IT WAS DESIGNED TO DIE: New York enters the ObamaCare death spiral.
Archive for 2016
May 21, 2016
AND I FIND MYSELF THINKING WE’RE GOING TO SPACE, EVEN IF WE MUST WALK THERE SEEMS EMINENTLY SENSIBLE: Dr. Jerry Pournelle 2016 NSS Heinlein Award Acceptance Speech.
May 20, 2016
LISA DE PASQUALE: Outsourcing Masculinity: Where Have All the American Action Heroes Gone? “Most of them fall into two categories: 1) Over 50 years old and 2) Not born in the United States.”
GIVE THE GIFT OF AMAZON PRIME.
DISPATCHES FROM THE LEFT’S WAR ON BATHROOMS: 78 Representatives Ask Obama Admin How It Will Force Schools to Obey LGBT Bathroom Order.
SO THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T ENTIRELY DISAPPOINTING: Legal 3D-Printed Semiautomatic Weapon.
AT AMAZON, 100+ Dash Buttons.
TENNESSEE GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1, UT OFFICE OF DIVERSITY 0. Here’s an email that went out to the University of Tennessee community from Chancellor Jimmy Cheek today:
It saddens me to share with you that a new state law requires us to defund the Office of Diversity and Inclusion from July 1, 2016, to June 30, 2017. This means that no funds can go to operate the office. Vice Chancellor Rickey Hall has announced that he is becoming the vice president for the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity at the University of Washington and chief diversity officer for the UW system. One of the employees in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion has been offered another position with the university, and the university continues to assist the other employee whose position is being eliminated. As the law requires, the university will reallocate the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s budget to minority engineering scholarships.
The new law does not permit us to reallocate money to continue to fund the Office of Diversity and Inclusion from another budget. As a result, there will be a reorganization of the units that reported to the vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion. The Office of Multicultural Student Life will report to the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Life; the Office of Equity and Diversity will report to the chancellor; the Educational Advancement Program will report to the Office of the Provost; and the Commission for Blacks, the Commission for LGBT People, the Commission for Women, and the Council for Diversity and Interculturalism will report to the chancellor. The Pride Center will remain a gathering space for students, but it will no longer be staffed by university employees.
We are still attempting to determine how other portions of the law affect the university. I know there will be more questions, some of which have not been resolved. The vice chancellors and I will communicate further when we have more information.
This in no way diminishes our commitment to diversity and inclusion. The new law doesn’t impact most of the funding for those efforts. We will use the coming year to determine how to more effectively advance diversity and inclusion on our campus, how to measure the effectiveness of our efforts, and who should lead those efforts in the future.
Diversity and inclusion are priorities in our Vol Vision 2020 plan. I am committed to making sure each person is respected for who they are and that each person feels safe and valued on our campus. It’s my responsibility to make sure that we’re providing access, accountability, opportunity, and education.
Over the past year, I met with students from the Black Student Union and UT Diversity Matters to listen to their concerns. We resolved some problems and disagreed about others, but we were listening and talking and I learned a lot from our students. As a result of these meetings, we have improved our bias protocol, increased our commitment to inclusivity training, and addressed diversity issues in our Student Counseling Center.
I know there is still much work to do to create and maintain a welcoming work and educational climate. I am committed to continuing the conversation, listening, and taking positive action steps. I am asking for your help in these efforts.
Jimmy G. Cheek
Chancellor
I’m curious to see what will happen next year.
PRIME MINISTER ZOOLANDER HAS CONTEMPT FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Trudeau’s outburst was not just ill-mannered. It was revealing. Like his friend Barack to the south, he regards all opposition as illegitimate and contemptible.
SCOAMF WATCH: 13 Incompetent Failures in the Obama Administration.
WHAT WOULD PROFESSOR KINGSFIELD SAY? The Emotionally Intelligent Law Professor.
Some thoughts on Kingsfield here. There’s something to be said for a professor who cares more about whether students learn than whether they are happy.
21ST CENTURY CRIME: Michigan man arrested for tipping stripper with $100 bill made on his computer.
HEY RUBE! Shepard Fairey, creator of fascistic “Hope” poster, blasts ‘disappointing’ Obama:
Fairey, who’s now a Bernie Sanders supporter, says that after Obama won the presidency, he went “quiet on a lot of things” he promised while running for office.
“I think history will be fairly kind of his presidency but I want things to move further in the direction that he promised as a campaigner,” he said. “He’s been more outspoken in the last 18 months.”
“I think he’s going out having done some good things and said some good things, but there were about six years there where I think he could have done more.”
Fairey said he had “high hopes” for Obama and that the president couldn’t blame his failures entirely on congressional gridlock.
“If he had been as outspoken as he was as a campaigner, I would give him a pass on not being able to push through some of the progressive things I hoped he would, but he was quiet on a lot of things,” he added. “That to me was unfortunate.”
Yet another rube self-identifies.
HEADLINES FROM 1959: Balloons. NASA Is Using Balloons to Study Space.
AT AMAZON, Father’s Day Gifts galore.
THAT SOUNDS GOOD: IBM says it’s designed a molecule that could fight off any human virus.
GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE: Decaying Long Island V.A. Hospital Closes Operating Rooms. “Usually, there are 10 operations a week scheduled at the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center on Long Island. But since mid-February, the hospital’s five operating rooms have stood empty and unused, shut down after sand-size black particles began falling from air ducts.”
WHAT POST-COMMUNISM HATH WROUGHT: In the new issue of City Journal, Fred Siegel writes:
Shortly after the collapse of Communism, the Nobel-winning novelist Doris Lessing took to the pages of the New York Times to warn that “while we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives.” She had been a Communist in her youth, and from that experience she learned how the ideology “debased language and, with language, thought.” Lessing was more prescient than she knew. Even as Communist political correctness was thrown back on its heels for a time in the former Soviet empire, it was defying gravity in Europe and America. Indeed, in the United States, our constitutional republic based on limited government had already begun to give way to an expansive bureaucratic liberal regime built on court-constructed interest-group “rights.”
* * * * * * * *
Like Communism, the democratic culture of the present day “produces large numbers of lumpen-intellectuals.” There is no shortage of people who ecstatically become involved in tracking disloyalty and fostering a new orthodoxy in which accusation replaces argument. And as under Communism, America’s social-justice warriors, particularly on campuses, are relentlessly in search of “casual remarks taken as evidence of systematic failings.” Communism’s once never-ending fight to ferret out “capitalist roaders” has been succeeded in the voluntary soft Stalinism of academia by a never-ending fight against an increasingly elusive enemy.
In America, Legutko notes, young people have shifted from the “pursuit of happiness,” which required delayed satisfaction with a plan as to how to move forward, to the momentary pursuit of pleasure. Their pursuits, as with “hooking up” in college, have become increasingly episodic. The upshot, he believes, is that divorce and abortion have become the outstanding achievements of the new political/cultural system. And in this regard, Legutko notes wryly, “Communism was far ahead of the liberal West.”
Related:
Being a grinning fool who jumps up and down on a sofa proclaiming his passion for the world is not enough. Passion demands suffering. Freely accepted suffering. And the endurance of that freely accepted suffering until the end. If you cannot deal with that side of passion, you are not truly passionate. Of course, most people opt out of passion when they begin to suffer. It’s understandable, especially in our pleasure-pumped world. In fact, it’s perfectly reasonable; after all, reason is the nemesis of passion. Say your marriage has become dull or boring and efforts to bring the passion, the desire, and enthusiasm back have gone nowhere. Reason will tell you to call a divorce lawyer and find your happiness elsewhere whereas passion will demand you stay and endure. The same goes for writing or anything for that matter. Real passion starts where suffering starts. Be strong enough to endure and you will understand the meaning of passion. The mystery will be solved; the hidden truth, revealed.
—Mark Judge, quoting Francis Berger, in “We Don’t Need Grit. We Need a Better Understanding of Passion,” at Acculturated.
OH, THAT DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP: A Stroller Company Made A Grown-Up Version For Adults To Test Ride.
If only someone had warned us of this moment.
BARBARA BOXER CLAIMS BERNIE SUPPORTERS MADE HER FEAR FOR HER LIFE: “IT WAS SCARY.” (Video.)
Why are Democrat-controlled institutions — like, err, the Democratic Party — such cesspits of violence?
CHARLES C.W. COOKE: New Jersey Flouts the Second Amendment — Congress Should Intervene.
My own proposal, to which Cooke alludes in passing, is a federal law providing that states may assess only minor, traffic-ticket-like fines on gun-carrying by anyone who can legally possess a firearm under federal law.