Weight

I was in Reno until yesterday afternoon.  This morning's weight was 199.6.

I Can See Clearly Now

Back in May I posted about the contact lens I wear at night that corrects my eye like a retainer does teeth. I just got home from the DMV.  Now, for the first time in I don't know how long, my drivers license will no longer have a "must wear corrective lenses" restriction on it. 

Monovision--correcting only one eye so that I have one eye to see up close and one eye to see distance, giving me fairly good vision overall--is really working out well for me.  No distance glasses, no reading glasses, nothing.

And while I was at DMV, I paid an additional $5 to have a "veteran" designation put on my license.  One never knows when that might come in handy!

How Much Is The Rich's "Fair Share" of Taxes

Liberals want to "tax the rich", but at some point you're just killing the goose that lays the golden egg.  Even the New York Times sees this, although they sugarcoat it a bit in this story:

Our top-heavy economy has come to this: One man can move out of New Jersey and put the entire state budget at risk. Other states are facing similar situations as a greater share of income — and tax revenue — becomes concentrated in the hands of a few.

Last month, during a routine review of New Jersey’s finances, one could sense the alarm. The state’s wealthiest resident had reportedly “shifted his personal and business domicile to another state,” Frank W. Haines III, New Jersey’s legislative budget and finance officer, told a State Senate committee. If the news were true, New Jersey would lose so much in tax revenue that “we may be facing an unusual degree of income tax forecast risk,” Mr. Haines said.

It isn't just New Jersey: 

In New York, California, Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey, the top 1 percent pay a third or more of total income taxes. Now a handful of billionaires or even a single individual like Mr. Tepper can have a noticeable impact on state revenues and budgets.

California had to account for a “Facebook effect” in 2012 and 2013 after that company’s 2012 initial public offering of stock. The offering generated more than $1 billion in revenue — much of that from the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and a small group of company shareholders. Washington, D.C., had an unexpected $50 million gain in its 2012 fiscal year — which helped create a budget surplus — after the death of a local billionaire increased its estate tax receipts.

Some academic research shows that high taxes are chasing the rich to lower-tax states, and anecdotes of tax-fleeing billionaires abound. But other studies say there is little evidence showing that the rich move solely for tax purposes. Millionaires and billionaires who move from the high-tax states in the Northeast to Florida, for instance, may be drawn by the sunshine, lifestyle and retirement culture, in addition to lower taxes.

The NYT is a liberal paper, so you knew "income inequality" had to come up somehow:

“In a time of rising inequality, I’m not sure the right answer is lowering taxes or making them less progressive,” said Kim S. Rueben, senior fellow of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute. “It’s more about keeping an eye on people, seeing where they are and enforcing the tax rules.”

Don't let those rich people move!  And if they do, tax them to death! 

Seems to me that the states listed above can't afford to kill their golden goose.  I'd suggest that if their budgets are overly dependent on just a few people, they probably shouldn't chase those people away with confiscatory tax rates.

In California, 5,745 taxpayers earning $5 million or more generated more than $10 billion of income taxes in 2013, or about 19 percent of the state’s total, according to state officials.

“Any state that depends on income taxes is going to get sick whenever one of these guys gets a cold,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Liberals decry the rich--even though so many of them are rich themselves!--but can't fund a government without them.  Hey libs, you want to be the party of science?  Study some economics.

Guest Blogging

My guest blogging posts at Joanne's blog for yesterday and today are:
Justice Department To Address Affirmative Action at Universities, and
What Is The Proper Response To This?

Finally, An Official Press Release

I'd seen the pdf file of the orders identifying the senior cadet leadership positions at West Point, and I saw a blog post (from a blog I'd never before heard of) identifying that the brigade commander, known colloquially as the First Captain, will be a black woman for the first time.  Here's an army public affairs story containing the press release:

Cadet Simone Askew of Fairfax, Virginia, has been selected First Captain of the U.S. Military Academy's Corps of Cadets for the 2017-2018 academic year, achieving the highest position in the cadet chain of command. She will assume her duties on Aug. 14.

Askew, an International History major, currently leads 1,502 cadets as the Regimental Commander of Cadet Basic Training II.

As First Captain she is responsible for the overall performance of the approximately 4,400-member Corps of Cadets. Her duties also include implementing a class agenda and acting as a liaison between the Corps and the administration.

Askew is the first African-American woman to hold this esteemed position. 

The press release itself is here.

It's hard to tell from the unisex names on the press release of leadership positions but I read that three of the four regimental commanders are also women.

I wish good luck to all of them as they undertake their last year at West Point.

Another Well-Intentioned Step On The Road To Hell

I don't think too many people genuinely honestly truly want to destroy higher education.  There are plenty who are clueless, who don't think through the ramifications of their proposals, who naively or stupidly think they're genuinely helping people.  In other words, I'm inclined to think the best of people even when the idiocy of their ideas should be a trumpet call to battle.

But that positive view of people's motivations can be stretched to the limit sometimes, and I'm nearing that point with university math.  Recently the chancellor of California's community college system recommended eliminating the algebra requirement for college because too many minority students can't/don't pass it (link).  I'll take him at his word that he truly wants to help people earn an associate's degree; he and I would no doubt disagree on whether or not his proposal devalues the degree and hence the reason for earning it.

That proposal was bad enough.  That was a stick of dynamite.  Let's jack that up to bunker-busting-bomb level:

Cal State plans to drop placement exams in math and English as well as the noncredit remedial courses that more than 25,000 freshmen have been required to take each fall — a radical move away from the way public universities traditionally support students who come to college less prepared than their peers.

In an executive order issued late Wednesday, Chancellor Timothy P. White directed the nation’s largest public university system to revamp its approach to remedial education and assess new freshmen for college readiness and course placement by using high school grades, ACT and SAT scores, previous classroom performance and other measures that administrators say provide a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of students’ knowledge.

Cal State will no longer make those students who may need extra help take the standardized entry-level mathematics (ELM) exam and the English placement test (EPT).

The new protocol, which will go into effect in fall 2018, “facilitates equitable opportunity for first-year students to succeed through existing and redesigned education models,” White wrote in a memorandum to the system’s 23 campus presidents, who will be responsible for working with faculty to implement the changes. The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system's priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025.

When you see the words "equitable" or "equity" in an education context, run for the hills.  Those words don't mean what they mean in ordinary English; allow me to translate:

"Too many minority students have been placed in remedial classes, and that's not 'fair'.  To solve this problem we're going to get rid of the remedial classes."

Sure, they're spinning this as a wonderful positive:

Under the new system, all Cal State students will be allowed to take courses that count toward their degrees beginning on Day 1. Students who need additional support in math or English, for example, could be placed in “stretch” courses that simultaneously provide remedial help and allow them to complete the general math and English credits required for graduation.

Faculty are also being encouraged to explore other innovative ways to embed additional academic support in college-level courses. A few other states have experimented with these approaches, and the results so far are encouraging, administrators said.

This is a "social justice" action given the lightest veneer of academic respectability.  I'm not buying it. I want to see evidence of improved math ability. 

There is good commentary of the community college chancellor's idea in the comments on my three posts at Joanne Jacob's blog:

Here We Go Again With Algebra
Getting Rid of Algebra, Part 2
Getting Rid of Algebra, Part 3--The Empire Strikes Back

Such comments are even more applicable in the university setting.

Guest Blogging

My guest post over at Joanne's today is Whiny Misfit, Victim, or Both?

It's Not Heavy Statistics, But The Numbers Are Telling Us Something

When it comes to college admissions, it's hard to deny that Asians are the new Jews:

One microdrama this week came from a leaked document revealing that the Justice Department may staff up an investigation into “intentional race-based discrimination” in college admissions. The left is accusing Justice of dismantling racial preferences, though acceptance practices at elite universities deserve more scrutiny, particularly regarding Asian-American applicants.

In 2015 a coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups filed a complaint with the Justice Department Civil Rights Division that alleges admissions discrimination at Harvard University, and the details are striking. In 1993 about 20% of Harvard students were Asian-American, and that figure has barely budged over two decades, even as the Asian-American share of the U.S. population has grown rapidly. Harvard’s admitted class of 2021 is 22% Asian-American, according to data on the university’s website, and the numbers are roughly consistent at Princeton, Yale and other Ivy League schools.

Compare that with California, where a 1990s referendum banned the state’s public universities from considering race as an admissions factor. The share at University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles tops 30%, as the complaint notes. At the private California Institute of Technology, which by choice does not consider race as a factor, more than 40% of students were Asian-American in 2013, up from 26% in 1993.

Also notable is research on how much more competitive Asian-Americans must be to win entry into Harvard or other hallowed progressive halls. All else being equal, Asian-American must score 140 points higher on the SAT than a white counterpart, 270 points higher than a Hispanic student, and 450 points higher than a black applicant, according to 2009 research from Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and co-author Alexandria Walton Radford.

Schools are allowed to consider race as a “plus” factor, and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in recent years has muddied the legal standards, most recently in Fisher v. University of Texas. But the Asian-American disparities look like evidence of de facto admissions quotas that the High Court has explicitly declared illegal.

Guest Blogging

My posts over at Joanne's today are
Cognitive Privilege, and
I Can Think Of Worse Pursuits for Teenagers

Culture Isn't Stagnant

That's one of the lesser reasons why the idea behind so-called cultural appropriation is not only wrong, but insidious.  And yes, immigrants to the United States should learn English and should integrate their former cultures into the greater American culture:

In fact, the only difference between the ctrl-left and the alt-right is how they envision the treatment of these “minority cultures.”

And I hate to say it, but if the innate nature of language and culture were correct, the alt-right would have the right idea. If a culture can’t be assimilated into your own, if the descendants of your immigrants will never understand your political system, your language, or be able to participate fully in the life of the nation, immigration amounts to a poison pill.

Which makes the left’s position that we should bring in these minorities, encourage them not to assimilate and give them all sorts of linguistic accommodations, like a lot of their other beliefs essentially suicidal. They hate themselves and have since the day they were born, but are too wussy to eat a bullet, and therefore they seek to destroy their homeland, their co-citizens, their own culture, in an ecstatic fit of oikophobia.

Note the if in the above sentence. If language and culture were innate, the alt-right would be at least self-preserving.

The problem, of course, is that the alt-right and the ctrl-left both ignore reality.

That Big Yellow Thing In The Sky

Do you think it has an influence on the earth's climate?  I do, and have for a long time.  Here's some more evidence for that belief:

In a just published study in The Open Atmospheric Science Journal here, German scientists Horst-Joachim Lüdecke and Carl-Otto Weiss have used a large number of temperature proxies worldwide to construct a global temperature mean over the last 2000 years, dubbed G7, in order to find out more about the sun’s role on climate change.

Their results drop a huge surprise on the laps of scientists who have long believed the earth is warming due to human-emitted CO2.

The analysis by the German scientists shows the strongest climate cycle components as 1000, 460, and 190-year periods. The G7 global temperature extrema coincide with the Roman, Medieval, and present optima, as well as the well-known minimum of AD 1450 during the Little Ice Age.

Leftist Indoctrination Begins Before The First Class Starts

A very astute observation about college freshmen reading assignments:

The indoctrination is probably unnecessary. After all, studies show that today’s high school graduates – especially those who listened well, earned the best grades and gained admissions to top schools – are more likely to identify themselves as “liberal” or “far-left” than at any time since the early 1970s. They are more committed to “social justice” and increasingly support efforts to shut down speakers whose views they disagree with (no wonder the left fights so hard to preserve the public education status quo).

And during four, five or six years on campus – sorry mom and dad – students will be instructed by professors who support Democrats. In their book, “Passing on the Right,” Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr. noted five major studies that “all placed the percentage of Republican professors between 7 percent and 9 percent in the social sciences and somewhere between 6 percent and 11 percent in the humanities.”

Nevertheless, North Carolina’s top schools make sure to signal the rules of the game from the get-go through the books they ask every incoming freshman to read...

As a classical liberal, I find the left-wing tilt of these books disturbing. Their underlying message is that American culture is cruel and close-minded, a problem to be overcome. Training our future leaders to see we the people as members of separate identity groups engaged in a Darwinian struggle is a form of national suicide.

I also see the sad logic of it. The elite culture these schools are training students to join is defined by a bundle of progressive attitudes. These include the idea that there are single right, unquestionable answers on a range of complex issues, from race, gender and identity to climate change and health care.

I do not deny that African-Americans, Muslims, LGBTQ Americans and others face special challenges.

My concern is that the books assigned do not leave room for the larger purpose of education: to question and challenge ideas, to truly engage in what the left calls “courageous conversations.” The three books selected by the North Carolina schools are, at bottom, personal stories. They are not collections of facts – which can be debated objectively – but of opinions, which, by their nature, are unassailable.

They are words to be heard, not scrutinized or challenged.  (boldface mine--Darren)

The only people who are supposed to challenge their own ideas and beliefs are those the left doesn't agree with.

I like the author's closing:

Indeed, the growing intolerance we see on campus reflects this failure. Such authoritarian behavior is the long-favored response of those who see the world in black and white, who insist that their opinion is Truth, and who lash out in frustration because they lack the words to form a cogent response.

Addressing that is higher education’s greatest challenge. 

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/j-peder-zane/article164863872.html#storylink=cpy

Guest Blogging

My post today at Joanne's is about Digital Natives and Multitasking.

Microsoft Office World Championship

When teaching statistics I use a variety of tools--small scientific calculators, TI-83's, Minitab on laptops.  I also use Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software, as much to introduce its functionality to students as for its statistical analysis tools.  The vast majority of my students have never used a spreadsheet before taking my class.  Digital natives?  Outside of a few apps on their phones, I'm not so sure.

These kids, though?  They know what they're doing, and it looks like they're having fun doing it:

Like many teens, John Dumoulin passed the summer before his senior year of high school in front of a computer screen. But he wasn’t playing “League of Legends,” streaming “Game of Thrones” or watching hours on end of YouTube videos.

He was mastering the art of the pivot table.

The 17-year-old from Virginia spent several hours a day perfecting his technique in Microsoft Excel. He was training for what he calls the “Olympics,” after all.

This week, John was one of 150 students from 50 countries competing in the Microsoft Office World Championship at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. At stake: cash, prizes and the clout that comes with being the best in the world at Excel, PowerPoint or Word.

Very cool!

My Kinda Feminist

While she holds many views that I don't, Camille Paglia is someone whose ideas about feminism are ones I often share:

Camille Paglia has been called the "anti-feminist feminist" for decades but she's not one to back down.

As a self-proclaimed "leader of the dissident wing of feminism," she maintains that her arguments with what she calls "mainstream feminists" are necessary to shake up a movement she sees as stuck in near-religious ideologies.

In Paglia's recent collection of writings from 1990 to today, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism, she argues "[w]omen will never know who they are until they let men be men."

Her key message to feminists: "Stop blaming men."

I like this part, too:

Paglia's advice to young women wanting to succeed in today's world:

"They should model their persona on me and on fellow Amazon feminists of the 1960s," says Paglia, "which is that you are responsible for how people treat you."

Calexit Goal: To Eliminate the Middle Class

He said it, not me!  And he is a leader in the movement for California to secede from the union.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson asked “Calexit” leader Shankar Singam how California could stand as its own nation given their current mismanagement has caused the middle class to move to other states.
Singam, who believes the Golden State is “not the U.S.,” argued that it is a “good thing” that the middle class is leaving California because it makes room for new immigrants.

“We need to open up for the new wave of immigrants to come up,” Singman said. “We’re exporting our middle class to the United States–you guys should be thanking us for that.”

link

At least we're going to get the socialist worker's paradise without the killing fields of Cambodia, the famines of Ukraine, the gulags of Siberia, the Cultural Revolution of China, or the walls and fences that keep people in instead of out of every communist country that's ever existed. No, this time we're just going to chase away the bourgeoisie and import our peasants!

Guest Blogging

My post over at Joanne's today is

Educated, Yes, But Smarter? Happier?

How Bad Is The Environment at Evergreen College

You've probably heard of the explosive, racially-charged events that took place earlier this year at Evergreen (State) College in Olympia, WA.  After getting plenty of well-deserved negative press, the school has pledged to "educate" its students about discriminating against students based on the color of their skin.  That would be straight out of 1964 were it not for the fact that white students were the ones being openly harassed, attacked, and threatened:

After a white Evergreen State College student filed a formal complaint citing claims of “racially driven violence and harassment” from peers of color, a campus official has pledged that future training topics for student leaders will include preventing bias based on race.

The complaint had been filed by student Steve Coffman*, a junior and history major at the embattled university, who stated that at a heated campus meeting in late May organized by students who claimed the campus is racist and attended by President George Bridges, Coffman was told to get out of the seat he was sitting in and move to the back of the room because he is white.

“I entered about 20 minutes before the meeting started and sat in one of the numerous provided chairs in the room. Subsequently I was approached twice about being a ‘white person’ sitting in chairs that were ‘reserved for people of color,’” Coffman stated in the emailed complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix.

“Twice I was told I should not be sitting in those chairs and I should leave the room or stand in the back. 

You'd think minorities, specifically American blacks, would be sensitive to issues about being told to sit in the back (of the bus).

“I refused to move and was repeatedly harassed by event organizers and other students around me,” Coffman added. “As this happened on college property and at an event attended by college leadership, it is patently obvious that attempts to discriminate and deny access to facilities based on race or ethnicity occurred in violation of state law and college policy.”

Ya think?

Also in mid-July, a memo emailed from an Evergreen State College administrator to students warned them that aggressively cornering and shouting down faculty, staff and peers and blocking campus exits is actually illegal and future occurrences could result in criminal charges.

One wonders why the school didn't enforce these rules last May.

Another student, while claiming that the campus isn't a hotbed of racism, somehow survives swirling inconsistency after writing this:

I’m left wondering, where is the racism I keep hearing so much about? This place is so not racist. If it was any less racist, it could be the textbook example for MLK’s dream. It’s so far left its professors and policies often make Bernie Sanders look moderate.

Yet I kept hearing about racist campus police, and racist professors, and racists campus policies, and institutional racism. Then I asked for specifics. Big mistake.

The response I get in person and online can be summarized thusly: “Asking about racism is perpetuating racism.” “Seeking evidence is oppressive.”

It's not racist because it's so leftie?  *retch*

After a few more observations he states,

I say this as a non-traditional student in nearly every way. I’m 37 years old and a junior. I’m a gun-toting libertarian atheist who voted for George W. Bush. Twice.

The racism is right in front of him but he refuses to see it.  Impressive, dangerous, clueless, or some mixture of all three?

What Is There For The University To Investigate?

The man clearly didn't rape the woman.  The evidence--video, no less--shows the sex was consensual.  The legal case against the man has been dropped.

Prosecutors will no longer pursue a case against a USC student accused of raping a fellow undergraduate after a judge’s decision that there was not enough evidence to send the case to trial, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said Monday.

Charges will not be refiled against 20-year-old Armaan Karim Premjee, who was accused of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old student in her campus dorm on April 1, said Shiara Davila-Morales, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. Premjee’s preliminary hearing was held in Los Angeles Superior Court last week...

Emily Gersema, a USC spokeswoman, said in an email Monday that Premjee is registered for courses in the fall. Gersema said she could not confirm whether the university was conducting its own investigation.

What could a university "investigation" possibly uncover?

Totally left out of this story are two questions that need to be answered:
1) Who reported this alleged rape?
2) Are charges being filed against the person who falsely reported a rape?

Update:  Then there's this, also from USC, which should be proof enough that the university can't be and shouldn't be trusted to investigate alleged sexual assaults.  Leave such investigations to law enforcement:

A former football player was “railroaded” by a “rogue” Title IX office at the University of Southern California, according to a surprising source — his alleged “victim.”

Zoe Katz, the captain of USC’s women’s tennis team, is accusing the university of not only ignoring her protestations that her boyfriend Matt Boermeester didn’t assault her, but threatening her for speaking up...

She denounced USC for conducting a “horrible and unjust” investigation: “Looking back, Matt never had a chance. Before he was even interviewed by the Title IX investigator, he was suspended from the University"...

“I was told that I must be afraid of Matt, which I definitely was not and am not,” Katz wrote in her statement denouncing USC. “When I told the truth about Matt, in repeated interrogations, I was stereotyped and was told I must be a ‘battered’ woman, and that made me feel demeaned and absurdly profiled.”

Instead she fears “further” retaliation from USC’s Title IX office, which she says isolated her by prohibiting her from speaking with Boermeester and even her own friends....

USC is not covering itself in glory on this topic.

Guest Blogging

My post at Joanne's today is about teaching in International Schools.