OBAMA’S LEGACY: The Economy’s Worst 8-Year Run in 62 Years.
Archive for 2015
February 21, 2015
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Practicality vs. Utopia.
Our political culture’s faith in education as a ritual that brings prosperity raining down from the heavens is positively religious in its intensity. Obviously a good education is enormously important to career success, as well as good citizenship and personal fulfillment, but we ended up viewing education as an expensive blended fuel to be poured into the engines of life – the more of it people get, and the more expensive it is, the further they’ll go.
The American people were long ago bludgeoned out of demanding value for their education dollars, to the point where college is now a hugely expensive remedial education for all the subjects high school and grade school didn’t teach well – a point that will be driven home all the more forcefully if President Obama’s fantasy of “free” community college comes true. “Free” community college would amount to a couple more years of high school, protracting adolescence and making those hyper-expensive advanced degrees even more of a class signifier. Instead of turning high school into a six-year affair, we should be asking very tough questions of our highly-compensated educational bureaucracy about why our kids aren’t emerging from the public school system with the well-rounded education they need to make solid practical decisions about the next steps in their lives.
Another aspect of ritualized utopianism is our loss of respect for vocational education and the “dirty jobs” celebrated by TV host Mike Rowe, who campaigns for young people to investigate skilled trade work. There are solid careers out there in trades where employers perpetually complain about a shortage of hard-working, eager apprentices, even in times of chronic high unemployment.
There’s too much magical thinking. “The belief in credentials over competence has profoundly failed America over the past few years, costing us an ocean of money and inflicting terrific damage upon the fabric of our society.” Yes. But, as I keep saying, our political class values credentials over competence because they are better provided with the former than with the latter.
ULTIMATELY, ED MORRISSEY IS BEHIND THIS AMAZING TRANSITION: When Did Canada Get So Badass?
No, really, he is.
UPDATE: Austin Bay on Canada’s Badass Military History. Plus: “In my experience — in terms of individual, quality personnel — only Australian troops match Canadians on a one-for-one basis.”
WENDY KAMINER: The Progressive Ideas Behind The Lack Of Free Speech On Campus. “These days, when students talk about threats to their safety and demand access to “safe spaces,” they’re often talking about the threat of unwelcome speech and demanding protection from the emotional disturbances sparked by unsettling ideas. It’s not just rape that some women on campus fear: It’s discussions of rape. . . . I remember the first time, in the early ’90s, that I heard a Harvard student describe herself as oppressed, as a woman of color. She hadn’t been systematically deprived of fundamental rights and liberties. After all, she’d been admitted to Harvard. But she had been offended and unsettled by certain attitudes and remarks. Did she have good reason to take offense? That was an irrelevant question. Popular therapeutic culture defined verbal ‘assaults’ and other forms of discrimination by the subjective, emotional responses of self-proclaimed victims.”
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ASHE SCHOW: Bipartisan group calls for Education Dept. reform regarding campus sexual assault.
Department of Education regulations forcing colleges and universities to create pseudo-court systems to handle campus sexual assault are interfering with schools’ core mission to educate, according to a bipartisan report from a task force for the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
The report was designed to offer solutions for easing regulatory burdens on colleges, which have exploded in recent years.
“Over time, oversight of higher education by the Department of Education has expanded and evolved in ways that undermine the ability of colleges and universities to serve students and accomplish their missions,” the report said. “The compliance problem is exacerbated by the sheer volume of mandates — approximately 2,000 pages of text — and the reality that the Department of Education issues official guidance to amend or clarify its rules at a rate of more than one document per work day.” . . .
Regulations relating to Title IX, the report says, have only been formally implemented three times: in 1975, 2000 and 2006. But since then, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which oversees Title IX compliance, has been creating new regulations stemming from the infamous 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter regarding campus sexual assaults.
“While OCR strenuously maintains that the letter does not add requirements to applicable law, the reality is that these standards impose serious additional responsibilities and break new policy ground,” the report said.
These new requirements are for colleges and universities to adjudicate accusations of sexual assault — a separate justice system that has been labeled a “kangaroo court” — which has led to lawsuits from both accusers and the accused that the system is biased.
Well, because it is, and it’s designed to be.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Rudy Is Right: Barack Obama doesn’t even like America.
Questions about patriotism and love of country are, according to our self-appointed referees, out of bounds, déclassé, boob bait for bubbas, etc. Those are questions that we are not allowed to ask in polite society. Why? Because polite society does not want to hear the answers.
Does Barack Obama like America? The people around him certainly seem to have their reservations. Michelle Obama said — twice, at separate campaign events — that her husband’s ascending to the presidency meant that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” She was in her mid 40s at the time, her “adult lifetime” having spanned decades during which she could not be “really proud” of her country. Barack Obama spent years in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church as the churchman fulminated: “God Damn America!” The Reverend Wright’s infamous “God Damn America!” sermon charges the country with a litany of abuses: slavery, mistreatment of the Indians, “treating citizens as less than human,” etc.
A less raving version of the same indictment can be found in the president’s own speeches and books. His social circle includes such figures as Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, who expressed their love of country by participating in a murderous terrorist campaign against it. Does Barack Obama love his country? Call me a rube for saying so, but it’s a fair question.
Though it’s one that our media folks might have done a better job exploring in 2008.
But here’s why Democrats, and their media protectors, are so unhappy with this question with regard to Obama in particular: It turns 2008 on its head. Obama’s appeal in 2008 lay in no small part in xenophilia: We’re so open-minded, we’re not just electing a President with a Muslim-sounding name, we’re electing a President with the same name as our most recent wartime foe! It let people feel enlightened, and progressive.
But all those differences that seemed so appealing can quickly flip into grounds for suspicion, especially when the object is behaving suspiciously. After all, if — like me — you believe in evolution, you might think that xenophobia, as such a well-established human trait, must have had beneficial functions: Maybe the xenos couldn’t be trusted, or even expected, to have the polity’s best interests at heart. Maybe, when people start getting worried about the polity’s future, those novel characteristics that once seemed so appealing now seem threatening. So while there’s a general reason the establishment wants to take the patriotism question off the table — patriotism is unsophisticated, and so limiting — there’s also a specific reason, which is that it’s something Obama’s vulnerable on right now, and it’s something the establishment can’t afford to cast Obama loose on, for reasons internal to its coalition.
But of course, the more they attack Giuliani on this, the more attention they draw to it. And even those who are, at first, repelled by Giuliani’s argument may find doubts lingering, and perhaps even growing, as they look at Obama’s presidency in a new light. . . .
And what are those reasons internal to the coalition? Williamson explains:
There is a personality type common among the Left’s partisans, and it has a name: Holden Caulfield. He is adolescent, perpetually disappointed, and ever on the lookout for phoniness and hypocrisy. His is the sort of personality inclined to believe in his heart the declaration that “behind every great fortune there is a great crime.” (He also believes that this is a quotation from Honoré de Balzac, whose works he has not read, when it fact it comes from Richard O’Connor’s The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur.) He believes with Elizabeth Warren that the economy is a rigged game based on exploitation and deceit rather than on innovation, productivity, and competition. He believes with Barack Obama that the only reason (e.g.) Staples does not pay its part-time associates more or schedule them for more hours is so that it can pad its executive pay and protect its “billions” in annual profits.
(He believes that Staples, whose financials he has not read, makes “billions,” when in fact it does no such thing.) Say an admiring word about Steve Jobs and he’ll swear that there are four-year-olds working 169 hours a week in Chinese sweatshops producing iPods at the point of a bayonet. He believes that most people get into Harvard and Yale because they have influential parents (that’s the University of Texas, unfortunately), that rich Americans mostly inherit their money (in reality, about 15 percent of their assets are inherited, less than for middle-class families), that the U.S. goes to war abroad to enrich contractors at home, and that the entire history of Latin America must be understood through the prism of the United Fruit Company’s maneuverings in 1954.
Give Holden Caulfield a television show and you’ve got Chris Hayes.
Barack Obama has a great, big, heaping dose of Holden Caulfield in him. That and chutzpah: When as a candidate he was in trouble because of his association with the racist lunacy of the Reverend Wright, he responded by giving the American public at large a lecture on racism and its culpability therein, while his minions began proclaiming that the only reason to oppose this politician with the racist associates was — presto-change-o! — racism.
Yep. Read the whole thing.
THOUGHTS ON EUROPE AND THE FAILURE OF MULTICULTURALISM. “Thirty years ago, many Europeans saw multiculturalism – the embrace of an inclusive, diverse society – as an answer to Europe’s social problems. Today, a growing number consider it to be a cause of them. That perception has led some mainstream politicians, including British Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to publicly denounce multiculturalism and speak out against its dangers. . . . As a political tool, multiculturalism has functioned as not merely a response to diversity but also a means of constraining it. And that insight reveals a paradox. Multicultural policies accept as a given that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. They seek to institutionalize diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes – into a singular, homogeneous Muslim community, for example – and defining their needs and rights accordingly. Such policies, in other words, have helped create the very divisions they were meant to manage.”
IT’S ALWAYS NICE TO MAKE TWITCHY: Rachel Maddow plays ‘female senators are better’ gender card; Instapundit folds her hand with one question.
Meanwhile, Maddow is supposed to be the smart one at MSNBC, and she’s playing the “girls rule, boys drool” card? Well, I guess being smarter than Al Sharpton or Ronan Farrow isn’t setting a high bar.
February 20, 2015
ED DRISCOLL: Oh, That Return of the Primitive. “Do Islamic terrorists and the doomsday fringe of the global warming cult have something in common?”
YEAH, WELL, I THINK AMERICANS SHOULD IGNORE OBAMA’S PRONOUNCEMENTS WHEN IT’S IMPORTANT, TOO: Rasmussen: Plurality of Democrats think Obama should be able to ignore court rulings if it’s “important.” Quit paying taxes, obey only the laws you agree with, and punish anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. Goose, meet gander.
DO TELL: New Dietary Guidelines: The Real Bad Egg Is Sugar. “A nutrition advisory panel that helps shape the country’s official dietary guidelines eased some of its previous restrictions on fat and cholesterol on Thursday and recommended sharp new limits on the amount of added sugar that Americans should consume.”
This is, of course, what we’ve been hearing from Gary Taubes for years.
Plus, note that the new guidelines are still politicized: “The advisory panel included the vegetarian diet as an example of what it called a healthy eating pattern, noting that a plant-based diet is also more sustainable, with less of an impact on the environment. But critics questioned whether the guidelines might overstep the mandate to focus on health and nutrition.”
Also: “Since the 1980s, Americans over all have been eating more grains, produce, cereals and vegetable oils, while generally lowering their intake of red meat, whole milk and eggs, Ms. Hite said, and yet the population is fatter and sicker than ever.”
I’M NOT ACTUALLY SURE THE PROBLEM IS OVERLY-RIGID MASCULINITY: Britain’s Male Suicide Rate Highest Since 2001.
USING EXERCISE AND DIET TO PRODUCE mother-daughter hotness.
ERIC HOLDER WANTS AN HONEST CONVERSATION ABOUT RACE. PAUL RAHE TAKES UP THE CHALLENGE: What Do the Ten Most Dangerous Cities in America Have in Common?
Early on in his tenure, Eric Holder called for a national conversation about race and he described us as “a nation of cowards.” Although I doubt very much whether he in particular could stomach a genuinely frank conversation on this subject, I do believe that he is right that we as a people are afraid to speak up — and I regard this as a serious defect, for it prevents our even thinking about how we might address a grave problem.
The truth is simple and sad. While violent crime is by no means restricted to inner-city African-American neighborhoods, it is more prevalent there than anywhere else.
We have been treated in the last couple of years to astonishing nonsense concerning the “rape culture” that is supposedly pervasive on America’s campuses — when the statistics based on crimes reported to the police suggest that rape is exceedingly rare at our universities and exceedingly common in inner-city black neighborhoods. If our President and his Attorney General really cared about the mistreatment of women, these neighborhoods would be their focus.
If we were to have an honest national conversation on race or, for that matter, on rape, we would have to attend to the near collapse of the black family, to the fact that only 17% of African-American teenagers aged 15 to 17 live in a family where both parents are present, and to the impact this has on the likelihood that young black men will turn to crime. If Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were victimized, it was not by the likes of George Zimmerman or Darren Wilson. It was by their parents who did not stay together and keep their sons on the straight and narrow.
This really is a serious problem — and it is much more of a problem for ordinary African-Americans than it is for white men such as myself. For by and large black people are the ones who are victimized. They live in the dangerous neighborhoods. They are the ones threatened by violent crime. They are the ones most apt to be raped.
One would think that, with a black President and a black Attorney General, we would be witnessing an attempt to think through this problem and to deal with it. But, in the last six years, neither Barack Obama nor Eric Holder has said a word on the subject.
Sorry, wrong narrative. Also, you’re a racist for mentioning this.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What to do if a frozen pipe bursts in your home.
Tip: Make sure you know where your gas and water shutoff valves are now, before you need to. And have a shutoff tool — I have this one — in an easy to locate place.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: W&L Law School Permanently Reduces 1L Class to 100 (Down 47% From 2012), Eliminates 6 Faculty and 6 Staff Positions, Cuts or Freezes All Faculty Salaries, and Invades Corpus of Endowment.
That last is the big news. Dipping into capital, as the famous preppy joke has it, is the one unforgivable sin. . . .
SO MY BROTHER DUG OUT THIS OLD TRACK from a band we had in the early 1990s, The Backsliders, a cover of Spirit’s I Got A Line On You. This was recorded on a Yamaha 4-track cassette deck, with some bouncing, by me, and I only sort of knew what I was doing back then, but it turned out okay. Better than I remembered, actually.
Here’s the original version. We certainly did it with fewer people and less visible chest hair.
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PALACE GUARD: The media rushes to defend Obama’s honor from Rudy Giuliani. Their sensitivity on this topic tells you that it’s effective.
Also, that they’re racists.
JOURNALISM: PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year of 2014 falls apart only two months later. George Will should get a written apology. But he won’t, because the “fact checkers” at Politifact are hacks.