IT’S COME TO THIS: Italian Government Says: We Must Bomb Libya To Make Sure Muslims Don’t Make Havoc In Italy. “Italy’s foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, is now calling for military airstrikes strikes against the Libyan coast in order to protect Italy from Muslim terrorists who want to enter the country through the coastal border, or bombard Italy with some sort of attack.”
The biblical references, however, would be better in PowerPoint.
SEE, FOR THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW ABOUT SMART DIPLOMACYTM THIS MAY SEEM LIKE A SERIOUS RISK: Russia and America: Stumbling to War. But for those of us who are familiar with Smart DiplomacyTM . . . it looks like a really serious risk.
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SARAH HOYT: Take Your Nose Off My Fist. “If your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose, what if I move my nose and rest it on your fist, so you can’t move?” Well, that’s the whole point of “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and the like.
SO, POPULAR SCIENCE BASICALLY PUBLISHED THE SAME ARTICLE ON THE HUGO FIGHT THAT ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY HAD TO RETRACT: Now Vox Day is threatening libel and demanding a retraction. Is it reckless disregard to publish claims that another publication already had to retract?
UPDATE: From the comments: “I thought the demand was a joke. Then I read the PopSci article and couldn’t believe that such a thing was printed. It’s the type of batshit crazy stuff you’d see in a Berkeley alternative paper, not a science magazine.” The decline of Popular Science into a PC opinion mag has occasioned a mixture of dismay and schadenfreude among the PopMech crowd for several years, but this is a new low, I believe.
I WOULDN’T CALL HIM ANGRY, I’D CALL HIM DETERMINED: Justified star Nick Searcy: Hollywood’s angriest conservative. I met him in LA a couple of years ago and he seemed like a very nice fellow.
Meanwhile, Justified is on the DVD/Blu-Ray deal of the week at Amazon.
GYROCOPTER STUNT SHOWS GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE: When a left-wing, postal civil servant nut-job lands a gyrocopter on the Capitol Hill lawn to publicize the supposed need for campaign finance reform (i.e., to oppose Citizens United and free speech under the First Amendment), it seems pretty clear that D.C.–and the country in general–isn’t being adequately secured.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz is demanding a Secret Service briefing.
It’s good to have a hearing–especially about national security matters–but it seems to me that the Secret Service scandals under Obama’s watch are indicative of a larger theme of government incompetence/rulebreaking, and excessive liberal/progressive tolerance thereof, from the VA scandal to the DEA sex parties to the GSA Las Vegas parties to the EPA porn addict.
Congress would be better advised amending the Civil Service Act of 1978 to make it easier to fire incompetent employees and vigorously enforcing existing security measures, such as the Air Defense Identification Zone, rather than holding a bunch of dog-and-pony show hearings. It’s the toleration of lawbreaking and bad behavior that sends a signal that the U.S. government will look the other way.
This liberal attitude toward lawbreakers also helps embolden Iran and other bad actors around the globe.
35 YEARS LATER, an oral history of Airplane.
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TAR AND FEATHERS MIGHT HELP, BUT SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE: ‘Free-range’ flap in Maryland fans flames of national debate on parenting. As with sexuality, we’re regulating parenting according to the obsessions of neurotic upper-middle-class white women. And that’s not working out very well.
HUH. I WONDER WHAT HE’S TRYING TO SAY WITH THAT? NY Times Frank Bruni: Huma “Clings” To Hillary “So Tightly, Their Relationship Could Be Called Marsupial.”
IN THE DOG-EAT-DOG OBAMA ECONOMY, PEOPLE WILL TRY ANYTHING TO SURVIVE: Workers Seeking Productivity in a Pill Are Abusing A.D.H.D. Drugs.
Reliable data to quantify how many American workers misuse stimulants does not exist, several experts said.
But in interviews, dozens of people in a wide spectrum of professions said they and co-workers misused stimulants like Adderall, Vyvanse and Concerta to improve work performance. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs or access to the medication.
Doctors and medical ethicists expressed concern for misusers’ health, as stimulants can cause anxiety, addiction and hallucinations when taken in high doses. But they also worried about added pressure in the workplace — where the use by some pressures more to join the trend.
“You’d see addiction in students, but it was pretty rare to see it in an adult,” said Dr. Kimberly Dennis, the medical director of Timberline Knolls, a substance-abuse treatment facility for women outside Chicago.
“We are definitely seeing more than one year ago, more than two years ago, especially in the age range of 25 to 45,” she said.
Elizabeth, a Long Island native in her late 20s, said that to not take Adderall while competitors did would be like playing tennis with a wood racket.
Well, there you have it.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE to get out of shape?
FROM CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’ TO CALIFORNIA NIGHTMARE: Joel Kotkin over at Daily Beast has a great piece explaining how California’s drought crisis illustrates the State’s devolution into a feudalistic society dominated by an oligarchy of super-rich liberals who’ve handcuffed the State’s ability to grow and prosper:
But ultimately the responsibility for California’s future lies with our political leadership, who need to develop the kind of typically bold approaches past generations have embraced. One step would be building new storage capacity, which Governor Jerry Brown, after opposing it for years, has begun to admit is necessary. Desalinization, widely used in the even more arid Middle East, notably Israel, has been blocked by environmental interests but could tap a virtually unlimited supply of the wet stuff, and lies close to the state’s most densely populated areas. Essentially the state could build enough desalinization facilities, and the energy plants to run them, for less money than Brown wants to spend on his high-speed choo-choo to nowhere. This piece of infrastructure is so irrelevant to the state’s needs that even many progressives, such as Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, consider it a “ridiculous” waste of money.
And there needs to be, at least for the short term, an end to dumping water into San Francisco Bay for the purpose of restoring a long-gone salmon run, or to the Delta, in order to save a bait-fish, the Delta smelt, which may already be close to extinct. This dumping of water has continued even as the state has faced a potentially crippling water shortage; nothing is too good for our fish, or to salve the hyper-heated consciousness of the environmental illuminati.
Kotkin concludes:
What we are witnessing the breakdown of a once-expansive, open society into one dominated by a small group of plutocrats, largely in Silicon Valley, with an “amen” crew among the low-information donors of Hollywood, the public unions, the green lobby, and wealthy real estate developers favored by Brown’s pro-density policies. This coalition backs Brown and helps maintain the state’s essentially one-party system. No one is more adamant about reducing people’s carbon footprint than the jet set of Silicon Valley or the state’s planning elite, even if they choose not to live in a manner that they instruct all others.
Yep–pretty much sums up the progressives’ approach to problems: Political correctness+ignorance+crony capitalism= preferred “solution.” Read the whole thing.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 710.