AFTER CANADA, A QUESTION FOR THE U.S.: Do the Capitol’s Sergeants-at-Arms Carry Guns?
Archive for 2014
October 24, 2014
ED MORRISSEY: Why a GOP Wave Election Will Surprise the Media. Just remember, it’s not enough to win: You have to win outside the margin of fraud.
ORIN KERR: Tips For First-Year Law Professors.
OOPS: DNC head stumbles on Obama question. “The head of the Democrats’ campaign arm is insisting this week that President Obama is campaigning for threatened Senate Democrats in purple districts. But Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who heads the Democratic National Committee (DNC), couldn’t come up with even one example to back her claim.”
BILL MCMORRIS: How The Supreme Court Created The Student Loan Bubble: It all starts with Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
The lie that props up our Big Education regime is that the GI Bill, which paid for World War II veterans to attend college, produced the upward mobility and economic boom of the postwar period. It’s a heartwarming story, the veteran who would have been a dust farmer but for the grace of government generosity. But it just isn’t true. Only one out of every eight returning veterans attended college. The rest, the vast majority, benefited from something even more egalitarian: aptitude testing. The format favors raw talent above all else, allowing companies to hire high-potential candidates from any background and groom them to fit the company’s needs.
These tactics came to commerce from a familiar source.The armed services were forced to process hundreds of thousands of recruits during the war, and in order to filter and assign soldiers, the government developed aptitude tests. Businesses witnessed the U.S. defeat the two most efficient peoples known to man, thought there must be something to this whole testing thing, and followed suit. The chief hiring metric in the postwar era was not whether someone had a degree, but whether he had the aptitude that would enable him to succeed. Every industry from blue-blooded high finance to immigrant-heavy manufacturing employed testing to determine who would rise through the ranks, regardless of lineage, heritage, or education. Testing enabled men who set out to be blue-collar workers to ascend based solely on their ability. . . .
Two years ago I interviewed Den Black, a former automotive engineer at GM supplier Delphi whose pension was slashed to speed up the auto bailout. His backstory interested me nearly as much as his grievance with the Obama administration. A few years before the Supreme Court issued the Griggs decision, he set out to join his brother as a line-worker at General Motors. He hadn’t been the best student, didn’t care much for school, but submitted to the hiring exam. The test revealed that he had an advanced understanding of physics and mathematics. Within a few years, he was given the opportunity to take the entrance exam to General Motors University. After two years at GMU, where he combined shiftwork with education, he emerged an engineer in management. It’s no bachelor’s degree, but judging by the patents he helped generate, it was a worthy investment.
The Griggs decision has made that organic rise through the ranks impossible, as disparate impact left businesses liable for those who failed to pass hiring tests.
“Most legitimate job selection practices, including those that predict productivity better than alternatives, will routinely trigger liability under the current rule,” Wax wrote in a 2011 paper titled “Disparate Impact Realism.”
The solution for businesses post-Griggs was obvious: outsource screening to colleges, which are allowed to weed out poor candidates based on test scores. The bachelor’s degree, previously reserved for academics, doctors, and lawyers, became the de facto credential required for any white-collar job.
Read the whole thing.
BYRON YORK: Who says Obamacare isn’t a major factor in midterms? “Some Democrats and their advocates in the press believe Obamacare, a year into implementation, is no longer much of a factor in the midterm elections. But no one has told Republican candidates, who are still pounding away at the Affordable Care Act on the stump. And no one has told voters, especially those in states with closely contested Senate races, who regularly place it among the top issues of the campaign.”
ROGER SIMON: Could It Possibly Get Any Worse?… It Already Did!
Today, in my birth city of New York, within hours of each other, we had a doctor come down with Ebola and another quasi-Islamo-lunatic bash a cop in the head with a hatchet, only a day after a similar event in Canada.
The most amazing part of the cop attack was, at approximately 7PM West Coast time, after millions of people had been hearing about it on cable television for hours, according to Ed Henry on Fox, an administration spokesperson didn’t even know it had happened. They’re probably waiting to make sure it’s “workplace violence.”
Meanwhile, the infected doctor, who had just returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea, had been riding the subway only hours before being diagnosed. He had also gone bowling. . . .
Okay, no more Mr. Nice Blogger. Anyone who doesn’t realize our country is being governed by incompetents somewhere between Caligula and Nero (with golf replacing the violin) hasn’t been paying the slightest attention.
It’s pathetic. Related: Well, I feel safer.
I THINK WE SHOULD BE PAYING MORE ATTENTION TO NIGERIAN KNOW-HOW: Ebola crisis: How Nigeria’s Dr Adadevoh fought the virus.
As Nigeria heaves a collective sigh of relief after being declared free of Ebola, one woman is being widely praised for helping to ensure a more devastating outbreak was avoided.
Dr Stella Ameyo Adadevoh raised a red flag when attending to a Liberian patient at the First Consultant Hospital in Nigeria’s main city, Lagos, in July.
Patrick Sawyer had just flown into the country, already sick – he should never have been allowed on the plane.
Nigeria had never had an Ebola case before so it was an impressive piece of diagnostic work.
Whilst caring for Mr Sawyer and protecting the nation from the virus, Dr Adadevoh and her colleagues were themselves at great risk.
“From the day the index patient arrived in Nigeria, my father and I were constantly asking my mother and making sure she was OK. We were aware of what could come,” says Bankole Cardoso, Dr Adadevoh’s only son. . . .
During those early days caring for Mr Sawyer whilst awaiting the result of the blood test, Dr Adadevo came under intense pressure to let him leave – a move that could have had catastrophic consequences.
“The Liberian ambassador started calling Dr Adadevo, putting pressure on her and the institution. He felt we were kidnapping the gentleman and said it was a denial of his fundamental rights and we could face further actions,” says Dr Ohiaeri, adding that the hospital trusted Dr Adadevo’s judgment.
It’s good that they did. As I say, maybe we should pay more attention to how they’ve done things. We seem to be a bit less serious about it.
AT AMAZON, Kindle Daily Deals.
EBOLA IN NEW YORK CITY? Doctors Without Borders physician tested for Ebola in NYC. “The 33-year-old physician, employed at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, developed a fever, nausea, pain and fatigue Wednesday night, a law enforcement official briefed on the matter told CNN. On Thursday morning, he was taken to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan for testing. The doctor, who returned from West Africa about 10 days ago, has been identified as Craig Spencer, according to law enforcement officials.”
UPDATE: Patient at New York City hospital tests positive for Ebola, reports say. “A doctor who treated Ebola patients in West Africa has tested positive for the virus in New York City, according to multiple reports.” As someone says in the comments, shit just got real. Let’s hope he hasn’t infected anyone else in NYC.
And the wisdom of the doctor from Morristown, Tennessee who self-quarantined after returning from treating Ebola patients in Africa is quite clear now. I don’t think anyone who’s worked with Ebola patients should be out and about in the community until after a quarantine period.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Girlfriend now quarantined. Plus: “On his Facebook page, Spencer posted a photo of himself in protective gear. The page indicates he went to Guinea around September 18 and later to Brussels in mid October. . . . nvestigators took the case seriously from the outset because it appeared the doctor didn’t quarantine himself following his return, the law enforcement official said. The doctor traveled to Brooklyn and then back to Manhattan on Wednesday night, the official said. . . . The doctor began feeling sluggish a couple of days ago, but it wasn’t until Thursday, when he developed 103-degree fever, that he contacted Doctors Without Borders, authorities said.”
It seems quite clear that the public health people aren’t taking this disease seriously enough. Plus: “Mark Levine, a city councilman who represents the doctor’s Manhattan neighborhood, said earlier Thursday that city health department workers were canvassing the area, distributing information on the disease door-to-door, according to CNN affiliate WABC. ‘The goal right now is to make sure people don’t panic,’ he said.” Yeah, that’s been the goal all along. I suggest prioritizing this goal: Making sure people don’t get or spread Ebola. Yeah, crazy idea, I know.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Meet The New Serfs: You. Accountability is only for the little people.
In a sane world, the New Haven authorities would have shown up at Adams’s house with a check, flowers, and an apology, and a certificate exempting him from taxes for the rest of his life. In this world, people in his situation get treated by the government like they are the ones who have screwed up. And of course they’d say they had no record of the episode — getting information about your situation from any government agency, especially from one that is persecuting you, requires an agonizing effort. Keeping people in the dark is part of how they maintain their power. For fun sometime, call the comical New York State tax department and note the intentionally garbled phone numbers on the recording about how to get in touch with a tax agent’s superior to complain or ask a question.
The strange flip-side — the second half of Samuel Francis’s “anarcho-tyranny” — is that the brunt of government abuse falls on the law-abiding. Illinois, for example, makes it difficult for an ordinary citizen to legally carry a gun for self defense — up until a couple of years ago, doing so was categorically prohibited. But Illinois police seize thousands of illegal guns from criminals each year, and the state prosecutes practically none of those weapons cases. The law-abiding — by definition law-abiding — citizens applying for concealed-carry permits get treated like criminals, and the actual criminals do not. If you follow the law and inform Illinois authorities that you have a gun in the home, you invite all sorts of intrusion and oversight. If you don’t, nobody’s really looking. Meanwhile, the streets of Chicago are full of blood, going on 1,600 shootings this year and it’s not even Halloween. Nobody is held responsible for that carnage, but if you put an eleventh round in your legally owned rifle in Oak Park, you’re looking at jail time.
A return to tar and feathers looks more appealing all the time.
SO IS THE IRS JUST ROTTEN ALL THE WAY THROUGH? Whistleblowers: IRS Officials Behind ‘Fraudulent’ Multi-Billion Dollar Corporate Tax Giveaways. “In a letter to Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, IRS commissioner John A. Koskinen, and IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, Jane J. Kim, an attorney in the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel in New York, accused IRS executives of “deliberately” facilitating multi-billion dollar tax giveaways. The letter, dated October 19, will add further pressure on the agency, which is under fire for allegedly targeting conservative and Tea Party groups.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Tractor Beams Are Becoming Real.
TRYING TO SHRINK THE “MARGIN OF FRAUD:” Christie wants GOP control over ‘voting mechanisms.’ “Christie stressed the need to keep Republicans in charge of states – and overseeing state-level voting regulations – ahead of the next presidential election.”
Dems are predictably apoplectic, even though they had their own “Secretary of State Project” to do the same thing.
NOW OUT: From Dana Loesch, Hands Off My Gun: Defeating The Plot To Disarm America. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I think this cover will sell quite a few books. (Bumped).
AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL for drones.
YEAH, THAT’S A CRAPPY THING TO DO: Man sentenced for lasering plane with 118 passengers aboard.
IN LIGHT OF ALL THE BEN BRADLEE WATERGATE HOOPLA, I should note two things: First, this Watergate mythbusting by Prof. Joseph Campbell, and second, that I doubt Bradlee would have done the same to a Democratic President.