The wonderland that is Durham continues. I have the same question as the commenters–what kind of a university would hire a loon like this to teach young people? Is this a problem unique to Duke, or does every university have such creatures among its professoriate? I fear the answer.
I hope that they take the pro bono offer in comments and sue him for slander.
And what is not news?
This is almost like a laboratory experiment, isn’t it? A handful of veterans (including three out of something like 7,000 retired generals) oppose the war: News. Thousands of active duty personnel urge Congress to support the war effort: Not news. That pretty well sums up the journalistic standard that has been applied to the conflict in Iraq.
If soldiers support the war, I’d think that was news, given that they’re bearing the brunt of it. But that’s just me. One of many reasons I’ll never be an editor at a major news publication…
I briefly mentioned south Florida’s drivers in the previous post, but this comment elicited further thoughts:
I’ve driven in southern Florida, and I’m quite surprised to learn they actually have traffic laws. Judging from the near-random maneuvers of the locals, I’ll bet they’d be surprised too. It’s one thing if you’re a farmer stopping in the middle of a country road to chat with your neighbor coming the other way; it’s quite another to do it in Coral Gables in the middle of the afternoon.
I praised Florida’s laws, not their enforcement, or Florida’s drivers. In addition to the complaint here, I’d point out their inability to merge on a freeway, and to find the little stalk on the steering column called a “turn signal.” Or once having found it, to turn it off.
There are (at least) three types of lousy drivers in south Florida, which has the worst drivers, overall, that I’ve experienced in the continental United States. The place that it reminds me of the most is Puerto Rico (though fortunately, it’s not quite that bad). As far as his first complaint, that seems to be right out of San Juan, though I suspect that it might be a Caribbean thing in general.
That said, the three groups are:
The first group is similar to Puerto Ricans in their willingness to just pull over and gab if they see someone they know on the road, even on a freeway (though, again, it’s nowhere near as prevalent as in PR). Not, of course, to imply that there aren’t a lot of borriquenos here as well.
The second are similarly Caribbeans, but have even less experience with cars, coming from the poorest nation in the hemisphere (our own little bit of Africa). On the other hand, most of the dark-complected folks here are Haitian-Americans, rather than “African-Americans” (at least in south Palm Beach County) and great folks (when they’re not behind the wheel), because they’re grateful to be here and out of the hellhole that is their little bit of Africa, and haven’t been here long enough to have absorbed the grievance culture of blacks who were born here, and are still resentful of wrongs done to them decades or centuries ago, fueled by the grievance industry exemplified by the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world. One can always tell them by their unique French dialect. So let me make that a fifth thing* that is better about south Florida than southern California.
The third are people who shouldn’t be driving because they’ve been doing it too long. That is to say, the codgers of both sexes and all genders, of whom there are many down here, in “God’s waiting room.” They’re not only old drivers, but they’re people who never drove well to begin with, because they spent much of their lives in one of the five boroughs of New York (this is the sixth, most southern one), and rarely drove, and when they did, didn’t have to deal with the kinds of driving and freeways that we do here. On top of that, they have a preference for large cars, over the dashboard of which many of them are too short to see. There have been many essays written on this subject, and I shall say no more. I think you can imagine the situation, based on the information already provided.
* OK, for those who want the whole list:
Speaking of immigration problems and non-assimilation, Stanley Kurtz has an interesting post on the problem of giving preference to family members:
I am not saying that anyone in the Duka family, outside the plotters themselves, was involved here. The point is, when you bring over a vast extended clan through chain migration, and when that extended family group maintains constant ties with an originating village, it becomes vastly more difficult to assimilate. For one thing, chain migration means a constant supply of new family members who don
Could be. Of course, if we leave it up to the Dems, they’ll screw it up by raising taxes.
Jonah Goldberg, on the insanity of people who think that Bush knew about 911 ahead of time (depressingly, about a third of Democrats):
Ah yes, because Bush’s post-9/11 plan has worked out so perfectly on so many levels. All along he’d hoped that by 2007 he’d be a political eunuch on the Hill and below-freezing approval levels. And the mad genius’s plan to seize Iraqi oil and topple regimes across the Middle East has gone off without a hitch. Meanwhile, Karl Rove’s Mark Hanna-like scheme to permanently lock in a Republican majority couldn’t be going smoother.
Don’t any of these morons consider why, if he’s so evil and conniving, and willing to destroy buildings and murder thousands, he didn’t plant WMDs in Iraq?
And disgustingly, rather than using the opportunity as a “Sister Souljah moment,” a major Democrat candidate panders to them, instead of properly denouncing them as loons. He can’t, though, because they’re his base.
The people who whine that we haven’t caught bin Laden (I’m still not convinced that he didn’t die years ago), or that “Al Qaeda in Iraq is not Al Qaeda,” don’t understand what we’re at war with, or who the enemy is. Andrew McCarthy explains.
The people who whine that we haven’t caught bin Laden (I’m still not convinced that he didn’t die years ago), or that “Al Qaeda in Iraq is not Al Qaeda,” don’t understand what we’re at war with, or who the enemy is. Andrew McCarthy explains.
The people who whine that we haven’t caught bin Laden (I’m still not convinced that he didn’t die years ago), or that “Al Qaeda in Iraq is not Al Qaeda,” don’t understand what we’re at war with, or who the enemy is. Andrew McCarthy explains.
In the context of the Fort Dix hirabis, Victor Davis Hanson has some useful thoughts on the problem of completely uncontrolled immigration:
Once the United States accepts as a permanent condition the notion that several million illegal aliens can reside in perpetuity and under immunity from the law, then a sort of insidious message is established:
We in America will ask nothing of our immigrants-not legality, not English, not rudimentary knowledge of our history and values, and not real efforts at assimilation and Americanization.
So, the wannabe jihadist, here illegally, whether as in the Fort Dix case or as was true of a few of the 9/11 murderers