The Fall of Piers Morgan

You can read the entire analysis, or you can cut to the chase: "To put it more succinctly, Piers Morgan is a supercilious tosser."  (The inimitable Jeremy Clarkson would agree, I think.)

Bawl-ympics: NBC Hits New Low with Emotional Abuse

You know, I didn't post on this last night because my Olympic-viewing buddies and I were in a complete frothing, cursing rage, and I thought it would be better to wait until this morning and see if I were any less mad before commenting.

NOPE.

The crew and I were furious last night when we all sent nasty messages and tweets to NBC, and we're still furious.  We're talking about NBC's unacceptable treatment of skier Bode Miller. I refuse to link to NBC itself, but sports blogs are all over this, aside from Twitter, which had a meltdown.

NBC seemed bound and determined to hound Miller until he broke down on camera ... and when he did, they still followed him like a flock of voyeuristic vultures.  It was absolutely disgusting to see this pack of heartless ratings-grubbers openly exploit a man's raw grief over the death of his brother.  It was abusive.  It was wrong.

Miller took the high road and tweeted this:

I appreciate everyone sticking up for me. Please be gentle w christin cooper, it was crazy emotional and not all her fault. #heatofthemoment
— Bode Miller (@MillerBode) February 17, 2014

I beg to differ. It was her fault, and it was NBC's fault for making this sort of thing acceptable, and it was NBC's fault again for choosing to broadcast this interview over and over.  SCREW THIS HORRIBLE NETWORK.

But lest we all forget the really important part: Congratulations, Bode, on your bronze medal and making skiing history!

PS: See too this point.

Quote of the Day: Green Purges Are Still Purges

It's the desire to purge that should worry us immediately, no?  This news piece just reinforces my conviction that a lot of these Greenie/lefty folks are crypto-tyrants constrained only by the puniness of their actual power:

Imagine if there were a campaign to sack every senior government adviser who didn’t believe in God. There’d be outrage, and rightly so. Purging politicos from power on the basis of their private beliefs, on the grounds of what lurks in their conscience, would be seen as an intolerable assault on freedom of thought. 

Well, the Green Party is proposing just such an assault on senior government advisers – not on the basis of whether they believe in God but on the basis of whether they accept the climate-change consensus.

Nerd News: Hahvahd Student Arrested for Bomb Hoax

So is this guy a bigger idiot than he is a dirtbag? Tough call.  Apparently he wanted to get out of taking his final exams.  SCREW YOU, MAN.  Suck it up and do it like the rest of us.

UPDATE: Quote of the day about this:

“I don't think any lawyer in the world could save him at this point,” said Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who predicted Kim will plead guilty.

Nerd News: Idiotic Opinion Is Idiotic

This opinion is aggressively stupid.  James Taranto explains why.  You know, I'm getting sick of people mouthing off about public education and being self-righteous, bullying idiots about it.  This latest ... effluence reminds me of how pretty-faced Hollywood numbskull Matt Damon went on and on about how we need to support public schools and then promptly (of course) put his own kids in some posh private school (quelle surprise).

Cheerios and Interracial Families

I totally didn't understand the controversy.  It's an adorable ad.  The family in it had a black dad and a white mom.  SO WHAT?  But apparently some jerks got their undies in a bunch about it online.  So here's the backlash to the backlash: the reminder that hey, interracial families exist.  Thank you: this has been your public service announcement.  In fact, a whole bunch of my friends have married someone of another race and are raising gorgeous interracial families.  Love should be color-blind.  Shall we also bring up the related topic of interracial adoptions?  Don't be a hater, man.

Captain Shirk: Francesco Schettino Now On Trial

Schettino, you'll recall, is the despicable captain of the Costa Concordia.  Yes, the captain who abandoned his ship, crew, and passengers when it capsized.  (Remember this?)  The dirtbag is now on trial for manslaughter.

How Not To Combat A Stereotype

Protip: If you're angry about people thinking you're violent, then maybe you shouldn't express yourself by blowing people up.

Nerd Notes: Naughty and Nice in Academia

My advice: Don't be a jerk, even if other people are.

Rant: Ma Ying-jeou Is A Dirtbag

We all already knew that, but it's cathartic occasionally to say so.

Hello Kitty Monstrosity of the Day: 5-Year-Old Girl Criminal

I yield to nobody in my hatred of the mouthless cartoon cat, but this news item is insane.  The monstrosity this time isn't a Hello Kitty-themed object but the behavior of "adults" who should know better.  Headline: "Pennsylvania kindergartener uses Hello Kitty bubble-gun at school, suspended for 'terrorist threat.'"  

A threat? It's a pink plastic toy that makes soap bubbles, for goodness sake!  The little girl's parents are considering a lawsuit.

Quote of the Day: Greenie Hysteria

Heh:

... the habit of reading every warm spike and every storm as fresh confirmation of the coming apocalypse needs to stop. It’s bad science and it’s bad politics. Green hysteria is more likely to paralyze us then help us take the kind of steps we need to take towards sustainability. 

The gravest danger to Earth these days isn’t climate skepticism; it’s the broken, Malthusian and statist green policy imagination. Wedded to grandiose and unworkable “solutions”, greens feel they must push the panic button at every opportunity to stampede the world into embracing an unworkable and unsustainable policy agenda.

Well, I don't feel the urge to panic and adopt a Stone Age lifestyle if the New York Times is shutting down its environment desk and if Al Gore, that blowhard high priest of the Green religion, feels it's OK to sell out to Al Jazeera for a sweet, sweet personal profit of $100 million.  

Schadenfreude, Straight Up

Yes indeedy.  Kudos to Ben Shapiro.  Piers Morgan and his ilk get the "dirtbag du jour" tag.  I make it a matter of standard practice not to give Morgan and his bullying, intellectually dishonest, attention-whoring, gutter-media kind any time on my blog, but Shapiro's performance is too gorgeous to let pass in silence.  

What Fresh Hell Is This? Email Privacy

Oh yeah, I'm sure this is going to turn out frickin' awesome:

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.

UPDATE: Given universal outrage, Leahy backs off. Good.

Japanese Athletes and the Beijing Marathon

Really? Really?  Petty, stupid dirtbaggery is petty and stupid.  

In Flagrante: Scandal and Skulduggery

Having trouble keeping up with all this?  Me too. 4 thoughts:

• Lance Armstrong, David Petraeus, and now Elmo?
• L'affaire Petraeus gets stranger and stranger to the point that ...
• This is now a headline: "CIA Director David Petraeus Is The Only Sane Person In His Own Sex Scandal."
• Something from history: Allen Dulles as comparison.  

UPDATE 1: So ... Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelley, David Petraeus, some FBI agent, General John Allen, all muddled up with military and security concerns.  One gloriously snarky wag just quipped: "It's not a love triangle. It's a love Pentagon."

UPDATE 2: The Onion strikes again with this fake headline: "Nation Horrified To Learn About War In Afghanistan While Reading Up On Petraeus Sex Scandal."

UPDATE 3: How bad is this train wreck?  Professor Drezner has gotten sucked in and is watching this mess as if it were a soap opera.  Yup:

Look, let's be blunt -- as a responsible foreign policy blogger, I should be trying to divert your attention away from the tawdriness that is the David Petraeus scandal.  There's no shortage of other interesting stuff happening in the world.  Things like Argentina's slow-moving debt debacle, or the discord between the EU and IMF over Greece, or even the possibility of the United States overtaking Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil producer.  

The thing is, I can't, I just can't.  I'm weak, and the way this scandal has metastasized is friggin' incredible. 

What the hell.  If you're going to watch, you might as well call in some pizza!

FREE ADVICE: Don't send stupid emails. Especially (a) do not send threatening emails to some other girl if you yourself are indulging in some big-time double-adultery, and (b) do not send 30,000 emails to whomever you're carrying on a fling with.  (Still, 30,000 emails?)  

RELATED: The Secret Service's not-so-secret services.  Insta-Prof - um- nails it.

Like Hormonal Middle Schoolers in Health Class

A sizable percentage of people in the Obama campaign is apparently obsessed with the birds and the bees.  From the DNC's weird morphing into LadyPartsFest and Birth Control-a-Palooza to the Lena Dunham "voting = sex" video to this fresh and completely creepy statement by David Axelrod, the evidence seems (to me, anyway) incontrovertible that these folks are not just crude and vulgar but unserious and desperately immature. What the heck is wrong with these people?  I mean, come on.  Oh, and Axelrod?  Here's some free advice, dude: Never ever say the word "loins" in public.  Like, EVER.

UPDATE: I just had another thought.  You know the term "NSFW" that you usually see attached to ... ah ... rather provocative images?  It applies perfectly to the Obama camp too!  It really is NOT SAFE FOR WORK.  Just look at the economy!  Unemployment figures!  

Politicizing Sandy

It started almost immediately. Ugh!  I suggest that you round up everybody who's engaging in this skulduggery and put them to work doing hurricane relief.  It might teach them some humility.

Totalitarian Communism Loses Another Useful Idiot

My opinion of historian and unrepentant Communist cheerleader and apologist Eric Hobsbawm is a matter of public record here.  Two weeks ago he shuffled off this mortal coil, and I didn't bother saying good riddance.  Still, here's an interesting little piece wondering whether you can be both a good historian and a Stalinist.  I think the real issue is how so many people didn't think that Hobsbawm's Communist totalitarian sympathies mattered.  Imagine, if you will, if he were an unrepentant Nazi apologist or Holocaust denier.  Nobody respectable in his august academic circles would dream of giving him the time of day ... well, almost nobody.

Nerd News: Iran Bans Women From College Courses

INFURIATING.