CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Clinton Foundation accepted Qatari donation amid concerns over bribes. “For the Qataris, the moment offered a touch of Clinton-blessed legitimacy amid a brewing controversy. For the Clinton Foundation, it came with a major donation.”
Archive for 2015
June 4, 2015
ROLL CALL: How To Be The Best Summer Intern Ever. There’s a free e-book.
INSIDE THE WORLD OF FIRST-TIME VOTERS: iMessage from Madison to Olivia – #2.
THE HILL: Obama’s trust-me approach falls flat with Democrats.
President Obama’s argument that Democrats should trust his vision on trade is falling flat on Capitol Hill.
Democrats — even some of Obama’s closest allies — say it’s not enough for the president to pronounce his trade agenda the most progressive in history.
The lawmakers want assurances that the agreements under negotiation, particularly a huge deal being finalized with Pacific Rim nations, will protect U.S. jobs — assurances many say they simply haven’t gotten.
“I take the president at his word that he believes … the argument he’s making, but I think he’s wrong,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said Wednesday.
“The analysis I’ve done comes to a very different conclusion,” he added. “It’s clear that this will, in the long term, not result in the growth of American jobs and an increase in wages.”
Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), head of the Congressional Black Caucus, said he’s in talks with administration officials, who have yet to convince him the president’s trade agenda would create jobs in North Carolina.
“I’m still at the place I’ve always been: leaning no,” Butterfield said Wednesday.
“There’s a difference between growing the economy and helping American companies grow the bottom line, and creating jobs,” he added.
That’s true, and trusting Obama is risky.
June 3, 2015
ORIN KERR: “Don’t overlook one key feature of surveillance reform and the passage of the USA Freedom Act: It came from legislation, not the Fourth Amendment. A court had wrongly allowed the bulk surveillance program that Congress had not actually authorized. When the public became aware of the program, Congress restricted the program by passing a new law.” Yes, the courts are a last resort, not a first.
ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY TARGET PAMELA GELLER: Police: Original target of Boston terror cell was Pamela Geller. So far the score is Geller 3, terrorists 0.
ED DRISCOLL: The Left Continues To Devour Itself.
WHITE MEN? NO. THIS PARTICULAR WHITE MAN? QUITE POSSIBLY. Should White Men Stop Writing? The Blunt Instrument on Publishing and Privilege. “I am a white, male poet—a white, male poet who is aware of his privilege and sensitive to inequalities facing women, POC, and LGBTQ individuals in and out of the writing community—but despite this awareness and sensitivity, I am still white and still male. Sometimes I feel like the time to write from my experience has passed, that the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn’t there anymore, and that the torch has passed to writers of other communities whose voices have too long been silenced or suppressed. I feel terrible about feeling terrible about this, since I also know that for so long, white men made other people feel terrible about who they were. Sometimes I write from other perspectives via persona poems in order to understand and empathize with the so-called ‘other’; but I fear that this could be construed as yet another example of my privilege—that I am appropriating another person’s experience, violating that person by telling his or her story. It feels like a Catch-22.”
It feels like a Catch-22 because the whole concept of “white privilege” was designed to be a Catch-22 that would ensnare gullible white guys like this.
SO WHEN, EXACTLY, DID COMEDIANS turn into Democratic Party apparatchiks? “Truly mocking people in power seems to be a thing of the past, so long as they’ve got a D by their name. This is not in any way shocking, as the creative class is decidedly liberal, but it’s a bit jarring that their commitment to politics constantly seems to trump their commitment to laughs.”
DR. RUTH TO WOMEN: Don’t take back your consent once it’s given. Feminists are naturally outraged.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Nevada Enacts First Nearly Universal Education Savings Account.
On Tuesday, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval signed into law the nation’s fifth education savings account (ESA) program, and the first to offer ESAs to all students who previously attended a public school. Earlier this year, Sandoval signed the state’s first educational choice law, a very limited scholarship tax credit. Despite their limitations, both programs greatly expand educational freedom, and will serve as much-needed pressure-release valves for the state’s overcrowding challenge.
When Nevada parents remove their child from her assigned district school, the state takes 90 percent of the statewide average basic support per pupil (about $5,100) and instead deposits it into a private, restricted-use bank account. The family can then use those funds to purchase a wide variety of educational products and services, such as textbooks, tutoring, educational therapy, online courses, and homeschool curricula, as well as private school tuition. Low-income students and students with special needs receive 100 percent of the statewide average basic support per pupil (about $5,700). Unspent funds roll over from year to year.
The eligibility requirements for ESA programs in other states are more restrictive.
Faster, please.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Mark Rippetoe: Should Personal Trainers and Coaches Be Licensed by the State? Occupational licensing is always a tool to protect the connected from competition by the unconnected. It’s justified in the name of protecting consumers, but it’s never demanded by consumers, but by members of the industry being protected.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Preserving protein function in DNA-protein nanostructures.
I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN 128MB WAS A LOT: SanDisk Squeezes 128GB of Storage Into a Dime-Sized Drive.
WHEN ACCEPTANCE TURNS TO HARM: Psychiatrist Paul McHugh had an intriguing take on “accepting” transgendered individuals a few months back in the WSJ that may be worth re-reading in the wake of the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner revelation:
[P]olicy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention. This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.
The transgendered suffer a disorder of “assumption” like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one’s maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight. . . .
When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic, 70%-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Some 25% did have persisting feelings; what differentiates those individuals remains to be discerned.
We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into “sex-reassignment surgery”—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as “satisfied” by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.
It now appears that our long-ago decision was a wise one. A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription. . . .
At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered. “Sex change” is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.
It’s an interesting question: If individuals who seek sex reassignment surgery are suffering from a treatable mental disorder–a form of body dysmorphic disorder–that could allow them to recover without invasive surgery, shouldn’t society encourage the less intrusive psychological therapy rather than the more intrusive (and irreversible) surgery? Indeed, if the surgery does not improve–but amplifies–underlying psychological disorders such as depression, would not the surgery constitute an unethical harm? Why is society so eager to lump “transgendered” individuals into the same category with homosexual or bisexual individuals? I know LGBT makes a nice-sounding acronym and all, but is there a principled, medical reason to treat the LGBs differently from the Ts? Where is the psychiatric community on this question?
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THE SNOWFLAKE GENERATION: Anxious Students Strain College Mental Health Centers. “Anxiety has now surpassed depression as the most common mental health diagnosis among college students, though depression, too, is on the rise. . . . The causes range widely, experts say, from mounting academic pressure at earlier ages to overprotective parents to compulsive engagement with social media. Anxiety has always played a role in the developmental drama of a student’s life, but now more students experience anxiety so intense and overwhelming that they are seeking professional counseling.”
To be fair, looking at the state of the country and the world today, anxiety and depression are understandable reactions.
FASTER, PLEASE: Graphene Heating System Dramatically Reduces Home Energy Costs.
AT AMAZON, Father’s Day Deals in Electronics.
THOUGHTS ON AUTOMATION:
What if we were to reframe the situation? What if, rather than asking the traditional question—What tasks currently performed by humans will soon be done more cheaply and rapidly by machines?—we ask a new one: What new feats might people achieve if they had better thinking machines to assist them? Instead of seeing work as a zero-sum game with machines taking an ever greater share, we might see growing possibilities for employment. We could reframe the threat of automation as an opportunity for augmentation.
I’d like to be augmented.
SO WE SHOULD STIGMATIZE FAT PEOPLE AND MAKE THEM EAT OUTSIDE? Cut Obesity Rates With The Tobacco Treatment.
But here’s a thought: Obesity rates have risen as smoking rates have fallen. The social interventions that produced a smoking reduction may well have led to the obesity “crisis.” Solution: More social interventions, of course!
WELL, TO BE FAIR, THE COUNTRY AND THE WORLD WERE IN A LOT BETTER SHAPE IN 2008 THAN IN 2015. George W. Bush outpolls Barack Obama.
