Archive for 2016

FLASHBACK: A Confession Of Liberal Intolerance. “‘Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,’ he told me. ‘But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.’”

JOURNALISM: The NYT publisher and executive editor would like you to take them seriously now… now that they are done putting their all into getting Hillary Clinton elected. They’d like to be empowered for the purpose of undercutting President Trump. “I don’t know who’s supposed to be influenced by this. . . . Please, don’t go. I get that they’re saying that. But I don’t get the argument why we should stay. I see a promise to keep doing something they haven’t been doing. Or… a dishonest claim about what has been done and a promise to continue dishonestly. There’s no confession of bias, no admission of any need to do better.” Hacks gonna hack. Dem operatives with bylines gonna operate.

TRUMP’S ADVANTAGE: LEFTIES’ ARROGANCE.

After all, these same voters have watched as every Republican candidate in recent memory has been accused of waging a “War on Women.” If Democrats are going to claim that Mitt Romney and John McCain hate women (and they did), then they shouldn’t be surprised when voters ignore them when they say Donald Trump hates women. If every Republican is a misogynist, then no Republican is.

While many liberals have dismissed the idea of political correctness as a right-wing manufactured hysteria, it is in fact a real thing. That Trump has stretched its meaning to encompass pretty much any horrible thing he wants to say makes its existence no less real.

Conservative white Americans have watched (often fearfully) as liberal cultural elites demand that everyone fall in line with their agenda or risk being called a homophobe, racist or misogynist. The concept of persuasion and debate has been overridden by a quest for immediate and forced cultural conformity. My friend Sally Kohn, the liberal commentator, summed up the left wing view fairly honestly when she told me in a recent debate over free speech that, “If [conservatives on campus] feel like they can no longer speak against positive social change, good.”

This is a paradigm where honest disagreement about abortion makes one a woman-hater, holding orthodox religious views on marriage equates to gay-bashing, and refusing to cop to white privilege — even if you are a working class white person struggling economically — defines you as a racist.

It’s basically a culture of hate, when you think about it.

I THINK THEY REALLY BELIEVED THEY’D NEVER LOSE AN ELECTION: ‘I Won:’ The Left will not enjoy living with its own precedents. “The pretensions of the imperial presidency are going to haunt Democrats for the immediate future, but they’ll quickly rediscover their belief in limits on the executive. While they’re rediscovering old virtues, they might take a moment to lament Senator Harry Reid’s weakening of the filibuster, an ancient protection of minority interests in the less democratic house of our national legislature. They might also lament Senator Reid’s attempt to gut the First Amendment in order to permit the federal government — which in January will be under the management of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and — incredibly enough — President Donald Trump — to regulate political speech, deciding who can speak, about what and when, and on what terms. Perhaps they’ll thank those wicked “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court for saving basic political-speech rights. If they are smart, they will rediscover federalism, too, and the peacemaking potential of a school of thought that says in a diverse nation of 320 million souls, there is no reason that life in rural Idaho must be lived in exactly the same way as it is in Brooklyn or Santa Monica. As Charles C. W. Cooke pointed out, the same people who until ten minutes ago denounced federalism — which they mischaracterize as the doctrine of ‘states’ rights’ — as an instrument for the suppression of African Americans are now embracing secession, which, in the American context at least, has a little bit of its own racial baggage.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Are Promoting Psychological Frailty and We Should All Be Concerned.

Unless students are suffering from a severe mental illness, the type of pathology that would likely keep them from being able to attend and succeed in college to begin with, they should be perfectly capable of remaining psychologically healthy in the face of offensive Halloween costumes, distasteful jokes or comments, and sensitive course material.

It’s all about jobs for educrats. One thing a Trump Administration can do is put pressure on colleges to reduce their staff-to-student ratio, and it should because this is the kind of thing that a lot of staff do.

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, FAMILY EDITION: Mom investigated after video goes viral, sparks outrage. “A local mother is being investigated after posting a video online of her young child being thrown out of her home after he told her he voted for Donald Trump during a mock election at his elementary school.”

TRUMP PICKS Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff. That’s the non-threatening pick, though I would probably have preferred Kellyanne Conway in that role.

BILL STERNBERG: How I missed the signs of a Trump win. “Anecdotal evidence? Absolutely. But, after this year’s unexpected outcome, who are you going to believe? Pollsters, or your own eyes?”

MAYBE THE ANSWER TO THE FERMI PARADOX IS THAT THEY’VE BEEN WATCHING OUR NEWS BROADCASTS: The Zoo Hypothesis: Are aliens avoiding Earth?

In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi asked a very important question over lunch at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Based on the number of galaxies we know exist, how many stars are inside those galaxies, and how many planets potentially orbit those stars, probability states that there should be alien life.

So, where is everybody?

This question – known as the Fermi Paradox – raised a lot of eyebrows, because it’s a logical thought when considering just how vast our Universe is. While there are many different hypotheses out there that attempt to concoct an answer, one of the best and most thought-provoking is the zoo hypothesis.

The zoo hypothesis was thought up in 1973 by MIT radio astronomer John Ball. He posited that, yes, there might well be intelligent aliens out there, but maybe they are simply ignoring us, forcing us to live in a cosmic ‘zoo’ or wildlife sanctuary where they can monitor our activity without disturbing it.

In other words, the hypothesis assumes that alien life is out there, but it’s so advanced, it either does not want to influence our primitive society, or it knows not to get involved with other intelligent lifeforms.

This makes sense when you consider that life might have evolved and progressed at a much quicker pace on other planets in our galaxy.

The rate at which humanity has progressed over the last 100 years alone sheds a bit of light on how much further along a civilisation that has lasted 100 million years longer than us might be.

I’m actually leaning toward the hypothesis that we’re the Old Ones, the Forerunners, the first intelligent life in the galaxy.