By yoking himself to the memory of the Los Angeles riots, and to the coming trial of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Sharpton is implicitly threatening violence even as he explicitly denounces it. “I’ve fought for justice for Trayvon,” Sharpton wrote at the Huffington Post, “because I believe in America and I don’t believe we should burn it down. Let’s prove that we are in fact the United States of America, and let’s not miss another opportunity to show just how great we can be.”
And just how great can we be, Mr. Sharpton, if “justice for Trayvon” results in an acquittal of George Zimmerman?
Sharpton surely knows this is a real possibility. As pointed out by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, among others, the case against Zimmerman is feeble. But this is of little import to Sharpton, and indeed may even be to his advantage. The initial narrative of the Martin shooting – racist white guy shoots harmless black child – has come unraveled, leaving Florida special prosecutor Angela Corey in the unenviable position of pressing a murder case in which the only known eyewitness bolsters the defendant’s claim of self-defense. But expectations of a conviction have already been raised, not least by Sharpton himself, leaving him in the role of the man who will pour oil on the troubled waters. And, conveniently for Sharpton, the anniversary of the L.A. riots arrives to provide exactly the right platform for the type of self-promotion at which he is so adept.
I’m sure that Chris Gerrib will be along any minute to defend the lying race baiter, though.
The history. Actually, the most interesting part of the story was the part about St. James Infirmary burning down. The last few times I’d been in Mountain View, I’d been wondering what happened to it.
…that changed the world. One of the signs of the disaster that is modern academia is that it is not only acceptable, but for many a point of pride, that they don’t understand math.
You have to be pretty ignorant of institutional cultures to imagine that what happened in Cartagena was an isolated incident. Was it just a coincidence that everyone assigned to that detail just happened to go along with it, that no one tried to get their colleagues to behave? No, they obviously all came from a much larger pool of individuals, from a culture in which such things were at least tolerated, if not reinforced and encouraged.
This source witnessed the majority of the men drink heavily (“wasted,” “heavily intoxicated”) at the strip club. He says most of the Secret Service “advance-team” members also paid extra for access to the VIP section of the club where they were provided a number of sexual favors in return for their cash. Although our source says he told the agents it was a “really bad idea” to take the strippers back to their hotel rooms, several agents bragged that they “did this all the time” and “not to worry about it.” Our source says at least two agents had escorts check into their rooms. It is unclear whether the escorts who returned to the hotels were some of the strippers from the same club.
These alleged incidents in El Salvador occurred a full year prior to recent revelations that secret service agents used prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia, on a presidential trip this month.
This wasn’t an anomaly; it was standard operating procedure.
Over at PJMedia this morning, I have some thoughts on why “liberals” are unable to understand conservatives, but not the reverse. I like the one comment over there that a simple explanation is that everyone remembers being a teenager, but that the leftists don’t know what it’s like to be grown up.
This is what happens when you have race mongers and baiters like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the black caucus and the “liberals” in the media driving the national conversation. And I hold them responsible for this:
“During the course of the investigation, we learned that the crime was related to the victim’s race,” Reynolds said.
Conklin said Hayes told investigators that he was angry about the Martin shooting and decided to attack the victim because of his race. Reynolds would not comment if the crime had anything to do with the Martin shooting.
This has been as big a case of journalistic malpractice as the Duke lacrosse affair.
If scientists are reluctant to share their data with other scientists it’s very difficult to believe they will be happy to put it all in the public domain. But I think they should. And I don’t mean just chucking terabytes of uncalibrated raw data onto a website in such a way that it’s impossible to use for any practical purpose. I mean fully documented, carefully maintained databases containing raw data, analysis tools and processed data products.
You might think this is all a bit Utopian, but the practice of sharing data is already widespread in my own field, astrophysics, and there are already many public databases of the type I’ve described. An exemplar is the excellent LAMBDA site which is a repository for data arising from research into the cosmic microwave background. Most astrophysical research publications from all around the world are also available, free of charge, at the arXiv.
So astrophysics is already much more open than most other fields, to the extent that it has already made the traditional model of publication and dissemination virtually redundant. I hope other disciplines follow this lead, because if researchers can’t find a way to break free from the shackles placed on them by the current system, the fragile relationship between science and society – already frayed by episodes like the University of East Anglia email scandal – may disintegrate entirely.
The problem is that astrophysics, unlike climate “science,” doesn’t have a political agenda, so he’s obviously making an unreasonable request.
Once you realize this, everything changes. You no longer worry about the earth running out of energy resources, because you realize there are no energy resources — there never were — there are only various forms of matter that our minds, the mind of man, transformed into energy resources for our pleasure and convenience. These will never run out as long as we’re here because the mind is limitless and will invent more.
You no longer worry about pollution, because you know that once free people become annoyed by it, other free people will fix it with cleaner fuel-burning methods and filters. Where are the pea soups of London? Where are the smogs of Los Angeles? Where are the snows of yesteryear? All right, I was just curious about that last one.
You no longer worry about the earth, because the earth is here for us, not the other way around. The earth is just our living space — for now. We should keep it reasonably clean and pleasant. But a carping obsession with spotless housekeeping turns you into a scolding fishwife — or an environmentalist — and makes life less comfortable for man, not more.
I’m a lifelong outdoorsman. I hike. I fish. I run through the woods acting out scenes from Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Or I did before the restraining order. I understand that a reasonable caution for the good of the environment should balance the profit motive of those excellent people who provide us with all the wonderful energy we need. I believe we can begin to achieve that reasonable caution by burying every environmentalist we can find up to his neck and then pouring honey on his head to attract the ants. You like ants, don’t you? So there’s a good way to celebrate Earth Day!
I love ants. And the “environmentalists” don’t love the earth as much as they hate humanity.
I celebrate Earth Day by working hard to spread humanity beyond it.
Gee, I would have expected them to be much more attractive. They wouldn’t be worth the money or risk to me. Now I think even less of those secret service agents.
Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Eliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.
Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.
All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes, or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on their head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of $126 billion. The feds’ half a billion to Solyndra would have been a mere $18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.
Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope . . . and Change! Red lights, not red ink.