A FITNESS WRISTBAND that shocks you if you don’t exercise enough.
Archive for 2014
July 8, 2014
HEH: Iowahawk captions the photo of Elizabeth Warren riding a parked motorcycle. “Still no proof that anybody in Elizabeth Warren’s family has ever ridden an Indian.”
JOHN TIERNEY: Soccer: A Beautiful Game Of Chance.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Bled dry by the new class: Bureaucrats push pencils at the expense of real workers.
IN THE MAIL: Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea.
Plus, today only at Amazon: 63% or More Off Schlage Camelot Keypad Deadbolt.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 425.
THE JAPANESE THOUGHT THE SAME THING. DISABUSING THEM OF THAT NOTION WAS EXPENSIVE FOR ALL CONCERNED. China thinks it can defeat America in battle. That’s why it’s dangerous to do things that encourage such notions.
WAR ON WOMEN: Funny how timely this 1972 piece from Joan Didion on feminism remains today:
And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women’s movement, and the invention of women as a “class.” One could not help admiring the radical simplicity of this instant transfiguration. The notion that, in the absence of a cooperative proletariat, a revolutionary class might simply be invented, made up, “named” and so brought into existence, seemed at once so pragmatic and so visionary, so precisely Emersonian, that it took the breath away, exactly confirmed one’s idea of where 19th-century transcendental instincts crossed with a late reading of Engels and Marx might lead. To read the theorists of the women’s movement was to think not of Mary Wollstonecraft but of Margaret Fuller at her most high-minded, of rushing position papers off to mimeo and drinking tea from paper cups in lieu of eating lunch; of thin raincoats on bitter nights. If the family was the last fortress of capitalism, then let us abolish the family. If the necessity for conventional reproduction of the species seemed unfair to women, then let us transcend, via technology, “the very organization of nature,” the oppression, as Shulamith Firestone saw it, “that goes back through recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.” I accept the universe, Margaret Fuller had finally allowed: Shulamith Firestone did not. . . .
They totted up the pans scoured, the towels picked off the bathroom floor, the loads of laundry done in a lifetime. Cooking a meal could only be “dogwork,” and to claim any pleasure from it was evidence of craven acquiescence in one’s own forced labor. Small children could only be odious mechanisms for the spilling and digesting of food, for robbing women of their “freedom.” It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir’s grave and awesome recognition of woman’s role as “the Other” to the notion that the first step in changing that role was Alix Kates Shulman’s marriage contract (“wife strips beds, husband remakes them”) reproduced in Ms; but it was toward just such trivialization that the women’s movement seemed to be heading. . . .
But of course something other than an objection to being “discriminated against” was at work here, something other than an aversion to being “stereotyped” in one’s sex role. Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children. One is constantly struck, in the accounts of lesbian relationships which appear from time to time in the movement literature, by the emphasis on the superior “tenderness” of the relationship, the “gentleness” of the sexual connection, as if the participants were wounded birds. The derogation of assertiveness as “machismo” has achieved such currency that one imagines several million women to delicate to deal with a man more overtly sexual than, say, David Cassidy. Just as one had gotten the unintended but inescapable suggestion, when told about the “terror and revulsion” experienced by women in the vicinity of construction sites, of creatures too “tender” for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets, so now one was getting, in the later literature of the movement, the impression of women too “sensitive” for the difficulties and ambiguities of adult life, women unequipped for reality and grasping at the movement as a rationale for denying that reality.
Read the whole thing.
Looking back on his famous battle with feminists, Norman Mailer once said, “I was chosen as the sexist pig mainly because I was the most available target. The women saying, ‘Let’s have a revolution,’ were having a revolution, but the revolution was taking place in New York. They weren’t going down to Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas, and saying to the men down there, ‘Let’s free the women down here.’ They were freeing the women in New York who were already free. They were occupying powerful jobs in New York. They were a strong element in the publishing houses. So, in other words, it was a false revolution to a certain degree.”
Indeed.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Study Finds Zero Conservative Books, Many Liberal Ones, on Freshman Reading Lists.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Bled dry by the new class: Bureaucrats push pencils at the expense of real workers.
SEN. ROBERT MENENDEZ: Those charges that I partied with underage Dominican hookers? A Cuban smear operation.
NEW YORK POST: Audit The IRS! “From testimony by the nation’s archivist, we know the IRS destroyed e-mails, contrary to federal law. From IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, we know it did so even though they were evidence in another case. If the IRS indeed has nothing to hide, the best way to prove it is to get that independent audit True the Vote is asking for.”
Of course, the IRS does have something to hide. We know that because they’re hiding it.
NEW EPA PROPOSAL: We should be able to garnish wages without a court order. Er, no you shouldn’t.
IT’S AS IF THE GAY-RIGHTS MOVEMENT IS JUST A DEMOCRATIC FRONT GROUP OR SOMETHING: Gay Group Snubs Independent LGBT Champion, Backs Gay Democrat with Weak Record on Issues.
OUT TODAY FROM KATIE PAVLICH: Assault and Flattery: The Truth About the Left and Their War on Women.
SCOTT OTT: Republicans Should Do Whatever It Takes to Make Obama Look Good. “Perhaps you’re thinking: ‘That’s not ‘work’ for Republicans. They do that effortlessly. Everything the GOP does seems to make Obama look good.’ That’s not what I mean.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Hastings Dean Fights Dive in U.S. News Law School Rankings.
NOW OUT FROM KURT SCHLICHTER: Conservative Insurgency. It occurred to me a while back that much of Obama’s reign consists of throwing away settled political culture when it stood in his path. This book looks at people on the right doing the same thing.
I’m reading it now — 22% through according to Kindle — and it’s good.
WAR ON WOMEN: Hillary Clinton Speaks About Defense of Child Rapist: “I fulfilled that obligation.” Was there an obligation to chortle gleefully? Or was that just a bonus?
Plus: “The question of why and how Clinton ended up serving as the attorney for accused child rapist Thomas Alfred Taylor in 1975 is still murky.” As are so many questions about her past.
JOSH HEDTKE: Higher Ed, Clinton Extravagance, and an American Pathology.
Hillary Clinton gave a Luskin Thought Leadership lecture at UCLA last March for which she raked in $300,000 in speaking fees. The appearance was one of at least eight lectures she gave at various universities throughout the past year. Her minimum speaking fee at said universities was reportedly $200,000.
There has been outrage among some students of these universities, who lambaste their administrators for doling out stratospheric speaking fees while students are left to grapple with tuitions that have increased by 500 percent over the last thirty years.
In defense of Clinton’s exploits, it’s been noted that the fees she was paid did not come out of the pot of money funded by tuition but rather from privately donated grants. For instance, at UCLA, the Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership fund established in 2011 by benefactors Meyer and Renee Luskin paid her fee.
The nascent Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership program has thus far brought in three speakers: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Kofi Annan, all of whom are, incidentally (or not?), of the liberal bent.
It is correct to point out that, because she was paid by a private donation, it is not as if her speaking fee directly diminished the school’s ability to pay for classroom resources and the like.
But I have always thought the excuse by university administrators that building the new conference center, or the new campus restaurant, or the new LGBT center is justified because various private donors have earmarked their donations for these express purposes, is rather dubious.
In an age when students are crushed by debt, it is conceivable that administrators with any concern for their students could tell potential benefactors that they would love to accept their donation for the new Muslim Cultural Center, but that because of the dire straits their students find themselves in vis-à-vis tuition costs, they would kindly ask that donors make their donations to the university’s general fund instead.
Once when I was in Las Vegas, a guy stopped me on the street and asked to borrow a thousand bucks for his mother’s operation.
I was skeptical. “How do I know you won’t just gamble the money away?”
His indignant response: “I’ve already got gambling money!”
I’m sure he was a college administrator of some kind. And I’ll be here all week; try the veal.
July 7, 2014
IT’S COME TO THIS: New York Times: Newt Gingrich Was Right About Medicare.
BRITISH ACADEMICS: Hey, Pedophilia Is Perfectly Natural. Hmm. I question the timing.