URLs du Jour

2017-01-16

Happy MLK Day!

  • Our nearly-annual commentary on the MLK celebration at the University Near Here is here. Note that the actual festivities don't take place for another month.

    Since I wrote that, the U has added more events, taking place February 1-22. Don't (for example) miss Mr. Ken Nwadike and his "Free Hugs Project"! Although Mr. Nwadike's politics are a bit too predictably tedious, still … free hugs!

  • Kevin D. Williamson gets a predictably amusing column out of NPR editor Marilyn Geewax's dark implication that HHS Secretary-to-be Tom Price was pro-cancer because he failed to clap sufficiently at the proper point in Obama's last State of the Union Address.

    Applause was a serious business in the Soviet Union, as it is in Cuba, as it is in Venezuela, as it is in all unfree societies and at our own State of the Union address, which is modeled on the ex cathedra speeches of unfree societies. The less free you are, the more you are obliged to applaud. Joseph Stalin’s pronouncements were greeted with perfervid applause, which would continue, rapturously — no one dared stop — until Stalin himself would order its cessation.

    "Perfervid." Heh. (My vim spellchecker is flagging that for a possible misspelling, but, c'mon vim, its a perfectly cromulent word.)

  • Vik Khanna debunks "The Phony ‘Public-Health Crisis’ of Gun Violence", noting two recent articles appearing in once-respectable medical journals.

    The first shot across the bow appeared in the November 8 Journal of the American Medical Association, where esteemed Stanford University health economist Victor Fuchs published a paper on the problem of life expectancy in the black community. Near the end of his lamentation, Fuchs asserts that increasing life expectancy in the black community “depends more on public health measures such as gun control than on medical care.” The second shot came with the release of the January issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, which has four papers and an editorial devoted to firearms violence, with a heavy emphasis on suicide prevention, which would benefit whites much more than it would the black community.

    Public health initiatives were once about clean water and polio shots, but activists increasingly use "public health" to justify controlling people "for their own good".

  • Career tip for government school personnel: don't correct your students' misspellings on social media.

    It would be difficult to find a better example of everything that's wrong with education in America: a Maryland public school fired the woman who ran its Twitter account because she corrected a student's spelling.

    As she was escorted from the building, her co-workers consoled/advised: "Forget it, Katie. It's Frederick."

  • Andrew Klavan manages to capture my own feelings about the current political climate.

    Look, I don't care if the Trump fan-bots rail against me, Trump is an unreliable chap, to put it mildly. He doesn't know what he doesn't know and he throws away his promises too easily and a lot of his instincts are leftist in the worst way. Everything he's done so far could be scuttled on the rock of his personality.

    But that hasn't happened yet and every day is another day. And today, after eight years of a dishonest, undemocratic, anti-American scold in the White House, I am feeling gleeful. Almost pretty. Okay, gleeful.

    Andrew's optimism/pessimism ratio is higher than mine, but otherwise: yeah.


Last Modified 2017-01-17 11:03 AM EDT