1. I saw law professor (and newly-minted Washington Post
blogger) Eugene Volokh do a fine job criticizing gun control at an NYU
Federalist Society debate yesterday (a reminder that I promise to replace the debates I’ve long hosted with other fun events
to be announced in the near future).
2. If the fundamental right to self-defense doesn’t resonate
with you when you contemplate guns, try mulling the principle while reading this Mark Steyn
piece about rising anti-Semitic violence (h/t Baruch Gottesman).
3. In other foreign affairs news, I hope you read my letter
in the Wall Street Journal a couple
months ago on
whether to merge the U.S. and Canada.
4. None of the above is quite as strange, though, as news of
a
woman in China duping people by pretending to be a male cop with superpowers.
5. I’ll be at the Wall
Street Journal offices tomorrow, as it happens, visiting along with a
three-times-a-year gathering of my fellow Robert Novak Fellows, an assortment
of conservative and libertarian writers.
We gathered in the old Journal offices once, and my favorite
part of that meeting may have been learning that an old stock-ticker-tape
machine still sat in one corner of the editorial boardroom, a rather steampunk
reminder that Dow Jones was technically an electronic communications company
over a century ago, before it owned a
newspaper.
6. Columnist Tim Carney (who was good on the Feb. 17 episode
of The Independents) is one of the
Novak Fellows, whereas his brother John Carney just joined the Journal, and two
weeks later brother Brian Carney left
the Journal, for those struggling, as we all have at times, to keep track of
Carney brothers.
Inevitably, they sometimes make me think of this song. And that song is not as creepy as this
unusual photo of the man singing it, Nick Cave, wearing a Scooby-Doo costume. If you combine Nick Cave and Echo and the
Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch, to my delight you sort of get the current band the
Editors, who have several neat songs like this.
7. The best way to combine the Novak Fellows experience with
music, though, is to see one of them perform Saturday at 6:30 (International
Arts Movement, 38 W. 39th, 3rd floor), namely Jesse James DeConto
with his band Pinkerton Raid.
8. After such revels, we will still need serious political writing, though,
such as this Journal item on (ex-Sandinista) Mayor
de Blasio’s campaign against charter schools.
9. In other de Blasio news, Julia Kamin notes his NYPD has
issued 215 summons for jaywalking -- yes, jaywalking, which no New Yorker
considers a crime -- in just over a month in early 2014, part of de Blasio’s
crusade to reduce traffic deaths while ticketing cars less.
I guess we won’t have to worry about being run over by the
carriage horses de Blasio’s banning either (and it sounds suspiciously like his
motivation there had less to do with horse wellbeing than with a de Blasio donor
wanting the horses’ building after the unemployed horses vacate it).
10. You almost can’t blame people for thinking politics is
wholesome and high finance corrupting, though, when you read things like this
account of decadent, secret Wall Street parties (h/t Ivan Cohen). And then there’s the strange wave of apparent
suicides among JP Morgan employees (not that one can’t find all that creepy and
be alarmed by public-sector goings-on, such as Democrats stealing
voter-registration information for campaign purposes in Texas...or the Obama
administration planning increased use of government minders in newsrooms...or...or...).
But when the world seems filled with corruption and
cronyism, there’s always this
cute kitten sitting in a glass as a distraction -- or this Matrix-like
berserk-kitten fight sped up and set to techno music. Would that all conflicts were as simple.
No comments:
Post a Comment