May 31, 2012
May 21, 2012
May 12, 2012
Rex Murphy on “Fauxcohontas”
In the National Post, Rex Murphy outlines the ridiculous situation Elizabeth Warren has created for herself:
When is a politician toast — done-on-both-sides, pass-the-butter-and-jam toast? Well, one hint might be when you show up on blogs and in newspapers photoshopped as the Lone Ranger’s great Indian sidekick Tonto. Another might be when thousands of people spend hours making up sarcastic names for you, such as “Fauxcohontas,” or more brutally, “Dances with Lies.”
This is the unfortunate lot of Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat running for a senate seat in Ted Kennedy’s old district. During the course of the campaign it was revealed that Ms. Warren had listed her minority status in law school faculty directories, and that no less than the Harvard Crimson in 1998 declared in print that: “Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American.”
[. . .]
This bizarre comedy highlights the ugly absurdity that arises when people, or institutions, become so absorbed with the question of race that it eclipses their common sense. But what’s perhaps most telling is how all involved — the candidate herself, the faculties and administrations of various law schools, everyone — step back in pure shock, nay, horror, from the very notion that Elizabeth Warren may have been hired for any other reason than her professional qualifications. Race? Nothing to do with it. Minority hire? Never!
Everybody acting like affirmative action hires are something to be ashamed of and denied, something rudely pushed aside as unthinkable, is baffling. In every other context, affirmative action and its attendant policies and protocols are looked upon as the secular world’s highest forms of public virtue. Companies and institutions boast about their so-called equity policies and minority placements. Does not every university, in every hire, on every bulletin board, and in every online notice — spell out every so proudly that applications from minorities and special groups will be given “special” attention, or are specifically urged to hire. Does this not right historical wrongs? Is this not part of enriching the educational experience?
And yet, any suggestion that a particular individual may have benefitted from these wonders of our modern age is treated as a slap in the face to said individual. How can a policy be a triumph in enactment but an insult in execution?
Update: Even the 1/32 claim appears to be failing, as the claimed documentation does not seem to exist:
I reached out to Christopher Child, the well-known genealogist who was the source of the claim, and his employer, the prestigious New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), but they have gone silent, refusing to comment on, defend or correct their claim that Warren was 1/32 Cherokee. The e-mail exchange appears at the bottom of this post.
The fallout from Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Native American status threatens to drag down not only her campaign, but also the credibility one of the premier genealogical societies.
You know the background, as I have posted extensively about the Warren Cherokee saga. The media and various pundits have continued to assert that Warren was 1/32 Cherokee based on her great-great-great grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith.
I understand that the US has a law on the books to allow the prosecution of people who falsely claim to have won military medals — I think it’s something like the “stolen honour law” — is there anything similar for those who falsely claim minority status in order to benefit from legislation intended to aid members of minority groups? (Not that I think there should be such a law, but I’m just curious about whether such a thing is on the law books already.)
May 2, 2012
The real NCAA scandal is how they treat the student athletes
Gregg Easterbrook’s annual post-draft column spends a bit of time excoriating the NCAA for its massively misplaced ethical priorities:
The draft had been in progress more than a day when the Sinners finally chose, having traded their first choice and lost their second in Sinnersgate. New Orleans’s first selection was Akiem Hicks, who played eight-game seasons at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, going there after the NCAA blackballed him for recruiting violations. Nakia Hogan of the New Orleans Times-Picayune describes the deeply shocking abuses of which Hicks was guilty:
“In 2009, Hicks transferred to LSU from Sacramento City Community College. … But Hicks was mired in a minor recruiting violation and never got to play at LSU. The school discovered potential violations associated with impermissible telephone calls to Hicks in the recruitment process, impermissible transportation before and after his arrival at LSU, impermissible housing and reduced-rent at an apartment complex in Baton Rouge in the three months before his enrollment at LSU, and the purchase of one meal by a football office student worker.”
Impermissible telephone calls! Three months of help with rent money! One free meal! Lock him up and throw away the key!
The description of Hicks’ blackballing sums up everything offensive about NCAA hypocrisy. Not only is it theater of the absurd that the NCAA punishes telephone calls. Not only do college kids always need help with the rent — if a kid from an upper-class family who was applying to LSU got trust fund money for his rent and meals, no one would blink. The real scandal is that the NCAA punishes phone calls but could not care less about graduation rates.
In the year Hicks tried to enter LSU, the federal graduation rate for the LSU football program was 42 percent, compared to 56 percent for the school as a whole. (Find any Division I sport program’s graduation statistics here.) The NCAA took no action on that.
College football players are creating hundreds of millions of dollars of value that goes to fund luxury living by coaches, college administrators and NCAA staff, but are not getting educations in return. Each passing day brings more evidence of the Taylor Branch “new plantation” analysis of big-college sports. As big-college coaches and NCAA administrators dine at four-star restaurants, one hungry kid gets one free meal — that must be punished! The horror, the horror!
March 15, 2012
Abusing the homeless … by giving them money to perform tasks
Chris Selley skewers the bien-pensant journalists who got so upset that some homeless people were given an opportunity to earn money:
Now, you might think homeless people, development directors at homeless shelters and anti-homelessness activists would know a thing or two about what homeless people need and want, and you would be correct. You might therefore think this was a good-news story, and you would be wrong. BBH took heavy fire from keyboard warriors who think the program was just ghastly.
Here in Canada, Maclean’s technology correspondent Jesse Brown, perhaps testing out a new hyperbole app, led the pack. He called it a “disgusting marketing ploy,” an “epic milestone in the history of bad taste,” “grotesque” and “degrading — literally.” Yes, literally.
“Yes, [the employee] keeps the money. No, that doesn’t make it okay,” he sniffed, presumably enjoying easy access to many multiples of $50 as he typed.
[. . .]
There ought to be an official term for this phenomenon, wherein well-meaning, bien-pensant carer/sharers freak out on behalf of a group of (homeless, poor, oppressed, disaster-afflicted) people, only to be told by those people to shut their goddamn pie holes. We saw it after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, when people criticized Royal Caribbean cruise lines for continuing to sail to its private beaches in the country, where it employs locals and, for a time, donated the proceeds of its visits to relief efforts. Such bad taste!
March 13, 2012
El Neil on Limbaugh’s “show of weakness”
L. Neil Smith weighs in on the Rush Limbaugh “apology” to Sandra Fluke and the media feeding frenzy it perpetuated:
Please understand that I am not a conservative of any kind. As a more or less lifelong libertarian, and a proud, battle-scarred (and, I like to think, highly decorated) veteran of America’s 1960s Sexual Revolution (which actually began in the 1920s), I’m very much in favor of individuals finding joy, and generally doing whatever they desire with their own lives. Love (or whatever floats your boat) is such a rare commodity that they ought to revel in it whenever they can. What I am vehemently opposed to, however, is making other people pay for it.
But then, despite the basic truth behind what he’d said about her, Limbaugh decided — far more likely it was decided for him — to apologize.
John Wayne became famous, among other things, for declaring, in several of his movies, “Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.” Mark Harmon has said it, too, in the role of Leroy Jethro Gibbs of NCIS. And there’s a basic, Darwinistic truth in what they’ve both said, as illustrated by what happened next to the Formerly Fat Flumpus.
When his ideological enemies began screaming about what Limbaugh had said, if he’d told them to stick it where the sun don’t shine and break it off, their screaming would have subsided and finished with a whimper.
But the minute he apologized, the minute he rolled over on his back, sticking his paws in the air and exposing his belly, they fell on him like wolves. With the ladies and gentlemen of the evening who constitute our news media cheering them along, public figures called for removing him from the air the way they had Don Imus — and Imus, true to the sad, broken figure of Winston Smith he had become, joined in.
“Do it to Limbaugh!”
Meanwhile animals and barbarians of all kinds showered Limbaugh with death threats and other worst-wishes, and the Internet writhed like a pit of snakes with vile, anonymous accusations of every kind against him. Clearly free speech in this country is supposed to be reserved to the creatures who call themselves “progressives” because they’ve dirtied the word “liberal” to the point it can’t be used any more.
December 14, 2011
“‘They’ve been very draconian,’ Gingrich said, meaning it as a compliment”
Jacob Sullum on the GOP’s current front-runner for the 2012 presidential nomination:
The first time Newt Gingrich disgusted me was in 1995, when the freshly installed speaker of the House proposed the death penalty for drug smugglers. Fifteen years later, I had a similar response when Gingrich demanded government action to stop Muslims from building a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center.
From the perspective of someone who wants to minimize the role of government in every aspect of our lives, Gingrich is bad in the ways conservatives tend to be bad—and then some. At the same time, he is generally not good in the ways conservatives tend to be good, which makes me wonder why anyone would prefer him to Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate.
Gingrich’s bloodthirsty enthusiasm for the never-ending, always-failing war on drugs is especially appalling because he casually dismissed his own pot smoking as “a sign that we were alive and in graduate school in that era.” Last month he expressed admiration for Singapore’s drug policy, which includes forcible testing of suspected drug users, long prison sentences for possession, and mandatory execution of anyone caught with more than a specified amount. “They’ve been very draconian,” Gingrich said, meaning it as a compliment.
December 2, 2011
European anti-piracy campaign didn’t get permission to use music
In a lovely turn-about, they’re being sued by the composer whose music was, um, pirated:
Anti-piracy group BREIN is caught up in a huge copyright scandal in the Netherlands. A musician who composed a track for use at a local film festival later found it being used without permission in an anti-piracy campaign. He is now claiming at least a million euros for the unauthorized distribution of his work on DVDs. To make matters even worse, a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.
A story currently unfolding in the Netherlands painfully exposes the double standards and corruption that can be found in some parts of the copyright industry.
It all started back in 2006, when the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group BREIN reportedly asked musician Melchior Rietveldt to compose music for an anti-piracy video. The video in question was to be shown at a local film festival, and under these strict conditions the composer accepted the job.
However, according to a report from Pownews the anti-piracy ad was recycled for various other purposes without the composer’s permission. When Rietveldt bought a Harry Potter DVD early 2007, he noticed that the campaign video with his music was on it. And this was no isolated incident.
The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. According to Rietveldt’s financial advisor, the total sum in missed revenue amounts to at least a million euros ($1,300,000).
H/T to occultado for the link.
November 19, 2011
November 9, 2011
Penn State’s problem
Russ from Winterset loses his temper over the truly disturbing way Penn State is handling their child rape issues allegations:
So Joe Paterno is going to retire at the end of the season?
Whiskey? Tango? Foxtrot? Does Joe think he is going to be carried off the MISS PIGGY field to the BEAKER cheers of the DR. BUNSEN HONEYDEW crowd after leading Penn STADLER State to another GONZO bowl game? FOZZIE BEAR that noise. He should have the common DR. TEETH & THE ELECTRIC MAYHEM decency to slink out the back door of the coaching offices in shame like John SAM THE EAGLE Edwards leaving a session of a Federal RIZZO THE RAT Grand Jury.
That moderation expressed in my first update? KERMIT that. If Joe JANIS THE BASS PLAYER Paterno is allowed to coach another ANIMAL football game at Penn RALPH THE DOG State University, every WALDORF fan in the stadium who so much as smiles when their BERT team scores their first ERNIE touchdown can go Suck The Barbed Cock of Satan as far as I’m concerned.
BIG BIRD! Now I’m pissed.
And when you come back with the “look at all he’s done for the community” card, tell me this. How many other kids have been raped since 2002 because JoePa and the other jackasses at Penn State didn’t think it was necessary to get the police involved in this situation? Ten? Five? Even one? Is that a fair trade for all that Joe Paterno has done for his community?
If it’s not quite clear from context, he “replace[d] all but one of my f-bombs in the original draft of the post with the names of Muppet Characters”
September 20, 2011
About that “ethnic cleansing” in Basildon
All the great and the good are girding for battle over the Dale Farm evictions:
A terrible episode of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is looming. It promises to be so bad that a spokesman for the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has been helicoptered in to ‘oversee negotiations’. Amnesty International has set up a special ‘priority action’ page on its website, pleading with people to write letters of outrage to politicians. Head-tilting celebrities have turned up to raise awareness about what one journalist refers to as the ‘racist hysteria’ of the coming cleansing, including that grande dame of right-on causes, Vanessa Redgrave. Things are so dire that the BBC has sent in Fergal Keane, its softly spoken, Irish ponderer of all things evil, who doesn’t only wear his heart but also his lungs, liver and spleen on his sleeve, who cut his teeth reporting on the war in Bosnia and the calamity in Rwanda. ‘It’s a very apprehensive situation’, he intoned on last night’s news.
Oh god, what has happened? A new war in Africa? A rekindling of the old wars in Bosnia? No. Basildon Council in Essex in south-east England is planning to evict some Travellers from their plot of land in Dale Farm. That’s all. Yet watching the media coverage, perusing the millions of tweets of tear-stained concern, you could be forgiven for thinking that the so-called Battle of Dale Farm was a rerun of Bosnia 1992. That is because moral opportunists, cause-hunters, those desperate for some political momentum in their lives, have cynically transformed a small-scale spat between a council and some Gypsies into an epochal stand-off between the forces of racist hysteria and the massed ranks of decent UN cheerleaders. It speaks to the desperation of today’s wannabe moral crusaders that they are willing to infuse even the Dale Farm fallout with the kind of simple-minded moralistic lingo they usually reserve for foreign wars.
Of course, the threatened Dale Farm eviction, which was supposed to take place yesterday until the High Court in London imposed a temporary injunction against it, will be bad and distressing for the Traveller families involved. Eighty-six families could be forcibly removed, simply for building homes on land which they own yet which Basildon Council says is protected Green Belt territory. But is that any justification for using phrases such as ‘racist hysteria’ to describe Basildon Council’s actions and even conjuring up the Holocaust to describe the plight of the Travellers, with Vanessa Redgrave talking about ‘what happened during Hitler’s rule’ and demanding that ‘minorities shouldn’t be destroyed’? If there’s any hysteria here, it is among those who fantasise that we’re witnessing a rerun of Nazi evil and that it is down to conscience-exercising celebs and Amnesty letter-writers — the heroes of the hour — to stop it in its tracks.
September 5, 2011
“Listening to some foodie types, you would think that anything that has been remotely industrially processed was as deadly as nerve poison.”
Rob Lyons calls out hypocritical attitudes toward processed food:
Listening to some foodie types, you would think that anything that has been remotely industrially processed was as deadly as nerve poison. Yet even food snobs eat plenty of processed food. It’s just the right kind of processed food.
A great illustration of the fact that there is nothing wrong, per se, with processed food is a little bit of self-experimentation by Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University. Last year for 10 weeks, Haub ate a Twinkie bar every three hours instead of a meal, adding variety to his diet with Doritos, Oreos and sugary cereals. He kept up some semblance of good nutrition by taking multivitamins and throwing in a few vegetables, too.
But most importantly, Haub stuck to eating no more than 1,800 calories per day — well below the 2,500 calories per day usually suggested for men. The result was that Haub lost 27 pounds. This ‘convenience store diet’ may not have been ideal, but in many respects his health appeared to be better. His cholesterol test results suggested he was in better condition than before, despite this diet of ‘junk’.
August 27, 2011
QotD: Consistency
We are all glad that the Gadhafi regime is purportedly on its last legs. When I visited Libya in 2006, tragedy was what I saw—and a friendly population under the yoke of a psychopath. But I don’t think we have had much idea of what we were doing in Libya—a sort of diplomatic pastime secondary to presidential jet-setting and golfing. Moreover, I don’t see any hypocrisy in critiquing our confusion over Libya, as a supporter of the removal of Saddam Hussein. Wanting to use American power and influence to its fullest extent when going to war is preferable to not wanting to use all our power and influence when going to war. The hypocrisy is rather on the Left, which once damned the principle of intervention against an Arab Middle East oil-exporting nation that had not recently attacked us, only to support intervention against an Arab Middle East oil exporting nation that had not recently attacked us. In the Left’s defense, one could argue their consistency is that it’s OK if you have a UN vote, but irrelevant whether you have consent of the U.S. Congress.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the object of 23 different Congressional authorizations (one should go back and read that October 2002 long list of “whereas”es), had been in hot and cold wars with us since 1991, attacked four neighbors, and in the heart of the ancient caliphate was hosting all sorts of terrorists. In a post-911 climate it made sense to reckon with him. Indeed, I think one of the great untold stories of Iraq was the carnage of Islamic terrorists who by volition promised that Iraq would be the central theater in jihad, flocked there, were killed and wounded in droves, and lost—and vastly weakened their cause. But in contrast, the West was apparently in the middle of a weird charm offensive with Gadhafi (one advanced by bought-and-paid-for American academics, European oil companies, and multicultural elites), and the result by 2010 was that Libya was considered no longer the 1986 Libya that Reagan had bombed.
Victor Davis Hanson, “The Middle East Mess”, Works and Days, 2011-08-24
August 25, 2011
Look at what they actually do, not what they say
Tim Worstall peers behind the curtain of those noble, generous French fat-cats who wrote the letter to the French government, insisting that they be taxed more. It’s not a pretty picture:
All very jolly and public-spirited you might think, but applying a little bit of economic theory reveals that they’re somewhere along the “speaking with forked tongues” to “lying toads” continuum.
That bit of economics is the concept of “revealed preferences”: translated out of the jargon it just means don’t look at what people say, look at what they do. For example, Liliane Bettencourt, the L’Oreal heiress, is one signatory calling for higher taxes on herself: it’s also been widely reported that she has received tax refunds under French “fiscal shield” provisions intended to limit taxes on the wealthy to 50 per cent. Madame, if you really want to pay higher taxes, just don’t cash those cheques.
We see the same sort of call everywhere of course. All sorts of people call for higher taxes: it’s just that very few actually pay higher amounts of money. We can see this in both the UK and US.
The US has an account, “Gifts to the United States”, specifically for charitable-minded citizens. Send them a cheque, they’ll cash it and spend the money on government. Last time I checked, the figures they received were $2,671,628.40. Roughly speaking, 1 cent per head of population. OK, so, yes, taxes were too low in the US that year. By exactly that amount.
The UK numbers aren’t even that good. In the same year only five Brits sent in cheques to the Treasury and four of those people were deceased. No, the fifth was not Polly Toynbee, despite the impression one might get from her columns (well, I don’t know it wasn’t her but I’m sure she would have urged the rest of us to do the same if it were).
An FOI request revealed that from 2002 to 2009 actual living people contributed £7,349.90 to the Treasury, over and above their legally due taxation. No, not each or per year… but in total.
There’s literally nothing stopping people from paying more taxes than they actually owe: every jurisdiction appears to allow people to give more money voluntarily. The US government even allows it to be done electronically. So, if you feel you’re not paying “your rightful share”, go right ahead and give it to the government. If you don’t, you’re demonstrating that you really don’t feel under-taxed after all.
August 19, 2011
If you want to take the moral high ground, you must live up to it
James Delingpole has a bit of advice for the BBC and the Guardian:
The liberal-Left has many vices. But surely the most noisome one of all (in a crowded field) is its rank hypocrisy. If you’re going to take the moral high ground — as Lefties will insist on doing at every opportunity — the very least you owe the world in return if you have a shred of compunction, decency or intellectual consistency is to demonstrate more integrity than those you are impugning. And if you can’t do that, then bloody well shut up.
In the last few months, you can’t have helped noticing, the liberal-Left media, led by the BBC and the Guardian, have been dwelling on the News International phone hacking scandal with a shrillness and hysteria and foaming moral outrage out of all proportion to the nature of the offence.
Am I defending phone hacking or the leaking by police of confidential information to newsapers? Of course I’m not. I think it’s a horrible, grubby practice which must have left all the people who were victims of it feeling soiled and discomfited. But a) as we saw in the cities of Britain last week (and we’re also seeing on the stock markets) there are many problems far more deserving right now of the media’s crusading attention. And b) it’s not as if News International’s imprints which were the only newspapers playing this game. The gutter end of journalism is, of necessity, an unscrupulous, highly competitive business. Tabloid hacks stand or fall on the number of scoops they get over the opposition. It would be stretching the bounds of credulity to claim that other papers, besides those owned by Murdoch, have not engaged in similar dirty tricks.
