Archive for 2019
May 25, 2019
I WAS HOPING WE COULD DO BETTER THAN THAT: Bringing human-like reasoning to driverless car navigation.
EVEN CNN IS STARTING TO FIGURE OUT THE MODERN WORLD: “How an internet mob falsely painted a Chipotle employee as racist.”
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Mammoth Mountain to Stay Open Into August After Recording Its Snowiest May Ever.
(Classical reference in headline.)
WHO DO YOU THINK I THINK I AM? Nebraska Man Arrested For Giving Cop Fake Name While Wearing Name Tag With Real Name.
THERESA MAY’S CALAMITOUS PREMIERSHIP COMES TO AN END: “Most of the leading candidates to replace Mrs. May are more sympathetic to free markets and classical liberal ideas. As well as cleaning up Mrs. May’s many mistakes in the handling of Brexit, it must be hoped that whoever comes next will also clean up the mess she made of economic policy.”
Faster, please.
HE’S REALLY TAKING THE LEAD ON THIS: Cruz: Defund colleges that don’t support free speech.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Roast Naomi Wolf.
I gotta be honest: as a writer, when I first heard about this, my first thought was, There but for the grace of God go I. That was Alan Jacobs’s too. He writes:
Wouldn’t you — wouldn’t anyone — assume that the phrase “death recorded” means “death sentence carried out”? I know that’s what I would assume. Now, someone might say, “Well, she should have looked it up.” But we only look words or phrases up when we have reason to think that we have misunderstood them.
But Jacobs backtracked a bit when he learned that Wolf had faulted professional historians for missing this “fact” — when actually, they were right and she was wrong. Jacobs:
As I say above, it’s reasonable that the term “death recorded” would raise no alarms; but it’s far less reasonable to blithely assume that all previous professional historians simply missed information that was there to be read.
Sounds like confirmation bias got the best of Naomi Wolf (and, one assumes, her editor). I’m just now starting my next book, and you’d better believe that I’m taking this self-immolation as a sign to be even more careful.
As Rod Dreher writes, it’s terrifying to think of being dunked on by an interviewer with a fact that destroys much of your book’s thesis. And if Wolf was a conventional historian or even a mainstream partisan pundit on either side of the aisle, most authors and journalists would feel much more sympathetic. But Wolf has a long history of crankery and conspiracy theory peddling, and it finally caught up with her in a very public way.
More from Dominic Green at the American edition of the London Spectator: False history from Naomi Wolf and Marc Lamont Hill.
The truth, host and historian Matthew Sweet explained to Wolf in an excruciating interview, is the opposite. The verdict ‘Death recorded’, which Wolf takes as proof of execution, was created in 1823 to allow judges to abstain pronouncing a death sentence. Worse, one of the men that Wolf describes as an ‘executed’ victim of Victorian homophobia was prosecuted, and not executed, for raping a child.
‘Well, that’s a really interesting thing to investigate,’ Wolf understated.
As another legendary fabulist said, summing up his own career, “If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story.”
K-12 IMPLOSION FLASHBACK: Are Homeschoolers Overqualified? A shocking letter to Mike Rowe suggests they are.
AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.
OFFICIAL DNC WAR ROOM ACCOUNT CALLS BLACK NEUROSURGEON A ‘MORON:’
Impressive ratio on this tweet. Why is the Democratic Party such a cesspit of racism, and the mirror image of the alt-right?
THE SAT’S ADVERSITY SCORE: Redlining In Reverse.
FOR SOME THAT’S NOT A BUG, BUT A FEATURE: Rural Americans would be serfs if we abolished the Electoral College.
AGGRESSOR IN GHOST PAINT: An F-16 from the 64th Aggressors Squadron takes off from Nellis AFB, Nevada wearing the unit’s new “ghost” paint scheme. According to the caption, the new paint scheme was based on an idea “generated from the 57th Wing commander’s social media account…”
WHAT PASSES FOR “WHITE SUPREMACY” IN THE 21st CENTURY: “So ‘white supremacy’ consists of such sinister elements as perfectionism, sense of urgency, ‘worship of the written word’– I suppose that means using correct grammar and spelling, ‘either/or thinking,’ individualism and objectivity. I think I am starting to get the picture. One thing that puzzles me, however, is the inclusion of ‘right to comfort.’ Isn’t it leftists who think they have a right to ‘safe spaces’ where they can’t be offended?”
I remember my Antitrust prof, Ralph Winter, saying that universities think the law doesn’t apply to them, and that they’d be sorely surprised one day to find out that it did. Maybe now is the time.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: CNN Completely Edits African American Pro-Lifer Out of Abortion Documentary.
Evergreen:
Though the tweet from Iowahawk on the media that we often use to accompany it is a little too spot-on in this case:
CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION OPENS: On this day in 1787, the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia. It had been scheduled to start on May 14th, but on the appointed day, there was no quorum. Nor was there a quorum on May 15th, 16th, 17th or for many days thereafter. Some began to wonder whether the convention would be a failure (as a similar meeting in Annapolis, Maryland had been the year before).
But they were worrying unnecessarily. Their colleagues were on their way, delayed in transit. Soon delegations from every state except Rhode Island had arrived. In the meantime the early arrivers (like James Madison, who was so eager that he had arrived on May 4) could cool their heels at the Indian Queen Tavern.