and Shop Amazon - Save on Temptations and Dentastix Products.
and Shop Amazon - Save on Petmate Products.Their 1949 marriage in Palm Springs was front-page news, with Howard Hughes, a close friend of Grant's, serving as best man. It would be the most durable of Grant's five marriages.
After they separated in 1958, Drake started seeing a Beverly Hills psychotherapist, who prescribed therapy with LSD, which was legal at the time.
In her first session, she experienced the pain of her own birth.
"Enthused by what she considered an incredible experience, Betsy went home and called her mother, with whom she hadn't spoken in a decade," Vanity Fair magazine reported in 2010.
"'I told her, 'I love you,' and after all that time, she just said, 'Of course you do, darling,' and hung up."
Drake talked Grant into similar sessions and he came away a true believer, using the drug more than 100 times...
To our fellow Claremont students, we are disappointed in you as well. We are ashamed of you for trying to end someone’s career over a poorly worded email. This is not a political statement––this is a person’s livelihood that you so carelessly sought to destroy. We are disappointed that you chose to scream and swear at your administrators. That is not how adults solve problems, and your behavior reflects poorly on all of us here in Claremont. This is not who we are and this is not how we conduct ourselves, but this is the image of us that has now reached the national stage.Heh.
We are disappointed in your demands. If you want to take a class in “ethnic, racial, and sexuality theory,” feel free to take one, but don’t force such an ideologically driven course on all CMC students. If the dearth of such courses at CMC bothers you, maybe you should have chosen a different school. If students chose to attend Caltech and then complained about the lack of literature classes, that’s on them. And though it wouldn’t hurt to have a more diverse faculty, the demand that CMC increase the number of minority faculty members either rests on the assumption that CMC has a history of discriminating against qualified professors of color, or, more realistically, it advocates for the hiring of less qualified faculty based simply on the fact that they belong to marginalized groups. A hiring practice of this sort would not benefit any CMC students, yourselves included.
We are disappointed in the fact that your movement has successfully managed to convince its members that anyone who dissents does so not for intelligent reasons, but due to moral failure or maliciousness. We are disappointed that you’ve used phrases like “silence is violence” to not only demonize those who oppose you, but all who are not actively supporting you. We are most disappointed, however, in the rhetoric surrounding “safe spaces.” College is the last place that should be a safe space. We come here to learn about views that differ from our own, and if we aren’t made to feel uncomfortable by these ideas, then perhaps we aren’t venturing far enough outside of our comfort zone. We would be doing ourselves a disservice to ignore viewpoints solely on the grounds that they may make us uncomfortable, and we would not be preparing ourselves to cope well with adversity in the future. Dealing with ideas that make us uncomfortable is an important part of growing as students and as people, and your ideas will inhibit opportunities for that growth.
We are adults, and we need to be mature enough to take ownership of and responsibility for our feelings, rather than demanding that those around us cater to our individual needs...
The racist, McCarthyite, totalitarian movement rearing its ugly head on college campuses as diverse as Missouri, Yale and Vanderbilt is being treated by conservatives as a case of kids too fragile to handle views with which they disagree. This may work as a debating tactic but it misunderstands both the malignancy of the politics behind the campaign and the ferocity of its radical leaders. Now they are calling for the heads of liberals (and getting them). But quaint American prejudices like the First Amendment still stand in their way. But for how long? If this movement, which includes large contingents of the Democratic Party – including the president, achieves critical mass and succeeds in its agendas and acquires the necessary power, who can doubt that they will be putting dissenters in prison and worse? These are people intoxicated with their own virtue, and determined to purge non-believers in their path. They are a perfect analogue to the Islamic fanatics who want to purify the planet. While the Islamic fanatics be-head, the American fanatics suppress and burn. At bottom, they see the world in parallel terms: Slay the infidels wherever you find them.
The current eruptions on college campuses, which will be escalating through this year, are the product of four decades of capitulations to leftwing racism and political correctness, which is a totalitarian party line whose inventor Mao Zedong murdered 70 million Chinese in its name. America still has strong traditions of intellectual pluralism and individual rights, which are obstacles in the way of the progressive storm troopers, but for how long? How many capitulations by so-called liberals, how many unconstitutional executive orders, how many coercions by Democrat-controlled government agencies before there are no obstacles left?
We saw these lynch mobs first hand in Ferguson, but only an inaudible few were willing to name them for what they were. In Ferguson, the president of the United States supported the lynchers, along with the Democratic Party and the leftwing chorus. And so it spread to New York and Baltimore and now Missouri and Yale. The time has come to call this for what it is, an American fascism. But the time is also getting late to reverse the tide.
The passion that ousted the heads of the University of Missouri after protests over racial discrimination on campus is spreading to other colleges across the country, turning traditional fall semesters into a period of intense focus on racial misunderstanding and whether activism stifles free speech.So, they were inspired by a lie, "Hands Up, Don't Shoot"? That figures.
Hundreds of students demonstrated at Ithaca College in upstate New York on Wednesday, demanding the resignation of the college president, Tom Rochon, for what they said was his lackluster response to complaints of racial insensitivity on campus, including an episode in which two white male alumni on a panel called a black alumna a “savage,” after she said she had a “savage hunger” to succeed.
At Smith College, in Northampton, Mass., about 100 students demonstrated in solidarity with their counterparts in Ithaca and Missouri, while at the University of Kansas, the administration called a town hall meeting to give students and faculty a chance “to be heard” before any concerns about race on campus could grow.
At Claremont McKenna College in California, the junior class president resigned Tuesday after a furor over a Facebook photograph that showed her posing with two women who were wearing sombreros, ponchos and mustaches for Halloween. A campus demonstration followed on Wednesday.
And at Yale, the campus is still in turmoil about an overheard “white girls only” remark at an off-campus fraternity party, and debating over whether students had a right to wear transgressive Halloween costumes.
In interviews, students say they have been inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement that grew out of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by the police in Ferguson, Mo. They say the victory of protesting students and football players at the University of Missouri has spurred them to demand that their universities provide a safe space for students of color...
By bonfire of the academy we mean a conflict of values about the idea of a university that now threatens to undermine or destroy universities as a place of learning. Exhibit A is the ruin called the University of Missouri.Keep reading.
In the 1960s—at Cornell, Columbia, Berkeley and elsewhere—the self-described Student Left occupied buildings with what they often called “non-negotiable” demands. In the decades since, the academy—its leaders and faculties—by and large has accommodated many of those demands regarding appropriate academic subjects, admissions policies and what has become the aggressive and non-tolerant politics of identity and grievance.
This political trajectory arrived at its logical end this week at Missouri with the abrupt resignation of the school’s president, quickly followed by its number two official. The kids deposed them, as their liberal elders applauded either out of solidarity or cowardice.
The cause of President Tim Wolfe’s resignation is said to be his failure to address several racially charged incidents on campus and the threat by its Division One football team to boycott this weekend’s game unless he stepped down.
The university’s campus, in Columbia, is not far from Ferguson, Mo. Among the charges against President Wolfe was that his response to the shooting of Michael Brown was inadequate, which is to say, he did not sufficiently take the side of the protesters or rioters. Since Ferguson, the left-wing Black Lives Matter group has come to prominence and intimidated even presidential candidates. This has been accompanied by successive claims of racial grievance against public and private institutions.
In the United States, by now the instinct of the overwhelming majority of people is to address such complaints in good faith, investigate them and remediate where necessary. Only the tiniest minority would wish to see racial grievances bleed indefinitely. Yet the kids assert that America is irredeemably racist...
Donald Trump and Marco Rubio won Tuesday’s night primetime Republican debate, according to an overnight poll of Internet users who watched the contest, but Mr. Trump came out as the favorite among Republicans and left the best impression about his ability to serve as president.Also at Memeorandum.
Some 24% of debate-viewers named Mr. Trump and 23% picked Mr. Rubio as the winner of the eight-candidate event, which was sponsored by the Wall Street Journal and Fox Business News. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson followed, with 13% declaring each to have won.
Mr. Trump’s lead in the Internet survey was larger among debate-watchers who said they’d vote in a Republican primary...
Marco Rubio won the fourth Republican debate -- and John Kasich lost.
That’s the assessment of this week’s POLITICO Caucus, our bipartisan survey of the top activists, strategists and operatives in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. Nearly 40 percent of Republican participants said Rubio won the debate in a survey taken immediately following Tuesday night’s contest -- no other candidate had more than 12 percent.
“Energy,” said an Iowa Republican of Rubio. “He wants the job.”
“By every measure Marco Rubio won the [night],” a New Hampshire Republican said. “Strong and informed on every issue, inspirational, presidential. He actually moved the ball down the field.”
Added a Nevada Republican, Rubio “gave a compelling vision for a hopeful future contrasting his youthful vision to a tired "older" take on the country epitomized by Hillary.”
For the second Republican debate in a row, the POLITICO Caucus named the Florida senator the biggest winner of the night, noting his vigorous defense of a muscular American foreign policy — one of the biggest applause lines of the evening — and forceful remarks concerning Wall Street as evidence of a strong and articulate candidate.
Forty-two percent of Democrats also agreed that Rubio won the night.
“He is engaging, articulate, comfortable in his own skin and has a hopeful positive message...he packages well for a party that is looking for change but still wants a foot in policy and politics,” a New Hampshire Democrat said...
On the left and right, voters express anxiety over the future in a new poll https://t.co/YhMV0PM0mc pic.twitter.com/WFVcaBv6Pd
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) November 9, 2015One year before the presidential election, a pervasive disquiet has shaped voter attitudes, with a majority of Republicans pessimistic about moral values and the increasing diversity of the country's population, and Democrats uneasy about an economy they see as tilted toward the rich.
By more than 2 to 1, voters both nationally and in California say they are more worried than hopeful about changes in the country's morals and values. By nearly the same margin, more worry than express hope about the changing national economy. And by 5 to 1, they say they are worried about how the nation's politics have changed.
California voters and those nationwide largely agree on those points but diverge on others. Nationally, for example, voters divide almost evenly on whether cultural diversity worries them or makes them hopeful. In California, those who are "mainly hopeful" about the changes caused by cultural diversity outnumber those "mainly worried" 56% to 41%.
Those concerns — detailed in a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, conducted online by SurveyMonkey — have been driving voter decisions about which candidates they favor for president. Both in California and nationwide, they have helped propel two nontraditional candidates, businessman Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, to the forefront of the Republican field...
Voters' downbeat mood is particularly notable in light of economic numbers typically associated with good times. The nation's unemployment rate, 5%, is the lowest since April 2008, and the economy has grown steadily, albeit slowly, since the recession officially ended in June 2009.
Still, by 70% to 29%, voters see the country as headed in the wrong direction. California voters are only marginally more positive, with 63% saying the country is headed the wrong way and 34% seeing the nation as being on the right path.
That sense of the country headed the wrong way has been true now for a dozen years, through two presidencies, for "the longest period of sustained pessimism in more than a generation," said Neil Newhouse, a veteran Republican pollster who advised Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in 2012.
Pessimism is particularly profound among white voters, especially those without a college education. In California, fewer than 1 in 4 non-college-educated whites say the country is on the right track, and 70% say they are worried about the way the economy has changed. Nationally, the worried share among the group is even higher, 74%.
By contrast, racial and ethnic minority voters have a considerably more upbeat view, particularly those who have graduated from college.
Those two groups — whites who have not graduated from college and minorities who have — stand at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Non-college-educated whites have become a bulwark for Republicans, while upwardly mobile minority voters have reshaped the Democratic Party.
In California, where about half of college-educated minority voters are optimistic about the economy, the two groups are of similar size, each about one-fifth of the electorate. Nationally, whites without college degrees outnumber college-educated minorities by about 3 to 1.
Among the Republicans in the presidential race, several candidates have tapped into the pessimistic mood of whites who did not graduate from college, none more directly than Trump, whose slogan "Make America great again" expresses a sense of better times gone.
Trump has a significant lead among white voters nationwide who have not graduated from college. Rubio, by contrast, does notably better with the college-educated; he is in first place with that group of voters among Republicans in California.
Trump's strongest base of support, however, comes from those troubled by the effects of immigration.
Nationally, voters divide closely over whether "immigrants from other countries mainly strengthen American society" or "mainly weaken" it, with 49% seeing immigrants as a source of strength and 43% as a weakness.
In California, with its much larger population of minorities, 59% see immigrants strengthening America and 35% say they "mainly weaken American society."
Trump's backers are overwhelmingly in the "mainly weaken" camp: 73% in California and 82% nationally take that view...
RIO DE JANEIRO—When proper electricity arrived in Santa Marta, a small favela in the shadow of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue, longtime resident Cândida Oliveira Silva was happy to get the bill.Remember, Rousseff’s a Marxist. I guess the withering away of the state toward the communist utopia's going to have to wait.
For the 52-year-old homemaker, it meant having legal proof of address and “feeling like a citizen” for the first time. But in recent months it has also meant cutting back on all but the most basic expenses. Reduced government subsidies and a drought have raised her bill to about 280 reais ($72) a month, roughly five times what it was a year ago.
“I can’t travel anymore, I can’t afford to eat at even a modest restaurant,” Ms. Silva said. Rising inflation and Brazil’s plummeting currency have quashed any hopes of visiting her daughter in San Francisco.
Ms. Silva’s struggle to maintain her standard of living amid rising prices shows how a spiraling economic crisis has pushed Brazil’s emerging middle class to the brink.
Urban unemployment rose to 7.6% in September, tied with August for the highest rate in more than five years. Economists on average expect gross domestic product will shrink 3.1% this year and 1.9% next year, according to the Central Bank of Brazil’s latest weekly survey. Inflation approaching 10% has forced the poor to stop buying meat and the central bank to ratchet up interest rates. A disorganized effort by the government to stem a widening budget deficit has resulted in painful tax increases, further crimping family budgets.
Experts say it is hard to estimate how many people are at risk of falling down Brazil’s social ladder, as official data aren’t yet available. But with wages rising less than inflation, around 35 million members of Brazil’s lower middle class are vulnerable, says Maurício Prado, a partner at research firm Plano CDE.
“They have low education and low job formalization,” he said. “There is confluence of negative factors.”
The situation is threatening to derail what Brazilian leaders have extolled as a transformation of the country’s economy and society. Long counted among the world’s most unequal nations, Brazil made significant progress in the past decade toward reducing its gaping income disparity, authorities say.
Strong prices for commodity exports stuffed public coffers with money that was used to weave a social safety net, including a cash-transfer program targeting nearly 14 million impoverished families. Minimum-wage increases averaging more than 11% a year since 2003 transferred more wealth toward the bottom of the spectrum.
Between 2003 and 2013, Brazil’s median household income grew 87% in real terms, compared with a 30% rise in per capita gross domestic product, says Marcelo Neri, an economist who wrote a book on the “new middle class” and served as President Dilma Rousseff’s strategic-affairs minister.
“People who were left behind—uneducated people, people in the northeast and rural areas, poor people, black people, domestic workers, informal workers—these people grew at a much faster rate than the country as a whole,” Mr. Neri said...
I know there are plenty of kids who think that school is slavery. But finally there's a principal who agrees with them.Keep reading.
Think about it. They're rounded up on buses, sent to buildings, forced to learn things and then answer questions about them. It's just like slavery or the Holocaust or something terrible. We must all join together to stamp out all learning and test-taking so we can finally achieve true social justice utopia.
Just ask the principal of the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action.
In an online rant, a Bronx public school principal has likened standardized testing to slavery, redlining and crack cocaine in damaging the lives of minorities.Educational standards. They're just like crack cocaine and slavery...
BIG RIG UPDATE: At least 3 apts damaged in crash; Residents were evacuated from building https://t.co/Ylx4cdPvUc pic.twitter.com/Q7BVPgxYzX
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) November 10, 2015Marginalized populations are not obligated to educate and converse about our experiences, but we did to make this campus more aware.
— ConcernedStudent1950 (@CS_1950) November 10, 2015A lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t pay attention to this type of protest now are because of the solidarity you received from the football team. For those who are just tuning into this story, what do you want them to know?Basically, demands for respect, amid amorphous "racial incidents," shut down a university, and almost derailed a major collegiate football program, with potential financial losses in the million dollar range.
Butler: The campus climate here at the University of Missouri is an ugly one, it’s one that often we don’t talk about and it’s one that, when issues come up, whether it’s sexual assault, whether it’s Planned Parenthood, whether it’s racism, it gets swept under the rug because we want to rest on our traditions and rest on all these values that we hold in high esteem. And I think the message is that underneath all of that there is a lot of dirt and there’s a lot of pain and there’s a lot of hurt. There’s things that need to be changed. And at the end of it all, even if you don’t really understand what I’m saying, even if you can’t really understand systemic oppression and systemic racism, is the fact we can’t be at a university where we have values like “Respect, Responsibility, Discovery and Excellence” and we don’t have any of those things being enacted on campus, especially in terms of respect. I’m on a campus where people feel free to call people the n-word, where people feel free as recently as last week, to used [their] own feces to smear a swastika in a residential hall. Everything that glitters is not gold. We really need to dig deep and be real with ourselves about the world we live in and understand that we’re not perfect but understand that just because we’re not perfect doesn’t mean we don’t start to understand and address the issues around us...
Forget that red state-blue state stuff. The real chasm dividing the US is economic, with one economy for industry and one for tech, and the friction between them is getting fierce.Keep reading.
When we speak about the ever-expanding chasm that defines modern American politics, we usually focus on cultural issues such as gay marriage, race, or religion. But as often has been the case throughout our history, the biggest source of division may be largely economic.
Today we see a growing conflict between the economy that produces consumable, tangible goods and another economy, now ascendant, that deals largely in the intangible world of media, software, and entertainment. Like the old divide between the agrarian South and the industrial North before the Civil War, this threatens to become what President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, defined as an “irrepressible conflict.”
Other major economic divides—between capital and labor, Wall Street versus Main Street—defined politics for much of the 20th century. But today’s tangible-intangible divide is particularly tragic because it undermines America’s peculiar advantage in being a powerhouse in both the material and non-material worlds. No other large country can say that, certainly not China, Japan, or Germany, industrial powerhouses short on resources, while our closest cousins, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, remain, for the most part, dependent on commodity trade.
The China syndrome and the shape of the next slowdown
Over the past decade, the United States has enjoyed two parallel booms that combined to propel the economy out of recession. One was centered in places like Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Oklahoma City, and across much of the Great Plains. These areas were all located in the first states to emerge from the recession, and benefited massively from a gusher in energy jobs due largely to fracking.
At the same time, another part of the economy, centered in Silicon Valley as well as Seattle, Austin, and Raleigh/Durham, has also been booming. Though far more restricted than their counterparts in the “tangible” economy in terms of both geography and jobs, the tech/digital economy did not lag when it came to minting fortunes. By 2014, the media-tech sector accounted for six of the nation’s wealthiest people. Perhaps more important, 12 of the nation’s 17 billionaires under 40 also hail from the tech sector.
Until China’s economy hit a wall this fall, these two sectors were humming along, maybe not enough to restore the economy to its ’90s trim robustly enough to improve conditions in many parts of the country. But as China begins to cut back on commodity purchases, many key raw material prices—copper and iron to oil and gas as well as food stuffs—have fallen precipitously, devastating many developing economies in South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Plunging prices are also beginning to hurt many local economies in the U.S., particularly in the “oil patch” that spreads from west Texas to North Dakota. This is one reason why overall economic growth has fallen, and is unlikely to revive strongly in the months ahead. Overall, according to the most recent numbers, job growth remains slow and long-term unemployment stubbornly high while labor participation is stuck at historically low levels. Much of this loss is felt by the kind of middle and working class people who tend to work in tangible industries...
It’s been long understood at Fullerton College that faculty cannot make a single cent off any self-created, custom course materials, from books to course packs.I don't have a problem with professors assigning their own textbooks. Actually, it's kind of cool to take a class with a professor who's a major published author.
However, roughly two miles away at Cal State University, Fullerton, no such policy exists to keep faculty from doing just that.
Schools across Orange County vary in how they handle faculty authored educational materials -- a touchy topic that exploded in recent weeks into a nationwide debate about academic freedom and soaring textbook costs.
In the region, at least 500 higher-education classes during the most recent school session are taught by faculty members who require students to use their published works, according to a Register analysis of public documents.
Sales of faculty-written materials at these schools could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single semester or quarter, assuming new copies are purchased in each case, based on the Register’s sampling of schools.
The priciest such text at Chapman in the most recent semester was law professor Michael B. Lang’s “Federal Tax Accounting,” which comes with a $206 price tag at the campus bookstore. It can be purchased on Amazon in used condition for about $100.
At Cal State University Long Beach, a new copy of “Language Learning Disabilities in School-Age Children and Adolescents: Some Principles and Applications,” co-written by professor Geraldine P. Wallach, sells for $197 at the campus bookstore. Online, the book can be rented for as low as $17.
“I think you bring upon yourself greater scrutiny when the book is not only expensive, but also happens to be written by a campus faculty member who benefits from its use,” said Meredith Turner, assistant executive director of the California State Student Association.
At least two schools in the county have rules in place to address the topic of faculty-authored course materials. Nationwide, some institutions, such as University of Missouri and Iowa State University, require academic authors to give any royalties back to the school, or to charity.
Cal State Fullerton has no such policy. Last week, the president of the roughly 39,000-student campus stood by the school’s decision to reprimand associate math professor Alain Bourget, who assigned less expensive alternative textbooks instead of a text co-written by the math department chair and vice chair.
Many faculty authors say they assign their books because they are experts in the field and are offering specialized knowledge. The profits argument is overblown, they contend, as typical royalties are meager and academic book advances are rare. The professors’ cut is often 10 percent to 18 percent, according to Stephen Gillen, a media and publishing attorney.
In fact, faculty authors in a class-action case in New York court allege royalty payments have essentially remained flat over the years while textbook prices have ballooned by more than 80 percent in the last 10 years, according to the lawsuit...
Every time I mention William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale here, it sells a few copies via the Amazon Associates link, a surprise that is both pleasant (because I need the money) and troubling, because it bugs me to realize that today, in 2015, there are conservatives who have not yet read that 1951 classic. Buckley’s book, published not long after he had graduated from Yale, immediately ignited a firestorm among the liberal elite. God and Man at Yale was published amid the Cold War tempest that history has called “McCarthyism,” and Buckley pointed out the ways in which “the superstition of academic freedom” was used to protect teaching that was clearly hostile to capitalism and Christianity...Keep reading.
HAMBURG—Few places have a longer affinity for free trade than this German city, home to one of Europe’s busiest ports.Keep reading.
The city’s left-leaning government overruled environmentalists in 2012 and approved deepening the Elbe River for bigger container ships. License plates boast of the city’s founding role in the Hanseatic League, a medieval alliance that was among the world’s first free-trade blocs.
But unease over new trade deals runs deep in Hamburg these days, as it does in the U.S. and across much of the developed world. The more aggressively leaders push to expand the reach of multilateral agreements into sensitive zones such as drug patents and investor protections, the more aggressively opponents push back.
Ire here is directed at portions of the proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, which would join the U.S. and the European Union in a vast common market with more than 800 million of the world’s richest consumers.
The freshly completed Pacific trade deal between the U.S., Japan and 10 other countries has sparked similar outcries, underscoring the challenge of completing sweeping pacts that go far beyond eliminating tariffs—few of which exist between the U.S. and Europe...
Young adults, beholden to causes like climate change, abortion, and gay-marriage, view Republicans as "anti-science" and bigoted. Young adults in turn relate Republicans’ political views with their faith, and thus, run from both.
While a growing number of Americans, particularly within the younger demographic, shun religion, they have embraced another one in its place – that of secular-progressivism. What is perhaps most ironic, is that this political philosophy, so imbued with moral relativism, is as much if not more "anti-science" than the Judeo-Christian faiths its adherents mock.
Of course true believers do not see it that way. Rather, they view their political ideology as the more enlightened way forward and evangelize it with the vim and vigor. What results, however, is a populace that is less tolerant and increasingly devoid of a moral compass with which to guide it through life...
Sometimes a culture disappears with a whimper, not a bang. Institutions age and are ignored, and the complacent public insidiously lowers its expectations of state performance.Still more.
Infrastructure, the rule of law, and civility erode — and yet people are not sure why and how their own changing (and pathological) individual behavior is leading to the collective deterioration that they deplore.
There is still a “West” in the sense of the physical entities of North America, Europe, many of the former British dominions, and parts of Westernized Asia. The infrastructure of our cities and states looks about as it did in the recent past. But is it the West as we once knew it — a unique civilization predicated on free expression, human rights, self-criticism, vibrant free markets, and the rule of law?
Or, instead, is the West reduced to a wealthy but unfree leisure zone, driven on autopilot by computerized affluence, technological determinism, and a growing equality-of-result, omnipotent state? Tens of thousands of migrants — reminiscent of the great southward and westward treks of Germanic tribes in the late fifth century, at the end of the Roman Empire — are overwhelming the borders of Europe. Such an influx should be a reminder that the West attracts people, while the non-West drives them out, and thus should spark inquiries about why that is so. But that discussion would be not only impolite, but beyond the comprehension of most present-day Westerners, who take for granted — though they cannot define, much less defend — their own institutions.
No one claims that such mass immigration into Europe is legal. No one wonders what happened to the fossilized idea of legal immigration, much less the legal immigrant who went through what has now been rendered the pretense of bureaucratic application for legal entry into Europe. Germany, which lectures others on law, is lawless. In theory, Westerners have the power to stop the mostly young males from the Middle East from swarming their borders, but in fact they apparently lack the will. Or is it worse than that?
Without confidence in their own values, much less pride in their accomplishments, are they assuaging the guilt over their privilege by symbolic acts of undermining the foundations of their own culture? Certainly, Germany, which insists on European Union laws of finance applying to its fellow European nation Greece, has no compunction about destroying, for its own particular purposes, the Union’s immigration statutes as they apply to Middle Easterners.
The same is true in the United States. Millions of foreign nationals from Latin America, and Mexico in particular, simply have crossed the border without even the pretense of legality. They assume Americans not only won’t enforce their own laws, but also will find ways to demonize any who suggest that they should. If there is now no such thing as an “illegal alien,” what in theory prevents anyone from arriving from anywhere at any time and making claims on the American state?
Again, the irony is not just that millions of Mexican nationals want into the U.S., but that, ostensibly, no one in Mexico or even the United States knows why that is so (certainly not the National Council of La Raza [“the Race”]) — much less wonders whether Mexico might learn from the U.S. about ways to make a nation’s own people become content enough to stay in their homeland. Only in the West does a migrant fault his host for insufficient hospitality while exempting his homeland, which drove him out.
Sanctuary cities illustrate how progressive doctrine can by itself nullify the rule of law. In the new West, breaking statutes is backed or ignored by the state if it is branded with race, class, or gender advocacy. By that I mean that if a solitary U.S. citizen seeks to leave and then reenter America without a passport, he will likely be either arrested or turned back, whereas if an illegal alien manages to cross our border, he is unlikely to be sent back as long as he has claims on victimhood of the type that are sanctioned by the Western liberal state.
Do we really enjoy free speech in the West any more? If you think we do, try to use vocabulary that is precise and not pejorative, but does not serve the current engine of social advocacy — terms such as “Islamic terrorist,” “illegal alien,” or “transvestite.” I doubt that a writer for a major newspaper or a politician could use those terms, which were common currency just four or five years ago, without incurring, privately or publicly, the sort of censure that we might associate with the thought police of the former Soviet Union...
The biggest bets are on familiar names and faces, a reminder of how much track records matter to readers at this time of the year. HarperCollins Publishers, for example, has printed 700,000 hardcover copies of Mitch Albom’s “The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto,” a story narrated by a guitarist touched by the supernatural. HarperCollins, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.Keep reading.
Tuesday also marks the return of Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Random House is printing 390,000 copies of Mr. Meacham’s new work, “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush,” making it the publisher’s biggest nonfiction work of the year.
On the lighter side, Grand Central Publishing will publish 120,000 hardcover copies of model Christie Brinkley’s “Timeless Beauty: Over 100 Tips, Secrets, and Shortcuts to Looking Great,” while Simon & Schuster has teed up 75,000 copies of TV producer Shonda Rhimes’s memoir “Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person.”
The relatively large print runs come at a time when the digital book market is in flux. E-book sales in the first half were down 10% from a year earlier, according to an industry report, a decline that industry executives attribute in part to higher prices set by the major publishers.
“There may not be one stand-out title yet, but I think the breadth and complexion of this holiday’s new titles is better than in 2014,” said Mary Amicucci, Barnes & Noble Inc.’s vice president of adult trade and children’s books...
Every presidential candidate is obsessed with polls, but only Donald Trump fixates on ratings. Not approval ratings, television ratings.Interesting, but I think she misses the point.
"I get the best ratings," he said recently, appearing to channel NBC executives to explain why he had been asked to host "Saturday Night Live" this weekend.
It's something Trump says a lot, almost as often as he says "I'm going to build a wall." In September, he warned that television itself would collapse should he withdraw from the race — no doubt something that he will be saying even more if he continues to lose his lead in the polls.
There is something quaint and almost endearing about Trump's faith in Nielsen; it may be one of the last great attempts to restore ratings to their former position of glory, and, indeed, empower them further.
But ratings have never been the same as votes — just ask the cast of "Empire" — or even political support, and for all his frequently self-referenced business experience, Trump seems to have missed a major shift in the television industry: Ratings ain't what they used to be.
Once an easy and instant predictor of success, the television numbers game has become if not outdated then deeply complicated. Judging from the awards bestowed in recent years, ratings have an almost antithetical relationship with voters' notions of "best" or "outstanding." A narrow but deeply dedicated group of followers is now deemed as valuable as a large, less passionate audience who may be tuned in more out of curiosity or habit.
Overnight ratings, which is what Trump deals in for the most part, have become less meaningful, and any gains he brings to shows like "Saturday Night Live" are one-time bumps rather than a business model; it's not as if he were joining the cast (or at least not yet.)
Like the current crop of Republican candidates, television is now too broad and disparate for its traditional measurements, making "success" an increasingly complicated term, gauged as much, if not more, in nuance than numbers.
And Donald Trump has never been big on nuance...
Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said, “all politics is local.” After Republican Matt Bevin’s surprisingly convincing victory to become Kentucky’s next governor, the maxim should be reversed. All local politics are now national. Bevin, with help from the Republican Governors Association, effectively utilized national issues—gay marriage, Planned Parenthood, federal energy policy, President Obama’s health care law—to bludgeon Democrat Jack Conway, who tried to distance himself from his party’s national brand to no avail.Keep reading.
And the biggest drag of all for Conway was Obama. The RGA unleashed a last-week $1 million ad blitz connecting the Democratic state attorney general to Obama—a potent line of attack in a state where the president’s disapproval rating is near 70 percent.
Just as the Kentucky gubernatorial campaign carried national overtones, the results from Tuesday night’s election carry national lessons. Here are four of the most significant takeaways...
In a South Los Angeles classroom, a boy hassles a girl. The teacher moves him to the back of the room, where he scowls, makes a paper airplane and repeatedly throws it against the wall. Two other boys wander around the class and then nearly come to blows.Keep reading.
"Don't you talk about my sister," one says to the other. The teacher steps between them.
When she tries to regain order, another boy tells her: "Screw you."
It's another day of disruption on this campus in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has been nationally hailed by the White House and others for its leadership in promoting more progressive school-discipline policies. The nation's second-largest school system was the first in California to ban suspensions for defiance and announced plans to roll out an alternative known as restorative justice, which seeks to resolve conflicts through talking circles and other methods to build trust.
The shift has brought dramatic changes: Suspensions districtwide plummeted to 0.55% last school year compared with 8% in 2007-08, and days lost to suspension also plunged, to 5,024 from 75,000 during that same period, according to the most recent data.
The district moved to ban suspensions amid national concern that they imperil academic achievement and disproportionately affect minorities, particularly African Americans.
But many teachers say their classrooms are reeling from unruly students who are escaping consequences for their actions.
They blame the district for failing to provide the staff and training needed to effectively shift to the new approach — and their complaints are backed up by L.A. schools Supt. Ramon Cortines. He said the new discipline policies, which were pushed through by the Board of Education and former Supt. John Deasy and which he supports, were poorly executed. He compared the implementation to the flawed effort to equip students and teachers with Apple tablets.
"I will compare it to the iPad," Cortines said. "You cannot piecemeal this kind of thing and think it is going to have the impact that it should have. Don't make a political statement and then don't have the wherewithal to back it up."
FRANKFURT—Here in the city that gave its name to the famous sausage, the World Health Organization’s warning against eating processed meats is hard to swallow.Keep reading.
The United Nations body last week said eating frankfurters and their ilk can cause cancer. To Germans, many of whom consider sausage and cured meats comfort food, that idea doesn’t go down well.
“It’s total nonsense,” said Simone Kluge while selling sausages to a line of customers in Frankfurt’s main market hall. “If it were true, every German would have already died of wurst,” she scoffed, using the German word for sausage.
Many cultures make sausages. Italian salami, Polish kielbasa, French saucisson and British bangers are widely known. But Germans have a special affinity for the oblong food.
Of 31 types listed in the U.S. National Hot Dog and Sausage Council’s online sausage glossary, 11 come from Germany and two more come from heavily Germanic Austria. Italy is a distant second place, with six varieties.
Germany has at least three museums devoted to sausages. Sausages were a hot potato in national elections two years ago and the language is peppered with sausage references.
In a make-or-break situation, Germans say: “It’s about the sausage.” For indifference, they say: “It’s sausage to me.”
“Sausages to Germany are like pasta is to Italy,” said Andreas Fuhr, a master butcher selling his products at a weekly market in Frankfurt.
Sausages are so integral to the German diet that German Food and Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt quickly reacted to the WHO warning with a statement reassuring German consumers of their safety and he posed in the country’s biggest newspaper holding a platter piled with sausages.
“No one should be afraid of eating a bratwurst,” he declared, referring to the most ubiquitous sausage. “What counts is quantity,” he added. “Too much of something is always bad for health.”
Austria’s agriculture minister didn’t mince words, calling the WHO report “a farce.”
Two days after the WHO announcement, German newspapers were bursting with more than 200 articles about the wurst alert.
World-wide reaction to the WHO report was so vocal that the organization later issued a clarification that its finding “does not ask people to stop eating processed meats,” though eating less of them can reduce the risk of colorectal cancer.
While the criticism of processed meats gnaws at many sausage fans, it was particularly biting in Frankfurt. “Examples of processed meat include hot dogs (frankfurters), ham, sausages, corned beef, and biltong,” the agency said.
“We won’t let the WHO simply kill off our fine Frankfurt sausages,” fumed Oliver Bergmann, a master butcher at Waibel Butcher shop in Frankfurt, who has been in the trade for 30 years...
The day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, Ben Carson’s black classmates unleashed their anger and grief on white students who were a minority at Detroit’s Southwestern High.Still more.
Mr. Carson, then a junior with a key to a biology lab where he worked part time, told The Wall Street Journal last month that he protected a few white students from the attacks by hiding them there.
It is a dramatic account of courage and kindness, and it couldn’t be confirmed in interviews with a half-dozen of Mr. Carson’s classmates and his high school physics teacher. The students all remembered the riot. None recalled hearing about white students hiding in the biology lab, and Mr. Carson couldn’t remember any names of those he sheltered.
“It may have happened, but I didn’t see it myself or hear about it,” said Gregory Vartanian, a white classmate of Mr. Carson’s who served in the ROTC with Mr. Carson and is now a retired U.S. Marshal.
Mr. Carson’s biography, a rise from poverty to become a top neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University, is central to his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Now, his story—told in nine books and countless inspirational speeches over the past 25 years—has come under the harsh scrutiny of presidential politics, where rivals and media hunt for embellishments and omissions that can hobble a campaign.
In 2008, Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton said she was mistaken when she claimed she and her daughter, Chelsea, had come under sniper fire and had to run for cover during a trip to Bosnia in 1996 while she was first lady. A video of the trip unearthed after her comments showed no gunfire.
The threat to the Carson candidacy is that the inconsistencies or hard-to-check anecdotes, which were told long before he ever considered a presidential run, will put off voters only now getting to know him.
Mr. Carson’s campaign manager, Barry Bennett, said Friday there was “no evidence” that any aspect of Mr. Carson’s biography wasn’t true. “There’s no facts saying they are not true. We are guilty until proven innocent,” he said. “You have no reason to believe that they are not true. There’s no evidence to point to the fact that they are even questionable.”
