If true, this was a staggering missed opportunity. The President’s string of misjudgments on the Middle East—on the peace process, Erdogan, withdrawal from Iraq, Libya, ISIS as the “J.V. team”, and Syria—is one of the most striking examples of serial failure in the annals of American foreign policy.
Generally speaking, what the President seems worst at is estimating the direction in which events are flowing. He thought Erdogan was taking Turkey in one direction; Erdogan was going somewhere else. He thought there was a transition to democracy in Egypt; there never was a prospect of that. He has repeatedly been caught flatfooted by events in Syria. And Putin keeps running rings around him.
Understanding the intentions and estimating the capabilities of people who don’t share his worldview are not our President’s strong suits.
4. Is the academic program geared towards academics or political messaging?
In fifth grade we were introduced to the concept of “multiculturalism”. My school district felt the best way to introduce us to other cultures was by partnering with another elementary school in the district for special programming on cultures of third world nations. This boiled down to one primarily white school meeting up with another primarily white school, splitting into carefully crafted groups that included at least one student of color, and watching a bunch of white teachers shake rain sticks at us to demonstrate the culture of Africa. Sound highly hypocritical? It gets better.
We were told to work together to create group names. The “person of color” in our group was a goof off from my own class. When he suggested a name I felt was stupid, I as much told him so. Everyone else agreed. When the teachers came around to see how we were doing, the “person of color” accused me of bullying him. “That’s not nice, Susan. We have to respect other people’s cultures. I think that’s a great name for the group. That will be your name.” The name was “The Orange Juices.” Totally multicultural and reflective of his native culture, I’m sure.
Contrast that experience to the one I had in my gifted classes led by a very old school teacher, Mrs. Lenox. Our first class focused on learning Bloom’s Taxonomy, a method of study that would guide how we would approach every topic over the course of the year. Not only did she lay out topics of study, she explained the method she’d be using to teach. Everyone was on the same page from day one and it made sense.
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?
Well, playing political ball in a far left bureaucratic system is what teachers do, so it’s no wonder they want to pass that “skill” onto the kids they indoctrinate teach. As Glenn noted in his 2014 book, The New School, it’s not a coincidence that the typical school is modeled after the factories of the early 20th century and is designed to churn out cogs to fill their assembly lines, even if there are less and less of them in the US. “Thus, the traditional public school: like a factory, it runs by the bell. Like machines in a factory, desk and students are lined up in orderly rows. When shifts (classes) change, the bell rings again, and the students go to the next class. And within each class, the subjects are the same, and the examinations are the same, regardless of the characteristics of the individual students.”
If French presidential elections were held today, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, could come out on top in the first round. Ms. Le Pen would easily beat the current president, François Hollande, and might even edge out the center-right’s most likely candidate, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, according to recent polls. Voters hostile to the National Front would still band together to hand Marine a defeat in the second round if elections were held today, the same polls show. She would, however, end up carrying between 41 and 45 percent of the vote.
And that poll was held before the migrant crisis convulsed Europe.
The National Front, the party founded by Ms. Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972, has never been as popular as it is today. At the height of his own popularity, Mr. Le Pen won 16.9 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, but was soundly defeated in the second round. His daughter, who took over the party leadership in 2011, beat her father’s best showing on her first try, coming in with 17.9 percent of the vote in the 2012 elections. With the atmosphere in France increasingly uncertain, she may well have the shot in 2017 that her father never did.
And the National Front is not the only far-right party on the popularity upswing. All across Europe, far-right parties are making big strides. In Hungary, the ultranationalist Jobbik party, whose members have been accused of holding rabidly anti-Semitic views, is riding high in the polls and is now the second strongest party in Hungary. In April of this year, Jobbik’s Lajos Rig defeated the favored candidate from the ruling center-right Fidesz in a by-election that the party’s gloating leader, Gabor Vona, described as “historic.” Similar successes are on display in Austria, where the Austrian Freedom Party had one of its best performances in 2013 when it captured 20.5 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections; in Denmark, where the Danish People’s Party is the second largest party in parliament as of the 2015 elections; in the Netherlands, where the anti-immigrant PVV is currently pulling ahead of the mainstream VVD in aggregate polls; and in Finland, where the euroskeptic True Finns have joined the government after getting 13 percent in the latest elections. Even in traditionally left-leaning Sweden, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats are the number one force in the country. With far-right parties becoming a rule rather than the exception in mainstream politics, the political landscape in Europe has been transformed.
Does Hillary Clinton believe her husband is a rapist?
Now before you bite my head off, the question is a fair one given what the Democratic candidate said in a speech before a “Women for Hillary” event earlier today:
“To every survivor of sexual assault…You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed. We’re with you.”
The vast majority of conservatives and liberals who are deeply concerned about sexual assault will agree with Clinton’s larger point. I don’t think anyone would disagree that victims of sexual assault who come forward have a right to be heard, a right to be taken seriously, and a right to have their claims thoroughly investigated. But Clinton goes a step further and says they have “the right to be believed.”
Well, as it happens, her own husband has been accused of sexual assault. Not once, but several times. And contrary to Clinton’s bold new standard, the media and Democrats alike elected not to believe a single accusation. “In media accounts, [Paula Jones] tends to be portrayed as a trailer-park floozy digging for money and celebrity,” Newsweek admitted back in 1997. Clinton’s own stalwart ally James Carville was just as blatant: “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, there’s no telling what you’ll find,” he said.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker laid out a proposal Monday to completely overhaul the nation’s labor union laws, calling for eliminating most of the advantages private-sector unions have under federal law and prohibiting public-sector unions altogether.
The proposal, if enacted, would represent the most radical change to federal labor law in almost a century, making Walker’s labor reforms in his home state seem modest by comparison. They also would be a massive blow to the strength of organized labor, a major player in Washington politics and staunch ally of the Democratic Party.
Walker said the proposals were aimed at strengthening the rights of individual workers, which under current federal labor law are often sacrificed to bolster union strength. Unions would still exist, but they would be voluntary organizations with workers able to join or leave whenever they felt.
FROM THE MAN WHO HELPED BRING YOU THE ECO-PARANOIA THAT DEFINED THE EARLY 1970s: Quite a coup for Mark Steyn — Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, discovers Mark Steyn has a new book out questioning Michael Mann’s increasingly limp hockey stick and does not like what he reads.
Considering that much of what Ehrlich helped inspire in the early 1970s now sounds like Reefer Madness with bell-bottoms and long sideburns, that’s quite a glowing “reverse endorsement” indeed for Mark:
(Here’s the YouTube link if you’d like to watch the complete version of Matt Novak’s 2010 Paleofuture video, which nicely sums up the doomsday zaniness of the 1970s.)
Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose liberal call to action has propelled his long-shot presidential campaign, is proposing an array of new programs that would amount to the largest peacetime expansion of government in modern American history.
In all, he backs at least $18 trillion in new spending over a decade, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal, a sum that alarms conservatives and gives even many Democrats pause. Mr. Sanders sees the money as going to essential government services at a time of increasing strain on the middle class.
His agenda includes an estimated $15 trillion for a government-run health-care program that covers every American, plus large sums to rebuild roads and bridges, expand Social Security and make tuition free at public colleges.
To pay for it, Mr. Sanders, a Vermont independent running for the Democratic nomination, has so far detailed tax increases that could bring in as much as $6.5 trillion over 10 years, according to his staff.
Hey, Hugo Chavez just didn’t implement socialism correctly. . . .
HIGH NOON: CARSON VERSUS TRUMP: As Roger Simon writes, “indeed, it’s not difficult to envision Ben Carson as a kind of Gary Cooper-type for our time, come to clean up America and return her to her former greatness. The more humble he is in the process, the better, the more likely to succeed in the deepest sense:”
Of all candidates, Carson’s qualifications to handle the first of these disasters is unparalleled. We know less of his qualifications for the second, but he says he has been boning up on foreign policy and (hello, Hugh Hewitt) he should be tested on that at the debate Wednesday. My guess is that, unlike Donald Trump, Carson will know the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah.
This is not to say I bear any enmity toward Trump. On the contrary, his influence on the electoral season has been hugely positive on balance. He has brought attention to a process that is often largely ignored. But more than that, his focus on the immigration crisis has proven prescient, not just because of the murderous domestic behavior of illegal aliens (Fisherman’s Wharf, etc.) but because of the escalating migrant crisis in Europe and the Middle East that is bound to hit our shores. He has also spoken out definitively against the Iran deal. Bravo, Donald!
I just think, however, that the time is ripe for Gary Cooper. The bigger question is whether America is ready for him. Do we deserve Ben Carson if he is as moral a person as he appears to be? Or will his political inexperience prove to be more important than some of us think? Is a decent man unfit to be president in the modern world?
hen Maryland’s Attorney General announced last summer that his office had negotiated a settlement whereby $45 million would be recouped from the IT contractor that botched the state’s Obamacare exchange, it was widely reported as good news for taxpayers. It appeared that their investment in the mismanaged project would not be a dead loss. But the AG’s statement included this curious passage: “The agreement… will lead to the recovery of funds for both Maryland and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS].” What’s so odd about that? Well, the state didn’t contribute any money to the project.
All of the money used to build the failed exchange, as well as its hastily constructed replacement, came from federal start-up grants. Maryland received more than $179 million in such grants. About $73 million was paid to the original contractor, Noridian Healthcare Solutions, and another $41 million was paid to the firm that cleaned up the mess. Yet, according to the Maryland AG’s office, the state is in negotiations with CMS concerning how the $45 million will be divided. But why would Maryland receive any part of the settlement if all the money used to build and repair the exchange came from Washington?
This very question, as it happens, occurred to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch when he got wind of the Maryland deal. Hatch’s committee has been pressing Obama administration officials for information on their plans to recoup billions in federal tax dollars that have disappeared into the coffers of states that followed Obamacare’s directive to set up insurance exchanges. Only fourteen, all controlled by Democrats, set up these “marketplaces.” And, like Maryland, they used federal grants to do so. Those states, along with the District of Columbia,spent more than $5 billion to launch their exchanges.
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.
Read the whole thing, for a good old-fashioned Fisking.
Q: ARE WE NOT MEN? A: WE ARE DEVO! The name Devo comes “from their concept of ‘de-evolution’ — the idea that instead of continuing to evolve, mankind has actually begun to regress, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society,” as Wikipedia notes.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Graduates Don’t Know Basic Facts About the Constitution. “According to the study, nearly 10% of college graduates think Judith Sheindlin — commonly known as Judge Judy — is on the Supreme Court; one-third of college graduates can’t identify the Bill of Rights as a name given to a group of Constitutional amendments; and 32% believe that Representative John Boehner is the current president of the U.S. Senate. Shockingly, 46% of college grads don’t know the election cycle — six years for senators, two years for representatives. Turning to the general population, the report finds that over half (54%) of those surveyed cannot identify the Bill of Rights accurately, and over 1 in 10 (11%) of those ages 25–34 believe that the Constitution must be reauthorized every four years.”
Accepting submissions for a new volume of the There Will Be War series. Send with cover note to submission@therewillbewar.net. Stories should preferably be 20,000 words or less. Poetry encouraged, but see the previous series; it needs to make sense. Hard science fiction mainly; urban fantasy with a military theme possibly acceptable, but mostly we want hard, realistic stories. They need not be action adventure; good command decision stories encouraged. Space opera always considered. Again see the previous nine volumes.
Nonexclusive anthology rights only are purchased. Payment on acceptance is $100 advance against pro rata share of 50% of the revenues received from the publisher. Given the sales of the previous volumes we expect this to be a respectable payment. Original works will be considered, but author is welcome to sell it elsewhere; we purchase only nonexclusive anthology rights.
There will be a hardbound print edition, paperback if the sales indicate it, and eBook publication. Contributors will receive an author’s copy. Each contribution will have an introduction by the editor. The work will contain non-fiction essays by invited contributors: again see the previous volumes.
We have a major microagression situation at, get this, Oberlin College.
Apparently there was an intramural soccer match scheduled at the same time as a Latin Heritage Club meeting. A White Male (uh oh) sent out an email to a Hispanic girl noting that he’d like to have her at the match, if she wasn’t going to the Latin Club meeting.
He wrote the most racist sentence since Mein Kampf:
Hey, that talk looks pretty great, but on the off chance you aren’t going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!
Anyone see the problem there?
That’s right, he said the f-word– Futbol. He racistly appropriated the Spanish language.
Uh-oh. Read the whole thing.
And speaking of being on the lookout for highly problematic microaggressions in everything, Helen Mirren, who over the past decade brilliantly transformed her career by seemingly eschewing her earlier, zanier days, is reverting to form: “It annoys me to see men with an arm slung round their girlfriend’s shoulders – it’s like ownership.” The London Independent added that “Mirren, 70, said that if she could give her younger self one piece of advice, ‘it would be to use the words ‘f*** off’ more frequently.’”
YALE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS HITLER’S MALTHUSIANISM, THINKS THERE’S SOMETHING TO IT: In contrast, as Bob Zubrin writes at NRO, “The real lesson of the Holocaust for our time is this: We are not threatened by there being too many people. We are threatened by people who say there are too many people:”
The fundamental question boils down to this: Are humans destroyers or creators? If the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed, with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is enemy of every other race or nation. The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide.
But if we choose instead to have faith in the power of unfettered creativity to invent unbounded resources, then every new life if a gift, and every person, race, and nation becomes ultimately the potential friend of every other, and, rather than suppression, the fundamental purpose of government must be to protect human liberty at all costs.
Only in a world of freedom can resources be unlimited. Only in a world of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.
There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis — some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.
Malthusianism provides the perfect mechanism for what William James dubbed at the start of the 20st century “The Moral Equivalent of War” — or war itself, in the case of post-Weimar Germany.
That’s ultimately what women want. It’s not that they need to ensure their future husband took classes like “Shakespeare in Film” or “Calculus for Poets” (both real college credit classes).
It’s that what women continue to look for in men is security — and a college degree goes a long way toward convincing them he can provide that.
We’ve just gotten to a point where it’s unacceptable to admit that, so we use the “college degree” code to say the things we won’t: We want someone with a good job who will take care of us — yes, even if we’re perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves.
It’s not as if women will turn down an entrepreneur, like, say Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, just because they didn’t finish college. Exceptions will be made.
The Iran deal is not a treaty and has no constitutional status. Congress should declare, and try to get a court to declare, that President Obama has no authority to lift sanctions in Iran because he failed to comply with the Iran Nuclear Review Act he signed earlier this year—specifically, the legal requirement that he show to Congress the entire agreement including “side agreements” like the one between Iran and the IAEA.
There are other steps to take. Gen. Michael Hayden, a former CIA director, has suggested an immediate congressional authorization for the use of force if Iran violates the deal; beefing up U.S. defenses in a meaningful way; and perhaps providing Israel with the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. This “bunker buster” could penetrate even the underground Iranian enrichment facility at Fordow, which is suitable principally for creating an atomic weapon.
. . .
However, before Iran can respond to a credible threat of force there must be a U.S. administration with enough steel to do more than talk about whether a vague military option is on or off a metaphoric table. That is assuredly not the current “we.”
The Holocaust may seem a distant horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.
The quest for German domination was premised on the denial of science. Hitler’s alternative to science was the idea of Lebensraum. Germany needed an Eastern European empire because only conquest, and not agricultural technology, offered the hope of feeding the German people. In Hitler’s “Second Book,” which was composed in 1928 and not published until after his death, he insisted that hunger would outstrip crop improvements and that all “the scientific methods of land management” had already failed. No conceivable improvement would allow Germans to be fed “from their own land and territory,” he claimed. Hitler specifically — and wrongly — denied that irrigation, hybrids and fertilizers could change the relationship between people and land.
The pursuit of peace and plenty through science, he claimed in “Mein Kampf,” was a Jewish plot to distract Germans from the necessity of war. “It is always the Jew,” argued Hitler, “who seeks and succeeds in implanting such lethal ways of thinking.”
The piece goes on to the usual “climate change” boilerplate, but Hitler’s “limits to growth” attitude presages the modern environmental movement. Norman Borlaug, on the other hand, remains surprisingly unknown, and utterly uncelebrated, by the Greens.
SALENA ZITO: “More than 3 million people didn’t show up to vote in 2012, according to David Leip’s ‘Atlas of U.S. Elections.’ That number was not a show of apathy, but the beginning force of populism that sent a message to the establishment of both parties that neither recognized.”
ROGER KIMBALL: A Word About “Fundamentals.” “It would be cruel to compare Hillary circa 2008 with the bedraggled harridan of today.” It was cruel to let her run. But, then, who could have stopped her?
A LONG, SLOW RIDE TO HELL — AND WE’RE NOT THERE YET: Michael Walsh has a lengthy excerpt from his new book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace at PJM, focused on “the Frankfurt School of mostly German Marxist philosophers, whose destructive, anti-cultural handiwork we can see all around us. For just about every social pathology that currently has Americans and Europeans scratching their heads — how the hell did we get here? — has its origins in the teachings of the Frankfurters and its practical application embodied by the pernicious doctrine of Critical Theory. Destruction of national sovereignty? Check. Redefinition of marriage and the family? Check. Replacement of the Individual-as-Hero with the collectivist ethos of the human ant farm? We have a winner. Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich — the list of villains reads like Hell’s honor role.”
Ethel was 40 and three months pregnant with her last child, daughter Rory, when her husband was assassinated. Bobby Jr. was 14, and one week after his father’s funeral, the family celebrated his brother’s 13th birthday. Bobby slipped laxatives into everyone’s drinks as a prank.
“Just leave home!” Ethel yelled at him. “Get out of my life!”
She often used such language with him. “Her moods could swing drastically,” Oppenheimer writes, and soon after, she “literally beat Bobby with a hairbrush.”
Unable to cope with her grief — let alone her children’s — Ethel shipped Bobby off to a series of boarding schools, each less prestigious than the last, each forced to expel the namesake son of a martyred political icon.
Bobby wasn’t even 15 and was already using drugs heavily. He insisted each school allow his pet falcon to stay in his room. He formed a gang, The Hyannis Port Terrors, and one of his favorite practical jokes was bumping the fender of a passing car, having a pal collapse in the road, then yelling, “You’ve killed a Kennedy!” He once spat in a cop’s face.
Ethel did nothing. She was sealed off in her McLean, Va., estate. Only her dead husband, his legacy and her privilege as a Kennedy widow existed. Nothing Bobby did got her attention for long, and that attention was usually negative.
“I never witnessed a civil conversation between Bobby and Ethel,” one of RFK Jr.’s ex-girlfriends told People in 1984.
When Bobby was arrested for buying pot in 1970, Ethel threw him in the bushes. “You’ve dragged your family’s name through the mud!” she yelled. . . .
In his 1994 biography of Ethel, “The Other Mrs. Kennedy,” Oppenheimer writes of her “uncontrolled rage” and the abuse that extended to her household staff. Her brother-in-law Peter Lawford was shocked when Ethel berated a new maid for going to throw out some old scraps of paper.
“You stupid n- - - -r,” Ethel yelled. “Don’t you know what you’re doing? You’re destroying history. Get out of my sight! You’re fired.”
One of Ethel’s secretaries, Noelle Fell, told Oppenheimer she was surprised by such outbursts.
“She would say things like, ‘Those black people are stupid,’ ” Fell recalled. “I really don’t think she liked blacks or Hispanics. She couldn’t stand it if they didn’t speak English.”
One such maid, who brought sanitary pads when Ethel asked for face cream, got a hard slap in the face. She quit on the spot.
VDH ON THE WEARINESS OF THE WHINERS: “The cult of the whining victim is now ubiquitous,” Victor Davis Hanson writes:
The 21st century has become a cowardly era in which we point to collective race, class, or gender rather than own up to our record of behavior and performance when our exalted expectations are not met. Or is it worse than that? Does a Brandon Marshall count on making unsubstantiated charges of racism in hopes of preemptory careerist advantage: one must prove he is not a racist in the future by offering beneficia in the present?
The culprits are not just our obsessions with race, class, and gender, or the careerist aspirations of elites. We also live in the most affluent and leisured era in the history of Western civilization. But given human nature, our bounty has not given us pause for appreciation, but rather increased our appetites in geometric fashion. The more we have, the more we think we deserve — or else. In an affluent society, society can afford now to have no losers. There is enough stuff and praise to be shared by all. In T-ball everyone is a winner; so is today’s student who feels A’s are his birthright. The poor man in the inner city has more computing power in his palm with an Apple smartphone than did the billionaire twenty years ago in his study — but, of course, not as versatile a phone perhaps as that of today’s billionaire, and thus he can legitimately whine that life is not fair due to the machinations of someone else.
The bane of our age is not poverty but parity, or rather the perceived absence of a state-mandated equality of result. It no long matters how much one has, much less in comparison to those abroad or to Americans of our past. The rub is whether someone has something more or better than your own — and why and how that can still be possible in the American horn of plenty. Given those requisites, whininess is the lubricant of our national machinery.
Lions have been coming out of the surrounding bush, prowling around homes and a small health clinic, to snatch goats and donkeys from the heart of this village on the edge of one of Africa’s great inland deltas. Elephants, too, are becoming frequent, unwelcome visitors, gobbling up the beans, maize and watermelons that took farmers months to grow.
Since Botswana banned trophy hunting two years ago, remote communities like Sankuyo have been at the mercy of growing numbers of wild animals that are hurting livelihoods and driving terrified villagers into their homes at dusk.
The hunting ban has also meant a precipitous drop in income. Over the years, villagers had used money from trophy hunters, mostly Americans, to install toilets and water pipes, build houses for the poorest, and give scholarships to the young and pensions to the old.
Calls to curb trophy hunting across Africa have risen since a lion in Zimbabwe, named Cecil by researchers tracking it, was killed in July by an American dentist. . . .
“We had a lot of complaints from local communities,” Ms. Kapata said. “In Africa, a human being is more important than an animal. I don’t know about the Western world,” she added, echoing a complaint in affected parts of Africa that the West seemed more concerned with the welfare of a lion in Zimbabwe than of Africans themselves.
This is what happens when you let your policy be driven by “social justice” virtue-signalling, instead of, you know, reason and consideration actual human needs.
FENCE JUMPERS BREAK LEGS TO GET INTO UNITED STATES: “We could spend the whole state budget on the border and I am not sure it would solve the problem,” Arizona state senator tells PJM.
Taking deportation for illegal immigrants seriously might. Or at the very least would certainly be a good way to start.
The massive, ongoing surge of migrants and refugees into Europe has brought up horrendous scenes of deprivation, along with heartwarming instances of generosity. It has also engendered cruel remembrances of the continent’s darkest hours. But viewed over the long term, this crisis may well be the prelude to changes that could dissipate, and even overturn, some of the world’s most-storied and productive cultures.
Some may prefer to ignore the long-term impacts of huge migration from the often-chaotic developing world – where 99 percent of the world’s population growth will be taking place – to the more orderly, prosperous and low-fertility richer countries. Separated from the daily drama, the human movement from Syria, the rest of the Middle East and Africa can be seen as potentially changing European society forever by breaking its already-weak Christian foundations and threatening the future of Europe’s elaborate welfare states. In many ways this invokes the vision laid out in the 1973 French novel “Le Camp des Saints,” which envisioned a Europe overwhelmed by a tide of poor refugees.
These concerns, of course, are not simply European. The flow of generally lower-income people from Central and South America has emerged – largely courtesy of the demagogic Donald Trump – as a key political issue in the Republican presidential race. Claims, based on federal employment data, that immigrants have gained far more jobs in the recovery is the kind of thinking that keeps Trump in business. Concerns about other transfers from the Third World to the First World have also surfaced in a host of other countries, including Canada, Australia and even orderly Singapore.
And Kotkin is right about this: “Previous waves of immigrants – including those of the 1960s – entered a confident society with strong values and a decent birthrate. Today, they confront a European society that does not much believe in anything but a post-modernist faith in their own emotions.” That will end badly.
The Department of Education calculated the percentage of students at each college who earned more than $25,000 per year, which is about what high school graduates earn. At hundreds of colleges, less than half of students met this threshold 10 years after enrolling. The list includes a raft of barber academies, cosmetology schools and for-profit colleges that often leave students with few job prospects and mountains of debt.
But some more well-known institutions weren’t far behind. At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year. At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the median annual earnings were only $35,700. Results at the University of New Mexico were almost exactly the same.
The data reveals how much money students are borrowing in exchange for earnings after graduation. While U.C.L.A. and Penn State are both prestigious public research universities, recent U.C.L.A. grads leave with about 30 percent less debt, even as their predecessors are earning about 30 percent more money than counterparts at Penn State. Harvard students borrow barely a quarter of what Brandeis students take on, and earn nearly twice as much.
In other words, a college degree isn’t a generic product, or a magic wealth-enhancer. It matters a lot what and where you study, and when you calculate return on investment, the size of the investment matters as much as the size of the return.
“They will approach you by sending a general recruiter message with a profile picture of an attractive woman,” he then explained their modus operandi. “The job will be relative to your job. They will ‘scout’ a few people (besides you). After about a week they stop sending out new requests, the profile picture is removed and a bit later their name is changed making it hard to find these people back in your list if its big). In about a month the accounts disappear, not sure if on purpose.”
I THINK HEINLEIN KNEW THE ANSWER: A scarcity of economic growth. From the article: “The causes of the productivity collapse are unclear.”
… if you don’t read Heinlein. If you do, you’ll remember this:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
ANALYSIS: MOSTLY TRUE. The Arab Press Reacts to the European Refugee Crisis: “We are a nauseating nation.” “We too could be like them and our countries could be like their countries, which do not persecute the citizens and do open their arms to the victims of natural and political disasters. Yes, we could be like them if we thoroughly examined our barbaric political regime, our backwards social order, our obsolete curricula, our media that operates without professional norms, and our religious establishment that interprets the texts in a barbaric fashion, inciting to hatred and to abuse of the other, even members of the Islamic faith! This situation clearly mandates a velvet revolution that the educated [sector] must launch.”
State law states that someone with a gun carry permit can bring a weapon to a state or city park, if it’s not close to a school.
The Tennessee Valley Fair, however, is making it clear: No weapons will be allowed at the annual event, which begins Friday and runs through Sept. 20. The ban at Chilhowee Park will include permit-holders.
The city of Knoxville and the fair operators argue the law, which Gov. Bill Haslam signed into law in April, does not apply in the case of the fair. Despite the objection of some cities, including Knoxville, lawmakers chose to over-ride local bans to keep guns out of city parks.
According to the city, the park is an “entertainment and public assembly” facility to which the law doesn’t apply.
Besides being kind of cheesy, this is also indicative of an unwholesome prejudice. People with carry permits are very law abiding, and demonstrably less likely to shoot someone improperly than are cops. I suspect that Rogero, who’s a Democrat, is just playing politics here. I don’t know if a court would grant a TRO or not; she probably waited until the last moment with that in mind.
Just remember this when you hear that elected officials have to follow the law. In practice, they pick and choose.
SO MY AUGUST COLUMN ON the European immigration mess was ahead of the curve. Let me just repeat: “The good news is that immigration concerns aren’t just a problem for the United States. The bad news is that they’re a problem for the entire First World. What to do about it? Nobody seems sure. But although open borders are a nice idea, the fact is that countries differ in economics, in culture and in politics. No country can accept and assimilate an unlimited number of outsiders, and when the number exceeds a threshold, a backlash is certain. Thresholds are being exceeded, and backlashes are building, all over the world.”
President Obama on Saturday abandoned his two-year effort to have the government create a system that explicitly rates the quality of the nation’s colleges and universities, a plan that was bitterly opposed by presidents at many of those institutions.
Under the original idea, announced by Mr. Obama with fanfare in 2013, all of the nation’s 7,000 institutions of higher education would have been assigned a ranking by the government, with the aim of publicly shaming low-rated schools that saddle students with high debt and poor earning potential.
Instead, the White House on Saturday unveiled a website that does not attempt to rate schools with any kind of grade, but provides information to prospective students and their parents about annual costs, graduation rates and salaries after graduation.
On the one hand, this is probably a better approach. On the other, this change is almost certainly because the higher education industry is a key core constituency for the Democrats. And, one suspects, a key source of six-figure speaking fees in Obama’s post-presidency.
I HAVE RAISED A SWEET, THOUGHTFUL, ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS MONSTER—AND SOON I WILL BE FREE: Glenn already linked to the jaw-dropping article titled “Bidding My College-Bound Son Good Riddance,” written by a veteran Bay Area journalist/environmentalist activist last night, but it’s worth another look for a variety of reasons.
Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim.
And beginning in 1970 with Walter Cronkite and CBS, environmentalist crankery has been very much approved by Big Business for decades. In 2007, GE, which makes a considerable amount of money selling light bulbs, urged its customers for the sake of Gaia to turn off the lights in their homes via the TV network it owned at the time – during halftime of a Sunday night Cowboys-Eagles NFL game whose stadium was bathed in a zillion watts of klieg lights. A couple of years later, American Express was praising would-be California “Dam Busters,” AKA, the people who helped bring you California’s current water crisis. In 2009, James Lileks linked to the following jaw-dropping MasterCard ad:
If they’d intimated that Mastercard can be used to placate your humorless little eco-scold, no one would have minded much. But no: the child is making his father a better man. It’s nice to see that Dad exists in a state of such unearthly perfection that the only means of betterment consist of abjuring incandescent lighting for pig-tailed CFLs, right? Alas: dad is a scoff-law who lets the tap run, uses doubleplus ungood bulbs, and doesn’t correct the clerk when the food is put in a cornstarch bag, perhaps because he’s thinking about his job, the cutbacks and layoffs, the tiresome daily scrum of adult life. He works hard, but of course he could work harder – he has a part-time job so he can stay at home with his son. Mom’s full-time. He downshifted so someone would always be there when Ethan came home from school. This makes him an okay man, I guess.
But he could be better. He could buy a florescent bulb. On credit.
If I had a Mastercard, I’d print this ad out frame by frame and sent it along with my shredded card.
Afterwards, Lileks embedded a frame from the film version of 1984, in which early on in the movie, a nine-year old uniformed “Youth League” member whose father works alongside Winston in the Ministry of Truth blurts out to Winston, “You’re a thought criminal!” Later in the book, after his sister turns in dad for being a thought criminal, he and Winston sit in the white porcelain abattoir-like Ministry of Love awaiting their fates. As dad ponders how many years in a prison camp he faces, he’s proud that he raised that he raised such a good little citizen of Oceania!
‘It was my little daughter,’ said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. ‘She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.’
How many parents allow their kids to hector them over environmentalist minutia without reminding them who is in charge of the family? Even if you do, how do you raise a kid knowing that they’ll be sent off to school where they’ll hear endless variations of Al Gore-style eco-crankery from their teachers? And assuming you don’t personally buy into the corporatist mantra that “we only have [fill in number of years] to save the planet” — or eco-doomsday is sure to follow — how does a parent counteract such programming?
Far from making college campuses less rigorous in their adjudication of such allegations, we propose making them more rigorous by referring all sexual assault allegations to local police and prosecutors for adjudication by the criminal justice system. If a student is guilty of sexual assault, that student should face a penalty worse than expulsion — that student should be subject to all the sanctions of the criminal justice system.
Over and over, college campuses have demonstrated a lack of expertise in pursuing such allegations. It is not, after all, what faculty and administrators are trained to do. Tales abound of athletic departments covering up for star players.
Sexual assault is a serious problem, in society and on college campuses. The answer is not to throw up our hands at the prospect of adjudication and delete all the messy steps between allegation and punishment. The answer is to preserve individual rights through due process, assign such cases to institutions trained to investigate and prosecute them, and punish those found guilty to the fullest extent of the law.
Yes, but that doesn’t support a Hillary-friendly “war on women” narrative, or create more jobs and power for campus (and federal) educrats.
NUCLEAR POWER DOESN’T DEPEND ON WEATHER. I’M JUST SAYIN’. Low Winds In America Cut Wind Power Output. “In the future we won’t just have drought years and hot or cold years. We will also have low wind years. Wind drought? We need a term for it.”
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