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Women’s College Bans the Word “Women”

 

I was at a restaurant recently and a waiter tripped over something and spilled a tray of drinks. I’m sure he was embarrassed, but I was uncomfortable as well. I was embarrassed for him. I’m not one who generally rejoices in watching someone make a fool of themselves. So I’m a little hesitant to admit how much I enjoyed this article on Fox News.

So the professors at a women’s college have been instructed not to use the word women (to avoid the appearance of thinking that there may be two genders). Perhaps next they won’t be allowed to use the word college (to avoid the appearance of thinking that there is some benefit to attending their institution). The left’s lack of any core principles (other than the ever-increasing acquisition of power) often leads to disconcerting conflicts. Disconcerting, and sometimes hilarious. The picture below is a good description of what’s happening on the left right now:

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The Brave Only Die Once

 

I’ve had three really scary events in my life. Two were life-threatening, but the one that wouldn’t have harmed a hair on my head was pure terror.

In 1969, my wife Marie and I took a scooter trip through Europe, camping along the way. We started out in England, Marie perched on the back, along with a tent, sleeping bags, clothing, etc. Then across the Channel and through France, the Mediterranean Coast, and Italy. Then we started north and into the Swiss Alps, where we planned to go up and up and finally motor through one of the tunnels of the Simplon Pass. The climb up the Alps on our 200 cc Lambretta was beautiful and uneventful. Then we started through a long, gently curving, totally dark tunnel.

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From the Police Blotter: Can You Feel the Love?

 
Police officers turn their backs as Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks at the funeral of slain officer Rafael Ramos on Dec. 27, 2014.

Mayor de Blasio has not improved his relationship with the NYPD from the moment that this AP photo was taken. He’s not getting a whole lot of love from The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of the City of New York.

The NYC PBA recently conducted a poll on how its members feel about Mayor de Blasio; 6,000 out of 24,000 members responded. 96 percent had unfavorable opinions about the Mayor.

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Marital Advice from a Divorce Lawyer

 

I have been a lawyer for 41 years and have done child custody cases for 36 years. Along the way, I have come across three questions to ask spouses to give them an insight into the needs of the opposite sex. I hope you find them to be helpful.

I want you to each answer three questions with as much detail as you can remember, and to write your responses on separate pieces of paper without the other person knowing your answers.

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Gun Laws: What Works and What Fails

 

Maryland has way super-strict gun control laws. These laws include bans on what leftists call “assault rifles,” the requirement to get permission from the state before being allowed to purchase a firearm, a requirement that purchasers of firearms be fingerprinted like the common criminals leftists think they are, strict age limits, universal background checks, limits on magazine capacity, a gun registry (which has never even once been used to solve a gun crime), and, of course, “gun-free zones” around every school.

None of those laws were worth a bucket of spit yesterday when a 17-year-old punk brought a gun to school to shoot his ex-girlfriend. Rather, the element that prevented this incident from becoming a mass casualty event was the very thing leftists have been ridiculing these past few weeks: trained and armed security in the school where the shooting happened.

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A Little Too Much Reality in the Show?

 

Watching the parade of porn stars, reality TV contestants, and former Playboy models lining up to lambaste the President of the United States, as well as the daily trove of stories of wife beating, naked nepotism, gambling, and official corruption among his cabinet members and White House staff, I was reminded of a story Bill Buckley once told.

He had been nominated by the Nixon Administration to serve as one of our delegates to the United Nations. The FBI called around to his friends and colleagues, and one, William Rusher, groaned that he had already answered all of their questions when Buckley had been nominated for an earlier assignment. The agent replied: “I know, but it is my duty to ask whether Mr. Buckley might have done anything since 1969 to embarrass the president.” The sly Rusher responded, “No, but the Nixon Administration has done a great deal to embarrass Mr. Buckley.”

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Quote of the Day: Individual Sovereignty

 

“Your group identity is not your cardinal feature. That’s the great discovery of the west. That’s why the west is right. And I mean that unconditionally. The west is the only place in the world that has ever figured out that the individual is sovereign. And that’s an impossible thing to figure out. It’s amazing that we managed it. And it’s the key to everything that we’ve ever done right.” – Jordan Peterson

This quote is key to understanding why Martin Luther King’s desire to that his “children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” resonates so much. It also exposes the fraud that is intersectionality and identity politics. Should we abandon the concept that the individual is sovereign, we sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science.

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Name That Quote!

 

OK, let’s play Name That Quote! Who said the following: “I don’t think — the President has a fear of the Lord, the fear of the wrath of God, which leads one to more humility.”

What do you think — who was that? Pat Buchanan, speaking about Bill Clinton? Maybe some Bible-banging Southern Baptist minister complaining about Barack Obama? No. That quote is from California governor Jerry Brown, as he was criticizing President Trump and his immigration policies.

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Conservatives Can, and Must, Win the Fight for Free Speech

 

George Orwell said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Admittedly I tend to have a slightly dour outlook on the current state of the culture and politics, the side effect of being sucked into my own personal negative news cycle. My husband calls me a Negative Nellie, I tell him I’m simply a realist, which makes him laugh. Starting with an Orwell quote may not dissuade anyone from agreeing I have negative tendencies, but what if this quote is a signal of the impending doom of liberty in America, not in 1984, but now?

In universities and on college campuses across America, a recent and growing trend of suppression of speech is making headlines. The Heckler’s Veto (a situation in which a person who disagrees with a speaker’s message is able to unilaterally silence that speaker) has become the main tool of this suppression. The students leading the protests and interruptions claim people such as Ben Shapiro, Christina Hoff Summers, and Charles Murray are fascists spewing hate speech. Students are unwilling to hear any idea that strays from their leftist viewpoint; they cannot afford the opportunity for anyone to hear the speakers’ words. If you don’t have the right opinion, you aren’t entitled to an opinion- or worse, your opinion is wrong or hateful. This results in a serious problem in the intellectual development of our youth. A person who travels through life insulated from different ideas and perspectives than their own will never have the ability to articulate his own thoughts and beliefs. John Stuart Mill writes in his 1859 work, “On Liberty”, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” The longer this behavior is allowed to continue, the more we will see the end of free speech and free exchange of ideas on our college campuses. We will graduate a generation of young people not only unwilling to listen to different ideas, but find them offensive. In his March 10 essay, “The Psychology of Progressive Hostility” Matthew Blackwell writes “People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand.” Anger in response to disagreement is not discourse. Self-reflection and intellectual curiosity may be difficult. It is human nature to dislike admitting one is wrong (speaking of arguments between me and my husband). But growing pains beget growth- intellectually, spiritually, and psychologically. We learn from our mistakes when we admit them.

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Vanguard 1 60th anniversary

 

Last Wednesday, I attended the Vanguard 1 60th anniversary at the Naval Research Lab. Vanguard 1 was the fourth satellite, the first to carry solar cells, and is the oldest one in orbit. As some of you know, it was designed by my dad. Six Vanguardians attended the celebration. Four of them are here:

Credit: Kim Lammertin

Dave DeVorkin and Michael Neufeld from the National Air and Space Museum and Angelina Callahan from NRL had a panel discussion about Vanguard and its legacy. I am writing a brief account of the celebration which I hope to get published in The Space Review. Here’s an account of it.

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Now 100% T****-Free!

 

I wonder if we can comment about the current administration’s activities without using the T-word or alluding to things that, however sensational they might be, aren’t actually matters of policy, executive action, or law.

I really like Scott Pruitt over at EPA. I think his talk of streamlining the permitting process, ending the seemingly arbitrary authority of that agency to classify my backyard as a navigable waterway, and otherwise introducing some balance into an overzealous bureaucracy, is wonderful.

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Law-Abiding Citizens: Make the World Safer by Turning in Your Guns!

 

There is a movement afoot to start voluntary programs in which law-abiding citizens can turn their guns into the police (and sometimes receive some compensation for them). I say law-abiding citizens, because obviously criminals are unlikely to walk into a police station and voluntarily disarm themselves, so criminals will be unaffected by these programs.

I find this concerning for two reasons. First, I suspect that the goal is that, over time, these programs will become, um, less voluntary. (I’m sure progressives would avoid scary words like mandatory.) The other reason these programs concern me is that there apparently are people out there who think this might help improve public safety.

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Facebook Data Scam Latest Liberal Trump Coping Technique

 

CNN is reporting on the latest scandal stemming from the 2016 election,

Facebook is facing a crescendo of questions about how user data was harvested for political purposes, and for a second day investors dumped its stock over the risk the scandal poses to its business.
Some U.S. lawmakers are calling on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify. British members of Parliament are summoning Zuckerberg too. But for now he is remaining silent about the uproar.

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2017 Was an “Annus Horribilis” for Facebook and Silicon Valley. And 2018 Is Looking Worse.

 

Facebook isn’t Equifax. And “data breach” probably isn’t the most illuminating way to describe how Cambridge Analytica came to harvest the private information of potentially 50 million of the social network’s members. There wasn’t some technical security flaw that savvy hackers found and exploited.

Rather what happened was a misuse of data that was initially collected in a way Facebook encouraged through the Facebook Login tool for app developers. But that social graph data was, first, allegedly collected under false unclear pretenses (unlike the similar — if not more extensive — 2012 Obama reelection campaign Facebook data effort), and then, second, passed along to Cambridge Analytica. So a bad actor violated Facebook’s terms of service (which have since been modified). Moreover, it isn’t clear that the psychographic profiles of voters using the data are really that effective or had any meaningful impact on the 2016 presidential election. (I think there is a plausible case that the Trump campaign actually underperformed given the state of the economy and the quality of the opposing candidate.)

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Are You Ready for Some (More) Football?

 

Back in the 1990s, Dick Ebersol helped form the short-lived XFL. Today, his son Charlie introduced the AAF. The Alliance of American Football kicks off in 11 months, with the first games on the Sunday after the 2019 Super Bowl. The games will be broadcast on CBS and a variety of digital platforms.

Why this might succeed where the XFL failed is the team the younger Ebersol has recruited. Legendary NFL executive Bill Polian; former players Troy Polamalu, Justin Tuck, Hines Ward, and Jared Allen; Peter Thiel and a large group of major investors; and, of course, Dick Ebersol, who created “Sunday Night Football.”

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Pension Abuse in California

 
Mark Janus, the plaintiff in Janus v. AFSCME.

One of the main themes in the blockbuster case of Janus v. AFSCME—currently before the United States Supreme Court—is the risk of having unions sit on both sides of the table in public-sector contract negotiations. Nowhere is that risk more pronounced than in California, where the perverse and pervasive effects of union political influence are on display in Cal Fire Local 2881 v. California Public Employees’ Retirement System, now before the California Supreme Court. Between 2009 and 2013, California law allowed state and local employees with over five years of service to purchase with their own funds up to five years of “fictional years of retirement service credits”—commonly called “airtime”—that they could then add to their years of actual service in order to increase the value of their pensions at retirement.

This novel airtime benefit was supposed to be cost-neutral to public employers, but it never was: each unit of airtime represented a huge windfall to the lucky state employees and a drain on the public treasury. The Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act of 2013 (PEPRA) sought to end the practice moving forward, without taking away airtime rights that had already been purchased by public employees. The union’s position is that the right to purchase future airtime rights was vested in all current employees on passage of the statute, so that PEPRA violates the state constitution’s contracts clause by preventing employees hired before 2013 from making purchases after 2013. The California Court of Appeal rebuffed that union effort by holding that the union did not meet its “elevated” burden of showing that the legislature had indeed intended to create these vested rights going forward. The California Supreme Court should follow suit.

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The Other Women’s Movement

 

So I was cleaning up some items from my mom’s room a couple months back, and I came across her Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart Nursing School graduation picture, Class of ’47. There she is, donned in her starched white nurse’s cap, along with a few other dozen graduates, including one of her best friends for life, Connie (“Aunt Connie,” to us kids). I brought it up to her room, where she’s currently, at 91, confined to her bed due to severe arthritis and osteoporosis, to remind her of that wonderful time in her life.

Fast forward to today, where I’m texting back and forth with an old college friend about the new movie Chappaquiddick. We get into the details, some of which I never realized. (I was not yet five at the time it happened.) Anyway, in the digital discussion I mention my mom attended Manhattanville at the same time as one of the Kennedy daughters, Jean, I believe, and that Ethel Kennedy, then Skakel, was also a classmate.

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