A LOT OF ACTION TONIGHT: A Sotomayor Injunction Against the ObamaCare Contraception Mandate.
UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!
Archive for 2013
December 31, 2013
52 THINGS, 52 WEEKS: 2013: A Year in Review. “Say Yes. You never know what you really like until you try it and you won’t have any great life experiences while sitting at home on the couch watching TV. I have learned so much about myself and have had a great deal of fun just by saying ‘yes’ to invitations to go out and do things I would not normally want to do. I know it can be painful to break out of your comfort zone, but 90% of the work is just walking out the front door.”
Plus: “People love goats. Two of the most viewed photos on my posts are pictures of goats. You guys are weird.”
INJUNCTIONS PENDING APPEAL AGAINST THE OBAMACARE CONTRACEPTIVE MANDATE: From the DC Circuit.
From the Sixth Circuit, in a case involving the Diocese of Nashville. (Judge Stranch dissents).
From the Sixth Circuit, in a separate case from Michigan. (Judge Stranch dissents).
MIDDLE-EARTH RELATIONSHIPS: If they can interbreed, aren’t Hobbits, Elves and Humans all the same species, really?
AT AMAZON, Kindle Daily Deals.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Dishonor Roll: 10 Most Notorious Teacher Sex Scandals Of 2013.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHRONIC ILLNESS. “When should you disclose medical conditions to a date? When is illness too much for a relationship to survive?”
IP TOMFOOLERY: Universities That Post Own Scholars’ Work Getting Takedown Notices From Elsevier. Despite the blather in the story, it’s not clear to me that they provide much in the way of value added.
TECHNOLOGY: Redesigned Window Stops Sound But Not Air.
THIS IS A FUN SERIES: Photographer’s Girlfriend Continues to Lead Him Around the World.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Zero-Tolerance Stupidity At Schools.
SHORT ANSWER: BECAUSE THEY’RE BETTER. Why People Still Use Inefficient Incandescent Bulbs. Plus:
Some consumers complain that CFLs don’t last as long as advertised. One characteristic of CFL bulbs is they are “fairly fragile” and can succumb to overheating, said Terry McGowan, director of engineering for the American Lighting Association.
“Those life ratings are established in a test lab and not established in somebody’s living room fixture,” McGowan said. “When you put them in a fixture and bottle them up in a glass shade, they get too hot and the life will be shortened.”
LED lights can also overheat. McGowan recommends using these bulbs in light fixtures that have good ventilation.
So the LED lifespan figures, like the CFL lifespan figures, aren’t really applicable to the real world. Great.
It’s not quite too late to stock up on incandescents.
AN AMUSING RESPONSE to intellectual-property threats.
ANN ALTHOUSE UNPACKS a dishonest smear from Amanda Marcotte.
FASTER, PLEASE: Seven Spaceships Of The New Space Age.
ROGER KIMBALL: Inadvertent Comedy From The American Studies Association, or, An Ecofeminist Does Milk. “You may not know much about the American Studies Association. The small (5000-member) organization is known to many outside the academy as “The Anti-American Studies Association” because of its reliably backwater, reflexive leftism. . . . Every now and then, however, something truly egregious bubbles up from the dismal pit of pseudo-intellectual academic lucubration, some special gem of fatuous, wood-pulp darkeni’g nonsense that even now, at the fag-end of Anno Domini 2013, has the capacity to spark a little frisson of nauseated wonderment in this jaded breast. . . . Despite the inadvertent comedy of its title, ‘Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies” really exists, and my is it in earnest. How many things had to go wrong — intellectually, socially, morally — to account for prose like this? . . . Charity prevents me from offering an analysis of this vaguely minatory tripe. Considered as a rhetorical product, it is pitch perfect in its bristling opacity, touching gently on a vast host of political and intellectual clichés while maintaining a semantic content of nearly zero. The amazing thing is that Ms. Gaard keeps it up for nearly 25 pages.”
IN THE MAIL: From Larry Correia, Swords of Exodus.
ROGER SIMON: The Principal Enemy. “The principal enemy for the right and the center-right is now Hillary Clinton, the vastly favored frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. She is so far in front, in fact, that her competitors are not even in hailing distance. Hillary is the one who can consolidate and solidify the ‘gains’ of the Obama era in a way Obama himself never could because she is much more politically savvy — Obama was only savvy about getting elected, not governing — and has the backing of her even more politically savvy husband. Hillary is the one who can fully remake the United States into some version of Western Europe or, yet more frighteningly, China, a permanently stratified state capitalism governed by quasi-totalitarian bureaucrats. (We can call this system Soros Marxism, meaning a ruling clique of increasingly rich corporate czars employing a propagandistic veneer of socialist equality to keep the power and wealth for themselves.)”
TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 236.
THEY’VE REALLY GONE DOWNHILL SINCE THE EARLY MICROSOFT/KINSLEY DAYS: Slate Wonders Why Libertarian Party Insists on Being Libertarian on Gay Rights Issues, Reveals Utter Ignorance of Party’s History. “Slate‘s piece combines confused thinking with near utter ignorance on its topic. However, it will, if read quickly and carelessly by equally ignorant readers, help make certain people think less of libertarianism, and that’s all that matters.” Like most lefty writing, it’s all about keeping people tribalized and on the plantation.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Dickinson State Enrollment Drop Leads To Downsizing.
Low enrollment figures at Dickinson State University have led to several downsizing measures on campus.
In addition to a change in operations at the main campus cafeteria in the Student Center, several floors in the school’s three residence halls will be shut down for the beginning of spring semester in January, said Marie Moe, director of enrollment services and communications.
“We’ll be closing two floors in DeLong Hall and one floor each in Selke Hall and Woods Hall,” Moe said. “Those changes will start in January, and they’re basically happening because of our student enrollment numbers, and the fact that we want students to have that college residential hall experience. That experience includes having roommates.”
Down from 675 five years ago, Moe reported that 233 students were living in DSU residence halls in the fall 2013 semester, representing less than half the current capacity of 550 available living quarters.
In addition to what she called the enhancement of students’ “campus life environment,” Moe said the university also will save money and energy costs when the halls are closed down.
In October, DSU reported an official head count of 1,449 students enrolled, and only about 16 percent of enrolled students at the university are living on campus.
With DSU’s total student enrollment down more than 40 percent in three years, the university is trying to regain some of that lost market share on the heels of the Higher Learning Commission’s announcement that the school’s accreditation was taken off “on notice” status earlier this fall. The notice was issued in 2012 after the school received a scathing audit that outlined problems with inflated grades, questionable tuition waivers, scholarships and spending.
Say, did I mention that my new book is now shipping from Amazon?
BUT IT’S THE LAW OF THE LAND!!!! Change Is Obamacare’s Only Certainty. “Sometime after March 31 — probably not very far after — I would expect the administration to announce that after careful thought, it has decided not to enforce the individual mandate for 2014. As we’ve already seen, the individual mandate is very politically vulnerable. And I suspect we’re not done with the emergency fixes.”
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