Archive for 2016

January 23, 2016

QUICK, WHO SAID THIS? “IT’S FRIDAY, JAN. 22, 2016, AND WE’RE WRITING THIS as yet another alarmist-MSM-declared Storm of the Century hits the Northeast. Seriously, folks: It’s Winter and when it get cold enough, any precipitation takes the form of snow. But before we go any further, since we’re on the subject of white stuff, a quick thought on another manifestation evoked by this photo forwarded by George Lawlor:”

Sorry, but you have to go to The Daily Gouge blog site to see the photo, which is hilarious. The Daily Gouge is the creation of Thom McKee, former Navy F-14 pilot, commercial developer par-excellence and upstate New York humorist responsible for the infamous story of the three-legged pig. I promise, you will thank me for telling you about this guy, especially after he explains the pig.

 

Posted at 10:33 am by Mark Tapscott on Jan 23rd, 2016

A WIN FOR SANITY AT OBERLIN:

The president of Oberlin College—a famously leftwing school that recently made headlines for student protests against “cultural appropriation” of ethnic food in dining halls—has issued one of the most forceful rebukes of campus activist intimidation of any academic authority figure to date. Whereas many college presidents have made their best efforts to appease social justice protesters (mostly by promising to spend more money on the protesters’ preferred campus programs), President Marvin Krislov of Oberlin responded to a list of demands—which included firing specific faculty members, granting tenure to others, creating segregated “safe spaces” for black students, and paying student activists for their efforts—by firmly declining to negotiate. . . .

The students concluded their list of demands by saying, “these demands are not suggestions” and threatened “immediate action” if they were not heeded. So who knows what, if anything, they will have in store for the Oberlin administration in the coming semester. But it’s also clear that campus activists regard capitulation as a sign of weakness, not solidarity—just ask President Christina Paxson of Brown. So whatever response the activists are planning would probably have been just as bad, if not worse, had Krislov tried to placate them by promising a new campus diversity center or convened a committee to make courses less, as the activists put it, “westernized.”

At the same time, for critics of modern university political culture, it’s hard not to feel at least a modicum of appreciation for the activists’ willingness to attack certain academic orthodoxies. As Ross Douthat (no supporter of campus Jacobinism) has written, academic administrations have “long relied on rote appeals to the activists’ own left-wing pieties to cloak its utter lack of higher purpose.” The Oberlin activists seemed to sense this: In their list of demands, they criticize the College for using “the limited number of Black and Brown students to color its brochures” and suggest that its ideals of “equity, inclusion, and diversity,” as recited by campus administrators, are meaningless. On that front, they are not entirely wrong: The academy’s worship of diversity is in many ways a hollow exercise, a type of collective virtue signaling motivated more by a desire to boost rankings and market itself than by any comprehensive idea of justice.

True enough. That said, if I were a university president, I’d announce a policy of expelling anyone who used violence against persons or property. I very much doubt if many of the students at these elite and semi-elite schools, who went through years of college-application hell to get there, would be willing to risk it.

Posted at 10:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Jan 23rd, 2016

EPA AWARDS HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN GRANTS IT CAN’T SHOW IMPROVE AIR QUALITY: Diesel emissions, for example, are particularly harmful to air quality, so EPA awarded multiple grants between 2009 and 2014 aimed at reducing such emissions. And $532 million later, an EPA spokesman – who understandably insisted on not being named – conceded to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton that “we cannot definitively establish cause and effect on one project’s impact on a city’s air quality.” The DCNF IG analysis is based on a database of more than 100,000 EPA grants compiled by Open The Books. BTW, if you aren’t familiar with Open The Books, you should be because those guys are doing incredible work bringing government spending at all levels out in the open.

Posted at 10:09 am by Mark Tapscott on Jan 23rd, 2016