DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: U of Iowa looking to create social justice bachelor’s degree.
Archive for 2016
September 8, 2016
LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: “I am still in shock that anyone would throw a pretty good sized rock at a less than 3 year old.”
And this remains evergreen, alas:
JAMES COMEY SHOULD RESIGN NOW FOR THE GOOD OF THE COUNTRY, Roger Simon writes. Read the whole thing.
Requiring one more correction:
So anyone can make a mistake, but if you work at the New York Times, shouldn’t you know that Damascus is the capital of Syria? Especially when you’re mocking someone for not knowing about another city that’s not the capital of Syria?
TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND ALL THAT STUFF: ‘Justice League’ Cast Unites to Save World from Dakota Access Pipeline.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: New state by state poll: 65% to 83% agree “America reflects my values LESS than it has in the past.”
THE JOKE WILL BE ON THEM WHEN STUDENTS START SIGNING UP FOR ONLINE COURSES BASED IN INDIA: The University of California is laying off a group of IT workers at its San Francisco campus as part of a plan to move work offshore. “The layoffs will happen at the end of February, but before the final day arrives the IT employees expect to train foreign replacements from India-based IT services firm HCL. The firm is working under a university contract valued at $50 million over five years.”
Plus: “UCSF employees say the training of the HCL staff has not begun, so they don’t know yet if they will be training visa-holding replacements. But HCL, along with many other offshore firms, is considered H-1B dependent under law, meaning 15% or more of their U.S. workers are here on an H-1B visa. HCL and Cognizant were sued earlier this year by laid-off Disney IT employees, who allege the law was broken when they were replaced by visa workers.”
It’s just the beginning.
HEALTH: Early Antibiotics Exposure Ups Risk Of Allergies Later In Life.
The researchers selected 22 studies involving 394,517 patients to study eczema risk and 22 studies involving 256,609 participants to study hay fever risk. Twelve of those studies (64,638 patients) had observational data on both conditions.
On analysis, it was found that when children are exposed to antibiotics in early life, the risk of eczema heightened, with a 15 to 41 percent increase. Early life antibiotic consumption also resulted in an increased risk of hay fever by 14 percent to 56 percent. The risk of eczema and hay fever were found to be higher when the children were given two or more courses of antibiotics for the conditions.
Though the reason behind the findings is unclear, the researchers suggest that the antibiotics could be altering the immune system of young children by disrupting the microorganisms in the gut.
The human gut is a mini-biosphere inhabited by microorganisms which impact the health of the rest of the body — and we still don’t have enough understanding of how it all works.
ANGRY MOB OF WHITE JOURNALISTS TRYING TO INTIMIDATE A BLACK MAN:
Pulverizing Lauer is their way of warning Lester Holt that he’d better be all over Trump at the first debate https://t.co/uwYeQXw0S2
— Allahpundit (@allahpundit) September 8, 2016
OUCH: Speaker Paul Ryan says, “Yes” FBI Obstructed Justice Against Hillary Clinton.
HH: On Tuesday of this week, September 6th, the House Chairman of Oversight and Governmental Affairs, Jason Chaffetz, sent a letter to the CEO of Platte River Networks. And it referenced a March 25th, very mysterious meeting which Mr. Chaffetz says Secretary Clinton’s team, including attorneys David Kendall and Cheryl Mills, held a conference call with the Platte River Network engineer who maintained Secretary Clinton’s server. In subsequent interviews with the FBI, the PRN engineer refused to answer questions about that call, asserting either a 5th Amendment or Attorney-client privilege. The Chairman then writes, “This timeline of events raises questions as to whether the PRN engineer violated federal statutes that prohibit destruction of evidence, and obstruction of a Congressional investigation, among others, when the engineer erased Secretary Clinton’s email contrary to Congressional preservation orders and a subpoena. The sequence of events leading up to the destruction of Secretary Clinton’s emails, the conference call, the work ticket, the use of BleachBit, and PRN’s subsequent refusal to discuss a conference call with the FBI, raises questions about whether Secretary Clinton acting through her attorneys instructed PRN to destroy records relevant to the ongoing Congressional investigation.” Are you concerned, Speaker Ryan, that the House is being denied its Constitutional oversight by an FBI that is indifferent to what is obviously an obstruction of justice?
PR: Yes, and it’s not the first time we’ve experienced this. I was part of the IRS investigation in my last job here in Congress, and I would say it’s a very, very similar story. It’s a story of stonewalling.
See, you wouldn’t get this kind of behavior on behalf of a President Trump.
LAYERS OF EDITORS AND FACTCHECKERS AND WHATEVER: New York Times Gets Key Aleppo Fact Wrong in Story About Gary Johnson’s Gaffe.
To be fair, Johnson committed no gaffe — he had never heard of Aleppo, and admitted it. But Johnson’s ignorance doesn’t say much for how seriously he’s prepared himself for the White House, not that he ever had a chance of winning it.
So I suspect the media overreaction to the tiny affair is a tacit admission that Johnson is taking a lot more votes from Clinton than he is from Trump.
IT’S OFFICIAL: HOLLYWOOD STILL OUT OF ORIGINAL IDEAS. The Crow remake slated to begin production next year.
To be fair, the original was released in the far distant past, in what now seems like Hollywood’s golden era, a time when stars still appeared on the silver screen and all was well in Tinseltown. Or as I like to call those hazy distant days…1994.
IF TRUE, THIS SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was once a KGB spy codenamed ‘Mole,’ report claims.
The birth of Arab nationalist terrorism, which evolved into modern Islamic terrorism, was midwifed by Leonid Brezhnev’s USSR.
AN ERA OF TENUOUS MAJORITIES.
IN THE MAIL: From Amber Smith, Danger Close: My Epic Journey as a Combat Helicopter Pilot in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Save on These Twisted Root Design Airmocks
Plus,: Lightning Deals Galore!. Get ’em before they’re gone.
TO BE FAIR, WHAT HASN’T HE POLITICIZED? Ed Morrisssey: Is Obama Politicizing the Pentagon in the Fight Over War Funding?
IT’S A ZOMBIE, DRACULA, AND FRANKENSTEIN’S CREATURE ALL ROLLED UP INTO ONE: Iran Nuclear Deal Likely to Survive Next Administration.
CULINARY FOSSIL: A snake swallowed a lizard who swallowed an insect. Then the snake died and fossilized. The pictures and explanatory images are extraordinary.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1218.
FIVE OBJECTIONS TO THE DEATH PENALTY — AND WHY THEY’RE WRONG: Walter Hudson posits that “We Need the Death Penalty for Jacob Wetterling’s Killer.”
Read the whole thing.
MAX BOOT: Another Obama Apology Tour?
I get what Obama is up to here. He thinks the U.S. can exercise more influence today by acknowledging past “misconduct” without directly criticizing the behavior of countries it deals with. The problem is that, in practice, this amounts to kow-towing to dictators from Cuba to Iran and buying into their fiction that the U.S. is guilty of conduct just as bad, if not worse, than what they have done. That simply isn’t true, and by shading the truth the president is failing to speak on behalf of the principles upon which the United States was founded–and which have long been our most powerful tool and selling point in international affairs. He is also inadvertently buttressing the dictatorships he is dealing with; now they can turn to their people and say in essence, “Our problems are America’s fault–the president of the United States even said so.”
I’m not so sure it’s inadvertent; President Pen & Phone isn’t isn’t a huge fan of representative democracy. And as Glenn noted earlier, Obama “never much liked the country he was elected to run.”