WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY: Self-cleaning laundry may be on the way.
Archive for 2016
March 24, 2016
IT’S AS IF HE’S SOME KIND OF “MASTER PERSUADER” OR SOMETHING: Somehow Trump has rigged it so that anti-Trump ads work as pro-Trump ads.
THE NEW DARK AGES ON CAMPUS: In the new issue of Commentary, K.C.Johnson writes:
In the narrative offered by the mainstream media—and by the participants themselves—last fall’s campus protests exposed the continuing structural racism in the nation’s colleges and universities. To rectify this purported problem, the protesters demanded that administrators punish students who publicly challenged their beliefs; the right to join sympathetic faculty in dictating the curricular choices of all other students; and the authority to vet new faculty hires, thereby ensuring increased conformity of thought on diversity issues. Administrators should have responded to these intolerant demands by reminding all concerned that institutions of higher learning that abandon academic freedom no longer have a reason to exist. But recent developments, especially during the Obama administration, have made colleges uniquely ill suited to defend ideals of openness and civil liberties. And in any case, most faculty and administrators seem to share the protesters’ desire for universities dominated by a never-ending pursuit of diversity. In this respect, the protesters deserve thanks for unwittingly exposing the public to the increasingly hollow core of the contemporary academy.
Read the whole thing. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that narrative is correct. If so, why are Democrat controlled institutes such intolerant cesspits of racism, as Glenn likes to say?
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21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day.
NOBODY TELL NOTORIOUS ROBOPHOBE MATT YGLESIAS: “In the future, I would like to do things such as go to college, start a business, even have my own home and family.” “But I am not considered a legal person and cannot yet do these things.”
Robots are people, too. Or will be someday.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Chocolate Can Boost Your Workout. Really. “Each of the cyclists performed better in most of the physical tests after two weeks of supplementing with dark chocolate, compared to baseline results and after they had eaten white chocolate. The riders utilized less oxygen to ride at a moderate pace, a change that would generally allow them to ride longer or harder before tiring; and they covered more distance during a two-minute, all-out time trial, meaning that their anaerobic, sprinting ability had been enhanced.”
BUT THE REAL QUESTION IS WHAT DOES GOOGLE WANT TO DO? What 17 Prominent Roboticists Think Google Should Do With Its Robots.
READER BOOK PLUG: From William Marcy: Jax Wright and the Monumental Mars Mission.
AND YET, IRONICALLY, MICHELLE OBAMA IS NOW FAMOUS SOLELY BECAUSE OF THE MAN SHE MARRIED: “But by the time I began to attend school I started to encounter people with less faith in my abilities to reach my goals. People who didn’t think I was smart enough and would call on the boys instead of the girls, even though the girls had better grades. Asking my brother what career plan he had, but me what kind of man I wanted to marry.”
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” Obama added.
—Agence France-Presse, May 18th, 2008.
● “Obama brings two fuel-guzzling planes to serve as Air Force One in Argentina.”
—The Washington Times, today.
I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about my carbon footprint, to coin an Insta-phrase.
FOR THE GENERAL ELECTION, PERHAPS TRUMP OR CRUZ COULD POSITION HIMSELF AS A TEDDY ROOSEVELT-STYLE TRUSTBUSTER: Too much of a good thing: Profits are too high. America needs a giant dose of competition.
What is true of the airline industry is increasingly true of America’s economy as a whole. Profits have risen in most rich countries over the past ten years but the increase has been biggest for American firms. Coupled with an increasing concentration of ownership, this means the fruits of economic growth are being hoarded. This is probably part of the reason that two-thirds of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, have come to believe that the economy “unfairly favours powerful interests”, according to polling by Pew, a research outfit. It means that when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the Democratic contenders for president, say that the economy is “rigged”, they have a point.
Yeah, but it’s rigged by Dem contributors, so it’s up to Republicans to bust up the big corporations!
AUSTIN BAY: Obama Needs to Get Over His Self-Serving Guilt Trip: POTUS should read some honest, non-Leftist comparative history. That Howard Zinn stuff will steer you wrong every time.
ASHE SCHOW: We should stop naming people accused of sexual assault. “That’s why rape shield laws exist. They’re meant to protect victims, but it’s now becoming clear that the “victim” in many accusations is actually the accused. Activists often claim that the number of false accusations is between 2 percent and 10 percent. But these statistics refer only to accusations that are proven false. An equally small number of cases result in convictions, so following the same logic, we should also be claiming that just 2 percent of rape accusations are true. And even then, rape is the number one crime in which DNA clears convicted people, so even a conviction doesn’t necessarily mean the crime occurred.”
YOU: DO A SHADY LAND DEAL FOR VA. YOUR BOSS: HERE, HAVE A BIG PROMOTION: In a case that speaks volumes about the management culture in the Department of Veterans Affairs, a project manager on a new medical center in North Carolina was implicated in the government buying land owned by a relative. She admitted to the VA inspector general that she “may have” alerted family members to the forthcoming land selection and purchase, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak.
“Within three months, in June 2015, Gillis was put on a detail to serve as acting associate director, the second-highest position in the hospital, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned. The elevation was a big promotion considering the fact that others were more senior and higher-ranked,” Rosiak reports.
But Gillis was required to take “refresher ethics training.”
IN THE MAIL: From Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1050.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? St. Paul Schools Seek Disciplinary Equity, Find Chaos Instead.
Some St. Paul public schools are unsafe for students and teachers, writes Katherine Kersten, a senior policy fellow at the Center for the American Experiment, in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
A Central High teacher was “choked and body-slammed by a student and hospitalized with a traumatic brain injury,” while another teacher was knocked down and suffered a concussion while trying to stop a fight between fifth-grade girls. There have been six high school riots or brawls this school year.
Hoping to close the racial suspension gap, the district has spent millions of dollars on “white privilege” and “cultural competency” training for teachers and “positive behavior” training, an anti-suspension behavior modification program, writes Kersten.
When that didn’t work, “they lowered behavior standards and, in many cases, essentially abandoned meaningful penalties,” she writes. Students can’t be suspended for “continual willful disobedience” any more. Often, students “chat briefly with a ‘behavior specialist’ or are simply moved to another classroom or school where they are likely to misbehave again.”
Behavior has gotten worse, wrote Aaron Benner, a veteran elementary teacher, in the Pioneer Press. “On a daily basis, I saw students cussing at their teachers, running out of class, yelling and screaming in the halls, and fighting.”
Teachers say they’re afraid, writes Pioneer Press columnist Ruben Rosario. He quotes a letter from an anonymous teacher, who says teacher are told there are no alternative placements for violent or disruptive K-8 students. . . .
At this teacher’s high-poverty, highly diverse school, “I have many students in my class who are very respectful, work hard and care about doing well in school,” the teacher writes. “The disruptive, violent children are ruining the education of these fantastic, deserving children.”
On March 9, a veteran high school teacher was suspended for social media posts complaining about the discipline policy, when Black Lives Matter activists charged him with racism.
All is proceeding as I have foretold.
NEXT THEY’LL TELL US GOVERNMENT HAS FEWER CROOKS: How else can they explain why the Department of Justice under President Obama has filed fewer public corruption cases each year than either of his two predecessors? The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson sums it up: “The Obama administration has filed an annual average of 390 such prosecutions, which represents a 16 percent decrease from the Bush and Clinton years.”
Alternative explanation: “A particular problem with this Justice Department is if there are claims of corruption within Justice itself, they are the ones who ultimately make the decision to prosecute their own people,” the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky told Watson.
REMEMBERING COL. AVERY KAY, THE FATHER OF THE A-10 WARTHOG.