Jay Nordlinger on the overamplification of American life:

You'll be in a little restaurant with a flat roof. Say it's by the sea. A small musical ensemble will be setting up. You are probably looking forward to it. And then they use enough amplification to fill Yankee Stadium, and maybe the entire Bronx.

Why? Don't they realize they're in a little seaside restaurant with a flat roof? Why do they need any amplification at all? And why don't patrons rise up and say, "No!"?

Part 1 and Part 2

DALLAS POLICE SHOOT UNARMED WHITE MAN - WHITE TEXANS PROTEST BY GOING TO WORK

The shooting of the unarmed white man has the entire Dallas white community enraged. To protest, thousands of Texans got up early and went to work today. Some of the more angry protesters made a point of being a few minutes late to the office.

Local secretary Laurie Johnson said: "No overtime, no peace! Hey hey, ho ho, it's 5 o'clock and I have to go.to pick up the kids from soccer practice."

Former AP correspondent Matti Friedman notes the over-coverage of news from Israel:

The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives-that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America's safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.

News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.

Jim Geraghty makes an interesting observation:

If you live outside of a troubled, poor community with failing schools, broken homes, high crime rates, few jobs or other economic opportunities, racial tensions, and high crime rates, you may have noticed that you are the eternal scapegoat.

If you notice the problems of these communities and discuss them, you're demonizing the residents and fear-mongering. If you ignore them, you're sweeping them under the rug and guilty of malign neglect.

If you make recommendations about how to solve the problems in these communities, you're condescending and fail to understand the "root causes" of the problems there. If you move into these communities, you're part of the gentrification process, driving up housing prices and driving out the poorer residents, culturally supplanting and replacing what came before.

As Kevin D. Williamson noted, the only individuals who seem to escape blame for the conditions of America's poorest, most crime-ridden, opportunity-deprived, and despairing communities are the elected officials who actually govern these communities.

Thank goodness! Now we can make sure our Cheerios purchase is politically correct! Jim Treacher at the Daily Caller found this app:

Enter Matthew Colbert, a former campaign and Hill staffer, who has built a new app for smartphones that allows users to scan the barcode of products in the grocery store and immediately find out what political party the company and its employees support. [...]

The goal of the company, he said, is make "every day Election Day" through "spending choices."

Or, as Jim says, "That is, unless there's something I really want or need anyway. In that case, I'll just buy it, because I'm not a miserable leftist who can't even make a food run without turning it into a goddamn political statement."

Jay Nordlinger: "(I)f you waited to play golf until Islamists stopped chopping the heads off innocents, there would be no golf."

Ian Tuttle says "Feminists have made feminism frivolous."

For all of its convention-flouting, glass-ceiling-shattering exhibitionism, contemporary feminism has not served to individuate and personalize; it has served to create a yattering mob of indistinguishable activists whose defining characteristic is their obsession with their own genitalia.

And now memorizing The Vagina Monologues and dismissing as "a**holes" males who watch Family Guy is the intellectual output of an advanced scholar at a major university.

Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven take down Hamas:

What the world never gets is the full picture of Hamas. There is very little in the media about what Hamas is, what it has been, and what it wants to become. There is very little about its vision of the world - its vision of the future for the people of Gaza.

What we know is only that it doesn't believe in a future for Israel.

If that context were provided, the world would know that the battle in Gaza is not a land dispute, or a battle of moral equivalents. The ongoing battle in Gaza is not a case of the Hatfields and the McCoys, a senseless blood feud over a patch of land that, over the years, just goes on for no good reason.

This is a battle between good and evil, the battle in Gaza - and the battle throughout the Middle East. It's a battle between modernity and religious feudalism. Between freedom and totalitarianism. Between moderate Muslims and extremists hell-bent on imposing their will on the majority of peaceful followers of Allah.

Check out ESPN "commentator" Colin Cowherd's moronic rant:

ESPN's Colin Cowherd partially blamed what he described as NASCAR's southern "eye-for-an-eye culture" for the tragic death of driver Kevin Ward Jr., who was run over by three-time champion Tony Stewart Saturday at the Canandaigua Motorsport Park dirt track. [...]

Saying NASCAR had a "unique culture" that was almost exclusively a "southern delicacy," the ESPN host linked the sport's emphasis on displays of masculine aggression to what he said was the "eye-for-an-eye" culture of the South . . .

So, in summary here's Cowherd's thesis: Tony Stewart, a race car driver from Columbus, Indiana accidently hits Kevin Ward Jr, a race car driver from Port Leyden, New York at the Canandaigua Motorsports Park in upstate New York at about the same latitude as London, Ontario. And somehow this is symptomatic of the "culture of the South." I wonder what Cowherd would have said if Stewart had been driving an Indy car or a Formula 1 car.

Update: Daniel Flynn, writing at Breitbart, noticed the same thing:

But it's still silly to blame the South for New Yorker Kevin Ward Jr.'s death under a Hoosier's wheel in the Finger Lakes region of the Empire State. All serious people know it's George W. Bush's fault.