…in “higher” education. If I were a parent, I wouldn’t be wasting my money on thousands in tuition for this kind of nonsense.
Also related: the student debt bubble officially pops.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
More Guns, Less Crime
Only the media morons are baffled by the notion. Must be something in the water in J-school.
It sort of reminds me of this headline at the Gray Lady a few years ago.
Space Settlement
Al Globus lays out the potential paths.
Anti-White Bigotry
…goes mainstream:
Let’s examine this argument carefully. The Post acknowledges that “we can’t know their hearts.” But it finds a (literally) prima facie reason to suspect them of invidious motives: Almost all of them are persons of pallor. The Post is casting aspersions on Duncan and his colleagues based explicitly on the color of their skin. And it is accusing them of racism!
A couple of other items related to race and politics caught our attention over the Thanksgiving weekend. First, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., an Illinois Democrat and CBC member, resigned from Congress “amid federal ethics investigations and a diagnosis of mental illness,” as the Chicago Tribune reports. That sets up a special election to fill the vacancy:
Some Democrats quickly offered to broker a nominee to avoid several African-American contenders splitting the vote in the heavily Democratic and majority black 2nd Congressional District, which could allow a white candidate to win.
This passes with neither editorial comment nor a disapproving quote. It’s hard to imagine the same absence of reaction if a group of pols offered “to broker a nominee” with the goal of preventing a black candidate from winning a white-majority district.
I’m getting very tired of being accused of racism by virulent racists. They are the party of slavery. They are the party of the Klan and Jim Crow. They are the party that pushes gun control, and Davis-Bacon, and minimum wage, all of which were originally justified as a means to protect white people from blacks. And now they’re the party keeping the blacks on their new inner-city plantations. But I’m the racist.
[Update a few minutes later]
The WaPo‘s dreams of Dixie.
It is amusing (and infuriating) to recall that Condi Rice was opposed by (former?) Klansman Bob Byrd.
Two-Thirds Of The Way
I’ve raised almost $2400 on the Kickstarter project, with a little over a week to go. By the way, I don’t know if people noticed, but if you click on the video, you’ll see an endorsement from the space-policy teddy bears. Or dogs. Or whatever they are.
Female Teachers
…are sexist, and waging a war on men.
The Tea Party
What’s next?
Honduran Free Cities
Are they DOA? I visited Honduras back in the nineties. It could certainly use something like this. And I too find it bizarre that a court would find a constitutional amendment unconstitutional.
How The World Almost Ended
Apparently we had a very close call in 1883.
It’s amazing to me how unseriously we take this threat, at least judging by our policy choices.
The DC Economy
Are we living the Hunger Games?
Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O’Rourke famously observed: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” But it’s not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It’s a cold calculation: You’re likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.
So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.
I’m not the only one to notice this, or even to make the Hunger Games analogy. As Ross Douthat wrote, “There aren’t tributes from Michigan and New Mexico fighting to the death in Dupont Circle just yet. But it doesn’t seem like a sign of national health that America’s political capital is suddenly richer than our capitals of manufacturing and technology and finance, or that our leaders are more insulated than ever from the trends buffeting the people they’re supposed to serve.”
I always have a sense when I visit DC of a corrupt and decadent capital, bleeding the rest of the country, which it barely deigns to fly over, white.
[Update a while later]
Link was missing before. Fixed now, sorry.