Tidbits
Political Quotations
To Accompany the November 29, 2016 edition of Tidbits
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2016/tidbits112916.htm
Bob Jensen at
Trinity University
It's hard to beat a person who never gives up.
Babe Ruth,
Historic Home Run Hitter
What's sad is to witness what Syria has become because nobody will give up.
And "because they're nonstate actors, it's
hard for us to get the satisfaction of [Gen.] MacArthur and the [Japanese]
Emperor [Hirohito] meeting and the war officially being over," Obama observed,
referencing the end of World War II.
President Barack Obama when asked if the USA of
the future will be perpetually engaged in war.
http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-on-americans-being-resigned-to-live-in-a-perpetual-war-2016-7
Only those who
will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T.S. Eliot
There
is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.
Margaret Wheatley
Even conversations
that are not politically correct.
We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life
that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.
George S. Patton
Why were nearly all
poll statisticians thinking alike in 2016?
If you don't know
where you're going, you might not get there.
Yogi Berra
Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude
you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly
on your shoulder.
Henry David Thoreau
Wildlife populations plunge almost 60 percent since
1970: WWF ---
https://www.yahoo.com/news/wildlife-populations-plunge-almost-60-percent-since-1970-000904325.html
California Drought Kills Off More Than 100
Million Trees ---
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/11/18/california-drought-kills-off-more-than-100-million-trees/
Big Farms Are Getting Bigger And Most Small Farms
Aren’t Really Farms At All ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/big-farms-are-getting-bigger-and-most-small-farms-arent-really-farms-at-all/
Tax Rate Of S&P 100 Companies ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/11/tax-rate-of-sp-100-companies.html
There are some surprises here
Can We Please Stop with This Nazi, Hitler, Name-Calling Stuff? ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2016/11/22/can-we-please-stop-with-this-nazi-hitler-namecalling-stuff-n2249202?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
20 Things About Chelsea Clinton That
Hillary and Bill Never Mention ---
http://scribol.com/a/news-and-politics/politics/things-about-chelsea-clinton-that-hillary-and-bill-never-mention/?utm_source=Outbrain&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=Chelsea_Clinton_Hidden_Facts_US_Desktop&utm_content=5300062
What Was Conservatism? Forty years ago, George H. Nash
created the field of conservative intellectual history. What can he tell us
about the right today? ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Was-Conservatism-/238345
Many who decried Trump now exhibit the worst traits he
was accused of. ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-trumpers-channel-their-inner-donald-1479774178?mod=djemMER
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is Democrats' nightmare
---
Byron York
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2607849
The 13 most amazing findings in the 2016 exit
poll ---
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/10/the-13-most-amazing-things-in-the-2016-exit-poll/
SNL Hillary Clinton Singing 'Hallelujah,' Or
How Political Correctness Gave Us Trump ---
http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/14/snls-hillary-clinton-singing-hallelujah
No, Voter Turnout Was Not Way Down from 2012
---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-voter-turnout-wasnt-way-down-from-2012/
FBI Director Comey Did Not Cost Hillary
Clinton the Election
Bernie Sanders
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-comey-not-cost-clinton-election-people-dont-think-dem-party-standing-video/
Hitler was merely using anti-Semitic
propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused,
enthusiastic and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and
sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
The New York Times in 1922
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/the-new-york-times-first-profile-of-hilter.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Gwen Ifill ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwen_Ifill
PBS' Gwen Ifill Dies at 61 ---
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/14/502031518/gwen-ifill-host-of-washington-week-pbs-newshour-dies
The death of Monica Petersen, an Assistant
Director at the Human Trafficking Center, sparked conspiracy theories involving
the Clinton Foundation.---
http://www.snopes.com/monica-petersen-killed/
California Voters Defy Trends—By Voting As
Expected On a Slew of Propositions ---
http://reason.com/archives/2016/11/11/california-voters-defy-trendsby-voting-a
Limits of Free Speech on Campus are Not Bright Line Limits
Oberlin College has dismissed Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and
composition, following an investigation into anti-Semitic and anti-Israel
statements she made on social media -- including her assertion that ISIS is
really an arm of Israeli and U.S. intelligence agencies and that Israel was
behind the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/11/16/oberlin-fires-joy-karega-following-investigation-her-anti-semitic-statements-social?mc_cid=e537345daf&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
|
Jensen Comment
This probably is testing the limit of free speech on campus. The interesting
question is the limit to which professors and students can claim highly
questionable "facts" with totally unsupported evidence. Some climate deniers are
being squelched on campus for the same reasons. I vote yes to such limits that
protect the academic respectability of our higher education institutions. But
the limits are seldom bright lines. One of my colleagues and friends at a
university was becoming a problem when he paid to publish his own book claiming
that his method of exercising was a cure for all types of cancer.
Stanford University (and other universities) might become sanctuary sites for
people Trump wants to deport
https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/5f1ef13e-c496-341e-a9ee-c2d08b7ebf17/ss_hundreds-walk-out-of-stanford.html
At the moment Trump says his priority id deporting undocumented persons who
commit crimes
Stanford better up its security efforts and budgets for refugee camps
There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter
--- they are all racist---
Slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/there_is_no_such_thing_as_a_good_trump_voter.html
That included police officers since nearly all the police unions supported
Trump. Nobody can say Slate is not doing its part to get police officers
ambushed.
Mourning for Whiteness
Toni Morrison
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/aftermath-sixteen-writers-on-trumps-america#morrison
She doesn't get it --- it's not about race in 2016
Trump Voters Aren't Racist, They Voted for
Obama
Vice President Joe Biden
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/justinholcomb/2016/11/17/joe-biden-trump-voters-arent-racist-they-voted-for-obama-n2247412?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
Forwarded by Naoimi Regen in Israel
Democrats have “cried wolf” so many times that nobody
believes them anymore.---
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
It's not all about Trump in Washington DC
Like the upheaval that happened with the national election, the states had
somewhat of their own shake up this November, with Republicans winning a record
number of legislative spots—and a historic high for governorships—in what some
have described as a “bloodbath ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/11/how-the-gops-sweep-in-the-states-will-shape-americas-schools/508283/
A B Grade is No Longer Good Enough for At-Risk
Students --- Inflate Your Grading Even More
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/11/15/developing-metrics-and-models-are-vital-student-learning-and-retention-essay?mc_cid=e52ed87db8&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
The Pentagon cleared the way for military personnel to
carry private firearms on base ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-private-firearms-military-base-open-carry-2016-11
Trump is about to use a budget trick to
steal from an entire generation ---
http://www.statedatalab.org/news/detail/trump-is-about-to-use-a-budget-trick-to-steal-from-an-entire-generation
Scientific advice to governments has never been in
greater demand; nor has it been more contested. From climate change to
cyber-security, poverty to pandemics, food technologies to fracking, the
questions being asked of scientists, engineers and other experts by
policymakers, the media and the wider public continue to multiply and increase
in complexity. At the same time, the authority and legitimacy of experts are
under increasing scrutiny ---
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/palcomms/article-collections/scientific-advice
Animated map shows the most dangerous
countries in the world for tourists ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/animated-map-dangerous-countries-world-tourists-terrorism-2016-7
Well, the
rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame
Preacherman seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain
Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks
Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain
False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin
Only a matter of time ’til night comes steppin’ in
Bob Dylan
Thanks for the heads up Scott. I don't know how I missed this one before the election. My latest tidbit on this is shown below.
How Trinity
University's alum Brad Parscale played a major role in the Trump win (if Trump
survives the recounts)
Inside the Trump Bunker Before the Election ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go
Jensen Comment
Although Clinton spent over three times as much per vote at Trump, it appears
that Trump spent much of the money he raised wisely in a Trinity University alum
named Brad Parscale in San Antonio.
Personally I think the role of the marketing effort by Parscale is overhyped in
the above article. Trump won with a lot of the
non-college-educated
blue collar workers and unemployed (male and female) in battle ground states. He
also had help from Cubans in Florida and an enormous number of angry and scared
older voters.
In my opinion marketing by computer networks (e.g. Tweets) was not the tactic that won over most of those Trump voters who are not computer users in social networks. In my opinion many of the voters for Trump did so out of anger and fear of lots of things like ISIS, global terror, unemployment, taking away guns in homes, immigration hordes, riots in the streets, rising health care insurance costs, anger with a biased media, nuclear weapons bullying by Iran, Russia, and North Korea, China's naval bullying in the South Pacific, etc.
The anger was there long before Parscale played to that anger. This is evident from Trump's amazing successes before Parscale in the Republican primaries, voters out to drain the swamp in Washington DC.
Even most computer users like me never read a single Trump Tweet, although I voted for Clinton and not Trump. Trump's Tweets would've turned me off even more.
It appears that there's a good argument for recounts in some battleground states. However, recounts are troublesome when losers of the recounts demand more recounts ad infinitum. The real problem is that USA elections have become so close among very angry voters unhappy with corrupt and ineffective leaders on both sides. The United States is no longer "united."
The president-elect’s analysts picked up disturbances others
weren’t seeing—the beginning of the (angry) storm that would deliver Trump to
the White House ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/trump-s-data-team-saw-a-different-america-and-they-were-right?cmpid=BBD111116_BIZ
Nobody saw it coming. Not the media. Certainly not Hillary Clinton. Not even Donald Trump’s team of data scientists, holed up in their San Antonio headquarters 1,800 miles from Trump Tower, were predicting this outcome. But the scientists picked up disturbances—like falling pressure before a hurricane—that others weren’t seeing. It was the beginning of the storm that would deliver Trump to the White House.
Flash back three weeks, to Oct. 18. The Trump campaign’s internal election simulator, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” showed Trump with a 7.8 percent chance of winning. That’s because his own model had him trailing in most of the states that would decide the election, including the pivotal state of Florida—but only by a small margin. And in some states, such as Virginia, he was winning, even though no public poll agreed.
Trump’s numbers were different, because his analysts, like Trump himself, were forecasting a fundamentally different electorate than other pollsters and almost all of the media: older, whiter, more rural, more populist. And much angrier at what they perceive to be an overclass of entitled elites. In the next three weeks, Trump channeled this anger on the stump, at times seeming almost unhinged.
“A vote for Hillary is a vote to surrender our government to public corruption, graft, and cronyism that threatens the survival of our constitutional system itself,” Trump told an Arizona crowd on Oct. 29. “What makes us exceptional is that we are a nation of laws and that we are all equal under those laws. Hillary’s corruption shreds the principle on which our nation was founded.”
His hyperbole and crassness drew broad condemnation from the media and political elite, who interpreted his anger as an acknowledgment that he was about to lose. But rather than alienate his gathering army, Trump’s antipathy fed their resolve.
He had an unwitting ally. “Hillary Clinton was the perfect foil for Trump’s message,” says Steve Bannon, his campaign chief executive officer. “From her e-mail server, to her lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street bankers, to her FBI problems, she represented everything that middle-class Americans had had enough of.”
Trump’s analysts had detected this upsurge in the electorate even before FBI Director James Comey delivered his Oct. 28 letter to Congress announcing that he was reopening his investigation into Clinton’s e-mails. But the news of the investigation accelerated the shift of a largely hidden rural mass of voters toward Trump.
Inside his campaign, Trump’s analysts became convinced that even their own models didn’t sufficiently account for the strength of these voters. “In the last week before the election, we undertook a big exercise to reweight all of our polling, because we thought that who [pollsters] were sampling from was the wrong idea of who the electorate was going to turn out to be this cycle,” says Matt Oczkowski, the head of product at London firm Cambridge Analytica and team leader on Trump’s campaign. “If he was going to win this election, it was going to be because of a Brexit-style mentality and a different demographic trend than other people were seeing.”
Trump’s team chose to focus on this electorate, partly because it was the only possible path for them. But after Comey, that movement of older, whiter voters became newly evident. It’s what led Trump’s campaign to broaden the electoral map in the final two weeks and send the candidate into states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan that no one else believed he could win (with the exception of liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, who deemed them “Brexit states”). Even on the eve of the election Trump’s models predicted only a 30 percent likelihood of victory.
The message Trump delivered to those voters was radically different from anything they would hear from an ordinary Republican: a bracing screed that implicated the entire global power structure—the banks, the government, the media, the guardians of secular culture—in a dark web of moral and intellectual corruption. And Trump insisted that he alone could fix it.
Continued in article
I can't believe The Chronicle published
this
"What Liberal Academics Don’t Get," by Roland Merullo,
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 20,
2016 ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Liberal-Academics-Don-t/238428?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=328c00f512c04936a81308fecd4427c9&elq=cab44d0705bd49bea9345b727b99e4d5&elqaid=11570&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=4562
All the election postmortems make me think of the disgraced former presidential candidate John Edwards, who famously talked about "the two Americas." There are different ways to delineate these two Americas: according to race, gender, political preference, religious feeling or the lack thereof, even by dietary choices. But this past week I’ve been thinking more about the dividing line between less educated and more educated Americans.
I straddle that line because, though I’m a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and have two degrees from Brown University, my roots are in Revere, Mass., a rough-edged, working-class city on Boston’s northern cuff. Many of my grammar-school classmates and both my siblings have gone through life without the benefit of undergraduate degrees. Of the 14 uncles and aunts on my father’s side, not one of them had more than a year of higher education. Six of my 36 first cousins went away to college.
When you spend a lot of time around people like that, as I do, and when you care about them enough to listen to them with respect, you come away with a much clearer appreciation for the emotions that propelled Donald Trump to victory than you do by listening to NPR, scanning your friends’ Twitter feeds, or sitting at a table in a university cafeteria with like-minded colleagues.
For those of us who see Trump as an appalling choice for the Oval Office it’s tempting to take the easy route and brand his supporters — overwhelmingly white men — as racist or misogynist. Hillary Clinton gave in to this temptation in her infamous — and politically damaging — "basket of deplorables" remark.
Certainly some of the people who voted for Trump are racists and bigots. Surely we’re within our rights to think of the white supremacists, KKK sympathizers, and woman-haters as deplorable characters, and to condemn Trump for the subtle and not-so-subtle signals he sends them.
But the Trump voters I know — and I know them well — don’t come close to fitting into that basket. The thought patterns that led them to support Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton had little to do with race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. They made their choice out of a deep-seated sense of humiliation, a feeling that they’ve been cheated out of their share of our national abundance.
I have a close friend who supports his family on a yearly salary of $48,000. In the past two decades, this man has not had a vacation that took him away from home. Every time he turns on the TV he sees advertisements with smiling men and women riding around in new cars, or drinking cocktails on a cruise ship, things and experiences he knows he will never have. In his adult life, has there been a career politician he can point to, Republican or Democrat, who has made his situation easier?
. . .
People take it personally when you mock their candidate — whether the mockery is face to face, on the cover of The New Yorker, on a bumper sticker, or in a political speech. And if you’re in the less-educated group, mockery hits home in a particularly painful way. From first grade, these people have been made to feel less because they couldn’t read as well, didn’t get A’s, weren’t the ones with a star on their papers to show Mom and Dad after school. And they didn’t go to college.
And highly educated liberals thought it furthered their candidate’s cause to post Facebook memes calling Trump an idiot, a monster, a fool?
After winning the Nevada Republican caucuses, Trump said, "I love the poorly educated." We laughed and made fun. But poorly educated whites were listening. And they vote, too. For decades those people have felt ignored and belittled. During the campaign they heard a great deal about the concerns of African-Americans, gay and transgendered people, immigrants, refugees. For us, those concerns are part and parcel of a necessary compassion; they dovetail with our sense of being American. For many white voters in the other America, though, stuck in dead-end jobs and low-rent neighborhoods, those comments make them want to say, "But what about me?"
When you spend a lot of time around people like that, as I do, and when you care about them enough to listen to them with respect, you come away with a much clearer appreciation for the emotions that propelled Donald Trump to victory than you do by listening to NPR, scanning your friends’ Twitter feeds, or sitting at a table in a university cafeteria with like-minded colleagues.
For those of us who see Trump as an appalling choice for the Oval Office it’s tempting to take the easy route and brand his supporters — overwhelmingly white men — as racist or misogynist. Hillary Clinton gave in to this temptation in her infamous — and politically damaging — "basket of deplorables" remark.
Certainly some of the people who voted for Trump are racists and bigots. Surely we’re within our rights to think of the white supremacists, KKK sympathizers, and woman-haters as deplorable characters, and to condemn Trump for the subtle and not-so-subtle signals he sends them.
But the Trump voters I know — and I know them well — don’t come close to fitting into that basket. The thought patterns that led them to support Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton had little to do with race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. They made their choice out of a deep-seated sense of humiliation, a feeling that they’ve been cheated out of their share of our national abundance.
I have a close friend who supports his family on a yearly salary of $48,000. In the past two decades, this man has not had a vacation that took him away from home. Every time he turns on the TV he sees advertisements with smiling men and women riding around in new cars, or drinking cocktails on a cruise ship, things and experiences he knows he will never have.
In his adult life, has there been a career politician he can point to, Republican or Democrat, who has made his situation easier?
Continued in article
The New Book of Snobs: A Definitive
Guide to Modern Snobbery ---
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/27/the-new-book-of-snobs-a-definitive-guide-to-modern-snobbery-dj-taylor-review
Snobbery is a form of social superiority, but it can also be a moral failing. Snobs may laud it over others, but we, in turn, despise and punish them for it.
There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter
(they are all racist)---
Slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/there_is_no_such_thing_as_a_good_trump_voter.html
Mourning for Whiteness
Toni Morrison
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/aftermath-sixteen-writers-on-trumps-america#morrison
She doesn't get it --- it's not about race in 2016 for most Trump voters
If progressives
want to win back political influence in America, they may need the support of
the people they see as racists ---
Emma
Green
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/protesters-trump-phildelphia/507665/
Jensen Comment
Whipping up unrest on college campuses and in the streets is not a good way to
win back political influence in America. The Ferguson looting and fires did a
whole lot more for Trump than Clinton
Joan C. Williams --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_C._Williams
"What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S.
Working Class," by Joan C. Williams, Harvard Business Review,
November 10, 2016
---
https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class?referral=00202&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-weekly_hotlist-_-hotlist_date&utm_source=newsletter_weekly_hotlist&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=hotlist_date&spMailingID=15892371&spUserID=MTkyODM0MDg0MAS2&spJobID=903305802&spReportId=OTAzMzA1ODAyS0
. . .
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.
. . .
Avoid the Temptation to Write Off Blue-Collar Resentment as Racism
Economic resentment has fueled racial anxiety that, in some Trump supporters (and Trump himself), bleeds into open racism. But to write off WWC anger as nothing more than racism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous.
National debates about policing are fueling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids (and professional athletes) derided policemen as “pigs.” This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For elites to write them off as racists is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are.
I do not defend police who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current demonization of the police underestimates the difficulty of ending police violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations. I don’t. If I had to, I might make some poor decisions too.
Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends on the left coast. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.
In 2010, while on a book tour for Reshaping the Work-Family Debate, I gave a talk about all of this at the Harvard Kennedy School. The woman who ran the speaker series, a major Democratic operative, liked my talk. “You are saying exactly what the Democrats need to hear,” she mused, “and they’ll never listen.” I hope now they will.oan C. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center of WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
Bob Jensen's threads and many quotations on the 2016 outcome are
provided at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2016/TidbitsQuotations111516.htm
It's not all about Trump in Washington DC
Like the upheaval that happened with the national election, the states had
somewhat of their own shake up this November, with Republicans winning a record
number of legislative spots—and a historic high for governorships—in what some
have described as a “bloodbath ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/11/how-the-gops-sweep-in-the-states-will-shape-americas-schools/508283/
Jensen Comment
This will likely impact education at all levels, including higher education.
Political Correctness Law of Higher Education
Writings should be judged on the political correctness of the author and not the
written words of the author --- this is the new standard for political
correctness on USA campuses.
Political Correctness on Campus
To be politically correct at the University of Virginia
students and faculty are encouraged to no longer quote the Constitution of the
State of Virginia or anything else Thomas Jefferson ever wrote.
U. of Virginia Students and Faculty Ask President to Stop Quoting
Jefferson, the founder of the University of Virginia and principle author of
Virginia's State Constitution ---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/u-of-virginia-students-and-faculty-ask-president-to-stop-quoting-jefferson/115516?elqTrackId=e50a59346dec4186a11b83264cd1ea2a&elq=a373ec4040f04e3bb1f24fb30dd2426c&elqaid=11482&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=4497
Are students in the Law School of the University of Virginia
banned from reading or citing the State Constitution?
Is this type of political correctness that will end historical scholarship?
Writings should be judged on the political correctness of the author and not the written words of the author --- this is the new standard for political correctness on USA campuses.
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness guidelines in
higher education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
Oops: The Harvard Business Review just violated
the Political Correctness Law
Debate on the Post-Election Reaction of the University of Michigan Campus and
Its President
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/11/15/debate-michigan-presidents-election-statement?mc_cid=0cdad2e794&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
"What So
Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class," by Joan C. Williams,
Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016 ---
https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class?referral=00202&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-weekly_hotlist-_-hotlist_date&utm_source=newsletter_weekly_hotlist&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=hotlist_date&spMailingID=15892371&spUserID=MTkyODM0MDg0MAS2&spJobID=903305802&spReportId=OTAzMzA1ODAyS0
. . .
Avoid the Temptation to Write Off Blue-Collar Resentment as Racism
Economic resentment has fueled racial anxiety that, in some Trump supporters (and Trump himself), bleeds into open racism. But to write off WWC anger as nothing more than racism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous.
National debates about policing are fueling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids (and professional athletes) derided policemen as “pigs.” This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For elites to write them off as racists is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are.
I do not defend police who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current demonization of the police underestimates the difficulty of ending police violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations. I don’t. If I had to, I might make some poor decisions too.
Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends on the left coast. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.
In 2010, while on a book tour for Reshaping the Work-Family Debate, I gave a talk about all of this at the Harvard Kennedy School. The woman who ran the speaker series, a major Democratic operative, liked my talk. “You are saying exactly what the Democrats need to hear,” she mused, “and they’ll never listen.” I hope now they will.
Joan C. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center of WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
Joan C. Williams --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_C._Williams
Sometimes writers on the right or left are lousy at research
A writer for the left-leaning Vox Website asserts that Trump won because most
of his supporters despise women ---
http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/11/15/13571478/trump-president-sexual-assault-sexism-misogyny-won
Most serious researchers concluded that angers over his treatment of women were ignored due to many more dominant fears such as fears of unemployment, Supreme Court override of the 2nd Amendment, immigration hordes, budget deficits, and unsustatinable Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Trump's treatment of women like Hillary's email indiscretions were low on the list of angers among the people that voted for Trump.
If progressives want to win back political influence
in America, they may need the support of the people they see as racists
(and women haters)---
Emma Green
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/protesters-trump-phildelphia/507665/
Jensen Comment
Whipping up unrest on college campuses and in the streets is not a good way to
win back political influence in America. The Ferguson looting and fires did a
whole lot more for Trump than his copping feels at beauty contests did for
Hillary Clinton.
The Real Reason for Disappearing Jobs Isn't Trade, It's Robots ---
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-real-reason-for-disappearing-jobs-isnt-trade-its-robots/ar-AAkzMCq?ocid=spartanntp
. . .
Although conventional wisdom holds that manufacturing in the United States is in decline, in fact it's been growing steadily.
The production of manufactured goods in the U.S. has been on a "on a steady and long-term growth path" as measured in inflation-adjusted dollars in recent decades, according to a report on the evolution of the sector from Ball State University. "The notion that manufacturing in the United States is in decline is factually incorrect," the report states.
Even through the Great Recession, manufacturing grew in the U.S. From 2006 to 2013, manufacturing grew by 17.6 percent, or at roughly 2.2 percent per year. But, even as manufacturing production has grown, employment in the sector "has largely stagnated," the Ball State report says. That is due to increases in productivity of each worker thanks to technology.
The period from 2000-2010 saw the largest losses in employment in manufacturing in the history of the U.S., the report says. "Had we kept 2000-levels of productivity and applied them to 2010-levels of production, we would have required 20.9 million manufacturing workers. Instead, we employed only 12.1 million," the report says.
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Book Reviews
1-Free Thought Under Siege?
2-What's Happened To The University? A Sociological
Exploration Of Its Infantilisation (read that microaggressions and political
correctness)
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/11/whats-happened-to-the-university-a-sociological-exploration-of-its-infantilisation.html
. . .
Rancorous trends such as microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings and intellectual intolerance have taken hold at universities with breathtaking speed. Last year’s controversy over Halloween costumes at Yale led to the departure of two respected faculty members, and this year made the fall festival a flashpoint of conflict at campuses across the country. The recent explosion in the number of university administrators, coupled with an environment of perpetual suspicion—the University of Florida urges students to report on one another to its “Bias Education and Response Team”—drives students who need to resolve normal tensions in human interaction to instead seek intervention by mediators, diversity officers, student life deans or lawyers.
As Frank Furedi compellingly argues in this deeply perceptive and important book, these phenomena are not just harmless fads acted out by a few petulant students and their indulgent professors in an academic cocoon. Rather, they are both a symptom and a cause of malaise and strife in society at large. At stake is whether freedom of thought will long survive and whether individuals will have the temperament to resolve everyday social and workplace conflicts without bureaucratic intervention or litigation.
Mr. Furedi, an emeritus professor at England’s University of Kent, argues that the ethos prevailing at many universities on both sides of the Atlantic is the culmination of an infantilizing paternalism that has defined education and child-rearing in recent decades. It is a pedagogy that from the earliest ages values, above all else, self-esteem, maximum risk avoidance and continuous emotional validation and affirmation. (Check your child’s trophy case.) Helicopter parents and teachers act as though “fragility and vulnerability are the defining characteristics of personhood.”
The devastating result: Young people are raised into an “eternal dependency.” Parenting experts and educators insist that the views of all pupils must be unconditionally respected, never judged, regardless of their merit. They wield the unassailable power of a medical warning: Children, even young adults, simply can’t handle rejection of their ideas, or hearing ones that cause the slightest “discomfort,” lest they undergo “trauma.”
It is not surprising to Mr. Furedi that today’s undergraduates, having grown up in such an environment, should find any serious criticism, debate or unfamiliar idea to be “an unacceptable challenge to their personas.” ...
The new demands for “balancing” free speech with sensitivity and respect have several unifying themes, according to Mr. Furedi. One is that they are based on the subjective sensitivities of anyone who claims to be offended. If words can cause trauma and are almost akin to violence, an appeal to health and safety guarantees that “the work of the language police can never cease.” Microaggressions, by definition, are committed unconsciously and without intent. Since “it is almost impossible to refute an allegation of microaggression,” the author views them as the ultimate “weaponisation” of offense-taking. Emory University students, for instance, demanded redress for their “genuine concern and pain” after seeing the name of a major presidential candidate written in chalk on campus, an incident proving “that in a world where anything can be triggering, people will be triggered by anything.” ...
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness in action ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
The IRS Scandal, Day 1287
IRS Commissioner Koskinen Urges Trump Transition Team To Name New IRS
Commissioner Soon
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/11/the-irs-scandal-day-1287koskinen-urges-trump-team-to-name-new-irs-commissioner-soon.html
Trump is about to use a budget trick to
steal from an entire generation ---
http://www.statedatalab.org/news/detail/trump-is-about-to-use-a-budget-trick-to-steal-from-an-entire-generation
The Atlantic: Fidel Knew the 'Cuban Model' Couldn't Last Forever ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/11/fidel-castro-obituary/508805/
. . .
His self-awareness evinced itself most notably during a discussion about the relevance of Cuban revolutionary socialism. I had asked him if he believed that the Cuban model was still something worth exporting. He answered, “The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore.” As I wrote at the time, this struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments—it seemed as if the leader of the Revolution had just said, in essence, “never mind.”
Continued in article
In Cuba where the goal was to eliminate inequality, Fidel Castro found that his ration books, free housing, free public transportation, and minimal wages destroyed incentives to work.
"Report: Castro says Cuban model doesn't work," by Paul Haven.
Associated Press, Yahoo News, September 8, 2010 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100908/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_cuba_fidel_castro_5
Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba's communist economic model doesn't work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.
The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel's brother Raul, the country's president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba's 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.
He said Castro made the comment casually over lunch following a long talk about the Middle East, and did not elaborate. The Cuban government had no immediate comment on Goldberg's account.
Since stepping down from power in 2006, the ex-president has focused almost entirely on international affairs and said very little about Cuba and its politics, perhaps to limit the perception he is stepping on his brother's toes.
Goldberg, who traveled to Cuba at Castro's invitation last week to discuss a recent Atlantic article he wrote about Iran's nuclear program, also reported on Tuesday that Castro questioned his own actions during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, including his recommendation to Soviet leaders that they use nuclear weapons against the United States.
Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba has clung to its communist system.
The state controls well over 90 percent of the economy, paying workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free health care and education, and nearly free transportation and housing. At least a portion of every citizen's food needs are sold to them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices.
President Raul Castro and others have instituted a series of limited economic reforms, and have warned Cubans that they need to start working harder and expecting less from the government. But the president has also made it clear he has no desire to depart from Cuba's socialist system or embrace capitalism.
Fidel Castro stepped down temporarily in July 2006 due to a serious illness that nearly killed him.
He resigned permanently two years later, but remains head of the Communist Party. After staying almost entirely out of the spotlight for four years, he re-emerged in July and now speaks frequently about international affairs. He has been warning for weeks of the threat of a nuclear war over Iran.
Castro's interview with Goldberg is the only one he has given to an American journalist since he left office.
For decades, marine chemists have faced an elusive
paradox. The surface waters of the world's oceans are supersaturated with the
greenhouse gas methane, yet most species of microbes that can generate the gas
can't survive in oxygen-rich surface waters. So where exactly does all the
methane come from? This longstanding riddle, known as the "marine methane
paradox," may have finally been cracked thanks to a new study from the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
http://phys.org/news/2016-11-mysterious-source-greenhouse-gas-methane.html#jCp
National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson minced few words in a recent assessment
of the future of the IRS and its current interactions with taxpayers: The
agency’s growing disconnect from the people it serves will lead to its failure
---
http://www.accountingweb.com/tax/irs/nina-olson-irs-out-of-touch-with-the-people-it-serves?source=tx112116
Despite the IRS’s focus on its “future state” initiative, which is laden with goals of easier transactions through digitalization of services, the agency must focus more on physically engaging with taxpayers, Olson said during the American Institute of CPAs’ National Tax Conference in Washington, DC, on Nov. 15. Her year of nationwide travel, interacting with taxpayers and listening to focus groups, provided an overarching mantra: Improving the IRS’s current state preempts its future state. “Go online to the IRS website, and they have these vignettes of how they envision different taxpayers interacting [with the agency] in the future, and it’s all through computers and digital notifications,” she said. “People think it’s arrogant, that it shows taxpayers losing and the taxpayer being wrong.”
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Finding and Using Health Statistics --- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/usestats/index.htm
Best Medical Schools in the World (2013) ---
http://studychacha.com/discuss/139694-best-medical-school-world.html
More of the Top 50 are in the USA relative to any other nation.
World Health Organization ranking of health systems in 2000 ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_ranking_of_health_systems_in_2000
Bob Jensen's threads on economic statistics and databases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics
Medicare Fraud is Rampant ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/stevesherman/2016/02/05/medicare-fraud-is-rampant-n2115375?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
Medicaid Explodes New enrollments vastly exceed estimates, and
states are on the hook. ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/medicaid-explodes-1479426939?mod=djemMER
On Donald Trump’s victory Republicans in Congress are primed for an ambitious agenda, and not a moment too soon. One immediate problem is ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid, which has seen enrollment at least twice as high as advertised.
Most of the insurance coverage gains from the law come from opening Medicaid eligibility beyond its original goal of helping the poor and disabled to include prime-age, able-bodied, childless adults. The Supreme Court made this expansion optional in 2012, and Governors claimed not joining would leave “free money” on the table because the feds would pick up 100% of the costs of new beneficiaries.
In a new report this week for the Foundation for Government Accountability, Jonathan Ingram and Nicholas Horton tracked down the original enrollment projections by actuaries in 24 states that expanded and have since disclosed at least a year of data on the results. Some 11.5 million people now belong to ObamaCare’s new class of able-bodied enrollees, or 110% higher than the projections.
Analysts in California expected only 910,000 people to sign up, but instead 3.84 million have, 322% off the projections. The situation is nearly as dire in New York, where enrollment is 276% higher than expected, and Illinois, which is up 90%. This liberal state triumvirate is particularly notable because they already ran generous welfare states long before ObamaCare.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
President Obama baited the hook by claiming the Federal Government would pay for
Medicaid expansion. But the states that took the bait are now on the hook.
Medicaid is not the largest single expense item in most states, and the expense
that will go completely out of control (heavily due to fraud) will be the cost
of caring for older people where medical expenses are greatest, especially since
Medicaid foots sometimes years of all nursing home and medication costs.
Russia's Bad Health Care System Is Getting Worse ---
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/12/02/dire-russia-health-care-523380.html
Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Bob Jensen's health care messaging --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Bob Jensen's Home Page --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/