The Myth of 'Learning Styles' is Likely Causing Harm

A very popular paradigm. I've listened to some of my teaching colleagues expound on it at length.

But there's little evidence to support the "learning styles" hypothesis, according to Wired, "All You Need to Know About the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth, in Two Minutes" (via Instapundit).

It's Never a Good Time for a Carbon Tax

Amen.

California just got hit with a new "carbon tax," which is supposed to cost consumer an additional $2 billion a year. And it's basically a stealth tax, part of a "cap and trade" scheme that no one knows about.

We're taxed enough already.

But see the analysis at the Daily Signal, in any case.

Movement to Stop 'Manspreading' Reaches San Francisco (VIDEO)

The most imbecilic "movement" ever devised, and of course San Francisco --- Moscow by the Bay --- would be pushing it to the leading edge.

At CBS News Bay Area, "Movement to Stop ‘Manspreading’ on Transit Reaches San Francisco."

At the clip, just talking about this makes one women get up and leave, obviously not so interested in hearing men discuss opening up space for their masculine parts. And that chunky woman at the 25-second mark? Jeez, lady, take a freakin' shower!

Also at CBS News New York, "'Dude... Stop the spread, please'."

ADDED: From Dr. Helen Smith, at Pajamas, "NYC to Curb ‘ManSpreading’":

Why is one form of sexism okay and the other not? And don’t give me the crap about the patriarchy. If you shame men in this way, you are a nasty sexist who deserves contempt.

Well, that's a good start to explaining leftist hatred. These people are depraved. And it never ends.

Egyptian Bomb Disposal Officer Killed in Giza

Looks like the bomb blew the poor f-ker's head off.

At Blazing Cat Fur, "Video - Bomb disposal officer killed in explosion in Giza Egypt" (GRAPHIC).

List of Demands from 'Black Lives Matter'

This is laughable.

Sandhya Somashekhar, at the Washington Post, purports to chronicle the list of "demands" from the "Black Lives Matter" protesters. See, "Oprah says protesters lack clear demands. Here’s what they do want." Ah, I don't think these "demands" are what the protests are really all about.

In any case, here's the background on Oprah's tussle with the "Black Lives" criminals, "Protesters slam Oprah over comments that they lack ‘leadership’."

Actually, Oprah didn't go far enough in dissing these thugs.

Novelist Darryl Pinckney, at the latest issue of the New York Review, indicates that the Michael Brown protesters in Missouri were looking beyond the old guard MLK-style leadership as models for the new (misnamed) "civil rights" rights movement now emerging. Ella Baker, an iconic civil rights activist of the 20th century, who was critical of top-down professionalized leadership, is considered an inspiration by the Ferguson protesters, and she was "ambivalent about nonviolence."

And if you're following along on Twitter, you know that protesters are not all about "non-violent" avenues of resistance:

It is so integral for elders to find the connections between the rad #blackbrunch organizing methods + the 60's lunch counter sit-ins.
— Sharmin Ultra (@sharminultraa) January 6, 2015

It is so necessary for elders of social movements to recognize that we don't follow their hierarchal non-collectivist respectability shit.
— Sharmin Ultra (@sharminultraa) January 6, 2015

It is so beautiful to see horizontal leadership, allies knowing their place, community safety + queer prison abolition all in one space.
— Sharmin Ultra (@sharminultraa) January 6, 2015

Our generation is talking about trans people, about the need to abolish prisons + police forces, about the need to dismantle systems.
— Sharmin Ultra (@sharminultraa) January 6, 2015

Our generation is attempting to center anti-blackness in a deeply embedded white supremacist social structure. We want to eradicate systems.
— Sharmin Ultra (@sharminultraa) January 6, 2015

It is not just about indictments. It is about eradicating entire systems whose foundation lie in private property, violence + incarceration.
— Sharmin Ultra (@sharminultraa) January 6, 2015

Dismantle. Abolish. Eradicate.

Yeah, not at all about "non-violence."

And notice how the protests are increasingly racist as well, at AoSHQ, "Protests Become Explicitly Anti-White As Black Protesters Occupy "White Spaces"-- Restaurants Where People Are Eating Sunday Brunch."

Gigi Hadid

Some afternoon Rule 5 for good measure.

At London's Daily Mail, "Sneak peek! Cody Simpson's girlfriend Gigi Hadid poses for new Guess campaign."

Also at Egotastic!, "Gigi Hadid Is Your New Sextastic Face of Guess!"

BONUS: Ms. Hadid's was also a "rookie" for Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition 2014.

Far-Left #BlackLivesMatter Protesters Launch DDoS Attack Against Weasel Zippers

If you don't consider this all-out war from the radical left, you've either got your head in the sand or you're down with left's violence and terrorism.

At Weasel Zippers, "SITE NOTE: WZ Under Attack By Radical Black Group...," and "Today #BlackLivesMatter Imploded":

In the beginning of Occupy, there were some normal, non-radical folk that came out to the protests. People were upset about bailouts and thought that this was what the protest was about. But there was a point at about two months in, where the normal people figured out what Occupy was all about, and the normal people left. What was left was the organizing radicals who were not there because of bailouts but were there for revolution, for anti-U.S., anti-capitalism.

We’re at that point today with #BlackLives Matter. It has never been about #BlackLivesMatter, anymore than Occupy was about bailouts. It is about the same thing Occupy was about – revolution and anarcho-communism. Small wonder, as the same people are behind it.

Exactly. Hey, "hands up, don't shoot!" leftists, is that so hard?

Also at the Right Scoop, "Hackers have taken down a conservative website over THIS 'BLACKS ONLY' manual for 'Black Brunch' protests!"

Be sure to click through to read the (barely legible) "communication" at the link.

Marxists Crash American Economic Association Annual Meeting, Attack 'Fantasy World of Neoclassical Economics...'

I've yet to post on the #BlackBrunch protesters, who by the looks of their Twitter feeds are violent far-left cadres pushing anarcho-communist and neo-Marxist paradigms, and so it's a timely coincidence to come across this piece on the Occupy-backed radicals attacking the economics profession in Boston, at the Washington Post, "The protesters who are trying to upend the ‘fantasy world’ of economics" (via Lonely Con):

There were leaflets, a manifesto, and this warning: “On campus after campus, we will chase you old goats out of power. Then, in the months and years that follow, we will begin the work of reprogramming the doomsday machine.”

On Friday, on the eve of the annual meeting of The American Economic Association in Boston, attended by many of the top economists in the United States, the agents of the heterodoxy had come to declare war on the profession. The small group threw their messages onto the side of the Sheraton Boston in glowing, six-foot tall letters: “BEFORE ECONOMICS CAN PROGRESS, IT MUST ABANDON ITS SUICIDAL FORMALISM.”

“The projection’s looking great,” said Keith Harrington, bearded, bespectacled, and bundled-up, as the sun set in the subzero weather.

“It’s a twelve-thousand lumen projector,” said Kyle Depew, who had schlepped the suitcase-sized thing from New York that day.

Harrington, a community organizer and videographer, once worked as a climate change activist. But after a few years he came to see that the real fight was elsewhere. “The type of activism we were doing around climate was running into systemic challenges,” he said. “We couldn’t get the types of climate change policies we need without system change, without addressing questions in economics like growth and limits to growth.”

Harrington now runs a campaign called Kick it Over, which aims to combat what it describes as “the fantasy world of neoclassical economics — a faith-based religion of perfect markets, enlightened consumers and infinite growth that shapes the fates of billions.” The project is connected with the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters, which had gestated the original idea behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. Harrington, who studied alternative economics at The New School, hopes to reform the profession from the inside, starting with the way it’s taught.

“When I was in school, I started realizing how limited was the range of economic ideas that students were exposed to in the classroom,” he said. “Neoclassicism is essentially the standard for 95 percent of the graduate departments in the country.”

Through mailing lists and word of mouth, Harrington recruited economics students from around the country to hold the campaign’s first official demonstration here, at this tweedy conference of academics. About nine students showed up at the Sheraton on Friday night to hand out fliers and smash the orthodoxy.

“We were just very disillusioned students for the first couple of years that we were taking econ,” said Jess Fuller, a senior at the University of Vermont majoring in economics and history. “We just felt it was very out of touch with reality, and there were some questions that never seemed to be answered or even asked in the first place.”

Fuller, who also works with a feminist group on her campus, says that mainstream economics doesn’t do a good enough job incorporating perspectives on gender and class.

“There is a sort of value judgment to the way economics is taught,” added Aparna Gopalan, a sophomore at Connecticut College. She recommended a book on Buddhist economics. “From that point of view, the GDP is so funny,” she said. “It makes no sense! It’s like, they’re measuring how many commodities are bought and sold in a year, but the point isn’t the commodities, you know? It’s the hours of labor.”

I don't think "about nine students" are going smash the orthodoxy quite yet, although they're amusing. However, this part reminded me of the #BlackBrunch thugs, and it's not very funny:

On Sunday, they hectored Carmen Reinhart, an economist at Harvard who studies financial crises. A few years ago, Reinhart and her colleague Kenneth Rogoff had become famous for observing a connection between high debt in a country and low GDP growth. Their paper was then the center of a controversy in 2013 when economists at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst pointed out an error in an Excel spreadsheet.

Reinhart, on Sunday, was presenting a paper on the statistics when countries were unable to pay back their debts in full.

Harrington said: “She’s continuing on her focus, which is essentially public debt, and we went in there, and we said: ‘You’re now going to be releasing a new study that’s even more massive and potentially more consequential than the last one. Have you had a graduate student go through and check your data for errors?’”

“She was just livid,” Harrington said. Using a pocket projector, he projected a slide quoting Paul Krugman on to the wall, which declared that Reinhart and Rogoff have “done a great deal of harm.”

Reinhart said that the episode seemed like a personal attack rather than an argument for other perspectives in economics. The irony of the matter, she noted, was that her talk that day concerned a non-mainstream corner of macroeconomics.

“If they understand — if they understand, which is a big if — what heterodox means, this was actually a session precisely on the alternative approaches to debt reduction, the debt relief associated with haircuts,” she said.

“If they want to say ‘we don’t like you, and we want to make it personal,’ this is not the venue for that.”

Not going to win over too many adherents with that methodology, but then they're radical leftists. Their spiel is mostly about performance hatred. A couple of "Black Live Matter" posters and they'd really have outdone themselves.

Police Arrest Fugitive Greek Communist Christodoulos Xiros

He had "absconded" while out on "leave."

Yeah, because those progressive prison furloughs sure keep those crack prisoners on the straight and narrow.

At Euronews, "Greece: Police rearrest fugitive Marxist extremist Christodoulos Xiros":

The formerly dark-haired member of the Greek Marxist guerrilla group November 17, seized by security forces on Saturday in a coastal town outside Athens, now has shoulder-length blond locks and a beard.

Serving multiple life sentences for his role in the now defunct militant group which has killed Greek, US and British diplomats, he had absconded while on leave from jail 12 months ago.

Authorities say he was armed when rearrested.

“He had altered his features. He had long hair, a beard, he was wearing glasses and carrying a gun,” Hellenic Police Chief Dimitris Tsaknakis told reporters, adding that Xiros had erased the identifying features on the weapon.

“He had 13 bullets in the magazine and one in the chamber. He didn’t resist arrest.”

Despite a one million euro reward for his capture, Xiros made a video after his escape, vowing armed action to avenge the pain of austerity cuts suffered by Greeks under international bailout programmes.

As in other European countries, including Germany and Italy, a number of violent leftist groups were active in Greece from the 1970s and 1980s and authorities have been concerned about the prospect of a resurgence during the economic crisis.

Baby Kidnapped in Long Beach Found Dead San Diego Dumpster

The horror.

At CBS News Los Angeles, "Missing 3-Week-Old Long Beach Baby Found Dead In San Diego Dumpster."

Tabitha Bliss tweeted this story last night.

Boys Won't Slap Girl in 'Social Experiment' in Italy: 'Why? Because I'm a man!' (VIDEO)

I don't know why someone thought this would be a good "experiment," but then, you can't stop watching. And of course, the boys are all well-raised. They've been taught that boys don't hit girls, as I was when I was a little boy.

At ABC News Los Angeles, "YOUNG BOYS ASKED TO SLAP A GIRL IN SOCIAL EXPERIMENT."

From the comments:

The media shouldn't be teaching children what they should be learning at home, but unfortunately a lot of parents aren't such good role models. Turn off the TV and be a better parent.

Not all the other commenters agree, sadly.

More at London's Daily Mail, "'Why not? Because I'm a man': Tearjerker video shows touching reactions of boys who are asked to slap a girl in the street."

Yes, it's a tearjerker. Such a sweet video, despite the questionable motivations of the "investigators."

Historians Against the War Defeated at American Historical Association's Annual Meeting

It's the historical association's radical BDS contingent.

Covered exceptionally well at Legal Insurrection, "American Historical Association rejects anti-Israel Resolutions."

Also at Commentary, "A Big Loss for Anti-Israel Academics" (via Astute Bloggers).

'Peaceful Protesters' Disrupt Ceremony for 100-Year-Old War Veteran

At Instapundit, "LIFE IN OBAMA’S POST-RACIAL AMERICA":

This is bullying for the sake of bullying, by racists. It is designed to intimidate, but it is likely to have the opposite effect. It has also completely undermined what looked like a substantial bipartisan consensus on police reforms.

Well, not among the Margaret Hoovers of the RINO right, but still.

More at Fox News, "'Give Me a Chance': WWII Vet's Medal Ceremony Crashed by Protesters (VIDEO)."

PREVIOUSLY: "Violent Leftists Shut Down Ron Wyden Town Hall in Portland."

State Dept Can't Explain Why Cuba Isn't Fulfilling Promises Made in Obama Deal

Video, via Washington Free Beacon.

It's doe-eyed Jen Psaki. She's so sweet and stupid. You gotta love her.

PREVIOUSLY: "Where Are Cuba's Political Prisoners?"

Kaley Cuoco Apologizes for Saying She's Not a Feminist

Another celebrity caves to the left's thought police.

At Truth Revolt, "Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting 'Apologizes' for Saying 'No' to Feminism":

Just as they did with Katy Perry and Shailene Woodley before, feminists immediately lashed out their whips to beat the 29-year-old actress back into the fold, saying she owes all her success to feminism and shouldn't bite the hand that feeds her. On Sunday, instead of sticking to her statements, Cuoco-Sweeting caved to her feminist overlords on Instagram and apologized for offending their good graces. Her apology:

In my Redbook article, some people have taken offense to my comments regarding feminism- if any of you are In the "biz" you are well aware of how words can be taken out of context. I'm completely blessed and grateful that strong women have paved the way for my success along with many others. I apologize if anyone was offended. Anyone that truly knows me, knows my heart and knows what I meant.

Eugène Delacroix, "Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi"

An art review, from Christopher Knight, at the Los Angeles Times, "Delacroix's 'Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi' as a rallying cry":

They don't make paintings like "Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi" anymore.

The slow, ruminative medium of oil paint on canvas has pretty much had it as the sharpest system for the memorable delivery of effective, politically minded propaganda. Painting has long since been replaced by the relentless, 24/7 information cycle repeated nonstop on cable television and the Internet.

Painter Eugène Delacroix, born in a small Parisian suburb in 1798, was a principal artistic pivot on which the total transformation began. It's as if the pressures of unstoppable change pushed him to raise the propaganda bar to extravagant painterly heights.

"Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi," painted in 1826, was among his first bravura masterpieces in the genre.

The allegorical painting is on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Bordeaux, France, for a small but incisive exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (L.A. and Bordeaux have been sister cities for 50 years.) The image is keyed to a tragic episode in the long war for Greek independence from Turkish rule.

Curator Leah Lehmbeck shows it with a Delacroix copy of an oil sketch by Peter Paul Rubens, one of his idols, plus the lovely little version of the "Grande Odalisque" by his chief rival, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, that LACMA acquired last year. There are also lithographs by Théodore Géricault, whose topical paintings Delacroix admired, and by Antoine-Jean Baron Gros, whose Neoclassical work he didn't. (Gros famously dismissed Delacroix's war painting "Massacre of Chios" as a "massacre of art.")

Finally, a bronze medallion by British artist Alfred Joseph Stothard portrays Romantic poet Lord Byron, who died in Missolonghi just a year before the dramatic event Delacroix's canvas commemorates. The poet gets cast in the style of an ancient Greek or Roman hero.

All these provide fractional context for Delacroix's big, melodramatic canvas. A complex story — what has been called Greece's Alamo, a site of heroic resistance fought to the death in the face of a superior military foe — is stripped to representative elements. The painter conjures a personified image of a society badly broken but not destroyed — down but not out. And he inflects the scene with a sly if subtle glimmer of ultimate redemption and deliverance.

The picture, nearly 7 by 5 feet, was painted quickly — in about two months. It is dominated by a life-size female figure whose blue cloak and white tunic employ the colors of the Greek flag to identify her as a personification of the beleaguered nation. Visually she's a cousin to Marianne, the ample-breasted symbol of the French Republic and ancestor of America's Statue of Liberty.

The rubble of a ruined city lies all around her, blood spattered on the stone block below her slipper-clad right foot. She has dropped to her knee, bent on a teetering slab.

Delacroix rendered Greece as strong and powerful, dynamic brushwork describing her garments. The vivid paint bolsters an energetic figure implied by strong limbs articulated beneath her clothing.

He learned the technique from close study of Rubens, who knew the seductive clout of tangible color. Baroque painting had largely been conceived to advance the claims of the Roman Catholic Church, beleaguered by Protestant assaults. Delacroix revived propagandistic elements of earlier Baroque style, but now he put them at the service of nationalist politics.

Delacroix's brilliance was to subsume religious imagery within this secular composition. Drawing on its memory, worldly miracles are invoked.

The white-robed figure of Greece, wrapped in blue, is part Mary of the Immaculate Conception. Spreading her arms wide, she's also part Mary lamenting the death of her son.

The stone slab on which she kneels invokes a tomb. Next to this sepulcher, the grim inclusion of a slain Greek fighter's severed arm quietly suggests the bodies of Lazarus and Christ, soon to be resurrected...

Still more.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Ellie Goulding Red Bikini in Miami

Robert Stacy McCain, not familiar with Ellie Goulding, noted approvingly back in 2012, "Kinda not-bad looking..." And then on second thought, "Wow. She could grind diamonds into sand with her pelvis."

Heh.

So, here she is, at Egotastic!, "British Popstar Ellie Goulding in a Red Bikini on a Yacht in Miami, Florida."

Abandoned America: 50 States, 50 Deserted Places

Photos of abandoned towns, at Small Dead Animals (via Maggie's Farm).

Harvard Professors Outraged by Higher Out-of-Pocket Costs Due to #ObamaCare

And it's not just higher out-of-pocket costs. Harvard employees might be excluded from using services at Harvard-run hospitals, some of the best in the country.

Get a load out of this piece, at NYT, "Health Care Fixes Backed by Harvard’s Experts Now Roil Its Faculty."

Also from Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin's:

Oh how sad: Harvard profs upset because Obamacare was only supposed to affect the rubes http://t.co/Zx8oZ8s63u
— Doug Powers (@ThePowersThatBe) January 5, 2015

Europe Hasn't Abolished Capital Punishment: Frank Van Den Bleeken, Murderer and Rapist, to Be 'Euthanized' in Humanitarian Gesture

See, for Europe's progressive left, state sponsored murder is just fine. Fine and dandy. As long as it's justified not in terms of "brutal" law and order punishment, but "compassionate" treatment of society's disadvantaged.

At Telegraph UK, "Belgian rapist and murderer to be put to death by lethal injection":

Frank Van Den Bleeken won right to euthanasia after claiming he could not face rest of life in jail.

A rapist and murderer is to be put to death in Belgium this week, despite Europe’s ban on the death penalty, after a court granted him the right to euthanasia.

Frank Van Den Bleeken, 52, is not physically ill but claims his “psychological suffering” is unbearable and that he would prefer to die than spend more of his life behind bars.

He says he has no prospect of ever being released from prison as he cannot overcome his uncontrollable sexual impulses, and that he does not wish another two or three decades in jail.

His application to die was accepted by Belgium’s Federal Euthanasia Commission in September, and over the weekend, official gave approval for him to be taken to a specialist clinic on Sunday, where he will be killed by lethal injection.

Belgium legalised euthanasia in 2002, and is one of only three countries to allow the practice, the others being the Netherlands and Luxembourg. More countries, including Switzerland and some states of America, allow doctors to assist suicide in certain circumstances.

But Belgium has seen a fast growth in the number of cases of euthanasia, and has expanded the practice beyond terminally ill adults. It can now be used in cases of intense pain and psychological distress, while last February the right to euthanasia was extended to terminally ill children, as long as their parents gave consent.

One previous inmate has been euthanased, but he was suffering a terminal illness.

Van Den Bleeken raped Christiane Remacle, a 19-year-old girl, as she came home from a New Year’s Eve party on January 1 1989, and then strangled her with one of her own stockings.

He was deemed insane and not criminally responsible. After seven years on a prison psychiatric ward, he was released, attacking three more victims, aged 11, 17, and 29, within weeks.

He was then ordered to be detained indefinitely, and has seen “the outside” only once since, for his mother’s funeral...

F-king murderous bastard. Why not just label him for what he is: a criminal sociopath who deserves the damned burning needle in his arm?

Frankly, it's just more lies. Belgian leftists are no better than the Nazis. They just turn everything inside out, discombobulating reality, but end up killing just as efficiently as the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s. They make me sick.

More at the link. Ms. Remacle's survivors are not pleased. They want this monster to rot in prison for the rest of his leftist loser life.