DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Preferred Gender Pronouns Required in Virginia’s Public Schools. The Bible? Not Allowed.
Archive for 2018
December 12, 2018
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Should We Be Upset If the IRS Has Been ‘Gutted’? I wish that the malefactors in the IRS Tea Party targeting scandal had been properly punished, but collective punishment is better than nothing.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Los Angeles Mayor Shouted Down by Protesters at USC During Speech.
The protesters, who were organized by the Los Angeles Community Action Network and the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, resorted to shouting over Garcetti so that he could not continue his speech — a tactic known as “deplatforming” that has been commonly employed against speakers deemed controversial by campus activists.
As Garcetti tried to respond to each complaint individually, the protesters tried to drown him out by singing a revised rendition of “Santa Claus is Coming Town.”
“You better watch out, you better not cry, Eric Garcetti is telling us lies, human rights violations happening now,” they sang.
Garcetti tried to quiet the crowd by citing his first amendment rights, but was unsuccessful.
“Do you respect 1st Amendment rights, do you?” Garcetti said to a one man who refused to listen to his response.
Narrator voice: They don’t.
DECLINE IS A CHOICE: The Historical Profession Is Committing Slow-Motion Suicide. “A recent study confirms a disturbing trend: American college students are abandoning the study of history. Since 2008, the number of students majoring in history in U.S. universities has dropped 30 percent, and history now accounts for a smaller share of all U.S. bachelor’s degrees than at any time since 1950. Although all humanities disciplines have suffered declining enrollments since 2008, none has fallen as far as history. And this decline in majors has been even steeper at elite, private universities — the very institutions that act as standard bearers and gate-keepers for the discipline. The study of history, it seems, is itself becoming a relic of the past. . . . In the late 1960s, over six percent of male undergraduates and almost five percent of female undergraduates majored in history. Today, those numbers are less than 2 percent and 1 percent. History’s collapse began well before the financial crash. This fact underscores the sad truth of history’s predicament: The discipline mostly has itself to blame for its current woes. In recent decades, the academic historical profession has become steadily less accessible to students and the general public — and steadily less relevant to addressing critical matters of politics, diplomacy, and war and peace. It is not surprising that students are fleeing history, for the historical discipline has long been fleeing its twin responsibilities to interact with the outside world and engage some of the most fundamental issues confronting the United States.”
Then, of course, there’s fraud and plagiarism among its most-feted members, from Michael Bellesiles to Doris Kearns Goodwin. But mostly it’s just another case of “get woke, go broke.”
CHANGE: Beards Aren’t Cool Anymore. Unless you’re Santa. Then beards are always cool.
FASTER, PLEASE. Good Idea on ‘The Wall:’ Demand Funding For Physical Barriers That Congress Has Already Approved.
Related: Somebody’s been reading his Saul Alinsky:
WORST NAZI EVER: Hanukkah at the White House.
ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: “Witnesses said the suspect shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar’ as he fired at pedestrians and used his knife. According to Mr Heitz, Mr Chekatt has 27 previous convictions in Germany, Switzerland and France, and was placed on the terror watch-list while in prison in 2015 after he showed signs of radicalisation.” The London Telegraph reports that “France says it cannot ‘rule out’ that a suspected terrorist has fled to neighbouring Germany after killing at least two people and injuring 13 in the eastern French city of Strasbourg.”
SURE, YOU CAN TRUST THE GOVERNMENT TO PREVENT GUN VIOLENCE: DOD: Incompetence Led Air Force Not to Share Shooter’s Criminal Records With FBI: ‘The failures had drastic consequences and should not have occurred.’ “The investigators found the same mistakes were repeated over and over again by agents from the Air Force’s military justice system. At each point where procedure and policy required agents to report the shooter’s records to the FBI for inclusion in the background check system, the agents failed to do so. When the investigators asked why the mistakes were made, the agents told them they didn’t understand they were required to submit the records to the FBI. . . . When they looked into how the mistakes made it past supervisors, the investigators found that supervisors certified the results of the criminal process against the shooter without actually reviewing them.”
Missing from this report: News that anyone lost their job as a result. Compare how the feds would treat a private business guilty of similar behavior.
NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL PACKING HEAT: Why Conservative Millennials Are Wearing Yoga Pants With Gun Holsters.
THE MYSTERY OF LLOYD GAINES’ DISAPPEARANCE: On this day in 1938, the Supreme Court decided Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. Star-student Lloyd Gaines applied to law school at the University of Missouri, but was refused admission on the ground that he was black. Instead, the State of Missouri offered to pay his tuition at a law school in another state. The Supreme Court held that it was idiotic to call that equal protection. (No, the Court didn’t put it quite that way.) Its holding was nevertheless limited. It said that that it wasn’t necessarily so that Missouri must admit Gaines to the University of Missouri’s law school. It might be enough to set up a different law school for him in Missouri.
Here’s the weird part: Lloyd Gaines never took advantage of his victory. Months later, he vanished, never to surface again. He left the fraternity house in Chicago where he had been staying, saying that he needed to buy stamps. He never came back.
Some people, including some of his relatives, believe that he was murdered for his role as plaintiff in the case. But there are problems with that theory. Gaines was known to disappear for days at a time. He was that sort of guy. And he was known to be uncomfortable with his role as a civil rights hero. More than a decade later, his mother told a reporter for Ebony magazine that Gaines had written her before his disappearance, “Goodbye. If you don’t hear from me anymore you know I’ll be all right.” If true, that makes murder highly unlikely. But weirdly, she hadn’t mentioned such a statement in public before (although she’d never personally called the police about her son’s disappearance). FWIW, she was thought to be highly distrustful of police. It’s all very strange.
The NAACP circulated a photograph of Gaines, hoping that someone had seen him. There were possible sightings in Mexico City and New York, but … well … nobody knows for sure.
AND YET EVERYONE WANTS TO DO IT: Racing Your Street Car Is A Bad Idea. “It likely lacks safety equipment like roll cages and harnesses that are required in race cars. Races also make people competitive (duh), and you’re more likely to forget that you need to drive this car home. And that can result in a wreck of your lovely track day car. A wreck that will absolutely not be covered by any insurance company.”
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P. DAVID HORNIK: With Friends Like Angela Merkel, Does Israel Need Enemies? “She finds anti-Semitism ‘unacceptable,’ unless it’s made in Iran.”
I dunno — she sure has been enthusiastic about importing plenty of antisemites right into Germany.
My personal trainer has a new short eBook out called “Cooking Klean Christmas Edition.” She wrote it to help clients stay on track during the holiday season. If you want to check it out, you can order it here. Enjoy!
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: University of London Asks Comedians to Sign ‘Safe Space’ Contracts.
Related: I Was Kicked Off Stage by College Students. Did I Deserve It?
The second headline is attached to an article written by Saturday Night Live cast member Nimesh Patel.
I’m so old, I can remember when SNL cast members were made of sterner stuff. Imagine Belushi or Michael O’Donoghue writing an article like that, instead of blasting away at the new Puritanism of college snowflakes.
NICK CANNON: Hollywood Must Apologize for Its Racist Past. ““I believe we should force the Academy to apologize for how they’ve treated several communities…Let’s go back to Hattie McDaniel, the first black woman to ever receive and Academy Award, and she was forced to sit in the back and be segregated from the rest of the Gone With The Wind cast. Did we receive an apology for that?…We’ve allowed the Academy to grow since then and we did #OscarsSoWhite, all those things. And that was just a couple of years ago. But we’re allowing them to grow. We didn’t force them to apologize…If we’re going to start bringing up people’s past, then so has the Academy.”
Christian Toto has the full story at the link.
GOOD, BECAUSE I HATE PUZZLES: Sudoku, Puzzles, Won’t Slow Mental Decline.
UPDATE: Super Micro says no evidence of spy chips found in its hardware.
In a letter sent to customers, the California hardware maker said a third-party investigations firm, tested its current and older-model motherboards for evidence that malicious chips or other hardware had been inserted into its products. Super Micro said it wasn’t surprised by the results.
Super Micro didn’t identify the company that conducted the investigation. Nardello & Co. later said it conducted the investigation but declined to comment further.
The investigation follows an October story by Bloomberg Businessweek that reported Chinese surveillance chips had been inserted into Super Micro hardware in order to spy on its clients, including Apple and Amazon Web Services.
Apple and Amazon have denied the content of Bloomberg’s report.
Bloomberg News declined to comment.
Bloomberg stands by its story, but more than two months later and no one has been able to find one of these mysterious chips, whose powers and abilities seem dubious to some analysts.
COLOR ME SKEPTICAL: Can We Really Inherit Trauma? But if we can, then “inherited trauma” is normal, and an inheritance without it is the departure from human history.
SUNSHINE IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: ‘She’s Scared’ — Ted Cruz Criticizes Pelosi For Wanting To Turn Cameras Off During White House Meeting. “He was standing up and saying ‘we’re going to keep our promise, we’re gonna secure border, we’re gonna build the wall. And I’ll tell you one of the surest indications on how unhappy the Democrats were in that exchange is over and over again Nancy Pelosi says, ‘can we turn the TV cameras off? We are not supposed to be doing this publicly.’ You can tell they’re on the losing end of the argument when she’s scared that cameras are showing that she and the Democrats are for open borders and the president is fighting to do what the American people want which is secure the border, build the wall and keep our country safe.”
Bill Whittle said yesterday during this week’s Right Angle taping that it was the first time he could remember a Republican setting a media trap for Democrats, when it happens so often the other way around.