I hope you had a merry holiday. I finally saw Borat - Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Hilariously un-PC and insensitive, and therefore highly recommended. Now, back to work.
Christmas in Baghdad. Photo from the piece at Gateway
Harvard's endowment likely lost much more than they are saying. University greed is the problem.
What's with the double-counting? I don't get it.
Handel's Messiah: I thought I saw the face of God.
The alarmists are becoming increasingly shrill. Maybe they are worried that we quit listening, and have begun to mock and satirize them. Dang it, we want warmening - for the children.
Coyote on the wind power scam and the green jobs myth.
A year of scary, trumped-up myths about smoking and obesity. Spiked. Sounds like people don't like to feel pushed around by the government they pay for.
AVI on Special Education. From everything I've read about education, "special" or otherwise, neither $, nor computers, nor fancy buildings make any difference at all.
"More Science in journalism school, please." Surber. My impression is that journalists understand science about as well as they understand economics.
Speaking of science, Politicizing Science at Powerline.
Steyn on Subprime Education,
... in America, so-called "expanding opportunities for college" is an obvious crock to absolve high schools of their failure to educate.
with a h/t to Viking who also quoted Professor X thus:
There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces-social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students-that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.
Rape or love? Sounds like love to me.
What's the latest on Sen. Dodd? And why do Libs always get a free pass on their sleaziness?
Jonah critiques the New Republic's critique of Liberal Fascism
Well put, by Rick Moran:
Our economic situation is dire – and being made more so by mortgaging our future so that politicians can be seen to be “doing something about the problem.”
