Category Archives: Education

Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Former “Law Professor”

2 Comments

…has been schooled:

he would have failed my constitutional law class if he had tried to justify such sweeping authority to categorically rewrite existing law and confer benefits Congress never provided as “prosecutorial discretion.”

I think his reputation as a Constitutional (or any other kind of) scholar is highly overrated. It’s nice to see the courts finally stepping up to rein in these power grabs.

[Update a while later]

The “I” word is really the only remedy to this kind of overreach.

But partisan politics takes precedence over Congressional prerogatives.

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Climate Jihadists

5 Comments

California is currently at their mercy:

Meeting the new target of an 80 percent cut by 2050 would require the use of even more speculative technologies, including those that the CCST reserachers considered to be “in development, not yet available” or merely “research concepts.”

Yet such problems do not seem to impinge much on Sacramento’s political class. Any group willing, as is most egregiously the case with the Latino caucus, to wage war on their own people, are not going to worry too much about such subtleties.

So then, who wins? It’s certainly not the environment, but some of the oligarchs in Silicon Valley may benefit as they have been feeding at the renewable-energy trough at the expense of less-well-off ratepayers. Then there’s the whole bureaucracy, and their academic allies, who can enjoy profitable employment by dreaming up new ways to make life in California more expensive and difficult for average citizens – envisioning schemes that the taxpayers have to finance. And, certainly, the climate change agenda could benefit multifamily housing builders, who will seek to force often-unwilling Californians into residences in which most would rather not spend their lives.

At some point, people are going to get fed up, but we don’t seem to be close yet.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Gender Feminists

22 Comments

…are science deniers:

Ms. Benenson explains that there’s an “inherent conflict in unrelated females’ relations with one another.” They very much want one another’s support—as coalition partners and for help with childcare—but “they must invest first and foremost in their families.” In fact, because we are driven to pass on our own genes or at least those of people closely related to us, it really doesn’t make evolutionary sense for a woman to invest in an unrelated woman, except as a form of self-protection.

How this plays out among women leads to some “very confusing” (and often ugly) relationships, with women as covert competitors, using tools including gossip and social exclusion to push down other women, especially any who dare to stand out.

Men, on the other hand, are direct and domineering with one another from boyhood on in a way that women are not. Men come together in groups, while women form dyads—groups of two. Men love competition and contests to see who’s best, whereas women get insulted if one woman seems to be asserting herself as better than the others.

In fact, research finds that women bond through sharing their failures and vulnerabilities—an essential bit of information that helps explain what Sandberg merely laments: women’s not proclaiming their greatness in the workplace and not finding it natural to just march right up and “sit at the table.”

Although Ms. Sandberg, like other business advice writers, repeats the stereotype of women as “communal,” it is actually men who evolved to be cooperators in a way that women, ever-vigilant that another woman might get one over on them, did not. When men aren’t fighting each another, they are quick to band together against a common enemy. Or, after kicking each other’s asses, they’ll go and have a beer.

Sure, it’s 2015, and we’re marching through the workplace with iPhones instead of pawing in the underbrush for berries, but this evolved psychology is still driving us, and it’s to the detriment of the women who read Ms. Sandberg’s book that it is ignored instead of taken into account.

People should be treated as individuals, not members of groups, but it’s foolish to deny the intrinsic differences between men and women. In a sense, they’re almost different symbiotic species.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Planet Obama

20 Comments

Where self awareness goes to die:

Alas, among the Obamas, self-awareness is not a strong suit, and this particular deficit isn’t limited to the first lady. This week, at Georgetown University, the president bemoaned the scourge of private schools, driven by “an anti-government ideology that disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together.”

One wonders: Did he feel that way as a teenager while in the bosom of the exclusive Punahou prep school in Honolulu? The Obama children, of course, attend Sidwell Friends, a private institution that costs $37,750 a year. Before moving to Washington, D.C., Sasha and Malia studied at the University of Chicago’s elite Laboratory School, where middle school tuition runs at $29,328.

Intellectual consistency is for the little people.

[Update a few minutes later]

“How can Obama object to private schools when his children attend one, he went to one?”