There are some lessons to be learned here. We were just up there ourselves a couple weeks ago. People don’t realize how rugged it can get coming down from the high country into Yosemite Valley, even though most of the routes are pretty well known after many decades of hiking/climbing. Without modern tech (cell phones and helicopters), they might have died from exposure up there, even in the summer.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Language Police
…are not normal people. And I don’t mean that in a good way. This is even more stupid than the brouhaha over the word “niggardly” in DC a few years ago.
Falling Off Balconies
Ignoring all of the Feminazi sociological issues, this would never happen to me, because of my acrophobia. No, I don’t lean against railings on high buildings. That’s one of the least likely ways for me to cease metabolizing.
The Treatment For Islamicists In Egypt
…has changed for the worse.
Good. Maybe there’s some hope for that benighted country, and region, despite the support of it from this administration.
We Don’t Need Monet
I’d say that when you’ve engaged in conjugal relations with the pooch to the depth that Detroit has, you can’t afford either impressionists or public-employee unions.
Libertarians
Five myths about them.
It’s Not Selma Any More
No, Trayvon Martin was no Emmett Till.
But some people just can’t let go of their race-baiting. I for one (well, OK, for at least two) hereby officially refuse to engage in any more one-sided “conversations” about race.
[Link to the second page of the Barone piece at IBD seems to be broken — I’ve emailed him about it.]
[Update a while later]
The cheapening of civil-rights history. They should be ashamed, but they’re shameless.
Obama’s Creeping Authoritarianism
Thoughts from Dan Henninger:
The political left, historically inclined by ideological belief to public policy that is imposed rather than legislated, will support Mr. Obama’s expansion of authority. The rest of us should not.
The U.S. has a system of checks and balances. Mr. Obama is rebalancing the system toward a national-leader model that is alien to the American tradition.
Gee, someone should write a book
Press-Release Science
Some extensive thoughts, from Charlie Martin.
Sorry, but disagreeing with the media is not a “war on science.”
Detroit
Here, where cattle could graze in vast swaths of this depopulated city, democracy ratified a double delusion: Magic would rescue the city (consult the Bible, the bit about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes), or Washington would deem Detroit, as it recently did some banks and two of the three Detroit-based automobile companies, “too big to fail.” But Detroit failed long ago. And not even Washington, whose recklessness is almost limitless, is oblivious to the minefield of moral hazard it would stride into if it rescued this city and, then inevitably, others that are buckling beneath the weight of their cumulative follies. It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. This bedraggled city’s decay poses no theological conundrum of the sort that troubled Darwin, but it does pose worrisome questions about the viability of democracy in jurisdictions where big government and its unionized employees collaborate in pillaging taxpayers. Self-government has failed in what once was America’s fourth-largest city and now is smaller than Charlotte, N.C.
This is why the Founders gave us a republic, not a democracy.