HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Profs blame ‘masculine’ ideals for lack of women in STEM. “According to the professors, these masculine norms include ‘asking good questions,’ ‘capacity for abstract thought and rational thought processes,’ ‘motivation,’ ‘independent’ thinking, and a relatively low fear of failure.”
Remember, when taxpayers get tired of funding this stuff, we’ll be told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
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WHEN YOU’VE LOST BERNIE — OH, WAIT: Sanders: Questions about Trump’s mental health ‘absolutely outrageous.’
I’m just confused: Is Trump an evil Hitleresque mastermind who colluded with Russia — just like Hitler colluded with Russia! — or is he a demented old man who didn’t even want to win the election and was surprised when he did?
Time for a reboot of that Phil Hartman split-personality Reagan sketch, I guess.
BYRON YORK: What The Trump Dossier Criminal Referral Means.
THIS SHOULD BE INTERESTING: House Intelligence victorious again, obtains Fusion GPS’s financial records. We already know that Fusion GPS was paying unnamed journalists. I’m hoping we’ll get some names.
JIM MATTIS, ASKED ABOUT HIS BIGGEST MILITARY CONCERN FOR 2018: “I don’t have concerns. I create them.” “The quote follows in a long tradition of magnificent Mattis quotes, including his answer to what keeps him awake at night: ‘Nothing. I Keep Other People Awake At Night.'”
WELL, I HOPE HE WON’T LET THE MONEY GET DIVERTED TO SOCIAL JUSTICE ACTIVISM LIKE OBAMA DID: Trump to make infrastructure push during Camp David retreat.
President Trump will push for his long-awaited infrastructure package when he huddles with Republican congressional leaders at Camp David this weekend, as the GOP appears divided about whether the rebuilding effort will be a top priority for the party this year.
Trump will be hosting House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and others in Maryland this weekend to map out the GOP’s 2018 agenda. One of the priorities that will be discussed at the presidential retreat is “rebuilding our nation’s crumbling infrastructure,” a White House spokeswoman said Friday.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to tackle a $1 trillion infrastructure bill within his first 100 days in office, but the issue slipped to the back burner amid other GOP priorities like health care and tax reform last year.
But Trump hopes to put infrastructure back at the top of his agenda in the New Year.
The White House is supposed to unveil “detailed legislative principles” later this month outlining Trump’s infrastructure vision, which lawmakers will use as a blueprint to craft a bill while Trump works to sell the idea to the public, state and local officials, and members of Congress.
The issue is also likely to be pitched during Trump’s inaugural State of the Union address on Jan. 30.
Sounds like the GOP leadership would prefer an open-borders bill, though.
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MICHAEL WALSH: Sacramento Democrats Fire on Fort Sumter.
The situation is rich in irony. Southern Democrats insisted they were acting constitutionally under the 10th Amendment by defying anti-slavery sentiment; Southern Democrats, after Lincoln was assassinated by one of their number, continued to wage a rear-guard action at the state level in the defeated South throughout the Andrew Johnson and Grant administrations; Southern Democrats continued to use the same argument during the Civil Rights movement to justify Jim Crow laws and the poll tax. It took not only acts of Congress to certify the plain outcome of the Civil War, but also a series of federal court decisions, backed up at times by troops.
Had Lincoln, and the country, dodged Booth’s bullet, there is a strong case to be made that he would have declared the Democratic Party a seditious organization and outlawed it—especially as Democrats demonstrated, through their postwar actions, that they had every intention of returning Lincoln’s “charity for all” of the second inaugural address, with malice toward him, the GOP, and the country at large.
Now California Democrats—as radical a group of anti-Americans as you will find in this country, whether legal or “undocumented”—have again fired on Fort Sumter. And once again (don’t kid yourselves), the goal is de facto and, later, de jure, secession from the United States of America, as part of the Aztlan-inspired Reconquista of what Hispanic radicals consider lost territory.
Read the whole thing.
Related: “Who ever thought that John C. Calhoun would emerge as a key political thinker of the 21st Century? I certainly didn’t, but that is exactly what has happened.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The University of Michigan’s Costly and Pointless Diversity Plan.
Read through the official DEI materials and you soon feel overwhelmed by inspiring platitudes and glossy pictures of smiling minorities. As I noted in an earlier Michigan Review article, the administration has a nasty habit of hiding potentially controversial policy decisions deep in a matrix of feel-good fluff and pages of meaningless drivel, such as:
Your passion for making us better, your belief that all individuals deserve an equal opportunity to succeed and your unwavering dedication to the highest aspirations of our university.
Whether DEI will accomplish that is questionable, but the plan certainly succeeded in adding new positions within the administration, including the vice provost for equity, inclusion, and academic affairs. According to UM Salary, the University of Michigan’s open salary database, the provost earned $385,000 during the 2016-2017 school year.
Robert Sellers, who occupies this provost position, wrote an op-ed in the Michigan Daily last April defending those developments. Citing the importance of DEI’s “personal, professional, and educational benefits,” Sellers boasted of over 200 University of Michigan community members “who are devoting all or a portion of their professional lives to this work.”
He didn’t say exactly what are the “historic and contemporary contributions” those staff members provide, that Michigan taxpayers now sponsor. . . .
A major theme of the DEI plan thus emerges: to perpetuate the existence of our school administration’s diversity industry. Committees are formed to produce unreadable diversity pamphlets; these committees recommend more committees, and finally, the diversity provost makes sure everyone gets paid.
Yep. It’s all just an excuse for administrative bloat.
OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH GLOBAL COOLING:
I suspect the “the North ‘polarized’ cap,” which Al predicted back will entirely “disappear in five years” back in 2008 is still doing OK as well these days.
Of course, Al isn’t the first climate change zealot to predict both flavors of doomsday.
ALL THE DEMOCRATS’ WEAPONIZED FEMALE OUTRAGE HAD TO FIND A PATH TO GROUND SOMEHOW: Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings.
You can be sure that this weekend at the Golden Globes, Hollywood celebrities, not exactly known for their independent thinking, will turn the red carpet into a #MeToo moment replete with designer duds. Many have promised to wear black dresses to protest the stream of allegations against industry moguls and actors. Perhaps Meryl Streep will get grilled — again — about what she knew about Harvey Weinstein. The rest of us will diligently follow along on Twitter, sharing hashtags and suitably pious opprobrium.
But privately, I suspect, many of us, including many longstanding feminists, will be rolling our eyes, having had it with the reflexive and unnuanced sense of outrage that has accompanied this cause from its inception, turning a bona fide moment of moral accountability into a series of ad hoc and sometimes unproven accusations.
For many weeks now, the conversation that has been going on in private about this reckoning is radically different from the public one. This is not a good sign, suggesting the sort of social intimidation that is the underside of a culture of political correctness, such as we are increasingly living in.
The women I know — of all ages — have responded by and large with a mixture of slightly horrified excitement (bordering on titillation) as to who will be the next man accused and overt disbelief.
Publicly, they say the right things, expressing approval and joining in the chorus of voices that applaud the takedown of maleficent characters who prey on vulnerable women in the workplace.
In private it’s a different story. “Grow up, this is real life,” I hear these same feminist friends say. “What ever happened to flirting?” and “What about the women who are the predators?” Some women, including random people I talk to in supermarket lines, have gone so far as to call it an outright witch hunt.
Well, that’s because it is. Or maybe a Warlock Hunt.
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WHY ARE LEFTY MEDIA OUTFITS SUCH CESSPITS OF . . . OH, HELL, YOU KNOW: CBS Fires Political Director After Accusations Of ‘Inappropriate Behavior.’
IT HASN’T GOTTEN BETTER SINCE THE ELECTION, THOUGH IT ALTERNATES WITH BREATHLESS ALARMISM: The Unbearable Smugness of the Press.
ANOTHER OPEN THREAD, FOR YOUR ENJOYMENT. So enjoy!
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Trump vs. Obama: The Great Experiment:
Whatever Donald J. Trump’s political past and vociferous present, his first year of governance is most certainly as hard conservative as Barack Obama’s eight years were hard progressive. We are watching a rare experiment in political governance play out, as we go, in back-to-back fashion, from one pole to its opposite.
From January 2009 to January 2016 (especially when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress until January 2011), Barack Obama implemented the most progressive agenda since Franklin Roosevelt, to whom his supporters logically compared their new president. . . .In other words, free-market economics, deterrent foreign policies, and conservative cultural reform that are championed in the abstract in think tanks, on radio and television by conservative pundits, and in magazines and journals by conservative intellectuals are currently being put to work concretely in the real world, a rare occurrence. Or they’re being implemented as least as much as possible with a president and a Congress of the same party behind them and within a set tenure.
If the economy grows, if the world is calmer and the U.S. stronger, if average Americans acquire more income and more jobs, and if the culture encourages greater stability and virtue, then the conservative experiment will have worked. If all that does not happen, we cannot blame it on the bad Trump messenger, the incompetent Republican Senate, the biased or the squabbling conservative House.
Read the whole thing.
OF COURSE SHE DID: Wife of Pulse Gunman Omar Mateen: I knew He Was Going To Attack The club.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: David Solway on The Dead Letter of Modern Education.
MERYL STREEP: MORAL COWARD. Well, now we know how much Streep was projecting, when her character in the Harvey Weinstein produced The Giver said:
WHAT IS MICHAEL WOLFF SMOKING? Wolff claims in his new book that Trump and his top campaign officials expected to lose, some even wanted to lose. LifeZette’s Jim Stinson did a Pinata Google Search (i.e. blindfolded) and found three huge examples Wolff missed. Or are Wolff and his publisher just playing us all for fools so we’ll buy the book? Nah, they wouldn’t do that. Would they?
THE SEXBOTS ARE LOOKING BETTER AND BETTER: Man has conviction overturned for grabbing woman’s breasts during consensual sex. “The woman, who cannot be named, told the court: ‘Having my breasts grabbed, to me that is not normal behaviour.’ Queree, a medical student, was left with a career in ruins and he was put on the sex offenders’ register for five years.” Disgraceful that she’s not named, as other men should be warned.
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