PROFESSOR JACOBSON: #OccupyOprah.
Archive for 2011
October 17, 2011
FROM THE #OCCUPYWALLSTREET EMAIL LIST: “Christopher Columbus Was The First Zionist.” John Hinderaker comments: “This exchange strikes me as revealing on several levels, but I will close with just two observations: 1) It is a reminder of the sheer volume of ignorant BS that leftists can generate. 2) The only common denominator that binds together these miscellaneous cranks with their various obsessions is their visceral hatred of the United States.”
UPDATE: Reader Daniel Aronstein emails:
Anti-colonialism ties the two.
Anti-colonialism is central to postmodern Leftism.
The OWS effort is essentially postmodernist. (The Dems think they can exploit them; Obama is one of them.)
The postmodern Left sees the Israelis as Jewish interlopers from Europe who stole the land from peace-loving Arabs just as Columbus stole the USA from peace-loving Indians. (And Arabs and Indians also had sustainable economies that were replaced with evil free-markets!)
The postmodern left’s presuppositions are bad and their facts wrong. Lets set the record straight and unpack a few of them:
1 – So called indigenous peoples all over the world are better off under our system – as a result of colonialism – and in our culture then they ever were or ever could have been under their own. They all have longer healthier more prosperous lives.
2 – Jews are not interlopers and have lived in the Holy Land continuously for thousands of years. Very few Arabs had ever settled there.
3 – The so-called al aksa Mosque cannot possibly be the one in the Koran; it was built years after Mohamed died; it was dubbed the al aksa mosque by a Turk who was forbidden entrance to Mecca and needed another place to make a pilgrimage to.
4 – Arabs are the interlopers in the Holy Land and North Africa.
5 – The Crusades were a counter-offensive and not an offensive; they were waged to expel the invader and not to invade.
Frankly, the way post-colonialism has worked out, I have to admit that colonialism isn’t looking so bad these days. Funny how that works out.
JOHN MERLINE: The Austerity Myth: Federal Spending Up 5% This Year.
CHALLENGING THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM about the job market for lawyers.
AT AMAZON, digital deals.
“DON’T HOLD US BACK:” Minority groups attack teachers’ unions in L.A.
Today, full page ads appear in the L.A. Times, Daily News and La Opinion taken out by Don’t Hold Us Back — respected organizations calling out United Teachers Los Angeles and LAUSD for letting kids fail. The new supergroup includes The United Way, The Urban League, Community Coalition, Alliance for a Better Community, Families in Schools, Asian Pacific American Legal Center and Communities for Teaching Excellence.
The ad’s bland wording at first seems a bit “so what?” but it’s actually written in code to UTLA leaders, who have helped the local teachers union gain a reputation as one of the most anti-reform big-city education unions in the U.S. Here’s a translation:
In one line, the ad says teachers should “be rewarded for academic excellence.”
That sounds normal, right?
But in fact, that idea has for years been vehemently opposed by UTLA.
Read the whole thing.
MORE ON THE CLASS ACT’S DEMISE:
Last March, I did a retrospective on the law’s first year anniversary, wherein I pointed out that there had been a lot of bad news, and no upside surprises. Six months later, we’ve had more nasty surprises, and the “upside” consists of the entirely unsurprising revelation that forcing insurers to cover kids up to 26 results in more kids under the age of 26 being covered, at some cost in rising premiums.
During the debate over health reform, a lot of liberals were suggesting that ObamaCare’s deficit reduction was just as likely to be larger than projected as less–or even that the CBO’s scoring process systematically underestimated the savings from new health care programs. Jonathan Cohn professed himself “baffled” by the belief “that, rather than try and craft a fiscally responsible program, the Democrats instead figured out the CBO’s accounting methods, came up with ways to make an expensive program seem deceptively cheap, and then fiddled with the numbers to get the result they wanted.”
But how else do we explain the CLASS Act, which the Washington Post warned about in December 2009? Or the utterly moronic provision forcing small businesses to give 1099s to all their vendors? Are we really to assume that these were not stupid gimmicks put into the law to, erm, “make an expensive program seem deceptively cheap”, but rather, represent the sober and considered judgement of Democratic legislators and the Obama administration about sound fiscal policy?
That’s a far scarier thought, actually.
Indeed. I’m going long on tar and feathers futures.
GEE, YOUR CAR SMELLS TERRIFIC! “BMW announced the release Purif-i, a hand sanitizer and moisturizer from exclusive natural Austrian cosmetics manufacturer Susanne Kaufmann. It’s the official hand sanitizer of the all-electric BMW i sub-brand, and it promises to leave your hands as clean as the air in a city where only electric vehicles roam, or something like that. . . . We’re predicting that the next products to take off will be official Subaru-brand patchouli and a leather conditioner for your Grand Marquis that smells like Canoe and stale Dutch Masters.”
EUROPE: Round Up The Usual Suspects: “A former Maoist quite clearly reverting to type if not, exactly, to ideology, the top bureaucrat in Brussels, EU Commission President Barroso, tries his hand at a spot of scapegoating to change the subject away from the dishonesty and incompetence with which the Eurozone has handled its common currency.”
THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM: “Primeval Anarchy?” “Because in the most dynamic circles – the rising, jostling new powers – the discussion seems occasionally to take the liberal internationalist turn when strategically useful in conversation with the old powers, but in its actual implementation appears to be firmly rooted in hard realism.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Financial Emergency In Washington State Could Lead To Layoffs of Tenured Faculty: “A Washington law enacted in 1981 enables the board to declare a financial emergency if the state’s contribution to the two-year system is reduced compared to the previous budget. (Washington operates on a biennial budget cycle.) The declaration allows districts that oversee Washington’s 34 community and technical colleges to empower the campuses to dismiss tenure-track faculty members more quickly and easily — essentially the same way the colleges can currently lay off adjuncts. Tenured instructors make up about half of the system’s faculty members, teaching roughly 55 percent of credit hours.”
IF YOU PUBLISH YOUR GENETIC TEST RESULTS should you ask your family first?
GREEN JOBS — FOR KOREANS? Will 2013 electric Chevy Spark be built in Korea? If so, I’m sure the Koreans will be grateful for the GM bailout.
FASTER, PLEASE: Space Renaissance: Dawn Of A New Age Of Civilization.
JOURNOLIST REDUX: Occupy Wall Street Emails Show MSM, Dylan Ratigan, Working With Protesters To Craft Message. New chant: “This is what astroturf looks like!”
UPDATE: They’re attacking Wall Street as battlespace preparation for taking on Romney. But what do they get? Cain 43, Obama 41.
ANOTHER UPDATE: The Hill Poll: Voters Say Washington, Not Wall Street, Is Source of Economy’s Troubles.
YEAH, INSTAPUNDIT WAS DOWN for a while. The problem should be fixed now, but in case of an extended outage I’ll be blogging at GlennReynolds.com, so you might want to bookmark that.
IN THE MAIL: Cooking Essentials.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Iran: Keeping The World’s Oddest Couple Together. “The alleged Iranian assassination plot against Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in the US (if the allegations hold up) is not news in the sense that it doesn’t tell us anything new or represent anything new about the structure of relations in the Middle East. But it is very important news about the temperature of Saudi-Iranian relations, the explosive character of a rivalry that helps to define regional politics, and the reasons why the oddest couple in the world – the US and Saudi Arabia – quarrel fiercely but never quite break up.”
MICHAEL BARONE: Adult Leadership Comes From The House, Not Obama.
FOR SAM HUNG AND OTHER HOMESICK KNOXVILLE EXPATS:
This is the under-repair Henley Street bridge — notice the absence of anything above the arches — seen from the deck at Calhoun’s On The River last night.
THE HILL: Groups warn high court of big government intrusion in GPS case. “The high court will decide whether warrant-less GPS tracking by law enforcement is a violation of Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable search and seizure. The U.S. vs. Jones case is scheduled for argument in early November.”
So long as it’s not considered some sort of violation for me to attach a GPS tracker to a Congressman’s car, or a DEA agent’s, then I think it’s just fine for them to do the same to citizens without a warrant. Otherwise, I think it’s a Titles Of Nobility Clause violation to have a double standard. . . .
IF YOU MISSED IT ON FRIDAY, my interview with Greg Lukianoff of F.I.R.E. is now on YouTube. With a cameo by Nathan Fillion.