OBAMA PRESSES ‘SMART GUNS,’ ANNOUNCES GUN CONTROL SUMMIT.

We’re planning a very different kind of gun control summit at the next Bullets & Bourbon on December 1 through 5 this year. The updated Website and registration system will be online later this week, but meanwhile we highly recommend this video about B&B’s newest sponsor, Ripcord Travel Protection, which provides unique travel insurance and evacuation services for hunting and other roads less travelled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6Q2vb07qRA

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Extreme Exercise Can Impair Fertility.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: French teacher at HISD school doesn’t speak French.

“Have you ever heard him speak a word of French?”

Nathanial White: “Bonjour, but everybody knows that.”

The teacher, Albert Moyer, said in a brief phone interview that the extent of his French education was just one year in high school.

So why was he hired? To replace Jean Cius, a certified French teacher for more than 25 years.

“It makes me extremely mad,” Cius said. “I feel bad for the fact that the kids are not learning.”

Records show after a dispute in December, the school’s principal removed Cius from campus.

But when he was later declared fit for duty, HISD did not give him back his old job, or any teaching job for that matter.

Cius was sent to another HISD campus, where he said he was assigned to monitor the halls.

“I feel so bad for the taxpayers because they’re paying me for not doing anything at all,” he said.

However, Nathanial White’s report card shows H-I-S-D is still using Cius as the teacher of record.

Houston Independent School District’s Energy Institute High School Principal Lori Lambropoulos would seem to have some explaining to do about why a French teacher with 25 years experience and “declared fit for duty” is functioning as a hall monitor, while his replacement sends students to Google because he doesn’t speak any French.

CURT SCHILLING BECOMES UNPERSON AT ESPN; LEGENDARY ‘BLOODY SOCK’ GAME CUT FROM RED SOX-YANKEES ’30 FOR 30:′

The recounting of that performance, and Game 6 in general (including Alex Rodriguez knocking a ball out of reliever Bronson Arroyo’s glove), takes up about 17 minutes of the original version of the hour-and-five-minute-long documentary. ESPN apparently wanted to trim “Four Days in October,” which aired on ESPN2 after an Arizona-Oregon softball game and was likely timed to precede a live Red Sox-Yankees telecast on the main channel, down to fit into an hour-long time slot, with commercials.

“When a live event runs long, it’s standard procedure to shorten a taped program that follows,” an ESPN spokesman told The Post. “In this case, we needed to edit out one of the film’s four segments to account for the extra length of the softball game.”

Was it just a coincidence, though, that the segment taken out happened to feature a player-turned-analyst who just parted ways with ESPN under acrimonious circumstances? At the very least, the optics of that don’t look great for the network.

No – they look very much like this:

And the nearly 18 minute gap is a nice touch; as with Dan Rather committing seppuku on his CBS career, whom the gods destroy, they first render Nixonian.

AN ENORMOUS DEAL: A Look at Hillary Clinton’s Promise of a Cabinet Full of Women.

Thank goodness she didn’t say “binders.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Ted Cruz’s Tax Plan Can Unshackle America:

There are two basic and opposed views of economics. One, espoused by the administration in Washington DC, holds that economics is fundamentally about the redistribution of wealth. The other, espoused most powerfully by the Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz, holds that economics is fundamentally about the creation of wealth.

By the time he leaves office, Barack Obama will have doubled the federal debt, bringing it up to an astonishing $20tn. And he has managed this despite taking in more tax revenue than ever before. Mr Obama has achieved another distinction: he has been the only president in history not to have presided over a single year of 3 per cent growth in gross domestic product.

Mr Cruz would change all that. How? At the centre of his economic plan are two imperatives: tax cuts and drastic simplification of the tax code.
Let us start with the cuts. His plan calls for a flat tax of 10 per cent on family income above $36,000. That is down from a top rate of 39.6 per cent today. At the same time, he would abolish the corporate tax (a variable rate that currently maxes out at 39 per cent) and institute a “business transfer tax” of 16 per cent. He would also abolish a host of other taxes, including the estate tax, payroll tax and taxes associated with “Obamacare”.

The upshot, according to the Tax Foundation, which has published a detailed review of the plan, is that the Cruz initiative would spark an explosion in economic growth. Over a decade, GDP would increase by 13.9 per cent above what is currently projected, wages would increase by 12.2 per cent and the US would see up to 5m new jobs.
But those numbers tell only a part of the story. The US tax code runs to some 70,000 pages. The Cruz plan would replace that creaking monstrosity. Instead of having an accountant produce a long and semi-intelligible document at great expense, individuals would fill out their taxes on a postcard. Mr Cruz also promises to abolish the Internal Revenue Service “as we know it”. Obviously, there would have to be a mechanism to ensure that taxes were collected. But the behemoth that is the IRS could be replaced with a vastly slimmed down operation.

But what about revenue? Could taxes be cut so drastically without creating deficits? The Tax Foundation estimates that the Cruz plan, after factoring in projected growth, would result in a $768bn revenue loss over a decade. Should we worry about that? No. This is less than 2 per cent of projected federal revenue from 2017-26, and it is a terrific investment. For every $1 of revenue loss, the Tax Foundation finds that the Cruz plan will generate $23 of new GDP, a phenomenal return on investment. This compares very favourably with Donald Trump’s plan.

The problem — and this is a feature to me, but a bug to the political class — is that it offers insufficient opportunities for graft.

AT AMAZON, save up to 50% on select InSinkErator hot water dispenser products. We have one of those instant hot-water dispensers. They’re great.

I SHOUTED OUT WHO MADE TIM COOK KING? When after all, it was you and me.

THERE ARE SOME SECTIONS OF ALABAMA I WOULD NOT ADVISE YOU TO INVADE: 11-year-old boy shoots suspected burglar, mocks him for ‘crying like a baby.’

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Mizzou Race Relations Committee Releases Series of Anti-Racism Videos for ‘White People:’

The University of Missouri’s Faculty Council Committee on Race Relations released a video series this week that aims to educate students and faculty about racism on campus, Mizzou’s student newspaper, the Maneater, reported.

Committee member Craig Roberts, a Mizzou plant sciences professor, said that the target audience of these videos will be white faculty, the lessons will be applicable for the while community as a whole.

Roberts explained in an email to the Maneater that white people, including himself, are not as likely to detect racism because they do not experience it first-hand, and white faculty often downplay the degree to which racism affects the community.

“White people tend to see racism in terms of lynching, physical abuse, bullying and other products of hate,” Roberts said. “Racism is more than the overt, blatant, extreme incidents.”

As Ace of Spades quips, “And now you can view Mizzou’s handy guide to What a Racist Your Child Is. Plus — there’s still that one-in-five-will-be-raped thing! So you know: Definitely send your kid there.”

But fortunately, to coin a phrase, A New Hope has emerged from a most unlikely source. “Melissa Click just (accidentally) outed the campus PC Gestapo,” Carrie Lukas writes at the New York Post:

Click now claims her own dismissal is racially charged, meant to send a message that blacks aren’t supposed to stand up against whites. Yet she also notes that being “a white lady” makes her an “easy target.”

In other words, Click believes that although bigotry pervades the university’s liberal halls, administrators are too cowed to fire anyone who isn’t white, making her supposed white privilege also her biggest handicap.

Click is suing the school for allegedly failing to follow the rules governing firings in cases like hers. Her charge may have merit. But where was Click when Wolfe was being similarly sacrificed for political expedience?

As Lukas writes, “It’s long been evident that something is seriously wrong with American higher education, but Click’s case ties key pieces of the puzzle together: the absurdity of the racial- and gender-grievance game on college campuses, the politically motivated inquisitions that serve as university justice and the increasingly useless nature of so much of what’s studied.”

Is there nothing she can’t do?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: The Empire Strikes Back: LSAC Threatens To Expel University Of Arizona Over Use Of GRE In Law School Admissions.

So there are two things going on here. First, law schools want to use GRE so they can accept lower-tier students without being penalized for low LSAT scores by U.S. News. That’s self-serving. But the LSAC is trying to protect its own feedlot: “According to its latest publicly available Form 990 for FY 2014, LSAC President Daniel Bernstine earned $684,363 in total compensation, four other employees earned more than $300,000, and five other employees earned more than $200,000. LSAC reported over $200 million in net assets, including $93 million in publicly traded stock and $112 million in other investments (including $32 million in hedge funds).”

MORE ON HOW THE AMERICAN LAW INSTITUTE is trying to weasel “affirmative consent” into the criminal law.

IT’S LIKE THE STREET & SMITH’S OF SJWs: Meet The Most Social Justicy Social Justice Warriors!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How Anthropology Was Corrupted And Killed.

CALIFORNIA’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: “California Board of Equalization Chairman Jerome Horton should apologize to Rob Lowe for anti-Semitic slur,” the Sacramento Bee reported in March:

Horton should have one two-word response to actor Rob Lowe and his wife, Sheryl Berkoff: I’m sorry.

In a year when politicians seem to think crass is cool, Horton embarrassed himself and the constitutional office he holds as an elected Board of Equalization member by asking Lowe and Berkoff in a private meeting whether they had “Jewed down” contractors who had built their house.

In an email reported first by Bloomberg BNA, Lowe explained: “Appalled, we asked him to explain his comment. He doubled down, saying, ‘C’mon. You know what I’m saying. Did you Jew them down? You must have.’ ”

The Los Angeles-area Democrat invoked a term that is at once an example of casual anti-Semitism and reflective of ancient prejudices toward one ethnic group. Horton should have known better, having spent 20 years in public life, first as an Inglewood City Council member and later in the Assembly. Clearly, he doesn’t.

But it gets better: “California tax official got $130,000 worth of office furniture,” the Bee reported last week:

Last fall, more than $118,000 of designer furniture rolled into to a new downtown Sacramento high-rise office suite for Jerome Horton.

Then the chairman of the tax-collecting Board of Equalization, Horton had moved operations a few months earlier from the ninth floor of U.S. Bank Tower to its 21st floor. The new space offers a stunning view of the Statehouse and grounds out his office window, 300 feet above Capitol Mall. Some board staff privately call the office “Jerome’s aquarium” for its conference room’s floor-to-ceiling glass walls embossed with the agency’s seal.

Horton’s new furniture, some of it stashed away unused in another building as of last week, reflected the office upgrade.

According to purchase records obtained by The Sacramento Bee, more than 150 items on one invoice from Sacramento-based Miles Treaster & Associates included 24 white-leather-and-walnut chairs ($1,172 each), a matching couch ($2,267) and 21 wall-mounted cabinets with frosted-glass doors and “grooved edge top-silver undertrim” ($11,248 total). A separate invoice listed, among other items, eight satin-finish metal coat racks for $88 each and one “Blomus Symbolo Umbrella Stand (Stainless Steel, 20” tall)” for $115.

With delivery and installation of $12,000, taxpayers spent slightly more than $130,000 to outfit Horton’s office.

Related: “SBOE Chair Jerome Horton (D) has reported $731,835 in donations by organizations at his request, with that money going mostly to or through nonprofit organizations tied to his wife, a Bloomberg BNA analysis found,” in a piece from December titled, “California Scheming? Funneled Donations Raise Ethics Queries.”

“And you’re working for no one but me,” as a wise Beatle once sang about his country’s tax collectors. That sounds like Horton’s motto as well.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 5 Steps to Creating a Successful Raised Garden Bed.

WEE-LIEF! DOGS GET AIRPORT BATHROOMS OF THEIR OWN:

“There’s a fire hydrant in there!” Simba’s owner, Heidi Liddell, announced as she opened the pawprint-marked door between the men’s and women’s rooms.

It didn’t take long for the dog to sidle up to the little red hydrant atop a patch of artificial turf and do her business. A dispenser of plastic doggie bags and a hose was provided for the owners to clean the area up for the next pet.

The 70-square-foot room, at JFK’s sprawling Terminal 4, allows dogs and other animals to relieve themselves without needing to exit the building to find a place to go outside – a step that requires an annoying second trip through the security line.

“We had seen an increase of passengers traveling with pets and we decided to do it sooner rather than later,” said Susana Cunha, vice president of the management company that operates the terminal.

To paraphrase Oprah, you get a bathroom! And you get a bathroom! And you get a bathroom!

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON THE NIHILISM OF SANCTUARY CITIES: “The intellectual pedigree of sanctuary cities is not 1960s one-world ecumenicalism, but 1850s Confederate nullification. Their logical consequence is not a wide-open transnational continent, but utter disunion among the states and a second confederate attempt at destroying the primacy of the federal government,” VDH writes.

Read the whole thing.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1089.

FLASHBACK TO PROGRESSIVISM’S SALAD DAYS: Eugenics, “An Elite Faith:”

Indeed, while elites converted en masse to eugenics, the one large constituency that opposed them at every turn was the Catholic Church, which countered that sterilization violated natural law. Cohen takes this opposition for granted, never exploring the meaning or roots of natural law and why it drove the church to quash sterilization in states such as Louisiana and New Jersey. Rather than confront sterilization on moral or philosophical grounds, Cohen bases his opposition on scientific grounds: Carrie Buck had a sixth grade education, sterilization alone couldn’t eliminate “feeblemindedness,” Jews, it turns out, are pretty smart (they just didn’t know English when the eugenicists gave them IQ tests). It is convenient that eugenics makes for crappy science, but what if it had checked out? Would that make it any more moral?

Read the whole thing.

Related: Margaret Sanger: A Dark Past.

SPACE: THE INVISIBLE ARMS RACE. We’ve finally admitted that the space race is on. Time for bold steps to compete.

An arms race is under way in space—insidious, invisible, and at this point probably inevitable. The Bush Administration’s dream that the United States could control access to earth orbit as the British had once controlled sea lines of communication has been, as the bureaucrats say, overtaken by events. So has the Obama Administration’s emphasis on international “cooperation” (the word appears 13 times in the first few pages of the Administration’s 2010 National Space Policy document), an approach that served chiefly to demonstrate that no international consensus on the future of space exists, and that none is likely. Even the sensible, if vague and entirely voluntary, “Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities” floated by the European Union and pushed hard by the State Department for most of a decade found only tepid support. It was easy for the Chinese and Russians to portray it all as just the latest example of Western imperialism. Earlier this year, the Code was quietly put to rest. Leading from behind on space, the United States has been outmaneuvered and left for dead.

Not so the Chinese and Russians, who occupy the diplomatic high ground with their Treaty on Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space (PPWT), all the time working feverishly to put their own weapons in space, and anywhere else they might do some damage, including, we can safely assume, in the cyber domain. Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation describes a recent reorganization of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) structure to emphasize “information dominance,” defined as the ability to exploit battlefield information while denying the enemy that same capability. The information satellites provide is key to power projection; there can be no “pivot” to Asia without satellites; so disabling or dismantling our space infrastructure is a high priority for Beijing. Kinetic hit-to-kill weapons like the one China tested in 2007 and again in recent years are one way of doing this, but hardly the most efficient. Far better in an “informationalized” war to ensure that the data satellites gather and transmit never makes it to the end user—or that it arrives there in a form that looks reliable but isn’t. It’s the perfect way for a country like China to leap over the present imbalance and arrive as a fully fledged and dangerous adversary at the next stage of conflict in space. The key words on this new battlefield are hack, dazzle, jam, and spoof.

For their part, the Russians recently tested a small, maneuverable “Luch” satellite dangerously near a commercial communication satellite operated by Intel Corporation in geosynchronous orbit. Satellites that can maneuver freely in space have several legitimate functions; they can serve as space tugs, moving satellites from orbit to orbit, or refuel, inspect, or repair them. They might also be used to shadow national security satellites, modify their orbits, hit them with a burst of electromagnetic energy, collide with them or perhaps plant listening devices or limpet mines on them. Ten years from now, space will be filled with small, highly mobile satellites like this, many of them put into orbit by commercial operators for legitimate purposes, but many others by states for other, less benign reasons.

I had some thoughts on this a while back.

BECAUSE THEY’RE HORRIBLE PEOPLE: Mizzou Officials Spoke Out When Black Students Were Targeted – So Why the Silence on Anti-Semitism?

IT’S ALMOST LIKE SOMEBODY WANTS US DISTRACTED: Camille Paglia: While We’re ‘Navel-Gazing’ About Gender Identity, ‘ISIS Is Beheading People.’

CHANGE: The Greens Are Losing The Culture Wars. Good.