HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: More city co-eds turning to sugar daddies for school support. “More New York City co-eds are turning to a new source of income — sugar daddies — to cope with the rising cost of their college tuition, surprising statistics released yesterday reveal.”
Archive for 2013
January 15, 2013
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 6 Things a Woman Says When She Is Trying to Steal Your Man.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: AP Exclusive: US ordered delay in intern’s arrest. “Federal immigration agents were prepared to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender days before the November elections but were ordered by Washington to hold off after officials warned of ‘significant interest’ from Congress and news organizations because the suspect was a volunteer intern for Sen. Robert Menendez, according to internal agency documents provided to Congress. The Homeland Security Department said last month, when The Associated Press first disclosed the delayed arrest of Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta, that AP’s report was ‘categorically false.'”
ROGER KIMBALL: This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit: Sandy wrecked our house, but bureaucrats are keeping it broken.
Like many people whose houses were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, my family and I have been living in a rented house since the storm. Unlike some whose houses were totalled, we could have repaired things and been home toasting our tootsies by our own fireplace by now. What happened?
Two things: zoning (as in “Twilight Zone”) and FEMA.
Kafkaesque, indeed.
NO SURPRISE: Gallup: Gun control way down the list of concerns for Americans. But Obama would rather have you talk about gun control than about spending and the deficit.
READER BOOK PLUG: Out today from Stephen Hunter, The Third Bullet: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel.
BOB ZUBRIN: Al Gore’s Payday.
MORE ON Aaron Swartz.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: NLRB Member Under Fire Over Corruption Lawsuit. “The lawsuit, which names dozens of union officials as defendants, details an alleged scheme to defraud a union local out of money through kickbacks and extortion.”
MICHAEL WALSH: Cancel My Subscription. “As the past four years have shown time and again, the deeply unethical relationship between the White House and the Washington press corps ensures that nary a statement of Obama’s will be subjected to questioning or scrutiny, much less the mockery that attends just about anything a Republican says. That’s because the press corps is drawn from the same socio-economic and philosophical stratum of society as the politicians.” It’s a diversity problem. But Walsh has a solution.
ANTI-GUN ACTIVISTS NOT SO INTERESTED IN POSTING “GUN FREE” SIGNS.
NICK GILLESPIE ON JON STEWART ON GUNS: “Stewart makes a lot of good points, or at least points worth thinking about. In the end, though, he comes up well short of proposing meaningful reforms. In that failure, too, he’s capturing the anti-gun zeitgeist.”
Plus, peddling bogus numbers:
That 30,000 number stood out to me because it seemed very high. According to the FBI, in 2011, there was a total of 8,583 firearm homicides in the U.S. That may well be 8,583 gun murders too many, but it’s nowhere near 30,000 (the total number of murders by all methods came to 12,664). The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) uses a different method and found about 11,000 gun-related murders in 2011 and the total number of homicides to be around 16,000 (see table 2). So How did Stewart get to 30,000? By adding the number of gun-related suicides to the number of homicides.
Wait, why include suicides? I thought we had a right to die? Also:
Once you strip away the raw emotionalism of the carnage at Sandy Hook, or the Aurora theater, or Columbine, or Luby’s, or whatever, you’re left with a series of inconvenient truths for gun-control advocates: Over the past 20 years or so, more guns are in circulation and violent crime is down. So is violent crime that uses guns. Murders are down, too, even as video games and movies and music and everything else are filled with more fantasy violence than ever. For god’s sake, even mass shootings are not becoming more common. If ever there was a case to stand pat in terms of public policy, the state of gun control provides it (and that’s without even delving into the fact that Supreme Court has recently validated a personal right to own guns in two landmark cases). It’s probably always been the case but certainly since the start of 21st century, it seems like we legislate only by crisis-mongering and the results have not been good.
Well, we do have the worst political class ever, which is probably an argument for not doing much of anything.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST: Why D.C. Attorney General Irvin Nathan Should Have Recused Himself From The Gregory Case.
PIERS MORGAN PROVIDES BEAUTIFUL PROMOTION for Ben Shapiro’s new book, Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans.
Shapiro, meanwhile, is following a great man’s advice to “punch back twice as hard.”
#WARONBOYS: Two Boys Suspended For Playing Cops And Robbers At Recess. Everyone involved in this decision should be fired, and publicly mocked.
RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Age Of Administrative Excess. “Why is the federal government locking unwilling citizens into Medicare?”
NRA APPROACH TO SCHOOL VIOLENCE, CALLED “CRAZY” BY PRESS, SUPPORTED BY 55% OF AMERICANS. “I wonder what the support for LaPierre’s proposal would be if he’d been given a respectful hearing in the press?”
IN THE MAIL: From General Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir.
OBAMA ECONOMY: Workers Raiding Retirement Funds To Pay Current Bills. Just like the federal government!
QUESTIONS ABOUT CHINA’S ECONOMIC DATA: “Forgive us for not being shocked. China’s self-reported economic stats have been under scrutiny for some time now. The temptation for China’s central planners to fudge the numbers is especially strong given the pressure the country and the ruling party is under to continue to produce phenomenal growth. Not surprisingly, China’s National Bureau of Statistics has denied accusations of number-fixing. Their response to these allegations in the past has been to say: ‘prove it.’ That has been difficult, as China’s economy seems to be getting less transparent over time.”
What’s really disturbing isn’t just that China is lying to the rest of the world, but that China is most likely lying to itself — that the higher-ups can’t trust the numbers from the provinces, etc.
EXPLOSION IN E-FILING produces explosion in tax return fraud.
Worth keeping in mind as people talk about e-voting. . . .
RURAL AREAS LOSING POLITICAL INFLUENCE: “We lack political influence because we don‘t give money to campaigns, and we don‘t need handouts.”
WHY OBAMA WOULD RATHER TALK ABOUT GUN CONTROL: My USA Today Column: The debt is up about 60% since Obama took office. This can’t go on forever.