DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: At the University of Oregon, Fight Against Toxic Masculinity Costs $90K a Year.
Archive for 2018
August 17, 2018
REVIEW: 2018 Cadillac Escalade.
AT AMAZON, save on Appliances.
FILE UNDER “TWEETS THAT DID NOT AGE WELL.” Heh.
HIGHER EDUCATION AS RELIGIOUS INDOCTRINATION: “The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.”
Plus, “Lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. . . . Taken together, Salam’s and Deresiewicz’s view can be interpreted as this: anti-white rhetoric functions as a way for upper-class and upwardly mobile whites and select people of colour to distinguish themselves from less cosmopolitan whites, who also tend to be lower-income. Furthermore, many progressive environments encourage it, especially universities, and it conveniently helps obscure or rationalise their elitism—in part by shifting the focus away from class and in part by painting lower-income whites as immoral and thus unworthy.”
IT’S COME TO THIS: “NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar likened the national anthem to songs that were sung by slaves while they were forced to do manual labor.”
Related: ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro: Network won’t show national anthem on Monday Night Football.
But how will America know who the wokest athletes in the NFL are?
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: When Being a Good ‘Dad’ Gets You Promoted to ‘Mommy.’ A friend on Facebook comments: “We appear to have concluded as a society that laboring to keep your wife and children from starving in the streets is an assumed baseline, and/or qualitatively — and quantitatively! — inferior to domesticity. It’s a luxury of a particular point of view, that being the point of view which has never had to worry about that labor going undone, or that starvation knocking on your door.”
SILICON VALLEY STRIKES BACK: Facebook Censors PragerU After Google Lawsuit.
DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: Texas Man Claims Record-Breaking 3-Mile Shot.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: “As our media environment blurs, confusion often reigns,” AP claims:
A generation ago, the likes of Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer were the heroes of television news. Now the biggest stars are arguably Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow.
Notice the difference? Cronkite, Jennings and Sawyer reported the news. Hannity and Maddow talk about the news, and occasionally make it. But you never doubt how they feel about it.
Cronkite didn’t exactly just “report the news.” And we all knew how Peter Jennings felt when the GOP retook Congress for the first time in 40 years in 1994. While Diane Sawyer’s salad days were as a staffer for President Nixon, once employed by first CBS, and then ABC, she quickly toed the company line.
(Classical reference in headline.)
Nice jury you have there. Shame if something were to happen to it…
FASTER, PLEASE: First human trial of Zika vaccine gets underway.
ARETHA FRANKLIN ALMOST DIDN’T MAKE IT INTO THE BLUES BROTHERS:
The film also gave a much needed boost to Franklin’s career, as it earned $115 million at the box office. At the time, soul and R&B were declining in popularity, as the film’s director John Landis explained to film website HeyUGuys:
“You have to remember that in 1979 when we made the movie, rhythm and blues was basically over, and the number one music in the world was Abba, the Bee Gees and disco… So when people ask, how did you get the likes of Aretha Franklin and James Brown, it was easy. We just called them and said, ‘Wanna job?'”
Franklin almost missed out on the role. Universal Studios executives wanted younger, fresher acts, like Rose Royce, the band that sung the theme song from Car Wash. The creatives behind the project refused to replace the legendary singer, and the rest is history.
Indeed.™
Related: Making Blues Brothers With John Belushi and Dan Akroyd—“We Had a Budget for Cocaine.”
BLUE WAVE? Forecast: 75% Chance Dems Win House.
Assuming they do take the House, Matthew Continetti explores what happens next: The Agenda That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
Related: New pro-Trump theory: Losing the House this fall will all but guarantee his reelection in 2020.
Winning by subtraction theories are never a good look. In the interim, as Steve likes to say, “My 18-month-old advice to the GOP House still stands: Legislate like there’s no tomorrow, because there might not be one. And if they did, the increase in voter enthusiasm could make all the difference in November.”
(Via the Drudge Report.)
CYBERSECURITY: U.S. states demand better access to secrets about election cyber threats.
Switching back to paper ballots seems like less of a hassle. More secure, too.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 10 Affordable AR-15s Found Under $500.
I’M IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: When Digital Platforms Become Censors: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other tech giants say that they’re open forums. What happens when they start to shut down voices they consider beyond the pale?
Call 2018 the “Year of Deplatforming.” The internet was once celebrated for allowing fresh new voices to escape the control of gatekeepers. But this year, the internet giants decided to slam the gates on a number of people and ideas they don’t like. If you rely on someone else’s platform to express unpopular ideas, especially ideas on the right, you’re now at risk. This raises troubling questions, not only for free speech but for the future of American politics and media. . . .
Now these companies are trying to have it both ways. They take advantage of the fact that they are not publishers to escape responsibility for the endless amounts of problematic material on their sites, from libel to revenge porn. But at the same time, they are increasingly acting like publishers in deciding which views and people are permitted on their platforms and which are not. As a narrow matter of First Amendment law, what these companies are doing will probably pass muster, unless some federal court decides, as in Marsh v. Alabama (1946), that their platforms are functionally equivalent to “company towns,” where the public square is privately owned.
As a more general issue of free speech, however, the fact that a few corporations can play such a disproportionate role in deciding what subjects are open for debate is a problem. It is made more so by the pronounced leftward leanings of the big tech companies, which lately appear determined to live up to the right’s worst fears about them. Extremists and controversialists on the left have been relatively safe from deplatforming. . . .
The notion that Silicon Valley megabillionaires are actively limiting what ordinary Americans can talk and write about is likely to produce a backlash. The tech industry’s image has already suffered over revelations about Facebook’s experiments aimed at manipulating users’ newsfeeds to test their emotional states, as well as various cases of invasion of privacy and data mishandling. Twenty years ago, most Americans saw Silicon Valley as liberating; now it seems to have gone from the hammer-wielding woman in that famous “1984” Apple commercial to the Big Brother figure up on the screen.
And then there is the competition angle. Mr. Jones’s InfoWars is itself a media operation, in competition not only with Facebook and YouTube but with cable channels like CNN and MSNBC, which have made him a target. What happened to Mr. Jones could be described as “a conspiracy in restraint of trade,” in which one group of media companies gets another group of media companies to knock off a competitor.
One of the arguments for leaving tech industries unregulated has been that the industry is in constant ferment. But with a few companies now dominating the field, that ferment is less likely to continue. When giant companies combine to kick out their competitors and start interfering in politics, you can be sure that, even if they claim they are acting in the interests of decency, that’s not where it will end.
I think the Antitrust Division at Justice should be investigating the — admitted — collusion between these media companies as they shut out other media companies. It’s basically the blue-check media against the alternatives. (Bumped).
A SOCIALISM SO BIG, IT’S NATIONAL: Elizabeth Warren’s Batty Plan to Nationalize . . . Everything.
SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Social Distortion’s Mike Ness Accused of Punching Pro-Trump Fan at Concert.
SPACE: Joe Pappalardo: Cape Canaveral’s Legendary Launchpad Is Ready for Astronauts Once More.
There may be no more enduring image of American spaceflight than a heroic astronaut boarding a U.S. spacecraft. Images from the Apollo era of spacesuit-clad flyboys striding down sterile hallways have become iconic—and, in the hands of Hollywood, even mythological. Now this scene is on the verge of happening again.
Today, workers began final installation on a crew access arm to the Fixed Service Structure at Launch Complex 39A, a crucial milestone in the nation’s effort to resume American-based human spaceflight. This bridge is the last place NASA astronauts will see before going into the SpaceX capsule that will blast them into space, starting next year. . . .
When SpaceX launches astronauts from 39A, it will be the first to do so from U.S. soil since the Space Shuttle retired in 2011. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will be the first two NASA astronauts to fly in the Crew Dragon spacecraft, on the schedule for April 2019. After this orbital test, NASA’s Victor Glover and Mike Hopkins will take the ride to the International Space Station for a long-duration mission.
Launch Complex 39A will be a fitting setting for these launches, because the Kennedy Space Center site has been the focal point of American human spaceflight since the moonshots of Apollo. The launchpad’s history reflects the highs and lows of the U.S. space program, and its rebirth heralds a promising but very new future.
Faster, please.
GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T DEPOSIT YOUR GARBAGE HERE, THIS IS A TRASH CAN! New York City Removes Trash Cans on the Upper West Side:
What happened to the baskets? Did they get removed in anticipation of some windy weather? Surely the Department of Sanitation [DSNY] would soon restore the baskets – thereby easing the overflow trash – she thought.
A neighbor who shared her concerns called 311 and was told that the baskets had been removed because people leaving Riverside Park were putting their trash in them. “You can’t make this up,” says Melissa.
Nope.
Counterintuitive as it may seem, DSNY says having fewer trash baskets increases area cleanliness. “For some reason, when there’s a garbage can on a corner, it attracts litter,” DSNY Community Liaison Nick Circharo told West Side Rag. “The corner without a basket is the cleanest corner. If you take away the baskets, people will take their garbage elsewhere.”
* * * * * * * *
Circharo says the basket reductions, “Are not a money-saving thing, but a cleanliness-increasing thing,” noting that DSNY crews empty baskets on West End Avenue every day, twice a day, except for Sundays when there is no pickup.
Found via John Podhoretz, who tweets, “In my neighborhood, the Department of Sanitation is removing garbage cans because apparently they…produce garbage. The people who run this city are demented.”