BURGLAR-PROOFING: Tips & Tactics for Home Security.
Archive for 2018
March 31, 2018
RIP PATRICK J. KORTEN: Joe Morris offers a wonderful tribute in LifeZette.
FASTER, PLEASE: Targeted immunotherapy offers hope for ovarian cancer treatment.
WITH THEIR WEATHER, THEY SHOULD HAVE DONE IT: The Time Minnesota Almost Built a Domed, Future City.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is there life adrift in the clouds of Venus?
CESAR CHAVEZ’S 91ST BIRTHDAY—For good or ill, Chavez was a traditional union leader in the sense that he opposed the immigration of unskilled workers–sometimes in harsh and unlovely terms. To him, it was all about economic power; immigrants could undercut farmworker wages, so he was against them.
Things are different now. Instead of focusing on their members’ wages as the bottom line, union leaders are often unwavering in their support for the leftist party line. It’s about political power. In order to gain or keep it, they seek to keep the coalition together, even if it means sacrificing the short-term good of their own members. Fight global warming. Support abortion rights. Honor same-sex marriage. Elect Democrats. Any of those may or may not be good policy. But none is directly the concern of farmworkers as farmworkers. Somehow union leaders have to believe that in the long run their members will be better off by maintaining the coalition.
The problem with this strategy is that it’s so easy to lose sight of the people you are supposed to be representing. The thinking gets very complex. It gets easy to confuse policies that benefit union leaders (or just make them happy) with policies that benefit union members. One can always come up with a story about why the policies you personally favor will, in the long run, benefit the rank-and-file members too. Sometimes it’s just wishful thinking. Keeping the goal simple is a better guarantee that the fiduciary will remain loyal to the beneficiaries’ interests.
EVERYTHING IS AWFUL: Your Rubber Ducky Is a Disgusting Biohazard, Loaded With Potential Pathogens.
WHAT DAVID HOGG’S LAURA INGRAHAM BOYCOTT IS REALLY ABOUT:
The March For Our Lives folks are smart enough to realize this advantage and exploit it to maximum effect. It’s hard to promote your viewpoint when it comes at the price of your revenue stream.
Breitbart learned this lesson after becoming the primary target for an economic pressure campaign by the left-wing group Sleeping Giants. The conservative news outlet reportedly lost 90 percent of its advertisers due to this campaign.
Media Matters has wanted to replicate this effect for Fox News for some time. In the past, they were able to get Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly hauled off the air by pressuring their advertisers. Now the progressive group hopes to do the same with Ingraham and Sean Hannity.
The pressure campaign isn’t intended to promote civility or “facts-based” discourse. If that was the goal, Hogg would be the primary target of that effort. He’s taken every chance to smear his opponents as blood-thirsty murderers and spouted reckless rhetoric. Yet, Hogg is still a respected hero because he demands gun control. (RELATED: Don’t Expect Gun Grabbers To Be Civil)
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Fox will hopefully hold its ground and stand by its host. Axing her show would open up all of their hosts to the same kind of economic intimidation. A punitive action against Ingraham would only show blood in the water to its adversaries.
The Left knows it can count on corporations to do its bidding when called upon — and it’s going to be more frequently used against the Right in the years to come. It’s time for conservatives to acknowledge this problem and let corporate America know it can’t turn into the enforcer of progressivism.
Related: “Companies including Wayfair, TripAdvisor, Nutrish, and Nestlé have canceled their ads with Ingram. Now David Hogg is seeking reparations from one of America’s most beloved fast food chains. In a series of tweets late Thursday evening [Hogg] went after Arby’s for their advertising on Ingraham’s show. Hogg went as far as to publish the private names and emails of executives at Arby’s to pressure them into pulling their advertisements.”
Who knew that Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals was required reading at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School?
IN THE MAIL: From Joanna Gaines, Magnolia Table: A Collection of Recipes for Gathering.
STEPHEN L. CARTER: Secretly, Americans Love Guns. Watch ‘The Walking Dead.’
I don’t know how the debate over gun control is going to play out. But there’s a challenge at the heart of the matter to which we pay too little attention.
Secretly, Americans love guns — if not the actual physical devices then at least the abstract idea. We say we don’t, but our collective id, as represented by what we watch on the screen, suggests otherwise. Because for every police procedural where the suspect who swears he’s innocent finds his licensed handgun missing from its lockbox, there are two popular post-apocalyptic thrillers where the possession of firearms is the only ticket to survival. . . .
My point, once more, is the opposite: that such shows are popular because of a deep-set fear that perhaps things might one day spin out of control, that government, law enforcement, all the institutions that exist to protect us, might one day fail. No doubt the fear is stronger in some quarters than others. But in our debate over how best to control gun violence, let’s remember that fear can’t be legislated away.
Read the whole thing.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student paper features Jesus Christ in smut column. Now do Mohammed, bold student journos.
WELL, THEIR FAMOUS CLASSMATES ARE TOOLS FOR SENDING THE MESSAGE THE PRESS WANTS TO SEND: Marjory Stoneman Douglas Staffer Says Many Students Feel They Are Being Misrepresented By Famous Classmates. They don’t hand out those national podiums to people who depart from the narrative.
CONNECTICUT: Democratic State Sen. Mae Flexer Calls For Elizabeth Esty To Resign. “Flexer — an architect of the ‘Time’s Up Act,’ introduced by Democrats in the state Senate as an overhaul of Connecticut’s sexual harassment laws — is the first office holder in Esty’s own party to call for the congresswoman’s resignation.”
As noted earlier, the torpedoes they put in the water for Trump keep circling around on them.
The FBI’s absurd and self-serving policy of not recording interviews backfires. It used to be that people trusted the FBI so much that any inconsistencies got ignored or resolved in the FBI’s favor. The FBI has forfeited that trust.
SAD! Baseball striking out, fan level the lowest in 10 years.
UPDATE: Maybe viral social media can help!
WEAPONIZING CORPORATIONS AS THE LEFT’S ENFORCERS: What The Laura Ingraham Boycott Is Really About. Just another argument for more vigorous antitrust enforcement.
THERE ARE LOTS OF BIOGRAPHIES OF JACK JOHNSON: Paul Beston can help you choose one.
My interest in Johnson, the first African American heavyweight boxing champion, began when the Commission on Civil Rights did a report on Sex Trafficking. I thought the report went conflated three very different things (actual sexual slavery, teenage runaway prostitution and ordinary adult prostitution). They are all problems, but they are different problems with different solutions (or, in the case of prostitution by consenting adults, no good solution). The Commission ran them together to sensationalize the issue.
In my dissent, I touched on the Mann Act (also known as the “White-Slave Traffic Act”)–a ghastly little piece of federal legislation that allowed Americans to be imprisoned for transporting women across state lines “for immoral purposes.” (It still exists, but its text has been tightened up.)
Johnson, who filmmaker Ken Burns once described as “for more than thirteen years … the most famous and the most notorious African-American on Earth,” was prosecuted TWICE under the Mann Act. His “crime” was that he was a successful and flamboyant black man who enjoyed the company of white women. His case is a good example of how overbroad legislation can (and usually does) lead to prosecutorial abuse.
I BLOG THEREFORE I AM: Rene Descartes was born this day in 1596.