HOW OBAMA & THE LEFT VIEW ISRAEL & THE JEWS IN ONE PARAGRAPH: “If you haven’t heard about this murdered American. If you wonder why the butchering of this peace activist and civil rights warrior’s has not produced outrage, it’s because for all the good [Richard Lakin] has done, he committed the ultimate crime. He dared to be a Jew on a bus in Israel. His crime is was his very existence and as far as today’s left and this president is concerned, that is unpardonable.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, SHAMELESS HYPOCRISY EDITION: University wants due process for itself, but not its male students.
The University of Virginia and Virginia Democrats lobbied the Education Department to provide the school due process, something not afforded to its own students.
Specifically, the university wanted due process and fair treatment from the Education Department as it investigated the school for violations of the anti-gender discrimination law known as Title IX. But when the school conducts Title IX investigations of students accused of sexual assault, such due process is nowhere to be found.
It’s a clear case of “due process for me, but not for thee.”
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, urged the department to be fair to the school, fearing that the university would be denied “very basic requirements of due process.” He also worried about an “unfair or unjust process,” according to documents obtained by the Washington Post.
Two other state Democrats, Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, also pleaded with the department and asked that it give McAuliffe’s concerns “careful consideration.” As these top Democrats were making their case, the university itself requested fairness.
It’s easy to see why the politicians and school officials thought the investigation would not be conducted fairly. At one point, the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which oversees Title IX investigations, drafted a resolution agreement for university officials to sign. This agreement is a commitment from the school to overhaul its policies and procedures relating to sexual assault, sexual harassment and other Title IX-related accusations.
The thing is, according to U.Va. President Teresa Sullivan, the agreement was sent for signing before the school even knew the results of the investigation. How was the school supposed to update its policies if it didn’t even know what it was doing wrong?
While OCR appeared to be playing a game of “gotcha,” it is rich that Sullivan, U.Va. administrators and Democratic politicians were harping about due process and fairness. . . .
And then there’s Sullivan. This is the woman who throughout the Rolling Stone gang-rape debacle treated the accused fraternity as guilty, even after she acknowledged that the story was false. She punished the fraternity even when she knew all along that the accusation in Rolling Stone was false. See, Sullivan had access to the report from the accuser in that story. She knew it was a lie all along, yet when the story came out, she rushed to punish the fraternity. She maintained that facade even as the story crumbled.
Tar. Feathers.
ED MORRISSEY: Collapsing Obamacare Co-ops Signal Big Trouble to Come. It was a lousy program, rammed through by Democrats via abuse of procedure on a party-line vote. Now it’s failing. And the press will try to blame Republicans when it does. . . .
A JOURNALISM STUDENT RESPONDS TO A JOURNALISM DEAN’S BOGUS REPORT: My response to Dorothy Bland’s column, “I was caught ‘walking while black:’”
I believe Dorothy Bland fabricated the situation into something that it never was and certainly never intended to be. The dash cam video shows the cordial interactions and between two Corinth police officers and Dorothy. They simply bring to her attention that she’s walking on the wrong side of the road impeding traffic which is a safety hazard. In the police chief’s response article Debra states, “Impeding traffic is a class C misdemeanor, and it is our policy to ask for identification from people we encounter for this type of violation.” The police officers had valid reasoning for all their actions. The issue wasn’t race. The issue was Ms. Bland walking in the street vulnerable to being hit by a vehicle that she would’ve never seen coming.
I am not blind to the fact that racial profiling happens on a daily basis in this country. It absolutely happens, and it’s a sad reality. Dorothy’s reaction to this could very well be fueled by all the incidents that legitimately depict racial profiling, but her case seems like a desperate plea for attention. As a prominent leader who represents UNT I would expect Dorothy to respect the officers enough to know they were merely protecting her. The dash cam footage shows nothing but a polite interaction, which is far from the column she wrote for the Dallas Morning News. . . . I’m not sure what will happen next but as a journalism student I’m agitated that Dorothy holds the position of our dean. After the way she’s handled herself, she is undeserving of the title. Although she’s bringing poor attention to my university, I will not let her discredit the degree I worked so hard for.
It advanced a preferred Democratic narrative, so it’s “journalism” enough.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: ObamaCare Is Dead.
ROLL CALL: CQ Roll Call Survey Finds House GOP Staff Deeply Skeptical of Own Leadership. “The Republicans’ House majority, 246 strong, is the biggest the GOP has enjoyed since 1929. But House Republican aides stand apart from their counterparts in the Democratic Party and in the Senate in their skepticism about party leaders, a new CQ Roll Call survey of Hill staff members shows.”
Well, Republicans everywhere — including the grassroots Tea Party folks who provided that majority — are skeptical, too. It’ll be up to Paul Ryan — and those he leads — to prove that skepticism unfounded.
GOT TO LAUGH TO KEEP FROM CRYING: Semi-retired president now experimenting as stand-up comedian to mask his own failures.
It’s a show about a show about nothing — sort of like the later series of Seinfeld episodes telling the fictitious story about how its pilot was picked up by NBC.
ONE OF THESE HEADLINES IS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS:
—The London Daily Mail, April 22nd, 2014.
● Qatar’s foreign domestic workers subjected to slave-like conditions.
—The London Guardian, February 26, 2014.
● In Qatar Speech, Michelle Obama Complains About Growing Up as a Girl in America.
—The Weekly Standard, yesterday.
THAT’S BECAUSE WE LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE “STYLISH” AND “LEFTY” ARE PRESUMED TO BE SYNONYMS: Margaret Thatcher: Not Stylish Enough For the Victoria and Albert Museum.
SOMEBODY SABOTAGE THE HVAC AT EPA HEADQUARTERS: Gina McCarthy Is Coming For Your Air Conditioners.
Seriously, pranksters with a sense of humor could have a lot of fun with the eco-hypocrites.
CHANGE: Four Years After Complaining About Romney’s Wealth, MSM Now Obsessed with Rubio’s Lack of It.
Lack of wealth? My god, the man owns a motorboat — for the racially-obsessed MSM, that practically makes Rubio a Miami Vice character.
Speaking of which, the Federalist charts 6 Of The Most Racist Things The Media Has Said About Marco Rubio.
They’re going to need a lot more server space by the time 2016 rolls around — and infinitely more if Rubio wins the nomination and the presidency.
“OUTSIDE THE NEIGHBORHOOD HITLER STORE, GAZA MANNEQUINS DISPLAY THE LATEST MUST-HAVE FASHION ACCESSORY FOR PALESTINIAN YOUNGSTERS – KNIVES.”
Such lovely people. I can’t understand why anyone would think they’re in any way anti-Semitic.
Incidentally, how close is the Hitler Store to Gaza’s legendary Roots Club?
THOMAS FRIEDMAN, HARDEST HIT: China Massively Undercounts the Amount of Coal It’s Been Burning.
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: White Progressives Are The New Racial Purity Police.
Woodrow Wilson, call your office.
THIS IS YOUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. THIS IS YOUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ON DRUGS: Taxpayers pay $249k to determine if monkeys on cocaine make good decisions.
But talk about wasting money — as Frank J. Fleming tweets, everybody knows the answer to this: “Monkeys on cocaine don’t make good decisions. They make GREAT decisions.”
Better than those who approved this experiment, of course.
HEALTH: Big and deadly: Major foodborne outbreaks spike sharply.
Major foodborne outbreaks in the United States have more than tripled in the last 20 years, and the germs most frequently implicated are familiar to most Americans: Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria.
In the most recent five-year period — from 2010 to 2014 — these multistate outbreaks were bigger and deadlier than in years past, causing more than half of all deaths related to contaminated food outbreaks, public health officials said Tuesday. A wide variety of foods were involved, ranging from vegetables and fresh fruits to beef and chicken. Some had never before been linked to outbreaks, such as the caramel apples, tainted with Listeria, that led to an outbreak in which seven people died and 34 were hospitalized in late 2014. . . .
CDC Director Thomas Frieden said the latest multistate outbreaks are more dangerous because they involve deadlier germs. “On average, there are about two per month, and they can be big and they can be lethal,” he said during the briefing. . . .
Imported foods accounted for 18 of the multistate outbreaks. Foods from Mexico, including mangoes and papayas, were the leading source in those events, followed by foods from Turkey such as pine nuts, tahini, and pomegranate seeds.
I’d like to see the CDC spending more time on issues like this, and less on things like gun control and playgrounds.
THE PROGRESSIVE STORY HITS A SNAG: “Try as it might, even the Communist Party of China could not make one plus zero add up to two,” Richard Fernandez writes at the Belmont Club. “This is an important factor to bear in mind for those conditioned to think Progressives will inevitably triumph, or worse, that the Republicans will stop them. It is the sheer power of reality which wins in the end. What stands in Gramsci’s way are consequences, not John Boehner.”
Read the whole thing.
ERIC S. RAYMOND: From Kafkatrap to Honeytrap. “The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a ‘women in tech’ advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.”
GPS: An Assault On Manhood? “GPS challenges one of the few remaining areas of male excellence: navigation.”
WHERE WERE THE BLACK NEUROSURGEONS IN 1915? Damon Linker: Where are all the conservative university professors?
More seriously: Higher Education is in big trouble. It can’t survive by treating half (or more) of the country as mentally defective.
EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATIC: Looking for something to be offended by? Check out Harvard Law School’s logo.
HMM: Bernie Sanders Now Says There Are ‘Valid Questions’ About Hillary’s Damn Emails. No more Mr. Nice Guy, I guess, now that she’s called him racist and sexist.
CULTURAL DIFFERENCES: Picasso’s muse sparks anger by claiming there are fewer rapes in France because women smile at wolf whistlers. “If a man whistles at you and you smile, that oils the social wheels and eases the tension between the classes and sexes … It’s a kind of give-and-take that acknowledges that the other person exists, so in that sense it’s not treating another person as an object. To take offence all the time makes every relationship disagreeable.”
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Advice To The Koch Brothers: Invest in Media, Not Politicians.
TEST DRIVE: 2016 Porsche Cayman GT4. “We didn’t think Porsche would ever build this car. It’s a Cayman with the 911’s engine for base-911 money: $85,595. Many have heralded this as fratricide. But here’s why the Grand Cayman won’t kill the 911: Not many GT4s will be made, the GT4 is manual only, and 911s sell because they are 911s.”
A GLOBAL PHENOMENON: Young People Who Can’t Afford To Be Adults.
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“IT’S THE MOST COMMON DISEASE YOU NEVER HEARD OF:” Robin Williams’ Struggle With Lewy Body Dementia.
I’M NOT SAYING THAT IT’S ALIENS. BUT IT’S ALIENS. NASA Adds to Evidence of Mysterious Ancient Earthworks.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Are you on the autistic spectrum? Take the test.
GERMAN CHURCH REMOVES SYMBOLS OF CHRISTIANITY TO MAKE MIGRANTS ‘COMFORTABLE.’
To be fair, German churches have had a lot of practice updating the various symbols from time to time when demanded by conquering hordes.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
“We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers.”
—G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, 1910.
RED-LIGHT CAMERAS AS dangerous highway distractions.
CONFUSED, ELDERLY GRAY LADY SURPRISINGLY DISAPPOINTED THAT MEN CAN’T JOIN HER IN THE LADIES’ ROOM: New York Times Throws Massive Fit over Houston Voters Rejecting Transgender Bathroom Measure.
Meanwhile, the Atlantic, which a decade ago replaced Mark Steyn with Legendary Uterus Investigative Journalist Andrew Sullivan, begins to think the unthinkable: Liberals Are Losing the Culture Wars.
Even before voters flushed Houston’s bathroom bill, David French of NRO posited, “Sorry, Social Justice Warriors: Political Correctness Has Peaked.”
Nahh — at the very most it’s merely a sitzkrieg in its endless kampf against reality.
ZIP IT: GOP STUDENTS ‘INTIMIDATED’ ON CAMPUS, SAY VIEWS LESS TOLERATED, Paul Bedard writes at the Washington Examiner:
The rise of the Tea Party and a rowdy 2016 Republican presidential primary has done little to boost conservative speech on the nation’s college campuses where right-leaning students say they feel intimidated and their views sneered at.
In a poll sponsored by Yale University’s William F. Buckley Jr. program, 800 national undergrads said that by a nearly two-to-one margin, colleges were more tolerant to liberals. Pollster Jim McLaughlin of McLaughlin & Associates, found that 37 percent felt school more tolerant of liberals views, just 20 percent of conservatives, and 36 percent equally tolerant.
And while students believed their schools do a good job to bolster intellectual diversity, half, or 49 percent, said they have “often felt intimidated to share beliefs other than their professors.” And 50 percent felt intimidated to share their thoughts with students whose views differ.
Perhaps young conservatives should consider this a preview of what to expect when they enter the Brave New Workplace of the 21st century. Particularly old media; as the late Washington Post ombudswoman Deborah Howell wrote immediately after the 2008 election, “Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world*. I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo:”
Journalists bristle at the thought of their coverage being viewed as unfair or unbalanced; they believe that their decisions are journalistically reasonable and that their politics do not affect how they cover and display stories. [Stop laughing. – Ed]
Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said, “The perception of liberal bias is a problem by itself for the news media. It’s not okay to dismiss it. Conservatives who think the press is deliberately trying to help Democrats are wrong. [Dammit, stop laughing! – Ed] But conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It’s inconceivable that that is irrelevant.”
And yeah, the MSM has worked ever so hard to correct that imbalance in the last six years. And to bring this post full circle, as Thomas Sowell once wrote, “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
*And bury the news when it doesn’t work out so well.
PLANNED WEBSITE OUTAGE TONIGHT AT 12:30 AM EASTERN/9:30 PM PST: The tech people who oversee the servers that host both Instapundit and PJ Media are performing some updates, and both sites will be down for one to two hours. There is no need to panic.
Other than our being out of coffee.
Update: Headline adjusted, as the start time was pushed back a half-hour by our tech boffins.
THE FINAL OUTRAGE: “The hearts are the final straw: it’s time to nationalise Twitter,” demands London Guardian columnist.
Doesn’t our Nobel Peace Prize-winning administration have enough wars on its hands these days without planning an invasion of Twitter’s office building as well?
CNN CLAIM: U.S. OFFICIALS BELIEVE ISIS PLANTED BOMB ON RUSSIAN PLANE.
Update: “If this latest intel proves accurate, this would be biggest (successful) terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11,” Jake Tapper tweets. Plus much from Hot Air’s Allahpundit.
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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Advice To The Koch Brothers: Invest in Media, Not Politicians.
ANOTHER LEFTIST PROBE GOES DOWN TO DEFEAT — FOR NOW, Michael Walsh writes:
And bathrooms won, as Texas voters said to hell with with “equality and inclusiveness,” which they and the rest of the country are just now figuring out mean a wholesale destruction of cultural norms as the descendants of the Frankfurt School continue their merry work to overturn thousands of years of human history. The war against the Left is partly a fight over the language, which we are losing, and this is a good example. ”Transgender” bathroom “rights” has gone down in Houston. But it will keep coming back until heteronormativity is destroyed.
For my interview with Michael on how the Frankfurt School began their war on language and meaning click here.
And for a backgrounder on what Houston’s wannabe-Weimar socialists proposed, read “With Its Bathroom Ordinance, Houston Takes Leave of Its Municipal Senses,” written by Kevin D. Williamson on the eve of yesterday’s election.
Update: “How does the DC Media protect Dems, you ask? You seen any asked if they stand w/the Houston referendum that just went down? That’s how,” John Nolte tweets.
NEW QUINNIPIAC POLL: Carson, Rubio, Cruz, and Christie Over Hillary, Jeb! Continues His Free-Fall.
He’ll always have Paris, though.
CHINA BECOMING A MILITARY SUPERPOWER by spying and copying others’ technology.
COST OF SEQUENCING A HUMAN GENOME is plummeting. “What the present much lower cost of sequencing tells us: the number of genetic variants with known impact is going to soar in the next 5 years and soar even more in the next 10 years. By the year 2025 the number of pieces of useful information you can get from getting yourself sequenced is going to be large. It is going to be especially large for people who are thinking about having kids.”
WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF: Yes, There Is a Technology Bubble, and That’s Okay.
AMMUNITION HAS COME A LONG WAY IN THE PAST COUPLE OF DECADES: FBI Switching Back To 9mm.
PAUL RYAN ON IMMIGRATION: “Get serious about enforcing our laws.”
12 CLASSIC MOVIES TO WATCH WITH YOUR CHILDREN BEFORE THEY BECOME TEENAGERS: Curiously, the oldest movie namechecked in this PJM Parenting article is Star Wars from 1977. But I can remember watching The Wizard of Oz (in network reruns every year), the Hope and Crosby road movies (because my dad worshipped Crosby) and plenty of other pre-1960s movies with my parents.
Can kids no longer handle black and white movies or any films that pre-date the founding of Industrial Light & Magic?
IT’S POTEMKIN VEHICLES ALL THE WAY DOWN: VW’s emissions scandal spreads to gas-powered cars.
IN THE MAIL: The Business of Family: How to Stay Rich for Generations.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 909.
POLITICIZING TAYLOR SWIFT: Erick Erickson describes Red State readers outraged over Erickson taking his ten year old daughter to see Taylor Swift. “According to the emails and tweets, it was inappropriate for me to take my child to see her favorite singer because her favorite singer is supporting a Democrat:”
I just don’t get that attitude. Why must everything be politicized? In fact, Taylor Swift did not politicize her concert. There was no Hillary for President banner anywhere. It never came up. The only people I see politicizing anything are the people who declared I should not have gone.
That must be a miserable existence. I don’t know that any television show or movie or music, except for long dead Classical composers, would be acceptable if I limited myself based on the political affiliations of performers.
Then there are the people who get upset over where you shop. I’ve been criticized before for eating at Arby’s because of positions they’ve taken. Others are enraged by Chick-Fil-A.
Personally, I think life is too short to get upset by the fact that a singer might support a politician you don’t like especially when it’s not like the singer is in your face about it. And I don’t have enough time or energy to figure out the political leanings of the various grocery stores, restaurants, and other facilities I use.
Exactly — leave the politicized life to the left, who both invented the concept and all-too-frequently wallow deeply in it; as Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard once warned, “It’s hard work, politicizing your whole life.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: What We’re Buying With $1 Trillion+ in Student Loans:
You know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. This is certifiable. College is too expensive, so have the government make it easier to finance — then keep shifting more and more of the cost burden to the government, without doing anything about the underlying cost inflation that is making it necessary for government to get into the finance business.
Obviously, this can’t go on indefinitely. The income-based-repayment programs are relatively new, so the government hasn’t yet been handed the bill for the loan forgiveness that will be necessary as we give people payment rates that are often less than the interest on the loan. But when the government gets that bill, people are going to notice that this is a costly business.
Over decades, the government has restructured the educational system to make it look more like the health-care system, with the costs paid by third parties while the service is consumed by individuals who have no incentive to think about price. The effects are predictable for both. . . .
Does college actually make people much more economically productive? Yes, yes, I know: People who go to college earn substantially more than people who don’t, and that earnings premium has been increasing in recent decades. But what, exactly, do they learn in college that makes them so much more productive? In certain technical professions, the answer is obvious; engineers and nurses do need to master the rudiments of their trade before they are unleashed on an unsuspecting public.
But that doesn’t describe the whole higher educational system. It doesn’t even seem to describe the majority of college degrees. Administrators defending the value of degrees in “business” or liberal arts rely on nebulous claims that they are teaching students “how to think.” However, they provide little objective evidence that these programs impart thinking skills worth tens of thousands of dollars.
There’s at least some evidence that a lot of the benefit of a college degree comes not from what you learn in college, but from signaling to employers that you are the kind of conscientious, hardworking student who can get into college and stick with it long enough to get a degree. In other words, much of what we do in school is not learn anything in particular, but obtain a credential that certifies us as good potential employees.
Do tell. If you understand the federal student aid system as a means for transferring money from taxpayers to an industry that’s basically a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, it makes more sense.
WHY WE NEED SPACE COLONIZATION: The Chilling Regularity Of Mass Extinctions.
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SO FILMS TITLED BODY HEAT, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, AND SOME LIKE IT HOT ALL GOT IT WRONG? Bloomberg News: Climate Change Kills the Mood: Economists Warn of Less Sex on a Warmer Planet:
Hot weather leads to diminished “coital frequency,” according to a new working paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Three economists studied 80 years of U.S. fertility and temperature data and found that when it’s hotter than 80 degrees F, a large decline in births follows within 10 months. Would-be parents tend not to make up for lost time in subsequent, cooler months.
An extra “hot day” (the economists use quotation marks with the phrase) leads to a 0.4 percent drop in birth rates nine months later, or 1,165 fewer deliveries across the U.S. A rebound in subsequent months makes up just 32 percent of the gap.
As John Hinderaker quips at Power Line, “People in places like Brazil and India don’t have much of a sex life; it’s too hot. It explains, too, why beautiful women are referred to as ‘cold,’ and why animals in the mood for sex are described as being ‘in cold.’ And why couples looking for a romantic rendezvous schedule trips to Lapland and Siberia rather than the Caribbean.”
Heh. And just as a reminder — in the 1970s, the twin concerns of the far left were overpopulation and global cooling:
In any case, while the arguments change, as Roger Kimball writes at the New Criterion, in an essay titled “Misanthropic nostalgia,” the goal remains the same: “No matter what the crisis, massive government intervention is always the answer.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ANTISEMITISM EDITION: Israeli academic shouted down in lecture at University of Minnesota. “The protests were apparently organized by a group calling itself the ‘Anti-War Committee,’ which bragged on its Twitter feed about having disrupted the lecture and complained that the protesters’ ‘free speech’ rights were violated when a few were arrested.”
They’re not “anti-war,” they’re just on the other side. And they don’t care about free speech, or they wouldn’t be shouting down speakers. More evidence of the toxic environment on many campuses today.
THIS STORY IS BAD FOR THE NARRATIVE, SO THE NATIONAL MEDIA WILL LARGELY IGNORE IT: Kentucky’s New GOP Lt. Gov. Is Black Tea Party Activist. “Hampton’s path certainly represents triumph over adversity. Born in Detroit, the 57-year-old Hampton and her three sisters were raised by a single mom who lacked a high school education and couldn’t afford a television or a car. But Hampton was determined to better herself. She graduated with a degree in industrial engineering and worked for five years in the automobile industry to pay off her college loans. She then joined the Air Force, retiring as a Captain. She earned an MBA from the University of Rochester, moved to Kentucky and became a plant manager in a corrugated packaging plant. Then she lost her job in 2012. She used her free time to start a career in politics and becoming active in the Tea Party. She ran a losing race for state representative in 2014 but won an early endorsement from Senator Rand Paul. She was tapped by Bevin to be his running-mate earlier this year.”
Related: ObamaCare Loses Big In Kentucky. “Even some residents who are enrolled in the expanded Medicaid program or an exchange plan supported Bevin. Stanley and Deborah Harp, who own a business in Georgetown, Ky., were among Americans who saw their policies canceled after the Affordable Care Act went into effect. They now qualify for Medicaid, but they aren’t happy about it and they voted for Bevin.”
PENN STATE MORE INTERESTED IN POLITICS THAN IN SAVING A MALE STUDENT’S LIFE:
Pennsylvania State University appeared to be more concerned with federal pressure to “do something” about campus sexual assault than the life of one its students.
The student was found responsible using a process even the federal government has deemed unfair (more on that later) and suspended for two semesters. The problem is, the fourth-year architectural engineering student says that if the suspension is upheld he will be forced to return to war-torn Syria, where two members of his family have already been killed due to the civil war. . . .
The student in question was accused of sexual assault earlier this spring, months after a sexual encounter last December. The encounter, which occurred at a campus fraternity house, involved a young woman who went to the basement during a party, where Doe and two of his friends were, and performed oral sex on all three.
Doe says in his lawsuit that the woman initiated the encounter. She told the university that she had been too drunk to consent to such behavior. It was her sister that reported the encounter to police, but after an investigation, the police declined to file charges. The accuser then went to the school, which initiated its own investigation into the matter, using a single-investigator model of adjudication.
The single-investigator model used by Penn State replaced a hearing procedure where students could call witnesses and cross-examine their accuser. The new model employed by Penn State had one person interview the accuser, accused and any witnesses they provided, then present their findings to a hearing panel, without the students being able to participate.
The Education Department has deemed the single-investigator model to be unfair, as it creates conflicts of interest.
If it’s too unfair for the Department of Education, it’s too unfair. And shame on universities who care more about sucking up to federal educrats than they do about their own students. Which, sadly, seems to be nearly all of them.
JOHN PODHORETZ ON THE MEANING OF BEN CARSON’S STUNNING RISE:
The fact that together Trump and Carson are scoring 50 percent in the polls is remarkable only if it persists into the voting season. Trump’s lack of momentum may mean his supporters will be taking a second look around the GOP field. And Carson’s newly won supporters may only be weakly attached to him and ready to move elsewhere as they pay closer attention.
Republicans want a candidate they can believe in. But they also desperately want to win in November 2016. Political campaigns are courtships.
Most of those who are telling pollsters they support the outsiders are basically dating Trump and Carson. They’ll likely settle down with someone else.
Especially when as Steve Green writes, “Carson Feels the Burn Rate,” spending a large chunk of money to build his direct mail list, and as Steve warns, Carson’s “email fundraising efforts are strictly amateur hour… It’s no bold prediction that if Carson gets the nomination, Clinton’s high-tech, Google-powered machine will clean the floor with him.”
WASHINGTON POST: From coast to coast, conservatives score huge victories in off-year elections. “Even in San Francisco, the sheriff who steadfastly defended the city’s ‘sanctuary city’ policy went down.”
WELL, GOOD: Paul Ryan refuses to rule out riders on spending bill.
New Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Tuesday refused to rule out attaching legislative policy riders to an omnibus spending bill, foreshadowing a possible confrontation with President Obama next month.
“This is the legislative branch and the power of the purse rests within the legislative branch, and we fully expect that we’re going to exercise that power,” Ryan told reporters at his first news conference since he was elected Speaker last week.
Obama and congressional leaders struck a major deal last week that lifts sequester spending caps, sets spending levels and raises the debt ceiling for two years.
But House and Senate appropriators will need to pass an omnibus spending bill to prevent a government shutdown by Dec. 11. That’s when a stopgap measure, known as a continuing resolution, is set to expire.
Obama and Democrats are insisting on a clean spending bill, free of controversial policy riders or “poison pills.” But conservatives will be pressing their GOP leaders to attach a slew of amendments, including one to defund Planned Parenthood.
“Poison pills” means “provisions we don’t like.” I’d send Obama a lot of separate spending bills, and put the riders on legislation that his constituents need to pass. Go ahead, veto welfare spending or Department of Education funding. Make my day!
AND IT’S STILL ONLY 2015: 6 Of The Most Racist Things The Media Has Said About Marco Rubio.
WOW! TV REPORTER EXPLAINS SECOND AMENDMENT AND MAKES CASE AGAINST GUN CONTROL (VIDEO).
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: GOP students ‘intimidated’ on campus, say views less tolerated.
FRANK RICH: ‘FASCISTIC’ GOP DEBATE LETTER APPEARS ‘TO HAVE BEEN DRAFTED BY STALIN.’
This is recurring speech tic of Rich whenever he’s confronted by someone who might shrink government by even a minuscule amount — in November of 2009, with a mammoth case of Tea Party Derangement Syndrome fueling his paranoia, Rich wrote an article with the hilarious title, “The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York.”
As Matt Welch of Reason counseled Rich, “Only Stalinists Use Words Like ‘Stalinist’.” Both instances are made all the more curious considering the glowing terms in which the New York Times, Rich’s longtime former employer praised Stalin’s “accomplishments” upon his well-deserved death in 1953. (See also: Pulitzer Prize-winning Timesman, Duranty, Walter.)
A WORLD OF THEIR OWN: Richard Fernandez writes that “The New York Times has a series of articles examining the causes of why an entire generation ‘has become less tolerant of free speech’ noting the growing list of subjects or persons that are now banned on campuses to prevent people from freaking out:”
The safe spaces they crave don’t exist in in the ambient environment. To maintain a “nuclear free” or “gun free” zone someone has to do the distasteful work of maintaining it. Probably some guard, soldier or policeman with a gun. Cafeterias and dorms have to be supplied with meat, fossil fuels and dirty pharmaceuticals; the wrong people have to be shown the door by the academic equivalent of a bouncer. All this takes labor and costs money.
* * * * * *
In the past, when schools still regarded it their job to prepare the young for a world of danger and disappointment, mentors were expected to teach their students how to look unflinchingly at the facts. In those days educated men were distinguished by their ability to gaze full upon the truth armed with a free speech, which as Eugene Volokh reminds, opened our eyes to the pleasant and unpleasant alike.
Today, we don’t want to know. We don’t even want to know what we don’t know. In all the wide world the only trigger warning that is forbidden is the one which alerts us to our own ignorance.
Related: “A liberal New York Times writer told a liberal MSNBC host that the problem with conservatives is they exist in their own ideological echo chamber. Without a sense of irony, All In host Chris Hayes on Monday night wondered, ‘What do you make of this sort of inward turning that we’re sort of seeing effectuated in the Republican field?’”
I’M YASSER ARAFAT AND I APPROVE THIS BILINGUAL OBFUSCATION: Emails show Clinton had 2 Benghazi stories: 1 for Libyans, 1 for Americans.
ROGER SIMON ON BEN CARSON AND THE DEMOCRATS’ ‘WAR ON GOD:’
Now, with Carson a frontrunner in national and Iowa polls, not to mention the only Republican tied with Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical matchup, what I recently called, channeling Stalin, the media/Democrat “plot against the doctor” I fully expect to metastasize to a full-on “War on God.” But — take it from this agnostic — that will be a very risky war because it will be based on the assumption that Carson is wacky in his belief. He isn’t. He is to be admired and, in my case, envied.
Read the whole thing.
Related: ABC, NBC Knock ‘Hardline’ Ben Carson on Political Experience; ‘Issue’ ‘He Will Have to Address.’
Funny, I don’t remember this being an issue in 2008 (expect when the MSM-DNC needed to destroy the only person with executive experience in the race, of course.) Perhaps Carson could answer his critics by mystically replying, “I serve as a blank screen, on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
After all, it wouldn’t be the first time Americans would be “putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know,” to coin a CNN-approved phrase from the conclusion of that election cycle.
FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? The Climate Iceman Cometh.
RON FOURNIER: When The Clinton Scandals Boil Away, A Residue of Distrust.
Clinton has taken responsibility for security lapses at the U.S. compound in Libya, but she hasn’t explained her role in an administration-wide attempt to mislead Americans about the reason for the attacks. In the heat of President Obama’s reelection campaign, the White House initially blamed the raid on an anti-Muslim video rather than a terrorist strike.
Congressional investigators uncovered evidence that Clinton knew within hours that terrorists were behind the raid. According to the father of a former Navy SEAL who died in the raid, Clinton stood before his son’s coffin and privately told him the United States would arrest the filmmaker responsible for the attack.
Clinton has apologized for putting all her official email on a private server but continues to claim incorrectly that the actions had precedent and were authorized. She vowed in March that no classified material was ever on the server, a claim proven false. She now tells voters none of the emails were marked classified, which she must know is irrelevant; people are prosecuted for mishandling unmarked U.S. secrets.
Furthermore, Clinton insists that she voluntarily turned over the email to the State Department, though in fact, she had kept the government documents secret until Congress discovered her stash. She insists she voluntarily turned over the server, failing to mention the FBI’s strong desire to scour the storage unit as part of its ongoing investigation of her actions.
Because of all this, and more, the Benghazi and email stories could boil away, and there will remain the bitter residue of a character issue likely to stick to Clinton throughout the campaign—and throughout her presidency, should she win. People don’t trust her.
Well,they shouldn’t, because she’s untrustworthy.
REALLY, JEB? REALLY? Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush apologized to the people of France on Tuesday for making fun of their work week during last week’s Republican debate.
Nothing excites Republican primary voters like an apology to the French!
UH OH: Huge Crack Discovered In Earth In Wyoming.
John Manchip White, call your office!
WELL, THAT’S SAD: Guinness Tweaks 256-Year-Old Recipe — to Appease Vegans.
THIS WILL PREPARE THEM FOR BEING PLUGGED INTO THE MATRIX IN THEIR 20S. Many Children Under 5 Are Left to Their Mobile Devices, Survey Finds. I’d say this is better, because less passive, than being plopped in front of the TV. Playing outside would be better, of course, but children aren’t allowed to do that now because there’s a pedophile behind every bush.
AT AMAZON, gifts for the Organized Cleaner.
NOTICE WHAT PAUL EHRLICH IS COMPARING TO GARBAGE, Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal:
From “The Population Bomb” there came Zero Population Growth, an NGO co-founded by Mr. Ehrlich. Next there was the United Nations Population Fund, founded in 1969, followed by the neo-Malthusian Club of Rome, whose 1972 report, “The Limits to Growth,” sold 30 million copies. In India in the mid-1970s, the Indira Gandhi regime forcibly sterilized 11 million people. Then-World Bank President Robert McNamara praised her for “intensifying the family planning drive with rare courage and conviction.” An estimated 1,750 people were killed in botched procedures.
Power is seductive, as are fame and wealth, and it’s easy to see how being a scientific prophet of doom afforded access to all three. So long as the alarmists fed the hysteria, the hysteria would feed the alarmists—with no end of lucrative book contracts and lavish conferences in exotic destinations to keep the cycle going. It’s also not surprising that someone like Mr. Ehrlich, trained as an entomologist, would be tempted to think of human beings as merely a larger type of insect.
“My language would be even more apocalyptic today,” an unrepentant Mr. Ehrlich told the New York Times earlier this year. “The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is to me exactly the same kind of idea as, everybody ought to be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.” Notice what Mr. Ehrlich is comparing to garbage.
Meanwhile, Neo-Neocon spots Princeton’s Peter Singer, another utilitarian philosopher with otherwise similarly coldblooded Malthusian views blinking when confronted with a decision regarding someone close to him facing the end of life:
When Singer’s mother became too ill to live alone, Singer and his sister hired a team of home health-care aides to look after her. Singer’s mother has lost her ability to reason, to be a person, as he defines the term. So I asked him how a man who has written that we ought to do what is morally right without regard to proximity or family relationships could possibly spend tens of thousands of dollars a year for private care for his mother. He replied that it was “probably not the best use you could make of my money. That is true. But it does provide employment for a number of people who find something worthwhile in what they’re doing.”
…Singer has responded to his mother’s illness in the way most caring people would. The irony is that his humane actions clash so profoundly with the chords of his utilitarian ethic.
That doesn’t surprise Bernard Williams. “You can’t make these calculations and comparisons in real life. It’s bluff.” Williams told me, “One of the reasons his approach is so popular is that it reduces all moral puzzlement to a formula. You remove puzzlement and doubt and conflict of values, and it’s in the scientific spirit. People seem to think it will all add up, but it never does, because humans never do.”
Singer may be learning that. We were sitting in his living room one day, and the trolley traffic was noisy on the street outside his window. Singer has spent his career trying to lay down rules for human behavior which are divorced from emotion and intuition. His is a world that makes no provision for private aides to look after addled, dying old women. Yet he can’t help himself. “I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult,” he said quietly. “Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it’s your mother.”
“‘It’s different when it’s your mother.’ Duh,” Neo deadpans in response. “Singer’s ethics is an ethics for robots. And you better be careful, even when you design an ethics for robots, that you don’t end up creating something that makes things worse.”
As Stephens writes, “Modern liberals are best understood as would-be believers in search of true faith.” He’s not the first to notice the connection.
OBAMA CALLS SENATE ENVIRONMENT CHAIRMAN ‘CRAY’ FOR DOUBTING CLIMATE CHANGE:
Obama rattled off his standard policy stump, with special aim at Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) for bringing a snowball onto the Senate floor in February to argue that terrorism is a greater risk than climate change.
“And the planet is warming; 99 percent of scientists have said it’s warming. And we’ve got the Republican chairman of the Senate Energy and Environment Committee carrying a snowball into the Senate chambers to show that there is still snow and that climate change isn’t happening. I am not making that up. That’s what happened. That’s what happened. That’s crazy,” Obama said. “I was going to quote Kanye, but I can’t because this is a family audience. But it’s cray.”
That’s a reference to a lyric in Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “N*ggas In Paris”: “
that shit cray.”
President Camacho, call your office — and you too, Donald Trump; your presidency really would make the White House a classier place than it is now.
THE PERILS OF BAD GOVERNMENT: “The Peronists (named after former dictator Juan Peron) have had political control much of the last 70 years, and it has been a disaster for the country. In 1900, Argentina was one of the 10 highest-income countries in the world, having an estimated gross domestic product per capita of roughly 80 percent of that in the United States. Successive Argentine governments have squandered much of the wealth and potential of the economy, so now Argentina ranks approximately 57th in per capita income.”
As with all variants of socialism, impoverishing the nation to enrich cronies — all in the name of “fairness” and “equality.”
KATHY SHAIDLE: Nobody needs to tell me to boycott Quentin Tarantino:
Okay, it was faintly amusing, but Tarantino’s admirers insisted that this “meta” conceit—pop culture entities arguing about other pop culture entities—was somehow sui generis, and Tarantino, a genius.
I was the bore at every party pointing out that, in fact, the pilot for Cheers a full ten years earlier saw the soon-to-be-beloved bar regulars similarly quarreling about “the sweatiest film of all time.” (Cool Hand Luke won out, as I recall.)
And literally the same movie buffs who’d spent twenty years slagging Brian De Palma for ripping off Hitchcock were now hailing naked serial plagiarist Tarantino as the savior of cinema, knowing full well that he’d lifted entire scenes in Reservoir Dogs from Hong Kong director Ringo Lam’s City on Fire. “Isn’t that, er, ‘cultural appropriation,’ you guys?” I’d ask. “Even maybe a kind of ‘colonialism’?”
When cornered, I’d spit out a Tarantino-themed variation on David Lee Roth’s (unfair in retrospect) line about why rock critics loved Elvis Costello so much.
Oh, well. Good thing I never much liked parties anyhow…
Heh. I tuned out Tarantino after Jackie Brown in 1997 — but it was fun watching him make the rounds back then saying that he had grown up and decided to be a man before he began shooting that film.
Well, it must have sounded good at the time.
Update (11/4/14): At some point in the night, the article’s URL was apparently changed; link should be working now.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): P.E. teacher arrested on suspicion of sexual relationships with 2 students. “Lindsay Himmelspach, 33, was arrested Friday on suspicion of having unlawful sexual intercourse with two minors, communicating with them for the purpose of committing sexual acts and communicating with them to commit a lewd or lascivious act, according to the Butte County Sheriff’s Office.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON IN THE L.A. TIMES on How the widening urban-rural divide threatens America:
How did the new Californians deal with the drought? Not as in the past. Enthralled by a fantasy of a pristine 19th century California that has it all — from daily fresh organic tomatoes to schools of fish jumping amid white water, without understanding what it takes to grow those tomatoes — urbanites have argued that farmers can make do with less but wildlife needs ever more. Millions of acre-feet of precious stored water were released out of rivers as urban environmentalists hoped to increase the population of 3-inch delta smelt and to restore salmon to the upper San Joaquin River. Despite millions of acre-feet of released water, both fish projects have so far failed. Meanwhile, under pressure from environmental groups, the state canceled water projects such as the huge Temperance Flat reservoir on the San Joaquin River.
Common sense would have warned that droughts are existential challenges, the severity and duration of which are unpredictable. Droughts are times to bank water, not to release it for questionable green initiatives. Such common sense would assume, though, that millions of Californians had seen a broccoli farm or a Flame Seedless vineyard and had made the connection that what they purchased in supermarkets was grown from irrigated soil.
The founders and early observers of American democracy, from Thomas Jefferson to Alexis de Tocqueville, reflected a classical symbiosis, in which even urban thinkers praised the benefits of life in rural areas. Jefferson famously wrote: “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”
Read the whole thing — and then ponder how the typical bobo Los Angeles Times reader would respond to VDH’s harsh truths.
TRUTH REVEALED ABOUT ‘RAZOR BLADE’ FOUND IN LITTLE GIRL’S HERSHEY BAR:
It appears as though the little girl was not the only one to make a false report about dangerous objects in their candy bars.
In the greater Pennsylvania and New Jersey area, numerous reports were made to police, stating that sewing needles were found lodged inside Halloween candy:
t turns out that Robert Ledrew of Blackwood, who made the initial report, had fabricated the story as well, reports CBS3.
Ledrew, who posted needle-filled candy bars to his Facebook, claimed he was trying to teach his children a lesson to be careful with their candy. He was later arrested and charged with making a false police report.
Unexpectedly.
HOME RECORDING FLASHBACK: Recreating The ’80s Home Studio Experience.
To celebrate its 30th anniversary, England’s Sound on Sound magazine recreates the typical 1985-home recording studio, with a reel to reel analog recorder that record eight tracks of audio, a Roland drum machine, hardware synthesizers and a pair of Yamaha digital reverb units. (The article also includes a clip of a demo recorded on that gear. It doesn’t sound too bad!) Even if home recording isn’t your bag, baby (as legendary Ming Tea frontman Austin Powers would say), reading the article gives a real sense of how far technology has advanced in 30 years. Today a PC with software such as Cakewalk’s Sonar, Propellerhead’s Reason or Avid Pro Tools can record as many tracks as the PC’s RAM can handle (and that’s a lot), software synthesizers can replicate virtually any hardware synthesizer, and post-production tools such as Melodyne’s pitch correction program or Izotope’s RX5 audio restoration software would have seemed like science fiction in 1985.
I know — I was there; I had the same Roland TR-707 drum machine the Sound on Sound authors used, a pair of Yamaha SPX-90 digital reverb and processing units, and my hardware synthesizer was Yamaha’s CX5M music computer — which was an absolute beast to program, but was capable of some decent sounds; it was basically a Yamaha DX-9 synthesizer with a (very) rudimentary computer attached, and which used an existing TV as a monitor, Altair 8800 style. (Which isn’t pictured in this circa-2000 photo I took of the unit for a magazine article while it was in storage in my parent’s home):
Now if only songwriting and melodies had kept pace with the remarkable advancements in technology…
RECIPE: A Sandwich Straight From Heaven.
INSIDE THE DEVIL’S PLEASURE PALACE: My interview with Michael Walsh on his new history of the socialist Frankfurt School and its incalculable damage to America and the arts is online at Ed Driscoll.com.
MUGGERIDGE’S LAW BUSTS ZOMBIE: “I Predicted Europe’s Future — and Now I’m Depressed,” veteran Bay Area blogger Zombie writes today at the PJ Tatler:
Back in 2004, eleven long years ago, I made a satirical map of what Europe might look like in 2015, and posted the map on my site zombietime, along with a short satirical “news” article about how the EU was planning to intentionally hand the continent over to Muslim immigrants…Looking at it now for the first time in 11 years, I am disturbed at how I somehow managed to predict (albeit even as a joke) what would happen to Europe in 2015.
Of course I got many details wrong: I didn’t foresee that each nation would no longer merely import their own pet Muslims (Turks to Germany, Pakistanis to Britain, Algerians to France, etc.), but that it would turn into a pan-Islamic colonization of the whole continent en masse. Also, having started assigning humorous new names to the nations in central Europe, I ran out of ideas after a few minutes and just abandoned the theme halfway through, leaving most of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia with their original names. But interestingly, I did predict that it would be the Hungarians and the Swiss who, among all central European nations, would most actively resist the immigration — exactly as is playing out today. How could I have known that?
What was a joke in 2004 is a brutal reality in 2015, and even the progressive elites who encouraged this continental suicide now concede that the immigration crisis is only going to get worse, with no end in sight, as seemingly half the population of the Middle East is now in the process of relocating to a new homeland in Europe.
As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1989 article “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” the liner notes to his first novel, the Bonfire of the Vanities:
While Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn process of a state visit. Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.
And as Mark Steyn asked a decade ago regarding Europe’s future — and/or the distinct lack thereof in his London Telegraph article, “The strange death of the liberal West,” “The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what’s the point of creating a secular utopia if it’s only for one generation?”
A reminder that ultimately, the joke is on the EU — and as Zombie writes, it’s a very grim one at that.
Related: Steve Green proffers a timely juxtaposition, with both a new Star Wars and potential EU war on the short-term horizon:
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
● “How much is liberalism like a religion?”
—The subhead of Tyler O’Neil’s new article today at PJ Media exploring “The Theology of Liberalism.”
● “And since every good religion needs a devil, [the World Health Organization] has chosen bacon.”
The last sentence of Robert Tracinski’s new article today at the Federalist on “The WHO’s Bacon Fatwa And The New Puritanism.”
As H.L. Mencken famously defined the term, “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” which sums up the worst inner demons of the political correct, the socialist bureaucrat, and SJW rather well, doesn’t it?
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Meet The Most Popular Straight Woman On OKCupid.
She has a book out on online dating. But I think her secret is that she looks like Bettie Page.
AT AMAZON, deals galore in Training & Fitness.
And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals. When bad things happen, it’s good to have food.
Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Winter is coming.
T-MINUS 30 DAYS UNTIL BULLETS AND BOURBON IN TEXAS: We’ve sold out the suites, and only have one cabin left. We have a small number of rooms with king beds, and one room with two queen beds. Our sponsors have started to send us some terrific drawing items and I’ve just gotten my Texas TABC Server-Seller Certificate which will allow me to help Steve with his How to Make the Perfect Old Fashioned demonstration (plus it’s always good to have a fallback trade if this whole Internet media thing doesn’t work out…):
So with a month to go, click here to learn how to join Glenn, Roger L. Simon, Steve Green, Ed Morrissey, Kevin D. Williamson, Dana Loesch, and Mark Rippetoe December 3rd through 6th in Texas:
READER PEN PLUG: Let me put in a good word for reader Greg Shea’s Pen Company Of America. They make good pens.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: AALS, Law School Deans, Bar Official Respond To New York Times Editorial On The Law School Crisis.
I HOPE IT SPREADS TO AMERICA: A New Sexual Revolt Is Underway at British Universities; Could this be the start of an uprising?
George Lawlor, a student at Warwick University, started a firestorm when he wrote a piece for a student newspaper called The Tab, headlined “Why I Don’t Need Consent Classes.” Not only did he tell the “self-appointed teachers of consent” to “get off your fucking high horse”—even worse, in the eyes of the raunch-allergic feminists who staff Britain’s students’ unions, he posted a photo of himself holding a sign saying: “This is not what a rapist looks like.”
Cue global media outrage. Pretty much every liberal broadsheet in Christendom asked, “Well, what DOES a rapist look like?,” hinting that Lawlor, by virtue of the fact that he has XY chromosomes, does look like a rapist. A Guardian writer suggested every man in the world, including the Dalai Lama, should post photos of themselves holding a sign that says “This is what a rapist looks like.” Because, yep, any man might be a rapist. Maybe every woman in the world should post a pic of themselves with a sign saying, “This is what someone who commits infanticide looks like”? No, best not — the women who do that are a tiny minority, as are the men who rape.
A few days later, another Warwick student, Jack Hadfield, announced that he, too, would not be attending campus consent classes. We are witnessing “the demonisation of men,” he said, the promotion of the idea that “men are dangerous sex pests.”
Then came The Tab’s poll on consent classes. Sure, readers of The Tab, Britain’s spunkiest student newspaper, which often raises a very arched eyebrow at the buzzkilling shenanigans of student unions, might not be completely representative. Yet it’s striking that of the 4,440 people who voted in its poll, 2,708 said they were against consent classes, with 1,732 in favour. That’s 61 percent who don’t think they need to be told how to have sex.
The big question is: Why didn’t this happen earlier?
In a just society, the first administrators to roll out these policies would have been tarred and feathered.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Every Job Is A Public Service.
Two students borrow to earn nursing degrees. The one who works at a public hospital can pay an “affordable” percentage of his income for 10 years, then erase the rest of the debt under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF). The other works as a nurse at a private hospital. That’s not considered public service, so the debt has to be repaid in full. Every job is a public service, argues Alexander Holt on EdCentral. Under PSLF, anyone who works for a government agency or non-profit — payroll supervisor, computer tech, accountant — is a public service worker. About a quarter of the workforce qualifies. Nobody who works for a for-profit company — no matter what they do — can get the same debt forgiveness deal.
It’s as if it’s just a subsidy for groups of people who overwhelmingly vote Democrat or something.