It is true that we cannot be free from sin,
but at least let our sins not always be the same.
Teresa of Avila
Reason Nanny of the Month--May 2013
Who Else But Soon to be Nanny Emeritus Bloomberg
Next JOTY Nominee: Barbara Boxer
From Reason:
“This is climate change. We were warned about extreme weather: Not just hot weather, but extreme weather,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) declared on the floor of the U.S. Senate last week. “You’re going to have tornados and all the rest.” The senator’s impassioned outburst of climatological alarm was provoked by a mile-wide tornado that had just struck Moore, Oklahoma."Never underestimate the immoral, shameless politically expoitative legislator trying to get her pet climate change legislation back on track. Bailey points out that weather-related technology and reporting has vastly improved over the past few decades, any increases are negligible and could be attributed to apples-to-oranges methodological changes:
[The National Climate Data Center] reports, “There has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years.” Similarly, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2012 report on trends on weather extremes concludes that there is no evidence for either an increase or a decrease in tornado frequency or intensity.In fact, the ratio of tornado-related deaths has steadily declined with improved warning times since the release of The Wizard of Oz . Outlying high tornado damage years of 1953, 1965, 1974, and 2011 are well-above general trend, but if you adjust for inflation, there's been an almost two-thirds drop in damage.
I'm not minimizing the reality of the Moore, OK (southwest suburb of Oklahoma City) tragedy, including a recently confirmed total of 24 deaths (9 of them children) and hundreds of injuries. But I, for one, am sick and tired of megalomaniac progressive politicians seeking to expand their economy-sapping Statist empire building agenda, whoring science and crying crocodile tears.
Cool Science: 3D Printing and Mechanical Hands
HT Carpe Diem. Whose heart doesn't melt at the excitement of a young boy being able to do something, enabled by technology, he couldn't do before like all the other kids, like grasp or catch a ball with his right hand for the first time? Welcome to the personalized age--where limited-scale production and rapid product prototyping becomes feasible; there are many parallel developments: for instance. imagine drugs customized to one's own body genetics and health condition....
The Mainstream Media, Progressives, and Scandals
Matt Welch has an amusing column about how the MSM has reacted to the IRS scandal by doing simple Google searches on the "so-called" scandal and predictably try to turn tables by focusing on the "real" scandals (as if Jesse Jackson, Michael Moore or Katrina vanden Heuvel have written anything worthy enough to line the bottom of my birdcage!) Out of curiosity, I had to click on the Forbes' writer John Tamny link; I've mentioned him before--he's a self-taught Austrian School economist whom has taken a few shots at market monetarist Scott Sumner. In this case, he's basically asking, "Of course, the IRS is being used by politicians in power against their adversaries. This is news? It's always been that way." In other words, did anyone really believe the political rhetoric spun by Obama of a post-partisan politics, transparency, hiring the most ethical administration in history? I, of course, was never gullible enough to buy into the Obama fairy tales. Young people who have been manipulated by ideological "educators" have obviously never met a fast-talking snake oil salesman.
(I learned my lesson fairly early in life; I was a second grader attending a Catholic elementary school and didn't have much spending money--I don't recall getting much, if any allowance, mostly gift money for birthdays, Christmas, etc. We had a school fundraiser involving donated items. I got talked into buying a snow cone maker by a slick-talking big kid "demonstrating" its operation without ice. It turned out, of course to be a nonfunctional piece of junk. All sales final. Granted, I didn't pay that much for it, but I didn't have much money. It was a bitter lesson for a little kid--someone would really donate their junk to a fundraiser, and others would take advantage of a trusting little kid.)
Even in my salad days when I was politically liberal, I would never in a million years have voted for Obama or Hillary Clinton; I was a fiscal hawk, even back then. Would I have voted GOP? Possibly; the big issue I had with Gerald Ford was his preemptive pardon of Nixon; Nixon had not even been charged with a crime. I know Ford wanted to get the nation past Watergate. Personally, I thought the disgrace of being the first President to resign from office was enough punishment. Anyway, I would have probably voted for McCain in large part to my background as a military brat, his straight talk reputation, his stand on earmarks, and his more pragmatic approach to politics. Romney would have been a harder sell because his earlier flip-flops on issues, but to be frank, I would have voted for a yellow dog over Obama, knowing he had doubled the publicly held debt in just one term of office.
The incoherence of the progressive critique of the Tea Party is obvious to any thinking person. The Tea Party is against a convoluted tax system and massive spending; we are trying to eliminate corruption by design. That means eliminating crony capitalism, not expanding it. Crony capitalists are politically agnostic; they contribute to the powers that be; we want to transform the status quo. Obama didn't transform the system; he has worked the system on behalf of his special interests. And I think Tamny is onto something when he talks about a national sales tax; in another piece, he's also willing to accept a low flat income tax (e.g., to address fairness concern). But think about it: the former ensures a reliable source of income, even if a company is losing money in a recession.
Dimwitted people don't get the point; the same Fourteenth Amendment that ensures equal protection for things like civil rights also ensures equal treatment for things like audits. What was wrong was the unsupervised abuse of discretion and asking for things that are subjective and in fact illegal to ask for, like donor lists. The process should be objective and impartially applied. It wasn't. Progressives would be screaming if the same thing was done to, say, progressive groups during a GOP administration.
Kevin Hassett, "Commencement speakers: Conservatives need not apply", Thumbs UP!
To be honest, I can't recall the commencement speakers at my four college graduations. I think the last time I attended a graduation as a faculty member I was at UWM; I vaguely remember getting my gown laundered. I was not on speaking terms with my department chair, a real [expletive-deleted], back at UTEP. My baby sister was graduating the same day in San Antonio, and I had already booked my trip. He showed up in my office and ordered me to attend; I was already in the process of leaving UTEP, and I had no intention of cancelling my trip to accommodate the jerk's last-minute ultimatum. I think over the past 20 years I've probably been to one graduation--my second godchild's high school graduation in Colorado (I've occasionally mentioned that in past posts because one of the speakers decided to spend her allotted time giving her testimony for Jesus Christ.) But again, I couldn't tell you whom the commencement speaker was. I seriously doubt an obscure libertarian/conservative blogger will ever be booked as one. I think I've maybe embedded a couple in the blog, one from Steve Jobs, the other high school English teacher David McCullough Jr. ("You are not special.")
Hassett, like Mark Perry of Carpe Diem, is affiliated with AEI. His essay is not really that surprising given other work. Consider this excerpt from David Horowitz:
In its examinations of more than 150 departments and upper-level administrations at the 32 elite colleges and universities, the CSPC found that the overall ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans was more than 10 to 1 (1397 Democrats, 134 Republicans). Although in the nation at large, registered Democrats and Republicans were roughly equal in number, not a single department at any of the 32 schools managed to achieve anything even remotely approaching parity between the two.... In the entire Ivy League, the researchers were able to identify only 3 Republican administrators.
Consider Robert Maranto's anecdotal experience (Moranto worked for the Clinton Administration, not an ideologue):
I think my political views hurt my career some years back when I was interviewing for a job at a prestigious research university. Everything seemed to be going well until I mentioned, in a casual conversation with department members over dinner, that I planned to vote Republican in the upcoming presidential election. Conversation came to a halt, and someone quickly changed the subject. The next day, I thought my final interview went fairly well. But the department ended up hiring someone who had published far less, but apparently "fit" better than I did. At least that's what I was told when I called a month later to learn the outcome of the job search, having never received any further communication from the school. (A friend at the same university later told me he didn't believe that particular department would ever hire a Republican.)
He also notes
Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors' political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology....Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans.
Maranto thinks that this is more soft discrimination than an ideological purge.
Hassett notes how student protesters obstructed planned speeches by Ben Carson and Robert Zoellick and behaved badly at a Rand Paul speech at Howard University. He also did some summary statistics at top colleges:
In 2012, the political leanings of 84 people were identifiable. In 2013, with speakers still being announced, 69 are. In 2012, only one Republican elected official was invited to speak at a top 50 liberal arts college: Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell at the University of Richmond. The top 100 universities invited three Republican officeholders: Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal spoke at both the University of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham spoke at Clemson. Missouri Rep. Sam Graves spoke at the University of Missouri. No Republican official spoke outside of his home state
Now I don't think any of these authors are suggesting quota systems for conservatives--but for hypocritical progressives extolling the virtues of diversity and tolerance, faculties without a single GOP/conservative faculty member in areas like history and political science contradict the very concept of a free market of ideas.
Political Cartoon
And the buck stops in the Treasury Department...
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| Courtesy of Bob Gorrell and Townhall |
Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, "The Rising". This concludes my Springsteen retrospective. My plan is to reprise Simon and Garfunkel and Beatles consistent with my recent hit/single format. Upcoming series include Motown and favorite solo artists.
School Freaks Out Over Kindergartner's Tiny Toy Gun
A 6-year-old boy brought a tiny replica plastic nonfunctional toy gun; another student saw the toy and informed the bus driver. The school overreacted, initially punishing the boy with detention, having him write an apology to the bus driver, and threatening a possible suspension from bus riding. (It's not like he was bringing a loaded AK-47 to show and tell.) In a late development, the school has waived punishing the boy, but seriously some educators lack common sense....
