DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION: Harvard law students ask for right-of-center legal clinics to balance leftist clinics.
Archive for 2019
November 5, 2019
WAIT UNTIL YOU SEE WHAT IT DOES TO YOUR POCKETBOOK AND YOUR HEALTH: Medicare-for-All Insults Our Intelligence.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CULTURE OF HATE EDITION: In viral video, student exposes instructor’s ‘anti-white,’ anti-academic’ comments. What the hell is wrong with Utah?
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Behold the Incredible Triggering Power of the MAGA Hat! “The Twitter hashtag #KurtSuzuki reveals an array of fragility, mental instability, and fundamental misunderstandings of just what a hat is capable of. If I were a better person I would feel bad for these people.”
WRAITH PAINT SCHEME ON AN F-16: An aggressor squadron F-16 Fighting Falcon gets a new paint job in the paint barn at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. The “Wraith” design “replicates an adversary paint scheme.”
KIRA DAVIS: People Are Trying To ‘Cancel’ Comedian Hannibal Buress For Opposing Rent Control… Seriously.
Hannibal Buress is a comedian and actor who has in recent years seen a sharp rise in his popularity (Spiderman:Homecoming; Bojack Horseman; Tag; Broad City). Like most celebrities (I guess we’ll call him that even though he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who welcomes such a label) Buress leans politically left and isn’t shy about expressing it. He’s an admitted member of the Yang Gang and like most people these days keeps up with the progressing presidential campaign on Twitter.
This past week Buress made the mistake of crossing the Bernie Brigade when he responded to Bernie’s tweet about a national rent control plan.
His Twitter feed was immediately inundated with outrage.
It hardly seems possible to be a Twitter pecksniff and guttersnipe at the same time, but they manage.
RADICAL CHIC, THE GERITOL YEARS: It’s Petty When It Happens To Someone Else.
Currently, 17 percent of American homeowners have a smart video surveillance device, and unit sales are expected to double by 2023… The popularity of these devices has led to the “porch pirate gotcha” film genre, a sort of America’s Funniest Home Videos of petty crime.
In the pages of The Atlantic, our sympathies are solicited. Though not for the people being robbed, of course.
Read the whole thing.
MATT TAIBBI: The ‘Whistleblower’ Probably Isn’t: It’s an insult to real whistleblowers to use the term with the Ukrainegate protagonist. “Actual whistleblowers are alone. The Ukraine complaint seems to be the work of a group of people, supported by significant institutional power, not only in the intelligence community, but in the Democratic Party and the commercial press.”
I LIKE TO THINK PEOPLE WILL STILL BE WATCHING THE 1978 ‘SUPERMAN’ CENTURIES FROM NOW: Microsoft archived ‘Superman’ on its Project Silica glass storage medium. “Movie studios archive thousands of movies in their warehouses. But celluloid, the medium onto which master copies are printed, isn’t the most stable storage format; it’s prone to decay and is highly flammable. Yet, switching to hard drives wouldn’t be helpful, since they’re so prone to failure. Microsoft’s new glass-based storage medium could do the trick. As reported by Variety, Warner Bros. has saved the 1978 version of Superman onto one of Microsoft’s Project Silica glass plates, which will supposedly last for centuries.”
TOUGH LOVE: Trump Threatens to Cut California Wildfire Funds.
In a Sunday morning tweet, Mr. Trump alleged that California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, wasn’t doing enough to stop the fires, accusing him of doing a “terrible job of forest management.”
“Every year, as the fire’s rage & California burns, it is the same thing – and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help. No more. Get your act together Governor,” the president wrote.
Mr. Trump again called on Mr. Newsom to “clean” the state’s forest floors to help prevent the spread of fires, an argument he has been making publicly for months.
Why should the rest of the country continue paying for California’s bad decisions on forest management and urban development?
IS THE SUCCESS OF THE BABYLON BEE CAUSING THE ONION TO UP ITS GAME? CNN Responds To Richard Spencer Comments By Apologizing For Not Getting Him To Say Those Things On The Show:
“We’re truly sorry Mr. Spencer wasn’t able to espouse his hateful, anti-Semitic rhetoric during our interview, which would have easily secured at least 48 hours of nonstop coverage about whether it’s okay to say such things,” said CNN Chief Washington Correspondent Jake Tapper, who begged for forgiveness for missing an obvious opportunity to provide a nice boost to the network’s ratings.
Backstory here: Leak Claims To Show Richard Spencer In Racist, Anti-Semitic Tirade.
Flashback: Jake Tapper slammed for giving white nationalist Richard Spencer airtime during his program.
AT AMAZON, Deal of the Day, Stanley Adventure Base 4X Camp Cook Set, Stainless Steel.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Beto Got Nowhere Campaigning on Cultural Issues.
HMM: Frank Luntz reveals unprecedented findings on how voters view President Trump.
Author and pollster Frank Luntz said Monday that President Trump’s rhetoric is having an effect on voters that he has never observed before.
Speaking on Fox News Radio’s “Brian Kilmeade Show,” Luntz said new focus group research from the past 10 days shows a majority of voters approve of what Trump is doing as president but disapprove of what he says.
“A majority of the public like what Donald Trump is doing and a majority of the public don’t like what he’s saying. This is the first time that I can remember. Usually, it’s the opposite direction,” he explained, noting that past presidents were generally liked by the public, but their policies turned off voters.
Well, if those are the choices — nice words but bad policies, or the other way around — which do you prefer?
BOB MCMANUS: With O’Neill’s resignation, who’s going to clean up de Blasio’s mess now? “Who wants to be top cop in a city that appears to have lost the will to defend itself from criminals and their ever-present, ever-more-audacious advocates? And make no mistake: The criminal-justice agenda concocted in Albany last winter and now embraced so ardently by Gotham’s leaders — bail ‘reform,’ jail closing, tolerance for public disorder and so on — represents a not-so-subtle surrender to the city’s worst instincts.”
Plus: “Open contempt for the NYPD is a thing now. They were pouring water on cops — and, once, even a carton of milk — this summer because they had every reason to believe they could get away with it. And, by and large, they were right. Now they’re trashing cop cars in public; marching by the hundreds in Brooklyn to spew vile anti-NYPD invective; openly defying officers in the subways and on the streets — and basically they’re getting away with that, too.”
The stories began to appear in the Soviet press in the autumn of 1921, each one more gruesome than the last. There was the woman who refused to let go of her dead husband’s body. “We won’t give him up,” she screamed when the authorities came to take it away. “We’ll eat him ourselves, he’s ours!” There was the cemetery where a gang of 12 ravenous men and women dug up the corpse of a recently deceased man and devoured his cold flesh on the spot. There was the man captured by the police after murdering his friend, chopping off his head, and selling the body at a street market to a local restaurant owner to be made into meatballs, cutlets, and hash. And then there was the desperate mother of four starving children, saved only by the death of their sister, aged 13, whom the woman cut up and fed to the family.
The stories seemed too horrific to believe. Few could imagine a hunger capable of driving people to such acts. One man went in search of the truth. Henry Wolfe, a high-school history teacher from Ohio, spent several weeks in the spring of 1922 traveling throughout Samara Province, in southeastern Russia, intent on finding physical evidence of cannibalism. In the district of Melekess, officials told him about a father who had killed and eaten his two little children. He confessed that their flesh had “tasted sweeter than pork.” Wolfe kept on searching, and eventually found the proof he had been looking for.
At first glance, it appears to be an unremarkable photograph of six individuals in winter dress: two women and four men, their expressions blank, betraying no particular emotion. But then our eyes catch sight of the grisly objects laid out across a wooden plank resting unevenly atop a pair of crates. There are two female heads, part of a rib cage, a hand, and what appears to be the skull of a small child. The adult heads have been cracked open, and the skulls pulled back. Along with human flesh, cannibals had feasted upon the brains of their victims.
Wolfe stands second from the right, surrounded by Russian interpreters and Soviet officials. There’s a faint look of satisfaction on his face at having accomplished his goal. Here, at last, was the incontrovertible proof he had set out to find.
Read the whole thing, which describes very bad luck, indeed.
WHEN YOU TRY TOO HARD TO BE POPULAR WITH THE WRONG CROWD: Mitt Romney seen favorably by just 18% of Americans: Poll.
FACE, MEET PALM: Jerry Springer Blames Trump for Decline in Civility.
Flashback (From Ed): Moral Rot And The Age Of Trump: As I wrote in February of 2016, “I’ll eschew the usual conservative jeremiads on the radical changes in culture during the 1960s and ‘70s. But at some point in the mid-1980s, left-leaning programming executives decided that Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, and Morton Downey Jr. would bring in big ratings on radio and TV via shock. In many ways, the Trump campaign feels like a 24/7 version of the Morton Downey Jr. Show, right down to the fact that Downey was a former Democrat who saw an opening with conservative voters to exploit via an aggressive in-your-face Noooo Yewk attitude. (Particularly this past week, when Al Sharpton, whose public career began on the Downey show, made his inevitable guest appearance in the presidential campaign.)”
Or to put it another way: Choose the form of your destructor, to coin an Instaphrase.
AND SPEAKING OF PUBLISHING: ‘I told you so’.
CALIFORNIA DUMPSTER FIRE: Gavin Newsom, Your Carbon Offsets are Burning.
Those who leave their energy-guzzling multi-million-dollar mansions when they fly off on their private jets to save-the-planet climate change conferences like to ease their consciences and explain their hypocrisy by pointing to their carbon offsets like paying for trees to be planted somewhere that might mature in a hundred years or so.
There are a lot of trees in California and a good number of them are on fire, thanks to environmental regulations and policies that are supposed to protect the environment but are in fact destroying it. The irony in California that the very trees that are supposed to be sucking up those nasty carbon emissions are now a major producer of carbon emissions. . . .
California utility PG&E has been scapegoated by Newsom and others, who blame its power lines and equipment for most of the fires. Yet without the fuel provided by forest mismanagement promoted by environmentalists these firs would not have reached almost Biblical proportions. Not harvesting dead trees and not clearing away dry brush is what fueled these fires, not climate change.
A February 12, 2019 press release by the U.S. Forest Service shows the extent of the problem caused by environmentalists and suggests that maybe if we didn’t allow the 18 million California trees that died last year to rest in peace but instead harvested them perhaps the fire problem wouldn’t be of such tragic proportions.
How bad do things have to become in California before Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and dissolves the state government? In his second term, he’ll have more flexibility. And if anyone can deliver California to Trump, it’s Gavin Newsom.