BERKELEY VICTIM JOINS TRUMP ON CPAC STAGE: ‘He Took a Hard Punch in the Face for All of Us.’
Archive for 2019
March 2, 2019
PAUL MIRENGOFF: A Milquetoast Supreme Court. “Are we stuck with a milquetoast Supreme Court? Maybe. It ducks hugely important issues as to which conservatives may have a majority, doesn’t seem hesitant to decide ones where the liberals have five or more votes, and appears partial to deciding cases where ideology plays no part.”
BREITBART.COM ALUM TO RESUSCITATE HUMAN EVENTS:
A timeline of Human Events history indicates that Reagan began subscribing to the publication in 1961, a time when the conservative media space was sparsely populated. As the decades wore on, Human Events had to learn to share. Since the arrival of the Internet alone, conservative sites such as the Daily Caller, FoxNews.com, the Blaze, NewsBusters, Independent Journal Review, Breitbart, PJ Media and RedState have jostled and elbowed their way toward a piecemeal fragmentation of the right-leaning U.S. audience.
Human Events couldn’t keep up. It dropped print in 2013, and, according to [Raheem] Kassam, it hasn’t turned out original content in four years, though it has been posting syndicated material from Townhall Media.
The new Human Events, pledges Kassam, will leave the poverty in the past.
Read the whole thing.
PUSHBACK: House Dem on AOC threat to centrists: “Since when is it okay to put you on a Nixonian list?”
Related (From Ed): But can AOC find 57 card-carrying centrists in today’s Democratic Party?
WHAT WAS THE BULWARK THINKING?
I don’t have any beef with a liberal writer like Jong-Fast attending CPAC, and slagging it on twitter. Some of the other snark on her timeline was even pretty funny. What I don’t understand is why on earth The Bulwark would send her as their representative.
One of the most difficult things for me discussing politics today is convincing Trump supporters that disagreeing with Trump’s behavior, tactics, and yes, sometimes policy (ahem, trade) doesn’t mean we have become leftists. If the goal of The Bulwark is to ‘conserve conservatism’, they desperately need to demonstrate to a Trump Derangement Syndrome weary audience that they are still actually conservative.
Read the whole thing. Bill Kristol isn’t exactly the best salesman for “conservatism conserved” (thread):
UNDER A NEW BILL, MY TENNESSEE CARRY PERMIT WILL BE UPGRADED TO AN “ENHANCED CARRY PERMIT” that will let me carry in a lot of places where guns are currently banned.
IMPOSSIBILISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
One of my favorite Twitter accounts is the official Twitter feed of the Socialist party of Great Britain. Folks often criticize me for engaging with it because it is so irrelevant, even in socialist circles. That in itself is a kind of accomplishment. It’s like the guy who attends Civil War reenactment-society meetings, but dresses in full Klingon battle regalia and screams at everyone that no one knows how to fight Romulans. “You call yourselves warriors, but none of you even knows how to swing a Bat’leth!”
Virtually every time anyone says anything critical of Maduro’s — or Stalin’s — socialism, the SPGB Twitter feed leaps into action, raining “ACKSHULLYS” down like a UFC fighter beating on a 98-pound mugger. “Actually” real socialism is collective ownership of the means of production! Real socialism has never been tried! Soviet Communism was “state capitalism!” You can almost smell the old socks and stale urine wafting up from the guy tweeting from some public-library computer, his overstuffed shopping cart full of dog-eared copies of Das Kapital and back issues of Juggs close by his side.
But that’s kinda what I like about the SPGB. At least they take their ideas seriously. They’ve constructed a wholly hypothetical alternative world that is simultaneously as plausible and impossible as Middle Earth or Westeros or a great meal at a Wolfgang Puck Express at the Newark airport. It sounds like it could be real, and it’s kind of fun to think about, but it’s not actually reality. It’s like they think they can pluck the Platonic ideal of a hamburger out of the ether and use it as a rhetorical cudgel to say a Five Guys burger “isn’t a real hamburger! Real hamburgers have never been tried!” Even the Wikipedia entry on the SPGB says: “The party’s political position has been described as a form of impossibilism.”
Related: “‘Sorry to Bother You’ caused quite a stir last summer. Not only did Boots Riley’s film overperform at the box office, it earned raves from film critics nationwide. The movie just snared a Best First Feature award from the Independent Spirit Awards. Could the film’s strong anti-capitalist bent have anything to do with it? The Guardian asked, ‘Sorry to Bother You: is this the most shocking anti-capitalist film ever?’ Now, Riley is waging a one-man war on behalf of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro. Don’t believe the stories of Venezuelans starving, he says via Twitter. It’s much worse in Oakland, Calif.”
CPAC RECAP: If you’re looking for CPAC 2019 news, Tyler O’Neil has wall-to-wall coverage. Just keep scrolling.
WELCOME TO THE MILITARY: Airman Schools Mark Cuban On How Military Procurement Is A Mess In Four Simple Words. I love how Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson walked over and hugged him.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Concealed-Carry Holsters: Separating Good from Bad.
WAIT, WHAT?
So I guess all the civil rights statutes were a mistake? Or is this sarcasm? Genuinely unsure here.
CALIFORNIANS GOTTA CALIFORNICATE: Ventura County Planning Commission passes wildlife corridor law with list of changes:
A controversial proposal that sets new land-use rules to protect migration passages and habitat for wildlife was approved Thursday night after a hearing of almost 11 hours that drew hundreds of people.
The Ventura County Planning Commission voted 5-0 to recommend the proposal to the Ventura County Board of Supervisors, but added a laundry list of suggestions for changes.
The proposal calls for restrictions on outdoor lighting and fences plus the addition of 200-foot buffers around rivers, creeks and streams and near wildlife crossings. The territory stretches along the Santa Clara and Ventura rivers and includes a wide swath running from the eastern border of the county to the Ojai Valley, as well as land lying near Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Simi Valley.
What could go wrong?
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
SO MUCH FOR SETTLED SCIENCE: We Have Been Wrong About a Key Feature of Neanderthals’ Appearance.
After more than a century of alternative views, a new study has reconfirmed that Neanderthals once walked fully upright with a posture not unlike our own. They weren’t hunched after all.
The reanalysis is based on an elderly male Neanderthal that was found in La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France in 1911. Creating a virtual reconstruction of the ancient skeleton’s pelvis and spine, the authors say that both the stress on the hip and the position of the pelvis are not so different from modern humans.
When the research was extended to other Neanderthal skeletons, the vertebrae and pelvic bones also matched this model. Once thought to be a hallmark of modern humans, this suggests that the curve of your lower back is not so unique after all.
“On the whole, there is hardly any evidence that would point to Neanderthals having a fundamentally different anatomy,” explains Martin Haeusler, a specialist in evolutionary medicine at the University of Zurich.
If Neanderthals really had a posture similar to humans, they would have needed a double s-shaped spine like our own. These curves exist to take on the majority of weight and shock that is conferred when walking.
But some recent studies using isolated vertebrae had argued that Neanderthals actually had straighter spines than we thought – backing up the idea that Neanderthals were hunched.
The new research, however, suggests this conclusion is a mistake.
Well, given all the evidence that they interbred with modern humans, they’re basically just a slight variant of the same species.
ALLAN BLOOM ON HISTORY: “You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad?… Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past.”
Read the whole thing.
Though at least while Bloom was still alive, students were still learning some form of history: Flash-forward to today: Why Are Students Ditching the History Major?
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: In What Sense Is The Bulwark Conserving Conservatism?
Please note that I’m not calling on The Bulwark to fire Jong-Fast, or that she’s not entitled to her opinion. That’s not my way, because I’m not a liberal. But speaking as a cuck RINO traitor who probably wanted Hillary to get elected, I just don’t see how crapping all over conservative ideas is conserving conservatism. It might give you a visceral thrill to goof on individuals you hate, and if that’s all you want out of it, fine. But don’t condescend to me and pretend you’re accomplishing anything. In the words of the great Jon Gabriel, this is nothing more than a “weird, petulant shaming campaign.”
Related Twitter thread:
REASON TV: California’s High-Speed Rail Disaster Is a ‘Shot Across the Bow for the Green New Deal.’
If high-speed rail can’t make it in there, can it make it anywhere in America?
AT AMAZON, Spring savings in Garden & Outdoors.
THIS IS JUNK SCIENCE, EVERYONE KNOWS THE DIFFERENCES ARE SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED: Researchers discover clues to brain differences between males and females.
NOW WE HAVE CBD OIL FOR THAT: This 1850s Medical Device Was Said to Cure Toothache, Gangrene, and Ennui.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: High School Seniors Banned From Taking Limos To Prom Because Of Income Inequality.