Saturday, April 7, 2018

Dakota Johnson in Tight Leggings

At Taxi Driver, "Dakota Johnson Cameltoe in Tight Leggings."

BONUS: At the Nip Slip, "Dakota Johnson Topless and See Through Bikini on 'Fifty Shades Darker' Set! (PHOTOS)"

Evelyn Taft's Mild Weather Forecast

Here's the lovely Ms. Evelyn, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:



Arizona Bobcat Battles Rattlesnake (VIDEO)

This is pretty wild.

At Fox News 10 Phoenix:



Shohei Ohtani Makes History in Angels' 13-9 Comback Victory Over Athletics

The Angels are off to a great start. They're 6-2 so far, and both pitching and hitting are almost unrecognizable from last year.

I'm excited!

At LAT, "Down 6-0, Angels' bats awaken with homer by Ohtani and beat the Athletics 13-9":


Robin Holzken Takes You With Her (VIDEO)

She's a beauty!



Kevin Williamson, Thought Criminal

This is really good. So good, I've gained a new appreciation for Jonah Goldberg's writing. He's very thoughtful, articulate, fair, and measured.

At National Review:


An Oral History of the 1968 Columbia Uprising

This is actually pretty fascinating.

At VF:

In April 1968, hundreds of students at Columbia University took over campus buildings in an uprising that caught the world’s attention. Fifty years later, they reflect on what went right and what went wrong.

At Columbia University in April 1968, about a thousand students forcibly commandeered five campus buildings, effectively igniting the mass student revolts of the 60s. The events that began haphazardly on April 23 soon grew into a public crescendo of awakening that changed the course of the American student protest movement. It was a year when political, racial, sexual, and cultural forces exploded into a “revolutionary volcano,” as novelist Paul Auster, then a junior at Columbia, described it. It was also the year when two widespread movements—civil rights and anti-war—combined forces to stoke a flame of youth rebellion not seen domestically in half a century.

That spring 50 years ago, Columbia’s compact, six-city-block campus on Manhattan’s bohemian Upper West Side became a petri dish, fermenting and fomenting discord that would engulf the nation. By the end of the year, American deaths in Vietnam exceeded 35,000 soldiers. Anti-war protests multiplied, the draft continued to loom like a Sword of Damocles over the lives of 27 million young men, the peaceful civil-rights movement intensified along with the increasingly militant Black Power movement, the sexual revolution and early feminism movement transformed gender roles, and the unstoppable popularity of psychedelic drugs and rock music (the musical Hair opened on Broadway that month) created an unbridgeable chasm of a generation gap. All of these movements for social change—including the conservative counterrevolutionaries—were out in full force on the Columbia campus that April.

University president Grayson Kirk “was a walking anachronism,” says Paul Cronin, editor of the new, definitive book on the Columbia student uprising, A Time to Stir: Columbia ‘68. “He was clueless and unresponsive to the attitudes, needs, and demands of his students.” It turns out that Kirk and his board of trustees, members of New York’s corporate and media elites, were as out of touch with youth culture as President Lyndon Johnson and his F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was so threatened by what he saw at Columbia that, in May, he ordered his agency to initiate a secret counter-intelligence program, 2,000 F.B.I. agents strong, aimed at anti-war demonstrators and the New Left.

Not since the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964–65 had a campus of a major university been shut down by its students. The student rumblings of 1968 started in February, when two black South Carolina State University students, protesting a segregated bowling alley, were shot and killed by state troopers in Orangeburg. (A third young black man, a high school student, was also killed, as he waited to walk his mother home from work.) In March, students at the historically black Howard University, in Washington, D.C., staged a four-day protest and sit-in. But Columbia captured the attention of the nation because of its stature as an Ivy League college situated in the media capital of the world. The protest was so large (720 students arrested), it lasted so long (a week of building occupations, followed by a month-long strike), and the police reaction was so brutal and bloody, that it was seared into the national conscience.

As tens of thousands of high-school students all over the country organize demonstrations demanding gun-control reform from politicians in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, we may now be witnessing the first full-fledged American student protest movement since the late 60s. “I got chills when I heard Emma GonzΓ‘lez speak about her generation’s fledgling movement to stop gun violence,” said former ‘68 Barnard/Columbia Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) activist Nancy Biberman. A lifelong housing and social-justice advocate in the Bronx, Biberman is heartened by the new wave of protest that has roused high-school students from decades of apathy. “Imagine that a student movement might emerge again and play a catalyzing role in ending the slaughter of innocent people.”
Our young people, in disturbing numbers, appear to reject all forms of authority, from whatever source derived, and they have taken refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destruction. I know of no time in our history when the gap between the generations has been wider or more potentially dangerous.

Columbia University president Grayson Kirk, April 12, 1968

Dear Grayson, . . . You call for order and respect for authority; we call for justice, freedom, and socialism. There is only one thing left to say. It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”

Yours for freedom, Mark [Rudd] April 22, 1968
More.

Citizen's Righteous Rant Defending 2nd Amendment Goes Viral:

From Nice Deb, at Pajamas:


Friday, April 6, 2018

Trump Administration Imposes New Sanctions on Russia

This is all over Memeorandum, from the Treasury Department, "Treasury Designates Russian Oligarchs, Officials, and Entities in Response to Worldwide Malign Activity."

And at LAT, "Trump administration announces Russia sanctions for 'attacks to subvert Western democracies'":

The Trump administration on Friday announced new sanctions against seven Russian oligarchs, 12 companies and 17 senior government officials for a variety of acts, including what one official called “attacks to subvert Western democracies.”

“Russian oligarchs and elites who profit from this corrupt system will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their government’s destabilizing activities.” Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said in a news release.

Mnuchin criticized the Russian government for engaging in “a range of malign activity around the globe, including continuing to occupy Crimea and instigate violence in eastern Ukraine, supplying the Assad regime with material and weaponry as they bomb their own civilians, attempting to subvert Western democracies, and malicious cyber activities.”

President Trump has spoken of his desire to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and has at times spoken warmly of him, but he has also insisted his administration has been tough on the regime...

Migration is Baloney

Seen on Twitter:


When Leftists Take Off the Mask

Seen on Twitter. Just wow.


John F. Cogan, The High Cost of Good Intentions

At Amazon, John F. Cogan, The High Cost of Good Intentions: A History of U.S. Federal Entitlement Programs.



Nice Legs

Seen on Twitter:


Nasim Aghdam Was Angry Over YouTube 'Apocalyspe'

At LAT, "Woman suspected of opening fire at YouTube had battled against platform":


The website is a catalog of a woman's passion for animal rights and her anger at YouTube.

She complains of "close-minded" YouTube employees suppressing her page views and stifling her content. She gripes about a lack of revenue.

"Youtube filtered my channels to keep them from getting views!" she wrote on the site, which includes videos promoting veganism and photos of a woman in an array of outfits, including long gowns and a camouflage unitard. She speaks in Persian and Turkish.

"There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!"

It's the website investigators are looking at as they try to piece together the motive of a woman — identified as Nasim Najafi Aghdam, 39 — who stormed onto YouTube's sprawling San Bruno, Calif., campus with a 9-millimeter handgun and opened fire in a courtyard during lunchtime, wounding three people before turning the gun on herself.

The eruption of gun violence Tuesday in Silicon Valley hit a nation still reeling from recent mass shootings and gripped by a tense gun control debate.

"This is a terrible day in the United States, when once again we have a multiple-casualty situation," said Dr. Andre Campbell, a trauma surgeon at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, which is treating victims.

The shooting left a 36-year-old man in critical condition, a 32-year-old woman with serious injuries and a 27-year-old woman in fair condition. A fourth person suffered an ankle injury while fleeing.

In a tweet, President Trump thanked law enforcement and first responders, and said: "Our thoughts and prayers are with everybody involved."

Law enforcement sources told The Times they initially believed the shooting was a domestic incident, but San Bruno police said late Tuesday there's "no evidence" the shooter knew the victims or targeted specific people. Investigators are now focusing on the alleged shooter's grudge against YouTube.

The YouTube account tied to the website was shut down "due to multiple or severe violations" of the company's policies against spam, deceptive practices and misleading content. But it's unclear exactly when.

The website investigators are probing, titled "Nasime Sabz," translates in Persian to, "Nasim the green." YouTube videos created by an account of the same name can no longer be viewed, but the site also features videos from other sources criticizing YouTube's policies, as well as clips promoting animal rights and veganism. Instagram and Facebook accounts listed on the website were deactivated Tuesday.

Aghdam was quoted in the Los Angeles Times in 2009, speaking at an animal rights protest outside Camp Pendleton.

"For me animal rights equals human rights," said Aghdam, who at the time worked as a construction company office manager. "Just because they can't talk doesn't mean we should take advantage of them."

About two weeks ago, Aghdam vented to her family that YouTube stopped compensating her for her videos, her father told the Bay Area News Group.

Ismail Aghdam said that the family had called police to report his daughter missing Monday because she hadn't answered her phone for two days. He said he had told police she might be going to YouTube because she "hated" the company.

Police in Mountain View, Calif., say they spotted a woman who went by the name Nasim Aghdam asleep in a car in a city parking lot early Tuesday morning and notified her family.

The first reports of a shooting came in to San Mateo County dispatchers before 1 p.m.

Zach Vorhies, a senior software engineer, was sitting at his desk on YouTube's campus when he heard the fire alarm blaring.

He grabbed his electric skateboard and hurried toward an exit. Outside, he heard yelling. On a patio where tech workers often grab lunch, he saw a man lying motionless on his back, blood staining his shirt. As he stared, a police officer with an assault rifle popped through a nearby gate.

Vorhies skateboarded away.

He was one of hundreds of YouTube employees whose workday was thrown into chaos as panic spread across the technology hub south of San Francisco.

"I thought, 'This is a mass casualty event,'" said Vorhies, 37. "I was terrified."

Some employees in a meeting heard rumbling and thought there had been an earthquake. It seemed serious, not just a standard emergency drill. As they moved toward an exit, they heard that someone had a gun.

"I looked down and saw blood drips on the floor and stairs," Todd Sherman, a product manager for YouTube tweeted. After peeking around for threats, he headed down the stairs and out the front of the building.

Police in tactical vests, helmets and rifles swarmed the campus soon after, coming upon a chaotic scene as workers ran from the area. Television footage showed people filing away with their hands up...
Still more.

Lais Ribeiro Turns Up the Heat (VIDEO)

At Sports Illustrated Swimsuit:



Thursday, April 5, 2018

ICYMI: W. August Mayer, Islamic Jihad, Cultural Marxism, and the Transformation of the West

At Amazon, W. August Mayer, Islamic Jihad, Cultural Marxism, and the Transformation of the West.



William J. Murray, Utopian Road to Hell

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, William J. Murray, Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World With Central Planning.



Erick Erickson on the Cultural Revolution

At RCP, "The American Cultural Revolution":
Kevin Williamson has been fired by The Atlantic. Williamson is one of the great conservative intellectuals of our times. He has a keen wit and frequently engages in heterodox opinions that make his writing and thinking intriguing. For a decade he wrote at William F. Buckley's National Review until hired away last week by Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor of The Atlantic.

The Atlantic fancies itself a place of intellectual diversity where the best writers across ideologies can share their views. But Williamson's hire drew burning rage from the left. Williamson's birth came from an unplanned pregnancy. Instead of aborting him, his birth mother gave him up for adoption. As you might imagine, Williamson has strongly held views on the matter of abortion. A week after hiring him, Jeffrey Goldberg bowed to the leftwing mob and fired Williamson for, in part, how he might make the pro-abortion women in the office feel.

Never mind Williamson's feelings on abortion and that he could have been aborted himself, the editor took the brave stand of worrying about the hypothetical feelings of pro-abortion women in the office. The left told us that the purges happening on college campuses were contained to the campus. Yet here we are today with one of the best voices of conservatism fired from a job for his conservative views.

It will only get worse...
Keep reading.

And on Twitter:


Newt Gingrich on the Cultural Civil War (VIDEO)

At Fox News:



Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Amy Chua, Political Tribes

*BUMPED.*

I've been reading fiction almost exclusively, but there's some excellent non-fiction works coming out. I'll have to shift gears a little.

This looks awesome!

At Amazon, Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.