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Archive for 2019
April 28, 2019
S.G. CHEAH: How Feminism Is Driving The Growing Trend Of Anti-Women Subcultures. “It is not a coincidence that feminism brands strong, capable, action-oriented masculinity as toxic because feminism scorn men for being men.”
Plus: “The problem isn’t women. The problem is feminism.”
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.
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.
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?
I’M NOT SAYING THAT IT’S ALIENS, BUT IT’S ALIENS: The US Navy Will Start Taking UFO Sightings Much More Seriously.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: It’s That Stupid ‘Blame Trump For Jew-Hatred’ Season Again.
REMEMBER HOW MUCH WE WERE HEARING ABOUT “INCITEMENT” JUST A WEEK OR TWO AGO? By its own standards, the New York Times deserves blame for the Poway synagogue shooting. “Does anyone else remember when a New York Times editorial blamed Sarah Palin for the shooting of Gabby Giffords because of a bulls-eye on a map?”
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A PACK, NOT A HERD: Subway riders stop hatchet-wielding maniac on train.
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.
ALIENS: Oxford University professor claims aliens are already breeding with humans on earth. “Dr Young-hae Chi, an instructor in Korean at Oxford’s Oriental Institute, part of the prestigious university, thinks this new species will save Earth from annihilation from climate change.”
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-functioning autism, and OCD. She also suffers from selective mutism—which explains why she sometimes can’t speak to anyone outside her closest family. When she wants to tell a climate researcher that she plans a school strike on behalf of the environment, she speaks through her father. . . .
Greta is not alone in her mental suffering, according to the book. Her sister Beata, who was 12 when the book was written, lives with ADHD, Asperger’s syndrome, and OCD. She is prone to sudden outbursts of anger, during which she screams obscenities at her mother. What would normally be a 10-minute walk to dance class takes almost an hour because Beata insists on walking with her left foot in front, refuses to step on certain parts of the sidewalk, and demands that her mother walk the same way. She also insists that her mother wait outside during class—she isn’t allowed to move, even to go to the bathroom. The child still ends up weeping in her mother’s arms. . . .
A workplace strike shows company owners and management that workers are able to harm them economically. A school strike, on the other hand, constitutes a form of self-harm, undertaken to attract adult attention. And the global school strike for climate is led by a girl with a long and tragic history of self-harm to her own body.
It’s not “climate change” that is the cause of these problems, and activism isn’t a solution, just an outlet.
Related: Woman Glues Her Breasts To Road In Climate Protest.
Our upper classes’ propensity for mental illness and mass hysteria does not bode well.
MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY: It happened on this day in 1789. And if what you know about the mutiny is what you saw in the 1935 movie or the 1962 movie, then you may be surprised that the acerbic William Bligh was more the hero of the story than the villain. It was complicated.
The HMS Bounty had been sent on its long journey to Tahiti to collect breadfruit trees and transport them to the British West Indies. But when it arrived it turned out that, among other things, the trees needed to be dug up, potted, and allowed to take root before they could be taken away. As a result of all the delays, for a period of five months, the crew of 45 had to remain on Tahiti and be entertained by the … uh … extremely hospitable ladies of the island. The men—especially Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian—really hated to leave. He was in love.
Contrary to the early 20th “history,” the 33-year-old Bligh was not physically cruel to his men—not by late 18th century standards anyway. He used the lash rather less than most captains. That is not to say that he was Mr. Congeniality. He could give humiliating tongue-lashings with the best of them. But the mutiny, which occurred about three weeks after leaving Tahiti, was more about a rash group of fools who desperately wanted to go back to the lovely ladies of Tahiti than it was about unreasonably harsh treatment.
And they were vicious. As leader, Christian’s plan was to cast Bligh and the men who were loyal to him adrift in the Pacific, where the odds that they would survive were very slim. One problem was that it turned out half the crew were loyalists and there was not enough room in the launch for all of them. Several therefore stayed with the ship, some of them begging Bligh to remember that they were not among the mutineers. “Never fear, lads,” he told them. “I’ll do you justice if ever I reach England.”
The launch, which held 19, was equipped with only five days of food and water, a sextant, a compass, a few tools and cutlasses, nautical tables and little else. It was only Bligh’s impressive seamanship skills through stormy seas that saved their lives. Or at least some of their lives. An early effort to get food and water on the island of Tongatapu resulted in one crewmember getting stoned to death by the natives. They dared not stop in the Fiji Islands given their reputation as a home to cannibals. Instead, they headed for the Dutch settlement at Kupang some 3500 (yes, that’s 3500) miles away, requiring them to navigate their way through treacherous parts of the Great Barrier Reef and through a maze of other hazards.
Miraculously, they made it. On June 14th they arrived Kupang, although several of the men were in such poor health they ultimately died before making it home.
Bligh arrived in London in March of 1790 where he was hailed as a hero. He was formally court martialed for the loss of the Bounty, but it was a foregone conclusion that he would be acquitted. (Of course, no mutineer was there to testify.)
Meanwhile, the mutineers had made it back to Tahiti (in a somewhat roundabout way). There, the group broke up. Fearful that British authorities would catch up with them and aware that many Tahitians had begun to view them with hostility, Christian and eight others essentially abducted 20 Tahitians (14 women and 6 men) and headed for faraway, uninhabited Pitcairn Island. If there was anyplace they could successfully hide, Pitcairn was it.
The rest of the crewmembers, including several loyalists, were allowed to remain on Tahiti, where ultimately they were arrested by British authorities. Some died in a shipwreck on the way back to London. After a trial (at which, fairly or unfairly, Bligh’s reputation was somewhat tarnished), four were acquitted, three were pardoned, and three were hanged.
The Pitcairn Island contingent was not discovered until 1808. By that time, things there had long since come undone. Five of the mutineers, including Christian, had been killed in 1793 by the Tahitian men, who themselves were killed later on. Violence and alcoholism had ravaged the island for more than a decade. In 1808, only one mutineer was alive—John Adams—along with several women and children. It is a ghastly story, softened only by Adams’ efforts to ensure the children would learn to read and become good Christians.
HOW YOU KNOW THAT SOCIAL MEDIA IS A THREAT TO THE POWERS-THAT-BE: Like Guns, Social Media Is a Weapon That Should Be Regulated.
DWIGHT EISENHOWER SMILES: NYT: Obama didn’t want Biden to run in 2016.
QUESTION ASKED: Why Are the McCains Able Forgive Biden But Not Trump?
As Michael Walsh would say, the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party protects its own.
IN CHINA, teaching young boys to be alpha males.