h/t Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse
Friday, July 29, 2016
An enormous persuasion mistake
Ann Althouse is
Scott Adams adds,
extremely interested in the way equality/inclusiveness/diversity is supposed to substitute for actually doing well and becoming prosperous.Read more here.
Scott Adams adds,
...if you’re an undecided voter, and male, you’re seeing something different. You’re seeing a celebration that your role in society is permanently diminished.Read more here.
...As Michelle Obama said, we now take for granted that a woman can be president. That sale is made. But Clinton keeps selling. And that’s an enormous persuasion mistake.
...Based on what I know about the human body, and the way our thoughts regulate our hormones, the Democratic National Convention is probably lowering testosterone levels all over the country. Literally, not figuratively. And since testosterone is a feel-good chemical for men, I think the Democratic convention is making men feel less happy. They might not know why they feel less happy, but they will start to associate the low feeling with whatever they are looking at when it happens, i.e. Clinton.
Concealed carry saves an officer's life in Ohio
Bob Owens reports at Bearing Arms,
A concealed carrier in Ohio has been presented with the Citizen’s Award of Valor for stepping in with a drawn handgun to stop a meth abuser who was fighting a Mount Vernon officer for control of the officer’s gun.Read more here.
What happens when children ingest marijuana edibles?
Although we Coloradans love our sunny days, Daniel Greenfield notes at Front Page Magazine,
Life isn't altogether sunny in the legal pot utopia. The usual victims of adults behaving irresponsibly are unsurprisingly children. And this entire issue is summed up as adults behaving irresponsibly.
“Here at Children’s Hospital Colorado we saw an increase from one child we saw in the emergency department in 2009 to 16 in 2015,” said Dr. G. Sam Wang, the lead author of the study, in a press release. “And at the regional poison center, we had nine calls for kids between [ages] zero and nine in 2009 increase fivefold to 47 in 2015.”
Dr. Wang said that the majority of the cases happened at home, with the children later presenting symptoms of “lethargy” and “sleepiness.” Some cases were more serious, he added, requiring tracheal intubation to treat coma or respiratory depression...
Two more findings shore up this hypothesis: Not only did Colorado’s increase in marijuana-related calls for young children outpace such increases in the rest of the country, but nearly half of the cases after legalization involved recreational rather than medical marijuana.
A new study shows marijuana poisoning in young children has risen 150 percent in Colorado since the substance was legalized in 2014... According to the study published by the JAMA Pediatrics Journal Monday, the mean rate of marijuana poisoning increased at Children’s Hospital in Denver from 1.2 per 100,000 two years before legalization to 2.3 per 100,000 after legalization.
The majority of those cases involved children who had ingested marijuana edibles.
Dr. Sharon Levy, director of the adolescent substance abuse program at Boston Children’s Hospital, said excessive marijuana exposure can cause psychotic episodes for both children and adults.
The long-term effects for young kids are unknown.
“They could have acute psychotic reactions, which is why they would need to be admitted to intensive care units in some cases,” she said. “They have a change of mental status and become very lethargic.”
"I'm trying to show that it can be done!"
He's made 18,000 parachute jumps, helped train some of the world's most elite skydivers, done some of the stunts for "Ironman 3." But the plunge Luke Aikins knows he'll be remembered for is the one he's making without a parachute. Or a wingsuit.
Or anything, really, other than the clothes he'll be wearing when he jumps out of an airplane at 25,000 feet this weekend, attempting to become the first person to land safely on the ground in a net.
The Fox network will broadcast the two-minute jump live at 8 p.m. EDT (5 p.m. PDT) Saturday as part of an hour-long TV special called "Heaven Sent".
Read more here.
Nixon in a pantsuit
At National Review Jonah Goldberg writes,
Barack Obama was a blank slate for most Americans, so his status as the first black nominee and president was inextricably part of his identity. Hillary Clinton is a known quantity. She’s Nixon in a pantsuit. She’s been a tedious, grating, cynical, corrupt presence in our lives for nearly three decades.Read more here.
Who wants to accept that after a lifetime of public exposure people have concluded they just don’t like you or trust you?
Promise me you'll laugh and sing and dance a bit today
At A Holy Experience Ann Voskamp asks,
Do we ever really know which mark we make — that will matter the most? The extraordinary things happen nowhere else but in the everyday and today can always be the beginning:
...we don’t know when and how we are leaving the greatest marks on the world. It all matters.
...Just For Today — take these words, words of Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the United Nations, words that you can take to the bank, take to eternity: “It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for … the masses.”
...The most exquisite marks anyone makes with their life — are the marks done in secret. The mark that no one — but One — will ever see.
And tell yourself this when you feel forgotten and invisible and unimportant: So the celebrities get their celebration here.
But the wise are the hidden who hold out for heaven — and the applause that comes from God.
...Dear Self, tuck this away to read again whenever you need to know it again — and promise me, you’ll laugh and sing and dance a bit today?
Thursday, July 28, 2016
Pathological altruism
Ed West writes at Lapidomedia,
...as Christianity has declined in Europe, its ideas have lived on and sort of mutated into the social justice religion which still derives much of its logic from the old faith.Read more here.
The transgender cause, for instance, partly rests on the idea we each have a ‘soul’, rather than just biological mechanisms.
...Anti-racism has at its heart St Paul’s idea that we are all united in Christ, whatever our ethnic group, and the anti-racist story, epitomised by Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, would not have been possible without Christianity.
This universalism is what makes European Christian countries so nice to live in, but the downside is what is called ‘pathological altruism’; that is, altruism that harms the interests of one’s own group and favours people who might not reciprocate. This did not matter while the simple fact of geography kept different parts of the world distant, and when newcomers were expected to conform, but in the jet age – and especially the smart phone age – it presents a serious weakness.
The downside of Christian universalism is that it invites settlement from people who are themselves clannish and divide the world into an in-group and out-group, often between the believers and non-believers.
And for all the sympathy one might feel for the migrants as individuals, there is no way such large-scale movement of clannish people into decadent societies will not cause social unrest.
Importing significant numbers of people from outside Europe is clearly not in our continent’s interests, yet it is hard to make the moral argument because of the logic that we should not discriminate against the outsider, something ingrained in us by Christianity.
In some ways this is a misreading of the faith, for Christianity is about voluntary altruism, whereas forcing one’s poorer countrymen to make the sacrifices (and it would inevitably fall on the poor, whose neighbourhoods would be home to the refugees), is not.
But that is a complex argument to make, and it is one that no bishop does.
In fact the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches have long campaigned for more immigration to Britain, despite the evidence that it reduces social solidarity and harms the poor they are supposed to champion; the Catholic Church even campaigned for an immigration amnesty, even though similar schemes in Spain and the United States led to a huge increase in subsequent migration.
...It is sad and strange that the country that almost destroyed Europe with pathological nationalism now threatens it with pathological altruism; but one cannot ignore the role that Christianity and the churches have played in this debacle.
"If that's possible!"
Dave Boyer reported in the Washington Times,
Philadelphia’s police union is blasting Hillary Clinton for inviting relatives of victims of police shootings to speak at the Democratic National Convention next week, but failing to include relatives of slain police officers.
John McNesby, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, said the union was “shocked and saddened” by the planned choice of speakers at the convention, which opens Monday in Philadelphia.
“The Fraternal Order of Police is insulted and will not soon forget that the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton are excluding the widows and other family members of police officers killed in the line of duty who were victims of explicit and not implied racism,” Mr. McNesby said in a statement.
He said it’s “sad that to win an election Mrs. Clinton must pander to the interests of people who do not know all the facts, while the men and women they seek to destroy are outside protecting the political institutions of this country.
“Mrs. Clinton, you should be ashamed of yourself, if that is possible.”
Rigged!
Grim writes at Grim's Hall,
Is a "Trainwreck" Ever Good?
To answer Ed Morrisey's question, there is one really positive aspect to the trainwreck in Cleveland. It proves, again, that the Republican party is not rigged.
The Democratic Party really is. We've seen the fix in for Clinton from the DNC's own internal messaging, from the way in which they structured the debates to favor Clinton's interests, and especially from the handling of her criminal troubles by the Justice Department. The whole system, up to and including the criminal justice system, was rigged to deliver her as nominee. When a substantial number of Democratic voters said, "No, thank you, we'd really prefer Bernie," the DNC bent itself backwards to make sure that he failed. The voter fraud was so bad that even Snopes can't bring themselves to fully deny it.
WHAT'S TRUE: Two researchers (presumably graduate students) from Stanford University and Tilburg University co-authored a paper asserting they uncovered information suggesting widespread primary election fraud favoring Hillary Clinton had occurred across multiple states.
WHAT'S FALSE: The paper was not a "Stanford Study," and its authors acknowledged their claims and research methodology had not been subject to any form of peer review or academic scrutiny.
That's funny stuff -- 'OK, the part about the study proving widespread voter fraud is true, but it's not really a 'Stanford Study,' it was just done by students at Stanford... and, er, nobody's going to check their work, because nobody wants to know if they're right.'
So, democracy is messy. The RNC had a rules fight, a floor fight, Ted Cruz's excellent speech on principle, and then nominated Donald Trump. Donald Trump, I mean, and not Jeb Bush. If the Republican party were rigged like the Democratic party, Jeb Bush would be the Republican nominee this morning.
Factor that in to the choice, I suppose. The Democratic system is rigged from stem to stern. The Republicans are really taking this democracy thing seriously, even at the cost of losing control of the party, even at the cost of public embarrassment. Even, possibly, at the cost of what should have been an easily-winnable election.
Maybe that commitment to democracy ought to mean something. I leave it for you to decide.
Bernie dumps the Dems
Bernie Sanders is dumping the Democrat party. He is returning to the Senate as an Independent, Read more here.
So, what will his supporters do in November?
Abortion!
V the K asks at Gay Patriot,
...isn’t it peculiar that in a party so fanatically pro-abortion that they actually oppose health and safety standards for place where abortions are performed, that they won’t actually say the word ‘abortion.’ It’s always ‘right to choose,’ ‘reproductive rights,’ or even ‘family planning?’ If abortion is such a great and important thing, why not just come out and say the word?
Secondhand marijuana smoke more harmful than second hand tobacco smoke
CBS in Pittsburg reports about a new study conducted by the American Heart Association.
In the study, arteries in rats that inhaled secondhand marijuana smoke for one minute carried blood less efficiently for at least 90 minutes.
Similar exposure to second hand tobacco smoke cause blood vessel impairment for 30 minutes.
In a news release the AHA says, “While the effect is temporary for both cigarette and marijuana smoke, these temporary problems can turn into long-term problems if exposures occur often enough and may increase the chances of developing hardened and clogged arteries,” said Matthew Springer, Ph.D., study senior author and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco’s Division of Cardiology.
Researchers say arteries of rats and humans are similar in how they respond to second hand tobacco smoke.
Researchers also found the mere burning of the plant material appears to cause the impaired blood vessels, not chemicals like nicotine and tetrahydrocannabinol.
What accounts for the Clintons' inordinate greed?
Victor Davis Hanson asks at National Review,
Wall Street profiteering aside, why, while decrying soaring tuition and student indebtedness, would Hillary Clinton charge the underfunded University of California, Los Angeles, a reported $300,000 — rather than, say, $50,000 — for a 30-minute chat?Read more here.
...The Clintons discovered that one could become very rich from a host of sources and still be considered quite progressive; indeed, liberal pieties both assuaged any guilt about one’s privilege and in a more public manner provided exemption from the logical ramifications of one’s own redistributionist rhetoric.
After a decade of loud liberal pronouncements, a Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, or Steyer brother is likely to be seen as coolly progressive rather than inordinately wealthy and exploitative. So the Clintons had unprecedented opportunities to shoulder-rub with liberal financial titans without suffering the class invective reserved for the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson.
Former vice president Al Gore is emblematic of the progressive contradictions in leveraging politics to get rich. After winning the popular vote in 2000 and losing the presidency, he discovered that the road to multimillionaire status was to mouth green and progressive pieties while monetizing his political contacts and celebrity among new networks of the global liberal rich. Fearing that new capital-gains taxes of the sort he supported would kick in, Gore then rushed to sell a failed cable station to the often anti-Semitic Al Jazeera, a Middle East media conglomerate funded from the carbon-exporting wealth of the right-wing royal autocracy in Qatar.
...the Clintons had found a way to exploit the idea that both of them would return to the White House. That reality gave them access to quid pro quo opportunities, often funneled through a philanthropic foundation, of a sort unknown to any past American president. Most important, the Clintons had long since discovered that public outrage at their impropriety could be dismissed as the empty and vindictive charges of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” be they allegations of sexual assault or criticisms of Bill’s becoming the highest-paid “chancellor” in the history of higher education, hired by private for-profit Laureate University at some $4 million a year.
But if the Clintons’ opportunities for lucre were unique — in both what the couple had to sell and the huge resources of those who wished to buy — and if they could peddle myths that they were perennial victims of right-wing witch hunts, still, what accounts for their inordinate greed? Why not settle for a fortune of $50 million — in Obama’s formulation that “at some point you’ve made enough money” — rather than risk the public opprobrium of Bill’s globetrotting shakedowns or Hillary’s efforts to hide personal e-mails that were tangential to her job as secretary of state? Their previous embarrassments, from the mundane to the existential (Whitewater, the Clinton Foundation troubles, writing used underwear off as IRS deductions, the all-but-impossible odds of making a $100,000 profit in cattle futures from a $1,000 initial investment, etc.), all reflect a nonstop drive for lucre.
...The Clinton litany of whiny victimization and excuse-making reflects that sense of entitlement — one not uncommon among academics, journalists, and politicians who believe that those in the business world hardly deserve to enjoy more opulence than do those who are more refined and cultured. In sum, the Clintons left the presidency at a historic moment of globalized wealth creation, especially in fields considered progressive and green. They were unique in that, unlike other retiring first families, who could offer wealthy profiteers little more than nostalgic signed group portraits, they could provide an avenue to the buying of influence in a second Clinton presidency. They felt no shame about their drive for riches, not just because they were liberals who sacrificed for the underprivileged and therefore deserved their belated rewards, but also because they were convinced that, as correct-thinking elites, they needed a vast fortune commensurate with their sense of self-worth.
For now, the Clintons again have avoided the final wages of the classical sequence of overweening greed (koros) leading to arrogance and disdain (hubris) descending into a sort of recklessness (ate) and ultimately earning divine retribution (nemesis). But the tragedian Sophocles reminds us that for such people there is never self-reflection or enough money — and thus nemesis is still on the Clinton horizon.
It's time to let Michelle's slaves go free
Daniel Greenfield writes,
...As the Democrats continue their circus of hate in Philly, it ought to be remembered that this was where Thomas Jefferson wrote that “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” were inalienable rights and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Governments do not gain their authority from any innate superiority, but from consent. The Obama theory that government gains power in proportion to its historical moral superiority is slavery wrapped in hypocrisy. The attempt to perpetuate a new slavery by invoking 19th century slavery, as Michelle Obama did, is a moral obscenity.Read more here.
It is time to end slavery all over again. It is time to free Michelle Obama’s taxpaying slaves.
The first step to ending slavery is to recognize its fundamental injustice. It is unjust that a working family ought to work its fingers to the bone so that Michelle Obama can enjoy yet another sightseeing tour. It is unjust that a class of parasites claiming to be public servants can draw unlimited amounts of money on the credit of people trying to make ends meet. It is unjust that Michelle Obama can own hundreds of millions of people as slaves.
And it is an injustice that must end.
Nineteenth century slavery ceased to be an issue in the nineteenth century. Twenty-first century slavery is the issue that we must tackle today. Scarlett O’Hara’s slaves have been freed. It’s time to let Michelle’s slaves go free.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)