Archive for 2013

HISTORY: Rare Photo of the Mushroom Cloud Over Hiroshima Discovered in a Former Japanese Elementary School. “The person who took this photo would have been among the first to look out there and realize that this wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill bomb. It wasn’t the air raid that the citizens of Hiroshima had been anticipating for months. This was the beginning of a new world, one with a bomb unlike anything anyone had ever experienced before, something so new and fearsome that at first no one could understand what it was.”

A POLITICAL LIE FROM A CLINTON? Bill Clinton Fibs About Gun Control:

At a speech before the Conusmer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 9, Bill Clinton stated: “Half of all mass killings in the United States have occurred since the assault weapon ban expired in 2005, half in the history of the country.” But that statement is untrue, as Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post demonstrates.

Asked by Kessler about his statement, Clinton’s spokesman declined to comment or to say where Clinton got his numbers. As Kessler, a professional fact-checker, says, “this always makes us suspicous.”

Well, that and the fact that Bill’s lips were moving. They can’t sell their gun policies without lying. So they lie.

LATE: MIT president orders review of Aaron Swartz episode. “The president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced Sunday that he has ordered a top-to-bottom review of the university’s actions in a computer hacking case that led to the federal prosecution of renowed programmer and web activist Aaron Swartz, who killed himself last week as he awaited a federal trial on 13 felony counts. . . . Swartz’s suicide at the age of 26 has led to an outpourting of sadness as well as anger directed at the Obama Administration, federal prosecutors, and MIT over a prosecution that critics regard as either unjustified or heavy-handed.”

UPDATE: More here. See, I think that David Gregory could have gotten away with this . . . .

GUN OWNER ON LOWER HUDSON JOURNAL NEWS LIST victimized by burglar who may have used list to target home. “At least two burglars broke into a home on Davis Avenue at 9:30 p.m. Saturday but were unsuccessful in an attempt to open the safe, which contained legally owned weapons, according to a law enforcement source. One suspect was taken into custody, the source said.”

More: Journal News gun permit map used by burglars to target White Plains home?

NEWS FROM AMERICA’S OBESITY FRONTIER: Woman Crashes Through Sidewalk. “A heavyset woman caved through an Upper East Side sidewalk last night — dropping six feet into a huge hole where she was eventually pulled out by emergency crews using a crane-like rescue unit, authorities said.”

Takeaway: “The woman was enormous. . . . She is a very large person, but we were able to secure her and stabilize her and lift her out of the hole.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Piers Morgan, Filleted.

Ben Shapiro’s satisfying dismantling of Piers Morgan on CNN over the issue of gun control has been getting some of the plaudits it deserves. . . .

Others have celebrated Ben’s performance. Here I’d like to underscore two points.

One concerns Morgan’s attitude towards the Constitution. At one point in the interview, Ben handed Morgan a copy of the Constitution and invited him to ponder the language of the Second Amendment. A few minutes later, Morgan’s handed it back to him dismissively: Here’s “your little book.” The Constitution of the United States is “your little book”?

The other point concerns the point Ben made toward the end of the interview. One of the reasons the Founders framed the Second Amendment, he pointed out, was to arm citizens against the possibility of a tyrannous government.

Read the whole thing.

WASHINGTON POST: How The NRA Went From A Target-Shooting Organization To A Mighty Civil Rights Group.

David Hardy calls it “an amazingly impartial article.” It’s also a model for other reformers.

Plus, the essence of gun control: “Again, it’s an expression of contempt for Middle America. They don’t like you and yours and don’t think you should be in charge of the capacity to take care of yourself. They know they can’t do this for you, but they’ve hired these nice people to draw chalk outlines of your kids, and that’s supposed to make you feel better.”

ARE “SEX TIPS FOR GIRLS” RUINING ACTUAL SEX? “Women’s magazines are especially to blame in this regard. . . . There’s a crucial difference between encouraging sexual experimentation amongst women as a form of empowerment, and telling us that we should be re-enacting a strip club in our bedrooms every night. The former involves an element of truth-seeking, of body confidence building and laying positive foundations for relationships in the future – what is it that I want, and, equally, what doesn’t work for me at all? – while the latter is basically a group of mainly female journalists trying desperately to second guess what men want.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS LOOKING A LITTLE DESPERATE. “The AP rolled out two unconventional money-generating strategies this week: it sold its Twitter feed and cut a restaurant receipt ad deal. Just 22 percent of the AP’s revenue come from American newspapers, and that number that should sink lower in the new year with the loss of high-profile member papers such as Tribune Co.’s Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, the Hartford Courant, and the Orlando Sentinel, all of whom replaced AP content with the cheaper Reuters America wire service.”

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