LOVE ISLAND: Reason Weekly Contest: Comfort the Emory University Students.
And I guess I was right: You can tag any news story with a Norman Cook song title! I’ve been doing it all day. I’m especially pleased with Everybody Needs A .303.
LOVE ISLAND: Reason Weekly Contest: Comfort the Emory University Students.
And I guess I was right: You can tag any news story with a Norman Cook song title! I’ve been doing it all day. I’m especially pleased with Everybody Needs A .303.
HALFWAY BETWEEN THE GUTTER AND THE STARS: 3 Problems With Media Coverage Of Attacks On Heidi Cruz.
YOU’RE NOT FROM BRIGHTON: Calais migrants using makeshift RAFTS to cross channel as Britain braces for fresh influx.
BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY: “Why wouldn’t I give patients a Percocet prescription? It makes their life easier and my life easier.”
NEWS YOUR DM CAN USE: What to do with a Useless RPG Character.
GANGSTER TRIPPIN’: Illinois County Sues Felonious Street Gang. Well, if you care about violence, targeting the gangs is the schwerpunkt. But they’re in bed with a lot of Democratic machine politicians. Note that this gang is one of the “outsider” Hispanic gangs.
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PUNK TO FUNK: Reflections In Iron. “He remained able to literally uproot small trees, and one time I was doing deadlifts with 450 lbs., and he wandered in. I asked him a question about squats, and he proceeded to heave the weight up onto his deltoids and carry it over to that same crappy squat rack I wrote about earlier and set it down on the rack, so he could get under it and show me. I usually say he power-cleaned the weight, but really it was more of a sheer heave. . . . Just recently I was reading an old journal he kept – he kept hundreds of pages of notes and thoughts on all kinds of things. I think he was trying to begin a book on lifting weights and strength training specifically for the high school football player. He might have just been designing a program for a young athlete he had met too; he did things like that. Guess what it involved? Five sets of five on heavy barbell exercises like squats, deadlifts, power cleans, and bench presses.”
SONG FOR SHELTER: Bay Area buys in to hottest homeless housing trend: ‘tiny homes.’ Again, the real problem is over-regulation.
WEAPON OF CHOICE: B-52s Further Accessorized.
NEXT TO NOTHING: Marines Had To Scrounge for F/A-18 Parts at a Museum. It’ll be a great day when our military has everything it needs to fight effectively, and Obama has to have a bake-sale to pay for his luxury travel.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Six Tips for Reducing Airport Security Hassles.
Ways to better enjoy the folie à deux between yourself and the TSA agent — because security kabuki is a shared performance art ritual.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: For first time, drone delivers package to residential area.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Four Steps to Protect Kids from Gun Accidents.
EVERYBODY NEEDS A .303: Enfield Rifle nearly 100 years old works better than a lot of new stuff. “Last weekend, I went out in the country and shot the thing. It still works almost perfectly. I say almost because the safety catch is loose and comes on every time the gun is fired. A new spring and it should be as good as new. . . . I also found the rifle to be surprisingly accurate. At 60 paces, though iron sights, I managed a group small enough to cover with a credit card.”
IN THE MAIL: From Gary Poole & John Ringo, Black Tide Rising.
Plus, today only at Amazon: 40% Or More Off Puma Athletic Shoes.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1052.
RETOX: Blue Civil War Escalates:
Connecticut Democrats are going after Yale, for the same reason Henry VIII went after the monks and Willie Sutton went after the banks. . . .
There is a widespread (and well-founded) perception that the top university endowments are approaching irrational levels—Yale’s chief Ivy League rival has been called a large hedge fund with a small research institute attached to it.
Meanwhile, desperate cities and states—caught between the unplayable pension promises created by decades of irresponsible governance, bloated workforces organized into unions that keep asking for more, poor residents wanting and needing more basic services, and rich residents threatening to flounce out of town unless they get more ‘amenities’—have no choice but to scrounge under the couch cushions for extra cash. And university endowments are a prime target. . . .
From the point of view of much of the public, highly-endowed colleges are becoming an underperforming asset: The feeling is growing that elite fat cat universities are an expensive luxury, and that the money spent propping up their endowments would be better spent buying school lunches for needy kids, or topping off up the pensions of retired civil servants.
For many years, colleges have fended off the fiscal claims of local authorities by pointing to the jobs they create and to the spending of their students and staff. These were and are valid arguments, but the great American private universities are going to have to take a hard look at what else they can do to make more friends among the general public and, consequentially, among politicians.
Once Henry VIII discovered that you could squeeze gold coins from wealthy monastic foundations, he decided to squeeze harder. American politicians are no stupider than he was, and the need for revenue to feed Big Blue Machine is continuing to grow. The people who rule the Ivory Tower should start to take note.
What’s funny is that university faculties supported all the social programs and fat civil-servant pay-and-benefit packages that produced the problem. If they’d had Andrew Mellon’s politics, things might be different. Choose the form of your destructor!
BUILD IT UP, TEAR IT DOWN: Backlash is mounting against Emory students who protested pro-Trump chalk messages. University’s president James Wagner is under fire for not dismissing them outright. That’s because they’re stupid and childish. He should be forced to watch the scene with Larry Summers and the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network.
Related: Is ‘Vote Trump’ chalk message a threat? A test for campus culture. No, it’s not. Next question? Or as Marc Randazza says, “This is political speech, the most precious speech we have: ‘Vote Trump.’ Yes, [Emory has] the right [to restrict speech since it’s a private university], but I also have the right to never read a résumé from Emory ever again, because their student body apparently needs a blankie.” What I find interesting is that despite all the diversity — at Emory, we’re told, only 4 in 10 students are white — the fear of “white supremacy” is paralyzing.
And I love the idea that chalked slogans are threatening because they’re “covert.”
UPDATE: Here’s the Larry Summers scene.
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ISIS SUPPORTERS RELEASE VIDEO WITH EXPLODING EIFFEL TOWER.
Funny how the media cluelessly asks, “What does ISIS want?”, when ISIS couldn’t make it clearer.
STAR 69: Few due process protections in new campus sexual assault policies.
At least two universities have recently released revised campus sexual assault policies, and, as expected, the new policies provide few due process protections for accused students.
The University of California-Berkeley and the University of Michigan announced new sexual misconduct policies this week. I’ll start with UM because its policy is much better — but still troubling — than UC-Berkeley’s.
UM’s new policy, a draft of which was released last September (the final will be released on April 6) does include some due process protections for accused students. Whether the school will actually provide them in individual cases or whether they will be provided adequately remains to be seen. (In schools across the country, such protections are rarely provided or lack usefulness.)
UM’s new policy refers to accusers and the accused as “claimants” and “respondents,” which removes the guilty-until-proven-innocent tone of usual policies where accusers are called “victims” or “survivors.” The school also allows accusers and the accused to have an adviser throughout the process, and this person can be an attorney; however, this adviser cannot speak on behalf of the students.
But there is something about UM’s draft policy that is frightening to due process advocates: The ability for accusers to request anonymity. This means the accused student might not actually be told who is making the accusation against him, which would severely hinder his ability to defend himself.
Disgraceful.
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