THE SPY LEFT OUT IN THE COLD: UK PM May says Trump dossier author has not worked for Britain for years.
Archive for 2017
January 13, 2017
CONSPIRACY THEORY OF THE DAY: Assange offering an extradition deal?
Let’s start with the claim that Assange wants Chelsea Manning pardoned or given clemency and released in exchange for his surrender to authorities in the United States. Isn’t it odd that he’s bringing this up only days after the White House floated a trial balloon suggesting that Manning might be in line for just such a favor in the next few days? For the complete background on that story and its possible implications, read Ed Morrissey’s analysis from Wednesday. Obama ostensibly has political reasons to do it – i.e. tossing a huge bone to the LGBT community on his way out the door – but he also has a serious beef with Wikileaks in general over all of the leaked email brouhaha and Manning is irreversibly tied to Assange. But if Manning were already in line for possible release, what benefit accrues to Assange in exchange for giving himself up?
Unless, of course, this was part of a prepackaged deal. We all found it shocking that Obama would even be considering releasing Manning, LGBT benefits aside, but if there was a possible deal with Assange in the works behind the scenes, was this the reason for the trial balloon? And if so, was Assange worried that the deal was going sour, leading to his decision to blast out the tweet to try to move things along?
Read the whole thing, and remember that anything is possible in the Mad Duck’s final days.
DAN MITCHELL: The Left’s Siren Song of Coerced Equality.
Traditionally, folks on the left favored a conventional welfare state, which revolved around two components.
1. Means-tested programs for the ostensible purpose of alleviating poverty (e.g.., Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, etc).
2. Social-insurance programs for the ostensible purpose of alleviating sickness, unemployment, and aging (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, etc).
This agenda was always a bad idea for both macro and micro reasons, and has become a very bad idea because of demographic changes.
But now the left has expanded its goals to policies that are far more radical. Instead of a well-meaning (albeit misguided) desire to protect people from risk, they now want coerced equality.
And this agenda also has two components.
1. A guaranteed and universal basic income for everyone.
2. Taxes and/or earnings caps to limit the income of the rich.
Taking a closer look at the idea of basic income, there actually is a reasonable argument that the current welfare state is so dysfunctional that it would be better to simply give everyone a check instead.
But as I’ve argued before, this approach would also create an incentive for people to simply live off taxpayers.
The real goal of course isn’t an ever-more generous welfare state, or even “income equality.” The real goal is power — and concentrating it into fewer and fewer hands, all located in Washington, D.C.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Legislators Take Aim At Academic Tenure:
Following in the footsteps of Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, which in 2015 and 2016 weakened tenure protections for public university faculty, legislators in Iowa and Missouri have introduced bills to eliminate the practice in their states. . . .
Both bills were introduced very recently and it’s unclear whether either one have a chance of making it into law. The usual argument for tenure—that it is a necessary institution for protecting academic freedom—continues to hold significant purchase, and rightly so. Many untenured professors report being afraid to express unpopular views; it’s possible that eliminating tenure would make academia even more politically conformist. And politicians have a tendency to try to interfere improperly in university research agendas.
At the same time, this is by no means a simple question. The institution of tenure-for-life—and the “for-life” part is critical; it used to be that professors could be forced to retire when they reached old age—imposes significant costs on universities as well. It makes education more costly by reducing universities’ flexibility in consolidating or changing departments, forcing them to hire an ever-growing poorly paid caste of low-paid adjuncts. .
And when it comes to risk-taking and conformity, the evidence is once again mixed. It could be that while the institutions frees tenured professors to be more creative, it encourages young faculty to be more risk-averse. And one study found (unsurprisingly) that on average, the quality of professors’ work declines after they get a job-for-life guarantee.
It would probably be unwise for state legislatures to torch the institution of tenure overnight. At the same time, the existing faculty hiring and retention system is overdue for reform. Faculty are becoming a smaller and smaller share of university personnel, even as adjuncts and administrators proliferate; the university business model is increasingly not working for the American middle class; and higher education is growing increasingly politically monotonous and irrelevant in the humanities and social sciences.
I don’t think tenure is the problem — in fact, the real political activists seem to be student life / diversity administrators. But higher education’s brand has suffered a lot in recent years, which makes this sort of thing less unthinkable than it used to be. And that brand damage has been self-inflicted.
I’M NOT OPPOSED TO THIS: You Know What Banks Need? Slot Machines, Miniskirts and Chocolate.
It’s tough being a small-bank operator in Japan. Customers are rapidly aging. Companies are stockpiling cash rather than borrowing. Big Japanese banks are seeking growth in the U.S. and elsewhere, but that’s far beyond the means of smaller banks such as Mr. Tsuchiya’s.
…
To make its ATMs even more fun, OKB gives customers a chance to win cash prizes in slot, roulette, dice and pinball games when they deposit or withdraw money. “We’re not a bank, we’re a service company,” says Mr. Tsuchiya. “If you’re going to go to the bank, it should be fun.”Among the bank’s other innovations: Women can get loans to finance divorce proceedings, undergo infertility treatments or get plastic surgery.
This seems like exactly the kind of exciting deregulation opportunity President Trump should look into.
I’M SO OLD I CAN REMEMBER WHEN HIGHER EDUCATION WAS SOLD AS A MEANS TO REDUCE INEQUALITY: Rich Students Go To Graduate School To Get Richer.
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CENSORSHIP: YouTube has removed Legal Insurrection’s Channel. “YouTube took down Legal Insurrection’s Channel without any prior notice based on ‘multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement,’ but we never received any claims of infringement.”
FAKE HATE: Black Teenage Girl Cited for Sending Out Racist, Threatening Tweets.
We don’t get to retire Jon Gabriel’s tweet quite yet.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Charleston, Florida Coastal Law Schools Fail ‘Gainful Employment’ Test, Will Lose Federal Student Loans If They Fail Again Next Year; Three Other Law Schools In Danger Zone.
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
TRANSPARENCY: Obama’s Science Officer Defies Court, Keeps Private Emails Secret.
A federal appeals court ruled in July 2016 that Holdren must release to a lower magistrate all work-related emails on the account. The emails are being sought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market nonprofit foundation.
White House officials told the court there are no undisclosed work-related emails, but CEI disputes that contention. (RELATED: DOE Does Little To Stop Senior Officials From Using Private Emails)
“CEI contends that OSTP is attempting to re-litigate the issue on which it already lost in the circuit,” CEI said in a statement Wednesday. “Moreover, OSTP’s has provided no reason to believe that Holdren has in fact forwarded all of his relevant private emails.”
Laws are for the little people — at least until January 20.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION: Percentage Of Law Students Paying Full Tuition Falls To 28%, Down From 48% In 2011.
As I warned some years ago, if you want to see the bubble bursting, watch for increased tuition discounting.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Obama boasts of better race relations, 75 percent of cops disagree.
Concerned about their safety, the overwhelming majority of police are now less likely to do their job because of fatal encounters between law enforcement and the black community.
According to new polling from the Pew Research Center, 93 percent of police officers are concerned about their safety on the job; 72 percent are less willing to stop suspicious characters; and 75 percent report increased tension between cops and the black community.
While the majority of police officers, 67 percent, insist those encounters are isolated, the episodes have made viral news and front page headlines throughout 2016. The shooting of a 32-year-old Minnesota man, for example, was broadcast on Facebook Live, sparking local and national protests. As a result, 60 percent of the public disagrees with police and believe the shootings reflect a broader problem.
Last year, according to the Washington Post, 963 people were shot and killed by police.
Politicians from both parties have suggested solutions to the problem. The majority of police suggest greater accountability and favor tougher tactics. Two in three cops say they’re ready to wear a body camera on the job. At the same time, 45 percent believe that getting physical is the answer for unruly individuals.
The findings provide an interesting footnote to Obama’s farewell address. Though polls suggest that the majority of American believe race relations have worsened in the last eight years, the outgoing executive believes the country’s made progress in this area.
Well, he believes a lot of things. Meanwhile:
BERKELEY HATEWATCH UPDATE: UC Berkeley Extremists Dox Student MILO Event Hosts, Post Personal Details & Workplace Address.
A group of left-wing extremists at UC Berkeley have doxed the student hosts behind MILO’s upcoming event on campus, posting personal details, photographs, email addresses, social media accounts, and even one of the student’s workplace addresses.
In their post entitled “The Kids Are Alt-Right: The UC Berkeley Students Behind the Milo Event,” the far-left website and group known as “It’s Going Down” posted the personal details of five student organizers in an attempt to intimidate and harass those behind MILO’s upcoming event on February 1st.
IGD listed the organizers’ names and pictures, supposedly taken after stalking the students’ private social media accounts, and attempted to link many of the students to white supremacy and racism purely based on their pro-Donald Trump and Republican stances.
The group even referred to one of the students as a “snitch” due to the fact that he had reported a violent incident to the police, after he was assaulted by anti-Trump protesters and had his property destroyed.
This seems more like organized crime than political activism.
F.H. BUCKLEY: How Trump can end brainwashing on US campuses. “Andrew Brietbart told us that politics is downstream from culture. The question for conservatives, then, is how to change the culture. We ruffians don’t think it’s enough to zero out the efforts to turn college students into community activists.”
PRIVACY: Throwing up a peace sign is one of the most dangerous things you can do.
“Just by casually making a peace sign in front of a camera, fingerprints can become widely available,” Isao Echizen, a researcher from NII, told a local Japanese newspaper this week, PhysOrg reports. He also explained that if the lighting is right in a photo, even a smartphone camera could potentially capture enough fingerprint data to recreate a user’s biometric identity.
According to the story, countermeasures are already being developed.
HE WHO TROLLS LAST… When Trump Tweets, the Left’s Outrage Machine Shudders.
Stephen Miller:
The anti-Trump group Grab Your Wallet called for a boycott of L.L. Bean stores, even though the company itself has offered no political position on Trump or anything else for that matter really. This is how it usually starts.
Suddenly, however, the left finds itself somewhat outmatched and ill-equipped, because now they are up against the most powerful pushback tool they’ve ever faced: Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
Trump took to Twitter on Thursday to announce his support for Linda Bean. “Thank you to Linda Bean of L.L.Bean for your great support and courage. People will support you even more now. Buy L.L.Bean,” he wrote.
He also mistakenly included the twitter handle of a lobster restaurant in Maine, thinking it was the LL Bean company hashtag. So they are having a fun day now as well. You can bet a handful of left-wing websites are trying to figure out where the restaurant stands on gay marriage.
Trump is a master at branding. It’s one of the few things he’s managed successfully over the decades. His product launches fail, but the name and the branding carry on, and it carried him to the White House. Republicans in the primaries had no idea how to counter it. Hillary Clinton had no idea how to stop it. Trump knows he can tweet out support of a company, or insult them, and cause their brand to rise in prominence, their stocks to fall in value.
The Obama campaign took his powerful personal brand, wedded it to Big Data, and the result was a permanent political campaign which the GOP never did figure out how to fully counter.
Trump has done something similar, but he runs his permanent campaign more like a guerrilla action — a social media version of Mao’s Long March.
UPDATE (From Glenn): A reader emails: “Just spent >$500 with them online. On stuff I really don’t need. But it felt so good. Haaaaa! Eat that, boycotters!”
Question: When do businesses start deliberately trolling the left to reap the additional business it generates?
ANOTHER FAKE HATE CRIME: Police Charge Student For Threat Made At Arundel High School. “That person has been identified as a 14-year-old African American female who attends Arundel High School.”
OF COURSE SHE DID: Freshman Democrat Kamala Harris grills CIA director nominee on climate change.
Harris, who was elected in November over another Democrat without a Republican general election opponent, later said Pompeo’s views on global warming called into question his ability to accept evidence and the consensus of the intelligence community.
Perhaps someone should explain to her what the CIA does. At any rate, it’s amusing to hear Democrats piously invoking “the consensus of the intelligence community.”
IS DAVOS THE PROBLEM? IT CERTAINLY ISN’T THE SOLUTION:
Kenneth Rogoff can pinpoint the moment he started to grow concerned Donald Trump would be the next U.S. president: It was when Rogoff’s fellow attendees at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last January said it could never happen. “A joke I’ve told 1,000 people in the months since leaving Davos is that the conventional wisdom of Davos is always wrong,” says the Harvard professor and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. “No matter how improbable, the event most likely to happen is the opposite of whatever the Davos consensus is.”
The repeated failure of business and political elites to predict what’s coming—last year, that included the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union—doesn’t strike those returning this month to the Swiss Alps as very funny. After a year in which political upsets roiled financial markets and killed off the careers of once-dominant Davos-going politicians, the concern for delegates attending this year’s meeting isn’t that their forecasts are often wrong, but that their worldview is. . . .
Even as Davos attendees say they aren’t about to stop advocating for the policies they’ve endorsed for decades, which they believe remain the best way to deliver prosperity, it may be time to concede they’ve been going about it the wrong way. “There has to be some humility. For 30 years the elite have said, ‘We’re managing globalization, and we’re making it work for everyone,’ ” Woods says. “They cannot just keep repeating that.”
If you’re a “global citizen,” you’re a citizen of nowhere.
WHAT EVERYONE WANTS: A candle in “Monkey Farts”