri-services joint exercise with the United States off the eastern coast of India in 2019. We are also putting in place an enabling framework for closer cooperation between our defense forces,” Nirmala Sitharaman, Indian defense minister, said at the same press conference.
Both stressed the need for continued maritime cooperation to secure the stability of the Indo-Pacific.
Now that’s a pivot to Asia.
AT LEAST SOME OF MY TAX DOLLARS ARE GOING FOR SOMETHING WORTHWHILE: This Group Teaches Kids to Love Guns, and U.S. Taxpayers Foot the Bill.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Obama campaign speech reviews are in, and they’re not good… “The speeches have proven unremarkable, except for the fact that they happened.”
So it’s a dog-bites-man story then.
Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz today.