Archive for 2019

HERO OF THE DAY–OSCAR STEWART: From a paywalled Wall Street Journal article about yesterday’s synagogue shooting: “Mr. Stewart, 51 years old, said he shouted and charged at the shooter. ‘As he saw me, he dropped his weapon, turned and ran,” Mr. Stewart said. “He may have been trying to change a magazine, or he just panicked….’ Mr. Stewart and a Border Patrol agent who is a member of the congregation were pursuing the shooter… As the gunman got into his car, Mr. Stewart heard the agent shout for everyone to clear away…. and the agent fired five shots at the car, hitting it four times.” Every mass shooter eventually pauses to switch weapons or reload. Few have the presence of mind and guts to take advantage.

UPDATE: Some reports of the incident suggest that a female congregant, Lori Kaye, was killed when she stepped between the rabbi and the gunman to protect the rabbi, but other accounts, including the rabbis, differ. Either way, my heartfelt condolences to Ms. Kaye’s family. May her memory be for a blessing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: “Get down!” Stewart yelled, according to his wife and others who were at the scene. “You motherfucker! I’m going to kill you!” The heroic border patrol agent’s name is Jonathan Morales.

Daily Caller:

Stewart said he chased him all the way out to his car, and began pounding on it — the shooter had managed to lock himself in. When Stewart saw him reach for a rifle, he punched the side of the car as hard as he could, intending to figure out a way to drag him out of the car — that’s when a Border Patrol agent  who attends the synagogue came running out to the parking lot, yelling for Stewart to get down because he had a gun.

Stewart says this man may have saved his life, and pointed to his use of a civilian gun — he was off-duty and was apparently handed the weapon by someone else on the scene — as evidence that gun control isn’t the answer to these kinds of tragedies.

OPEN THREAD: Go ahead, have your fun.

VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Democratic Party of Virginia Tells Justin Fairfax They Don’t Want His Money, and His Office Is Fuming.

Meanwhile, CNN’s Brian Stelter “forgets” Gov. Ralph Northam’s infamous January 30th statement during an interview broadcast on Washington DC’s WTOP radio:

When we talk about third trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of the mother, with the consent of the physician. More than one physician, by the way. And its done in case where there may be severe deformities, where there may be a fetus that is non-viable.

So, in this particular example, if a mother is in labor I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.

Here’s video of Northam uttering those words shortly before his medical school era blackface scandal erupted.

Related: Gaslighting in progress: Ilhan Omar, Bernie, CNN and others are covering for Ralph Northam’s abortion extremism to bash Trump.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their amnesia makes perfect sense. Or as a New York Times headline put it at the start of the month, (with a nice use of the passive tense), ‘‘‘It Just Went Poof’: The Strange Aftermath of Virginia’s Cascade of Political Scandals.”

WHAT’S THE TREATMENT FOR A BURN THIS SEVERE?

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: What I Saw at Middlebury College. At Quillette, Dominic Aiello writes:

“At a meeting last week at Middlebury College, students upset and angry that conservative Ryszard Legutko had been invited to speak on campus were calmed and reassured by three administrators who apologized to the students for their feelings of discomfort, agreed that they had every right to feel aggrieved, and assured them there’s steps underway to ensure controversial right-wing speakers are not easily invited to campus in the future,” reported Jennifer Kabbany of The College Fix this week. “That according to a 40-minute recording of the meeting recorded surreptitiously by a student in the room…who said the three administrators at the meeting were Sujata Moorti, the incoming dean of the faculty, as well as Dean of Students, Baishakhi Taylor, and Renee Wells, director of education for equity and inclusion.”

The “student in the room” cited in this report—that was me. But before I discuss the controversy over Legutko, let me offer a brief flashback to February 6, 2019.

At the time, I was beginning my first semester of college as what Middlebury calls a “Feb”: Along with about 80 or 90 classmates, I was beginning my college education a semester late. I moved in while most of the campus was away on break, and spent the week getting to know the other Feb freshmen. It was essentially a week full of fun activities and bonding on an idyllic private liberal-arts college campus in rural Vermont. Along with everyone else, I was encouraged to believe that this is what the whole Middlebury experience would be like. And maybe, in times of yore, it was. But not in this era, when students are encouraged to experience campus life as one long sequence of ideologically-inflicted psychic traumas.

Shades of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. More from Middlebury:

When I entered the room, there was probably about 25 students in attendance, but that number exceeded 40 by the time the event was over. (The numbers here are small, but the entire Middlebury student body consists of only about 2,500 students—the size of a large high school.) Eventually, someone at the campus newspaper got word of the event, and began to livestream it from a Facebook account. A professor told them to stop recording his class, and Professor Legutko subsequently left the conference room with a security detail as a crowd of about half a dozen student protestors looked on passively. He was then escorted off of campus.

Security detail. Or as Iowahawk once quipped:

Read the whole thing, which is a brilliant portrait of the factories churning out young 21st century crybullies.

SO MUCH OF LEFTY ACTIVISM IS JUST MENTAL ILLNESS ACTING OUT:

Greta is eleven years old and has gone two months without eating. Her heart rate and blood pressure show clear signs of starvation. She has stopped speaking to anyone but her parents and younger sister, Beata.

After years of depression, eating disorders, and anxiety attacks, she finally receives a medical diagnosis: Asperger’s syndrome, high-functioni