The drip-drip-drip of the water torture media campaign to force Joe Biden to step aside picked up steam in the last few days. First, Maureen Dowd, the weather wane of respectable centrist feminist opinion at the New York Times, delivers a well-deserved scolding for Joe Biden’s directive to make his son Hunter’s love child with a stripper into a non-person: “The president’s cold shoulder — and heart — is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it’s out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead.”
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Slow Joe’s Countdown Clock
When a charter board in Oklahoma recently approved an explicitly Roman Catholic charter school, it received opposition from some conservatives and libertarians, in addition to the usual hyperventilation from progressives about the separation of church and state.
Critics on the Right fundamentally misunderstand the nature of church-state relations and the American historical experience more broadly.
David French recently used his Sunday New York Times column to argue that the charter violates the Establishment Clause and is harmful to both church and state. He contended that schools must be neutral and state funding of any institution that had a particular metaphysical commitment violates the Establishment Clause. But French wrongly equivocated any institution funded by the state with the state itself. Schools, for example, can’t raise armies or police forces; they can’t raise taxes; they can’t even be self-governing. The state does those things. Confusing church and state, and state and school, is an interesting mistake for someone intent on maintaining that they’re different and necessarily separate.
David French is a supine tool of the progressive left. Nobody with the IQ of a carrot accepts his pretense that he is either conservative or even-handed.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Separation Anxiety
The Tunisian government has defended its treatment of West African nationals transiting through the country after human rights groups reported that Tunisian authorities expelled hundreds of migrants to the Libyan border.
Tunisia is battling a summer surge of Sub-Saharan African immigration as the country’s ports and cities become major transit hubs for those wishing to enter Europe, sparking a wave of sporadic violent clashes between migrants and locals.
Administrators at America’s universities never stop invoking diversity as the salve to heal America’s wounds, and continue to repeat the theme that diversity, unaccountably, is our strength. Diversity is “essential to our mission,” said MIT President Sally Kornbluth. Harvard put out a letter in response to the Supreme Court’s decision lauding how racial diversity brings “progress and change.”
No academic administrator effused more ardently on this issue than the University of Alabama’s dean for the College of Education. Usually diversity is defended as a means to an end. For Dean Peter Hlebowitsh, however, diversity must be “deeply embedded in the telos of the university.” But even that extraordinary formulation understates the importance of diversity. “Diversity,” for Hlebowtish, “is better expressed as the essence of life.”
The diversity industry is setting up shop at the University of Alabama (UA) and Auburn University, as we show in a new report at the Center for the American Way of Life. Both Alabama and Auburn have active diversity strategic plans aimed at transforming the universities. Both have central administrators dedicated to achieving greater diversity among the student body and faculty and to transforming the culture of the universities. Both are transforming university curriculum to emphasize the ideology of diversity. Estimates show that each school spends more than $2.5 million on diversity salaries and initiatives. These schools in the heart of Dixie are going woke in a big way.
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Honolulu officials worried that their new train would be “overwhelmed” with riders when it opened at 2 pm on June 30. They needn’t have worried; a local news station reported that “scores of people lined up to ride the trains, which were free the first five days of operation.
In fact, about 9,000 people rode the train the first afternoon. Considering that each train can hold 800 passengers and they ran six times an hour until 6:30 pm, they were operating at about 40 percent of their capacity on opening day.
Over the next four days, another 62,000 people rode the trains, less than 25 percent of their capacity. When the agency began to charge fares, daily ridership fell to under 1,300 per day, or about 2 percent of the rail line’s capacity.
Taxpayers spent $9.9 billion, or $900 million per mile, for this 11-mile line to nowhere. The original plan was to build 20 miles from suburban Ewa to downtown Honolulu, but when costs more than doubled, the line from Ewa was terminated at Aloha Stadium. City officials hope to finish another 5 miles by 2025, and the rest by 2031, but don’t know where all of the money will come from to do so.
This study addressed a gap in the research literature by evaluating the validity of general mental ability (g) and personality test scores for prediction of firearms proficiency via shooting range performance, an entirely objective task-based criterion. It was hypothesized that mental ability test scores would be positively related to firearms proficiency based on past research in related areas (e.g., g predicts skill acquisition and training performance) and conceptual similarities between firearms proficiency and cognitive tasks. Using 4 datasets with a combined sample size of 22,525 individuals, this hypothesis was confirmed: g had operational validities ranging from .162 to .188 and logical reasoning had operational validities ranging from .179 to .268 after correcting for range restriction and criterion unreliability. Mental ability test scores predicted an entirely psychomotor criterion task: use of firearms to hit targets at a pre-determined level of accuracy. Most of the validity appears to be attributable to g, but a post hoc analysis indicated that writing ability acted as a suppressor (i.e., the validity of g increased when writing ability was included in a regression model). Conscientiousness was hypothesized to have a positive relationship with firearms performance and emotional stability was hypothesized to have positive linear and quadratic relationships. In contrast, it was observed that conscientiousness had a negative operational validity (?.079) and emotional stability lacked validity relative to the firearms proficiency criterion. The implications for individual differences research and practice are discussed.
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The Athletic has an interview with Boston Celtics forward Grant Williams about his decision to move to the Dallas Mavericks: “In Boston, it’s really like $48 million with the millionaire’s tax, so $54 million in Dallas is really like $58 million in Boston and $63 million in L.A.”
The Boston Herald noticed this and headlined it “Millionaire’s Tax helped push Celtic forward to Dallas Mavericks.”
This is a nicely concrete example of the effects of this tax in pushing talent out of Massachusetts and in increasing the cost of Massachusetts employers to retain talent. It was entirely predictable—opponents of the tax predicted that this would be the effect, as it has been when other states adopted similar measures. Yet the voters in Massachusetts narrowly approved the millionaire’s tax anyway in November 2022 after a fraudulent union-backed mail campaign. The new 4 percent tax in the Bay State comes on top of the 5 percent that is already in place, bringing the total marginal state income tax rate to 9 percent.
Sweden has earned the ire of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for its refusal to ban Koran-burning and its failure to punish people who criticize Islam. Now the leader of Nyans — the recently established Turkish party in Sweden — says that Sweden must be willing to bend to President Erdogan.
So…. Peggy Noonan is eagerly awaiting Trump’s Waterloo? Can’t wait to get rid of him for good forever? Afraid that he might escape his current exile on Elba and return to power? And his deplorable loyalists, like all those French worshippers of Napoleon, might see their hero rise again?
I confess: I did not read her article, as I am too cheap to pay for the WSJ, and the article is behind a paywall.
One thing Trump did not do, and would never do, is invade Russia. Seems like Biden is headed in that direction…
Matthew Desmond, a Princeton sociologist who has won a MacArthur “genius” grant as well as a Pulitzer for his previous book, Evicted, devotes his latest work to expounding a “theory” that will explain “why there is so much poverty in this land of abundance,” the United States. According to Desmond, the American people as a whole are its cause.
Without offering a precise definition or measure of poverty, Desmond laments that America, the world’s richest country, has “more poverty than any other advanced democracy.” (That the United States is also by far the most populous advanced democracy might itself help to explain this alleged fact.) Relying chiefly on a report he had published in 2015, along with statistics issued by the Census Bureau and the OECD, Desmond asserts that “almost one in nine Americans” live in poverty, with over 38 million unable to “afford basic necessities” and another 108 million “getting by on $55,000 a year or less,” “stuck in that space between poverty and security.”
Of course a large majority of the world’s population—including India, Pakistan, Indonesia, China, most of Africa, and much of Latin America—would envy an individual or even a family with an income half that large.
In exceptionally rare comments given press, Pierre Brochand—the former director of the French Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), which is among the world’s eminent foreign intelligence agencies—during an interview with Le Figaro, described the past days’ events as an “uprising or revolt against the French national state by a significant part of the youth of non-European origin present on its territory.”
“In terms of amplitude, official statistics suggest—for historians to verify—that nothing comparable has happened in French cities since the Revolution of 1789 or, at the very least, the weeks following the Revolution,” Brochand, who formerly served as France’s ambassador to Hungary and Israel, told the newspaper.
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On Saturday (July 8), pro-khalistani elements gathered outside the Indian High Commission building in London in the United Kingdom to protest against the killing of Khalistani terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
As per reports, about 40-50 of them demonstrated outside the Indian High Commission with flags and banners between 12:30 pm and 2:30 pm on Saturday. They also carried posters which incited violence against Indian High Commissioner Vikram Doraiswami and the Consul General of India in Birmingham, Dr Shashank Vikram.
The development came days after posters surfaced on social media wherein Khalistanis were seen threatening Indian diplomats. After India demanded protection for its diplomats, security was increased in the area to avert any untoward incident. According to journalist Aditya Raj Kaul, the Khalistani event was a ‘major flop’ and only a handful of people participated in the protests.
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Unbeknownst to economists, the Keynesian bedrock of modern economics–using financial repression and government spending funded by debt to manage the business cycle of growth and recession–is an artifact of a century of expansive cheap energy and virtuous demographics.
Presented as quasi-scientific “laws of economics,” Keynesian policies of suppressing interest rates and funding stimulus with debt were only possible in an era in which energy per capita (per person) always became more abundant and affordable in terms of the purchasing power of wages, i.e. how many hours of labor does it take to buy the energy to fuel a vehicle, prepare a meal, etc.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on All Dreams End: The Collapse of Keynesian Economics
Nowadays, when White Liberal guilt has gone from being an annoying nervous tic to being a full-blown mass psychosis, you don’t get to celebrate, e.g., Independence Day without legions of prune-faced schoolmarms stepping up to tell us our country is rooted in oppression and cruelty, White Supremacy and slavery, duh duh duh duh duh
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Last Friday, a day after the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, I noted the gap between the Democratic Party’s leaders and its voters on race-based admissions. Polls find a majority of Democrats opposed to using race as a factor in admissions. The party’s elite, however, is almost universally in favor of affirmative action — as hysterical reactions from the president and others made clear.
But that was last week. Now that the dust has settled, and everyone has had a chance to cool down over July 4, have the Democrats gained some Independence-Day perspective on the end of race-based decisions? Not really. Emotional denunciation remains the dominant tone, and elected officials willing to side with the majority of their party’s supporters are no easier to come by than they were last Friday. For the left more generally, it has been a week of impressive mental contortions to avoid any awkward realities about the discrimination against millions of non-white Americans made possible by affirmative action. NPR gets the gold medal for this news story suggesting Asian Americans are white supremacists. Or something.
Missing from the Democratic reaction to the Supreme Court decision is any suggestion that they see the bigger picture. Were the Democrats a genuine working-class party, they might use this decision to highlight the many ways in which America’s elite schools fall short of their meritocratic potential.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Meritocracy Now!
Like all indoctrinated economics PhDs, I used to teach students that the Federal Reserve was created as a central bank in order to provide cash to banks experiencing a run on deposits so that bank failures would not become general and collapse the money supply and, thereby, employment and output. It all sounds so reasonable and rational until you realize that finance least of all is idealistic.
The Federal Reserve was actually created in order to save the big New York banks from their greed-driven mistakes, and that is the Fed’s principal activity. In recent decades the Fed has gone beyond merely saving the big banks from their mistakes to helping the big ones concentrate more banking into their hands. The Fed causes banking crises and then provides funds for the big banks to absorb the troubled regional banks. The Fed’s current policy of raising interest rates after a decade of negative interest rates has the entire banking system insolvent. This resulted in runs on the banks, which the Fed did not save by expanding reserves, instead permitting failure and acquisition. Obviously, what I had been trained to teach was false.
This is true of so much of what is taught in every subject.
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MSNBC’s Joy Reid was afraid to leave house on July 4th: ‘America is awash with guns’ (Fox) Considering how much she hates America, and how public she is about it, that was probably a wise decision.
No One Can Stop Talking About Justice John Marshall Harlan (N.Y. Times) Of course, a black guy with a BA who has spent his life writing about politics for left-wing rags knows more about what the Constitution means than two Supreme Court justices. That’s the Narrative.
Harvey Mansfield once quipped that the Democratic Party is a coalition of college professors and morons, which prompted “Lucretia” to remark on a podcast that it is impossible to tell the difference. But if higher education wasn’t an adjunct of the Democratic Party, surely the left would be charging the industry with consumer fraud and price gouging. The likes to talk endlessly about the soaring cost of health care, but the cost of higher education has risen more than any other sector of our economy over the last 40 years, because government has turned higher education into a giant subsidy-capture machine. And few things have been more central to increasing subsidies colleges could capture than easy student loans. One may hope the Supreme Court decision on Friday to disallow forgiveness of student loans by executive fiat will pump the breaks on college costs, but don’t count on it.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Daily Chart: College Bloat After the Loan Decision
A tourist who sparked outrage for engraving his initials into a wall of the Colosseum has apologized, saying that he wasn’t aware of the monument’s ancient significance.
Ivan Danailov Dimitrov, 27, in a letter to the city’s prosecutor and mayor, expressed regret for causing damage at the UNESCO World Heritage site while apologizing to the people of Italy and the global community.
Government schools.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Tourist Who Defaced Colosseum Unaware of Significance
