IF ONLY: Hillary We Hardly Knew Ye.
Archive for 2015
November 13, 2015
BUYING MORE PANHANDLERS:That $200-an-hour panhandler proves Bill Bratton right.
November 12, 2015
SHE’S TALKING ABOUT ABORTION, RIGHT? Jennifer Lawrence: GOP ‘doesn’t support women’s basic rights.’
LAURENCE JARVIK: The Consolations Of Philosophy.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Alan Dershowitz Goes Off on PC College Culture: ‘the Fog of Fascism Is Descending.’ “It is free speech for me, but not for thee. Universities should not tolerate this kind of double standard… If you’re going to be a college administrator or a professor, if you have tenure, you have to speak back to the students, you have to call these things what they are: double standards, hypocrisy, bigotry, McCarthyism, and the fog of fascism is descending quickly over many American universities.”
FORMER UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE CHANCELLOR: Mizzou leaders squarely at fault for campus fiasco. Well, mostly because they failed to lead. And still are. I predict much closer outside supervision is in their university’s future.
YEAH, I DON’T THINK THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT RUBIO SAID: Philosophy Professor: Sen. Marco Rubio thinks I should quit my job. “I won’t quit because my colleagues and I are part of a sacred order, bound to seek out and profess truth, no matter how complicated or unappealing that truth might be.”
What’s the truth about what Rubio said? Did he say philosophy professors should quit their jobs? I must have missed that part.
BABY BOOMERS AND THE END OF HIGHER EDUCATION:
Fifty years ago this week, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Higher Education Act, ushering in an era of massive federal support for college students through a flurry of new programs: tuition grants, guaranteed student loans, and work-study funds. The law allowed a much greater swath of Americans to earn a college degree regardless of their family income. During the following decades, enrollment at campuses across the country grew threefold, to some 20 million students.
But today, Johnson’s vision of the Higher Education Act as a great equalizer in the American economy is at risk. Indeed, the divide between the haves and have-nots in higher education is almost as great today as it was in the mid-1960s. In the past decade alone, the percentage of students from families at the highest income levels who received a bachelor’s degree has grown to 82 percent, while for those at the bottom it has fallen to just 8 percent.
Viewed that way, the flood of money into higher ed has been a bust. But if you think of federal aid to higher education as a transfer of money from taxpayers to a Democrat-supporting industry, then it hasn’t been a failure at all.
THAT’S A GOOD MOVE, IF THEY CAN KEEP IT UP: Republicans Are Becoming The Anti-Cronyism Party.
Subsidies, bailouts, tax complexity and protective regulations in general tend to tilt the playing field towards the large and politically connected. When Republicans note this, they risk upsetting some of their friends on K Street and in the boardrooms of those large firms, but they also begin to provide the moral defense for free enterprise. Free enterprise is fair, and it maximizes wealth in the economy. Crony capitalism is immoral, it corrupts both politics and business, and it robs from the rest of the economy to enrich insiders.
And as Fiorina points out time after time, no politician in recent memory is as caught up in cronyism as Hillary Clinton.
The Republican grassroots are all-in for this, but the leadership, well, we’ll see. . . .
AT AMAZON, the Levi’s Holiday Sale.
THE BIRTH OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: “On the pop-culture Richter scale, Gary Gygax deserves a place alongside Walt Disney and Steve Jobs, says Michael Witwer, author of Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons and Dragons. In other words, Gygax was a 12th-level genius,” says John J. Miller in his ten minute “Bookmonger” podcast interview with Witwer at Ricochet.
Full disclosure/confession of my misspent teenage years: I played a little D&D at school, but once I discovered the Traveller RPG set in the far future, I was quite happy to immerse myself in that gaming universe.
WILL THE RETAIL SUPPORT BRIGADE TURN OUT THIS YEAR? On Black Friday, Wal-Mart to simplify deals schedule.
In an effort to score big on Black Friday, Wal-Mart says that it is simplifying its schedule for rolling out deals this year and has made a big push to ensure shoppers don’t find key items out-of-stock.
The world’s largest retailer plans to kick off its in-store sale at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving – the same time as last year. But, based on customer feedback, the company is retreating from an approach it tried last year in which it staggered deals so that some began later in the evening or even on Friday.
“Fundamentally, the customers are asking for, ‘Make it simple for me. Give it to me all at one time,’ ” said Steve Bratspies, Wal-Mart U.S.’s chief merchandising officer.
The retailer is also moving to have more synchronization between its online deals and in-store deals, with 96 percent of specials available in both channels this year, a share that executives said is up significantly from last year.
Hmm.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Nicole Gelinas: Want Less Corruption? Free The Markets? But that means fewer opportunities for graft. . . .
AT AMAZON, deals on Fire Tablets.
FISH DON’T KNOW THEY’RE WET: MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Denies Existence of Liberal Media Bias.
Related: Well, At Least Chris Matthews Didn’t Call Cruz & Rubio “White Hispanics.”
YOU SAY YOU GOT A REAL SOLUTION, WELL, YOU KNOW, WE’D ALL LOVE TO SEE THE PLAN: Student activist demands free college, has literally no idea how to pay for it when Neil Cavuto presses her on the details [VIDEO].
For today’s campus cry-bullies, logic is the ultimate hate speech.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Secret Service Agent Charged With Sexting 14-Year-Old From White House.
GRAY LADY LAMENTS ‘A LOST GENERATION OF DEMOCRATS.’
Why, it’s as if President Obama is the second coming of Woodrow Wilson or something.
THE EU SLAPS DISCRIMINATORY LABELS ON ISRAELI PRODUCTS:
The move has been in the works for a while. In September the European Parliament voted 525-70 in favor of it. Israeli settlement products have been excluded from EU trade preferences since 2004.
This latest move, though, is something new.
Once it comes into effect, shoppers in any EU supermarket will see certain products labeled “Made in the West Bank” (Israeli settlement) or “Made in the Golan” (Israeli settlement).
They won’t see such labels on products from any other of the world’s 200 territories that are under dispute. Not, for example, Turkish products from Northern Cyprus. Not Chinese products from Tibet.
In some strange way, in a continent that has a long, unlovely history of subjecting Jews to boycotts and badges, it is only products from the Jewish state that are going to be specially marked.
As Giulio Meotti wrote in Y-Net, as linked to by Roger Simon in a 2012 post ominously titled “A Jew-Free Europe,” “To quote psychiatrist Zvi Rex: ‘Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.’ Europe doesn’t want to live under the psychological burden of Auschwitz forever. The Jews are living reminders of the moral failure of Europe. This leads to the projection of guilt on Israel and the remaining European Jews.”
NOAH ROTHMAN: A Plague Of Racial Hoaxes On College Campuses. “The incentive to invent episodes of discrimination is basically a form of Munchausen Syndrome; one that is exacerbated by the press that routinely doles out the attention that these hoaxers so desperately seek. The dangerous idea that someone who alleges they have been the victim of bigoted or sexually discriminatory violence has ‘the right to be believed’ — a notion irresponsibly lent credence by no less a figure than Hillary Clinton — has nurtured the idea among students that they can get away with these fabrications.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: For $40,658 a Year, Your Child Can Learn to Play Dead on a Quad.
VOXPLAINING INNER CITY VIOLENCE TO SPIKE LEE TAKES SOME BALLS: “Vox really ate the whole wheel of cheese on this one.”