21st CENTURY DILEMMAS: Is There Such a Thing as Feminist Plastic Surgery?

DISPATCHES FROM THE CORNER OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND REDNECK NATION: Jim Crow-like Segregation Now At Cal State Los Angeles.

TRUMP PROVIDES A FEW SPECIFICS ON EDUCATION POLICY: Does he support Title I portability? Good question and thoughtful commentary by Jason Russell.

Excerpt:

Trump’s plan echoes the idea of what in the education policy world is called “Title I portability.” In federal education legislation, Title I funding provides states and school districts with extra funding if they have a disproportionately high number of students living in poverty. The federal government spends roughly $14 billion a year on Title I, or about $500 to $600 per student. If those funds were portable, it would mean students would have several hundred dollars to use toward their education at a school other than the local school they’re assigned to.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER: The spark with South Korea is gone as China makes clear the North comes first.

The degree of warmth between Ms. Park and Mr. Xi was unexpected, given that South Korea is a staunch American ally and China is North Korea’s socialist bedfellow. But they had a mutual interest in cozying up.

Mr. Xi sought to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington. He also wanted to further poison Ms. Park on Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who early in his tenure had enraged the two countries by visiting the Yasukuni war shrine, where Japanese war criminals are honored.

For her part, Ms. Park invested heavily in the relationship in hopes that it would encourage Beijing to do more to restrain Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.

She’s still waiting for the payoff. Judging by North Korea’s latest nuclear test, its fifth, it may never come.

The mistake Park made was forgetting that for dictatorial regimes, international commercial interests, no matter how lucrative, will inevitably take second place to domestic political exigencies, no matter how transitory.

SOMEWHERE IN HIS WASHINGTON-SHRUNKEN-SOUL: Our FBI Director knows he let a crook go free. In 1974 obstruction of justice drove Nixon from the White House. In 2016 it’s a major component of Hillary’s White House campaign. (My latest NY Observer column.)

MORE ON NORTH KOREA’S LATEST NUCLEAR TEST: How powerful was the nuke? “…more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, according to some estimates.” The seismic footprint indicated the device produced a 20 kiloton to 30 kiloton blast. The NorKs intend to build a standardized and miniaturized nuclear weapon. Then they’ll mount them on ballistic missiles. Then what? Well, they routinely threaten South Korea, the US and Japan with nuclear attack. Have a nice day.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1219.

ADVERSE SELCTION: A Scary Obamacare Mystery.

Megan McArdle explains — yet again — a simple concept to her readers at Bloomberg:

Because outside of the near-poor, uptake of Obamacare policies is not as high as we’d like. As health insurance consultant Bob Laszewski has written, “Historically, insurers want to see a 75-percent participation rate.” In other words, they want to see three-fourths of the eligible people sign up.

That’s because insurers can predict their costs when a representative cross-section of people buys their plans. But when too few sign up, the insurer has to ask, “Who’s declining to buy insurance?” and the most likely answer is, “Healthy people who don’t expect to use it much.” The remaining pool, then, will be sicker. The lower the participation rate, the more likely it is that you’ve got a small group of people who are going to make expensive claims.

This is a phenomenon known as “adverse selection.” And it tends to get worse as premiums rise to reflect the cost of covering this sicker pool, because more people start dropping the ever-costlier insurance, and usually the folks who drop out are the healthiest ones.

Obamacare’s individual mandate was supposed to prevent this death spiral by levying a tax penalty on those who refused to sign up. But the fine appears to be too small to get young folks to buy in.

Despite the headline, there’s no mystery here. Many of us, McArdle included, explained ObamaCare’s perverse incentives and adverse selection problems ad nauseum even before it was passed into law.

If its supporters still don’t understand why ObamaCare is failing, it’s their own damn fault.

HOW DARE THE REFS TREAT BOTH TEAMS FAIRLY! Media Furious that Matt Lauer Treated Trump and Hillary the Same.

I’m so old, I remember when they were called the “objective” media — and some in the media even believed their own fiction.

JOURNOLISM:

I see the polls have the Washington Post in full panic mode. pic.twitter.com/kKBB53NtKK

— neontaster (@neontaster) September 9, 2016

WOODWARD AND BERNSTEIN COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT. Actual Washington Post headline: The Hillary Clinton email story is out of control.

I’m so old I can remember when Bob Woodward was a superstar at the Post – there was even a movie about him starring Robert Redford! – before he was later demonized by his young would-be successors at the Post for treating a Democrat president just like a Republican.

UPDATE: “Interesting inadvertent formulation by WaPo’s Aaron Blake,” John Podhoretz tweets:

Huh. Usually Post spokespeople wait until after the election to drop the mask and admit their staff’s bias.

KURT SCHLICHTER: 2016 Is the Year of the Hack.

Read the whole thing.

AT THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH: History professor rips down campus 9/11 ‘Never Forget’ posters (VIDEO).

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” Just ask Comrade Ogilvy:

HYPER-PARTISANSHIP BEHIND THE BASHING OF MATT LAUER’S PERFORMANCE AT THE COMMANDER-CHIEF-FORUM: Well, yeah. Lauer actually asked Hillary some tough questions. Poor Howard Kurtz has noticed the attacks on Lauer. And Howard’s upset about those vicious attacks, as well he should be. He’s also noticed that most of the attacks on Lauer come from the Left. Howard, please review this history lesson, written for you, personally.

YOU DON’T SAY: ‘Broadway Supports Black Lives Matter’ Event Cancelled for Antisemitism.

I’m pleasantly surprised they at least had the decency to cancel.

FRANCOIS HOLLANDE: French Republic must make room for Islam.

In a speech on terrorism and democracy in Paris he defended the country’s Muslim minority following a vitriolic debate on the banning of the Islamic burkini swimsuit.

“Nothing in the idea of secularism opposes the practice of Islam in France, provided it respects the law,” Hollande said.

Secularism was not a “state religion” to be used against other religions, he said, denouncing the “stigmatisation of Muslims.”

The problem isn’t that France hasn’t made room for Islam. There’s been room for it in France’s “sensitive urban zones,” where Muslims have lived unassimilated for generations. And France has made more room for Islam in the form of tens of thousands of migrants from North Africa and the Levant. That hasn’t been going very well, either, as France’s Muslim guests have created new cultural and criminal tensions with native Secular/Catholic/Jewish French citizens.

The real problem then is the still-open question of whether there’s room for the French in Islam.

JUST HOW MUCH MONEY DID OBAMA GIVE IRAN?: Testifying before a House Financial Services Committee sub-committee, Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said “the worst-case scenario here is that Iran may have received as much as $33.6 billion in cash or in gold and other precious metals.”

ELECTIONS MATTER. Supreme Court’s Dismaying Message Received: Don’t Look to Courts to Root Out Political Corruption, Andrew McCarthy writes.

HOPE AND CHANGE: Americans Are More Worried About Terrorism Than They Were After 9/11. Well, back then we didn’t have a president who talked about how America could “absorb” terrorist attacks.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: If You Want Checks and Balances, Vote Trump: The civil service, though supposedly professional and nonpartisan, has become a Democratic Party monoculture.

UPDATE: A friend who works for the federal government emails and says that I’m wrong, that about a third of his colleagues are openly pro-Trump. I find it hard to believe that that’s representative, but if Trump’s really getting that kind of support within the overwhelmingly-Democratic bureaucracy, then Trump will win by a landslide. But he still won’t have as much support as Obama has had, or Hillary does.

THIS IS PRETTY MUCH THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: Google’s DeepMind claims major milestone in making machines talk like humans.

The researchers note that today’s best TTS systems, generally considered to be powered by Google, are built on “speech fragments” recorded from a single speaker. Those fragments are then reconstructed to create utterances.

While this approach, known as concatenative TTS, has produced natural-sounding speech, it is generally limited to a single voice unless a new database is provided.

Another technique called parametric TTS, which relies on voice codec synthesizers, may be more flexible, but this hasn’t achieved as natural-sounding speech.

WaveNet differs by being trained on raw audio waveform from multiple speakers and then using the network to model these signals to generate synthetic utterances. Each sample it creates is fed back into the network to generate another sample.

“As well as yielding more natural-sounding speech, using raw waveforms means that WaveNet can model any kind of audio, including music,” DeepMind researchers note in a blogpost.

Just don’t give it control of the pod bay doors.

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE TED STRIKER AGAIN: This Isn’t The Flight 93 Election, It’s The MH370 Election.

I definitely picked the wrong election to quit sniffing glue.

A BERKELEY SOCIOLOGIST MADE SOME TEA PARTY FRIENDS — AND WROTE A CONDESCENDING BOOK ABOUT THEM. As Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post notes, in order to write Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Arlie Russell Hochschild “made 10 trips to southwestern Louisiana from 2011 to 2016, extended forays away from her perch at the University of California at Berkeley, to delve into her ‘keen interest in how life feels to people on the right — that is, in the emotion that underlies politics:’”

“To understand their emotions,” she writes, “I had to imagine myself in their shoes.” She interviewed some 60 people, including 40 professed tea party supporters, visiting their homes, communities and workplaces. It is the same technique Hochschild employed in “The Second Shift” (1989), a well-reviewed look at how couples manage duties at home when both work outside of it. In this case, however, Hochschild arrives with so many preconceived ideas that they undercut the insight she claims to desire.

Hochschild preps for her conservative immersion by reading “Atlas Shrugged,” because we know tea party types are into that. “If Ayn Rand appealed to them, I imagined, they’d probably be pretty selfish, tough, cold people, and I prepared for the worst,” this acclaimed sociologist writes. “But I was thankful to discover many warm, open people who were deeply charitable to those around them.”

When she lands in Louisiana, Hochschild realizes, “I was definitely not in Berkeley, California. . . . No New York Times at the newsstand, almost no organic produce in grocery stores or farmers’ markets, no foreign films in movie houses, few small cars, fewer petite sizes in clothing stores, fewer pedestrians speaking foreign languages into cell phones — indeed, fewer pedestrians. There were fewer yellow Labradors and more pit bulls and bulldogs. Forget bicycle lanes, color-coded recycling bins, or solar panels on roofs. In some cafes, virtually everything on the menu was fried.”

Dear God, no yellow Labs or solar panels? How do you live?

Through Hochschild’s time in Lake Charles, La., and nearby cities and small towns, readers meet people who complicate our oversimplified “whither white America” moment. Especially memorable are Lee Sherman, who repaired pipes carrying lethal chemicals and drained toxic waste illegally into nearby waterways before becoming an environmentalist and, yes, a tea party supporter; and the Areno family, disagreeing over the benefits and risks of local industries, even as they watched turtles go blind and cows die from drinking polluted water. They are the strength of the book, yet Hochschild interrupts their stories to place everything in a formulaic big-picture context, a capitalized and italicized theory of the right. The author, we learn, hopes to scale the Empathy Wall and learn the Deep Story that can resolve the Great Paradox through a Keyhole Issue. These contrivances guide, and ruin, this book.

“An empathy wall,” Hochschild lectures, “is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs.” The author has traveled to the South to conquer that wall, and she constantly refers to it. “As I was trying to climb this slippery empathy wall, a subversive thought occurred to me,” she says at one point. Or when she doesn’t quite get another person’s thinking, she feels “stuck way over on my side of the empathy wall.”

Beyond the wall awaits the deep story. “A deep story is a feels-as-if story — it’s the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols,” Hochschild writes.

Read the whole thing, which for the Post, is a pretty good deconstruction of yet another variation of the proverbial “Gorillas in the Mist” books and articles that the left always writes around election time. But as Dana Loesch noted, you can’t run a country you’ve never been to. And good luck simply writing about it.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)