OK, this is weird.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Hillary
Five reasons that she was the worst presidential candidate the Democrats could have run.
Pious Thinking
An interesting post from Bryan Caplan.
Dog-Rape Culture
This is a pretty weird story. If I had more time, I’d be doing a lot of Sokalesque spoofing of these “academic” “journals.” They seem like real suckers for it.
Britain
Is it lost? Bruce Bawer thinks so. I fear he’s right.
I would add that, in refusing to recognize the root cause, and saying that the rape gangs are “Asians,” they (including Nigel Farage) are in fact being racist. That’s right, they’d rather be accused of racism than of criticizing a religion. And I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that the adherents to that particular religion react violently when it is criticized.
[Sunday-afternoon update]
It’s not just Britain: Lying about Amsterdam. I agree. As someone whose sister lives in a village a few kilometers east of the city, I’ve never noticed any problems like this in the city center.
[Bumped]
The Hollowing Out Of The American Dream
For generations, California’s racial minorities, like their Caucasian counterparts, embraced the notion of an American Dream that included owning a house. Unlike kids from wealthy families—primarily white—who can afford elite educations and can sometimes purchase houses with parental help, Latinos and blacks, usually without much in the way of family resources, are increasingly priced out of the market. In California, Hispanics and blacks face housing prices that are approximately twice the national average, relative to income. Unsurprisingly, African-American and Hispanic homeownership rates have dropped considerably more than those of Asians and whites—four times the rate in the rest of the country. California’s white homeownership rate remains above 62 percent, but just 42 percent of all Latino households, and only 33 percent of all black households, own their own homes.
In contrast, African-Americans do far better, in terms of income and homeownership, in places like Dallas-Fort Worth or greater Houston than in socially enlightened locales such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Houston and Dallas boast black homeownership rates of 40 to 50 percent; in deep blue but much costlier Los Angeles and New York, the rate is about 10 percentage points lower.
Rather than achieving upward class mobility, many minorities in California have fallen down the class ladder. This can be seen in California’s overcrowding rate, the nation’s second-worst. Of the 331 zip codes making up the top 1 percent of overcrowded zip codes in the U.S., 134 are found in Southern California, primarily in greater Los Angeles and San Diego, mostly concentrated around heavily Latino areas such as Pico-Union, East Los Angeles, and Santa Ana, in Orange County.
The lack of affordable housing and the disappearance of upward mobility could create a toxic racial environment for California. By the 2030s, large swaths of the state, particularly along the coast, could evolve into a geriatric belt, with an affluent, older boomer population served by a largely minority service-worker class. As white and Asian boomers age, California increasingly will have to depend on children from mainly poorer families with fewer educational resources, living in crowded and even unsanitary conditions, often far from their place of employment, to work for low wages.
I would encourage Mike Schellenberger to work with the Cox campaign to oust Newsome and the entire corrupt “woke” CA establishment, by pointing out the insanity of the state’s energy policies, that hit minorities the hardest. A Cox win would be a political bombshell.
Higher Education
…is in decline. It has been for many years, but only now are more people finally noticing:
The president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has summed up the consensus among faculty: “The sad truth is that US higher education is in decline.” A poll in 2012 showed that 89 percent of American adults and 96 percent of senior academic administrators agree that American higher education is “in crisis.” When a recent dean of Harvard College writes a book subtitled How a Great University Forgot Education and laments “the loss of purpose in America’s great colleges”—meaning Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the other elite universities that follow their lead—the presumption must be that something has gone very wrong. These are the opinions of academics, most of whom are by no means conservative.
Some authorities still insist that colleges, even if they teach no specific knowledge, at least improve “critical thinking.” But this contention is not borne out by a test designed to measure such thinking, the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Since the 1980s the improvement in students’ CLA scores during their four years of college has dropped by about 50 percent, and such improvement now averages just 7 percent over the first three semesters.
Along with government-recommended nutrition, this is one of the biggest public-policy disasters of our time. And it doesn’t even mention the degree to which the student-loan debt for these worthless degrees blights the lives of young people, while lining the pockets of banks and colleges at no risk to them.
[Update late morning]
I think it says something about the state of higher education, and particularly BU, that economics major Alexandria O-C is so fundamentally ignorant about not just the federal budget, but basic arithmetic.
Amelia Earhart
This is the first time I’d ever heard this: Many people heard her final calls for help.
Blogging light, because I’m still at the ISS R&D conference.
The FISA Warrant
OK, one post (at least) before I hit the road. The big news this weekend, is that Judicial Watch (finally) got a (heavily redacted) copy. Of course, the mainstream media is lying (or to be more charitable, ignorant and desperate to maintain the narrative) about its implications. I’m seeing lots of tweets from partisan hacks in both media and politics (like Adam Schiff) that this somehow undermines the Nunes memo, when in fact it supports it.
It’s been amazing how both sides can look at the same fact pattern here, and see a completely different narrative. It’s almost like the blue/yellow dress, or the “Laurel/Yammy” thing. The other thing that’s amazing is the dramatic historical role reversal, with Democrats defending the (corrupted) intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, and going into full McCarthy mode over Russia Russia Russia. Not to mention the amnesia about the Obama administration and “the eighties called, they want their foreign policy back.”
I’d expand on this and dredge up more links if I had more time, but I have to hit the road. But feel free to comment.
[Update a few minutes later]
The FBI goes full Nixon with the FISA report.
This is a clear abuse of power, and a much bigger scandal than Watergate, perhaps the greatest one in the nation’s history.
[Tuesday-afternoon update]
Byron York: The next step is to declassify the entire thing. I think it would be better to bring in someone else to go through it with White House staff, maybe out of Bolton’s office, to determine which things would actually damage NatSec if declassified, and which are only covering up the obstruction of justice and abuse of power.
[Update a couple minutes later]
OK, not what I’ve read the piece myself, that’s basically what they’re proposing, so it’s a misleading hed. Probably not Byron’s fault.
They Want To Be The Cool Kids
Sarah Hoyt explains what motivates the Left, and how to defeat them.
[Update a few minutes later]
What to learn from the SJW who was eaten by his own mob.
[Via Stephen Green, who also has an apt quote from Atlas Shrugged]