Archive for 2019

THEY’RE UPSET BECAUSE ONLY LEFTISTS ARE SUPPOSED TO THREATEN VIOLENCE IF THEY DON’T GET THEIR WAY: New Republic: Conservatives: We’ll Spill Blood to Keep Our Guns. “‘There would be violence’ neatly elides what’s actually being claimed: Some gun-rights activists would murder government officials who try to enforce a duly passed law. This isn’t an extreme viewpoint among such gun enthusiasts. If anything, it’s one of their central tenets.”

What part of Molon Labe don’t you get? Well, probably all of it, given today’s dismal education system.

And a law that violates the Constitution — which gun confiscation absolutely would — isn’t a “duly passed law.” It’s a usurpation of authority. Funny that all these people who have been yammering about #Resistance and punching Nazis seem okay with the idea of laws that violate the Constitution, laws that are — of course — themselves enforced with guns and violence.

But should it come to that, which I doubt, I suspect it wouldn’t be the cops and troops enforcing this who would be targeted first.

UPDATE: A friend on Facebook comments:

Oh, good, you finally understand. I thought we were going to have to explain it to you using small words and simple pictograms.

It’s so tedious trying to explain the facts of life to the sort of dumbasses who think “shall not be infringed” means “maybe you could have a duck gun. If your doctor, your wife, and three of your neighbors agree.”

Harsh, but fair.

OPEN THREAD: You made it to the weekend. Congrats!

HOW TO SUCCEED IN TENNIS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING: A review of Roger Simon’s The GOAT in RealClearBooks.

If you read Roger Simon’s latest novel, “The Goat,” avoid reading it on an airplane. I burst out laughing enough to alarm everyone else in the cabin. Simon has cooked up a frolicking, comic fantasy with lots to say. . . .

Through all the comedy and hilarity, Simon has something to say. Call it wisdom, call it the complexity of experience. Call it a backwards glance at the self-absorbed cultural transformation that occurred in the United States in the sixties and seventies. Whatever it is, “The Goat” lets you live the dream and laugh along the way, and still laugh when you reach that dark inevitable place that avarice, lies, deception and greed take you, even if Simon has the mercy to set you down gently in a soft warm place.

It’s a great book. Highly recommended. (Bumped).

REMINDER: Records Found in Dusty Basement Undermine Decades of Dietary Advice: Raw data from a 40-year-old study raises new questions about fats. “Ramsden, of the National Institutes of Health, unearthed raw data from a 40-year-old study, which challenges the dogma that eating vegetable fats instead of animal fats is good for the heart. The study, the largest gold-standard experiment testing that idea, found the opposite, Ramsden and his colleagues reported on Tuesday in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal). . . . Analyzing the reams of old records, Ramsden and his team found, in line with the “diet-heart hypothesis,” that substituting vegetable oils lowered total blood cholesterol levels, by an average of 14 percent. But that lowered cholesterol did not help people live longer. Instead, the lower cholesterol fell, the higher the risk of dying: 22 percent higher for every 30-point fall. Nor did the corn-oil group have less atherosclerosis or fewer heart attacks.”

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: General Flynn Goes On Offense Against the Deep State. I like the request for “Any and all evidence that during a senior-attended FBI meeting or video conference, Andrew McCabe said, ‘First we fuck Flynn, then we fuck Trump,’ or words to that effect.”

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Coppola gets into Godfather spat with UK’s Johnson.

Filmmaking legend Francis Ford Coppola is not impressed with Boris Johnson’s love for his bloody 1972 gangster classic “The Godfather”.

The Brexit-backing UK prime minister told The Daily Mail newspaper during his successful leadership challenge in July that his favourite piece of filmmaking was the “multiple retribution scene in ‘The Godfather’.”

The comment turned into a social media meme after Johnson expelled 21 of his own MPs — including Winston Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames — from the ruling party for straying from his hardline Brexit stance.

Coppola, who wants Britain to stay in the EU, told London’s Financial News that Brexit looked like it was heading for a disaster more reminiscent of the 1979 war film “Apocalypse Now”.

“The Godfather seems to be the favorite film of modern history’s most brutal figures, including Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gadhafi and others,” he told Friday’s edition of the news site by email.

That’s quite an ad hominem smear of Johnson by Coppola, who surely knows the first two Godfather movies are also the favorite films of Barack Obama, according to news articles from the 2008. Curiously, his name is left out of both the above article and an interview Coppola did last month when promoting the recent re-release of Apocalypse Now, when Coppola bristled after the interviewer mentioned the Godfather is Donald Trump’s favorite movie. But hey, Coppola’s drive-by attacks on the two center-right leaders are strictly business, I’m sure.

IT’S COME TO THIS: There’s Only One Democrat Talking About the Constitution, and It’s (Shudder) Joe Biden.

“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people,” Milton Friedman once said. “The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”

Related: Jim Clyburn (D-SC) I’m not too sure we’d hold on to the Bill of Rights if it were up for debate today.

As Kevin Williamson wrote in his new book, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, “The Bill of Rights ought to be titled ‘A List of Things You Idiots Don’t Get a Vote On, Because They Aren’t Up for Negotiation.’”

BEEN A ROUGH WEEK? THIS WILL HELP: Check it out, Friday Poetry Fun from Recovering Know-It-All.