Friday afternoon round-up and Open Thread

Victorian posy of pansiesBecause I allowed myself to wallow in my traffic woes yesterday, I never got around to linking to some wonderful things that came my way.  Then, my website got all worried.  Readers could access it, but it blocked me from posting — not to mention deleting everything I’d written between 9 a.m. and now.

Two weeks ago, in Houston, an anti-gun Jack in the Box owner proudly announced that his store is a gun free zone. Apparently some people didn’t get that announcement because, three times in the last two weeks, people showed up with guns . . . to rob the store. Cause, meet effect.

***

George Leef says we’re making a mistake if we try to attack Thomas Piketty’s book demanding government redistribution by showing that his numbers are wrong and will never work. Instead, we have to challenge the fundamental premise that it is ever all right to play Robin Hood with people’s wealth, especially because the government, rather than robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, manages to take a huge cut for itself with every transaction.

***

Commencement speeches weren’t always so awful (with Adm. McRaven being a striking exception to that modern rule). Neo-neocon went back to 1956 and looked at a lyrical, thoughtful, pro-American, and knowledgeable speech that poet and educator Robert Frost gave at Colby College.

***

Trust my friend Mike McDaniel to have a great take on the insanity of “trigger warnings” at American colleges. I mean, how can you not love a post that starts like this:

When I attended college back in the 1400s, no one had time to protest whatever it was fashionable to protest at the time.But then again, there were no “studies” departments. No gender studies, no black studies, no queer studies, no feminist studies, no “studies” at all. We all just…studied. There were, to be sure, some professors of a rabidly leftist bent, but even they carried full course loads, and because I attended a small Midwestern college, a state supported school, they, rather than graduate students, tended to actually teach their classes. No one really had time to work up outrage about Israel, accuse every male in sight of rape, or complain about much of anything except the latest batch of homework. I guess we weren’t very trendy or sophisticated. We were in college for reasons having to do with being able to learn enough to support ourselves in the future.

***

It’s come to this: there are no non-weed smoking job candidates left to apply for work at the FBI. Having a lemon, the director is trying to make lemonade.

FBI Director James Comey said stoners should still apply to work for his agency, noting that the best and brightest to fight cyber crime usually “smoke weed on the way to the interview.”

***

That magical moment when you figure out that “climate science” is a faith based institution: when a leading light in the field insists that it’s an error for people to expect any consistency between the doom and gloom climate models and the actual non-doom and non-gloom climate.

***

By the way, did you know that I got a link in an article that Kyle Smith wrote for Forbes about the desperation of global warming alarmists? It wasn’t a big link, but it was a link, in the sentence that says “Oh, and if you think mankind can somehow muddle through climate change, you’re a Nazi.” That Nazi bit? That’s me!!