Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 33

Great Moments in Law Enforcement

Seniors in Teaneck, New Jersey, engage in massive school prank/petty vandalism. Fifteen law-enforcement agencies (including K-9 units) respond.

It’s enough to make you wonder how the United States ever functioned in the lawless bygone days of, oh, 1990.

Those MIT kids were lucky the law didn’t SWAT teams and snipers weren’t around.

Santino. WFB. Juicevox Mafia.

As a friend of mine delicately put it over email, OH MY GOD!

I don’t want to spoil it for you, so just go. Go. GO.

 

 

 

 

 

Disclaimer: The images you are about to see are merely historical recreations of what might have transpired based on meticulous research and the public record.

Francis Is Magic!

From Peggy Noonan:

Everyone keeps talking about the Francis Effect. The pope has captured the world’s imagination with his warmth, apparent merriness and palpable affection for those who are poor and imprisoned, in whatever way—jail, loneliness, illness, disability. An American cardinal smiles and shakes his head when he tells me that nowadays his seminaries are full.

Boy, that really is some effect. Francis assumed the throne of Peter on March 13, 2013 and just 13 months later, the “seminaries are full.” This suggests three possibilities:

(1) The Francis Effect is so powerful that within weeks of his ascension, a generation of young men suddenly decided to enter the priesthood because of him.

(2) A rising wave of vocations has been nurtured and seeded in the American Church by other, hardline, pontiffs who led the Church for the vast majority of these young men’s lives.

(3) Or, once again you have Catholics who should know better talking nonsense.

If there was a Francis Effect, it wouldn’t be hard to measure. Look at Church attendance year over year, from March 2012 to March 2013 and so on. Do the same thing with giving. Then look to enrollment in the vocations, numbers of baptisms, etc.

The fact that no one touting the Francis Effect actually shows any of these elementary numbers is pretty suggestive.

Update: Rod Dreher notes a particularly silly tweet from Pope Francis, who may or may not be angling to become the patron saint of Vox Dot Com.

And remember, I’m one of the bleeding hearts who thinks that “inequality” is a real problem.

The Public Discourse and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Yesterday the good folks at the Public Discourse published an uncharacteristically foolish essay by Brandeis grad student (and Islamic-convert) Celene Ayat Ibrahim-Lizzio, which takes the side of Brandeis and criticizes Ayaan Hirsi Ali for lacking a sufficiently “nuanced” view of the world in general, and Islam in particular.

As Galley Friend X put it:

[The Ibrahmi-Lizzio piece] was gross for a number of reasons–not least of which was that the Public Discourse was adopting a “free speech has consequences” view that they really don’t want to be adopting.  (“Brandon Eich could not be reached for comment.”)

There is something very rich about the girl who converted while living life’s lottery at Princeton lecturing Ali about how her position is insufficiently nuanced. I guess Ali missed the nuanced exegesis of the Imam in the Hague who prayed for her to get mouth cancer. Or she overlooked the critical-gender Sharia analysis of the Imam in Pittsburgh who said she should be sent to an Islamic country and beheaded for her apostasy. Those American Muslim communities are so diverse!

Google Glass and Breastfeeding

In a move that is surely designed for no purpose other than getting gullible press, Google Glass announced that it now has an app to help new mothers who are having trouble with breastfeeding.

What’s the over-under on the total number of Glass users who are new mothers?

I’ll start the line at five.

Mike Russell on Creativity

Go for the long memo, stay for the sprezzatura.

This would make for an excellent college commencement address.

Bryan Singer, Fox, Double and Triple Standards

You may have heard that after years of whispered rumors concerning Bryan Singer’s unpleasant behavior toward young fellows, he’s now being sued for abusing a teenage boy who says that contemporaneous reports were made to the LAPD, but were dismissed without investigation. This is pretty serious stuff! If a priest were accused of this sort of thing, we would hope the Church would rush in and DO SOMETHING! Though of course we would all presume that the priest was innocent the way we presume that Singer is innocent. (After all, if Singer wasn’t innocent, surely he wouldn’t be filing a countersuit.)

Fortunately for Singer, the studio handling his latest film, has declared that whatever did or did not happen is really just a “personal matter” that they have no intention of addressing.

Which is absolutely the right thing to do. Singer’s personal behavior in this case has no bearing on his ability to serve Fox’s business interests or work within the community.

We should hope, however, that Singer has been put on on warning. Because if the discovery process finds that he gave money to Proposition 8, there’s going to be hell to pay. You can only expect society to tolerate so much.

Duke Lax Redux

Two great reviews are out today concerning William Cohan’s re-revisionist account of the Duke lacrosse rape fabrications of eight years ago. See the great Peter Berkowitz here and the great Stuart Taylor here.

Both pieces are entirely convincing and we can stipulate that the bum-rush of Duke professors and administration to vilify the Duke players was, as Jackie Childs might put it, pernicious, outrageous, contagious. The conduct of district attorney Mike Nifong was every worse–not merely criminal, but the type of abusive use of state power that ought to scare the bejeezus out of every American and, when uncovered, be punished in the severest possible manner. (Anyone sympathetic in the least to Nifong ought to consider how exactly analogous his conduct was to the behavior of police who plant evidence, trump up charges, or unlawfully detain citizens–the type of thing the left normally abhors.)

That said, I’ve never quite been able to shake the sense that the Duke lacrosse players themselves were/are deeply unappealing as a cause. Here’s Berkowitz:

Even in Cohan’s unfriendly account — and in sharp contrast to their accusers and condemners — the lacrosse players and their dismissed coach comported themselves throughout the ordeal with honor and dignity.

Well, maybe. They may have comported themselves with honor and dignity in every moment after they were falsely accused of rape and pursued by the state. Which is to say, after they were placed under constant adult supervision and had an army of lawyers and supporters rally to their sides expending large amounts of money to protect them. That’s not nothing–but you can’t really imagine a situation in which they wouldn’t have been on their very best behavior. The prospect of hanging concentrating the mind and all that.

But before they were falsely accused of rape? They were at a bacchanal where they got stupid drunk. They hired strippers to come and degrade themselves perform for their amusement. When the strippers got surly, they responded with the sort of uncouth behavior which suggests that they were supremely aware of the social gulf between them and the women they had hired.

Look, at Gene says in a somewhat similar context in the movie Layercake, boys will boys. I get that. I went to college, too. But a university setting in which students can indulge in this sort of behavior without either (a) thinking it’s outside the norm or (b) worrying that they have to get to class, do some problem sets, you know, not fail out seems to be pretty messed up. If you can party like the Duke guys at college, then your college has clearly given you way too much free time. As I’ve suggested elsewhere, there’s an easy way to put all of this stuff to a stop: it’s called the C-curve.

But that criticism of the university project is separate from the observation that, when confronted with this scandalous amount of free time, the Duke players did not behave with an ounce of charity, respect, grace, or gratitude–either toward their fellow man or for the luxuries which had been gifted them. Nobody deserves to be falsely accused of rape. But not every man falsely accused of rape is a good guy.

It would be nice if, in the course of prosecuting a dangerous figure such as Mike Nifong, we could refrain from romanticizing his victims.

Understanding Cliven Bundy

John Hinderaker has a nuanced and perceptive analysis of the Bundy Ranch stand-off which should be persuasive to pretty much everyone in America, left, right, and center.

Ultimate Warrior, RIP–Updated

I was never an Ultimate Warrior guy. Actually, I was just about the opposite: The cresting of the Ultimate Warrior’s run in the WWF coincided with me turning away from wrestling. I don’t know why, exactly. For me, he felt like Poochie–a product being foisted on the audience in a transparent attempt to freshen up the franchise with an eye towards a post-Hogan future. And he just didn’t do anything for me either in the ring or on the mic. The whole gimmick felt forced.

But that’s just me. Friends of mine today who were just a shade younger loved the Warrior. He hit them at exactly the time wrestling loomed largest in their lives. For them, he wasn’t an arriviste. He was a legend.

In any case, it’s bizarre and sad for Jim Hellwig to have died a day or so after being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame and appearing in the ring to give his speech. Bizarre enough that my first reaction was to suspect it might be a work. (And my third reaction, was to briefly consider if the entire HoF induction might have been a trap Vince set to lure the Warrior out of the shadows and finish him!)

Update: For example, Galley Relative X, who’s about five years younger than me, sends in the following:

Circa 5th grade, I wrote a “story” for writing class that was about . . . wait for it . . . WWF wrestling stars taking part in the writing of the Declaration of Independence. The relevant point: at one point in the story the hero–The Ultimate Warrior–was running from door to door in ol’ Boston warning people that “The Henan Family is Coming!  The Henan Family is Coming!” Needless to say, he saved the day.