Archive for 2016
December 27, 2016
THANKS, HARRY! Dems’ Nuclear Option will allow Trump to fill over 100 court vacancies quickly. I swear these people acted like they thought they could never lose another election. If Trump’s smart, he’ll quickly nominate Eugene Volokh to the 9th Circuit and Randy Barnett to the DC Circuit. Also, given how overworked the Courts of Appeals are, we should probably add a hundred new judges to ease the workload. . . .
WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Students of Color Conference Results in ‘Oppression Olympics.’
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MEET THE NEW MAO, SAME AS THE OLD MAO: Xi’s Power Play Foreshadows Historic Transformation of How China Is Ruled.
China’s Communist Party elite was craving a firm hand on the tiller when it chose Xi Jinping for the nation’s top job in 2012. Over the previous decade, President Hu Jintao’s power-sharing approach had led to policy drift, factional strife and corruption.
The party’s power brokers got what they wanted—-and then some.
Four years on, Mr. Xi has taken personal charge of the economy, the armed forces and most other levers of power, overturning a collective-leadership system introduced to protect against one-man rule after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.
Shattering old taboos, Mr. Xi has targeted party elders and their kin in an antigraft crusade, demanded fealty from all 89 million party members, and honed a paternalistic public image as Xi Dada, or Big Papa Xi.
Now, as he nears the end of his first five-year term, many party insiders say Mr. Xi is trying to block promotion of a potential successor next year, suggesting he wants to remain in office after his second term expires in 2022, when he would be 69 years old.
Mr. Xi, who is president, party chief and military commander, “wants to keep going” after 2022 and to explore a leadership structure “just like the Putin model,” says one party official who meets regularly with top leaders.
Read the whole thing.
TONI AIRAKSINEN: Homicides spiked in 2016. Black Lives Matter made it worse.
IT’S ALMOST AS IF THE ONLY HATEFUL RACISTS LEFT ARE THE ONES LIVING IN LEFTIES’ MINDS: White husband confesses to wife to setting their cars on fire and painting racial slur on their garage door in staged ‘hate crime.’
BLUE CITY BLUES: Chicago’s Bloody Christmas Weekend.
Jim Geraghty:
For all of our complaining, every now and then the national media notices. The New York Times did a lengthy, in-depth piece in June — albeit one that mentioned Mayor Rahm Emanuel exactly once. Maybe there’s a hesitation to spotlight the ugly side of Chicago, or Emanuel’s tenure, or the city’s legendarily heavily Democratic leadership over the past century, or Obama’s hometown. Maybe it’s the glaring evidence that having really strict gun-control laws has had little effect on gang violence. In August, the state passed a law toughening penalties for penalty on anyone without a gun-owner identification card who brings a gun into the state of Illinois to sell. So far, there’s not much sign that that new law is having much effect, either.
The problems of Chicago’s violent neighborhoods — poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunity, family breakdown, drug abuse and addiction — exist to varying degrees in every other big city in America as well. So why is the gang violence in Chicago so much worse?
Good question. My initial answer is that Chicago is the Las Vegas of bad governance — a sort-of destination city for everything gone wrong with the Blue Model. And while that’s certainly too glib, there’s also some truth to it.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Thomas Lifson: Higher Education At The Precipice.
An entirely predictable cataclysm awaits the American higher education sector. Having jacked up their prices at roughly triple the rate of inflation for at least 5 decades, college education is no longer affordable without crippling debt for all but the richest families. The sole justification for spending a quarter of a million dollars on a child’s education at a full-price private school is that a prestige degree is the gateway to upper middle class work status.
Yet in tandem with higher education’s putative lock-grip on career prospects has come an intellectual death spiral into ideology and irrelevance. Baristas with prestigious baccalaureate degrees are now a cliché; but the underlying fact is that a bachelor’s degree in grievance studies (most of the humanities and social sciences are now little but propaganda on the evil of America) does not equip one for useful work.
All of these facts are well known, but have yet to influence a significant-enough segment of the market, with a few exceptions.
If only someone had issued a warning.
SALENA ZITO: Miracle on the Old Lincoln Highway.
It is a story of poise, generosity and gratitude, one filled with layaways, community service and creating education opportunities; it is void of the stereotypical political resentments attributed to rural Americans since this election began last year.
“It all started with a phone call from someone who was calling for ‘Santa B’ on Dec. 1,” said Ryan Kennedy, the store manager. “The person said they wanted to know what it would cost to pay off the entire store’s layaway items and when the pick-up date was,” he explained.
The Walmart is located equidistant between the two towns, explained Michael Corle, a rural renaissance man, who despite his preference for shopping local, often finds himself with his wife and three kids taking advantage of the bargains and the convenience of the big discount chain department store.
“For so many young families in his area layaways offer customers the ability to slowly pay off an item over a determined amount a time, often allowing them the ability to pay off items on their children’s or family’s wish list that they could not afford all at one time,” Corle said.
It is something they can do with dignity if they are on a fixed income or have fallen on hard times or working two or three jobs, he said.
Many families on limited budgets rely on the service, which typically does not place an additional fee like a credit card. It is also a great service for people who have poor or no credit, Corle said.
The store manager was skeptical and apparently the anonymous donor anticipated that because he directed Kennedy to Google recent past layaway payoffs to other small towns in Pennsylvania.
Read the whole thing.
DIET: The meals your parents made for you are now too calorific for modern lifestyles.
An analysis of 30 years of data by the LSE has proven that the obesity crisis is largely driven by modern lifestyles, which have allowed people to become so inter-connected that they barely need to leave their desks or sofas to work, socialise or shop.
It means that traditional meals recommended by parents are now simply too much for a less-active generation.
Trade deals between countries have also caused food prices to tumble, creating virtually unlimited access to unrestricted calories for most people, while on-tap entertainment through television, smartphones and personal computers has replaced many traditional hobbies and activities.
Recommended calorie counts, which have been about 2,500 for men and 2,000 for women since the First World War, were set at a time when people naturally moved far more in their daily lives. But the new study suggests those counts may now be too high and researchers say that people need to stop eating the way their parents taught them.
There’s also evidence that a low-calorie diet in itself can be life-extending.
But it still might be smart to spend more time away from the desk and off of the sofa — I know I’m trying to.
AIR OFFENSIVE: British RAF pilots to switch bombing raids to ‘the heart’ of Isil.
Senior military sources said that from next Spring the RAF is likely to “pivot” its focus from Iraq to Syria as it seeks to bolster rebel forces fighting Syria.
Last year the RAF mounted just 60 air strikes in Syria compared to 347 in Iraq, where British planes have been heavily involved in the campaign to liberate Mosul from Isil.
Britain hopes that Mosul will be re-taken by Spring of next year, enabling RAF Typhoons, Tornados and Reaper drones to mount a fresh offensive in Syria.
The raids are likely to be “far more dangerous” because there is the added risk posed by the fact that Russia and the Assad regime control airspace.
Godspeed.
TRUMP WOULD LOVE THIS: Obama ‘Might Just Weigh In’ On Issues During Trump Presidency.
ANALYSIS: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Maxine Waters: A Problem With Democrats Is That We’re Too ‘Nice’ to Other Side.
Not The Onion.
ANAYLSIS: TRUE. Sorry, Liberals. Bigotry Didn’t Elect Donald Trump.
Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump equally won over party loyalists. Yet about one in five voters did not have a favorable view of either candidate. These voters overwhelmingly backed Mr. Trump. Exit polls demonstrated that if voters who disapproved of both candidates had divided evenly between them, Mrs. Clinton would have won.
Several weeks before the election, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 51 percent of white working-class voters did not believe that Mr. Trump had a “sense of decency” and ranked Mrs. Clinton slightly higher on that quality.
But they were not voting on decency. Indeed, one-fifth of voters — more than 25 million Americans — said they “somewhat” disapproved of Mr. Trump’s treatment of women. Mr. Trump won three-quarters of these voters, despite their disapprobation.
Bluntly put, much of the white working class decided that Mr. Trump could be a jerk. Absent any other champion, they supported the jerk they thought was more on their side — that is, on the issues that most concerned them.
Many of those same voters helped put Barack Obama into the White House twice, but the jerk certainly had to look like a better choice than another four years of neglect and disdain.
CYBERSECURITY: This low-cost device may be the world’s best hope against account takeovers.
The Security Keys are based on Universal Second Factor, an open standard that’s easy for end users to use and straightforward for engineers to stitch into hardware and websites. When plugged into a standard USB port, the keys provide a “cryptographic assertion” that’s just about impossible for attackers to guess or phish. Accounts can require that cryptographic key in addition to a normal user password when users log in. Google, Dropbox, GitHub, and other sites have already implemented the standard into their platforms.
After more than two years of public implementation and internal study, Google security architects have declared Security Keys their preferred form of two-factor authentication. The architects based their assessment on the ease of using and deploying keys, the security it provided against phishing and other types of password attacks, and the lack of privacy trade-offs that accompany some other forms of two-factor authentication.
Two-factor authentication can be a real pain for users, as well. Just switching over from two-step authentication (not the same thing!) to two-factor a year or two ago was a confusing hassle. But according to the story, “Security Keys, by contrast to the alternatives, provide the best mix of security, usability, and privacy. They sell for as little as $10, although some of the more popular brands—such as the U2F Security Key from Yubico—list for $18. They’re smaller than a door key, plug into a computer’s USB slot, and require no batteries.”
These keys should become standard equipment.
EUGENE VOLOKH: At the University of Oregon, no more free speech for professors on subjects such as race, religion, sexual orientation.
Again, contrary to the university’s explicit assurances in its free speech policy, the university report shows that “[t]he belief that an opinion is pernicious, false, and in any other way despicable, detestable, offensive or ‘just plain wrong’” would indeed be viewed as “grounds for its suppression.
Should a law school with this position on free speech be accredited? Plus:
For a long time, universities have argued that the public has to tolerate the views of professors, even when those views sharply depart from established moral and political orthodoxy, and even when the views create offense and upset (which indirectly often create disruption). That’s how universities have tried to maintain public support, including financial support from legislators and from donors, in the face of such offensive professor views.
It looks like the University of Oregon is abandoning that position, most clearly as to certain speech on certain topics, but the logic of the abandonment applies far more broadly. And this makes it hard to see why the public should continue to support the university when it sees professors expressing many other views that members of the public find offensive.
Yes, that’s the big problem here, and it’s one that university administrators are too entitled to perceive. That will change.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Drexel University Professor Wishes All a Merry Christmas By Calling for ‘White Genocide.’ “According to the Daily Caller, the professor is a self described ‘radical political theorist.'”
I’m guessing that by “radical” he means century-old conventional hard-left ideas that have failed everywhere they’ve been tried. If these people weren’t dangerous, they’d just be tedious.
Related: “Looking at his public history of books and articles, it’s hard to believe Drexel didn’t know who they had hired. A socialist who writes for Jacobin thinks revolutionary violence is a good thing? Color me shocked!”
FAKE NEWS: Pearl Harbor ceremony punctuates Obama effort to ease tensions Trump could inflame.
Obama is “one of the worst foreign policy presidents ever,” with a record of vanishing red lines, rising terrorism, a flood of refugees, nuclear proliferation, spurned allies, and emboldened rivals, topped off by last week’s shameful and petty anti-Israel abstention in the U.N. last week — but it’s Trump who’s going to set the world on fire.
Never change, WaPo.
IT’S ANOTHER FESTIVUS TRUMP MIRACLE! Inauguration performer Jackie Evancho’s album sales skyrocket. “Trump detractors attacked the teenage classical singer earlier this month for agreeing to perform at the event, noting that it would ruin her career. However, it has done quite the opposite.”