ANOTHER READER KINDLE BOOK: Reader Karen Wyle writes to ask a plug for her book, Twin-Bred. She writes: “Twin-Bred asks the question: can interspecies diplomacy begin in the womb?” Summary and reviews at the link.
Archive for April, 2012
April 30, 2012
THE CRIMINALIZATION of bad mothers.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Will piezoelectric graphene provide options for nanoscale manipulation?
ON OBAMACARE, legal academics moving from denial to anger. “I can explain it only this way: the resistance is to the very notion of any limit, qua limit.”
BUS, UNDER: Top EPA Official Resigns Over “Crucify” Comment.
YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING: Arianna Huffington: Obama’s bin Laden ad ‘despicable.’
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The New Reactionaries. “Twenty-first century progressivism is not aimed at political reform. There is no new effort at racial unity. There is not much realization that we are in a globalized, rapidly changing, high-tech economy or that race and gender are not as they were fifty years ago. Instead, progressivism has become a reactionary return to the 1960s—or even well before.”
IN THE MAIL: From Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.
MICKEY KAUS: Why The Volt’s Flopping. “Maybe the Chevy Volt’s problem isn’t Obama’s kiss-of-death endorsement, but instead simply that consumers don’t like plug-in hybrids. The plug-in version of the proven, reliable Toyota Prius isn’t selling either in Japan, where it was launched, according to Truth About Cars. Drivers might not want to have to plug their cars in. Simple as that. It’s an extra, unfamiliar hassle.”
I didn’t mind plugging in the Leaf, but that may be true.
UPDATE: Reader Richard Kaul writes: “Plug-ins face an uphill battle against reality. Let’s be honest, how many folks manage to get their cars in their garage? In the older section of town my relatives have a one car garage filled with stuff and 3 cars parked on the curb, while in the suburbs at least two of the three garage stalls are filled with stuff.”
You know, that’s a good point. We keep our cars in the garage, but when Knoxville got hit by golf-ball-sized hail last year, I was surprised how many people said they took damage when they weren’t able to get their car in the garage because it was full of junk.
A VERY POSITIVE REVIEW of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, The Tyranny of Cliches. I’m reading it now, for an InstaVision interview this week, and it is indeed very good.
TIM CAVANAUGH: How The L.A. Riots Changed Nothing. “The failure of community activism is on vivid display throughout South L.A., where neighborhoods thrive in almost exactly inverse proportion to the attention they get from activists. . . . If the riots have a lesson, it’s that people respond poorly to civil disorder and well to the rule of law. This is a simple lesson that got buried under 20 years of socialist hoodoo and activist baloney. But it’s never too late for a fresh start.”
AT AMAZON, 25% or more off on men’s and women’s swimsuits.
Plus, 70% off on sunglasses.
And, today only, Ray-O-Vac Sportsman Xtreme LED Lantern, $17.99. Good for disaster prep.
OBAMA’S COLLEGE COP-OUT: I talk about student loans and the Higher Education Bubble in the New York Post.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: High Noon In Beijing. Don’t worry. We’ve got “smart diplomacy” for this. No, really, this time. “That within a few months a leading Chinese official and a leading dissident should both have turned in extremis to American diplomats should, by the way, make Americans everywhere stand a little taller. We have somehow managed to acquire a reputation for honest dealing and political courage in China; it should be our goal to preserve that. There are times when it is appropriate to be proud of your country, and this is one of them.”
THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND, if you were out, you know, having a life or something.
Dog-Eating President Jokes About Eating Dogs, Jim Treacher Tweets: I win.
America’s public pension disaster compared with Joe Nocera’s 401k debacle: “As I say, if people are too dumb to plan for their own retirements, they’re probably too dumb to plan for other people’s, too. And certainly there’s no evidence that the folks in Washington are any less dumb than the public at large.”
Michael Barone: Obama Is Losing His Rock Star Status With Younger Voters.
What’s better than 7 days of sex? Duh. 8 days of sex.
How Big Government Is Killing California.
Tradeoff: Obama Got Osama, But Lost The Middle East.
Good Samaritan remembers the LA Riots.
Why I am a poor correspondent.
“If it gets better, why is Dan Savage so bitter?”
Why Does MSNBC Compensate A Racist Like Sharpton?
Bill Clinton’s Osama Hypocrisy. Plus, a Breitbart reference.
Is the mainstreaming of survivalism the result of economic despair?
#GREENFAIL: Wind Farms Cause Warming?
In Japan, birthrates are now so low and life expectancy so great that the nation will soon have a demographic profile that matches that of the American retirement community of Palm Springs. “Gradually but relentlessly,” the demographer Nick Eberstadt writes in the latest issue of The Wilson Quarterly, “Japan is evolving into a type of society whose contours and workings have only been contemplated in science fiction.”
Funny how the warnings of demographers are laughed off, while the warnings of climate scientists produce immediate calls for action. But what’s most revealing to me is the kind of sentiment displayed in the comments to the piece, such as “There are a DISGUSTING number of people on this earth.” And: “This column is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on a woman’s right to choose.”
And, unsurprisingly, this triumph of eliminationist hate speech:
Call me an America-hating but what better than declining birth rate among a ‘pathogen on the planet’ (Caldicott), hurling pan-global wars & arms & political meddling for its amerigoon-exceptionalist empire promoting a culture of Greed-Uber-Alles. More fundaMentalist Biblicalism we’re all so over?
Oikophobia lives. And Bob Zubrin is clearly on to something. Of course, quoting Helen Caldicott is an immediate I Am An Idiot! marker. . . .
UPDATE: Via email, Jim Bennett notes an irony:
So, “dumb rednecks breeding in their double-wides” turns out to be “America’s demographic secret weapon”?
Some people are obviously having a hard time with the necessary mental re-adjustment.
Heh.
POLITICAL FOOT-DRAGGING in the Jon Corzine probe? Well, he is one of Obama’s top bundlers. Plus: “Again, the probers no doubt want to do the right thing, but the heads of the investigative agencies can hardly be described as impartial. Many are presidential appointees or at least have a vested interest in helping Obama avoid a major embarrassment. The publicity hungry and hyper-ambitious Preet Bharara, the US attorney for the Southern District, as well as the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are all longtime Democrats. Some, like Bharara, are fairly partisan Democrats looking for bigger future jobs. They have much to gain if the investigation doesn’t blow up before Election Day — so it’s pretty convenient that they keep hitting what we’re told are dead ends.”
TENNESSEE TECH fails free speech test.
JERRY POURNELLE ON the Higher Education Bubble. “But the real question is, why does all this cost so much? My wife and I both worked our way through college, and all four of our boys got through without lifetime debts. In those days college tuition was high for prestige private colleges, but most people could afford state college or even state university tuition. . . . Tuition costs are going up. Even as we discover that for about half the college grads the education is useless.”
TWITTER, YOU HAVE A PROBLEM: An Infestation of Radical Flag-Spam Abusers. Twitter knows who’s doing this. It should cancel their accounts for abuse.
UPDATE: Twitter Eats Itself?
ANOTHER Church Attack In Northern Nigeria. While the Knights Templar slouch toward Rome, waiting to be reborn.
Actually, Martin Roth already has a series of novels along this line.