Archive for 2018

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: How Queer Theory Became University Policy — The establishment of an official doctrine on gender identity is an unprecedented threat to academic freedom. Sex and gender should be subjects for debate.

MARTA HERNANDEZ: Stop The Bleed.

WHEN UNDERCOVER POLICE OPERATIONS GO WRONG:

Sources say it started when two special ops officers from the 12th Precinct were operating a “push off” on Andover near Seven Mile. That is when two undercover officers pretend to be dope dealers, waiting for eager customers to approach, and then arrest potential buyers and seize their vehicles.

But this time, instead of customers, special ops officers from the 11th Precinct showed up. Not realizing they were fellow officers, they ordered the other undercover officers to the ground.

FOX 2 is told the rest of the special ops team from the 12th Precinct showed up, and officers began raiding a house in the 19300 block of Andover. But instead of fighting crime, officers from both precincts began fighting with each other.

Sources say guns were drawn and punches were thrown while the homeowner stood and watched.

The department’s top cops were notified along with Internal Affairs. Each officer involved is now under investigation as the department tried to determine what went wrong.

Embarrassing.

OPEN THREAD: Give it your all.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ ON LEFTY BATTLEFIELD PREP FOR 2020. New Dem Tactic: We Were Thinking What Trump’s Been Saying All Along.

This is how Trump will fade. Democrats will simply say they were thinking the same thing all along. “In an interview with the Guardian, [Hillary Clinton] the former Democratic presidential candidate… suggested immigration was inflaming voters and contributed to the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s vote to leave the EU.”

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of interviews with senior centrist political figures about the rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas.

It is true that Democrats have been saying what Trump has been saying all along. You just have to set the Wayback Machine a quarter of a century or so backwards to hear them — 1993 for Harry Reid and 1995 for Bill Clinton. And then something changed…

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): With Latinos in general looking more Trump-friendly, and with analysts saying that Puerto Ricans in Florida may have elected Rick Scott, the Dems might start sounding like 1993 Harry Reid again.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE: How gun-free zones invite mass shootings. Spoiler: It’s pretty much how you’d figure. But you may not know this:

Of the 97 countries where we identified mass public shootings, the U.S. ranks 64th per capita in its rate of attacks and 65th in fatalities. Major European countries, such as Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland and Russia, all have at least 25 percent higher per capita murder rates from mass public shootings.

While Americans are rightly concerned by the increased frequency and severity of mass public shootings, the rest of the world is experiencing much larger increases in per capita rates of attack. The frequency of foreign mass public shootings since 1998 has grown 291 percent faster than in the U.S.

I didn’t, and I pay attention.

‘WOMEN’: THE WORD THAT CANNOT BE UTTERED WHEN DISCUSSING BRAS. As Tim Blair notes, “Poor Buzzfeed. Being part of the woke media, certain clear descriptive terms are no longer available to them.”

Funny how each edition of the Newspeak dictionary shrinks “progressively” ever-smaller.

NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF LEGAL EDUCATION: Federal District Court Allows Former Male John Marshall Law School Employee’s Gender Discrimination Claim To Proceed. “John Bergholz, 59, was the law school’s executive director of development and alumni relations from 2015 to 2017. His complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in December 2017, claimed individuals attempted to orchestrate a Title IX complaint against him after he met for lunch with a donor at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The complaint says Bergholz was fired by Angela ‘Darby’ Dickerson, the school’s dean, in April 2017. Bergholz claims Dickerson, who started the job in January 2017, has a pattern and practice of eliminating older men employed by the university, according to the complaint.”

DENNIS PRAGER: Even Astronauts Fear The Left.

But the worst part of the Scott Kelly story is the astronaut’s immediate reaction to the negative tweets: “Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill. My apologies. I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views which I do not support. …”

In Kelly’s view, Winston Churchill went from “one of the greatest leaders of modern times” to a man whose “atrocities and racist views” he will further educate himself on.

You know why? Because in America today, the greatest fear is fear of the left. Apparently, the left is even scarier than outer space.

Read the whole thing. As Steve noted last month, “Kelly was wrong to give into the progressive outrage mob, which simply must make Churchill an unperson for the crime of having saved Western Civilization.”

THIS REMINDS ME OF THE OLD SOVIET JOKE ABOUT LEONID BREZHNEV AND HIS MOTHER: In China, The Communist Party’s Latest, Unlikely Target: Young Marxists. “Young people who belong to Marxist groups have recently become the unlikely targets of a state crackdown due to their zeal to help educate and mobilize China’s working class to fight for their rights. The conflict has exposed a paradox between a party founded on Marxist principles and the very young people it has tasked with carrying those principles out.”

It’s not really a paradox. Communism is just a con. When the true believers get in the way of the con, they have to be shut up.

The old Soviet joke went like this: General Secretary Brezhnev shows his mother his palatial apartment in Moscow, his fancy dacha in the countryside, his chauffer-driven limousine, his personal helicopter, etc. and says “See mom, I’ve really made it. Aren’t you proud?”

“Very much so,” she says. “But I’m worried, too.”

“What are you worried about?” asks Brezhnev.

“Well, Leonid — what if the communists come back?”

THE UNAPPRECIATED SUCCESS STORY OF ORPHANAGES: “I was raised in one and have spent much of my career researching them. My findings have shown positive life outcomes—reflecting my own.”