the Revision Division

STEVE SAILER: Benjamin Franklin’s American Dream.

Franklin had become interested in immigration reduction because of two abuses that may seem familiar today. First, the British government was dumping convicts on the colonies, and these poor-quality immigrants raised the crime rate.

The institutional background of the second is more abstruse, but the injustice Franklin perceived is even more familiar at the moment. Just as the current government is attempting to elect a new people, so, too, were Franklin’s political adversaries. By 1751, the Province of Pennsylvania had become an uneasy hybrid of ownership by the absentee landlords resident in England (the heirs of William Penn) and middle-class self-government. The hereditary proprietors attempted to tip the balance against Franklin’s local-rule party by recruiting immigrants in Germany, who upon arrival in Pennsylvania voted en bloc for the owners.

EUGENE VOLOKH: Let’s have a national conversation about race — so we can figure out whom to fire.

VOX DAY: How to lose to SJWs.

You do NOT fight a rhetorical battle with dialectic; in a rhetorical battle the only use for dialectic is in a rhetorical manner; it can be used to explode pseudo-dialectic poses, but that is the extent of its effectiveness. It is an intrinsically defensive weapon on the rhetorical level. This means you cannot win with it.

The primary difference between the Left and the Right is that the Left instinctively defends its extremists and the Right instinctively runs from them and leaves them out to dry. The latter is an appeasement strategy, and it works about as well as the infamous failures of appeasement we all know from history.

Read the rest.

EUGENE VOLOKH: Marquette University tells employees: “Opposition to same-sex marriage” could be “unlawful harassment”.

Given that Wisconsin law bans sexual orientation discrimination, and that discrimination laws have been read as banning “hostile environment harassment” — including political and social commentary that offends people based on race, religion, sex and (in those states that cover this) sexual orientation discrimination — there is indeed a risk that such speech by co-workers would be found to be unlawful. But this risk is far from a certainty, and there are indeed cases (e.g., this one) stating that the First Amendment forbids legal liability for this sort of political or social commentary overheard by offended co-workers. (The First Amendment, of course, doesn’t itself bar private employers from restricting employee speech, but it would indeed bar legal liability that pressures employers to restrict such speech.) . . .

A professor at Marquette . . . tells me: “[T]he new harassment training, which McAdams mentions on his blog and which we as faculty all had to go through this fall, has a chilling quality to it, … then basically urging people, when in doubt, to refrain from expression.”

That’s the idea.

Related: Marquette suspends prof’s teaching, orders him off campus:

In November, Prof. John McAdams (Marquette political science) — who blogs at Marquette Warrior — wrote a post critical of a philosophy instructor, Cheryl Abbate. . . . The post faulted Abbate for allegedly not allowing criticism of homosexuality in class discussions (the quotes appear to be from the student who had approached McAdams to complain about Abbate):

Abbate explained that “some opinions are not appropriate, such as racist opinions, sexist opinions” and then went on to ask “do you know if anyone in your class is homosexual?” And further “don’t you think it would be offensive to them” if some student raised his hand and challenged gay marriage? The point being, apparently that any gay classmates should not be subjected to hearing any disagreement with their presumed policy views. . . .

She went on “In this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.” She then invited the student to drop the class.

Earlier: “An anti-harassment training session at a Catholic university in Wisconsin encouraged employees to report anyone they hear criticizing gay marriage to the school’s human-resources department.”

OPEN-MINDEDNESS IS A ONE-WAY STREET: Christian Man Asks Thirteen Gay Bakeries To Bake Him Pro-Traditional Marriage Cake, And Is Denied Service By All Of Them.

Earlier: Baker forced to make gay wedding cakes, undergo sensitivity training, after losing lawsuit.

THANKS, MICROBES! Microbes on Pubic Hair Could Help Solve Sexual Crimes.

OPTICS: Only five show up to feminist protest of London’s Miss World pageant. So, how many no-shows told their girlfriends that they’d be there, only to flake at the last minute? Typical women.

FACTS DON’T MATTER: “I still don’t really care if what’s presented in this article is true or not because I think it’s far more important that people focus on the issue of sexual assault as a whole.” Reality is overrated.

Earlier: Don’t let facts get in the way of the preferred narrative.

Also: Facts don’t matter. Only the narrative does.

THE RISE of the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats: ‘We don’t feel at home any more, and it’s their fault’.

Politicians and the media in Sweden have maintained a stance unique in Europe in shunning the Sweden Democrats, excluding them from political debate and directing fierce criticism at anyone who suggests that the country’s asylum policy is a problem. Sweden currently accepts more than twice as many refugees per capita as any other of the 34 member states of the OECD.

Fredrik Reinfeldt, the centre-right former prime minister who has called on Swedes at the election to “open your hearts” to refugees, made headlines again when he said the country had “more space than you can imagine” to receive asylum seekers, who are expected to number 80,000 this year – a new Kristianstad every year. But as cracks have begun to appear in the Nordic model that has served Sweden so well, the country’s pro-immigration consensus has come under pressure. In Kristianstad itself, where 12,000 residents were born abroad, one in five voters chose the Sweden Democrats in September, and almost everyone has friends or workmates who are sympathisers. Even the party’s opponents hesitate to call it fascist.

UK: Family’s anger after wife who ran down and killed husband with her car following an argument is spared jail.

Pope, who is appealing her conviction, was initially arrested for causing her husband’s death by dangerous driving. However, the charge was dropped and replaced with the lesser offence of causing death by careless driving. . . .

Mr Pope’s sister, Christina Simmons, 33, said she burst into tears as Sheriff Robert Fife sentenced Pope to just 200 hours of community punishment. . . .

‘I couldn’t believe it,’ the mother-of-two said. ‘Even she thought she was going to jail – she had a rucksack and hold-all with her. But she turned the water-works on and was given unpaid work and a driving ban, all for taking somebody’s life. It is disgusting.’

Related: Gender [sic] disparity in criminal court. The post is mostly about the US, but the UK is mentioned: “Guidelines handed down in the UK in 2010 admonished judges to go easier on female offenders. In 2011 a UK Women’s Justice Task Force report offered the suggestion that women’s prisons in the UK be replaced with community service and mental health treatment. While the research done by the group making the suggestion is of interest, there is nothing in it to suggest that it is applicable only to women… yet the suggestion has not been extended to apply to male offenders.”

Earlier: Canada: After killing two with her car, defendant found “not guilty of dangerous driving causing death.” “Hecimovic testified she was distraught because of events at work that night and failed to see the lights at the intersection through her tears after making a lane change.”

SATIRE: Woman’s Babyless Nativity Scene Lets Neighbors Know She Is Childless By Choice. “‘Why are people so bothered by the absence of a baby?’ said Ms. Newirth. ‘Is that really so essential to the spirit of the holiday?'”

RUSSIA reaches out to Europe’s far-right parties.

A Russian loan to France’s National Front. Invitations to Moscow for leaders of Austria’s Freedom Party. Praise for Vladimir Putin from the head of Britain’s anti-European Union party.

As the diplomatic chill over Ukraine deepens, the Kremlin seems keener than ever to enlist Europe’s far-right parties in its campaign for influence in the West, seeking new relationships based largely on shared concern over the growing clout of the EU.

Russia fears that the EU and NATO could spread to countries it considers part of its sphere of influence. And it has repeatedly served notice that it will not tolerate that scenario, most recently with its Ukraine campaign.

Europe’s right-wing and populist parties, meanwhile, see a robust EU as contrary to their vision of Europe as a loose union of strong national states. And some regard the EU as a toady to America.

HEATHER MACDONALD: New York City’s Crime Drop Is Real.

TRIGGER WARNING: Read The ‘Hostile’ Column That Got Student Writer Suspended By Campus Newspaper.

He shouted after me, “I was just trying to do the right thing!”

The right thing… The right thing… I became so aware at that moment of the left hand that I had thrust out before falling, and suddenly my humanity was reduced to my handydnyss. The words rang in my eardrums, and my blood throbbed. This was the microaggression that broke the gender-neutral camel’s back. But unlike other microaggressions, this one triggered a shift in my worldview. All this while, I had been obsessed only with the color on this campus. All of a sudden, though, that became a side issue. All those race-based microaggressions now seemed trivial. I had, I realized, forgotten to think intersectionally.

The biggest obstacle to equality today is our barbaric attitude toward people of left-handydnyss. It’s a tragedy that I, a member of the left-handed community, had little to no idea of the atrocious persecution that we are dealt every day by institutions that are deeply embedded in society. So deeply embedded, and so ever-present, that we don’t even notice them.

That he was told to write an apology for this as a condition of staying on with the campus paper just makes his point for him.

CURIOUS: Genes that leap from one species to another are more common than we thought.

Most biologists viewed horizontal gene transfer among insects and other animals as something of an anomaly. Yes, bacteria and viruses exchanged DNA on a daily basis. But when it came to animals, plants and fungi, such genetic trespassing was surely rare overall and, in most cases, of little importance.

These are exactly the notions that have unravelled in the past decade as researchers have turned up one new case of gene transfer after another. ‘There was a time when we didn’t even realise that transposons could come from other species,’ says Cedric Feschotte of the University of Utah. ‘Now it seems our own genome is a patchwork of raw genetic material coming from different places with different histories – that to me is very profound. Even the largest eukaryote genomes have this patchwork origin to them.’

UH OH: FDNY drops physical test requirement amid low female hiring rate.

“It’s a lowering of the standards across the board,” said one former FDNY official familiar with training protocol.

“What needs to matter is how well you perform the tasks of firefighting,” he added. “The question is when you’re 270 pounds and you’re on the fourth floor and someone comes through that window — can they pick you up and drag you out or not?”

Earlier: “Unfireable” female fireman finally quits after failing timed running test for the sixth time.

Related: Swedish Equalism Endangering Lives. “Since the late 90s, Sweden has mandated equality in firefighting jobs, which has required a severe lowering of physical standards to bring women into the force. According to Dispatch International, a Swedish magazine, female firefighters take more than ten times as long to open reinforced doors, which would leave most people dead if they were trapped in a burning apartment for that long.”

GERMANY: 10,000 rally in Dresden against Islam/asylum seekers. “Germany is planning to take up to 20,000 Syrians in the coming months.”

2014 “HOTTEST YEAR” CLAIM A “Prostitution Of Science”.

The claim is based on just one (from a half dozen or so) thermometer-based products whose measurement quality is fraught with uncertainty and with actual error bars at least ten times larger than those claimed “effects”. WMO and others simply pick and choose the “data” that produces the press news they want in time for the Lima, Peru political pow-wow.

In truth the datasets taken as a whole clearly show that the global temperature has been flat-trending for nearly two decades now and that the theory of rising CO2 leading to global warming is sorrowfully exaggerated.

HERE WE GO: “While Washington focused yesterday on the prospect of yet another government shutdown, both House and Senate quickly and quietly passed bills which increase sanctions on Russia and authorize the sale of defensive arms to Ukraine.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Are carbohydrates needed to build muscle? Short answer: No.

REALITY ISN’T NEWSWORTHY: The Violent Threat Near UVA that Rolling Stone Downplayed. “Jesse Matthew Jr. does not ‘fit the narrative’ of the article’s spoiled, entitled, privileged, out-of-control frat boys.” In other words, the suspect is black.

Earlier: Gee, I wonder why this alleged college gang rape isn’t getting much attention.

HIT PIECE, OR VEILED CAMPAIGN AD? The Most Misogynistic, Hateful Elected Official In The Democratic World: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

After a female senator from the left-wing PSOL party (which includes prominent gay Congressman Jean Wyllys) requested that he be investigated, Bolsonaro said PSOL was a “party of dicks and faggots.” He added that he would respond to her “with toilet paper,” asked with mock sensitivity if he “injured her femininity,” and said she’s not like most Brazilian women. . . . When President Rousseff advocated a program to teach school children to respect gays, he strongly suggested it was because she is a lesbian (“stop lying,” he said on the floor of Congress, and “admit your love with homosexuals”). Last year, he called the Minister for Women’s Policy, Eleonora Menicucci, a “big dyke.” . . .

One of his current projects is support of a proposed law to ban same-sex couples from adopting children. When asked by The Intercept about this, he said: “If you want a baby so badly, why don’t you go and rent a woman’s belly?” He added: “don’t worry, soon homosexuals will be able to have a uterus implanted in them and then you can have a baby.”

THE NEW TOLERANCE: “An anti-harassment training session at a Catholic university in Wisconsin encouraged employees to report anyone they hear criticizing gay marriage to the school’s human-resources department.”

PAINFUL: The worst parking job in North America caught by police, YouTube.

DOG BITES MAN: Obama Now Just Making Up His Own Bible Verses. “The good book says don’t throw stones at glass houses.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, especially to those who are familiar with this exchange:

Falsani: Do you believe in sin?

OBAMA: Yes.

Falsani: What is sin?

OBAMA: Being out of alignment with my values.

Falsani: What happens if you have sin in your life?

OBAMA: I think it’s the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I’m true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward, when I’m not true to it, it’s its own punishment.

NO AUTHORITY, JUST RESPONSIBILITY: Dad Speaks Out After 21-Year-Old Sues Him to Pay College Tuition. “She didn’t want to abide by our rules, so she left. We asked her several times to come home and she never did. It makes my blood boil listening to a judge tell me that my daughter can go to any school in country she wants to, have no relationship with her parents, and we have to pay! We offered in-state tuition and she wants to go out of state. Common sense would say she should pay for it. The law is ridiculous. My ex and I have met with legislators who are writing a new bill that protects parents from this happening again. Do you realize that if you are married in the state of New Jersey, you are not under any legal obligation to pay for college? But, if you get divorced, you must contribute?”

Isn’t this just slavery under the guise of enforcing parental obligations? She’s an adult who has chosen to live away from home on her own terms, and has no right to take the property of any other adult without consent, parent or no parent.

Earlier: Tom James: Adult children suing parents for child support: Frivolous lawsuit or logical extension of the law? James refers to a similar case, also in New Jersey: “Rachel Canning is not an aberration. She is exactly what people should expect when they give unbridled authority to their governments to micromanage family life.”

WHOOPS: “Peru will seek criminal charges against Greenpeace activists who it says damaged the world-renowned Nazca lines by leaving footprints in the adjacent desert during a publicity stunt.”

ANN COULTER on the college rape hysteria.

If we’re in the middle of a college-rape epidemic, why do all the cases liberals promote keep turning out to be hoaxes? Maybe I’m overthinking this, but wouldn’t a real rape be more persuasive?

Instead, all the hair-on-fire college rape stories have been scams: the Duke lacrosse team’s gang-rape of a stripper; Lena Dunham’s rape by Oberlin College’s “resident Republican,” Barry; and Rolling Stone’s fraternity gang-rape at UVA. Two of the three were foisted on the public — and disproved in public — only in the last few weeks. . . .

Even Lady Gaga recently claimed she was raped, although, she admitted: “I didn’t even tell myself for the longest time.” How do you not “tell” yourself you’ve been raped?

JANET BLOOMFIELD: Women Who Lied About Being Raped And Why They Did It.

13. Women lie about rape when their friends get mad at them

Biurny Peguero was extremely drunk, out at a bar with friends, and impetuously accepted a ride in a van with three men. When she realized where she was, she became frightened and hysterical. The men took her back to the bar, and that’s when the trouble started. The friends she had left behind were angry with her and a brawl broke out among the women, who punched and bit one another. When a friend demanded to know if the men had raped Peguero, she said that they had. The bruises she had sustained in the fight with her friends were accepted as evidence of rape, and one man spent four years in jail on the charge.

REALITY IS OFFENSIVE: “Sexist” Barbie Book Accurately Describes How Video Games Are Made. “Here is Mattel, trying to portray Barbie as a strong woman in a largely male field, and the feminist/SJW machine blasts them because she conceivably might have work with men at some point!” It’s never enough.

MICHIGAN: Teachers Union Gives False Explanation to Members About Why Executive Salaries Rose. Isn’t “gives false explanation” just a euphemism for “lies,” considering that the union heads ought to know better about their very own policies regarding pay?

THE NEW TOLERANCE: College president sorry for saying ‘All lives matter’.

“We are united in our insistence that all lives matter,” read the e-mail, in which she made clear she was strongly behind the protests, writing that the grand jury decisions had “led to a shared fury… We gather in vigil, we raise our voices in protest.”

But she soon received backlash from students for her phrasing. They were offended that she did not stick with the slogan “black lives matter.”

The Daily Hampshire Gazette, which first covered the story, quoted one Smith sophomore, Cecelia Lim, as saying, “it felt like she was invalidating the experience of black lives.”

CHINA is worse off than you think. This post quotes from and provides commentary on an interview that can be found here.

Starting in 2008, China sought to counter global recession with huge amounts of ill-advised investment in redundant industrial capacity and vanity infrastructure projects—you know, airports with no commercial flights, highways to nowhere, and stadiums with no teams. The country is now submerged by the tsunami of bad debt that begets further unhealthy credit growth to service this debt. . . .

People are crazy if they believe any government statistics, which, of course, are largely fabricated. In China, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of physics holds sway, whereby the mere observation of economic numbers changes their behavior. For a time we started to look at numbers like electric-power production and freight traffic to get a line on actual economic growth because no one believed the gross- domestic-product figures. It didn’t take long for Beijing to figure this out and start doctoring those numbers, too. . . .

I’d be shocked if China is currently growing at a rate above, say, 4%, and any growth at all is coming from financial services, which ultimately depend on sustained growth in the rest of the economy. Think about it: Property sales are in decline, steel production is falling, commercial long-and short-haul vehicle sales are continuing to implode, and much of the growth in GDP is coming from huge rises in inventories across the economy. We track the 400 Chinese consumer companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets, and in the third quarter, their gross revenues fell 4% from a year ago. This is hardly a vibrant economy.

CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Denmark: Extremists using immigrant gangs to intimidate: People conforming to Sharia law to avoid being beaten up.

CRY WOLF: Canada: Sex victim con artist deported after police spend $150,000 investigating false claims.

Azzopardi faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison for her public mischief charge for misleading Calgary police, but she was sentenced to the two months she had already served in custody after pleading guilty during a brief appearance on Wednesday. . . .

As per policy, Canadian taxpayers will bear the cost of Azzopardi’s one-way flight. The public purse will also pay for a CBSA officer to escort the woman on her journey so she doesn’t disappear along the way.

Room and board for two months and a free return flight — what a punishment!

DALROCK: Feminists get sick on their own dog food.

All of this was a huge misstep by feminists, an unforced error. Just a few weeks ago they were methodically advancing their new rules for handling sexual assault on campus which place a huge burden on the accused. They even had many conservatives signing on to California’s new Yes Means Yes law in the deluded hope that it would usher in a post-hookup sexual marketplace. Now they are a sad, stinking, wretched mess, trying to figure out how to undo the damage they did to their own cause.

One thing strikes me as fairly certain; I don’t think feminists have learned their lesson.

A handful might have, but there are plenty of others who didn’t:

• “Ultimately, though, from where I sit in Charlottesville, to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake.”
• “While the details of this one case may have been misreported, this does not erase the somber truth this article brought to light.”

Such strict adherence to The Narrative (also known as a lie) will only let such people be taken in by the next boy who cried wolf.

REALLY? Berkeley Protest Rules: Let Blacks Beat Non-Blacks, Don’t Photograph Rioting Blacks. First Toronto and Boston, and now this. I wonder if anyone actually takes the directions seriously other than a handful of self-flagellating white kids.

CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Anti Muslim Hate Crime in Kansas City… Perpetuated by Somali.

Leaving aside the question of why Kansas City desperately needed a “community largely made-up of Somali immigrants,” this is just another case of tiresome Third World tribal warfare taking place on Western streets–a predictable consequence of mass immigration.

Nonetheless, keep your eye out for the actions of this “Kansas City man” to be used as a justification for crackdowns against actual Americans.

HOW ABOUT JUST WOMEN WITH MAKEUP AND PLASTIC SURGERY? Are Transsexuals Who Sleep With Straight Men Guilty Of Rape? “Last month, New Jersey State Assemblyman Troy Singleton (D-Burlington) introduced a bill that would criminalize ‘rape by fraud,’ the act of having sex with someone by lying about yourself.”

CATHY YOUNG: It’s Women Who Suffer When We Don’t Ask Questions. “One hopes that no sane person would take the discrediting of one very extreme account of sexual violence to mean that campus rape doesn’t happen, or that most women who report being raped are lying. But when believing all such reports is treated as an article of faith, every allegation exposed as false becomes deeply damaging.”

Again with the suffering women angle. Gee, and here I thought that all of the men whose reputations are tarnished, whose careers are harmed, whose property is vandalized, whose liberties are violated, and whose lives are taken were actually the ones who have been suffering. Silly me.

NEW JERSEY: Woman who specializes in convincing women and children that they were sexually abused by men loses her license to engage in psychotherapy — maybe for real this time.

December 2012: Marsha Kleinman Loses Appeal Of Psychological License Revocation. “Kleinman has long been known in New Jersey as a mental health professional who was dead set on finding men to be sexual abusers. That led her, in one of the cases before the ALJ and the Board, to browbeat a three-year-old girl for almost two years in the hopes of producing an allegation of sexual abuse against her father. Amazingly, the little girl stood up to Kleinman’s intimidation, sometimes by saying ‘no’ to her leading questions and sometimes by falling silent and refusing to take part in Kleinman’s efforts to destroy her father. In another case, a woman came to Kleinman to get a certificate of Battered Woman Syndrome. Kleinman ignored that completely, despite the fact that it was what she was being paid for. Instead, she repeatedly tried to get the woman to perjure herself before the court by claiming sexual abuse on the part of her husband. The woman refused and reported Kleinman to the Board.”

December 2014: New Jersey Revokes Marsha Kleinman’s License To Practice Psychology For A Second Time. (Note: she never got her license back after the first revocation, although she has appealed.) A recent news report available online contains footage from an earlier investigation showing Kleinman’s method.

KEEP DIGGING: Updated apology digs bigger hole for Rolling Stone.

The central confession of the Rolling Stone “note to readers” reflects heinous wrongdoing. At the request of Jackie, the magazine refrained from contacting the accused in this incident. “Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story,” reads the note, “we decided to honor her request not to contact the man who she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men who she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her.” The idea that the magazine was honoring a victim’s request conflicts with what a Rolling Stone editor told The Post’s Paul Farhi: “We did not talk to them. We could not reach them,” said Sean Woods of Rolling Stone.

So did the magazine lie about its reporting efforts? Have some sympathy here: What would you do if forced to choose between admitting that you agreed with a source not to contact other sources and admitting that your publication lacked the sophistication to track down modern day college students with presumably large digital footprints?

It’s nice of them to establish that the entire magazine, not just one writer, is lying to us.

THE WORLD WE MADE: UK: Josie Cunningham launches website encouraging girls to get pregnant and live on benefits.

The mum-of-three has helped create a website where desperate women can meet men and arrange seedy unprotected sex sessions with the aim of getting pregnant.

Josie told the Sun: “People will think I’m promoting unprotected sex so women can get pregnant, bag themselves a council house and have a life on benefits.

“But it’s really no different to what many girls have one night stands for on a Saturday night.

“Parents gain more points in many councils’ scoring systems [so] having a child definitely helps.”

Earlier: UK: Jobless mum advises her daughter, 19, to get pregnant – for an easy life on benefits. “I told Melissa to work the system and have a baby so she could claim more benefits, get a house of her own and have a better life. I don’t want her to work for peanuts in a low-pay job.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Slow the aging process through intermittent fasting and drinking water.

BAD BOYS: Paternal Antisocial Behavior and Sons’ Cognitive Ability: A Population-Based Quasiexperimental Study. “Sons whose fathers had a criminal conviction had lower cognitive ability than sons whose fathers had no conviction . . . Nuclear-family environmental factors did not contribute to the association. Our results suggest that the association between men’s antisocial behavior and their children’s cognitive ability is not causal but is due mostly to underlying genetic factors.”

NOT THE ONION: “Columbia Law School is permitting students claiming to be impaired due to the emotional impact of recent non-indictments in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner matters to postpone taking their final exams.”

The key passage, bolded in the original, is the rescheduling of exams for the “sufficiently impaired.” This, I’m told, is the essence of what the black students association asked for. The stuff about counseling, dialogue, re-education, etc. looks like window dressing. . . .

What is really behind the request for postponement of exams? I suspect it’s the fact that the students in question would rather protest with their friends and perhaps disrupt New York City than read cases, review lecture notes, or whatever it is that students do these days to prepare for exams. In addition, the students in question presumably want the law school to take their side on what they take to be a political question. In other words, this is, in part, a power play.

WHOOPS: Global warming “hockey stick,” finally updated with modern trees, collapses.

These particular proxies don’t work now and probably never did, and . . . this hockeystick shape depends on not using tree rings after 1980. . . .

The modern bureaucratized monopolistic version of “science” doesn’t work. Real scientists, who were really interested in the climate, would have published updates years ago. (Indeed, would never have published the hockeystick graph in the first place. Its dysfunctional combination of temperatures and truncated proxies mashed through a maths process so bad it produces a hockey stick most of the time even if the data is replaced by red noise.)

BREAK OUT THE POPCORN: “Sweden says it will pursue a feminist foreign policy to counter macho Russian aggression… even if no one really knows what that means.”

EGALITARIANISM WITHOUT EQUALITY Is Tyranny.

It only makes sense to treat things as equals if they actually are equal, a condition that is rarely met in the real world. . . .

The U.S. Department of Education is trying to eliminate racial disparities between suspension and other disciplinary rates in public schools, arguing that it is unfair to punish black students more heavily than white students. There would be some merit to this argument if black and white students engaged in disruptive behavior and other rule violations at the same rates, but they most emphatically do not.

Imagine if we were to apply the same standard on the basis of gender [sic]? Everyone knows that boys misbehave in schools more often than girls do. Should we punish the girls more or let the boys get away with their antics all for the sake of equality? This is obvious nonsense.

NOT DOING THE JOBS AMERICANS WON’T DO: “California foreign-born residents entering in 2010 or later and not participating in the labor force were estimated to be 51.9%.”