DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Wheaton College Students Say Black Pro-Life Speaker Made People of Color ‘Feel Unsafe.’
Archive for 2018
December 3, 2018
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Nigeria’s President Buhari denies dying, being replaced by lookalike. Yes, but that’s what a clone would say, isn’t it?
TAMARA KEEL: Review: DoubleStar PhD 1911.
LET THEM EAT CAKE: Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill on the Gilets Jaunes protests:
Most strikingly this is a people’s rebellion against the onerous consequences of climate-change policy, against the politics of environmentalism and its tendency to punish the little people for daring to live relatively modern, fossil-fuelled lives. This is new. This is unprecedented. We are witnessing perhaps the first mass uprising against eco-elitism and we should welcome it with open arms to the broader populist revolt that has been sweeping Europe for a few years now.
Jupiter’s response? To create a “High Council for the Climate.” It’s not as if there isn’t plenty of warning from French history about ignoring the true demands of the people.
JERSEY, MAN: FBI raids home of Atlantic City mayor.
Earlier: Atlantic City mayor, councilman filmed brawling outside casino.
THE INSTA-WIFE EXPLAINS THAT being older doesn’t have to suck.
AT AMAZON, save on Women’s Lingerie.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What did President Trump know, and when did he know it, regarding Melania’s red Christmas trees?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Beset by Problems, Thomas Jefferson Law School Tries To Avoid A Death Blow.
NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Seattle Antifa protester threatens journalist, ‘Are you willing to die?’
SECDEF MATTIS: Cutting defense will not help deficit.
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis on Saturday threw his weight behind an op-ed from two top Republicans calling for greater funding for the Defense Department — and lining himself against Trump administration guidance to cut fiscal year 2020 defense spending.
“Fiscal solvency and strategic solvency can co-exist,” Mattis said at the Reagan National Defense Forum.
In a Friday Wall Street Journal editorial titled “Don’t cut military spending, Mr. President,” Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Calif., and Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., warned that a smaller defense budget won’t have a major impact on fixing the national deficit, but would have painful repercussions on military equipment and end strength.
“Our top priority is the troops,” the pair wrote. “Any cut in the defense budget would be a senseless step backward.”
There’s nothing more expensive than a second-best military, the wise man once said.
AT AMAZON, Lightning Deal, Dante Men’s Leather Ratchet Dress Belt with Automatic Buckle.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Build The Perfect Fireplace Fire.
UPDATE: U.S. 5th Fleet Commander Found Dead in Bahrain.
While an investigation is ongoing, the death of Stearney will almost certainly be ruled a suicide, a U.S. defense official told USNI News. An official determination on the cause of death is expected by mid-week, USNI News has learned.
A Navy spokesperson didn’t have additional information on the investigation when contacted by USNI News on Saturday.
“The Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Bahraini Ministry of Interior are cooperating on the investigation, but at this time no foul play is suspected,” read a statement from Richardson.
RIP.
THE REAL HISTORY OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA AND GEORGE H. W. BUSH.
One of my favorites was the DNC-MSM, in lockstep with their candidate Bill Clinton, pummeling Bush in the run-up to the 1992 election over a minor recession that Clinton described as “the worst economy in 50 years,” only to turn around and reveal that, as the Charlotte Business Journal wrote in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity. And we learned in hindsight that recession had actually already ended when the [September 1992 Time magazine] article was printed.” Time described it in December of that year as “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.”
Or as Jim Treacher once said:
ORGANIZERS DISAPPEAR AS CHAOS ENGULFS CARAVAN: Actions, especially ill-advised attempts to rush a U.S. border port of entry, have consequences. Monica Showalter notes this morning on The American Thinker that Puebla Sin Fronteras hasn’t updated its web site “since advertising for last week’s border confrontation. And the mayor of Tijuana says he wants them arrested.” Maybe there’s a relationship between those two facts?
NUCLEAR SABER-RATTLING: Putin’s Plan to Send Russians to Heaven.
Nuclear threats are central to Russia’s strategy for dealing with the West and are sometimes made over trivial issues. Noted Russia expert Dr. Stephen Blank has pointed out that, “When 300 marines came to Norway to help Norway defend its coastline in the Arctic, they [Russia] made nuclear threats against Norway also. This is what they do, because it’s the only way they can intimidate people and force them to take Russia at Russia’s own self-evaluation.”[7] Notably, the recent Russian threats concerning responses to U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty were made during a period in which Russia was trying to downplay nuclear threats as part of a strategy aimed at ending sanctions, terminating the increase in NATO military budgets and ending NATO military exercises directed against a Russian invasion. However, Russia just can’t stop making them. As Alexei Arbatov, former Duma Vice Chairman of the Duma Defense Committee and head of the International Security Center within the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Major General (ret.) Vladimir Dvorkin and Petr Topychkanov stated in November 2017, there is “a visceral assumption among contemporary Russian strategists that the decision to use force—including nuclear weapons—would be a rational step.”[8]
Today, President Putin not only threatens to kill his enemies with nuclear weapons but asserts that he is doing so in a way that results in their eternal damnation.
This would be a huge deal if it were an American President — of a particular political party, of course.
Reagan was called a warmonger, even while working publicly to render the damned things useless, and privately some in the White House wondered if he’d actually push the button should the Soviets strike first. And now Trump, too. It’s almost as though the media has a single playbook for GOP presidents, regardless of the facts.
UNDER CAPITALISM, MAN IS EXPLOITED BY MAN. UNDER SOCIALISM, IT IS EXACTLY THE REVERSE. Cuban Doctors Accuse International Agency of Profiting From Their Work. “Cuba sends tens of thousands of doctors to countries around the world in what it bills as humanitarian missions. Its economically struggling government is paid for the services, sharing only a small fraction with the doctors who perform the work.”
TERRY TEACHOUT WAS HACKED, and Twitter management treated him like crap. “So that’s how Twitter Support responds when my verified account is hacked, obscene and racist messages are posted on it, and a ransom request is made to me by telephone. Is it any wonder that more and more people are getting fed up with Twitter?”
IN THE ATLANTIC, THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN RESTAURANT: “The dining experience is becoming less sociable and more atomized, even as old conceptions of public life wear away,” as explored by Rebecca Spang, “Director of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University.” It’s a fascinating article, until the bad orange man caused her to politicize its conclusion.
When men and women heckle Trump administration figures in restaurants, they are trying to claim restaurants as part of the public sphere of confrontation, debate, and political action. When others respond negatively, they show that they’ve internalized the idea of restaurants as sites of private consumption. In a way, confrontations such as these are an exciting development—a challenge to the depoliticization of public, commercial spaces (and of commercial interactions) affected over much of the 19th and 20th centuries. They are also alarming, since one can imagine such protests leading to the disappearance of any putatively public spaces whatsoever.
As a leisure activity, going out to eat was always more or less about showing off, about making a public statement of private good taste. Why do it if you no longer care about others’ opinions or suspect their opinion may be that you are a fascist, communist, or other enemy of the public good? Wouldn’t it be so much simpler to order online?
Somehow, I don’t think she’d be equivocating between “exciting” and “alarming” if Obama or Clinton officials were attacked in public restaurants. And note this earlier passage:
In his essay “On Refinement in the Arts,” the philosopher and historian David Hume traced a similar logic, positing that improvements in production (what we today call the Industrial Revolution) and ideas (the Enlightenment) would necessarily spur greater sociability. What was good for one was good for all. “The more these refined arts advance,” Hume wrote, “the more sociable men become … enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation … both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace … Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity are linked together by an indissoluble chain.”
Since the death of Michael Kelly in 2003, who oversaw one of the very few remaining opinion magazines with both leftist and conservative authors sharing the same issue, the Atlantic has worked very hard to atomize the culture and break down cultural norms. Including this charming bon mot on the weekend of the death of the last president in office who had served in combat during WWII:
Classy — I can’t decide if Foer’s tweet is “refined” or “sociable.”
YOU DON’T SAY: Mother Forcing Transgenderism on 6-Year-Old Son May Suffer From a Mental Disorder, Pediatrician Says. “This case is consistent with a diagnosis of Munchausen by proxy. This is a disorder in which an adult feigns either physical or psychological condition in a child for their own subconscious reasons. Most often the perpetrator is the biological mother and she often has a background in health or medicine.”
WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Wall Street Rule for the #MeToo Era: Avoid Women at All Cost. “Now, more than a year into the #MeToo movement — with its devastating revelations of harassment and abuse in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and beyond — Wall Street risks becoming more of a boy’s club, rather than less of one.”
