Some morons in Texas arrested a fourteen-year-old kid for building a digital clock.
As far as I’m concerned, though, CAIR isn’t doing him any favors by getting involved.
Defying Darwin
A Colorado park stays closed because too many people are taking selfies with bears.
I think we should just let evolution take its course, myself.
Scott Walker And Unions
He wants a dramatic overhaul of labor laws. It’s long overdue. They’re a relic of the thirties.
I haven’t read the proposal, but it’s worth noting that he could eliminate public-employee unions with the stroke of a pen. That’s how Kennedy created them.
Social Psychology
A new paper on the lack of political diversity in the field, and its consequences.
Bernie’s Proposals
They would add $18T to the national debt. That’s essentially doubling it (again, after Obama already did it once), not even counting the unfunded liabilities of social security et al.
Related: BS from Bernie:
Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke at Liberty University today. You can read his speech here. It is useful, in that it exposes the extent of Sanders’s ignorance and radicalism. Any deconstruction of a speech this bad must be selective.
Read the whole fisking. It’s also worth noting, in contrast to when a conservative speaker comes to a leftist college, how politely he was treated.
The War On College Men
A Democrat representative from Colorado steps it up a couple notches:
The main result of adopting Polis’s approach would be to create — since we all know this policy is aimed at male students, and almost exclusively enforced against them by a university “diversity” bureaucracy in which men are wildly underrepresented — a hostile educational environment for male students. As the Pope Center for Higher Education, which conducted a study of gender representation among “gender equity enforcers,” found, “Considering that the overwhelming preponderance of sexual harassment allegations are directed by women at men, the disproportion of women to men in the positions charged with interpreting and enforcing the sexual harassment rules is a legitimate concern. Are male students who are accused of sexual harassment likely to receive fair-minded treatment in these offices?”
If even a false accusation of sexual assault is grounds for expulsion, the result is to burden student sex lives with fear. That’s doubly so when the enforcers are so heavily non-male. Men who fear that they may be so targeted — and remember, you don’t even have to have dated a woman to be falsely accused — cannot possibly enjoy college in a normal fashion.
These people are insane totalitarians. If you wanted to destroy academia, it would be hard to do a better job.
Transhumanists
The Beeb checks them out.
Kind of funny that the reporter thinks that Aubrey de Grey is a woman.
[Update a few minutes later]
@Rand_Simberg oh wow, thanks for flagging. As you'll see from my film, I do know that! Not sure how that happened. Will change now.
— Benjamin Zand (@BenjaminZand) September 15, 2015
Probably an editorial error.
College Graduates
…don’t know much about the Constitution.
What a mess. This is shameful. They should be learning those sorts of things in high school. But instead, they’re propagandized about how we’re destroying the planet and how the US is the worst country in the history of humanity.
[Update a while later]
Related: Six questions you should ask about your children’s school:
If you want your child to grow up to be an independent thinker and a leader, take a look at the curriculum with this question in mind: Is your child being taught to learn in an objective fashion, or play political ball in a bureaucratic system?
If it’s a public school, it’s most likely the latter.
Paul Ehrlich
The man who has never been right about anything doesn’t like Mark Steyn’s new book.
[Via Ed Driscoll]
The Next President And Space
Another piece at The Space Review I missed last week was Jeff Foust’s assessment of the presidential field in the context of space policy.
Bottom line: None of them are going to be a JFK. Which isn’t surprising, because even JFK wasn’t the JFK of space-advocate fantasies. We live in a democratic Republic, and we’re not going to do Apollo again, to Mars or anywhere else. The best we can hope for is a president who recognizes the value of high-leverage space technology needed to reduce costs, and will fund those things necessary to support it during his or her term.