Sunday, February 28, 2010

UNIVERSITIES CAN iMPROVE SCHOLARSHIP by “buying out” non-productive tenured faculty.

Harvard’s endowment isn’t large enough. They wouldn't have any faculty left, either.

Link from Instapundit.
A POST ON POLLING devolves into an interesting discussion of chronic conditions health coverage in the comments.

Linked from Instapundit.
SO, CAN I SPLIT THE DIFFERENCE and take one aspirin every two days?
WHO HAS RACE ON THE BRAIN? In academic lala land, scholarship and teaching too often came second, bumper-sticker identification first — another sign that with supposed intellectual progress, so often comes moral regress.
THE LOOK OF OBAMACARE



Ecch!
THIS SAYS IT ALL


Note the language: "A taxpayer voting ..."
AN ORCHESTRATED CAMPAIGN AGAINST TOYOTA? I’ve been wondering about that myself.

More here.
EVERYONE KNOWS that people without health insurance are more likely to die. But are they?

The evidence –such as it is – seems to indicate that health control, not health care, has more effect.

Obama will be pleased.

The American public will not.
WHERE DO THE TEA PARTIES GO FROM HERE? Karl Rove comments: “The tea party movement will be more effective than it otherwise would be if it refuses to allow itself to become an appendage of either major political party.”

He’s right, I think. The point of the Tea Party movement is to impress upon the establishment of both political parties that the rising tide of federal spending, debt, and over-reach must stop.
LOGOGATE: The Missile Defense Agency has updated its logo.






Riehl World View notices the similarity with the Obama campaign logo: “[I]s this about the only way Obama can find to leave his stamp on America?”

Other critics saw things differently. "I'm having trouble seeing past the crescent and star in the new logo," one critic posted on WashingtonTimes.com. "Is this our signal to the muslim world ...?”


My thought is that this is much ado about what is really a minor waste of money.

IS ACORN COMING TO AN END? Or merely changing names?

Unfortunately there's no reason to think it isn't simply rebranding, to emerge with a different name and the same shenanigans.
CHILD OBESITY IN THE NANNY STATE. Marybeth Hicks has some thoughts.
CLIMATEGATE 2.0: the rot continues.

The emails show the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA, wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise. The emails show NASA making off with enormous sums of taxpayer funding doing precisely what they claim only a “skeptic” would do. The emails show NASA attempting to scrub their website of their own documents, and indeed they quietly pulled down numerous press releases grounded in the proven-wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in uncorrected form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial, after years of hysterically trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies.

As you examine the email excerpts below, as well as those which I will discuss in the upcoming three parts of this series, bear in mind that the contents of these emails were intended to prop up the argument for the biggest regulatory intervention in history: the restricting of carbon emissions from all human activity. NASA’s activist scientists leave no doubt in their emails that this was indeed their objective.
Here are the links to parts two, three, and four.

The corruption is stunning.
EVERY MAN A SEX ADDICT. More preposterous psychobabble.

Link via Instapundit.
FROM THE EMAIL. If George W. Bush had ...

been the first President to need a teleprompter to get through a press conference, would you have said this is proof of how he inept he is?

reduced your retirement plan's holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved?

made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?

given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?

given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?

bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?

visited Austria and made reference to the non-existent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?

filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved?

been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to "Cinco de Cuatro" in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was Cinco de Mayo, would you have winced in embarrassment?

burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he's a hypocrite?

okayed Air Force One flying low over millions of people in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether he actually understood what happened on 9-11?

ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?

proposed to double the national debt in one year, would you have approved?

then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?

spent more than all the Presidents combined since George Washington, would you have approved?

So, tell me: What is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive?

MAYBE NEXT YEAR. One year later, only 22,000 homes “weatherized”.

I could laugh if only it weren’t my tax dollars being spent not weatherizing my own home.
EXCELLENT QUESTION: “Capitalism is about progressing via the ingenuity and excellence of minds unfettered by government regulations and interference. [E]nvironmentalism based on the man-made global warming theory is about regressing from the advances that unfettered minds have made. It’s also about pushing the government to regulate and interfere at every step along the way.”

Knowing this, why should capitalists ever want to go green?
SARAH PALIN MAY SAVE AMERICA.

America need[s] a headliner to counter Obama’s famous brand of demagogy. Sarah Palin can do it.

Sarah Palin appeals in a more-than-rational way to all of us....She is a solid, substantive, conservative thinker, open-minded about facts. ... [L]ike Ronald Reagan, Palin adds something rare and special to a substantive understanding of life and politics.

[Democrats] think in sociological categories: black (check!), male (check!), cute (check!).... Palin happens to be an articulate, conservative woman who also looks good on TV, thereby defeating all of the left’s stereotypes at a single glance.
It’s an interesting argument, with more than a nugget of truth. Read it all.
A BIDEN MOMENT at the health care summit:
I think it requires a little bit of humility to be able to know what the American people think, and I don't. I can't swear I do. I know what I think. I think I know what they think, but I'm not sure what they think.
The truth outs: they don’t know, and they don’t care they don’t know.
MANNED SPACEFLIGHT: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” 23,000 of them, to be exact.

And the source of the problem is in the White House.

NOTE: the source of the phrase "we've had a problem" is here.