Archive for 2024

August 27, 2024

FREE SPEECH ISN’T ENOUGH: To rescue the American academic community from itself, that is, according to Hillsdale Professor Wilfred McClay, writing in City Journal. Yes, winning legal and other battles to protect and reinvigorate the First Amendment on college campuses is vital, but there is much more to this struggle:

“But the restoration of free speech, as well as the ethos that supports its flourishing, is not the full cure to what ails higher education in America. Yes, a university is a community of inquiry. But it also is something more than that: a community of shared memory, the chief instrument by which the achievements of the past are transmitted to the present as a body of knowledge upon which future knowledge can be built.

“Without the prior existence of that body of shared knowledge to build upon, the concept of progress is empty. This is what it means to be a civilization: a social formation in which such transmission takes place continuously and reliably, forming the basis of a rich and enduring common life.”

So much wisdom in that statement, and more from McClay in an invaluable look at the basics of what the restoration of Western civilization entails.

 

Posted at 12:09 pm by Mark Tapscott on Aug 27th, 2024

GLENN ALREADY LINKED TO JOHN SCHINDLER’S EXCELLENT ARTICLE, “Who Really Is Barack Obama?” but one more thing needs to be said.

Schindler devoted more than 3,500 exhaustively researched words trying to answer the headline question. But he was forced to repeat it at the end, “I ask again: Who really is Barack Obama?”

After all these years — and all that damage — he remains something of a cipher. That’s no accident.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green on Aug 27th, 2024

I WONDER IF BIDEN/HARRIS WILL DO THE SAME THING AFTER OUR ELECTION? “It’s an unprecedented situation in the history of the 5th French Republic: the loser in the election effectively rejects yielding power to the winner. . . . This awfully inconvenient fact remains: Macron’s party got way less votes and MPs than the NPF, yet it is Macron’s party that’s still running the French government, and it is Macron himself making choices on who can or cannot assume power based on what he thinks would ‘weaken France’ or not. It’s insane when you think about it.”

Posted at 10:43 am by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 27th, 2024

STANDING UP TO BIGOTRY AND BULLYING: Bullied off campus by Boise State students, coffee shop owner continues battle. “A coffee shop owner, ousted from Boise State University due to student backlash over her support for law enforcement, is continuing her legal battle against the school. Sarah Fendley updated The College Fix ahead of an upcoming trial on the current status of the lawsuit she filed which argues her free speech rights were violated by the university.”

Posted at 10:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 27th, 2024

“CONSPIRACY THEORY” NOW JUST MEANS “THREE WEEKS AHEAD OF THE NEWS CYCLE”:

Posted at 9:52 am by Stephen Green on Aug 27th, 2024

WELL, YES: Kamala Harris’s media gambit is working.

Vice President Kamala Harris has done an impressive job lowering the bar on the question of how she will communicate her views to voters. As you know, Harris has not done an interview since a group of backroom Democratic Party insiders muscled President Joe Biden out of the race on July 21, leading to Harris’s instant elevation to Democratic nominee the next day. Yes, she has taken a few softball questions from her traveling press corps but nothing of any consequence. Needless to say, Harris has not done a news conference to take questions from reporters over an extended period of time.

Harris is avoiding the press for two reasons. One, she’s not a very good extemporaneous speaker, and a news conference would just be an opportunity to create problems for herself. Two, the press is doing her work for her, portraying her as ‘moving to the center’ based on the word of anonymous aides, not Harris herself.

Mostly it’s working (to the extent it can work with a candidate as weak as Harris) because the press — if we can still call it that — is deeply uninterested in doing their purported job and heavily invested in pushing radical candidates into positions of power.

Posted at 9:37 am by Stephen Green on Aug 27th, 2024

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Trump Campaign CANNOT Cave to Harris’s Panicky Debate Demands. “Harris’s people have to be terrified. This sham of a campaign has been conducted in a media cocoon that’s protected Harris. A debate will be the first time that she’s really exposed, even with the ABC hacks running interference for her. The potential for a catastrophic embarrassment with Harris off-script is just as great as it was with Biden, but she doesn’t have the old and tired excuse to fall back on.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green on Aug 27th, 2024

SELF-INFLICTED. Liberal Media Scream: ‘CNN’ has become a laugh line. “This week’s Liberal Media Scream features talker Bill Maher mocking CNN and its hosts for viewing the lefty cable network as politically centrist, citing unending ‘gushing’ over Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential nomination acceptance speech the night before. ‘I watched from 8:09 to 8:23. There was just gushing about how great a speech it was,’ the talk show host and comedian told CNN host Kaitlan Collins.”

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Aug 27th, 2024

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT: China Gains Secret Access to Nvdia Microchips by Renting Computers. “The buyers and sellers of computing power and the middlemen connecting them aren’t breaking any laws, lawyers familiar with U.S. sanctions say. Washington has targeted exports of advanced chips, equipment and technology, but cloud companies say the export rules don’t restrict Chinese companies or their foreign affiliates from accessing U.S. cloud services using Nvidia chips.”

Posted at 7:33 am by Stephen Green on Aug 27th, 2024
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