Archive for 2018
May 18, 2018
WHY DO MASS SHOOTINGS HAPPEN? The Best Explanation Is the Least Comforting.
In other contexts, he’s elaborated further. The preparations for massacres are often extremely detailed. Shooters (and wannabe shooters) will often film videos, mimic the dress and poses of the Columbine killers, and otherwise copy the shooters who came before. [Malcolm] Gladwell is hardly an NRA conservative — and he believes gun control “has its place” — but he also shares this grim warning: “Let’s not kid ourselves that if we passed the strictest gun control in the world that we would end this particular kind of behavior.”
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While early reports are often wrong, there are indications that the Texas shooter engaged in behavior that sounds eerily like the Columbine shooting. We’ve seen reports of a trench coat, of the use of similar weapons, and of explosives — all hallmarks of the Colorado massacre. When I think of Columbine, I think of Gladwell’s essay. There are young men in the grip of a terrible contagion, and there is no cure coming.
Read the whole thing.
THE LEFT WILL ALLOW NO SAFE SPACES FROM POLITICS: NHL’s Nashville Predators Endorse Political Candidate In Twitter Video.
SPENGLER: THE FREUD FRAUD UNDERLIES POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. “You can’t understand liberalism unless you know Freud, and you can’t appreciate what a tissue of lies and half-truths liberalism is without knowing what charlatan Freud was.”
Read the whole thing.
THE KNIFE WORLD’S EQUIVALENT OF A “BARN FIND:” 500 year old katana found in shrine’s “attic.”
AT AMAZON, save on Herbs Spices and Seasonings.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER GIVES US NEWS YOU CAN USE: No, Don’t Livestream Transgender People in the Restroom.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Clinical trial to offer free 3D-printed prosthetic arms to children.
HBO’S FAHRENHEIT 451: A BOGUS DYSTOPIA.
In the future, after almost all of the physical books in America have been burned, Bahrani’s firemen, rising star Montag (Michael B. Jordan) and his ace boss Beatty (Michael Shannon), race around Cleveland catching malefactors surreptitiously uploading books to the Internet, only now the Internet is called “the 9.” “Drop the cord!” the firemen shout as terrified citizens fiddle with their gadgets. Huh? I picture Chinese state censors having themselves a hearty chortle. “Why do these dorks bust their butts going house to house trying to catch people in mid-upload? Why don’t they just do what we do and control the search engines and Internet service providers?”
Minus all of this manufactured drama of men with flamethrowers busting into people’s houses, though, there would be no cool visuals, hence no movie. You’d just have bored bureaucrats at desks. Yet what is the point of the movie if it doesn’t tell us something about ourselves? The whole point of the situation Bradbury feared was that information would remain decentralized, in books, whereas today it would be much easier to simply throttle information as it came sluicing through the Intertubes. Yet that isn’t the danger in the U.S. either. Today if a political leader simply called up his allies and campaign donors at FaceGoog and urged them to delete information he found dismaying, that information would effectively be hidden from America. Worse still, the tech giants could simply take it upon themselves to filter information according to their political goals, and call the stuff they’re leaving out “hate speech” or “fake news.”
Nah, they’d never do that. Let’s get back to the real threat, that thugs are going to come over and light up all your copies of Steinbeck and Proust.
Related: Spotify’s new hate speech policies should trouble artists and music fans.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: You might not actually need a new computer. Try these upgrades first.
THESE 29 GOP SENATORS VOTED AGAINST BALANCED BUDGET PROPOSAL: The proposal was Sen. Rand Paul’s “Penny Plan” to balance the federal budget by 2023 via one percent annual spending cuts, with only Social Security exempted. Twenty GOP senators voted for it, 29 GOPers voted against, as did all of the Senate’s Democrats.
“The bottom line is whether the debt is threatening our national security, whether it’s threatening the security and the economic foundation of our country, and I think without question it is,” Paul told his colleagues on the Senate floor.
“This vote is a litmus test for conservatives. Are you a conservative? Do you think we can cut one penny out of every dollar? I think it is a conservative notion that we have long said we are for. Now it’s time to step up to the plate and actually vote what you say you stand for,” Paul continued. LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby took names, but it will be voters who will kick GOP you-know-whats.
WHAT DID OBAMA KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT? Obama spied on Trump’s campaign. Where’s the outrage?
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and their silence makes perfect sense.
Related: Clapper: It’s ‘A Good Thing’ FBI Was Spying On Trump Campaign.
LEADING THE WAY BACK TO 1984: Media lawyer and friend Jens van den Brink in the Netherlands explains why the EU attempt to criminalize “fake news” is like taking cyanide to cure a cold:
In 2016 the American politician Ron Paul wrote an opinion piece to the effect that the fight against fake news is a war against free speech, and can lead to censorship. This publication draws the ire of the EU, which promptly labeled the opinion itself as ‘fake news’ – so Paul’s opinion is incorrect according to the EU. According to the EU stating that the fight against fake news can be problematic in light of the freedom of speech is ‘fake news’ and qualifies as ‘spreading of disinformation’. The irony of these accusations seems to be completely lost on the EU.
GOP HELPS DEMS KILL CONSERVATIVE FARM BILL REFORMS: The farm bill supported by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was defeated on the House floor earlier this morning and he is now trying to bring it up for a second vote.
But the essential fact about this bill was reported yesterday by LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby – Establishment Republicans joined with Democrats Thursday to defeat much-needed reforms to the Food Stamp program in the bill. This is the kind of thing that produces grassroots revolts that made Trump’s 2016 victory, if not quite inevitable, certainly predictable.
THIS IS CNN: CNN Pundits Party It Up With Stormy Daniel’s lawyer Michael Avenatti In Now-Deleted Photo. “The friendship between the lawyer and CNN anchor could also help explain why the network has hosted Avenatti a whopping 74 times in just ten weeks.”
MAN ‘FIRING GUN AND RANTING ABOUT TRUMP’ SHOT BY POLICE AT TRUMP NATIONAL DORAL GOLF CLUB, GUNMAN ID’D. “Nearly a year after politically-motivated shooting at the GOP congressional softball practice.”
WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN. Andrew Klavan: Journalists’ Hatred for Trump is Destroying Them.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, OPEN SEXISM EDITION: STEM prof offers to boost female students’ grades. “The University of Akron says it will not allow a STEM professor to conduct an ‘experiment’ by artificially boosting the final grades of female students by a ‘level or two.’ Professor Liping Liu described the grade inflation policy as part of a ‘national movement to encourage female students to go to information sciences,’ asserting that his female students might not pass without the boost.”
RESPECT VOLCANOES: On this day in 1980, Mount St. Helens blew its head off. Fifty seven people were killed. Among the dead was 30-year-old vulcanologist David A. Johnston, who was stationed as an observer on a ridge six miles away. His famous last words were radioed: “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!” And indeed it was.
Over 230 square miles of vegetation and buildings were flattened.
It could have been worse. Swarms of earthquakes had started in March. Because of the work of people like Johnston, we knew enough about volcanoes at the time to close the park and tell people in the vicinity that this one was likely to get ugly and that they should get the heck out of there. (There was apparently pressure not to close the park, but caution prevailed.)
One guy who refused to leave was 83-year-old innkeeper Harry R. Truman. He’d lived nearby for 54 years. Like Johnston’s, Truman’s body was never found.