Jordan Wooley, who attends West Memorial Junior High School in the Katy Independent School District, told her school board Tuesday night they were given an assignment asking them to identify whether different statements were facts, opinions or myths. On the statement, “There is a God,” the teacher would only allow students to write myth, or else they’d fail, Wooley said.
MILLENIALS EVEN SEE TRANSPORTATION DIFFERENTLY, Nicole Gelinas writes at the New York Post:
It’s all wonderful, then, that people are changing their behavior — except for the fact that the country needs for people to keep driving ever more miles so that it can fund its highway and transit infrastructure. Remember: Just as not everyone needed to default on his mortgage to cause a housing bust, not everyone needs to take the bus instead of a car to cause a roads bust.
To wit: Without money from gas taxes pouring into federal highway coffers, taxpayers have had to bail out the nation’s highway fund for the past half-decade. I-95 from Florida to Maine needs at least $8 billion in bridge repairs — and we don’t have the money to make them.
Transit infrastructure is falling apart, too, even as people increasingly crowd trains and buses.
It’s tempting to want to keep bailing out the highways, just as we bailed out our housing market seven years ago.
It’s also foolish. Just as the 2008 housing crash was a necessary market signal that our way of life — bigger houses and bigger cars, all paid by bigger debt — was unaffordable, the traffic crash is a necessary market signal, too.
More people want to spend their lives working or with their families, not sitting on their butts behind a steering wheel.
Need another market signal?
You can buy a big house anywhere in the country, dirt cheap — as long as it’s nowhere near an efficient mass-transit system.
It’s also an opportunity for pols to say that we need a new way of funding our infrastructure. Sure, we should raise the gas tax — to what it would be if it kept up with inflation.*
Over time, though, charging people by the amount of gas they use or even the amount of miles they travel may be a losing game, as people travel less. Nearby real-estate owners who benefit from keeping up a highway may have to kick in.
In August, the London Independent claimed “Millennials are no longer going to night clubs,” with a take that presumably is applicable to American Millenials as well, given that on both sides of the pond, “once costly high-end audio equipment can be easily and inexpensively sourced online, meaning that the house party represents a better value option, as indeed do the entertainment offerings from Netflix, Amazon Instant Video or games companies.”
And as we noted back then, at least in America, that house party is likely to be in mom and dad’s basement. “More young adults are living at home than five years ago, despite the economic recovery, according to a new report by Pew Research Center that crunched U.S. Census bureau data from 2010 to 2015,” Forbes reported.
So they’re not going out to night clubs, they’re not driving, and they’re staying home watching TV. Congratulations, Millenials – you’re already leading the sedentary lifestyle my parents led in their 70s and 80s; have we got an exciting, wild and crazy candidate whose boundless sense of fun matches yours!
* It’s always time for Democrats and the MSM (but I repeat myself) to call for new gasoline taxes.
NEW SURVEY REVEALS ALARMING STUDENT ATTITUDES ABOUT FREE SPEECH—Yale University’s William F. Buckley, Jr. Program recently released a national survey measuring U.S. college students’ attitudes towards free speech on campus. The results were, ahem, troubling. It’s almost as if liberty is something these students are… unlearning.
Here are just a few of the highlights (lowlights?) from the survey:
Nearly one third (32 percent) of students could not identify the First Amendment as the constitutional amendment that deals with free speech. 33 percent of those who correctly identified the First Amendment said that the First Amendment does not protect hate speech.
More than half (51 percent) of students are in favor of their college or university having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty.
72 percent of students said they support disciplinary action against “any student or faculty member on campus who uses language that is considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive.”
In less awful news, 95 percent of the students surveyed said that free speech is important to them. However, as I have long predicted and discussed, when you ask Americans if they like free speech, they nearly always say “yes.” But when you get into the nitty gritty details about what kind of speech warrants protection, you discover that some folks (especially college students) are more in the “I love free speech, but…” camp. And I fear the list of exceptions is growing larger by the day.
You can check out more from the survey over at FIRE’s website and look through the full results on McLaughlin & Associates’ website.
Scientists studying ancient ice cores extracted from Greenland and Antarctica have found further evidence of two very powerful solar storms in the last 1,300 years, raising concerns about similar events in the future. Extreme solar storms pose a threat to all forms of electronic technology.
In 2012, Japanese scientists first reported the discovery of a spike of carbon-14 in cedar trees on that island during the AD 774-775 time frame. Since then, similar spikes have been observed in tree rings from the same era obtained on other continents. And thanks to a college biochemistry student, scientists have rooted the event in history through a reference in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which cites a “red crucifix” appearing in the heavens after sunset in the year 774.
It hasn’t been entirely clear what caused this radioactive spike, however, and exotic theories such as a giant comet hitting the Sun or a nearby supernova have been put forward to explain it. Now researchers led by geologist Raimund Muscheler of Lund University in Sweden say they have solved the mystery of both the 774-775 AD event as well as a similar one in 993-994 AD. In addition to carbon-14, they have linked radioactive beryllium to both events, firmly establishing them as solar flares. . . .
The new analysis of these past solar storms also confirms that they were several times stronger than the most intense solar storms that have been recorded on Earth. The largest solar flare ever measured came in 1859, during the so-called Carrington Event. Named for British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington who discovered and tracked the solar outburst, the event disrupted telegraph service around the world.
In 2013, Lloyd’s of London and the Atmospheric and Environmental Research Center estimated that the duration of power outages during a Carrington-like event today could last five months or longer for 20 to 40 million Americans at a total economic cost of $0.6-2.6 trillion.
Generally, people are thought to spend 20 percent of their night in slow-wave sleep, and the study’s white participants hit this mark. Black participants, however, spent only about 15 percent of the night in slow-wave sleep.
The study was just one data point in a mounting pile of evidence that black Americans aren’t sleeping as well as whites. This past June, the journal Sleep published a study on the sleep quality of black, white, Chinese, and Hispanic adults in six cities across the United States. The participants were pooled from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), a cohort of more than 6,000 people who, for the last 15 years, have been intermittently pricked, prodded, and assessed to discover how geography and race influence health over time. (More than 950 papers have been published on this cohort. It’s from them that researchers have found evidence that the farther people live from a wealthier area, the more likely they are to develop insulin resistance—or that blacks appear to have higher levels of the substances that cause blood to clot.) . . .
What’s more, the sleep discrepancy persisted even when the researchers tried to control for economic factors: As blacks got wealthier, the gap in sleep narrowed, but did not go away entirely. “The race gap is decreased if you take into account some indicator of economics,” says Lauderdale, “but it’s not eliminated in the data that I have looked at.” Indeed, in the San Diego study, researchers also concluded that there were racial differences in sleep regardless of income. (It should be noted, however, that researchers concede their attempts to control for economic indicators are far from perfect. “We know our measures for adjusting for socioeconomic status are still somewhat limited,” says Redline. “Sometimes the variation isn’t great enough.”)
So what explains the gap? It’s an intriguing and still somewhat open-ended scientific mystery.
The statistical disparate impact of sleep is just further evidence, of course, of “white privilege.”
PRAGER UNIVERSITY VIDEO: WHO KILLED THE LIBERAL ARTS?
Narrated by Heather Mac Donald, and found via Small Dead Animals, who asks, “Serious question: Can anyone paint a picture how universities can ever get out of this politically correct, dumbed down quagmire they’re in?”
FASTER, PLEASE: Enzyme Inhibitors May Reverse Male Pattern Baldness. Actually, this isn’t likely to matter much to me, as I seem to have gotten my maternal grandfather’s hair. But it matters to plenty of others!
RICHARD VEDDER: Seven Ways the Department of Education Has Made Higher Ed Worse. Here’s just one: “Second, if anything, college has become more elitist and less accessible to low income students. The proportion of recent graduates who are from the bottom quartile of the income distribution has declined since 1970 or 1980. The qualitative gap between the rich highly selective private schools and state universities has widened—fewer state schools make it near the top in the US News rankings, for example.”
A fellow researcher decided to troll the recommendations, sarcastically recommending that women not be allowed to go to the movies while pregnant. Karsten Juhl Jørgensen, a senior researcher from Copenhagen writes:
Going to the movies a few times during pregnancy may seem harmless. But it involves spending time in traffic to get there. The serious harms of spending time in traffic is well documented, also for fetuses, and there is no safe lower limit of exposure. While there, to my knowledge, is no direct evidence that the small amount of exposure to trafic [sic] on the way to the movies is harmful to pregnant women or fetuses, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and there is plenty of indirect evidence, in particular from members of the opposite sex in the same age range as the soon-to-be mother. As going to the movies is not a necessary activity, we need to develop guidelines explaining the risks of moviegoing to pregnant women and advise strongly against any such activity. Even a very small risk is not worth taking when the circumstances are that the activity is not absolutely necessary, Think of the children!
ED ROGERS IN THE WASHINGTON POST:The FBI director is saying something the Democrats need to hear. “FBI Director James Comey has made two recent speeches where he warns us there is an emerging trend of police officers standing down or demonstrating reluctance to engage criminals because they are worried about sparking a situation similar to the riots in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore. Comey’s comments do not fit the Obama administration’s narrative on crime, and drew criticism from civil rights activists, law enforcement unions and the White House. Well, what do these groups have in common? That’s easy — they’re almost all Democrats, and they may be going down a slippery slope of promoting policies that have the effect of being pro-crime and anti-gun at the same time. Calling Democrats ‘pro-crime’ may sound a tad harsh, but if you are for inhibiting police activity, causing fewer arrests and making mass releases from prison, what else would you call it?”
The comments appear to signal acknowledgment by the Obama administration that its strategy against the Islamic State has had limited success. Last month, General Lloyd Austin, the head of U.S. Central Command, said the $500 million American effort to train 5,400 troops had resulted in some “four or five” fighters still in the field. Carter announced this month the U.S. was looking at other ways to train support the rebels.
Carter’s remarks Tuesday appear to reflect a change in strategy by the Obama administration whose national-security advisers have recommended that U.S. troops be moved closer to the front lines in Iraq and Syria, according to The Washington Post. . . .
On Friday, commenting on an operation in Iraq to rescue dozens of prisoners held by the Islamic State that resulted in the death of an American serviceman, Carter said: “I expect we’ll do more of this sort of thing,” he said, before adding: “It doesn’t represent us entering the combat role.”
U.S. troops left Iraq in 2011, and remain there in an advisory role.
No combat, just a few advisors. Where have I heard that before? And I suppose I should repeat my Iraq War history lesson: Things were going so well as late as 2010 that the Obama Administration was bragging about Iraq as one of its big foreign policy successes.
In the interest of historical accuracy, I think I’ll repeat this post again:
[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.
Plus:
Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but “A lot of people think he really didn’t want to keep any troops there.” Woodward agrees that Obama didn’t want to keep troops there and elaborates:
Look, Obama does not like war. But as you look back on this, the argument from the military was, let’s keep 10,000, 15,000 troops there as an insurance policy. And we all know insurance policies make sense. We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still 65 years or so after the war. When you are a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies. And he didn’t in this case. I don’t think you can say everything is because of that decision, but clearly a factor.
We had some woeful laughs about the insurance policies metaphor. Everyone knows they make sense, but it’s still hard to get people to buy them. They want to think things might just work out, so why pay for the insurance? It’s the old “young invincibles” problem that underlies Obamcare.
Obama blew it in Iraq, which is in chaos, and in Syria, which is in chaos, and in Libya, which is in chaos. A little history:
As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.
Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.
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