Archive for 2015
August 5, 2015
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HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Goldman Sachs: Job Market, Student Debt Keep Millennials With Parents.
WAIT, I WAS TOLD THAT WAS IMPOSSIBLE: Spain emerges as Europe’s economic star after years of austerity.
ROGER KIMBALL remembers Robert Conquest, who was right about pretty much everything.
Although, happily, his What To Do When The Russians Come, coauthored with my University of Tennessee colleague John Manchip White, turned out not to be needed.
WHATEVER YOU DO WILL BE WRONG: How are we supposed to treat women in the workplace?
Treating women differently than men in the workplace is bad; but now, treating women and men the same is also problematic, apparently.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox suggested in an article for the Harvard Business Review that, after decades of being told to treat men and women the same in the workplace, such treatment is actually hurting women.
“Because differences are not recognized, women are too often simply judged as ‘not fitting’ the dominant group’s systems, styles and patterns,” Wittenberg-Cox wrote.
“In all the companies I work with, lack of recognition of basic differences like career cycles, communication styles, or attitudes to power is enough to eliminate one gender and prefer the other,” she added.
But women in the workplace are not the only ones potentially hurt by not fitting in to a “dominant group.” Boys in school suffer their own consequences, as the majority of U.S. teachers are women.
“Instead of adapting to boys’ differences (‘more physical energy, developmentally less mature, use language differently,’ as [child psychologist Michael Thompson] put it), we insist that both genders behave the same, and medicate our sons to calm them down,” Wittenberg-Cox wrote.
Of course, outside of a few scholars like Thompson and Christina Hoff Sommers, the issue of poorly-performing boys isn’t addressed — because they don’t belong to a victim class. Meanwhile, anything that could possibly help bolster the suggestion of a “war on women” and oppression at the hands of the patriarchy is elevated to a national crisis.
It’s as if it’s all about keeping a voting constituency agitated.
NEW YORK: Democratic Primary to Challenge Zeldin Will Be Competitive.
The Democrat who challenges GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin in New York’s 1st District will face a close race. But the eventual nominee will have a primary shaping up to be just as competitive, political handicappers say.
The only two declared candidates for the Democratic nomination are Southampton Town Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst and former federal prosecutor and venture capitalist David Calone. They are locked in a tight race, with each candidate drawing on different bases of support in the Long Island district, and both having raised close to a half million dollars so far.
Stay tuned.
THIS HOUSING BUBBLE WILL END BADLY, TOO, Kevin D. Williamson warns at NRO:
[H]ousing prices are going up for the same reason that college tuitions are: because the government facilitates lending people money at concessionary rates to purchase them. The Fed has, despite the occasional sobering gander in the direction of reality, been keeping the cheap-money sluices pretty much wide open. The federal regulators have loosened their grip over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s lending activities, and, according to a Fed report released Monday, banks are once again loosening up their lending standards.
This ended badly the last time. It’ll end badly this time, too.
Read the whole thing.
CONGRATULATIONS: Mark Levin’s Plunder and Deceit is now Number One on Amazon. (Bumped).
“CONSTITUTIONAL VANDALISM:” George Will Coins the Perfect Phrase to Describe Obama’s Tenure.
HMM: Highest-ranking Jewish House Democrat opposes Iran deal.
The highest-ranking Jewish Democrat in the House announced his opposition to the nuclear accord with Iran on Tuesday, in a blow to the Obama administration’s lobbying efforts.
“I’m going to vote against the Iran deal,” Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) — the former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — told Newsday.
“I tried very hard to get to yes. But at the end of the day, despite some positive elements in the deal, the totality compelled me to oppose it.”
In addition to Rep. Israel, Reps. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) also came out against the deal on Tuesday, saying that the multinational agreement did not include enough safeguards to prevent Iran from cheating on its commitments or limit it from supporting extremist groups such as Hezbollah.
“After a decade in public life working to stop Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons, I cannot support a deal giving Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief — in return for letting it maintain an advanced nuclear program and the infrastructure of a threshold nuclear state,” Deutch wrote in the Broward County Sun Sentinel.
The announcements complicated the Obama administration’s push on Iran on Capitol Hill, which it has been vigorously pursuing for weeks.
It’s a lousy deal.
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: The U.S. government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol.
HOW FOX NEWS MADE MY DAD CRAZY: A new documentary with that title “reinforces the reality that it’s liberals who politicize everything,” Mark Hemingway writes at the Federalist.
And it reinforces how much of leftism is, to borrow from a recent article by Joel Kotkin on Jerry Brown, an Oedipal struggle against the legacy of mom and dad. As an associate of Norman Podhoretz said in 1960, back when the senior Podhoretz was still a man of the left and about to give a speech to his fellow leftists on the potential for American military involvement in a small country called Vietnam, “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”
Years of ‘soft-minded liberalism’ were yesterday blamed for the chaos at Calais by a former Labour immigration minister.
Phil Woolas made the blistering intervention as he demanded a British-run detention camp on French soil.
The former Home Office minister said the illegal immigrants ‘wouldn’t come’ if they knew they would be locked up.
He blamed an absence of ID cards in Britain and his own party’s Human Rights Act – which he said had made it harder to remove foreigners who had been effectively given equal rights to those of British citizens.
Mr Woolas, who was an immigration minister between 2008 and 2010, said: ‘The mess in Calais is down to years of soft-minded liberalism and utter naivety.’
He added: ‘Many migrants are fleeing war, but once in France they’re safe.
‘Others paid money to people traffickers in the hope of a good life. That’s not political asylum.
‘These people want to live in a rich country. This is economic migration.
‘As for Calais it’s French territory but our border control. A detention centre to replace the migrant encampments would send a signal.
‘If migrants knew they’d be locked up and deported when they got to Calais they wouldn’t go,’ he wrote in an article on the Daily Mirror website.
Actually, it wasn’t soft-minded liberalism, but hard-headed political calculation that caused Labour to open up immigration:
The release of a previously unseen document suggested that Labour’s migration policy over the past decade had been aimed not just at meeting the country’s economic needs, but also the Government’s “social objectives”.
The paper said migration would “enhance economic growth” and made clear that trying to halt or reverse it could be “economically damaging”. But it also stated that immigration had general “benefits” and that a new policy framework was needed to “maximise” the contribution of migration to the Government’s wider social aims.
The Government has always denied that social engineering played a part in its migration policy.
However, the paper, which was written in 2000 at a time when immigration began to increase dramatically, said controls were contrary to its policy objectives and could lead to “social exclusion”.
Last night, the Conservatives demanded an independent inquiry into the issue. It was alleged that the document showed that Labour had overseen a deliberate open-door policy on immigration to boost multi-culturalism.
Voting trends indicate that migrants and their descendants are much more likely to vote Labour.
That’s exactly what’s going on here now, of course. Import voters until you can’t lose.
August 4, 2015
IT’S A BAD DEAL. NOTHING TO THINK ABOUT: Chuck Schumer ‘loses it’ in meeting with Jewish leaders.
DESCRIPTION: “Alternately depressing and terrifying.” WaPo: How the Obama White House runs foreign policy. Even the Obama-friendly Washington Post is all about “an overbearing and paranoid White House that insists on controlling even the smallest policy details, often at the expense of timely and effective decisions.” Plus, explicit parallels to Jimmy Carter.
JOHN HINDERAKER: The Immigration Onslaught Continues. “We are in the midst of the biggest influx of immigrants in our country’s history. In the next ten years, under current law, the federal government will issue 10 million green cards–more than the combined populations of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. . . . The 1965 immigration legislation for which Ted Kennedy was largely responsible, was sold to Americans under false pretenses. It established a new regime, in which Third World immigration was prioritized and family connections valued over any benefit an immigrant might bring to the United States.”
TOO MANY THINGS ARE CHARACTERIZED AS “THREATS” THESE DAYS: Threats conviction for saying ‘I’m gonna get you’ reversed.
THIS WOULD BE HUGE NEWS IF SHE WERE THE PRESUMPTIVE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE: FBI looking into the security of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail setup.
JOURNALISM SUCK-UP WATCH: “Polished, practiced and private, Chelsea Clinton is the closest thing America has to a princess.”
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NOBODY TELL NOTORIOUS ROBOPHOBE MATT YGLESIAS: Sex with robots to be ‘the norm’ in 50 years, expert claims.
Related item here. And remember, if you think sex with robots is “creepy,” you’ll be an unemployable robophobe bigot in a few years.
WELL, I CERTAINLY FEEL SAFER: Secret sanctions revealed against university hosting $1.25 billion biolab.
WHEN MORE WOMEN GO TO COLLEGE THAN MEN, IT’S WOMEN RULE, MEN DROOL.
But when more women have college debt, it’s Student Loan Debt Is Leaving Women Broke and Vulnerable.
But it’s all just so distressing. Bring out the fainting couch!
Across the United States, women like Stallings are staring down piles of student debt—bigger piles, in fact, than the ones facing their former male classmates. They’re also making less money with which to pay off that debt. The combination is making women poorer, more dependent, and setting them up for a more tenuous retirement. And it’s creating a systematic gender wealth gap that persists for women’s entire lives. . . .
There is some degree of “choice” involved in the pay gap – insofar as women funneled into certain careers and men into others is a “choice.” More women major in the humanities than in fields like business, engineering and the sciences, which usually lead to better-paying jobs after graduation. Within employment sectors, men gravitate toward high-paying specialties, while women may focus on areas that are more fulfilling or more flexible, but less remunerative.
I thought we were supposed to be pro-choice. And shouldn’t the scare-quotes go around “funneled?”
Related: Women are at greater risk from global warming than men, claims MEP.
Related: Air-Conditioning Really Is a Sexist Conspiracy.
The Patriarchy gets ’em going and coming.