NEWS YOU CAN USE: Stop expecting your job to make you happy.
Archive for 2019
March 18, 2019
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Nunes sues Twitter, some users, seeks over $250M alleging anti-conservative ‘shadow bans,’ smears.
CHANGE: Public Opinion Turning Against Mueller, Impeachment. “Have President Trump’s uncompromising denunciations of Bob Mueller’s ‘witch hunt’ been effective? It appears so, based on this USA Today/Suffolk University poll. Currently, 50% of Americans consider Mueller’s investigation to be a witch hunt, while 47% disagree. Independents believe Trump has been the victim of a witch hunt, by 54%/42%.”
Well, all the Democratic pols making plain they’re determined to get Trump by hook or crook haven’t helped.
WELL, HE CAN’T DO THAT WITH A DEMOCRATIC HOUSE: Should Trump add six or more seats to the Supreme Court right now? But that’s not the plan:
This is not a Swiftian Modest Proposal-esque satirical suggestion. I’d like to see Trump do it — but not to get those seats added to the Supreme Court. If Trump tries it, Congress would move heaven and earth to block him from succeeding at his court-packing plan, and that would be a bipartisan effort. We’ll have more later on the bipartisan project to curtail the National Emergencies Act after Trump’s border-wall declaration, but this would generation an outrage of an order of multitude higher. Legislation to limit the Supreme Court to nine seats might even pass on unanimous votes, or at least far more than would be needed for a veto override.
That assumes that Trump would veto such a bill. He’d get exactly what he wants — a way to make sure that the current composition of the court endures, plus a strengthening of an institutional norm as his legacy. At the very least, it would expose his potential 2020 challengers as the idiots and blowhards they are for floating this idea in the first place, and that is in itself priceless. Especially for Trump in 2020.
Heh.
IT’S OFFICIAL: PJ Media Joins the Townhall Media Family. “We’re excited to partner with Townhall’s other excellent properties and their 15 million-strong monthly readership.”
I’ve been with PJ since the very beginning back in 2005, and am looking forward to seeing how we grow with Townhall.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: At Psychology Today, Pamela Paresky of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) spots “Rebels Without a Clue — Some students blame Chelsea Clinton for NZ. Others demand fabric softener.”
Repeatedly pointing her finger inches from Chelsea Clinton’s chest, a young woman at NYU (sporting what appears to be a Bernie Sanders campaign tee shirt) lambastes the pregnant Clinton. “Forty-nine people died because of the rhetoric that you put out there,” the young woman rages, referring, one assumes, to Clinton’s condemnation of antisemitic rhetoric. Onlookers snap their fingers. Clinton was on campus because she had been invited to participate in a vigil for the victims of the New Zealand massacre.
Twenty miles away at Sarah Lawrence College, students calling themselves the “Diaspora Coalition” staged a sit-in, claiming they planned to continue to occupy an administrative building “until an agreement is made with — and signed by — senior members of the Sarah Lawrence administration.”1 They have a twitter account (@TheDiaCoalition) and an Instagram account (@thediasporacoalition), and asked for donations “for food and resources.” Among the top three demands, “All campus laundry rooms are to supply laundry detergent and softener on a consistent basis for all students, faculty and staff.2
Yes, that sounds ridiculous. But more concerning than their need for fabric softener is the fact that it is now de rigueur for students to make “demands” of college administrations, and for administrators to comply.
So how are SJW snowflakes created? By what the New York Times dubs “snowplow parents,” naturally enough: “How Parents Are Robbing Their Children of Adulthood. Today’s ‘snowplow parents’ keep their children’s futures obstacle-free — even when it means crossing ethical and legal boundaries:”
Helicopter parenting, the practice of hovering anxiously near one’s children, monitoring their every activity, is so 20th century. Some affluent mothers and fathers now are more like snowplows: machines chugging ahead, clearing any obstacles in their child’s path to success, so they don’t have to encounter failure, frustration or lost opportunities.
Taken to its criminal extreme, that means bribing SAT proctors and paying off college coaches to get children in to elite colleges — and then going to great lengths to make sure they never face the humiliation of knowing how they got there.
Those are among the allegations in the recent college bribery scandal, in which 50 people were charged in a wide-ranging fraud to secure students admissions to colleges.
The text in bold is a pretty amazing moment, even for the New York Times:
In her practice, Dr. Levine said, she regularly sees college freshmen who “have had to come home from Emory or Brown because they don’t have the minimal kinds of adult skills that one needs to be in college.”
One came home because there was a rat in the dorm room. Some didn’t like their roommates. Others said it was too much work, and they had never learned independent study skills. One didn’t like to eat food with sauce. Her whole life, her parents had helped her avoid sauce, calling friends before going to their houses for dinner. At college, she didn’t know how to cope with the cafeteria options — covered in sauce.
“Here are parents who have spent 18 years grooming their kids with what they perceive as advantages, but they’re not,” Dr. Levine said.
Yes, it’s a parent’s job to support the children, and to use their adult wisdom to prepare for the future when their children aren’t mature enough to do so. That’s why parents hide certain toys from toddlers to avoid temper tantrums or take away a teenager’s car keys until he finishes his college applications.
If children have never faced an obstacle, what happens when they get into the real world?
They become leftwing journalists and/or publishers? (QED: Sulzberger, Pinch.) Flashback: “The coddling of American journalism — The snowflakes aren’t melting as they get older and wiser. They now have jobs in publishing and media and are marching through the institutions they work for.”
RACISM IS EVERYWHERE: White men dominate in Dem presidential fundraising and polling.
STEVE GREEN: Beto Takes a Beating — Except where it counts.
So do you want to know why the long knives are out? It’s because a new Democratic superstar was born on Sunday, and they all saw it coming. O’Rourke got the name recognition he needed last summer and fall, thanks to his quixotic-yet-overhyped campaign against Ted Cruz. And now the “Kennedyesque” former congressman has the war chest to go with it.
Now you might be thinking that a young candidate of no particular achievements and difficult-to-discern hopey-changey policies could never win the Democratic nomination… but history does have a way of repeating itself.
This time, one can hope, as farce.
Read the whole thing.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: AP Pushes New Leftwing Conspiracy Theory: “Puzzling” Number of Activists Connected to Ferguson are Dying (Usually by Suicide or Drug Overdose), And That Suggests They’re Being Secretly Murdered by an Unidentified But Obviously White Cabal.
This comes on top of the once “objective” news agency running the headline, “Students globally protest warming, pleading for their future,” on Friday.
(Classical reference in headline.)
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Boy killed himself after teacher sexually abused him in classroom ‘reading area.’
ANNOY A JOURNALIST: Learn to Code!
And probably some computer science professors and some college admission offices. But it’s my experience from years of tutoring that college grads don’t learn to code in computer science classes.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 18, 2019.
THANKS, I GUESS: Ex-DNC Chair Donna Brazile Says She’s Giving Up Hypocrisy for Lent.
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? A meteor exploded over Earth with 10 times the energy of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb.
RANGE REVIEW: Charter Arms Bulldog XL in .45 Colt.
ARMY OF GEEKS: Ohio Seeks to Create a Civilian Cyber Militia to Protect Elections.
It’s Glenn’s world — we just live in it.
STORMS LEAVE NEBRASKA WITH ‘LARGEST WIDESPREAD AMOUNT OF FLOODING’ IN THE LAST 50 YEARS. Offutt Air Force Base takes a “punch to the gut” as 1/3 of the facility is under water.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Beto Takes a Beating (Except where it counts).
THE BAT IS MY ASTRONOMER, CARL LASZLO: Very Large Telescope spots the Cosmic Bat.
#HIMTOO? Warner Bros.’ Kevin Tsujihara to Exit as Studio Chief.
In a Hollywood Reporter article on March 6, text messages between the executive and Charlotte Kirk revealed that Tsujihara said that he would push for auditions for the actress amid an apparent sexual relationship that he was having with Kirk. The actress appeared in two Warner Bros. films: 2016’s How to Be Single and 2018’s Ocean’s 8. Tsujihara’s personal attorney stated, “Mr. Tsujihara had no direct role in the hiring of this actress.” An outside law firm continues to investigate the claims made against Tsujihara.
If the allegations prove out, they’re yet another reminder, as Kyle Smith noted last fall, that “Hollywood Is a Sex-Grooming Gang.”
I THOUGHT THE CLIMATE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Have We Really Entered The Anthropocene? This Researcher Says It Doesn’t Exist.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t crazy: “Alternative terms like Capitalocene (which attempts to highlight the detrimental forces of capitalism), and Plantationocene (which emphasises the role of colonialism, the plantation system and slave labour) have been offered as a way of doubling down on the elements of human history responsible for environmental crises, rather than lumping all humans, and their responsibility, together.”
UNTIL HE FOUND A MORE PROFITABLE SCHTICK: Bernie Sanders in the 1970s urged nationalization of most major industries.