A short story, in tweets.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Police Wars
The problem isn’t racism (it rarely is, or at least it is much more rarely than it’s proclaimed to be). It’s tribalism. And the Left seems to cocoon itself much more.
Common Core And Campus Sexual-Assault Policies
Here‘s the link to the George Will column she cites.
Jessica Chastain
…buys the BS about SLS/Orion, sadly.
Crazy Democrats
GQ can’t find any, but Kyle Smith has no problem:
[Sanders] said the VA provides “very high quality health care, period” and that the shocking scandals surrounding it were traceable to “a concerted effort to undermine the VA” led by the “Koch Brothers and others, who want to radically change the nature of society.” So that’s why the Koches are funding all those hospitals! It’s really a roundabout way of making the VA look bad.
Yes, that’s it.
And how could he miss this guy?
U.S. Rep. David Wu’s behavior grew so erratic in the final weeks before his re-election last November that the Oregon Democrat’s closest political advisers staged two of what some of them termed “interventions” to urge him to seek psychiatric help, WW has learned.
Though I guess he hasn’t been in the news lately.
The Nutritional Junk Science
…of our government nannies (and ninnies). My thoughts, over at PJMedia.
Toys Of Christmas Past
Lileks reminisces on the Golden Age of Mattel.
By the way, Merry Christmas to all.
It’s A Wonderful Fountainhead
What was It’s A Wonderful Life really about?
Makin’ Mock Of Cops
Some thoughts on unrealistic expectations:
Essentially, the Left places an inhuman burden of patience and tolerance for risk on police officers, then jumps on the inevitable failure to achieve an impossible standard as proof of police corruption and violence. They do the same thing to soldiers in combat conditions, imposing on them restrictions that defy reason and human nature, then decry alleged “abuses” as creating moral equivalence between Americans and their enemies.
…The best way to lower the temperature in a neighborhood — to decrease the chances for the kinds of encounters that result in unarmed civilians dying to police gunfire — is to continue to engage in the law-enforcement and criminal-justice practices that we know can and do dramatically lower the rate of violent crime. And that means focusing on getting violent criminals off the streets. I strongly recommend Kevin Williamson’s piece on this point. Who commits murders? People with prior, violent criminal records. And so long as violent criminals are on the streets, police on those streets — who are properly and naturally more aggressive than civilians — will make exactly the kinds of decisions in the “fog of war” that cause anti-police radicals to chant for their deaths. It’s inevitable.
It’s all part of the Left’s war on human nature.
The War On Mammals
I’d come to watch the Adsheads poke at decaying stoats because they are nature lovers. So are most New Zealanders. Indeed, on a per-capita basis, New Zealand may be the most nature-loving nation on the planet. With a population of just four and a half million, the country has some four thousand conservation groups. But theirs is, to borrow E. O. Wilson’s term, a bloody, bloody biophilia. The sort of amateur naturalist who in Oregon or Oklahoma might track butterflies or band birds will, in Otorohanga, poison possums and crush the heads of hedgehogs. As the coördinator of one volunteer group put it to me, “We always say that, for us, conservation is all about killing things.”
It’s a bizarre story.
[Wednesday-morning update]
A number of commenters are wondering why I think this is bizarre. I guess it’s just because the notion of living in a place with no mammals whatsoever (other than humans) seems very weird to me. I understand that they’re not native, but I’ve lived with them all my life, and have trouble imagining their total absence. Would I even be allowed to keep a dog? Or a cat?