THE COMING CRASH OF THE GOVERNMENT DEBT BUBBLE: “It’s going to be a hell of a crash. And the thing is, most of the occupants of the bus are acting like there is nothing wrong.”
Well, that was pretty much how they acted before the last crash, which was a government-induced debt bubble.
IF YOU’RE WEARING BLACK MASKS AND BEATING PEOPLE FOR THEIR IDEAS, YOU’RE PROBABLY A FASCIST: Dinesh D’Souza: The Fascist Roots of the American Left.
AT AMAZON, 70% off or More on Reading Glasses.
I FEEL SORRY FOR THE CLEANING CREW: This cruise ship is just one massive sex party. Back when I was practicing law, I had a secretary who went on a “Rock and Roll Singles Cruise.” When she returned, she seemed . . . satisfied.
MONKEEING AROUND WITH CULTURE, a review of Michael Nesmith’s autobiography, Infinite Tuesday at the Washington Free Beacon:
The old middlebrow knowledge, the aspirations to culture of the middle class as late as the early 1960s, can be discerned in everything from the leather-bound sets of Great Books to the classical themes that made up the background music to Bugs Bunny cartoons. We had a kind of consensus that the high arts, what the Kennedy Center used to celebrate, were the goal of cultural knowledge. And as that consensus died, the music of the Monkees became part of what took its place. The pop songs of the 1960s merged with the movies of the 1970s to fill the vacuum. And regardless of its quality it became the new shared knowledge.
Sometimes that quality was quite high, but it isn’t Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, and old episodes of I Dream of Jeannie are not Faust. If the key to culture is the greatness of the shared references, then we have no culture in America anymore. If the key is that something is genuinely shared, then we do have culture. We have the Monkees.
Read the whole thing, which is also a rumination on how badly the Kennedy Center awards have fallen, shifting from its earlier celebration of traditional classicism, to embracing pop culture. This year’s nominees include “‘television producer Norman Lear, singer-songwriter Gloria Estefan, music mogul Lionel Richie and hip-hop star LL Cool J,’ all of whom have innumerable other sources of popular praise. What need have we of the Kennedy Center, when its gold medals are just late imitations of the Grammys, Oscars, and Emmys?” (And as we noted yesterday, they’ll have to deal with Trump at their awards ceremony. Perhaps a professional cuddling service will be backstage for the artists.)
As for the Monkees themselves, as the reviewer writes earlier in the article, their music worked in spite of itself. Not least of which because of their powerful assist from the Brill Building pros writing their songs, and in-house, Nesmith wasn’t at all a bad songwriter himself, pioneering the country-rock-pop fusion sound that would print money for the Eagles in the following decade. And it’s worth noting how much of pop music that followed after the Monkees’ demise as a working band has been far worse. William Goldman once noted that “Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood.” You can say the same thing about the Grammys as well.
LICENSE TO COLLECT SHARK TEETH WAS ONE OF THE LESSER-WATCHED BOND MOVIES: You need to a license to collect shark teeth in South Carolina.
Because “South Carolina is stupid,” as Michelle Ray, aka Galt’s Girl, tweets.
THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T WORKING OUT THE WAY I HAD HOPED: ‘Professional Cuddling’ A Growing Industry Because…Trump!
“At $80 a pop, it’s cheaper than a good hooker but more expensive than binge-watching Lena Dunham’s Girls.”
Presumably, the professional cuddler is less of a narc than Dunham, so she’s got that going for her, which is nice.
THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE STUCK IN 1963: Liberals can’t handle the Asian factor in affirmative action.
If you doubt that affirmative action policies in college admissions need a bright dose of sunlight, just read the first sentence of The New York Times story that purported to reveal a new Justice Department initiative to examine those policies. The story, which the administration has disputed, asserts that the aim of the Trump administration is to investigate and sue schools over actions that “discriminate against white applicants.”
Do you see the problem? It’s a common one in liberal defenses of affirmative action. We realize it in an admission a few sentences later in the story. The Justice Department document that The Times has obtained, you see, says nothing about white people. In fact, the document doesn’t identify any specific victim of affirmative action, only the procedures of “intentional race-based discrimination.”
Now, most people assume, as the Times reporter does, that white applicants are the ones who suffer when schools lower the bar for minority students. When the Supreme Court decided against Abigail Fisher in her challenge to affirmative action policies at the University of Texas, the interim president of the University of Houston Downtown predicted that while “moral order has been restored in the universe, there will be more aggrieved whites.” A journalist for The Root cast threats to affirmative action as the restoration of “white-collar white supremacy.”When we look at affirmative action policies at selective institutions, though, it isn’t whites who will benefit the most if they are restricted. It is, potentially, Asians. In 2004, a Princeton University study of 124,000 applications to elite selective institutions, looked at SAT scores and found that “Asians experience the greatest disadvantage in admissions vis-à-vis other comparable racial/ethnic groups.” The researchers claimed that being Asian is “comparable to a loss of 50 SAT points.”
The big surprise in the study was that Asians had to score significantly higher than whites, as well as blacks and Hispanics. Despite having a higher average SAT score, Asians have lower odds of admission than do “comparable whites.”
But, see, the narrative was set in 1963, and modern lefties — suffering from “Selma Envy” — can’t seem to get past it. Weirdly — or perhaps not so weirdly — my dad, who was actually at Selma, took a much less rigid view of such things.
WE’RE OVERDUE FOR A STOCK-MARKET PLUNGE, IT’S TRUE: Beneath the glow of stock-market records, darkly bearish trends are lurking. Basically, the question is whether new, business-friendly changes from Trump will be able to offset the natural trend after 8 years of anemic growth.
GIZMODO: Exclusive: Here’s The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google. “A software engineer’s 10-page screed against Google’s diversity initiatives is going viral inside the company, being shared on an internal meme network and Google+. The document’s existence was first reported by Motherboard, and Gizmodo has obtained it in full.”
You can make diversity your top priority, or you can make profitability your top priority, or you can make technical excellence your top priority. But you can only have one top priority.
CATHY YOUNG: Lena Dunham, Faux Survivor.
Well, a lot of retirement vehicles like 401k and 457 plans are inheritable, but yeah. The Insta-Wife keeps pointing out that lots of people who’ve not done so well are being bailed out by inheritances, but my question is always what’s going to bail their kids out?
NEO-NEOCON ON THE CONTENT OF THOSE LEAKED TRUMP PHONE CALLS (INCLUDING NEW HAMPSHIRE, THAT “DRUG-INFESTED DEN”):
[Trump] also told Pena-Nieto regarding illegal drugs coming into the U.S. from Mexico, “I won New Hampshire because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den.” Whether that description is accurate or not, he, er, did not win New Hampshire last year…
No, Trump didn’t win the general election in that state—Hillary won by a very small margin (.3%)—but he won the NH primary by a huge margin. That was a big big deal at the time, and gave him his very first primary win after a defeat in Iowa. New Hampshire made him legit, as it were, and if he’s bragging about his primary win there, it would make a lot more sense than talking about winning (or losing) New Hampshire in the general, where its paltry four electoral votes hardly matter.
Allahpundit questions whether that description of New Hampshire as “a drug-infested den” is accurate or is hyperbole. But although “den” is perhaps a bit colorful, it is accurate in terms of the seriousness of the drug problem that has come to plague the state.
Read the whole thing.
And right next door to that drug-infested den is another drug-infested den. As Slate noted in 2013, “The state with the biggest drug problem: It’s Vermont.”
AMERICA HAS THE WORST POLITICAL CLASS IN ITS HISTORY: Charlie Martin on Trump vs the Permanent Coastal Privilege Party.
NOT JUST IN THE UK: Nassim Taleb: Something is Broken in the UK Intellectual Sphere.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Wards Of The Court. “The rule of law is not at all the same thing as the rule of laws, or the preeminence of law in our lives; indeed, they are almost opposite, insofar as one of the objects of the rule of law is to make the legally permissible and impermissible knowable to the citizen in advance. Where there are so many laws that even highly specialized lawyers have difficulty in keeping up with the provisions in their own area of specialism, the rule of law declines, and litigators rush in where common sense fears to pronounce. This superabundance of laws exists in many places around the world today, and needless to say it flatters the self-esteem of legislators and judges. It makes them the arbiters of our existence. It also makes the rest of us wards of the court. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine offers food for thought about just how enveloping are the tentacles of law once they start gripping our lives.”
LEARNING TO LEARN: You, too, can rewire your brain.
The studio for what is arguably the world’s most successful online course is tucked into a corner of Barb and Phil Oakley’s basement, a converted TV room that smells faintly of cat urine. (At the end of every video session, the Oakleys pin up the green fabric that serves as the backdrop so Fluffy doesn’t ruin it.)
This is where they put together “Learning How to Learn,” taken by more than 1.8 million students from 200 countries, the most ever on Coursera. The course provides practical advice on tackling daunting subjects and on beating procrastination, and the lessons engagingly blend neuroscience and common sense.
Dr. Oakley, an engineering professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., created the class with Terrence Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and with the University of California, San Diego.
Prestigious universities have spent millions and employ hundreds of professionally trained videographers, editors and producers to create their massive open online courses, known as MOOCs. The Oakleys put together their studio with equipment that cost $5,000. They figured out what to buy by Googling “how to set up a green screen studio” and “how to set up studio lighting.” Mr. Oakley runs the camera and teleprompter. She does most of the editing. The course is free ($49 for a certificate of completion — Coursera won’t divulge how many finish).
I highly recommend her book, Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential.
BLUE DOG DEM TO LABOR BOARD: ‘Do No Harm to Those Job Creators,’ Repeal Obama-Era Rule.
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) joined Republican lawmakers in support of a bill that would reverse a decision made by the National Labor Relations Board during the Obama administration.
“For more than three decades, the Joint Employer Standard was the cornerstone of labor law; it protected businesses from undue liability involving employees over which they did not have the actual or the direct control. We know what happened in August of 2015 that decision that came out – that decision ignored years of legal precedent and created an environment of uncertainty that will put pressure on primary companies to assert more authority over their contracted small businesses and franchises to limit new potential liability under this federal law,” Cuellar said during a Capitol Hill press conference Thursday.
“I’m an attorney and I’ve been a small-business owner, so I know what it is to be a small-business owner, so I know what it is to work with employees, and I don’t think this is a Democratic or Republican issue – it’s something that we’ve got to do because it’s the right thing to do for the small-business owners,” he added.
In August 2015, the NLRB concluded that “two or more entities are joint employers of a single workforce if (1) they are both employers within the meaning of the common law; and (2) they share or codetermine those matters governing the essential terms and conditions of employment.”
This was a blatant act by the NLRB to enforce what I call the “Caligula Standard” on corporate/franchisee relations: “If only all of Rome had just one neck.”
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