It’s Wednesday, February 21st, 2018…but before we begin, here’s a headline just oozing irony:

Florida Police Visit Heroic Teen Who Was Shot Five Times While Shielding Twenty of His Classmates

 

At the risk of seeming a bit heartless, we only wish Sheriff Israel and his department had offered Nikolas Cruz such personal attention.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Since we’re on the subject of the bureaucratic bumbling exposed in the wake of the Parkland killings, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty disagrees with our position Wrong Wray should be unceremoniously canned, rather recommending The Donald…

Keep Christopher Wray Until There’s a Better Option

 

“This is one of the exceptionally rare moments when I disagree with Kevin Williamson, and I should note that I only disagree with the final conclusion of the final paragraph. Like almost everyone in America, Kevin is infuriated by the news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation received a fairly specific tip about the Florida shooter in January and failed to follow up on it.

The Friday press conference on that little oversight was a masterpiece of modern bureaucracy. The FBI has “protocols” for handling specific credible threats of that sort, “protocol” here being a way of saying, “Pick up the phone and call the local field office or, if we really want to get wild, the local police.” “The protocol was not followed,” the FBI bureaucrats explained. Well, no kidding. Why not? No answerthe question wasn’t even asked aloud. Did law enforcement’s ball-dropping mean that a preventable massacre went unprevented because of bureaucratic failure? I don’t think anybody could say that,” says Broward County sheriff Scott Israel, who is leading the investigation. His department had over the years received no fewer than 20 calls related to the shooter. What about that?Make no mistake about it, America, the only one to blame for this incident is the killer himself,” which is exactly the sort of thing a sanctimonious schmuck says when he doesn’t want to consider the institutional failures right in front of his taxpayer-subsidized nose and the culpable negligenceto say nothing of the sand-pounding stupidityof his own agency.

The FBI has a budget of $3.5 billion, almost all of which goes to salaries, benefits, and other personnel costs. Do you know how many employees the FBI field office in South Florida has? It has more than 1,000. Do you know how many employees the FBI has in total? It has 35,158 employees. It has 13,084 agents and 3,100 intelligence analysts.

Kevin concludes, “Governor Rick Scott wants FBI director Chris Wray to resign. A self-respecting society would have him whipped.”

If you want to fire the person whose responsibility was to evaluate and forward the tip to the local bureau, fine. But it’s not like the FBI director himself is working the tip lines…”

Then again, neither did the skippers of the destroyers Fitzgerald and McCain personally have the con at the time of their collisions, let alone their fleet commander; though all of them were relieved of duty, and both commanding officers currently face Article 32 hearings to determine whether they should be court-martialed for negligent homicideWray and his irresponsible underlings would merely be fired.

In a related must-read item courtesy of Speed Mach and the WSJ, Amy Wax details how hypocritical Liberals roll, as she identifies…

What Can’t Be Debated on Campus

Pilloried for her politically incorrect views, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax asks if it’s still possible to have substantive arguments about divisive issues.

 

“There is a lot of abstract talk these days on American college campuses about free speech and the values of free inquiry, with lip service paid to expansive notions of free expression and the marketplace of ideas. What I’ve learned through my recent experience of writing a controversial op-ed is that most of this talk is not worth much. It is only when people are confronted with speech they don’t like that we see whether these abstractions are real to them.

The op-ed, which I co-authored with Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego Law School, appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Aug. 9 under the headline, “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture.” It began by listing some of the ills afflicting American society:

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

We then discussed the “cultural script”—a list of behavioral norms—that was almost universally endorsed between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These norms defined a concept of adult responsibility that was, we wrote, “a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains and social coherence of that period.” The fact that the “bourgeois culture” these norms embodied has broken down since the 1960s, we argued, largely explains today’s social pathologies—and re-embracing that culture would go a long way toward addressing those pathologies.

In what became the most controversial passage, we pointed out that some cultures are less suited to preparing people to be productive citizens in a modern technological society, and we gave examples:

The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.

The reactions to this piece raise the question of how unorthodox opinions should be dealt with in academia—and in American society at large. It is well documented that American universities today are dominated, more than ever before, by academics on the left end of the political spectrum. How should these academics handle opinions that depart, even quite sharply, from their “politically correct” views?

The proper response would be to engage in reasoned debateto attempt to explain, using logic, evidence, facts and substantive arguments, why those opinions are wrong. This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of a question. But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and our way of life—something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.

What those of us in academia should certainly not do is engage in unreasoned speech: hurling slurs and epithets, name-calling, vilification and mindless labeling. Likewise, we should not reject the views of others without providing reasoned arguments. Yet these once common standards of practice have been violated repeatedly at my own and at other academic institutions in recent years, and we increasingly see this trend in society as well.

One might respond that unreasoned slurs and outright condemnations are also speech and must be defended. My recent experience has caused me to rethink this position. In debating others, we should have higher standards. Of course one has the right to hurl labels like “racist,” “sexist” and “xenophobic”—but that doesn’t make it the right thing to do. Hurling such labels doesn’t enlighten, inform, edify or educate. Indeed, it undermines these goals by discouraging or stifling dissent.

So what happened after our op-ed was published last August? A raft of letters, statements and petitions from students and professors at my university and elsewhere condemned the piece as hate speech—racist, white supremacist, xenophobic, “heteropatriarchial,” etc. There were demands that I be removed from the classroom and from academic committees. None of these demands even purported to address our arguments in any serious or systematic way…”

What Ms. Wax referred to as “some of the ills afflicting American society” (but which we would term some of the contributing factors behind America’s mass killings) were the subject of a conversation we recently had with one Daniel Francis Feeney, Esq.  Our list included the removal of God from the public forum, the breakdown of the family, the absence of moral absolutes, a culture of violence promoted on television, in movies and video games, the glorification of Hip-Hop gangsta-ism and the devaluation of human life through abortion.

Strangely enough, none of them involved the ability of law-abiding citizens to purchase an AR-15…or a bump stock for that matter; as, having actually purchased and fired the product, we know from experience it is incredibly inaccurate.  Which, while it might suit the purposes of a suicidal gunman firing down from a Vegas hotel on 20,000 tightly-packed concert-goers, hardly qualifies as a threat in less target-rich environments.

That anyone with minimal skills and the proper tools can, via the internet, easily modify many semiautomatic rifle into an automatic weapon appears to have escaped the “Ban the Bump Stock” crowd.  Then again, reality is a harsh mistress.

It’s our opinion Ms. Wax, though not as politically-correct as her critics, is still unwilling to recognize reality, preferring instead to list the symptoms of America’s moral and cultural decline rather than accurately identifying the causative factors behind the affliction.

 In their appearance with Tucker Carlson, neither Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin nor Dave Grossman are similarly constrained…

…being more than willing to call a spade a spade, rather than suggesting beating all our guns into garden implements would somehow prevent future mass shootings.

The great Victor Davis Hanson characterizes this current culture as “Kill Chic“.

Here’s the juice: Liberals want to rid us of the vehicles, because if they’re forced to admit the the problem lies with the drivers…drivers they’ve trained, individuals who represent the inevitable result of decades of Progressive policies…their entire anti-American agenda would be exposed and collapse under its own evil weight.

Thus Liberals only option is to double-down on decimation.  After successfully and deliberately institutionalizing infanticide, ravaging our morals and family structure, shattering our cities, and devaluing human life, Progressives must keep their sights set on taking what’s left of the country down the same path.

Otherwise, to borrow a phrase from James Carville, the truth that it’s the…

…stupid…a culture completely created by LIBERALS…will inevitably out.

Next up, also courtesy of Speed Mach, writing at The Federalist, Margot Cleveland explains…

How A Plea Reversal From Michael Flynn Could Uncover More Federal Corruption

Did Robert Mueller’s office withhold other evidence in Michael Flynn’s prosecution, either from the FISA court or from Flynn’s attorneys? There is reason to believe so.

 

On Friday, Judge Emmet Sullivan issued an order in United States v. Flynn that, while widely unnoticed, reveals something fascinating: A motion by Michael Flynn to withdraw his guilty plea based on government misconduct is likely in the works.

Just a week ago, and thus before Sullivan quietly directed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team to provide Flynn’s attorneys “any exculpatory evidence,” Washington Examiner columnist Byron York detailed the oddities of Flynn’s case. The next day, former assistant U.S. attorney and National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy connected more of the questionable dots. York added even more details a couple of days later. Together these articles provide the backdrop necessary to understand the significance of Sullivan’s order on Friday…”

Anyway you connect them, the dots don’t appear to paint a very pretty picture for Progressives hoping to force Flynn to flip on Trump…assuming of course the disgraced General had any dirt of even remote value in the first place.

And in the Environmental Moment, as James Delingpole records at Breitbart

NOAA Caught Adjusting Big Freeze out of Existence

 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has yet again been caught exaggerating  ‘global warming’ by fiddling with the raw temperature data. This time, that data concerns the recent record-breaking cold across the northeastern U.S. which NOAA is trying to erase from history.

If you believe NOAA’s charts, there was nothing particularly unusual about this winter’s cold weather which caused sharks to freeze in the ocean and iguanas to drop out of trees. Here is NOAA’s January 2018 chart for Northeast U.S. – an area which includes New England along with NY, PA, NJ, DE and MD.

You’d never guess from it that those regions had just experienced record-breaking cold, would you?

That’s because, as Paul Homewood has discovered, NOAA has been cooking the books. Yet againpresumably for reasons more to do with ideology than meteorologyNOAA has adjusted past temperatures to look colder than they were and recent temperatures to look warmer than they were.

We’re not talking fractions of a degree, here. The adjustments amount to a whopping 3.1 degrees F. This takes us well beyond the regions of error margins or innocent mistakes and deep into the realm of fiction and political propaganda…”

Which begs the question, if the theory of anthropogenic climate change is real, why the continuous, uninterrupted LIES?!?

Turning now to The Lighter Side

Finally, speaking of green, until we got this forward from Balls Cotton, we had no idea anti-American, Islamofascist douchebags…

came in that particular color.

Magoo



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