by David McElroy
There’s a vicious debate that rages among two gangs who oppose each other in a fight to the finish. Yes, it’s the battle over whether to use the serial comma or not — the one commonly referred to as the Oxford comma (or Harvard comma). I don’t use it, but don’t tell the pro-Oxford faction or my life won’t be worth a plugged nickel. (If the joke doesn’t make sense to you, you’re probably way too normal to be reading here.)
A Hawaii legislator who was angered by a negative website about her seems to have been the one behind a proposal in Hawaii to require Internet service providers to track every website that every one of their customers visits. So if there’s a site that someone “important” doesn’t like, she could learn who visited. Convenient, huh? (UPDATE: A reader reports that the Hawaii bill has now been killed.)by David McElroy
What does a coach do when his players talk back to him, ignore his game instructions and can’t be on time for practice? Most coaches today would grumble, but accept it as part of dealing with modern youth. Coach Mike Allen suspended his starting five players instead.
Allen took over coaching the boys’ basketball team at Gunderson High School in San Jose last year. He believes in discipline and respect, but he didn’t find much of those qualities among the players on his team. Instead, he found lousy attitudes and a lack of commitment.
He gave the players on the team “two, three, four chances” to correct their shortcomings, but nothing changed. Allen said the players continued to talk back to him, ignore his instructions during games and “showboat” on the court. So he suspended the starters. Shortly afterwards, the rest of the team confronted him, demanding that he reinstate the suspended players. When he refused, all 13 members of the team quit.
“I refused to win at all costs,” Allen told the San Jose Mercury News. “I knew I needed to take a stand or it wasn’t going to be a worthwhile season.”
After he lost his entire team, he called up players from the junior varsity team. He’s now playing a varsity schedule with just six underaged and unprepared players. The team has a 3-16 — and all three of the wins came from before the suspensions. In many games, the young players are being blown out. They finished one game with just four players, after two of them fouled out.
by Staff Monkeys
In running for president, Newt Gingrich repeatedly wraps himself in the mantle of conservative icon Ronald Reagan. Reports out this week throw cold water on any right Gingrich might have to do that. Former Reagan administration official Elliot Abrams says that Gingrich repeatedly insulted Reagan and predicted failure for his policies. (The article is in National Review, and you can’t get any more conservative than that.) In addition, columnist Mark Shields uses Gingrich’s own words from the past to show that he opposed the Reagan policies he’s so eager to embrace now. In addition, here’s video of Gingrich on television advising George Bush not to run on Reagan’s policies.
As I waited to pull onto U.S. 11 just a few miles from my house Wednesday evening, there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about it. The highway is busy that time of day, with two lanes of traffic in each direction and a turn lane in the middle. I’ve crossed those lanes hundreds of times, and I had no way of knowing this time was going to be different.
Traffic was heavy, but I was going to have time to cross to the other side if I timed it well. Just as I pulled out, though, an oncoming car did something I didn’t expect. I accelerated to get out of the way, barreling into the turn lane, where a car coming from another direction had just unexpectedly moved. I changed directions once again and ended up in yet another lane, startling another driver.
I’d almost hit at least three cars. I pulled off the road to think about this.
When a doctor first diagnosed me with breast cancer two weeks ago and said I had to have surgery, I expected to go through changing emotions in the days leading up to the experience. But knowing that and experiencing it are two entirely different things. Four days before I’m scheduled to be cut on next Monday, I can say I’ve had a number of emotions creep up on me unexpectedly.
by David McElroy
Those of us who’ve rejected the idea of a coercive state are frequently told that we need to be realistic and support government. Others tell us that we need to support “limited” government or “small” government. But what they never realize — and what we don’t point out often enough — is that they’re the starry-eyed idealists, not us.
I came across a concise and excellent quote from Brad Spangler that we should all learn to say when statists tell us to be realists. Spangler is the director of the Center for a Stateless Society. Save the graphic here and make it into posters if you want. (Click on it for a larger size.)
“Anarchists are the hard-nosed realists. People who have this fixation on some ideal government, which isn’t fundamentally just a criminal gang with flags, are the starry-eyed dreamers without a firm grasp on reality.”
by Staff Monkeys
When we found out that Fannie Mae had paid Newt Gingrich around $1.6 million in the last few years, Gingrich claimed that the taxpayer-backed mortgage firm was simply paying him for advice as a historian. Yep. That’s really what he said. We covered it here at the time. Now it’s come out that he was actually being paid by the company to lobby conservatives – to stop them from getting the federal government out of the business of inflating the housing mortgage bubble. That’s right. The man who wants to be a “conservative president” was trying to stop actual conservatives from making government smaller.by David McElroy
I make lots of random notes. Some turn into articles, but some are too short or never make it. I’m cleaning out the notebook of a few of those brief items.
I can’t bring myself to watch presidential speeches anymore, so I didn’t see Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last night. (It has nothing to do with who the president is. They’re all just as nauseating.)
Obama’s pitch seems to be for Progressive Lite, but the GOP already has that position covered, don’t they?
What about you? Did you watch it? Did you throw things at the TV? Did you like what he had to say? Or were you — like me — ignoring the whole thing?
I sometimes feel as though I should institute a “Missing-the-Entire-Point Award,” but I’ve realized that I’d have to give it out so frequently that it wouldn’t have any novelty or value. Do you ever feel as though people respond — in online discussions or in real life — without bothering to even understand what they’re responding to? I feel that way most days lately.
On a related note, I’d like to know why so (relatively) few people can see outside of their own existing narratives. For instance, a lot of people who call themselves conservatives have framed the political world as being about the “liberal media” working to hurt conservatives, so they can’t see past that frame and see that other things are sometimes going on.
Like a child who wants to play by his own set of rules, Newt Gingrich is threatening to withdraw from future debates if audiences aren’t allowed to be actors in the play he’s staging. I wish the networks would call his bluff by using no audience at all.
Modern political “debates” aren’t debates at all. They’ve become some kind of weird mishmash that’s halfway a free-for-all and halfway a joint news conference.
Since Gingrich’s entire strategy is based on running against the news media, he counts on the audience to roar with approval when he attacks — in order to influence the audience at home, just like a laugh track in a sitcom. In a very real way, he is staging a show, not debating ideas.
In Monday night’s debate, NBC News insisted that the audience stay out of the contest and just let the candidates answer questions. Now Gingrich is mad that he can’t have his way, so he’s threatening to pull out. If you ever had any doubts about the insufferable narcissism of the man, this should make it very clear.
Watch his interview with Fox News and see if you can’t imagine a spoiled little boy threatening to take his ball and go home when the other kids won’t let him make up his own rules.
by Staff Monkeys
We can’t figure out why this case had to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Police in the United States have been putting GPS tracking devices onto people’s cars to track them for weeks or months at a time — claiming that they don’t need search warrants to do this. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that this is unconstitutional, which should have been obvious from the start.Enter search terms and hit «enter»