LEVERAGE, MY BOY. LEVERAGE: Why Did China Hack Federal Employees’ Data? Officials think the massive data breach revealed this week is part of an effort to build a database of U.S. government workers. Given that all our databases seem to get hacked, I hope we’re at least larding them liberally with disinformation.
Archive for 2015
June 7, 2015
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RYAN LOVELACE: Did Hillary Clinton’s lawyer inadvertently expose her electoral nightmares?
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has filed lawsuits in Wisconsin and Ohio to fight voting rights laws passed by Republicans, and some say those lawsuits could be read as a sign that Clinton is worried about winning those states in 2016.
In 2012, both Wisconsin and Ohio went blue for President Obama. But they’re considered swing states now, and with Midwestern GOP contenders such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker poised to enter the presidential race, Clinton may have turned to her superstar lawyer to help eliminate her GOP competition.
Marc Elias serves as general counsel of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He has filed lawsuits in Wisconsin and Ohio, and more may be coming.
The Clinton campaign has insisted it had nothing to do with the liberal legal warfare, but Elias typically intervenes on behalf of Democrats in desperate need of assistance. He “emerged as the star” of the 2008 recount battle that resulted in Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, a “Saturday Night Live” alum, upsetting a Republican incumbent by just 312 votes.
And when Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., suddenly appeared vulnerable in last year’s midterm elections, Democrats called on Elias to ensure that Roberts would square off solely against one liberal opponent, independent Greg Orman, by removing the Democratic candidate from the ballot. A favorite of the outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Elias reportedly helped Democrats sneak a provision into a spending bill late last year that raised the maximum amount of money that donors can provide to Democrats and Republicans.
As 2016 approaches, Elias joined the Clinton campaign and appears to have begun waging a full-bore attack against the GOP. His lawsuit in Wisconsin alleges that several state laws — including the controversial voter ID law that has already survived judicial scrutiny — needlessly restrict citizens’ right to vote.
The GOP is way behind on the lawfare front. They need to raise their game, pronto.
RAND SIMBERG: Congress Fiddles with Monster Rockets While Human Spaceflight Burns: The Russian space industry is in big trouble, and with it, so is ours. Here’s where we are now: “Our backup plan…would be to mutually agree that the space station and space exploration is coming to an end. We would make an orderly evacuation….”
DOMESTIC TERRORISM: ‘I Watched Boston Beheader Go Radical:’ In private Facebook conversations, Usaama Rahim called for death to those “defaming the religion of Islam or the Prophet Muhammad.” When you’re named Usaama, well. . . I can’t find it online but I seem to remember The Onion having a story: Lou Gehrig Diagnosed With Lou Gehrig’s Disease: “With my name, it was only a matter of time,” says ballplayer.
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RECIPE: The Ultimate Umami Burger/Cheeseburger. You know, I think I’m going to have to give this a try.
A candid admission from an anonymous academic in Vox—“I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”—has higher ed spectators on all sides of the ideological spectrum concerned that students’ increasing aversion to offended-ness is forcing academics to dumb down their courses.
But while just about everybody agrees there’s a problem, sheer outrage is incapable of solving it. That’s because federal bureaucrats have declared war on campus free speech and universities would be crazy to defy them, short of a Congressional mandate to do so.
Watch what you say didn’t become the unofficial motto of American campuses by accident, and hyper-offended students don’t strike fear into the hearts of the professoriate because they are physically imposing. Rather, it’s the explicit threat of formal, government-backed sanction that gives a minority of easily-agitated agitators veto power over all aspects of campus life, from the classroom to the dorm room to the rec room. (Not even movie night is safe.) . . .
We have the federal government to thank for that.
Specifically, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights—a massive, bureaucratic agency staffed with 650 lawyers. They have one job: punish universities that don’t sufficiently police campuses for harassment and discrimination.
Ostensibly, they do this under the charge of Title IX, a 1972 amendment to the Higher Education Act that prohibits gender discrimination at universities that received federal funding. Initially intended to make sure that female student-athletes received as much institutional support as male athletes, Title IX has been reinterpreted by OCR to apply to virtually all human activity that takes place on campus.
Harassment, according to OCR’s confusing and ever-mutating guidance, is ill-defined and largely subjective.
And it’s all made up as it goes along, without much in the way of statutory language behind it, and mostly even without any sort of actual rulemaking — just administrative “guidance.”
June 6, 2015
MILO YIANNOPOULOS WATCHES EMMA SULKOWICZ’S NEW SEX TAPE SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO.
Naturally, Sulkowicz has become a feminist icon. But the activists and bloggers who supported her will be feeling a little uneasier this week, after she peeled back a few more layers on her own deep psychological dysfunction and apparently limitless ego by resorting to that age-old remedy for waning stardom: the sex tape. . . .
It’s telling, I think, that in Sulkowicz’s purported college dorm room there are no books. She has the same lack of interest in aesthetics as she does in intellectual enrichment: both in her choice of sexual partner (apparently satisfactory member notwithstanding) and the grim, bare walls with which she surrounds herself. Though I expect the austerity of her room reflects her barren emotional interior really rather well. You can tell “dad bods” are in fashion because both of the people in this video have one. But you do at least have to give an actress credit for doing nude scenes with a man who has larger breasts than she does. Sulkowicz’s size queendom apparently extends to love handles and leave the viewer sympathetic to the travails of her infamous mattress.
It’s revealing of her vanity that she insists on being filmed from four angles. Every crevasse of her unappealing naked body must be considered. Her congressional interlocutor is a gruesome sight in three dimensions, chosen, probably, to make young Emma look thinner. Which doesn’t work, I’m sorry to say.
All in all, it’s a tawdry, miserable encounter that tells us nothing about sexual assault or sex itself but quite a bit about the quasi-demonic inner workings of one Emma Sulkowicz.
Ouch.
INDUSTRY WEEK: Are Democrats Really Giving Up On Manufacturing?
MALE PRIVILEGE: D-Day began 71 years ago. “More than 156,000 Allied troops landed at Normandy on D-Day; total Allied casualties are estimated at 10,000 for the day, with 2,500 dead.”
SEX ON CAMPUS: Another Witch Hunt At Amherst.
What differentiates the Amherst suit from others, though, is that it portrays Doe as unable to give consent, and Jones as the initiator and the sober party.
And in a potentially explosive claim, the suit alleges the university has “targeted male students of color” like Doe since changing its sexual misconduct policy. Jones’ allegations were the first to be investigated under the new policy.
According to the lawsuit, Doe and Jones engaged in oral sex one night in February 2012. Jones was the roommate of Doe’s girlfriend.
The hearing board found it “credible” that Doe was intoxicated to the point of being “blacked out” during the encounter.
Amherst’s policy on sexual misconduct says a sexual participant can be incapacitated – “a state beyond drunkenness or intoxication” – and experience a “blackout state” in which they “appear to be giving consent” but don’t have “conscious awareness” of what they are doing.
Because the policy distinguishes incapacitation from intoxication, its statement that “being intoxicated or impaired by drugs or alcohol is never an excuse for sexual misconduct” does not clearly contemplate that an incapacitated student could commit sexual assault.
Only 21 months after her encounter with Doe did Jones file a complaint with the university, after a member of the university’s Special Oversight Committee on Sexual Misconduct encouraged her to do so.
A residential staff member with the university also encouraged Jones to “blame” the sex on Doe, according to the suit. This mirrors allegations in the Occidental suit that a university employee convinced the female student to accuse her drunken-hookup partner of assault.
I hope that Doe — and Doe’s attorney — walk away from this with a lot of money, and that the “residential staff member” is personally named. An awful lot of this stuff is ginned up by administrators.
IT’S KIND OF LIKE CHILDBIRTH, I GUESS: Forgetting the pain of exercise. Doing the Rippetoe workouts, as I do, there’s seldom much pain during the actual workout. It generally comes the next day . . .
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Losing Hope In Wisconsin. “With Wisconsin legislators poised to remove public university tenure from state statute, many faculty members were hopeful that a Board of Regents committee would respond forcefully Thursday. But the committee meeting ended with faculty leaders feeling that they had been let down. . . . The shared governance changes also are alarming, Fichtenbaum said, since ‘tenure and shared governance go hand in hand. Tenure is largely seen as being a protection for individuals being able to exercise individual academic freedom, but shared governance is really faculty collective academic freedom, in the formulation of academic policy, budget priorities, the hiring process and the very process of granting tenure.'”
When higher education was a booming industry, and when Democrats controlled most state governments, turning academia into an activist arm of the Democratic Party seemed like a good idea. Now academia’s seen as bloated and dysfunctional, the party it’s tied itself to is at record low influence in state governments, and the chickens are coming home to roost. It would have been better to have stayed out of politics, and focused on providing value to students.
VIDEO: This Week In Law.
ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST: Hawaii’s state Obamacare exchange has failed, after over $200 million in federal taxpayer funding and many millions more of state funding.
The once-highly praised Hawaii Health Connector has been “unable to generate sufficient revenues to sustain operations,” Gov. David Ige’s office said in a statement. The federal Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) informed the exchange last week that federal funds were no longer available to support long-term operations. . . .
While many of the state’s Democrats praised the ObamaCare exchange when it launched in October 2013, it was riddled with trouble from the start. The web portal never worked properly despite the state spending $74 million on a contract with CGI to build and maintain it. . . .
Enrollment never reached the 300,000 number then-Gov. Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat, enthusiastically predicted at the opening press conference launching the Connector. The enrollment number also never hit 70,000, the minimum needed to stay financially solvent. At its peak, enrollment reached 37,000, a fraction of the state’s 1.4 million people. Hawaii’s uninsured population, at 8 percent when the exchange opened, dropped just 2 percent.
Yep–another rousing Obamacare success story–all the more reason for the Supreme Court to give effect to the law as written by the Democrats and rule that individuals in federal-run exchanges don’t qualify for subsidies. Doing so will put the Obamacare monstrosity out of its misery sooner.
MICHAEL TOTTEN: The Second-Most Megalomaniacal Dictator on Earth. “He’s the ruler of—where else?—one of the ‘Stans. Turkmenistan, to be exact, where the post-Soviet period is exactly like its Soviet period. Berdimuhamedov just erected a 69-foot statue of himself in the center of Ashgabat, the capital. He’s up there on a golden horse atop an enormous slab of marble that looks like an iceberg.” Erdogan’s got to be in the top 5, though.
AMERICA’S NEXT PRESSING PROBLEM: ENDOWMENT INEQUALITY:
It didn’t take long for the criticisms to begin rolling in after Harvard University announced a $400 million donation to its engineering college.
The gift was proudly touted by the university as its largest-ever gift, and a significant step toward reaching the towering $6.5 billion fund-raising goal of its ongoing capital campaign.
Yet for many others, the gift didn’t make sense. They questioned why wealthy donors repeatedly choose to give large sums to the wealthiest university in the world.
Harvard has a $36 billion endowment that last year had a 15 percent investment return. The university has more than $43 billion in total wealth. It’s part of a prestigious pack of 10 rich universities that hold more one-third of all the wealth in higher education.
I think it’s better for everyone if you just spread the academic wealth around. That’s why I’m proposing a federal excise tax on “excess” endowment balances, with the funds to be redistributed to the less-fortunate institutions that didn’t win life’s endowment lottery.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Lawsuit: Infilaw Pays Low Performing Law Grads $5k To Defer Bar Exam To Pump Up School’s Pass Rate.
CHRIS NUTTALL on the economics of Indie publishing. I enjoyed his Ark Royal books.
WHEN ISIS GOES NUCLEAR: Investors’ Business Daily has a disturbing editorial, “Apocalypse Now: ISIS Establishing Nuclear Caliphate,” which claims that the radical Islamist group is close to acquiring sufficient funds for a nuclear weapon.
In the latest edition of its propaganda rag, the Islamic State says it has enough cash to buy a nuclear weapon from Pakistan and smuggle it into the U.S. through Mexico. This is the sum of all fears, and it’s not overblown. . . .
A Rand Corp. study says IS has more than $2 billion in assets from seized oil fields and refineries, kidnap ransoms and taxation. The think tank figures the terror group now controls fields with a production capacity of more than 150,000 barrels a day. It smuggles this oil out in tanker trucks and sells it at steeply discounted rates to buyers in Syria, Turkey, Kurdistan and elsewhere.
Despite falling world oil prices that have slowed IS’ energy revenues to about $2 million a week, the terror group is still raking in more than $1 million a day in extortion and taxes alone. IS has also stolen some $500 million from state-owned banks in Iraq.
This is far more cash than al-Qaida had access to before 9/11. And IS is more ambitious — and fanatical enough to actually detonate a nuke inside a U.S. city. . . . Indeed, IS’ magazine boasts that IS is “looking to do something big, something that would make any past operation look like a squirrel shoot.”
Another reason to seal the Mexican border as much as possible. But hey, ISIS is just the JV; nothing to worry about. This growing threat makes me glad I don’t live in a major U.S. city.
MARK FRAUENFELDER: As You Suspected, Those Claw Machines Are Rigged. “Claw machines can be programmed to automatically reduce their grip strength to maximize profits, while allowing an infrequent full-strength grip to entice suckers.”
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