Probably not. It’s pretty clear that Holder has perjured himself, and he’s likely to do it more next Tuesday when he testifies to Congress again.
The Academic Bubble
Is getting more and more attention.
More Of That “Smart Diplomacy”
Thoughts on the UNESCO fiasco:
For the U.S., the UNESCO vote was a debacle, with the assembled states voting 107 to 14 in favor of admitting the Palestinians, and 52 states abstaining. That would have been the moment for the U.S. ambassador to read UNESCO’s assembly the riot act and announce that the U.S. was pulling out, as it did in 1984, under President Ronald Reagan; returning only in 2003, under President George W. Bush.
Instead, the U.S. diplomatic message to UNESCO has been one of apology, regrets and fawning statements of support for a U.N. body that has just slapped the U.S. in the chops. U.S officials have even been hinting that they are looking for some kind of workaround, to get the money flowing again.
Insanity.
The Latest Warm-Monger Scam
Some thoughts:
Here’s what interest me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own?
Well, they believe in the “scientists.” But why? Are all scientists always right? Of course not; the definition of science is that new information and ideas are constantly refining or overturning old verities. The definition of science is that scientists are sometimes wrong, or will be at some point.
What if it’s a class thing? Instapundit has a link to an essay class warfare within the New Class. “OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.”
This seems to me to be the same thing. Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class: the technologists and researchers.
The phrase “the science is settled” is the very antithesis of science. But these people don’t really understand science.
Thoughts On Cosmology
…and early German movies, from Lileks.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Ain’t it the truth? Dispatches from Venus, and Mars.
Setting The Record Straight
Newt Gingrich’s daughter clears up a long-standing media lie about him.
What George Bush Understood About The Middle East
…that Barack Obama does not. And probably never will.
Remaking the map in the Middle East:
So, with one fell swoop, Obama has redrawn the strategic map of the Middle East. Iran will have unfettered access from its own territory, across Iraq and Syria, all the way to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon. The leaders in Iran could never have imagined such a comprehensive reversal.
The administration doesn’t seem to realize that we are war, or with whom. And you can’t “end” a war unless both sides want an end to it. But the other side wants to win.
[Bumped]
Drug Shortages
Did the White House undercut Congress? I’m shocked, shocked.
Magnificently Right
Here’s why the Tea Party is:
Republican consultants report that in focus groups, TV commercials about out-of-control debt prompt strongly positive responses even from Democrats. Even Democrats have to live somewhere and a lot of them own homes. And there are a lot more Democratic taxpayers and homeowners than there are government workers. This is a wedge issue for Republicans that won’t quit.
Here’s one result that I found remarkable: It shows the aggregate property taxes paid to state and local governments, against aggregate mortgage payments (the outstanding volume of mortgage debt multiplied by the current mortgage rate). The result is somewhat exaggerated, because about a third of property tax collections are commercial rather than residential, but it’s still compelling: the property tax burden on homeowners is now roughly equivalent to the interest burden on their mortgages!
When one gets to that point, one is no longer a home owner, but simply renting their home from their local government. That’s the way it feels here in CA. Our mortgage is still more than taxes, but not by all that much.
Are Schoolteachers Underpaid?
No:
Most teachers have Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in education, and most people with education degrees are teachers. Decades of research has shown that education is a less rigorous course of study than other majors: Teachers enter college with below-average SAT scores but receive much higher GPAs than other students. It may be that a degree in education simply does not reflect the same underlying skills and knowledge as a degree in, say, history or chemistry. When we compare salaries based on objective measures of cognitive ability — such as SAT, GRE, or IQ scores — the teacher salary penalty disappears.
I’d always suspected that, but I had never actually seen the statistics. Colleges of Education should be abolished, or at least not eligible for federal funding of any kind, including student loan guarantees.