URLs du Jour

2017-03-06

■ Proverbs continues to Speak Truth to Power with 28:2:

When a country is rebellious, it has many rulers, but a ruler with discernment and knowledge maintains order.

Is that last bit likely to happen anytime soon? My Magic 8-Ball says "Outlook not so good".

■ Charles Murray writes at the American Enterprise Institute about his Reflections on the revolution in Middlebury. A poignant moment during Murray's initial attempt to speak:

I stood at the podium. I didn’t make any attempt to speak—no point in it—but I did make eye contact with students. I remember one in particular, from whom I couldn’t look away for a long time. She reminded me of my daughter Anna (Middlebury ’07) — partly physically, but also in her sweet earnestness. She looked at me reproachfully and a little defiantly, her mouth moving in whatever the current chant was. I’m probably projecting, but I imagined her to be a student who wasn’t particularly political but had learned that this guy Murray was truly evil. So she found herself in the unfamiliar position of activist, not really enjoying it, but doing her civic duty.

Thugs won at Middlebury. Murray wonders, as do I, whether this will be disastrous for "American liberal education". And if it is, can America as a whole be far behind?

■ An unexpected take on the issue from Robert Stacy McCain at the American Spectator: From John Lennon to Charles Murray: We All Want to Change the World. Begins:

Permit me to suggest a semester’s worth of work that some college students may wish to undertake: Study the life of John Lennon and, after you finish reading two or three biographies of the famous leader of The Beatles, go read The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. When you have completed those assignments, read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. The purpose of this proposed curriculum is to understand how the abandoned son of an English sailor became one of the most influential figures in popular culture during the remarkable decade of the 1960s. What was it about Lennon, or the circumstances of his childhood, that enabled this boy from Liverpool and his friends to conquer the musical world? Ah, but first things first.

You don't even have to be a college student to follow Stacy's suggestions. It would probably help not to be one.

■ Patterico reports: NYT: Comey Trying to Get DoJ to Debunk Trump Wiretap Assertions. Which is not that big a deal in itself, but his comment contains wisdom:

I tend to believe Trump’s assertions are moronic misunderstandings of stuff he saw on the teevee, based on common sense, the lack of reporting to confirm any aspect of Trump’s claims, and a plausible narrative that involves an imbecile rushing to Twitter after seeing a Fox News report. But it’s also impossible to give any credence to stories in the New York Times based wholly on anonymous sources. So we’re back to square one, where we know nothing, meaning partisans on both sides will make confident pronouncements to fill the vacuum. Yay.

I won't hold my breath waiting for unambiguous clarity on this issue, given that Trump, the Democrats, and the MSM are all trying to out-stupid each other.

■ The "fact-checkers" at Politifact are hopeless left-tilted shills. But et tu, Snopes? William A. Jacobsen at Legal Insurrection seems to have a valid gripe: .@Snopes falls short on terrorism conviction of #DayWithoutAWoman co-organizer Rasmea Odeh. Why does that matter?

This matters because Snopes still carries weight among people seeking fact checks.

As of today, the Snopes page Jacobsen references is last-updated March 1, and contains a long quote from one of Odeh's (rabidly anti-Israel) apologists, presented without the debunking points Jacobsen cites. Before you cite Snopes as an unbiased fact-checker, you might first want to check how they proceed on this matter.

■ I don't really know how Twitter works, but I retweeted this:

As I noted on my retweet: Ideological combat pay is due those who pay attention to what @NancyPelosi says.


Last Modified 2018-12-25 11:26 AM EDT