Giving fake As in fake classes is not so much misguided compassion as an admission that the subject taught had no appreciable value

I get what DC McCallister is saying here when she rights of the UNC fake class and grade scandal:

Academic misconduct in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill doesn’t just expose how an elite institution with a pristine reputation can give way to greed and put athletic success above the educational needs of student athletes. At the core of this scandal is the failure of liberal compassion in which struggling students are treated with disrespect under the guise of sympathy by giving them academic freebies instead of challenging them to succeed on their own merit.

According to a comprehensive report by independent investigator Kenneth Wainstein, AFAM Department Chair Julius Nyang’oro and his administrative assistant, Deborah Crowder, ran a “shadow curriculum” between 1993 and 2011 that provided thousands of students and student athletes with “academically flawed instruction” through illegitimate “paper classes.”

But if the miscreants were compassionate and they believed that the material was esential to their student's success then they would have made sure they learned it.  Just like you won't find too many people handing out Scuba Diving certifications to people who couldn't pass or even didn't take the class.  No, the reason these leftists were happy to hand out fake grades was because they knew that the material taught in them was useless and believed that only the credential that was derived from them had value.

A more cogent testament as to the true value of much of today's higher education could not be given.  I applaud these corrupt truth tellers for inadvertently explaining why many of us shouldn't waste our money and why all racial and gender "Studies" programs should be shut down and their 'faculty' fired. 

There have been bigger frauds but none more pathetic.

Well Andrew these chicks are your home girls. They agree with you on almost everything. Except they believe you need to shut uo.

Andrew Sullivan has to learn that when he lies down with coercive authoritarian dogs he's going these feminist fleas on him. Hope they bite him where it's really hard to scratch. More of an authoritarian fellow traveller bitching about some of the thugs he's travelling with at the link.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/11/10/the-sjws-now-get-to-police-speech-on-twitter/

The times they are a changing alert: The Beltway searches for a new savior and he just may be Rand Paul

Noemie Emery wrote a very good column in which she points out

Can anyone name the most recent American president who ran to succeed a two-term president of his or her party who had an approval number of well under 50 percent, and won? Nobody can, because nobody did.

Several people did spin out a one-party run for more than three cycles, but the circumstances were special, and the occasions were rare. In 1908 and 1988 William Howard Taft and the elder George Bush succeeded Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, but the latter two presidents were already legends.
Even Bill Clinton at the height of his popularity couldn't pull it off.  This places the relentlessly left veering beltway in a conundrum.  What to do?  Well job number one is try to get the best damn Republican from their perspective that they possibly can.  And if you watch Christ Matthews, Bob Woodward and Howard Finemen three of the greasiest emininence grise's in Beltway politics in this episode of Hardball you understand what the Beltway answer is shaping up to be:

Which is fine by me:  I agree with his restrained attitude on foreign and defense policy - sort of an adult, thoughtful version of Obama's sophomoric "don't do stupid shit" routine. And I really like his social libertarianism which will go a long ways towards defanging the gentry liberals who really, really don't want to see a class war.  And on economics and the role of the government he's the right and probably the most right wing candidate that can be elected anywhere in the world today. His only weakness is he's got the same lack of executive experience as Obama.  But he hasn't been raised to sneering smugness by a lifetime of lavish praise and make work jobs, he's actually made his own way in the world.  He also comes from a party that for all its faults values structure, discipline and management much more than the chaos you saw from the Clinton administration or the naive golfing passivity of the Obami.

And Hillary Clinton?  From the Beltway's perspective why not let her be the nominee:  she can chum the water while the Dems raise up a new crop of contenders not crushed or tainted by the Obama fiasco.  Besides everyone is sick to death of the Clintons and a crushing defeat will hopefully put a stake through their undead hearts and keep their incubus Chelsea at bay. But watch the vid because it's fascinating to see Chris Matthews - a legendary leg tingling beltway battler incorporating the latest electoral information into his bayesian political model and beginning the long hard process of adapting rightward.

You heard it here first.  Happy days are here again!

I thought highway robbery was a thing of the past in America. But then the police started robbing people.

In Iowa of all places.

What happens when the people who are paid to "protect" us  - openly, with the support of the law and for their own gain - start stealing from us instead?

And for all you right wing church lady drug warriors: how far is it really from "you have a lot of cash so you must be a criminal so we get to steal it" to "you have a lot of wealth so you must be a criminal so we get to steal it"?

Constant police predation at the link.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/highway-seizure-in-iowa-fuels-debate-about-asset-forfeiture-laws/2014/11/10/10f725fc-5ec3-11e4-8b9e-2ccdac31a031_story.html

Beggars ballet

This comes from an experience I had sitting in traffic in Lahore, Pakistan.

I was in a fine car on a big street in a poor land.
And as we stopped out of nowhere came a hand.
It danced and swayed, dipped and waved.

I had never seen a more beautiful hand.
Asking, beckoning, beguiling
I'd never seen such a beautiful hand.
Dancing the beggar's ballet.

Because it's a fine line between want and need. 

A short hop between lost and free.
I wish I knew what I want 'cause I sure don't know what I need.

Dancing the beggar's ballet.

The dancing hand came from a legless man

Who traveled the world on a square wood slab

No one sees him but for his hand. 

I have never seen a more beautiful hand.

Asking, begging, smiling

I've never seen such a beautiful hand.

Dancing the beggar's ballet.

Because it's a fine line between want and need.

A tiny distance from lost to free

Please tell me what to want 'cause I sure don't know what to need.

Dancing the beggar's ballet.

I'm like the beggar and my hand sways too

Chasing pennies on a slab of wood

Come dance with my pretty hand,

Have you ever seen such a beautiful hand?

Asking, begging, pleading.

Have you ever seen a more beautiful hand?

Dancing the beggar's ballet

Because It's a fine line between want and need

A narrow space between lost and free

Can you tell me what I need, because I just don't want to be 

dancing the beggar's ballet.



Copyright William Reeves 2014

148 terrorists who the world has passed by

So there are 148 terrorists who have been sitting on their assess in Guantanamo drinking our coffee and eating our Halal burgers for up to 13 years. Compared to the 20 to 30 thousand ISIS fighters plus Boko Hiram, Taliban and so on that's peanuts.  Send em back to their homes and put the onus on Islamic states to keep them clean. If they go bad we have a rhetorical stick to beat their governments with and realistically,  how much damage can 148 has beens do? Andy McCarthy is doing what he accuses the Administration of doing: thinking in criminal justice terms.

Militarily these guys are a nothing burger. PR wise they're a wash hurting us with neutrals and allies balanced  against all the Allahu akbars that the iskamocrazies will yell upon their release.

Perhaps now both sides of the aisle comprehend the wisdom of the "catch, rendition and rend(er dead) before release" program of the CIA. Or even the Obami's "give 'em Hell(fire) Barry" approach. War is hell and until we kill all the lawyers (oh happy day) winning insurgent terror wars means we can take no prisoners.

I say let the little shits go. Perhaps with unobserved tracking tags so we can Hellfire 'em later. Or turn them into the jihadi equivalent of Fembots. Nothing would impress the ummah more than if the Great Satan could give their boys exploding heads and machine gun jubblies.

McCarthy's misguided maunderings at the link.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/11/10/as-war-heats-up-obama-dismantles-war-approach-to-counterterrorism/?singlepage=true

Jon Gruber, Democrat Apparatchik extraordinaire: Yeah so we lied through our teeth to get Oara past the rubes. So what?

O'care's success has always been predicated on:
1. Jamming it down the opposition's throat by hook or crook
2. Keeping that opposition small through lies and deception until O'Care became a fait accompli
3. At which time the splendiferous swellness of the program and more to the point the subsidy money for the proles and the market rigging for the swells would see it through in perfect corporatist order.

The screw up was that to get it supported by every one of  the 60 thimbleriggers and patronage junkies of Democratic caucus including such principled characters as Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson and Richard Menendez they had to create an insanely complicated, unworkable mess.

The key to other universal health care schemes has always been simplicuty: yes they might be letting mom die in agony in her own waste in the next room but I'm covered if I get sick and I don't have to do much of any thing except show up and fill out a form and presto! somebody else pays. Not thinking or having to do anything was their key.

But Barack Obama - that sweet, inexperienced and utterly unqualified naif - actually believed that the Federal Borg was a capable force for good (imagine a bunch of Smokey Bears who shave setting the stage for a nationwide catastrophic conflagration rather than just wrecking our forests) rather than the worst collection of thugs, mugs and plug uglies ever assembled to screw something up since the French General staff ca 1940.

Details at the link.

http://keithhennessey.com/2014/11/10/honesty-about-lying/

Should you hire anyone who graduated from an institution that believes that its students are so sensitive, so unable to cope with adverse information that they posted this?

MIT conducted a campus survey on Sexual Assault - a laudable goal (except for the fraudulent definitions but more about that later) and felt compelled to post the following "Trigger Warning" at the front of the survey instrument:

“TRIGGER WARNING: Some of the questions in this survey use explicit language, including anatomical names of body parts and specific behaviors to ask about sexual situations. This survey also asks about sexual assault and other forms of sexual violence which may be upsetting. Resources for support will be available on every page of the survey, should you need them.”

Clearly MIT is telling prospective employers that while its students are certainly very intelligent they also lack the moral fortitude to cope with adverse opinions and words without being mentally prepared for such horrors. Think about that in the context of dealing with customers or clients. Or coping with a major FUBAR in a critical project and all of the head cracking and pressure that entails. Do you really want people that MIT considers to be weaklings on your team?

But of course this is true of almost all "elite" universities where everyone gets As, is 'far above average', never hears a discouraging word and are marinated in a constant warm toungue bath of unmerited praise. It creates graduates that are remarkably narcissistic and unprepared to cope with adversity and criticism. As a matter of fact, we have one of these graduates in the White House right now. As a graduate of the University of Chicago I would recommend that employers avoid hiring these people because the environment has become so coddling, so unreal that it is very likely that many of these little dears won't be able to cope.

Harvey Silverglate - not a Republican and certainly no conservative but a leading civil liberties attorney recounts an astounding tale of modern blue stocking hysteria from Smith.

And the sad thing is our 'intellectual elite' actually believes that cowardly hysterical censorship is 'progressive'. It is fact retrograde.  In 1920s Germany fascists and to a lesser extent communists dominated German Universities long before Hitler came to power. They persecuted unpopular groups (Jews were targeted then just as they are becoming targets again today) and shut down speech they found distasteful. Just like they are doing today.  The conceit of the left is that they are 'progressive'. If they are then the word has no meaning left in it.

God help us every one.

Ding Dong the Dick is Dead?

Is Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi the ISIS top genocidaire dead.  Did we flatten The Baghdader with a a JDAM?  Here's hoping we did.

I have to admit I'm suffering quite a bit of cognitive dissonance right now

When I grew up the Democratic party was dominant in Congress and at the state legislative level.  My home state Oklahoma had never had a Republican legislative majority.  Hell when I first focused on politics in the late 70s I don't think the GOP even had a enough seats to sustain a veto.  This continued in spite of astounding corruption scandals that sent a Democrat Governor, a Speaker of the State House and a Majority Leader of the state senate to jail.  Plus over 300 county commissioners pled guilty to taking bribes...which was more than all the sitting county commissioners in the state.  All but one was a Democrat.  The only three counties where no one was convicted were the three Republican counties.  Yet it didn't move the needle at the state level at all.  The same could be said of Texas.

Yet today Republicans hold 69 of the 98 partisan legislative chambers plus the US Congress in thirty states the GOP controls both legislative chambers.  They have governors for 31 states including such blue but desperately broke meccas such as New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland and Illinois.  This is despite:

1. Being totally wiped out six short years ago to the point that they had no say in the Senate at all.
2. The mainstream media both news and entertainment versions has never been more partisan and more hostile to Republicans
3. The electorate is much more diverse than it was 35 years ago.
4. Republicans are roiled with disputes and differences between its various wings
5. The educational infrastructure from K to College has never been more uniformly left wing and hostile to Republican values.

Yet here we are.  It is pretty darn shocking, let me tell you.  Hard to get my mind around.

Speed the Mamet

David Mamet is America's most successful playright.  In 2008 he outed himself as a conservative which caused him to take a hit with certain theater companies.  This article tells that story but also points out that in the market as opposed to the tax subsidized NFP theater world, Mamet has never been more popular or successful.  It raises a fundamental question about subsidized art:  why do it? Mamet shows that the market works, at least for plays and the NFPs demonstrate that they aren't interested in what is popular but rather want to raise awareness for left wing issues.  Thus our NFP art subsidies are nothing but another wing of the leftist agitprop infrastructure.

Which both you and I knew but it is fascinating to see just how true (and unjust) it is.  Break it up, break it all up. And speed the Mamet.

The liberal snake is eating it's tail - Skint Detroit to get $816m from Ford, other foundations

Once you've blown it all in an all too predictable spending orgy you don't care where your bailout comes from. You just want their bloody money. 

Libs: if you think living with Obama is agony then the total financial collapse of most left leaning governments over the next two decades is really going to sting. It started with Detroit but Chicago, NYC and LA are close behind. With Rhode Island, Illinois and California hard on their heels.

And since the Dems are owned by the public unions there is no way that even bankruptcy will solve the problem: look at the CA cities that have already gone through bankruptcy: they are immediately back in the soup. Because they couldn't cut the driver of their bankruptcy: public pensions.

It's a paradox: the left is reduced to hoping and praying that Republicans pass a Federalism denying law that "forces" bankrupt Dems (virtually no Republican dominatef governments are going to go belly up) to "screw" public employee unions to both bail their asses out and give them an issue to run on to wit: evil Repubs took your pensions.

I say let Federalism work it's magic. As Marx might have said (or heck most of the clowns running these bankrupt hulks have said): Let this catastrophe play out with no intervention because it will heighten the contradictions inherent in Democrat "governance" if one can use such a word to describe the disorganized mismanagement cum looting of any fisc they get their hands on. 

As EJ  Dionne (!) Says:

As The New Yorker’s Jeff Shesol pointed out, leading Republicans from incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to Sen.-elect Cory Gardner to Rep. Paul Ryan all discerned a message from the voters against what Ryan called “incompetent big government.”

So the more bankruptcy chaos the left has the more Republicans win nationally for simply not being the party of drunken sailors and elected gangsters. Sure, not all Dem polities are circling the fiscal drain but for most of the nation the steady drumbeat of bankruptcy and fiscal chaos are going define the Dem brand for decades to come. Job 1 for Republicans is to make sure they keep the Dems from looting the Federal fisc (any more than they already have) to bail them out. Lessons must be taught to be learned. And nothing teaches a lesson faster than the good, hard clean thwack of reality. My God the  anguished cries of repudiated politicians will be so sad to hear. Snif.

And if Dems think gay marriage, fuck the rich and the uterus agenda will save them from the upcoming world historical bankruptcy phase of their saga.....well why do you think they've opened the borders? Why they're so big on amnesty and immigration "reform"? Like an addict they think that all they need to do is to get one more hit, make one more bet, push off reality a little longer.

More righty chortling at the link.

If progressives fight against entrenched interests for the little people then what happens when government becomes the most powerful special interest?

Scott Walker asks in the land of LaFollette: Does siding instinctively with the most powerful interest in the land make you reactionary? After all in France reactionaries sided with the Ancien regime. 

And Scott Walker has the three straight wins and Republican legislative majorities to make the case that he's LaFolette 2. And the entrenched interests  are howling in their impotence.

What if the "Progressives" aren't really progressive?

Definitive proof of the church lady effect on our liberties

Men overwhelmingly support pot legalization. Women oppose it. More at the link.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/11/the-pot-legalization-gender-gap.html

Rich white shoe lawyers are the enemy. Find a way not to use them.

They are relentlessly and viciously leftist and use the law as their private political weaoon. They should be punished for that in the strongest way possible: their bank account. Why would an oil company retain such ideological thugs? Why would anyone?

In this case they were used to intimidate Christian pastors opposed to a Transgender "pee where you want to" ordinance. The pastors were part of a coalition who want to put the ordinance to a vote of the people but Mayor Parker knew she would lose if the people had a say. So the white shoe thugs were called in. And Dems wonder why they're deader than a mackerel in Texas.

This controversy arose after the city government passed an “Equal Rights Ordinance,” which among its effects would allow men who identify as women to use a women’s bathroom and vice versa. Denial of actual gender strikes at the heart of Judeo-Christian theology of God’s will. Thus, critics gathered more than 50,000 signatures to put the “bathroom ordinance” on the ballot so the residents of Houston could vote on it. A lawsuit was filed after Parker and her lawyers threw out the petitions claiming there were too many invalid signatures.
The only relevant issue in this type of election lawsuit is the validity of the signatures of the Houston residents who signed the petitions, and what standards the city used to determine their validity. Yet the mayor subpoenaed the sermons and communications of local pastors who weren’t even parties to the lawsuit, seeking anything that discussed the ordinance, the petition, and everything from “restroom access” to “the topics of equal rights, civil rights, homosexuality, or gender identity.”

Make them pay for their cynical politicization of the law. More at the link.

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/11/05/big-laws-battle-with-christians-in-texas/

This seems about right - focus on the economy, not social issues

One of the reasons the Dems have fallen so far so fast is that they let their social and enviro warriors diddle with the economy, leaving an already damaged entity even more broken and staggered.  The left's obsession with trace gasses, trace genders and trace bodily fluids is rightly perceived as being both narcissistic and beside the point.  Mark Uterus was laughed at not because people don't care or have a point of view but because it's such trivial crap at a time when the future is in such jeopardy from existential enemies, pathogens and economic decay.

Focus on fixing the basics and the states can sort out just how and what they define as 'moral' and 'fair'.  The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing and that means getting the hell out of the main thing's way.  Asch Schowe has more here.

"It was the capital strike wot dunnit"

The President and his party's policies such as stimulus for blue state profligacy, rapidly increasing costs for now mandatory health insurance, huge increases in environmental, financial and  energy regulatory burdens, wild talk about 'getting ' the rich and a deliberate Senate do nothing strategy to block alternatives all depressed business confidence leading to the worst investment and job creation climate since the Great Depression.

Which isn't surprising because BHO followed FDR's play book without the native optimism or the big ass war. It's as if he didn't know history. Or rather the only history he knew was left wing. And the Dems have paid a brutal and richly deserved price for putting forward a shallow, inexperienced, temperamentally unsuited hard core leftist candidate just because his race would guarantee a victory.

My God Tommy Friedman is shallow

First it was the world is flat.
Now it's the world is fast?
Next it will be the world is fat.
Then the world is Fa.
And then I suppose the world will eventually end F'ed up.

Drunk, stupid and cliched is no way to go through life, lil' Tommy.
Go Tommy Go!

Attaboy Barry, we couldn't have done it without ya!

When it comes to mid-term elections, President Obama is the most destructive to his party in recent political history. And it’s not even close.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/11/05/president-obama-set-a-record-in-the-2014-mid-term-elections/

The EU doesn't realize it yet but it's collapsing

Large segments of the EU have concluded that it's not in their interest. Chalk it up to the stupidity of the Euro. The breakup is going to be nasty. More here.

Evans Pritchard:

The ECB's North-South clash mirrors the political breakdown of monetary union after six years of depression and mass unemployment. France's Front National now has twice as many Euro-MPs as the ruling Socialists. Euro defenders invariably insist that the triumph of Marine Le Pen - currently leading presidential polls at 30pc - has nothing to do with her pledge to restore the franc and take back French economic sovereignty.

Whether or not this is true - and that smacks of presumption - she is snatching enough votes from the Socialists to threaten their survival as a political movement. If they let perma-slump drift on until 2017, they will meet the fate of Greece's PASOK, and deserve it.

Italy is also edging closer to an inflexion point. The Five Star movement of Beppe Grillo - which won a quarter of the vote in 2013 - has grasped the elemental point that zero inflation and falling nominal GDP is pushing Italy into a debt-compound trap. For a long time Mr Grillo wrestled with the EMU issue. There is no longer any doubt. "We must leave the euro as soon as possible,” he says.



Spain's insurgent Podemos party has come from nowhere to top the polls at 28pc. It is not anti-euro. Its wrath is directed against a corrupt "Casta". Yet the party's reflation drive and furious critique of Spain's "internal devaluation" is entirely at odds with EMU imperatives, as is its €145bn plan for a universal basic income, which would lift Spain's fiscal deficit to 20pc of GDP. Podemos reminds one of France's Front Populaire in 1936. Leon Blum did not perhaps intend to leave the Gold Standard, but he knew his policies would bring it about in short order.