Archive for 2017

NEWSWEEK IS STILL REACHING FOR THE HARD NEWS: Why Do Hipsters Mock Vegans?

To ask the question is to answer it.

RIDING VIA RAIL, WINNIPEG TO HUDSON BAY: A BBC photo gallery trek on a rail line in Manitoba. Here’s the click bait: local folks want to buy the tracks. For many people the train is how they get their groceries and medical supplies. But that’s not the only complication in this tale. Muskeg. Muskeg is a complication.

THIS IS WEIRD, BECAUSE I’VE NEVER HATED MY EXES. In fact, I’m on good terms with most of them (the rest I’ve just lost touch with) and Helen’s met a few and really liked them. But then, she and I met through one of my exes. Why We Hate Our Exes So Much After Breaking Up. So I’m going to guess that the answer to this question is narcissism, poor judgment, and immaturity.

Heck, sometimes I press them into service as correspondents.

CHARLIE MARTIN ON STEPHEN HAWKING AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOMS: “That, I think, is the biggest problem with this, and most other science reporting. Follow science reporting in the legacy media, and you’re continuously seeing stories about a famous scientist predicting impending doom, or a study that shows something we’re eating or drinking will kill us all. They know that impending doom will sell papers, so impending doom is what we get.”

Read the whole thing. If climate change scientists (and those who play them on TV, such as Bill Nye, the Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering Guy) and their enablers in the DNC-MSM wonder why they’ve been tuned out by much of the country, perhaps because It’s been nearly 50 years since Paul  Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb began the left’s doomsday cult, and it’s been nothing but “Temples of Doom” since. How many different ways – and how many times – can you say the sky is falling and still be taken seriously?

WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS: Tactical Bacon. Because everything’s better when it’s tactical!

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Will my baby granddaughter pay the price of my fight for equality? Sixties feminist JEANNETTE KUPFERMAN sees the emotional emptiness facing women today.

It makes me wonder what happened to the Brave New World we’d envisaged for our daughters and granddaughters. A world of unlimited possibilities, choices and equality for girls to become or do anything?

A world I — like many women — fought for in the Sixties.

Has feminism made life worse, not better, for today’s generation of girls?
Certainly, women have never existed in such a bleak emotional landscape.

Fish develops appreciation for bicycle-based culture. And not only did your — only, miraculously born — granddaughter pay the price, but so did the ones you never had.

KILLING THE GODS OF THE CITY.

Trump is slaying sacred cows and, in the words of American Greatness Senior Editor Julie Ponzi, he is killing the gods of the city and no one knows what to do. The only thing anybody knows is that the things we are seeing have never been done before and Donald Trump is refusing to follow any of the proper conventions (if he even knows what they are . . . tsk tsk).

The media—the cornerstone of the establishment—is doing its best to make it clear to the American people that they ought to be wringing their hands about all of this. Chaos reigns in the imperial city, and Trump is to blame. Nothing is getting done, and everything is terrible.

Of course, this is all poppycock.

People should not be upset; they should be enjoying this. . . .

Americans who elected Trump do not worship the current gods of the city. They know you’re responsible for killing the old ones and they wish to return the favor now. We want your gods dead.

Trump is not the cause of Washington’s decline. He’s a symptom, the wrecking ball that many Americans think was required.

CIVIL WAR ON THE LEFT, PART 45. THE BANALITY OF CHELSEA:

Chelsea tweeted a link to a story about an arson fire at an LGBT center in Arizona with her coda about how it is an example of “the banality of evil”—the phrase made famous in Hannah Arendt’s controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem. [Prof. Corey Robin of Brooklyn College] thought this a gross misuse or misunderstanding of Arendt’s phrase, and naturally defaulted to the usual mode of progressives everywhere, hectoring Chelsea for her superficiality. And Chelsea responded!

There follows a lot of explication about Arendt’s phrase, but twice Robin describes Chelsea thus: “author of a best-selling book; vice chair of a powerful global foundation; former special correspondent to NBC; possible congressional candidate, with a net worth of $15 million; daughter of the former president of the United States; daughter of the former Secretary of State and almost-president of the United States,” adding that “We have in this country a really weird ruling class.”

Credentialed-but-not-educated – and the worst political class in American history, as Glenn likes to say.

Steve Hayward’s write-up of the exchange at Power Line is fun, but you really should read the full back and forth between Robin and Chelsea, plus Robin’s correct assessment of how Arendt coined her immortal phrase and what she intended it to mean.

SLATESTARCODEX: Against Signal-Boosting As Doxxing. All I know is that if the genders were reversed this would be “bullying.”

SALENA ZITO: THE DEMOCRATS CAN RETAKE THE HOUSE. IT BEGINS WITH THE QUESTION, ARE THEY WILLING TO BE MORE INCLUSIVE?

Well, they can pose as being more inclusive. But after the 2006 midterms, in which those who pretended to be moderate “Blue Dogs” went full-on socialist, passed Obamacare and became “Nancy Pelosi’s Crash Test Dummies,” after Obama’s bitter clinger remarks about Hillary-supporting moderate Pennsylvania Democrats, after Hillary’s “Deplorables” sneer, and after all of the ongoing attacks on Trump and his core supporters, why would voters believe them?

More from Zito: The fate of the Democrats’ future may lie in Georgia. Eventually, they have to start winning elections in Georgia for Georgia to be a true battleground.

THE 1970s CALLED, AND THEY’D LIKE THEIR NOSE CARTILAGE BACK: Shocking cocaine adverts from 1970s.

They’re more amusing than “shocking,” but their artwork really captures the full stylistic horror of the 1970s quite well. Almost as well as James Lileks’ Interior Desecrations Website.

MICHAEL WALSH: THE WAGES OF THE ‘COLLUSION’ MEME ARE BIG TROUBLE. “In short, the ‘Russia!’ meme has worked like a charm. If the Democrats/Compromised Media/Never Trumpers had wanted to set out to help Putin in his global chess match vs. the United States, they could not have done a better job. And perhaps that was their goal all along.”

Read the whole thing.