The University of California has been admitting underqualified international students ahead of some of the state’s top students, according to a lawsuit.
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“Over the past several years, the university has undermined its commitment to residents in an effort to increase its revenue by recruiting and enrolling nonresidents,” state auditor Elaine Howle wrote in 2016.
Money money money mon-ey … MONEY….
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Lost in the turmoil of the present revolutionary moment is the fact that one side of the political class remains trapped in a strange time warp. Look through the publications of mainstream conservatives and it is as if they stopped publishing new material somewhere in the last decade. They acknowledge that Trump won the White House, but they refuse to see it as anything but a one-off anomaly. There was no reason for it, other than a bug in the code or a one-in-a-million event.
For a while after Trump took office, they carried on with the anti-Trump stuff, but the money from the usual suspects ran out, so they dropped it. The Israel First wing of Conservative Inc. has setup shop at The Dispatch and The Bulwark, sites that cater to an audience that is similarly lost in time. Both sites look like recycled versions of the Weekly Standard circa 1996 or maybe The New Republic in 1986. What’s left of the old conservative coalition looks like a museum exhibit.
In recent decades, income inequality in the United States has increased sharply, and the novel coronavirus crisis seems to have exacerbated the problem. Some blame tax cuts for creating billionaires and leaving the middle class behind, but it’s not that simple. While lower taxes did influence inequality, taxes alone are a red herring. Mounting evidence shows something else driving the uptick in inequality: Regulation.
Taxes are salient to this conversation, while regulation is silent. Every year on your W-2, and even more frequently on your paycheck, you see how many dollars of income you lose to taxes. Yet there is no such accounting for the unseen power of regulation to lower the average American’s income, raise prices and protect the position of the wealthy.
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Most of the frustrations involved in living as an adult human, have to do with conflict between appealing narratives vs. inconvenient realities. And perhaps the best example of this is the narrative that conservatives & liberals can, and should, “sit down and work out their/our differences, find common ground, labor toward the common good and learn from each other.” I think deep down both sides really do want that…so long as it doesn’t involve giving up anything. If it’s cost-free, most people with political opinions would like to be Archie & Meathead after they’ve softened up and learned to see eye-to-eye.
Our parents did that with other grown-ups who didn’t share the same political affiliations, right? Should be easy!
The problem is that what we today call “liberalism” has eschewed any & all notion that its adherents have anything at all to learn from those who are not adherents. This is non-negotiable. All electoral contests and all differences of opinion involve illegitimacy and ignorance on the side of the argument that is not theirs. Every election they lose, was cheated. Every dissenting opinion, indeed every statement or question that bleeds off some of the momentum, intentionally or not, comes from someone who shouldn’t have opinions at all.
Liberalism has devolved into a slightly off-center “I know something you don’t know” smirk. Worn by people who haven’t accomplished anything. And want to make all the decisions that matter, without accepting any ownership of the eventual results.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on On Common Ground
ZMan does a weekly podcast. You ought to subscribe. (I get it through what used to be called iTunes; don’t know what they’re calling it these days.)
The thing is, I could probably go on a ten hour, Chris Farley rant without too much trouble, other than the possible stroke. I don’t know about anyone else, but I am done with the ongoing revolution. It seems that everywhere we turn, there is some new madness or new tax on our patience. It is close to impossible to live a normal day, much less a normal life now. Even the most basic task brings a reminder that we live in a continent sized lunatic asylum.
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Toleration has its limits. The other day I got an e-mail from a client. I’m not sure why I was included, as it was an internal e-mail to employees. The point of the e-mail was to suggest all employees list their preferred pronouns in their signature. It’s not enough that these people feel the need to deny reality. They insist that the rest of us participate in their madness. Everywhere you turn, someone is trying to make you carry the burden of their madness. It is tax that is never paid in full.
People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.
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The headlines are screaming about recent increases in coronavirus cases, with some suggesting that the essential problem is the loosening of the lockdowns and restrictions. A number of media sources note that many of the problematic locations are “red” states with Republican leadership.
In 2019, people working outside their homelands sent $554 billion of their earnings back to their native countries. Nearly all of this cash flowed from developed nations to less developed ones. The $554 billion in remittances eclipsed the total of all foreign investment in these receiving nations, and three times the amount these nations received in foreign aid.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. The global health crisis touched off a global economic crisis, resulting in millions of lost jobs and restrictions on travel that make it difficult for foreign workers to get to a job in another country, even if one is available. For countries like the United States, the long-term impact of millions of foreign workers – legal and illegal – and the resulting loss of job opportunities and wages for native workers and the outflow of $150 billion each year is a problem.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Countries That Live By Remittances, Die By Remittances
Bertrand Russel said, “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” It is a pithy aphorism that has now been amplified by modernity into a description of liberal democracy. In every Western country, the stupid drown out everyone else in the court of public opinion, but do so with a breath-taking degree of self-righteous sanctimony. The hallmark of the modern man is to have an opinion on everything, almost all of them wrong.
It is not that the stupid have been made supreme, although it certainly seems that way when you encounter public opinion. It’s that everything has been politicized to the point where every issue, no matter how small, becomes a moral signifier. Where you stand on the issue says something about you and your position in society. If you don’t have an opinion on an issue, it is assumed you are ignorant or possibly in league with dark forces, those who hold the “horrifically” wrong opinion.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Deluge of Opinion
As data accrues on both a national and state-by-state basis, the parameters of COVID-19’s lethality is firming up. Two new papers from Dr. John Ioannidis point to the growing shortfall between apocalyptic pandemic predictions and the vastly more destructive policies implemented in observance of them.
Math is hard.
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Jonathan Turley has forgotten more about law than you or I will ever know.
But criticism of this commutation immediately seemed to be decoupled from any foundation in history or in the Constitution. Indeed, Toobin also declared, “This is simply not done by American presidents. They do not pardon or commute sentences of people who are close to them or about to go to prison. It just does not happen until this president.” In reality, the commutation of Stone barely stands out in the old gallery of White House pardons, which are the most consistently and openly abused power in the Constitution. This authority under Article Two is stated in absolute terms, and some presidents have wielded it with absolute abandon.
Followed by a laundry list of such questionable pardons going back to Thomas Jefferson.
Funny how the Democrats and the DemLegHump Media scream bloody murder about stuff that their side would do in a heartbeat — and often have. One could make a long list of political shenanigans indulged in by Obama and Eric Holder.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Why this Roger Stone Commutation Is Not as Controversial as Some Think
A few days later, a retired mechanic named Charlie buys your grandfather’s watch for $150. A 19-year-old line cook acquires your Beats headphones. And a nurse from Florida becomes the proud new owner of the scarf your mom knitted you for Christmas.
Yet another reason not to fly.
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At the end of last week, the lead writer for the Tucker Carlson show was fired for blasphemy, after it was discovered he was posting unapproved jokes on an on-line forum under a pseudonym. How his blasphemy was discovered is unknown, but the keepers of truth have teams of top women hunting down these people in order to keep their domains safe from unapproved thoughts. This is, of course, a familiar story that is now what the old newspaper guys would call a “standing head.”
Tucker Carlson has not commented on it, but his bosses at Fox News promise he will have an on-air struggle session Monday. Fox News, of course, “strongly condemns this horrific behavior.” By horrific, they mean saying “given how tired black people always claim to be, maybe the real crisis is their lack of sleep” on an on-line forum dedicated to snarky humor. Clearly, such words are so monstrous it is hard to believe a human being could think such things, much less say them out loud.
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You can’t help but notice how the bold, rock-ribbed defenders of truth and civility have adopted the language of the Left. Like the old communists, Progressive now contort the language to such extremes that it is becoming a genre of humor. How long before they force Sean Hannity to call Peter Brimelow a running dog lackey? What adds to the absurdity is the people indulging in the hyperbole are the sorts of mediocrities you find staffing government offices.
“Patty” refers to Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, who became famous for her kidnapping and brainwashing by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. To my knowledge, Stella Morabito (Why Do So Many White Women Hate Themselves?) is the first to make the comparison between Hearst and the woke white women torching and terrorizing our communities and verbally abusing policemen — including policemen of color (POC). She contends they have been similarly brainwashed and convinced to hate who they are….
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Beware the Pattys, Not the Karens
