THE BEST SOLUTION, AS I KEEP SAYING, IS TO MAKE WHERE YOU WENT TO SCHOOL LESS IMPORTANT: The Absurdity of College Admissions: How did getting into an elite school become a frenzied, soul-deadening process? “The mania has even spread into and shaped American culture, often distorting kids’ values, perpetuating economic inequality, and perverting the role of higher education in society as a whole.” Well, if you’re worried about inequality, abolish the Ivy League.
More on that here.
WAIT, YOU MEAN IT’S NOT LIKE HOW MURPHY BROWN DEPICTED IT? High-Achieving Women Find They’re Not Prepared for Motherhood.
GOOD: F.D.A. Clears Use of New Test to Screen Blood Donations for Zika.
The Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday that it would allow the use of an experimental test to screen blood donations for contamination with the Zika virus.
The move means that Puerto Rico, which had halted local blood donations and had imported nearly 6,000 units of red blood from the continental United States, will soon be able to resume collecting donations from residents. And it should help blood banks elsewhere in the country avoid similar ordeals.
“The bottom line is we are going to work with blood centers in Puerto Rico to try to help as many as possible make use of the investigational test,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
He estimated that the test, manufactured by Roche Molecular Systems, would be ready “within the next week or so.”
Experts noted that it took almost a year to develop a test to screen blood donations for West Nile virus, and some applauded the rapid progress described Wednesday.
“It is amazingly fast,” said Dr. Darrell J. Triulzi, the director of the division of transfusion medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. “This is a testament to the speed at which industry was able to respond to a need.”
He added that the F.D.A. deserved praise for fast-tracking the test.
I’m going to put a lot more work than usual into mosquito control in my backyard this year.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CONSUMER DECEPTION EDITION: U of Wisconsin Engineering Submitted False Data.
PJTV EXCLUSIVE: Does Ann Coulter Still Support Donald Trump for President?
If not now, perhaps at a later date, someone can dub in the “Col. Bogey’s March” song.
WHEN CITIZENS ARE SEEN AS PREY: Justice Department reinstates federal program that helps state cops act like robbers. “Back in December, the Justice Department suspended its dangerous ‘equitable sharing’ program, which helps state law enforcement agencies get around state law restrictions on asset forfeiture: the seizure of property from people who, in many cases, have never been convicted of any crime, or even charged with one. Sadly, the program is now back in force.”
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Hillary Clinton’s Delusional Media Courtiers.
CRYBULLIES IN THE MIDWEST: Now University of Kansas Students Are Complaining About ‘Donald Trump 2016’ Chalkings, Too. “Unlike Emory, KU staff reacted to the angry students fairly calmly, explaining that it wasn’t necessarily a student who made the chalkings and that students were allowed to make Trump chalkings if they wanted to. That answer angered Rock Chalk Invisible Hawks, the black advocacy group on campus.”
They anger pretty easily. And now that it’s easy to get people to make fools of themselves with nothing more than a piece of chalk, expect more.
Except, you know, at the more advanced schools, where people can tolerate this sort of thing without going crazy.
IRONY ALERT: CEO WHO LAST YEAR DECLARED ALL AMERICANS RACISTS NOW SEEKS NEW CIVILITY. Howard Schultz Caps Starbucks Annual Meeting with a Call for Civility and Values-Based Leadership:
Viewing the American Dream as a “reservoir” that is replenished with the values, work ethic and integrity of the American people, Schultz said, “Sadly, our reservoir is running dry, depleted by cynicism, despair, division, exclusion, fear and indifference.”
Yes, that can happen, when CEOs and other American elites think the very worst of their customers and decide that they’d rather be SJWs than business executives.
INTERESTED IN FIREARMS LAW? Consider the Annual Firearms Law Seminar.
NEWLY RELEASED LETTERS SHOW REAGAN LEFT LIBERALISM WHEN COMMUNISTS INFILTRATED: “His feeling of being had, of being manipulated, by communists who poisoned seemingly legitimate organizations and perverted their purposes, always keeping hidden their secret agenda goals, screams off the page of this letter. It would affect his entire life.”
And eventually, many other lives as well, as the section of the Berlin Wall outside of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley stands as a testament:
Read the whole thing.
HOLLOW FORCE? Congressional failures just forced the Marines to raid a museum for aircraft parts.
During a recent trip to several Southern U.S. military bases, Marines told House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, that they’ve been paying for their units’ supplies like pens and paper towels, and were forced to raid decommissioned aircraft for parts.
“I have heard firsthand from service members who have looked me in the eye and told of trying to cannibalize parts from a museum aircraft … getting aircraft that were sent to the boneyard in Arizona back and ready to fly missions, pilots flying well below the minimum number of hours required for minimal proficiency,” Thornberry said.
Military proficiency is difficult to earn and easy to squander.
ZAHA HADID, GROUNDBREAKING ARCHITECT, DIES AT 65:
Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-British architect whose curving, elongated structures left a mark on skylines around the world, and who was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, her profession’s highest honor, died on Thursday in Miami. She was 65.
Ms. Hadid “contracted bronchitis earlier this week and suffered a sudden heart attack while being treated in hospital,” her office, Zaha Hadid Architects in London, said in a statement.
Ms. Hadid, renowned for her theoretical work, created designs that were so complex that for the first few decades of her practice many of her more ambitious projects were never realized, even as she gained a dedicated following among her colleagues.
I remember seeing Hadid’s radical shapes for the first time in the mid-to-late ‘90s; yesterday when I began unpacking my books in Texas, I came across my copy of one of the first portfolios of her work, published by Rizzoli in 1998.
With their sweeping and expressionistic angles blended with a return to Mies van der Rohe-style minimalism, they seemed like an exciting way forward beyond postmodernism, which by then had gotten to be something of a dead-end. If we could have had Syd Mead design our cars and Hadid more of our buildings, the 21st century might have looked a bit more like the 21st century we were promised by Stanley Kubrick and Gerry Anderson in the late 1960s. Her fire station for the Switzerland-based Vitra furniture company, built in 1994, was her first completed structure, and still looks remarkable today.
ONE OF THE LEFT’S BIGGEST LIES IS THAT SOCIALISM LEADS TO EQUALITY AND DIGNITY: Five Nights in Pyongyang: Inside the secret brothel of North Korea’s elite.
IT’S LIKE ECHO, BUT WITH A PUSH-BUTTON INSTEAD OF CONSTANT LISTENING: Try Amazon Tap.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Hillary Clinton’s Delusional Media Courtiers.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: “Rosemary could be the secret to living to 100 according to researchers investigating 300 centenarians in a remote Italian village.”
Nonsense — we all know the secret to living to 100 or more:
ANALYSIS: HALF TRUE. A Belt-Fed Shotgun Is a Terrifying, Beautiful Thing.
THE BAD OLD DAYS RETURN TO NEW YORK: De Blasio has given up on graffiti.
Rudy Giuliani’s implementation of Broken Windows-style police methods kept the city clean and safe during his and Michael Bloomberg’s administrations. In addition to its aesthetic ugliness, De Blasio ignoring graffiti sends a clear signal to thugs that if they can get away with vandalism (and graffiti is vandalism, no matter what the moral relativist left says) then they can get away with lots of other petty crimes as well. Assuming De Blasio is reelected in next year, this isn’t going to end well for the city.
QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Intersectional Feminism: What Is It?
“Naturally it is the precious creation of the academic left, and Christina Hoff Sommers offers a splendid explanation and takedown in her latest ‘Factual Feminist’ video, released today:”
Related: “Stanford Activists Demand Its Next President Be Nonwhite and Female or Transgender — because a transgender white person would just not be ‘diverse’ enough.”
Well, duh, as the truly grandiloquent intersectionalist would say.
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