TELL IT TO OBAMA, CORY: Cory Booker: The War on Drugs has failed.
Archive for 2012
July 16, 2012
ADVICE ON Home Invasions.
RICK SANTELLI ON TARP: “Hurry up, let’s spend three quarters of a trillion dollars; how much due diligence did they do for our role as taxpayers in basically bailing out the banking system? Obviously zero!”
Related: OMB’s Stockman: “We’re At The Fiscal Endgame.”
Also, The Problem In A Nutshell: Annualized GDP Growth Of 1%; Annualized US Debt Growth of 21%. Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be.
HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Wall rallies for better Canada-U.S. relations, decries policies of Obama administration. “Wall’s comments come weeks after an article in Foreign Affairs by Derek Burney, Canada’s former ambassador to the U.S., and Fen Hampson, a foreign policy expert at Carleton University, declared the bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Canada has sunk to its worst level in decades.”
GEORGE KORDA WORRIES ABOUT KNOXVILLE’S FUTURE. “The population is stagnant but the costs are growing for government services, employee pay and pensions, and citizen desires. Somewhere in the future is a breaking point.” Lots of people have voted with their feet and moved outside the city to the county, which is where I live.
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Will American Law Schools Adapt To The Changing Legal Market? Ever? Do They Even Care? They will.
COULD A MISSING WORD sink ObamaCare?
HEH: Mike Bloomberg Needs To Plug Police Gun-Locker Room Loophole. “In an exclusive story, the New York Post reports that a 31-year-old police officer has been identified as a suspect in the theft of firearms from the locker room at the Ninth Precinct headquarters in the East Village. At least four handguns were taken and allegedly sold on the street, the newspaper said.”
SO I PUT TOGETHER THE FITDESK THE OTHER DAY. I like it. I’ll be putting up a longer post later, but here’s Helen’s review.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Atomically precise nanoparticle provides better drug delivery. “Using a technique known as ‘nucleic acid origami,’ chemical engineers have built tiny particles made out of DNA and RNA that can deliver snippets of RNA directly to tumors, turning off genes expressed in cancer cells.”
AT AMAZON, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.
I DON’T KNOW, BUT UNDER OBAMACARE I’VE GOT A SINKING FEELING I’LL FIND OUT: Virginia Postrel: How Much Is Your Kidney Worth?
UPDATE: Reader Michael Ryan emails: “If you are healthy, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great doctor somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American medical system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in bikepaths and broccoli. If you’ve got a healthy body — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. Cyclosporine didn’t get invented on its own.”
And reader Kevin Murphy writes: “Just remember, organ donation isn’t a mandate, it’s a tax.”
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: An Existential Crisis For Law Schools?
New numbers reveal that the collapse of the Episcopal Church dramatically accelerated in the last ten years. The denomination is literally falling apart, with attendance down 25% between 2000 and 2010. . . . The numerical decline, bad as it is, matters less than the collapse in the moral authority of the church. The Episcopal Church has made many controversial pronouncements on social issues; at the latest General Convention the church declared that transgendered persons cannot automatically be barred from the priesthood. One can agree or disagree with some of these individual decisions, but what is striking over time is the decline in the moral weight of the church.
It used to matter what the Episcopal Church thought of this or that social issue. Other mainline Protestant churches and many social and political leaders followed its theological and political debates. Now, basically, no one outside the dwindling flock in the pews really cares what The Episcopal Church says about anything at all. General Convention can pass a million resolutions, and nothing anywhere will change. No one is even really angry anymore at anything the Episcopal hierarchy does; at most, there is a sigh and a quiet rolling of the eyes. Soon, there will not even be that.
It’s an extraordinary decline in an institution that a generation ago was still one of the pillars of American life. At this point the disaster appears irretrievable; those running the church are determined to run it into the ground and it is hard to see how that can change.
For Anglicans, the theological and demographic collapse of their church is a bitter blow.
It’s just another example of Conquest’s Law in action.
UPDATE: Conquest’s Second Law. Though maybe the Third, as well.
WHY CRAIG NEWMARK sits at the top and bottom of Craigslist.
CHANGE: Layoffs at Sports Illustrated.
A PARASITE ON THE BODY POLITIC, TRYING TO PRETEND HE IS THE HOST: Obama Channels Elizabeth Warren. In fact, everything in the public sector — which now resembles a bloated, immobile tick — comes from the wealth created by the private sector.
UPDATE: Charle’s Krauthammer’s Epic Takedown of Obama’s Elizabeth Warren Impersonation.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nanoparticles Deliver Gene Therapy through the Skin.
COMPETENCE: The Hill: Obama Misses New Budget Deadline.
JOE PAPPALARDO: 7 Sights From A Jungle Spaceport Launch.
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense.
LAW OF THE SEA TREATY, SUNK.
TODAY’S SHOCKING DISCOVERY: Choices Matter In Avoiding Poverty.
UPDATE: Reader Bill Reece writes:
I had a law professor who taught the traditional business related law classes at my law school who followed the Chicago School’s “Law and Economics” Theory of Law. I will never forget my first week of Contracts Law in my first year in law school. I came to this class as a poor kid whose family had basically lost its dreams of a working-middle class lifestyle when my Dad’s job at US Steel disappeared along with thousands of others in 1981, six years earlier. I came from a pretty liberal background, and knew next to nothing about economics and business. I had managed to get to law school by earning a scholarship based on my undergraduate work while facing these tough economic times.
This professor said something that was shocking to me, and at first upsetting. He actually would go on to use the expression often in the classes I took from him (4 over three years of school). “There is a cost to being poor.” At first it seemed glib and uncaring, but as I sat through his classes and as I talked to him outside of the classroom, I realized it was said more with pity and regret than anything else. And from my family’s experience, I recognized pretty quickly and far better than any child of the upper or upper-middle class, that he was all too correct. The consequences of bad life decisions, made many times over, cost people heavily. Dependence, like addiction, begins with choice. We don’t want to admit this uncomfortable fact, but in the beginning there are conscious choices that leave people in the thralls of dependence, poverty, addiction, depression, and many other dead-ends in life. And the lesson this professor offered to me was that we make these outcomes more likely by excusing the choices that lead to them rather than confronting them. I can also pinpoint that week as the moment that I began to stop being a liberal and eventually became a libertarian.
Interesting.
EVERYBODY WANTS TO GET INTO THE ACT: Stacy McCain on the Higher Education Bubble.