PREPAREDNESS PAYS. Our power’s out, but the generator kicked in and we have heat, lights, Internet and TV. Here’s to hoping that it comes back on soon, so that other folks aren’t stuck in the dark, but right now Helen, who was slightly dubious, is very pleased.
Archive for 2015
February 16, 2015
MY OBSERVATION IS THAT A LOT OF OLDER FOLKS SEEM TO BE OVERMEDICATED: Continued Questions on Benzodiazepine Use in Older Patients. “A study in this month’s JAMA Psychiatry reports that among 65- to 80-year-old Americans, close to 9 percent use one of these sedative-hypnotics, drugs like Valium, Xanax, Ativan and Klonopin. Among older women, nearly 11 percent take them.”
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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Livingston: Rutgers Administration Is ‘Pulling a Fast One’ With Merger of Camden and Newark Law Schools. Expect to see more such, either in a “hide the decline” mode, or as cost-cutting as law schools go from cash cows to expense items.
Plus, from the comments:
I was wondering when someone was finally going to address this issue. A large number of junior ranking faculty are trying to transform law schools into something completely different. These professors, who are largely female, want to talk about anything but traditional law. Their focus is instead on abortion, parenting, racism, sexism, human rights violations and the environment. I get that there will be some overlap between these topics and the law, but they should be restricted to when the topic actually comes us and not woven mercilessly throughout the general curriculum. Since traditional topics still need to be taught for the bar exam and some business courses need to be offered, schools end up with a bloated faculty just so that they can have a strange panoply of socially progressive seminars that fit each faculty member’s niche interest. Perversely, this effect is most pronounced at low ranking schools, where students really should be focusing on basic legal skills since there is no way that they will ever have the resume to become constitutional law attorneys or public interest lawyers.
Graduating unemployable social-justice-warrior types is not a good mission, or a sustainable one.
YOU CAN’T DEBATE HERE, THIS IS A UNIVERSITY! Feminist, LGBT orgs threaten to ‘take action’ when Christian group invites them to debate.
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MARK CUNNINGHAM: To win in 2016: The voters Republicans forgot. “They’re the voters who didn’t come out for John McCain in 2008, and mostly not for Mitt Romney in 2012: They’re middle- and working-class — mostly men and mostly white, though some minority voters and women will respond to the same appeal. When these voters have come out for the GOP, it’s seen congressional landslides like 1994, 2010 and ’14 — but no national Republican since Ronald Reagan has fully drawn them in. . . . Why could Reagan talk to these voters? He’d talked with them. He spent 1954 to ’62 as a spokesman for General Electric — hosting ‘GE Theater’ on TV, but also giving speeches at GE plants. And eating that day in the cafeteria, talking to the workers. Actually, listening to them — getting an earful on how they saw their work, the country, the world. That experience informed Reagan’s entire political future — how he spoke, what he said, his occasional breaks with GOP orthodoxy. No candidate today has time left for such deep exposure — but any of them can get a start. And the smart ones will learn to signal that they’re on these voters’ side.”
Read the whole thing — especially if you’re a GOP politico, as it’s full of good advice.
MICHAEL BARONE: Check out the similarity between this map indicating the presence of unvaccinated children on the West Side of Los Angeles (hat tip: Instapundit) with this map of medical marijuana dispensaries on the West Side of Los Angeles, which, by the way, doesn’t seem to include data for the separate incorporated city of Santa Monica. Quite some similarity, eh? The enlightened folk on the West Side seem to believe that marijuana is good for you and vaccinations aren’t. . . .So West Siders, who eschew 1950s America’s acceptance of vaccinations and abhorrence of marijuana, also most closely resemble the racial characteristics of what we look back on as white-bread America. Interesting.”
THE POPE SAYS WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE WON’T: “They were killed simply for the fact that they were Christians.”
AND THAT’S EVEN BEFORE YOU FACTOR IN ALL THE TITLE IX SUITS AGAINST UNIVERSITIES: Law Firm Revenues, Profits Up Sharply in 2014, With More to Come in 2015.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 648.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Open Ukrainian Society And Its Enemies:
The West has been caught off guard by Putin because it underestimated the Russian capacity and will for mischief and overestimated its own strength and coherence. This is still to some degree a problem: We are still underestimating the damage that Russia can do to us. The EU is much more vulnerable than many people grasp. The euro project has divided Europe’s north from its south, and the still-evolving euro crisis has the potential both to paralyze European policymaking for years to come and to shake the foundations of the European order. Most NATO members are not fulfilling their obligations on military spending, and Germany’s political appetite for taking on expensive projects on behalf of foreign states is diminished, to say the least.
The West’s distractions and divisions created an opportunity for Russia, a weak and declining power with very poor longterm prospects, to catch the stronger West off guard and pose a significant challenge to the liberal order that the West wants to build. But Putin’s ugly and brutal invasion of a peaceful neighboring state isn’t just a problem for the West. It is also a historic opportunity. The future of Putin’s Russia is as much at stake here as the future of Ukraine, and Putin has quite unintentionally given the West a second chance to promote the construction of a genuinely democratic and prosperous Russia.
Despite its problems, the West is much richer, much bigger and enormously more powerful than Vlad the Invader and the ramshackle state he has built. Putin has rashly challenged us to a contest in which the odds are heavily against him. Our job isn’t to respond to his military probes in the Donbas as much as it is to grasp the nature of our advantages and to bring the immense advantages of the West into play in ways that demonstrate to Russia that the path Putin has chosen is a historical dead end. We didn’t beat the Soviet Union on the battlefield; we beat it by forcing the Soviets leadership to realize their utter inability to compete economically, technologically and ultimately militarily against the kind of open and dynamic society the western world built after World War Two. Putin, from a much weaker position and with a much less coherent set of ideas and institutions, has challenged us to another round of Tear Down That Wall. Dealing with his challenge will be a much less all-consuming and dangerous enterprise than dealing with the empire that Stalin built, but deal with it we must.
Unfortunately, we have the worst political class in our history, and if Europe is doing better than that, it’s only because its history is so much worse. . . .