SO IT WAS A HOAX, THEN: Clemson Stonewalls On Whether Banana Incident Was A Hoax.
Archive for 2016
May 10, 2016
I WAS WORRIED THAT JOINING THE DAILY BEAST WAS AN OMEN OF BAD THINGS TO COME: Conservative Author and Humorist P.J. O’Rourke Endorses Hillary.
WHAT THE ‘GAP YEAR’ PHENOMENON TELLS US ABOUT AMERICAN COLLEGES: “What they don’t seem to appreciate is that the gap-year trend represents a subtle indictment of their institutions. After all, if people believe that a gap year will accelerate students’ maturation, help them cultivate practical and/or vocational skills, make them more sophisticated, or give them (in the words of journalist Susan Greenberg) ‘a newfound sense of purpose and perspective,’ the implication is that colleges will fall short in each of these areas. For that matter, the gap year raises important questions about why so many people are attending college in the first place.”
SEXISM ON THE MARCH: As Hillary Plays the Woman Card, More Men Are Being Dealt Out. “A key indicator of American male decline is the gender ratio at U.S. colleges. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), women accounted for 43 percent of enrollees in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in 1972. The other 57 percent were men. Forty years later, the ratio had flipped. In 2012, the latest year for which actual data were reported, women made up 57 percent of the college population, with men representing the remaining 43 percent. Further, NCES projects that the gap will widen by 2022, when women are expected to reach 61 percent of the college population. If that projection holds, America will have roughly 14 million female college students and only 10 million male college students.”
And yet virtually every school has a “women’s center,” a relic of when women were a small and new minority in higher education. And not only is there nothing comparable for men, male students are treated as presumptive rapists.
But wait, there’s more:
So, if men are now underrepresented in higher education, where might they be? One place is in prison. At the end of 2014, almost 93 percent of inmates in state and federal correctional facilities were male. There were over 1.4 million male prisoners compared to 113,000 female inmates.
If we add inmates in city and county jails as well as those on probation or parole, the gap widens. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 5.56 million men were in the correctional system at the end of 2014, versus 1.25 million women.
While men have always dominated the correctional population, they have suffered disproportionately in today’s era of mass incarceration.
If you look at actual numbers and policies, it’s a war on men. The “war on women” rhetoric is just a smokescreen. But don’t expect Hillary to address that. . . .
THIS ISN’T THE 21st CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: Welcome to Your Curated Future — You’re going to miss out on a lot.
WELL, THEY PICKED UP THE GOVERNORSHIP: Could Maryland senate race be a Republican pickup?
Conventional wisdom would say Republicans in Maryland have no chance to win a Senate seat. But conventional wisdom has had a terrible track record recently.
John Fritze of the Baltimore Sun suggests Republican senate nominee Kathy Szeliga at least has that in her favor, and explains how the Baltimore County legislator is doing everything right for November.
“A number of observers said the second-term state delegate ran a shrewd campaign to win the GOP nomination — including a snappy TV ad that featured her riding a motorcycle — and is sounding all the right themes for the general election,” Fritze wrote.
The issue for Szeliga, as with any race, will be whether Republicans turn out in big enough numbers for her to repeat Gov. Larry Hogan’s surprise win in the state in 2014. Complicating matters is the fact that Democrats turn out more in presidential races, and outnumber Republicans in the Old Line State, two to one.
That doesn’t make it impossible, but it does make it hard.
COMMENTS CHANGE: We’ll be switching our comment system over from the home-rolled PJ system to Disqus tonight. Old comments will be migrated over, but that will take a bit. I hope this will address most of the complaints people have had with the previous commenting system.
CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR: Chris Cuomo Demonstrates Everything That’s Wrong With The Media’s Donald Trump Coverage.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Meet Mizzou Protestor Jonathan Butler: Stealing, Misogyny, Crack Songs:
His disdain for low-income Americans is also apparent in another blog post, from July 2011, that was written about his visit to a Subway sandwich shop. Butler describes how he “stormed up to the counter inpatient [sic] and indecisive,” further detailing rude behavior to the worker. He describes watching the worker, “a grumpy older gentleman, about 70-75 years old,” making his sandwich.
“And at that moment as I was charging my phone and sitting down to my fast food meal,” Butler continues, “it dawned on me that I cannot live like this. I got upset at the world and in rage thoughts raced through my head of all the time I have wasted not investing my money and budgeting correctly because I cannot, I repeat cannot! End up like the older gentleman behind the counter working at Subway. I will not be old, grumpy, and working when I should be retired, relaxed and happy.”
That seems like a relatively safe bet: “Butler, who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, is the son of a railroad executive whose compensation in 2014 was $8.4 million, according to regulatory filings.”
Related: Hard Truths About Race on Campus.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Wronged Waitress Calls for ‘White Tears’ SJW to be Disciplined.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED? Bison Declared National Mammal of the US After President Obama Signs Bill.
WAR ON WOMEN UPDATE: MSNBC’s Hall: Bill Clinton’s Cheating Involved Only ‘Alleged Affairs.’
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF OFFICIAL RACISM? ‘Crook County’ Author: Judicial System Stacked Against Blacks, Latinos.
Van Cleve said that when she wrote the book, “I wrote in fear. I researched it in fear… and it was mostly because as one of the only people of color in this court system, in this setting where mostly the prosecutors and judges were white and all the defendants were people of color, the idea that I could collect data on how people were being racially abused and then actually go and tell that publically was quite intimidating,” she said. “So I think it was a journey for me to reflect on what I was willing to put forth. And I hope that those stories come forth in the book.”
Yet in “Crook County,” Van Cleve documents how minority defendants in Chicago were referred to as “Mopes,” a term with the same derogatory intent as the N-word. Fabricated police reports were overlooked.
She’s a brave woman, taking on the Chicago judicial machine by herself.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Mapping the hobosexual: a queer materialism” – “That’s not a typo. It’s not homosexual. It’s hobosexual.”
As Ezra Levant writes, “Universities are now just daycare for millennials who don’t want to grow up, whose only real purpose is to become little soldiers of political correctness and radical activists. I’m not calling for a ban on anything. Except a ban on forcing the rest of us to pay for this crap.”
WHEN THE WILL TO POWER DERIVES FROM VICTIMHOOD, WE GET HEADLINES LIKE THIS: Photoshop Bullying is Evidently a Thing Now.
Headline via Jonah Goldberg, who noted last year, “We’re in a weird Nietzschian transition moment where victimhood is the way you assert your will to power.”
BEN RHODES RESPONDS TO LAST WEEK’S SELF-IMMOLATION: Ben Rhodes is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life, says Ben Rhodes.
QUESTION ASKED: Brazil’s impeachment proceedings — just what is going on?
The mess that is Brazil’s current political situation took another twist Monday when the new chief of parliament’s lower house said he wanted to strike down impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff.
That’s a bold move for a man that’s only been in the job for a few days. Last week Brazil’s Supreme Court suspended his predecessor — the man who initiated impeachment proceedings.
To make matters murkier, Senate leader Renan Calheiros said that the upper chamber didn’t “recognize” Maranhao’s motion, indicating that senators would press on with their vote regardless.What will happen next is anyone’s guess — if anything, because it’s completely unprecedented.
Forget it, Jake — it’s Brasília.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Army has fewest active-duty soldiers since 1940, report says.
Ben Rhodes might have a “mind meld” with President Obama, but he is causing headaches for the White House.
Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, managed in a recent New York Times Magazine profile to undercut the president’s message on the Iran nuclear agreement while angering the Washington press corps and foreign policy establishment.
The broad backlash triggered by the piece rippled throughout the nation’s capital and caused the White House to go into damage control mode.
In a blog post late Sunday, Rhodes wrote that the public relations campaign he ran to sell the Iran deal was meant “to push out facts” and not “spin” the public and members of Congress.
He wrote that the White House and its allies “believed deeply in the case that we were making,” that the deal represented the best chance at cutting off Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon while avoiding war.
The longtime Obama aide was responding to criticism to his comments in the profile, which was published online last Thursday.
In the profile, Rhodes said he “created an echo chamber” of support for the deal by spoon-feeding talking points to friendly think tanks and experts.
Rhodes, who is 38 and holds a master of fine arts in creative writing, derided the press corps as too naive to cover world events.
He said the average reporter the White House talks to “is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” suggesting that allowed him to easily manipulate media coverage of U.S. foreign policy.
“They literally know nothing,” he said.
The piece was clearly a source of frustration for the White House, which is looking to burnish Obama’s foreign policy record during his final year in office.
The Iran deal is a debacle, and the press went along because (1) Rhodes is right and they don’t know much; and (2) They’re happy to be lied to anyway, because they’re Democratic operatives with bylines.
May 9, 2016
I’M GOING TO SAY “DIFFERENTLY.” How Should Europe Respond To Islamism?
PHOTO ESSAY: Inside the Anti-Trump Circus: Here Comes the Summer of Hate. The mysterious Bay Area blogger known as Zombie makes a long-awaited return to PJ Media.
