PHILIP KLEIN: Debate Crowd Rallies Around Cain.
Related: Investor’s Business Daily: Will Someone Tell Us What Herman Cain Did? “After 10 days of saturation coverage by the media, we still don’t definitely know any more about Herman Cain’s alleged misdeeds than we did when Politico first broke the story. Media balance, anyone?”
STEPHEN GREEN drunkblogs the GOP debates.
DON SURBER TELLS US THAT THERE’S “no such thing as a gay Canadian penguin. Penguins live 12,000 miles south of Canada.” If I were really rich, I’d ship a boatload of polar bears to the Antarctic, and a boatload of penguins to the Arctic, just to put an end to such know-it-allism.
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS ON THE GIBSON CASE: The Guitars Gently Weep.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Reforming Higher Education: Incentives, STEM Majors, and Liberal Arts Majors — the Education versus Credential Tradeoff.
Overlooked in all this is the immensely damaging effect of grade inflation on risk-taking among our supposedly brightest elites. Grade inflation is really grade compression against a top line. And grade compression means that mostly you have nowhere to go but down. How do you avoid that? When falling below, in effect, an A– at worst average easily drives you out of the top ten law schools? Or out of the top 20? And when you know, and your parents know, that in addition to the 50k a year you’ve paid to study some liberal arts subject that only has a return on investment if you double down the bet on law school or b-school — at another 50k a year? And further, when you know that outside of the top 25 or so law schools at this very moment, the job opportunities are sufficiently iffy that you are not so much making an investment as placing a bet on employment … well, you are going to not just rationally, but desperately, seek every way of ensuring that your GPA is as close to 4.0 as humanly possible.
It is not, in other words, that you made irrational, foolish, or bad choices as a sophomore to study liberal arts, and the easiest majors among them, rather than STEM. Nor is law school then a way of merely making a more rational best of a bad and irrational situation. It is, rather, that you figured out that precisely because you had managed to get into a highly regarded university, you could not compete with the worldwide competition that the engineering school sees as its reputational guarantor — and in any case, your desire was not to be purely a technical STEM person, in research or pure engineering. Getting a C in courses in engineering at Rice or Stanford is not the equivalent of getting As at Cal Poly; getting Cs in these subjects probably means you didn’t learn anything substantial at a level you could understand and apply. So you switch to liberal arts, and immediately notice that your GPA goes up. Then you notice that top 25 law schools are basically demanding a near 4.0 GPA.
At that point (if not before, way back in high school), serious risk aversion kicks in.
Read the whole thing.
BEYOND BATTERIES: Hydraulic Hybrids. “The LCO-140H bus, like other hydraulic hybrids, operates on the same principle as battery-electric hybrids: Recapture energy typically lost as heat during braking and use it to propel the vehicle. Instead of storing energy as electricity in a battery, it is stored as pressure in a tank. The system uses the engine to drive a hydraulic pump that charges an accumulator to high pressure. The accumulator delivers that pressure to a hydraulic motor that turns the wheels. During braking, the pump motors are reversed to recapture braking energy. The internal combustion engine shuts down whenever the accumulator charge is sufficient to drive the motor. It sounds complex, and the packaging can be tricky, but storing energy in pressurized fluid often is more efficient than storing it in a battery.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Texas, Arlington Proposes A Tuition Freeze.
LEARNING ABOUT AFFAIRS from Google Autocomplete.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: An artificial molecular clock to control artificial molecular machines.
AT AMAZON, man-cave necessities. Uh huh.
UPDATE: Reader Patrick Carroll emails: “This is not the man cave I am looking for.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Tom Armstrong writes: “I do not think it means what they think it means…”
DEM DISARRAY? Durbin, breaking with Dems, applauds GOP offer on taxes as a breakthrough.
UPDATE: Reader Paul Baker writes: “Ok, so now Dick Durbin is the voice of reason within the Democratic Party? Yeesh.”
MICKEY KAUS: WHERE WILL ALL THE VOLTS GO? “General Motors is sticking by its prediction that it will sell 10,000 electric/hybrid Chevy Volts by the end of the year. Only 5,000 had been through October, meaning GM has to double that amount in just the final two months of the year.” Kaus predicts flimflammery and is launching “Project Voltwatch.” Follow the link to see how you can help.
TESTS SHOW MOST STORE HONEY ISN’T HONEY. “The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled “honey.”
The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world’s food safety agencies. The food safety divisions of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources. . . . ‘It’s no secret to anyone in the business that the only reason all the pollen is filtered out is to hide where it initially came from and the fact is that in almost all cases, that is China.'”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Disingenuous Data. “Iona College acknowledged Tuesday that its former provost had, for nearly a decade, manipulated and misreported student-related data to government officials, accrediting bodies, bond rating agencies, and others.”
#OCCUPYFAIL: London Police Outnumber, Overwhelm Protesters; Dismantle Tent City. “Marchers were outnumbered by police as only around 2,500 attended the protest, which was overseen by 4,000 officers.”
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? To Create the Perfect Machine, Soldiers Build a Robot Out of Robots.
AND YET IT’S THE PARENTS WHO BECOME ZOMBIES: The Baby Ate My Brain. “Jackson turns one month old tomorrow. One month. Roughly speaking, that’s about 250 hours of sleep I’ve lost. That’s how I count now, you see — in hours of sleep I’m missing out on. And I’ve missed out on a lot of sleep. I was complaining about this to my Dad on GChat the other day and he said, ‘Payback’s a bitch.'”
MUSLIM CAB DRIVERS save Jewish bagel shop.
DAN MITCHELL: Obama’s Big Fat Greek Budget Policy.
FAST AND FURIOUS UPDATE: Former Ariz. US Attorney admits leaking memo smearing Fast and Furious whistle-blower.
Former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke, who resigned in August, admitted late Tuesday that he leaked a document aimed at smearing Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent John Dodson, an Operation Fast and Furious whistle-blower.
“Dennis regrets his role in disclosing the memo but he’s a stand-up guy and is willing to take responsibility for what he did,” Chuck Rosenberg, Burke’s lawyer, said according to NPR. “It was absolutely not Dennis’s intent to retaliate against Special Agent Dodson or anyone else for the information they provided Congress.”
Rosenberg claims Burke is cooperating with congressional investigators. . . . The memo was leaked to press and had the names of criminal suspects deleted — but kept Dodson’s name on it. Attorney General Eric Holder came under fire during Tuesday morning’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing when he wouldn’t answer any questions from Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley about the leaked memo, who was held accountable for it and how they were held accountable.
It just keeps unraveling.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: European Wheels Spin Faster, Still No Traction. “Unfortunately, Club Med’s biggest problems can’t be solved by a change of prime ministers or even government coalitions. There are deep cultural and historical reasons why these countries’ economies and political systems work the way they do. Italy can’t become Denmark by an act of will or by passing a new legal code; Greece cannot become Germany and Spain can’t become Sweden.”
MICHAEL BARONE: A Few Thoughts On The November Elections. “The public employee unions’ success in overturning the Kasich reforms in Ohio does not constitute an embrace of Obamacare or the other national policies of the Obama Democrats, though it does give the public employee unions a boost in morale and ability to plunder taxpayers (the Kasich reforms would have cut off the payment of union dues directly from local governments to unions, with the employee/union members having only fictitious use of the money that is technically theirs). The results of gubernatorial and legislative races suggest that the low poll numbers of both parties don’t translate into carnage for incumbents of either one, though Democrats fared a bit worse than Republicans. . . . In other words, in November 2011 we are about where we were in November 2010, but we’re not very happy about it.”
UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!
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