Ah…it’s like an itch under a cast, finally getting scratched…

Some of us have been noticing this for awhile, with our dual entries for old and new “science” in our semi-official glossaries and such.

Spotted around the Internet lately, Doug Ross, Never Yet Melted, no doubt other places; hat tip goes to Gerard.

Context is key…

Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.

There are other examples waiting to be found, for those who need them. But the point stands: Conclusions do not necessarily become more certain when more people conclude them. Even when they’re experts. Loud experts, quiet experts, self-appointed experts, other kinds…and, there’s an awful lot of misinformation out there about which conclusions have enjoyed greater popularity, and how popular they really are. Such claims have the distinct whiff of politics-intermingling-with-“science” about them. It is a foul and pungent odor to those of us who have had reason to learn to recognize it.

No reason, none whatsoever.

Except maybe for this picture.

You want ten hours or so of this? Here you go.

The 133rd award for BSIHORL, Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately, goes to chasmatic‘s dad who, I’m inclined to believe, was actually a capital-dee Dad.

“[N]ever lay down with a woman that has more troubles than you.”

So much for bemoaning the tragic consequences of our manic people-control people-management.

Time to look at the lighter side. By making fun of it.

Back on the plane of reality, it is just one debacle after another, resulting directly from our freakish urges to micro-manage the behavior of total strangers…

Officials in Oklahoma and other states have resorted to these methods because they can no longer access sodium thiopental, the anesthetic traditionally used in lethal injections, and another drug used to paralyze the condemned. The lone US manufacturer quit producing sodium thiopental in 2011, and international suppliers—​​particulalry in the European Union, which opposes the death penalty on humanitarian grounds—​​have stopped exporting both drugs to the United States. This has left states like Oklahoma scrambling to find new pharmaceuticals for killing death row inmates. Some have been reduced to illegally importing the drugs, using untested combinations, or buying from unregulated compounding pharmacies, a number of which have a history of producing contaminated products.

Almost like a Monty Python skit. Oh! So glad the European Union is forcing us to treat prisoners humanely at all times!

It’s haunting. Because who among us hasn’t ever been here? And yet, we didn’t shoot people.

What’s truly frightening, is what’s bound to come next. I couldn’t believe the following two statements were so closely juxtaposed…

Earlier Saturday, attorney Alan Shifman issued a statement saying Peter Rodger believed his son, Elliot Rodger, was the shooter. It was unclear how the son would have obtained a gun. The family is staunchly against guns, he added.

“The Rodger family offers their deepest compassion and sympathy to the families involved in this terrible tragedy. We are experiencing the most inconceivable pain, and our hearts go out to everybody involved,” Shifman said.

Richard Martinez, the father of Christopher Michaels-Martinez, blamed politicians and gun-rights proponents at a news conference Saturday. “When will this insanity stop? … Too many have died. We should say to ourselves `not one more,”‘ he said. [emphasis mine]

Ugh. Yeah…masculinity, and guns, drive them both deeper underground. That’s done wonders for us so far.

I can buy into the idea that Eliott Rodger’s murder spree is a tip-off that something is wrong with our society. But, allowing guns is not likely to be what’s amiss, since there are so many people who own and use guns who wouldn’t do anything like what he did. Ditto for the young guys who are frustrated because they can’t get girls. In fact, the more you read up on this guy, the more you see this chaotic mixed-bag hodge-podge of normal and sick-n-twisted; I find it unavoidable to conclude that the latter started out as the former. The kid lacked the coping skills to deal with the pressures of adolescence. Just like a drinking glass lacks the flexibility to cope with ice tea fresh out of a hot dishwasher, or something like that. Seems like belaboring the obvious to even write it down.

His manifesto shows some signs of how far off-kilter this went…

In order to completely abolish sex, women themselves would have to be abolished. All women must be quarantined like the plague they are, so that they can be used in a manner that actually benefits a civilized society. In order to carry this out, there must exist a new and powerful type of government, under the control of one divine ruler, such as myself. The ruler that establishes this new order would have complete control over every aspect of society, in order to direct it towards a good and pure place. At the disposal of this government, there needs to be a highly trained army of fanatically loyal troops, in order to enforce such revolutionary laws.

Reminds me of what rob said: “Liberalism is the lifelong attempt to make high school come out right.” Think Mister Rodger just proved that.

Sorry, is that unfair to liberalism? Words, I am told, are defined by their common usage; and one thing we see rather consistently in people who are commonly described today as “liberals,” is a refusal, and perhaps an inability, to ever get past the bad stuff. We’re not seeing too many conservatives shooting strangers, even though conservatives are supposed to be the people stockpiling the guns — and, here & there, there are some conservatives who can’t get dates, and are frustrated when they see the objects of their affection ignoring them & lavishing that same affection on blowhards and jerks. (In fact, there are actually some movements to try to make that happen.)

What’s the difference between them and Elliot Rodger?

Mental stability, for one thing. And then after that, there’s something else. Not quite so much the conservatism itself, I’m thinking, but the stuff that goes with it. The ability to get past bad stuff. Attitude. “Oh well, her loss I guess; oh look, a new day.”

The ability to play video games with people online temporarily filled the social void. I got caught up in it, and I was too young and naive to realize the severity of how far I had fallen. I was too scared to accept it. This loss of a social life, coupled with the advent of puberty, caused me to die a little inside. It was too much for me to handle, and I stopped caring about my life and my future. I even stopped caring about what people thought of me. I hid myself away in the online World of Warcraft, a place where I felt comfortable and secure. [bold emphasis mine]

The Elliot Rodger story, thus far, stem to stern has been a saga about coping. This is still a new event and perhaps I shouldn’t draw conclusions in haste, but realistically, how likely is it that anything will come to light that will change this? Elliot couldn’t cope. Or didn’t. But cope with what? First class flights and Katy Perry concerts, a flashy BMW, wine…no chores, no unfinished projects, every problem handled?

Here’s a thought: Exactly. The image that ends up being rendered, is of failure to cope with a lack of purpose. Perhaps that is a delusive image, with some meaningful detail hidden from us so far. But, I don’t think that too likely. Or let’s say I’m not investing too much faith in that. Nor do I think anybody else is, either. His monologue makes it clear he was never wanted anywhere; what about being needed? Did he ever have a role to play in anything? Doesn’t seem to be the case, and in that respect his situation looks the same as many others of these shooters. This “retribution” seems to represent, to him, an opportunity to finally engage some action that will have an effect on something. And we’ve seen this many times before.

His is the story of a “society” getting way too high on managing the people who live in it, legally, politically, culturally and incompetently. And now, about to do even more of it. Scan the YouTube channel for tell-tale “disturbing videos” — hey, guess what, that was done and they actually did find something. How’d that work out? Stigmatize and criminalize the guns. The family is at a loss to explain how he ever got into them, they were “staunchly against” them. It isn’t a big mystery: It’s the allure of the unattainable.

And, the kid was diagnosed with Aspergers. Well, of course he was. See, there it is again: They were going to manage the future shooter. The problem isn’t that they failed, the problem is that they succeeded. They succeeded so well, that Elliot Rodger picked up the ball in the game of people-management and ran with it. He was going to be the Divine Ruler.

He was absolutely insane. But, I’m afraid, that doesn’t prove he was born with anything; there is such a thing as a manufactured insanity.

Update: Business as usual for our friends on the left; “truth” is whatever fits the narrative.

IJReview:

While Charlie was initially unsuccessful in his efforts to find the abandoned infant, he decided to try one more time. Then he heard a faint whimper…

Life is precious.

“What am I missing here?”, asks Allahpundit at HotAir. I wish I could say for sure.

Allahpundit continues:

There must be some inside joke or allusion I’m not getting that explains why you’d introduce this slogan during the one week more than any other of his presidency that illustrates what a terrible, disengaged manager he is. It’d be like the RNC rolling out a “Prosperity” bumper sticker the week of the financial crash in 2008.

So, obviously, it refers to something else. But…what?

I have my ideas. I’ve noticed often that the conflict with the modern-day liberal movement seems to orbit almost entirely around the perception that we live in “a universe of cause-and-effect.” They just can’t seem to get jiggy with that. They read a great deal into “income inequality,” they seem to be entirely on-board with the idea that those who prosper greatly must be doing something differently from the so-called “ninety-nine percent.” Normal, red-blooded people would then naturally conclude that they would want to find out what exactly that is, so that they, the ninety-nine percent, can do more of it and make themselves more prosperous.

But NO. Not even close. They don’t even seem interested in doing more of whatever magical wonderful stuff they think Barack Obama is doing, to be “Like A Boss.” It’s as if they doubt it’s the place of anybody, anywhere to actually do or not do anything; it’s more fitting to say that we all are or are not something. So you and I don’t do anything to make ourselves rich or poor — we’re just that way. Barack Obama could not have done anything to prevent the VA scandal, it’s just something that happened. It’s His voice inflection and His demeanor and His snappy comebacks that really matter. At least, that’s the most sense I can make of it.

Anyway, as Allahpundit noted, the NRCC had a fix:

And then the democrats had a rebuttal to that…it’s really juvenile and stupid. The most remarkable thing about it is the procession of “RT”s underneath.

It must be bring your kids to work day at Dem HQ. How thoughtful of you to let them take the twitter account for a spin.

come on. Stop.

if they mean empty suit then yeah “like” a boss.

A boss takes responsibility and acts maturely.

how often does a real boss hear about things going on in his organization from the news?

Ben Shapiro is making headlines this morning, and for good reason. He wrote the column that had to be written.

As the fallout from the Veterans Administration cooking of the books and the related deaths of over three dozen veterans continues, President Obama took to the podium on Wednesday to explain that problems at the VA are nothing new. On Wednesday, President Obama took to the podium to first express his tremendous anger – VA Secretary Eric Shinseki was “mad as hell” but President Obama was “madder than hell,” thus winning the rage sweepstakes – and then explained that the VA’s issues go back years:

[A]ll of us, whether here in Washington or all across the country, have to stay focused on the larger mission, which is upholding our sacred trust to all of our veterans, bringing the VA system into the 21st century, which is not an easy task…. caring for our veterans is not an issue that popped up in recent weeks. Some of the problems with respect to how veterans are able to access the benefits that they’ve earned, that’s not a new issue.

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And herein lies the problem for the left: the failures at the VA, including its bureaucratic incompetence, its waiting lists, and its deaths, all debunk the notion that a government-run healthcare system will work. It’s a fresh slap in the face to all those commentators who, in pushing Obamacare, endorsed the VA as a model.

And then — he starts rattling off examples. With the relevant quotes. Ouch. Every single one of them self-assured, self-centered, smug, smarmy…seldom correct but never in doubt. Just like a liberal commentator unloading on a conservative blog, or something. Not that I have too much familiarity with that.

Just a sample:

Every time I read about a Teabagger ranting about how socialized medicine will destroy this country I think of the VA system. There it is, a huge and vastly important universal healthcare system — government run, single payer and therefore socialist — right here in the brave and privatized United States: The Veterans Affairs hospitals.

He’s got a list of excerpts and they all read like that one.

If we turn the clock back and repeat the whole exercise a thousand times, it’s gonna go that way a thousand times. No matter who the Secretary of VA is, the leviathan bureaucracy is going to act like a leviathan bureaucracy, acting toward its own preservation instead of toward servicing those it’s supposed to be servicing. And liberals are going to act like liberals: Throw billions of dollars of someone else’s money at the problem, “smug out” anybody who mutters a peep of protest against socialized medicine, hold up the “huge and vastly important universal healthcare system” as a model, then get embarrassed at the eventual results. Then talk up a storm about how angry they are, how they just found out about this the same time we did, but conversely, don’t blame them because they inherited the mess.

About that. A bit of Hello Kitty of Blogging wisdom that drew an unexpected number of likes:

Note to President Obama: “I just found out about this” is NOT good. You should stop using that one. “I inherited this mess” is arguably even worse. Using both of those, in Your sixth year on the job, is really, really, really bad.

Note to self: if ever leaving a job where Barack Obama will be taking over, don’t leave any messes. Tie up all loose ends. Because if Obama finds He’s inherited a mess, He’ll bring it up *all* the time. Whenever it becomes clear He can’t do the job, which will be often.

But only after He finds out about the mess. Which can take six years.

To be fair, a dysfunctional VA is not a partisan thing. But — for the time being — the elevation of mediocre bureaucrats above the people they’re supposed to serve, the circling around them and protecting them when they screw up, and the myopia against the ineffectiveness of big government, certainly are. The democrats have made such a fine art form out of manipulating public opinion that I’m afraid if they were ever interested in actually fixing something, they’d find that particular skill set to have been atrophied and displaced a long time ago.

But I suppose there’s no way to test that.

Independent Journal Review:

Students at the University of California-San Diego have run the “Ché Café Collective” for 34 years, and it’s something the Marxist guerilla leader probably would have loved. As Fox News reports, it’s a vegan co-op and concert venue, with “exorbitantly low” prices and a staff of volunteers. It’s a terrific example of communism. Even more so because, well, it’s failing.

It has cost the student body over $1 million over the years, and it’s frequently in violation of school safety and fire codes. At several times in its history, it has been unable to produce enough money to cover the (reportedly cheap) rent. The café has been such a costly burden that the University has threatened to cut off funding. But a band of students, failing to see the writing on the wall (maybe they’re too busy looking at the Ché-inspired murals all over the café), are protesting the university’s decision, calling it an “orchestrated attack.”

And, the smackdown…

A communist-style business lacking financial smarts? You don’t say….Going to college involves expanding your worldview and gaining a little sense. This seems like the perfect opportunity for these Guevara-loving college students to learn a valuable life lesson: communism doesn’t work. Period.

Me, in a comment:

We may debate how much the financial meltdown is related to this current lengthy string of bad years for employment. But it would be a useless debate. With a strong, thriving economy, a disaster that took place in the past is just that, something in the past. Even a big one would have no more effect on the future than, say by way of example, Jimmy Carter’s massive economic screw-ups had on my fortunes (graduated ’84).

It’s always like this when democrats run things, ever since the Great Depression. The misery drags on and on, and they blame the predecessor until it becomes just ridiculous, then they keep going. That’s because they don’t fix anything. They sit, like scavenging animals, waiting for something good to happen so they can take all the credit — and if anything goes wrong, they blame conservatives. That’s what they do.

They don’t live in a world of cause-and-effect. To them, that’s just something you put in a speech to make disasters look like the other guy’s fault.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed that liberals don’t make anything better, evidently. Derek Hunter, writing at Townhall.com, in an excellent column called “What the VA Scandal Exposes About Liberalism”:

Did you catch it? The president has spent more money on the VA than anyone else has, and to liberals that’s the solution. No concern for how the money is spent – whether it is being spent effectively, being wasted or stolen – just that it’s being spent. The appearance of caring, coupled with a big check, is enough.

We see this not only in the Veteran’s Administration, but in just about everything liberals touch. Washington, D.C., spends nearly $30,000 per student and fully 83 percent aren’t proficient in something as basic as reading.

In Maryland, another big-spending state, Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley is gearing up for a presidential run by touting how the Old Line State is No.1 in national reading tests. What he leaves out is that’s in large part because Maryland exempts more students who would score lower on that test that any other state – by a lot. As the Washington Post put it, “The state led the nation in excluding students on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, posting rates that were five times the national average and more than double the rate of any other state.” (Emphasis added.)

As I’ve said before, when you choose the unit of measure, or invent one out of whole cloth (jobs saved or created), you’ll always come out on top. When it comes to caring, liberals have set that unit of measure as money – always other people’s money. With that as the yardstick, no one cares more than liberals. But, like a distant rich parent in movies and novels that raise horrible children, a bottomless checkbook is no substitute for results. And when it comes to results, at least in the real world, be it health care, education, anti-poverty programs, the Veterans Administration, or anything else big government attempts to “fix,” liberals are sadly lacking.

Liberals, along with the receptive moderates they seek to recruit, seem blithely ignorant toward what is most cringe-worthy about all this: When the time comes for them to make their one big contribution, which is to present this “big check,” or rather to preside over the flow of money at the problem — they’re sorely lacking in even the baseline bragging rights held by, let’s say, your family’s Uncle Moneybags who throws money at problems that don’t have to do with money. Uncle Moneybags, for all his other faults, had something to do with making the money. Uncle Moneybags, at least, is going without a hundred dollars for every hundred dollars spent.

And there must be some practical wisdom there somewhere. Whether it’s useful to the matter at hand is another question, but Uncle Moneybags did know something at some point, in order to make the money. Unless he happens to be a politician…

You just can’t say the same about liberals. You can’t take money from a program proposed by, or supported by, or associated with, a liberal and say “Those people must know something practical, because look at all this money they gave me.” Not only are liberals lacking in the skill, critical thinking and strong work-ethic that someone else had to provide to make that money; they see those things as vices and not virtues. They resent the people who have them and are willing to show them. They always have. Always, all the way back to the very first cave pussies.

Liberals don’t go without when they manage to negotiate these investments. To them, they’re just making one more Faustian bargain between two others. They play the role of neither Faust nor of Lucifer, they’re more like agents who arrange the meeting. They don’t get paid on commission — as far as we know, since that would probably not be legal. Their angle is in the bad decisions that will be made by the Faust, once his signature is on the contract, once he starts failing to reach the level of good judgment and maturity that only the guiltless and independent can reach. Such negotiations are all in a day’s work, to them. Just building blocks for something much larger. Like connecting points in a large, vast spider-web. A web full of people making bad decisions to pursue material dependence. Manacled, endlessly, to solutions that don’t work, problems getting worse, and treasuries running out.

That’s what makes the liberal world go ’round. Detroit, along with a long list of other jurisdictions run by liberals and with poor results to show for it, proves that out. They don’t fix problems, because they won’t define what the problem is. To them, if the stated problem is solved and everyone keeps their independence, good judgment and dignity, that’s getting worse. If the stated problem festers without any end in sight, and we all have to do the wrong thing because a slavish state of dependence has eliminated any other option for us, then that’s a “solution.”

And no minds changed. Why am I not surprised.

USA Today (warning, video auto-plays):

Seniors who graduate over the next several weeks are poised to be yet another product of a depressing economic cycle that isn’t their fault but that they may never fully recover from.

Fail-buzzer: A preposition is not something you end a sentence with.

But I noticed something else, and Stuart Schneiderman noticed it too:

It’s good for USA Today to say that their bleak job prospects are not their fault. And yet, we must notice that they voted for the politician whose policies are most responsible for this mess.

As the old saying goes, you get what you vote for.

…you get that for which you have voted…

It may be tough for the Class of 2014 to explain this to the Class of, oh, let’s say, 2052 or some such: After we voted in Obama and He fixed everything and made it all moar-wonderful, we were then faced with a depressing economic cycle that somehow wasn’t our fault.

I’m of the opinion that we’re going to survive this. I’m also of the opinion that when & if we do, it will be because — and only because — of a renewed, society-wide understanding of the plain and simple cosmic truth that things that happen, cause other things to happen. Our current miseries result from a widespread ignorance of this; the Weltanschauung that dominates is one that says everything is spontaneous, everything is random, and there’s nothing for anybody to do except believe in politically-correct pablum, start & win all the fights on the Internet about the pablum, tweet/twerk/selfie/Instagram like crazy, and have lots of “hope.”

Cathy Reisenwitz writes at Townhall:

A new working paper from libertarian think tank CEI called, hilariously, Tip of the Costberg: On the Invalidity of All Cost of Regulation Estimates and the Need to Compile Them Anyway, reveals that regulations cost American businesses $1.863 trillion annually. While that number is staggering, something somewhat buried in the blog post on the report is actually much more important. An earlier Small Business Administration report revealed “the extent to which regulatory costs impose higher burdens on small firms, for which per-employee regulatory costs are higher.”
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According to the SBA, over 50% of small businesses fail in the first five years. According to Bloomberg, 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months.

Failure itself isn’t a bad thing. Creative destruction is extremely important in a functioning economy. But many firms are failing due to government regulations instead of market signals.
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And lest we fall for the lie that regulations are just the cost of maintaining safe, functional, fair markets, we should note that most regulations frankly absolutely fail to accomplish their stated aims. That’s because most are written by and for incumbent businesses, and are aimed at creating barriers to entry for startups in order to protect existing companies’ from competition and maintain their places in the market.

Indeed, it’s no shock nor accident that compliance costs disproportionately impact small businesses. It’s by design.

Language used not acceptable for work, or for any sort of general audience.

From here.

Via Linkiest.

Sooner rather than later…

We have no place to be outraged when we are made to experience some small measure of suffering or sacrifice. This is what it means to exist as a separate, distinct, mature human being. This is what it means be alive. The world has left bumps and bruises on everyone, why should we be the exception?

Good advice for all of us, at any age.

Mike Adams:

The opening line of her response is typical of today’s college graduate in at least two specific ways. First, there is the tendency to respond to the tone rather than the substance of an argument. Second, there is the tendency to project motives of anger and fear onto others simply because they hold a different opinion. Gone are the days when we evaluated arguments. Today we evaluate emotions. This is particularly the case when sexual orientation is either directly or tangentially related to the topic at hand.
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And there you have it. This college graduate who took the time to write me a letter and slip it under my office door has completely wasted my time. She began by chastising me for referring to a “celebration” as a “graduation.” She ends it by referring to the very same “celebration” as a “graduation.” So I guess it really was a graduation after all (a fact that I am hoping she overlooked, rather than intentionally misrepresented).

To the casual observer, celebrating the way people have sex is strange. Conferring credentials upon those who approve of their lifestyles is even stranger. In a few short years it will all seem normal. That’s why I’m writing about it now.

Speaks for itself.

From here.

I certainly do hope so.

The collision between liberals, and ideas they do not like, is spectacular and fascinating. It is more captivating than the fresh concoction of Diet Coke and Menthos. Bleach and brake fluid. Baking soda and vinegar.

They’re missing something Aristotle thought was important.

William F. Buckley noticed it, too.

If this was not a joke…Zowee. The irony. And, the irony-ignorance.

Those two words sum up the qualifications — all of the qualifications — of this ambitious new candidate:

That’s where we are now.

The politics reflect the people. And people, I’ve noticed for awhile, relate to each other according to either strengths or weaknesses. You may know some people who know you only by your weaknesses, and if you take the time to look, you may be surprised to learn that that’s how they know everybody else too. That’s Bob, he can’t find a job. That’s Mark, he has a learning disability. That’s Susan, her husband left her with three hungry kids and she has no time for herself. Nobody’s a brilliant carpenter, nobody has anything interesting to say at a casual conversation, nobody knows how to play the piano…everybody just has their troubles. Which must have been caused by someone else, who they don’t know that well. It’s that darn so-and-so who didn’t pay enough money.

I’m voting for Hillary, her husband cheated on her and it’s time we had a woman President. And Sandra Fluke, because she can’t afford birth control and Rush Limbaugh called her a slut.

And then she whined about it. So she’s qualified.

Matt Walsh:

It’s everyone’s favorite form of irony – the one where you reveal your own prejudice by calling someone else prejudiced.

It usually looks like this:

Person A: “Man, I really dislike it when people murder their pet hamsters!”

Person B: “Hey! Why do you hate Australians?”

In this realistic example, Person A has expressed a general anti-hamster-killing sentiment, which Person B interprets as a verbal assault on the people of Australia. In so doing, Person B has exposed his own disturbing belief that Aussies are particularly inclined to slaughter innocent hamsters, which makes any anti-hamster-murder statement a direct attack against anyone of Australian descent.

Next thing you know, we can’t even make laws to protect hamsters because the legislation would be seen as discriminatory against a group of people who, if you asked them, probably aren’t particularly pleased about being unfairly associated with the mass genocide of domesticated rodents. That is until, after a while, even Australians begin to believe that crushing hamsters must be an integral part of their heritage and culture, as everyone else keeps insisting is the case.

This is all just an unnecessarily bizarre way of illustrating how progressives tend to argue their point. They take some illegal, illogical, unethical, or morally repugnant act, and confidently declare that act to be universally sacred amongst an entire racial, ethnic, or gender group — often to the protest of many in the group itself. Suddenly, those who disagree with their ideas are automatically in disagreement with the very existence of whatever demographic progressives have deemed as inherently opposed to decency and virtue.
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Now, with this in mind, we understand why racist white liberals have decreed that black people don’t know how to obtain a driver’s license, and anyone who thinks a driver’s license ought to be required for voting must be involved in a nefarious conspiracy to suppress the black vote.

Voter ID laws are racist, they claim. To ask people to produce a photo identification before voting is a ‘step toward Jim Crow laws.’

They’ve made this enormously stupid argument so many times, that even guys like Rand Paul have been scared away from protecting the integrity of the voting process. We wouldn’t want to “offend,” he says.

The anti-Voter ID folks will point out that a minority person – particularly a minority woman – is statistically less likely to have an ID than a white dude. This might be true, but it’s irrelevant. Whatever the requirement, in whatever situation, there’s always going to be some group statistically less likely to meet it. By progressive logic, every requirement is therefore prejudiced and ethnocentric.

Your grandmother is statistically more likely to drive the speed limit than I am, but that doesn’t mean speed limit laws are an evil plot against me.

Now, if there ever were a law that assigned a DIFFERENT speed limit to me, or a different speed limit to 27-year-old middle class white dudes in general, then I’d have a case. But, as it stands, we all are under the same tyrannical thumb of the same tyrannical speed limits, which means, by definition, they don’t discriminate.
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…if I had my way, you’d need to produce much more than a license to vote. You’d have to pass an elementary level civics test and then identify by name, at the very least, the Secretary of State, the Vice President, and the Speaker of the House. Next you’d be quizzed on a few current events. Finally, all votes would be cast in essay form. You’d be asked for your choice, and then 6 sentences explaining why you made that choice. There would be no wrong answer, as long as you have an answer. People who cannot even articulate the reasoning behind their vote don’t deserve to vote in the first place.

I imagine these easy tests would disqualify about half of the people who show up on election day, sending our voter turnout numbers plummeting into the basement. And that, my friends, would be a wonderful day in the Republic.

The 42nd President came out of the shadows earlier this week, to defend a woman who was once married to him and whom, according to some, still may be. It’s a mystery.

Former President Bill Clinton was interviewed in Washington D.C. today, and took the opportunity to defend his wife Hillary’s actions during the Benghazi crisis:

“In my opinion, Hillary did what she should have done.

She impaneled a very high-level review committee with the immediate-past Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

In other words, Hillary chatted with some people before disappearing to who-knows-where without taking any swift and serious action. A few critically important facts that Bill didn’t address:

• Hillary continued to blame an internet video, even after the administration knew it was a terrorist attack.
• The State Department’s actions were self-investigated; this is akin to a high school student “grading his own homework.”
• Hillary was exempted from the investigation.
• She did not convene the Counterterrorism Security Group, and did not dispatch the in extremis rescue team, though the siege lasted hours.

Every time Bill Clinton opens his cakehole to oppose common sense, which is pretty much every time Bill Clinton opens his cakehole, I’m just amazed and saddened that he ever picked up a following. The persuasive power of his words, which is always considerable, is sharply deteriorated when the words are recorded in print. They’re built for the audible forum. They require the famous Clinton charisma to achieve the full effect, because as the written language reveals, they don’t really make much sense. Hillary convened a committee? Yay. Let’s hear it for committees. Golf clap.

The democrats’ idea of “leadership” must look like a fine thing to anyone who can be assured it’ll always be some other person who’s in trouble. Oh yeah, we’re on the job. Most assuredly, if you get killed, we’ll convene a committee to study your cold dead corpse. It’ll be a real blue-ribbon panel. Vote for us!

When seconds count, the cops are only minutes away…

Update: Not directly Bill-Clinton related, but this cartoon does an absolutely brilliant job of capturing the problem:

James Delingpole’s column appears in Breitbart:

Professor Lennart Bengtsson – the leading scientist who three weeks ago signalled his defection to the climate sceptic camp by joining the board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation – has now dramatically been forced to resign from his position.

His views on the weakness of the “consensus” haven’t changed. But as he admits in his resignation letter, he has been so badly bullied by his alarmist former colleagues that he is worried his health and career will suffer.

Bengtsson’s recruitment by the GWPF (the London-based think tank set up by former Chancellor Lord Lawson) represented a huge coup for the climate realist cause. The Swedish climatologist, meteorologist, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and winner, in 2006, of the 51st IMO Prize of the World Meteorological Organization for his pioneering work in numerical weather prediction – was by some margin the most distinguished scientist to change sides.

But this, of course, is why he has been singled out for especial vitriol by the climate alarmist establishment – as he describes in his resignation letter.

I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen.

Aristotle…paging Mr. Aristotle, please pick up the white courtesy phone…

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Looks like we need more “education.”

Rogen describes what’s wrong with movie marriages:

Seth Rogen admits that in early drafts of the script for “Neighbors,” Rose Byrne’s character was basically just another humorless, nagging wife. That’s when Rogen’s real-life wife, actress and writer Lauren Miller, pointed out how unrealistic that was. What if the married couple in “Neighbors” — who get into a prank war with a next-door fraternity — were actually like them?

“My wife read the script,” Rogen told Studio 360’s Kurt Andersen. “She’s a writer. She’s one of the people who was like, ‘This isn’t how it would be. We get along, I want to have fun too…’

“And then as we started talking about it, that actually became the most exciting idea of the movie to us,” Rogen continued. “That we could portray a couple where the wife is just as fun-loving and irresponsible as the guy, and they get along really well. In a comedy, that’s almost non-existent. An actual healthy couple that really likes each other.”

Mrs. Freeberg and I saw it on Sunday. It would have to say our review is a bit mixed, because the movie still does have some problems. The writers sort of lost track of what kind of a villain Zach Efron’s character was supposed to be. At one point, toward the end, he comes over and taunts the married couple about how his frat house is going to hang around so long, and there’s nothing they can do to ever get rid of them, that they’ll make the baby daughter into a frat-princess or something. The couple has already looked into selling & leaving, and found that to be a dead end. Evil, evil, evil. Would a plan like that work? Probably not. But, from just making the threat, a bad-guy’s character doesn’t recover from that; you don’t get to redeem and reform into this happy-go-lucky guy who’s your good buddy by the time the closing credits roll, and boy the two of you are just really sorry about the madcap hijinks that got way out of hand…

It’s like slaughtering a Jedi Temple full of “younglings” with your lightsaber, or killing Peter Parker’s gentle Uncle Ben. There’s “tragic misunderstood villain with a heart of gold” stuff, and there’s dark, pitchy, evil, rotten-to-the-core bad guy stuff.

Other than that one thing, though, and an over-saturation of dildo jokes, the movie was enjoyable and generally funny. We did learn to care somewhat about what would happen to the characters and what would happen next, and didn’t look at our watches. It was alright. And yeah, the change Mrs. Rogen presented probably saved it, because Lord knows, I’ve just about had it with the nagging wife with the crease between her eyebrows and the migraine from chasing around her grown-up other-kid husband…it’s just not funny anymore, it’s been worn out. Probably would’ve ruined this movie.

Attention proggies like Chris Matthews: “All men are created equal” is the exact opposite of giving special privileges to targeted classes of people. Thought you’d like to know.

From Newsbusters, where IamnottellingYou points out:.

The gay marriage fight is not designed to give gays marriage. It is designed to destroy marriage as an institution. When marriage is destroyed, the children that result from sexual couplings will not belong with their parents, but with the state. Note what Melissa Harris-Perry said: “Kids belong to their communities.”

…or climate change, or whatever.

I guess it must be an even-numbered year. And democrats must be expecting to lose an election. “Income inequality” is sure to become some pressing, urgent problem all of a sudden too, right?

Crudo, at Misfit Politics:

We hear this party-switching myth so often, but nobody ever has a clear point or example in history for where it occurs. Ever since the birth of the Republican party in 1854, Republicans were strong supporters of abolition. Meanwhile, Democrats had KKK members in Congress, and Al Gore’s father not only voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but gave quite a lengthy filibuster. Republicans championed the Constitutional amendments ending slavery, giving African-Americans the right to vote, as well as securing that right. Civil Rights legislation as well as anti-lynching laws, and anti-poll taxes were pushed through by Republicans to ensure this, while Democrats fought them tooth and nail.

The closest I’ve gotten to an answer, in regards to the switch, was the Civil Rights “hero” Lyndon B. Johnson championing the “bi-partisan support” of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I used quotations because I’m being incredibly sarcastic.

“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”-LBJ

:
Once African-Americans were free of slavery and had legitimate voting power, (both thanks to Republicans) then and only then were Democrats forced into supporting Civil Rights legislation. It was all a charade for votes. Beyond this point, what significant events happened that showcased any sort of structural attitude change in either party?

Hat tip to fellow blogger and comment-poster CylarZ.

Related: The Party of Racism is Not What Most People Think.

What’s been consistent throughout it all, is the fascination with castes. These people we nowadays call “liberals” are overly fond of pigeonholing people, and bestowing them with privileges and obligations to remain in their designated spaces: These people belong here, those people belong there. It’s a pretty consistent pattern. By the time we see conservatives accusing liberals of racism, there’s nearly always some tip-off about the way the liberal thinks about people. The quote from LBJ is a decent example, although there are many others. Contrast that to when liberals accuse conservatives of racism. The “joke” going around is that this is almost like a facial-tic, just a word they use when they know they’re losing an argument, and it isn’t really that much of a joke.

There was no “switch,” but there’s certainly been a decline, and we’re now at the point where you’re an extremist, reactionary, right-wing conservative if you’ve reached the quite natural conclusion that you’re tired of all the specialty-audience campaigning, tired of the race card, tired of the hyphenated-American nonsense and just want to see people as what they are, people. Our culture has accepted as a mainstream-moderate viewpoint, the half-century-old hamster-wheel chicanery of “Come a long way but we still have such a long way to go.” But, not permanently. The fatigue with all the people-in-boxes politicking is bound fester over time, and the hamster-wheel gullibility must have some sort of half-life. You can’t culturally oblige people to not-get-sick of something, endlessly. It falls under the Herbert Stein rule.

Kingjester:

We’ve been treated by the image of a frowning Michelle Obama and several Liberal Hollywood Stars holding up poster boards featuring the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, as if somehow, this futile gesture would convince this Muslim Barbarians to let go of all these girls whom they are selling as slaves, and forcing under threat of death, to convert to Islam from Christianity.

It is no wonder that after Obama was first elected, the British tabloids nicknamed him “President Pantywaist”, after watching the wussy way he bowed to world leaders…something American Presidents have never done before.

And, of course, through the Obama Administration’s embrace of this emasculating philosophy, this philosophy has extended into our military, with Obama’s “Military Experts” being more concerned about performing Social Engineering Experiments on our troops, such as ending “Don’t Ask. Don’t Tell”, changing the hats they wear, and relaxing female hairstyles, than they are about protecting our country and defeating our enemies.

Derek Hunter, writing at Townhall.com, has some fun with it:

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan said he was “stunned” today by the announcement that Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau would surrender himself and all his followers to authorities after he realized he’d started a trending hashtag on Twitter that even First Lady Michelle Obama tweeted.

Shekau, a purveyor of workplace violence and kidnapper of little girls, was quoted as saying, “With progressives in Hollywood and Washington aligned against us, what choice did we have? Look, when Bradley Cooper and Michelle Obama tweet about you in a negative way it has an impact. Sure, you gain followers, but so many of them are negative. I can’t even look at my mentions column anymore. Twitter trolls are the worst. I missed an invite to a party and a picture of Miley Cyrus twerking because so many people were tweeting mean things to me. I’m done.”

Mark Steyn comments:

It is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks the picture at right is a useful contribution to rescuing 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist savages in Nigeria. Yet some pajama boy at the White House evidently felt getting the First Lady to pose with this week’s Hashtag of Western Impotence would reflect well upon the Administration. The horrible thing is they may be right: Michelle showed she cared – on social media! – and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

Just as the last floppo hashtag, #WeStandWithUkraine, didn’t actually involve standing with Ukraine, so #BringBackOurGirls doesn’t require bringing back our girls. There are only a half-dozen special forces around the planet capable of doing that without getting most or all of the hostages killed: the British, the French, the Americans, Israelis, Germans, Aussies, maybe a couple of others. So, unless something of that nature is being lined up, those schoolgirls are headed into slavery, and the wretched pleading passivity of Mrs Obama’s hashtag is just a form of moral preening.

But then what isn’t? The blogger Daniel Payne wrote this week that “modern liberalism, at its core, is an ideology of talking, not doing”. He was musing on a press release for some or other “Day of Action” that is, as usual, a day of inaction:

Diverse grassroots groups are organizing and participating in events such as walks, rallies and concerts and calling on government to reduce climate pollution, transition off fossil fuels and commit to a clean energy future.

It’s that easy! You go to a concert and someone “calls on government” to do something, and the world gets fixed.

Well…hold up, there. That’s the irony, is it not? If liberals were completely consistent in “talking, not doing,” then they wouldn’t be in charge right now. They have a tireless resolve to win-every-argument that seems to stop at the water’s edge; if only that sense of ambition, that drive, that strength could manage to swim across oceans, it might get something accomplished that would bring a victory to good in the never-ending battle against evil, and at the same time serve the country’s interests.

…and, the gravitational pull didn’t destroy us.

From here.

Came up with that mouthy metaphor while typing a status update into my phone. In complete frustration. Yes, I am among CNN’s captive-audience.

“Coverage,” in this context, is an oxymoron. It’s all depth and no breadth. Not really depth either — you don’t dig deeper by just repeating crap over & over. Racist basketball team owner; gay football player kissing his boyfriend; missing Malaysian flight; uh, what else? Ukraine, that’s it, that’s the fourth one. Then, back to the racist basketball team owner.

ALL. DAY. It’s as if a bigwig sent out a memo saying “One second of on-air coverage that isn’t about one of those four things, and heads will roll. I mean it.” The result makes you want to just rip your eyes out of your skull. Who watches this willingly?

Fox News, I don’t get to see that much. I don’t know that much about it, really. But I know it doesn’t play like this.

People who bitch and bellyache about Fox News, are the biggest phonies. What’s their preference? CNN? And they watch it while it’s on endless loop like this? I doubt it. They’re watching this guy, and bragging about it. So yeah, thanks guys…I’ll take your opinion under advisement, or something.