THE DAM HAS BURST: House of Cards to End With Season 6.
Archive for 2017
October 30, 2017
ITS COME TO THIS: “With so much of ESPN’s universe asunder, it’s not outlandish now to entertain a previously unthinkable prospect: Might ESPN elect to go without rights to NFL games after the expiration of its eight-year deal for Monday Night Football in 2021?!”
Who needs sports video? Might as well go all the way and make its transformation into what Clay Travis likes to call MSESPN complete.
CHANGE: How Google’s Quantum Computer Could Change the World: The ultra-powerful machine has the potential to disrupt everything from science and medicine to national security—assuming it works. I think we should name it Shalmaneser.
AT AMAZON, save big in Office Products.
SARAH HOYT INTERVIEWS AGILE AERO’S JEFF GREASON: Why Get Off This Rock?
FREE SPEECH VICTORY: UCLA backs down in security fee controversy over Ben Shapiro talk.
The New York-based reporter [Fox NFL writer Peter Schrager] left the Big Apple for an assignment in Indianapolis, Indiana, and when he got into a cab, the driver asked him why he was in town.
Schrager proudly spoke up and perhaps fatally over simplified his job, by saying that he worked in the NFL. But that was a major mistake because upon hearing that, the driver pulled over and told Schrager to get out of his cab.
The driver proceeded to tell the reporter that he did not appreciate the anti-American protests going on each week during the playing of the national anthem, and he didn’t feel the need to do business with anyone representing pro football.
“You can get out of the car,” Schrager said the driver told him. “The NFL is dead to me. The NFL, the fact that these guys take knees, I will never watch the NFL again,” the cabbie added according to the Fox reporter.
Amazing what news you can discover when you dare to leave The Bubble.
Related: Jerry Jones is trying to take out Roger Goodell.
Faster, please.
BODYHACKING AND the rise of the transhumans. I’m all for transhumanism, but I’m not big on first-gen technology in my body. Of course, not everyone has a choice.
I WANT TO SAY ONE WORD TO YOU. JUST ONE WORD: Corals eat plastic because we’ve made it tasty, study suggests.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, INTELLECTUAL BUBBLE EDITION: Frank Bruni: Too Many Colleges Flunk Trump 101.
“The idea that the only people who voted for Trump have missing front teeth is really so extraordinary, and yet I think that’s largely what people in the academy think,” said Jean Yarbrough, a conservative professor of political science at Bowdoin College who voted for him herself. These faculty members, she added, consider 2016 “an illegitimate election, so they’re not worried about their being out of touch with America.”
But others are rightly concerned, and that includes parents. Inside Higher Ed published an article recently in which college-placement advisers said that some clients wanted to steer clear of certain elite schools — Yale and Brown were singled out — that struck them as overzealously progressive.
Lynn Morton, the president of Warren Wilson College, publicly expressed dissatisfaction with its reputation as a bohemian enclave and made an explicit appeal for conservative students.
Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “to create deeper intellectual and political diversity, we need an affirmative-action program for the full range of conservative ideas and traditions, because on too many of our campuses they seldom get the sustained, scholarly attention that they deserve.” He said that in addition to Wesleyan’s commitment to admitting at least 10 military veterans to every freshman class, it would welcome senior military officials as instructors and would tweak its curriculum to offer, for example, a course on the philosophical underpinnings of free enterprise.
For educators open to such changes, the election was both an illustration and a consequence of how polarized our country had become and how poorly Americans in separate cultural and ideological camps communicated with one another. And they aren’t content simply to put “Hillbilly Elegy” on the summer reading list for incoming students (which many colleges have done).
Hence the Inside Higher Ed survey’s discovery of a heightened interest in applicants whose demographic and geographic profiles dovetail with those of Trump voters. If colleges are serious about the educational benefits of diversity, the thinking goes, they need to factor in those students, and they can’t promote respectful, elevated debate if the campus is one big blissful love-in of like-minded liberals. Affluent teenagers from Brooklyn Heights, Brookline and Bethesda need to hear from evangelicals, from young men and women who did tours of duty in Afghanistan, from those whose relatives thrilled to Trump.
Well, if you take diversity seriously, you need to be diverse.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Then: Sexual assault – “it’s on us” to stop it:
● Now: Jimmy Kimmel is making next year’s Oscars a Harvey Weinstein-free zone.
Exit quote: “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion.”
—Harvey Weinstein, as quoted by the Los Angeles Times, October 1st, 2009.
Related: There’s an Awakening Against Sexual Assault, So Why Is No One Talking About Bill Clinton?
ALSO, WINTER, SPRING AND SUMMER: Fall a good time to start exercising, medical experts say.
E-STASI: Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens. “The Chinese government plans to launch its Social Credit System in 2020. The aim? To judge the trustworthiness – or otherwise – of its 1.3 billion residents.”
More:
The Chinese government is pitching the system as a desirable way to measure and enhance “trust” nationwide and to build a culture of “sincerity”. As the policy states, “It will forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility.”
Others are less sanguine about its wider purpose.
Ya think?
No matter what Beijing claims about “trust” or “sincerity,” by definition, a high-trust society can’t be built from the top down. However it is possible with modern tools to build a surveillance state where everyone is both Winston Smith and the telescreen.
ACADEMIC, RESEARCH THYSELF: 82 percent of academic papers are never cited by anyone else. Moreover, half of the papers are never read by anyone other than the authors, editors, or peer reviewers.
FENCING IN FREE SPEECH AT LOS ANGELES PIERCE COLLEGE: 100,000 students within the Los Angeles Community College District are corralled into tiny free speech zones to exercise their rights. Student Kevin Shaw is fighting back with the help of FIRE (VIDEO).
THEY’RE FALLING LIKE NINEPINS IN THE RULING CLASS THIS WEEK: Tony Podesta, brother of John Podesta, who is a target of Mueller’s probe has stepped down from his firm.
We’re gonna find out that everybody in both parties was working for Russia, aren’t we? Which when you think about it, would explain a lot.
WAIT… WHAT? The Economy Can’t Grow Without Birth Control.
PERSONALLY, I’M BIG ON KEEPING MY SHOTS UP: Is there any benefit to revaccinating adults against measles, mumps, whooping cough and other diseases making a comeback?