WELL, THAT’S GOOD: Study: Electric cars don’t harm cardiac implants.
Archive for 2017
November 15, 2017
AUTONOMOUS DRIVING: Here’s How Alphabet Plans to Beat Tesla and GM.
Beating Tesla won’t be difficult if the company can’t get around to manufacturing the cars Elon Musk promised.
END OF AN ERA: Richard Cordray, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the last unbreached stronghold of leftist bureaucracy in DC, is to resign at the end of the month. The President should really have fired him months ago, although it looks like Cordray might have bamboozled some senior White House staffers into letting him stay on. Whomever the President nominates to take over has a big job to do to reform this rogue agency, as I explain in The Case Against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
WHY ARE LEFTIST-RUN COMPANIES SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? Black worker says Tesla factory was a “hotbed for racist behavior.”
CONGRATULATIONS TO MY COLLEAGUE JONATHAN ROHR, whose Blockchain-Based Token Sales, Initial Coin Offerings, and the Democratization of Public Capital Markets (coauthored with Aaron Wright) is now #3 on the SSRN Top Downloads chart.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Harvard Business School professor: Half of American colleges will be bankrupt in 10 to 15 years.
Wow. If only someone, somewhere, had provided some sort of warning.
CAPITOL HILL: $15 Million ‘Paid Out by the House on Behalf of Harassers in the Last 10 to 15 Years.’
Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier (Calif.) said on Tuesday that around $15 million in settlements has been paid out by the House of Representatives on behalf of those who have been accused of sexual harassment in the past 10 to 15 years.
MSNBC host Chuck Todd asked about the taxpayer money that has been used to cover up sexual harassment allegations against members of Congress.
“If the taxpayer is involved, don’t we have the right to know?” Todd asked the congresswoman.
“Well, I think you do have the right to know, but right now, under the system, you don’t have the right to know,” Speier said.
Accountability is just another word for you don’t have the right to know.
SURVEILLANCE STATE, JUNIOR EDITION: These 3 Student Data Bills Could Ruin Your Kid’s Life.
Sadly, states have had only varying degrees of success stopping some of the unbelievable amounts of data being collected on public school students. When I say “unbelievable amounts,” I have actual screen shots from the National Center for Education Statistics’ “National Education Data Model” (no longer online, incidentally), which provided model data points to be collected from students for very important educational information like “routine health care procedure required at school,” “number of teeth,” “orthodontic appliances,” “voting status,” “religious affiliation” (these two being big no-no’s in the world of data collection), “weeks of gestation,” and “weight at birth.”
The Common Education Data Standards, a one-stop A-Z data collecting shop where anyone can see the possible data collection titles populating public school SLDS, are still online. Here, a cursory search of the letter “I” will return 133 main records, from “IDEA Disability Type” through “Itinerant Teacher.”
I was most interested in the category of “Incident Behavior.” Here one can find 30 different sub-category data tags for school officials to use in describing any number of ways students can misbehave on campus, including “Sexual Harassment,” “Obscene Behavior,” and “Threat/Intimidation.” Thank goodness the government has spent so many taxpayer dollars finding ways to label accused students with subjective and often juvenile behaviors that will follow them throughout their academic careers—and, thanks to some new bills in play, especially, possibly their adult lives.
Read the whole thing.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Ruling Out the ABA on Judges: The Senate needn’t listen to the lawyers’ guild on nominees.
If Republicans are serious about getting President Trump’s judicial nominees confirmed, they will have to rid themselves of the fiction of a politically neutral American Bar Association. The outfit’s recent antics provide ample reason to remove it from Senate vetting.
The ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary last week informed the Judiciary Committee that Brett Talley is “not qualified” to serve as a federal judge. This is the fourth “not qualified” rating the ABA has slapped on Trump nominees, including Leonard Steven Grasz for the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Mr. Grasz’s “not qualified” rating rests on a misrepresentation of the former Nebraska chief deputy attorney general’s views on judicial precedent. Mr. Grasz once argued in a 1999 article that lower courts shouldn’t stretch Supreme Court rulings into broader rights, but the ABA contorts this to suggest Mr. Grasz would ignore Roe v. Wade. Mr. Grasz explicitly wrote in the same article that “lower federal courts are obliged to follow clear legal precedent regardless of whether it may seem unwise or even morally repugnant to do so.”
As for Mr. Talley, nominated for the district court in Alabama, the ABA says he lacks the “requisite trial experience,” having never tried a case. This ignores that the 36-year-old has clerked for a federal district judge and a federal appellate judge, has worked at the whiteshoe Gibson Dunn & Crutcher firm, and served as the Deputy Solicitor General of Alabama.
Many nominees have been younger than Mr. Talley, and the ABA called Barack Obama nominee Goodwin Liu “well-qualified” despite no experience as a trial judge. The ABA also called Elena Kagan “well qualified” for the Supreme Court, as indeed she was, despite her lack of trial experience. But since the ABA found nothing amiss with Mr. Talley’s “integrity” or “temperament,” it settled on a concern with “requisite” experience.
Hacks gonna hack.
JUST NBC THE LIBERAL FASCISM:
● Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them.
—Headline, NBC News.com, today.
And if you actually dare to have kids, they belong entirely to the state, as this 2013 promotional ad for MSNBC suggests:
That’s not at all a creepy double-play from NBC. And it’s a fascinating example of bias by selection: As Nick Gillespie of Reason tweets, “NBC News, which wouldn’t run Ronan Farrow’s expose on Harvey Weinstein, publishes case for reductions in number of kids.”
UPDATE: “This just in: school shootings are good for the environment,” Iowahawk tweets.
IT’S A TAX! Sen. John Thune drops the mic on Dems objecting to adding individual mandate repeal to tax bill.
Joseph Lawlor of the Washington Examiner noted that some Democrats objected to the individual mandate being included in the GOP’s tax bill; for that to happen, the Supreme Court would have had to have decided that the individual mandate was a tax … oh, wait.
John Roberts just can’t seem to make anyone happy these days.
IN THE MAIL: Convict Conditioning: How to Bust Free of All Weakness–Using the Lost Secrets of Supreme Survival Strength.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
WHY ARE LEFTY MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXISM AND MISOGYNY? ‘Unsafe and Just Plain Dirty’: Women Accuse Vice of ‘Toxic’ Sexual-Harassment Culture.
PARTY OF YOUTH: The Democrats’ old-people problem.
Democrats are rethinking their future — but doing it with the leadership of old men and women deeply rooted in the past. The top three House Democrats in leadership are all nearly 80 years old.
By the numbers: The average age of Democrats serving under them is 61. Three of the most talked-about 2020 contenders are Sen. Bernie Sanders, 76; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 68; and former Vice President Joe Biden, 74.
Why it matters: Older Democratic leaders are unwilling to give up their seats, even as younger Democrats call for “a new generation of leaders,” as top House Democrat Linda Sanchez said when she asked for Nancy Pelosi to step down. And former DNC Chair Howard Dean told MSNBC: “Our leadership is old and creaky, including me.”
Yeah, but that’s nothing compared to his party’s ideas.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, TURNABOUT EDITION: Female student sues Pitt for Title IX after it finds she beat up her boyfriend.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The End of the Modern Academy. Universities have abandoned the three ideals that once defined their mission, according to Richard Shweder, the cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, writing at Project Muse. Once upon a time, these were the core values:
Ideal #1: “Research done primarily in anticipation of profit is incompatible with the aims
of the university.”
Ideal #2: “The basic principles of the university include complete freedom of research
and the unrestricted dissemination of information.”
Ideal #3: “There must be no consideration of sex, ethnic or national characteristics, or
political or religious beliefs or affiliations in any decision regarding appointment,
promotion, or reappointment at any level of the academic staff.”
Unrestricted discourse and no identity politics? Why, these days on campus that’s hate speech.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela just defaulted, moving deeper into crisis.
Venezuela has no other meaningful income other than the oil it sells abroad. The government, meanwhile, has failed for years to ship in enough food and medicine for its citizens. As a result, Venezuelans are waiting hours in line to buy food and dying in hospitals that lack basic resources.
If investors seize the country’s oil shipments, the food and medical shortages would worsen quickly.
“Then it’s pandemonium,” says Fernando Freijedo, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research firm. “The humanitarian crisis is already pretty dire … it boggles the mind what could happen next.”
Apparently the only thing Venezuela hasn’t run out of is Unexpectedlys.
Also, this being CNN, “This story has been updated to characterize Venezuela’s government as socialist.”
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