Archive for 2019
March 15, 2019
I ALWAYS FEEL LIKE SOMEBODY’S WATCHING ME: Surveillance tech will make your car less private.
ON THIS DAY IN 1860, BACTERIOLOGIST WALDEMAR HAFFKINE WAS BORN: If he had only been willing to convert from Judaism to Christianity, he could have had an academic career in the Russian Empire where he was born. But Haffkine was not the type to bend to that kind of pressure. Fortunately for him and for humankind, he was able to secure a position at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he developed vaccines for cholera and bubonic plague. How did he know that his vaccines were safe? He tested them on himself.
THIS SEEMS RIGHT. WE OBVIOUSLY NEED A FEDERAL INVESTIGATION: College Admissions Scandal Is Likely Tip of the Iceberg.
KAMALA HAS MAYBE A LITTLE TOO MUCH EXPERTISE IN ONE-ON-ONE MEETINGS WITH SENIOR POLITICIANS: Harris says it’s ‘outrageous’ that Pence limits one-on-one meetings with women.
JACK BARUTH: I’m not giving up my pickup—and neither should you.
THE SPLC STRIKES AGAIN: Eventbrite Blacklists ACT for America for ‘Promoting Hate.’
ADVICE FOR WOMEN: Having Relationship Problems? Try Talking Less. An idea so crazy it just might work!
March 14, 2019
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Waging War Against The Dead. “Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam. In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Mohammed. The West prides itself on the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.”
Maybe we aren’t a liberal society.
SOHRAB AHMARI: The UN’s latest ‘women’s rights’ move just proved Trump right.
Remember the liberal freak-out over President Trump’s decision last year to withdraw the United States from the UN Human Rights Council? Human Rights Watch decried the move as “a sad reflection” of Trump’s “one-dimensional human-rights policy.” It was little more than “childish petulance” on the president’s part, a law professor told The Atlantic.
Well, in the months since, the UN human rights system has only vindicated Trump’s wisdom. The latest evidence: The UN announced on Wednesday that Iran had been appointed to its Working Group on Communications on the Status of Women. As Guy Benson pointed out on Twitter, that would be the same Iranian regime that on Monday sentenced Nasrin Sotoudeh, a female lawyer and leading campaigner for the rule of law, to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.
The council and the women’s rights committee both are part of the same morally bankrupt rights apparatus — a dictators’ mutual-praise society that permits some of the world’s most brutal regimes to demonize the US and Israel while whitewashing their own records.
Yep.
OPEN THREAD: So there.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Tragedy Behind the College Admissions Scandal, as explored by Lenore Skenazy of the Free Range Kids movement:
Today’s parents are stalked by the twin fears that their kids will be kidnapped, raped and eaten — or not get into Harvard… And now we have learned of the 30 or so families who were so afraid of their kids not getting into the “right” school that they got them into the wrong schools — schools where their kids most likely did not belong. To do this, they cheated for them. There is no excuse for this…except that we are in a culture that has made childhood into a landscape barren of almost everything except college prep. To many parents, schools, and districts, admission to a “good” school is the be-all and end-all.
Read the whole thing.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): School nurse allegedly performed oral sex on several students.
THERE IS TROUBLE IN THE FOREST, AND THE CREATURES ALL HAVE FLED, AS THE MAPLES SCREAM ‘OPPRESSION!’ AND THE OAKS JUST SHAKE THEIR HEADS: Emails to trees? British Columbia municipalities vie for title of worst, weirdest government waste.
TED KNOWS SOMETHING ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION: Sen. Cruz Issues Statement in Support of President Trump’s National Emergency Declaration.
IN DEFENSE OF THE classroom lecture.
AT AMAZON, save in Car Care.
CHANGE: Southern Poverty Law Center Fires Founder Morris Dees. “The SPLC announced Thursday afternoon that Dees—who in 1971 co-founded the far-left nonprofit, which has regularly been cited by major outlets over the years for its ‘hate’ group designations that oftentimes lump Republican groups in with actual racist groups—has parted ways with its founder.”
Related: SPLC Co-Founder Morris Dees Fired, Outside Audit Ordered.
“Effective yesterday, Morris Dees’ employment at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was terminated,” SPLC President Richard Cohen told The Montgomery Advertiser in a statement on Thursday. “As a civil rights organization, the SPLC is committed to ensuring that the conduct of our staff reflects the mission of the organization and the values we hope to instill in the world. When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.”
Dees, 82, co-founded the SPLC in 1971. The organization gained a reputation for taking the Ku Klux Klan to court and then it started labeling and tracking “hate groups.” In recent decades, it started listing conservative and Christian organizations along with the KKK, and last year it settled a defamation lawsuit for $3.375 million.
Dees’s departure is not the only big news Cohen broke on Thursday, however.
“Today we announced a number of immediate, concrete next steps we’re taking, including bringing in an outside organization to conduct a comprehensive assessment of our internal climate and workplace practices, to ensure that our talented staff is working in the environment that they deserve – one in which all voices are heard and all staff members are respected,” Cohen said in the statement.
“The SPLC is deeply committed to having a workplace that reflects the values it espouses – truth, justice, equity and inclusion, and we believe the steps we have taken today reaffirm that commitment,” he concluded.
In 1994, the Montgomery Advertiser took a deep dive into the organization’s activities, uncovering some evidence of discrimination against black employees.
Last December, a Baltimore lawyer filed a lawsuit taking aim at the SPLC’s tax-exempt status. His suit is moving toward the discovery period, and SPLC’s decision to clean house may have resulted from this litigation, first reported by PJ Media.
Sounds like there could be more revelations, and shakeups, to come.
UPDATE: This seems right: “The announcement was deliberately vague as to what Dees did to prompt his dismissal from an organization he built into a $500 million smear machine, but it must have been very bad, indeed.” Reportedly, there are claims of both sexual and racial harassment by Dees, according to leaked emails.
“The recent resignation of a black female attorney, Meredith Horton, seems to have been the ‘last straw’ in terms of the SPLC’s issues with women and minority employees.”
Stay tuned.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING: USC, Yale University among colleges sued by Stanford students amid college admissions scandal. “The University of Southern California, Yale University and several other elite colleges are being sued by two Stanford University students who claim they were denied a fair opportunity for admission and have had their degrees devalued due to the college cheating scheme revealed by federal officials Tuesday. Erica Olson and Kalea Woods filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Wednesday, a day after federal authorities said they uncovered one of the largest college admissions scams to hit the U.S. The lawsuit seeks $5,000,001 on behalf of what the lawyers estimate will be thousands of plaintiffs who fit the criteria to seek class status.”