Free mind reading, clairvoyance, crystal therapy, auras read, Nostradamus like predictions, and all other various and sundry prognostications. Warning, you'll probably get what you pay for.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:28 AM | Comments (328)
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Obama targets retirement accounts for the wealthy.

Don't worry though, they'd never come after your retirement account.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:39 AM | Comments (444)
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Bowdoin College in Maine apparently takes the "liberal" in Liberal Arts to the extreme.

It sounds like the setup for a bad joke: What did the Wall Street type say to the college president on the golf course? Well, we don't know exactly—but it has launched a saga with weighty implications for American intellectual and civic life.

Here's what we do know: One day in the summer of 2010, Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, a respected liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine, met investor and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein for a round of golf about an hour north of campus. College presidents spend many of their waking hours talking to potential donors. In this case, the two men spoke about college life—especially "diversity"—and the conversation made such an impression on President Mills that he cited it weeks later in his convocation address to Bowdoin's freshman class. That's where the dispute begins.

So the college president apparently went on to tell the frosh that while Bowdoin leaned to the left they should respect diversity of ideas of evil, racist, reichwingers like "the donor". The problem is that word leaked back to "the donor" that he was being used as a strawman for Bowdoin to pat itself on the back for its supposed tolerance and open-mindedness with respect to opposing views while simultaneously castigating them.

... A few months later, Mr. Klingenstein decided to do something surprising: He commissioned researchers to examine Bowdoin's commitment to intellectual diversity, rigorous academics and civic identity. This week, some 18 months and hundreds of pages of documentation later, the project is complete. Its picture of Bowdoin isn't pretty.

Funded by Mr. Klingenstein, researchers from the National Association of Scholars studied speeches by Bowdoin presidents and deans, formal statements of the college's principles, official faculty reports and notes of faculty meetings, academic course lists and syllabi, books and articles by professors, the archive of the Bowdoin Orient newspaper and more. They analyzed the school's history back to its founding in 1794, focusing on the past 45 years—during which, they argue, Bowdoin's character changed dramatically for the worse.

Published Wednesday, the report demonstrates how Bowdoin has become an intellectual monoculture dedicated above all to identity politics.

Read the whole thing. But you won't be surprised to see some of the details, including the curious freshman curriculum, which is short on anything you'd think of as education and long on ... bullshit. more...

Posted by: andy at 06:55 AM | Comments (564)
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The MSNBC Messaging Machine finds new ways to be stupid just about every day.

MSNBC is a televised blog. I keep saying this because it's true: part of blogs' charm, at least initially, was that they gleefully ignored any standards of professionalism. The honesty about the slapdash nature of them was bracing. And the honesty about agenda -- to wit, we have one -- was liberating.

But that upside of blogs also comes with a downside. Blogs speak relentlessly to one side of the aisle (are there any actual centrist blogs out there? It's a business model I don't think can actually work). We look for new ways to provoke -- because it's fun and profitable. And I don't mean that in the cliched joke way; I mean, it's literally both fun and profitable (at least in the sense of hit-whoring) to find exciting new manners of juvenile tweaking of one's political enemies.

The medium tends towards two things: emotional hotness and intellectual dumbness. Those aren't cast-iron rules, of course. (Present company excepted!)

MSNBC has fully embraced the blogger ethos of hit-whoring provocation first, second, last, and always. As well as exploring all the new and inventive ways to call people you don't like Nazis.

There simply is no professionalism at MSNBC, no aspiration to any kind of standards at all. It's Dumb By Design (TM), because Dumb is Easy and Easy is Holy.

It's a televised blog. It's a vlog (a term that never really caught on). It's a tlog, I suppose.

It's not a professional news organization in any way -- it's not professional, and it's not about news. It's also apparently overseen by callow morons so it's really not all that organized. It's sloppy, stupid liberal agitation 24/7.

Television is itself a potent medium -- people read less when TV came along. They also stopped going to movies as much. TV's easy and convenient.

Back in the day, the blogosphere was full of blog triumphalism. We actually thought Blogs Could Change the World (or at least we pretended to, sometimes).

It turns out we were right... in a way. What we failed to understand is that You Really Haven't Made It Until You're On TV. And we failed to understand that television was a ravenous, indiscriminately-consuming organism, always needing "content" (of a kind) to fill the time between commercials, and it was furthermore a highly adaptable, very fecund, very insidious sort of colonizing/cannibalizing pullulating growth.* Like the Thing, it imitates and consumes.

What we failed to understand, in short, was that the Triumph of the Blogs would come when a television channel adopted an all-blog format, with all the Hot Sloppy Stupid that is characteristic of blogs on their bad days.

And we failed to understand the Iron Law of American Dumb that is responsible for the rise of TV in the first place: It's just easier to watch people talking rather to read people writing. Pictures are fun and words are work.

Dumb is Easy and Easy is Holy.

MSNBC took a fairly Easy form of writing and made it even Easier, but taking out the "reading" part of it.

* Pullulating means "breeding or spawning new life freely." I just learned the world last night, looking up something about the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox (i.e., why isn't the the universe pullulating with detectable alien life, if such life is as common as many estimations for the Drake Equation suggest?).

Anyway, I thought it was a neat, Lovecraftian sort of word, and figured if I used it it might stick in my brain. So I used it.

Posted by: Ace at 01:30 PM | Comments (453)
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Have you ever noticed that all the "Good Stuff" Obama has supposedly done for the economy has no impact, or has impact years later (and possibly in decades to come), but all of the Republicans' economic initiative have immediate impact, and even retroactive impact (People were worried about the coming sequester and so stopped investing in biodegradable cars or whatever)?

Thus Obama's record is still an asterisk -- *, remains to be seen; only the economy of 2038 will tell -- but we know for a fact the Republicans' initiatives are colossal failures, because, Look! The economy is a shambles. Plainly this is the work of Republicans, and not Barack Obama, whose policies, again, will not begin to take hold until we've got Chick-Fil-A on Titan.

Posted by: Ace at 01:05 PM | Comments (146)
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Riiiiiiight.

That 4:1 ratio is very nearly correct; it's off by only one. It's 4:0.

The two cases are different in that Sandy Hook received wall-to-wall coverage and thus facilitated a national conversation about mental health and gun control -- a debate whose outcome is yet to be determined.

Not so with the Gosnell trial, which has been completely blacked out by the media. The American people are now like a jury, shielded from relevant information because judges (read: editors) decided it might prejudice their views -- in this case, against lightly regulated abortionists.

...

[T]elevision coverage of Gosnell's trial has been "hard to find," as the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan put it very charitably last Sunday on "Meet the Press."

In fact, not counting Noonan's allusion, Gosnell's case has not been mentioned even once on any of the three major networks in the last month (his trial began March 1 .

It has received only seven mentions on cable television since it began, one on CNN and six on Fox News. In print, Gosnell's case has been largely ignored outside of local media outlets in Pennsylvania and Delaware.

The media only pushes wedge issues against Republicans. It's just that simple.

A wedge issue splits off a party (with its more hardcore side) away from the middle. Obviously, the GOP's strong, near-absolute 2nd Amendment stance is a possible problem for them with the squishy middle. Hence, the media's desire to push this.

Similarly, the media's desire to push gay marriage.

But when a wedge issue presents itself that might split off the center from hardcore liberals -- liberals who support "abortion" up to and beyond the point of actual kill-a-live-baby infanticide -- the media won't even cover the story.

People might "draw the wrong conclusions." People might get "whipped up into a frenzy." None of these concerns apply to Republican wedge-issues, it seems. Only to ones that might hurt the Democrats. In this case, the media decides they dare not even mention the issue... lest the public get the wrong idea, and decide that maybe liberalism has gone several steps too far.

Posted by: Ace at 12:10 PM | Comments (196)
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Well, it's strongly implied.

“I’m a complete libertarian. I think it’s very, very dangerous. I really mean that. I think the smoking ban is a tip of an iceberg of society — the leaders of society telling us how to be,” he said during an interview on HuppPost Live

“I think it’s not their business. I think it is their business to tell us to care for and respect each other and each other’s happiness and each other’s health, and we are responsible enough to do that,” he adds.

The Three Musketeers have all expressed some kind of conservative/libertarian politics. Jeremy Irons is the third. I'm referring to the Three Musketeers in Randal Wallace's Man in the Iron Mask, a so-so 1998 remake.

Athos, John Malkovich, almost punched a guy for suggesting America deserved 9/11, shortly after the attacks. And he almost did this in France, where he lives. So, he was pushing against local weather patterns.

Porthos, Gerald Depardieu, quit his native France to move to Russia (???!!) to escape the socialist's millionaire tax.

And now Aramis, Jeremy Irons, outs himself as a full-on libertarian.

Randall Wallace himself has been accused of... well, a Salon critic claimed his movie Secretariat was....

"[S]ymbolic window dressing for a quasi-inspirational fantasia of American whiteness and power."

And what's worse:

Wait. There is yet another sinister subtext to be exposed in the film. O'Hehir mentions that Randall Wallace, who directed the film, "is one of mainstream Hollywood's few prominent Christians, and has spoken openly about his faith and his desire to make movies that appeal to 'people with middle-American values'."

Dear Lord, how did we let this happen?

That link is to Roger Ebert criticizing how kookoocrazy Salon's movie idiot is. When you've lost Roger Ebert, you've gone too far.

Posted by: Ace at 11:51 AM | Comments (117)
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He rather understates it.

I tried to be more clear about how preposterous and stupid this syndrome is-- "Let's ban things we don't even understand!"

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (322)
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Pretty amazing.

Prosecutors fought to have the evidence of these warnings -- from Holmes' psychiatrist, who reported that Holmes was sending her threatening messages and had thoughts of suicide -- kept under seal.

Why? It's possible that the prosecutors thought that if these documents were released, it might prejudice the public against Holmes (and thus possibly lead to a mistrial/vacated judgement later on), but it's also possible, as Ed Morrissey suggests, this information was suppressed in order to spare police embarrassment.

On a tangential note: I think many bad, self-serving motivations hide under a "good," permissible, non-self-serving motivation. That is, while prosecutors may have talked up to the judge and among themselves the "good" motive of not prejudicing the public against Holmes, secretly (and perhaps even secretly to themselves) they might have been more motivated by ass-covering and doing favors for other members of the law-enforcement guild.

So, several important things here:

Cops continue to ignore the very serious threat of stalkers and harassers. These people are dangerous. Cops blow it off because no one's been assaulted or killed... yet. But the type of brain that gets off on threatening others is clearly a brain gone bad. Think about how frigging messed up someone has to be to serially threaten or harass someone (and think about the problems such threats cause the victim, even if the threats are not carried out).

And yet these cases continue being treated at very low levels of priority. People who do this have announced both motive and means to commit murder; only opportunity is holding them back. They deserve far more scrutiny, and persistent threats should receive prosecutions and jailtime. It's offensive and destructive behavior in its own right, and it just might serve to reduce the number of murders.

The NRA -- and most of the country -- tells the political class "You have enough laws to enforce; enforce the ones you have, before you go asking for new ones." But the political class, whether due to incompetence or agenda, continues refusing to do so. James Holmes could have been prosecuted for making threats against someone -- that is a crime. He wasn't. He could have been tangled up in the machinery of investigation and prosecution, which doubtless would have uncovered his cache of weapons. But he wasn't. He was left free, and he killed a great number of people. And the political class' response is "make more things illegal."

How about working with what you have?

BTW: Heurfano adds:

t was CYA, plain and simple. I remember quite a lot of speculation about the psychiatrist's dereliction of duty in not contacting authorities that could have been answered before her reputation was trashed in the media.

True. I remember a lot of that -- Why didn't the psychiatrist say something? Should we toughen up laws requiring psychiatrists to report patients that confess a desire to commit violent crimes?

Well, she did.

And btw: Psychiatrists deal with lunatics all the time. A lot of lunatics fixate on their psychiatrists, and threaten them. So psychiatrists see a lot of this behavior.

Point is, they're not babes in the woods. They've seen it all. And when a psychiatrist says about one of her many lunatics, "This one is dangerous, this one is scaring me, this one has thoughts of murder," you should probably take more action than absolutely none at all.*

* Stolen from Plinkett.

Posted by: Ace at 10:21 AM | Comments (238)
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This flies against everything I've heard, which is why I'm linking it. I'm not at all certain this is correct -- again, because all I ever hear about is the inevitability of a dominant liberal coalition -- but such a surprising claim deserves some airing.

Here's the big caveat to the claim: Except for illegal immigration. Which might be why your friendly neighborhood Democratic Party is so determined to bring in millions of newly-minted voters with higher-than-replacement-level birth rates.

As shown by demographer Eric Kaufman of the University of London, religious couples across all cultures are for obvious reasons (including but not limited to abortion) having more children per family than are the secular-irreligious, whose birthrates are below replacement — which means a declining population.

"After 2020," says Kaufman, the devoutly religious of all faiths "will begin to tip the culture wars to the conservative side."

Posted by: Ace at 09:47 AM | Comments (208)
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