Archive for 2015
January 25, 2015
BYRON YORK: 12 keys to the GOP presidential race right now.
1. The candidates who have run before — Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum — all think they can get their teams back together for another race. They can’t. Each man has been in touch with staff and supporters from 2008 and 2012, with the assumption that the people who were willing to work for them back then will do so again in 2016. But the world has changed; issues have changed and new candidates have emerged. Moderates who backed Romney now have Jeb Bush and Chris Christie to consider, while conservatives who backed Huckabee and Santorum have Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. Even if the veterans run again, they won’t be able to recreate what they had before. They’ll have to do something different.
York has 11 more, and they’re all worth reading, but let me reiterate my belief that what the GOP needs is fresh blood, not people who have been running for President since the iPhone was new.
THE ECONOMIST: America’s New Aristocracy: As the importance of intellectual capital grows, privilege has become increasingly heritable.
Thomas Jefferson drew a distinction between a natural aristocracy of the virtuous and talented, which was a blessing to a nation, and an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, which would slowly strangle it. Jefferson himself was a hybrid of these two types—a brilliant lawyer who inherited 11,000 acres and 135 slaves from his father-in-law—but the distinction proved durable. When the robber barons accumulated fortunes that made European princes envious, the combination of their own philanthropy, their children’s extravagance and federal trust-busting meant that Americans never discovered what it would be like to live in a country where the elite could reliably reproduce themselves. . . .
Intellectual capital drives the knowledge economy, so those who have lots of it get a fat slice of the pie. And it is increasingly heritable. Far more than in previous generations, clever, successful men marry clever, successful women. Such “assortative mating” increases inequality by 25%, by one estimate, since two-degree households typically enjoy two large incomes. Power couples conceive bright children and bring them up in stable homes—only 9% of college-educated mothers who give birth each year are unmarried, compared with 61% of high-school dropouts. They stimulate them relentlessly: children of professionals hear 32m more words by the age of four than those of parents on welfare. They move to pricey neighbourhoods with good schools, spend a packet on flute lessons and pull strings to get junior into a top-notch college.
The universities that mould the American elite seek out talented recruits from all backgrounds, and clever poor children who make it to the Ivy League may have their fees waived entirely. But middle-class students have to rack up huge debts to attend college, especially if they want a post-graduate degree, which many desirable jobs now require. The link between parental income and a child’s academic success has grown stronger, as clever people become richer and splash out on their daughter’s Mandarin tutor, and education matters more than it used to, because the demand for brainpower has soared.
I don’t know, an awful lot of those Ivy League graduates are credentialed, but not educated. For them, I suppose, there’s always a career in journalism or politics.
IT BEGINS: Maine Governor Proposes Taxing Large Charities.
UPDATE: I had some thoughts on taxing nonprofits here.
ROBERT VERBRUGGEN: Treating Parents Fairly:
The stabilization of the proportion of mothers who stay at home, the persistence of the dramatic increase in working motherhood that occurred in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, and Americans’ continued uneasiness with full-time working motherhood all have implications both for generations of children and for the economy. And given the stakes and the complexity of the problem, it is tempting for many to look for guidance from experts. But because there are so many factors to consider, social science has not reached a consensus about what is best for children.
The lack of consensus, however, has not deterred policymakers from attempting to help parents by passing “family friendly” legislation. Unfortunately, and likely in large part because there is no social or scholarly consensus on which to base such policies, we have a host of government programs that work at cross purposes, prodding women into the workforce while at the same time making it difficult for mothers to work outside the home.
Well, that’s how government tends to work.
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Dad posts meddling note sent home by teacher over packed lunch.
Missing from the story: The name of the teacher. Name and shame the nannies. But at least the school superintendent, Damon Kizzire, is named. He’s apologized to the family.
REWRITE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS’ SONG: HEIDEGGER, HEIDEGGER WAS A NAZI OLD BEGGAR WHO WOULD SEND YOU OFF TO BELSEN. “Professor Shocked, Shocked To Find Out Prominent Nazi Was An Anti-Semite.”
The chair of Germany’s Martin Heidegger Society resigned in genuine horror after some of Heidegger’s private papers were released and showed that, surprise, surprise, he was an anti-semite.
The immense awkwardness that is Heidegger’s Nazi affiliation is always quite a thing to behold. The simple fact of the matter is that, in terms of influence and also perhaps quality, Heidegger is a giant of 20th century philosophy, and one whose influence was felt primarily on the “Left.” The fact that a man who exercised such a tremendous influence on postmodern and progressive philosophy was also a Hitler supporter obviously raises eyebrows.
Well, they were the National Socialists, something most intellectuals today are at pains to ignore, just as they were for years at pains to explain away Heidegger’s Nazism, which it turns out he actually believed in.
ROGER SIMON: Obama, the Shiite, Goes to Riyadh. “Much of this Iran-coddling began back when the Green Movement was in the streets of Tehran seeking the overthrow of the ayatollahs and chanting ‘Obama, Obama… Are you with us or are you with them?’ Our president did not respond. He was already in private communication with the bizarre Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obama wanted to be the one who got credit for reining in the excesses of the Islamic Republic, not those unruly student demonstrators who were the ones suffering from the regime in the first place, being murdered, tortured and raped in Evin Prison, often in reverse order. . . . Now I realize Obama is not really a Shiite. He was raised in Sunni Indonesia. And, yes, Sunnis — notably ISIS, Boko Haram and AQAP — are leading the way in the public butchery department for the moment and need to be opposed with all our might. But that doesn’t mean Shiites are not active. Just the other day we had the mysterious Buenos Aires death of Alberto Nisman, who was about to reveal truths about the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in that city in which 85 were killed — a kind of simultaneous beheading in which Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah are said to be the culprits. Almost anyone honest and awake knows the Islamic Republic is and has been the primary state sponsor of terrorism worldwide for decades. . . . The president now has an Iran deal so tied up in his mind with his legacy that the appearance of Netanyahu in front of Congress opens a psychological wound so large Obama is likely to do almost anything. The world — not just Saudi Arabia and Israel — had better beware.”
WHATEVER COULD OBAMA HAVE IN MIND? Charles Krauthammer On How Israel Tension Raises Questions On Iran.
THIS IS WHAT EVERYONE PREDICTED WHEN THE ADEA WAS APPLIED TO ACADEMIA. I SAY, SUCK IT, LEFTIES. It Is Time to End Tenure at Age 70. “A specter haunting the academy today is of an intellectually wizened white male professoriate refusing to step aside for au courant, energetic, ambitious, and of course diverse younger faculty.”
Interestingly, most of those doing the warning were those “intellectually wizened white males.” So, like I say, suck it.
GRAPHIC: Watch the rapid decline of “white America” over three decades. Of course, counties with 98% white is setting the threshold pretty high.
ER, WHY? Great news. Republicans look at eliminating filibuster for SCOTUS nominees. “If the GOP scraps the filibuster for SCOTUS nominees now, it benefits nobody except Barack Obama and his allies, making if much easier for him to rail through a far more liberal choice than would otherwise be possible. Then, if the GOP manages to lose the White House again and the margin in the Senate remains small, the Democrats will get at least four more years of benefit out of it. If the Republicans do take the White House but somehow lose ground (and control) in the Senate, the Democrats can simply put the filibuster back in place in January of 2017, and what possible evidence of good will exists to suggest that they wouldn’t make such a hypocritical move? I suppose I’ll wait to hear a more full explanation from Alexander and friends if this proposal actually picks up steam. But for the moment, it just doesn’t make any sense.”
THERE’S ALWAYS SOMEBODY WHO GAINS WHEN THE GOVERNMENT DISTORTS THE MARKET: Smart Shoppers Hitting Gun Buyback Events for Bargains.
LEFTY BILLIONAIRE GETS OFF PRIVATE JET, SAYS AMERICANS HAVE TOO MUCH STUFF: “Billionaire property investor Jeff Greene recently spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, saying he believes people in the United States need to stop aiming so high and start living with less. . . . The only issue Americans took with the 60-year-old’s opinions was, well, everything, given he owns a $195 million palace in Beverly Hills, which has 23 bathrooms and a rotating dance floor, as well as four other blue ribbon properties, and is famous for throwing wild parties on a 145-foot yacht.”
Related: Hundreds of Private Jets Delivered People to Davos. Also, It’s Climate Change Day at Davos.
Plus, winning Twitter:
FIGHT THE POWER: German man went to court, won the right to pee standing up.
UPDATE: A former student writes from Germany that this case was their dinner table conversation tonight. To be fair, some of the blame goes to the dreadful German style of toilet design. I think that America offers a happy medium between the German and Japanese schools of toilet craziness.
I SUSPECT “CIVILITY” IS OR WILL BECOME A PROXY FOR “NOT OFFENDING PEOPLE BY HAVING THE WRONG IDEAS:” Higher Education Update: 80% of Provosts Favor Civility as Factor in Faculty Hiring and Tenure Decisions. It’s unsurprising, of course, that administrators would feel that way.
AT AMAZON, deals galore at the Men’s Denim Store.
Plus, deals on Hunting & Tactical Knives.
Also, check out the Kindle Daily Deals. They’re new every day, you know. . . .
WILL YOU LOSE MORE WEIGHT exercising on an empty stomach? You’ll find it hard to work out really intensely — at least, I’ve tried a couple of times to do heavy squats without eating enough and I ran out of gas. It was quite palpable.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Wait! What? FCC ponders plan to route U.S. 911 calls through Russian satellites.
WOMAN WHO IS INCAPABLE OF FEELING FEAR says it’s not all that great. We wouldn’t have evolved it if it weren’t useful.