…says to stop calling natural disasters “natural disasters.”
Me:
There is no such thing as a "stable" climate. https://t.co/l1CjIqJO1m
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) September 22, 2017
I agree, though, that we shouldn’t be subsidizing development in coastal (or other) flood zones.
Impeachment is whatever Congress says it is.
Well, pretty much, yeah. This isn’t right, though:
“Bill Clinton got impeached because he lied,” Waters declared. “Here you have a president who I can tell you and guarantee you is in collusion with the Russians, to undermine our democracy. Here you have a president who has obstructed justice, and here you have a president that lies every day.”
…Unless Trump can be accused of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” he cannot be impeached.
While Waters claimed Clinton was impeached for “lying,” he was actually impeached for perjury — lying under oath.
Actually, he was impeached for multiple counts of obstruction of justice, including not just perjury, but suborning perjury from others via bribes and physical threats to a woman’s family, for the purpose of preventing someone he’d sexually harassed from getting a fair trial.
It’s not (contrary to what you leftists think) because they’re stupid. It’s because you are:
Perhaps the most problematic aspect of Green’s post is that, despite what he believes, most conservatives do not complain about liberal bias on American campuses because they are full of people who believe that evolution is true or that the US lost a war against Vietnam. They complain about liberal bias on American campuses because they are full of people who think conservatives are just cretins who are incapable of forming their beliefs in a rational way and have no problem saying so on a regular basis. In short, they complain about liberal bias on American campuses because they are full of ignorant fools like Green, who know next to nothing about what conservatives actually believe. Green’s lazy rant is a perfect illustration of why it’s hard to be a conservative on campus. Of course, he didn’t do it on purpose, but that doesn’t make his post any less valuable.
…This bias is a real problem that should concern everyone and deserves better than Green’s idiotic post. I’m one of a handful of openly right-wing people in academia, so I’m in a particularly good position to talk about it. In my experience, people who aren’t conservative have no idea what kind of things those who are have to deal with in academia on a daily basis, which is part of the problem. Universities worry a lot about micro-aggressions, implicit bias, etc. against women and minorities. But there is nothing “micro” or “implicit” about the hostility conservatives have to face on campus. Nobody goes around campuses saying that women and black people are stupid, but not a day goes by on campus without people saying that about conservatives. In my field, conservatives are so afraid to speak up that some of them have created secret groups, where they can say what they think without fear of reprisal. Just think for a second about how toxic the environment must be in order for things to have come to that.
This is of a piece with Haidt’s work that showed how conservatives easily understand leftists, but leftists are clueless about what conservatives believe.
…using AI?
Faster, please.
Yes, it looks like they did spy on Trump, just like they did with Sheryl Atkisson.
[Update a few minutes later]
What we still don’t know about the Obama administration’s unmasking. I think it’s unlikely that it will turn out to be innocuous. I agree with Rush Limbaugh that this (combined with the IRS abuse) is much worse than Watergate.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Samantha Power sought to unmask Americans on an almost-daily basis. And hey, remember when Clapper (you know, the guy who lied about spying on other Americans) categorically denied wiretapping the Trump campaign?
[Update a couple minutes later]
Congress needs to learn more about how the FBI interfered with the 2016 campaign. This, not what the Russians did, is the real scandal.
The service has just blocked all of my accounts (including my parody @HealthDotGov) account from posting, with no explanation other than:
Tweet from @HealthDotGov failed: To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, your account is temporarily locked. You cannot use the team account while your account is locked.
This is outrageous. No moron who objects to something that I tweet should be allowed to do this.
[Thursday-morning update]
It didn’t seem to last long, and things are back to normal now. Still no idea what happened, though.
Eric Berger says he’s likely to be approved as NASA administrator.
[Thursday-morning update]
Buzz Aldrin and Greg Autry: It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to run NASA.
Thoughts from Jonah Goldberg, with which I completely agree:
I am coming around to the position that the vast bulk of punditry in defense of Donald Trump is little different from hepatoscopy, chiromancy, tasseography, and other “sciences” that imbue essentially random phenomena with deep and prophetic significance (this is not to say that orbistry, the practice of explaining everything weird in this crazy world, is not 100 percent correct).
Let’s just look at the past week. On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to “immediately terminate” the DACA program if elected. In June, he flipped and said it would stay in place. Going into this week, the White House signaled that it would get rid of the program. On Tuesday, Trump’s attorney general came out and declared that the program was unconstitutional. And, in a move I praised, Trump said that he would give the task of dealing with the issue to Congress. But, after watching negative TV coverage and bristling at Barack Obama’s criticism, Trump flopped. In a tweet, Trump suggested he wants Congress to legalize the program, not get rid of it. And if Congress failed, he might have to “revisit” the issue, implying that Trump might use the same unconstitutional measures Obama used.
Now, in fairness to Trump, he’s always been torn on the issue, and rightly so. Deporting the “Dreamers” is a terrible idea. But the position of most immigration hawks has always been that we should trade some form of amnesty in exchange for serious border-security measures and/or implementation of E-verify or similar steps.
So, let’s consider instead the other big news this week. President Trump threw Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and the House Freedom Caucus under the bus to cut a deal with “Chuck and Nancy” on a short-term extension of the debt ceiling. Wait, scratch that. He didn’t “cut a deal” with the Democrats, he simply took their first offer in exchange for . . . nothing. He took a “deal” to get Harvey relief passed despite the fact that Harvey relief would have passed anyway. This was not The Art of the Deal. It was — to borrow a phrase from Seth Mandel — The Art of the Kneel.
Trump kicked the can to December, when his leverage will be weaker, apparently in a glandular act of spite against McConnell and Ryan. John Boehner was hounded out of office by tea-party types for even considering cutting far better debt-ceiling deals with Barack Obama. In both of these cases, the response from legions of Trumpers was rapturous approval of his genius and/or his willingness to punish McConnell and Ryan.
It’s almost as though his vaunted ability to do deals is highly overrated.
Also, read on for a devastating critique of Rachel Maddow’s misleading history of the Wilson administration.
One of the reasons that posting has been non-existent (in addition to prepping for a hurricane) is that we came to Florida with a broken laptop. Our Toshiba Satellite (a year and a half old) is flaking out, refusing to boot, and when you can cajole it to, it will die in mid session. That means that the only computers we have are our phones and Patricia’s iPad. Which means that I haven’t had a keyboard (other than finger painting on glass, which is largely useless).
I ordered a Bluetooth keyboard from Amazon on Sunday, and it arrived today. I’m typing this with it on the iPad, and I don’t feel crippled any more, but I still have to stab at the glass to make things happen. The mouse is supposed to arrive tomorrow, which will allow me to clear out my mailbox.
I’ll probably write a long essay sometime soon about how much I hate Steve Jobs and his hatred of useful user interfaces over aesthetic ones.
[Late Saturday evening update, as the storm approaches]
It’s not utterly impossible to blog from an iPad, but it’s close enough to it that it’s not going to happen. It is almost impossible to copy and paste, or to embed a tweet. Because apparently Steve decided that mice would not be allowed with His Preciousssss.
[September 19th update]
Welp, the authorized Toshiba repair place says it needs a new mobo and battery. Over $500 for a machine we paid $350 for a year and a half ago. I’m going to go pick it up and see if I can find some used parts. Despite the fact that it only had a year’s warranty, you’d think that Toshiba would be a little embarrassed to have it fail so soon.
[Bumped]
Jim Davis has expressed a preference to end it. Does anyone else have any thoughts?