It’s about 3:30am here at RNS Blogstation Tacoma and in a few moments I”ll be heading out to join David and Dave at the Boomeragio.
I’ll be attempting a new route to try and shave some time off the drive. Wish me luck. I’ll try to update when I arrive.
If you haven’t yet read Ace’s take down of the Guardian writer and her friends who got this London Tube advert banned yesterday
Then hither your yon, post-haste, because it’s Friday and you deserve it.
Requiring college professors to actually earn their salaries!
A bill introduced in late March in the North Carolina General Assembly has set college faculty members across the state abuzz with a bold suggestion:Â Require all professors within the University of North Carolina system to teach at least eight courses each academic year.
Senate Bill 593, titled “Improve Professor Quality/UNC System,” would reduce the salary of any professor who fails to hit that annual mark. ..
The backlash from faculty across the state was immediate — and unsurprising. Professors expressed outrage. Many said a mandated 4/4 course load — four courses per semester — would make it impossible to focus on their research and other responsibilities.
They’ve built up a system where their TA’s “teach” most of the coursework and they pop in for a class or two a week. They see that disappearing and are shitting themselves.
And exactly what kind of useful research does a Gender or Race Studies professor do, anyway? Of course, keeping them out of the classroom might a better idea.
Baltimore Mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake: We gave those who wished to destroy a place to do that.
Baltimore rioters: But this is our neighborhood. Can we destroy somewhere else too?
Mayor: …….
Rioters: Destroy other people’s neighborhoods.
And tomorrow, MSNBC will be complaining about “white flight”.
I say tomorrow, because tonight they were too busy complaining about Baltimore police officers not wanting to live in Baltimore. Specifically, they mentioned that a large percentage of officers were living in both York and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, thereby “stealing wealth” from both the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland.
Last week, you may have read Thirdpower’s post on the Yahoo article claiming that the NRA is illegally splitting donations amongst their various legislative organizations.
I read about the hit piece the day before when it spread like wildfire among the various progressive websites I visit. If I wasn’t putting in 55 hours a week at the new job right now, you’d have read this post the same day as his.
What you have here is no serious allegation. Just as you know these allegations are bullshit, so does Alan Berlow, the author of the hit piece. And so does anyone who understands that you cannot track your monetary donation once you have given them to an organization.
What Berlow describes in his claims is that he, effectively, attached an RFID tracking chip to every penny he donated to the NRA and watched as those pennies were split up amongst the NRA’s various orgs.
Of course, that is impossible, which is how you can tell he is lying.
But that is not the point of his allegations. Because the people who want to believe that this would actually be possible don’t care if he is lying. The people who support Berlow need the hatred of the NRA to be kept nice and toasty warm, lest these true believing progressives slip into apathy towards the NRA, or, heaven forbid, listen to an argument against gun control with their minds and not their hearts.
The NYT lie that the NRA banned all loaded and functional firearms at their convention was corrected so quickly and precisely that it made the hoplophobic bigots look stoopid (yes, with two O’s). This was shown to be a lie, which had the possibility to expose more leftist/progressive lies about the NRA, so they needed a bigger lie that made the NRA look so powerful, they could flaunt election finance laws without worry of reprocussion.
“How powerful is the NRA? So powerful they don’t even worry about the FEC coming down on them.”
This will be the new eevviil. To, of course, be tacked onto the old eevviill that the NRA makes money off of dead children.
It’s recognizable when you read how the leftosphere builds hate against both individuals and groups. They try to pile it on faster than it can be debunked. And when they can’t, they make one up so big, with an explanation that needs to be laid out in paragraphs instead of sentences, that will be swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the kool-aid drinkers that you’ll never get it out.
Even if one of the true believers walks into NRA headquarters with a gun and kills someone or multiple someones. Which is the unspoken goal.
This is how they believe the nation “Will finally have a serious talk about guns.”
Hit the comments sections of any leftist/progressive article about the NRA. Once you get past the ignorance of firearms and the Markley’s law types, you’ll find exactly what they want to happen.
Get your mathematics hats on and give this a read.
There is a “myth” that the economy of the United States chugged along at least in part due to higher taxes on the wealthy in the past. First, this myth, like so many about creating prosperity, ignores that U.S. growth came after two world wars wiped out most of our competitors. Second, the implication is that “the rich” were actually paying 90 percent taxes at some point in history. That’s never been the case.
Yes, it’s over four years old, and gets to feeling like TL;DR material rather quickly, but before next year’s election, you’re going to hear this myth a lot. Better to be prepared.
Linoge is closing down his venerable Walls of the City blog, so be quick and download from it what you wish to refer to, reread, and enjoy in the future, and do it quickly, because in June it’s all going away.
And there’s lots of good stuff there.
In case you haven’t been following the issue, anti-death penalty activists have been pressuring pharmaceutical companies to stop selling the products use to preform lethal injections executions to states that still have the death penalty on the books.
Essentially, states cannot buy items like sodium pentathol from anywhere, foreign or domestic. This is why the last few executions by lethal injection have been botched and made the news a few weeks back. States were mixing up their own lethal cocktails, some of which really make you wonder who taught chemistry to the person doing the mixing.
Of course, the anti-death penalty activists refuse to accept any of the blame for these botched executions, even though the blame stems directly from their actions.
But the Sooner State has a better idea, in case the case in front of the SCOTUS goes against them:
Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin signed into law a bill that approves the use of nitrogen gas for executions in the state. The method, which would effectively asphyxiate death row inmates by forcing them to breathe pure nitrogen through a gas mask, is meant to be the primary alternative to lethal injection, The Washington Post reports.
Fallin and other supporters of the procedure say it’s pain-free and effective, noting that the nitrogen would render inmates unconscious within ten seconds and kill them in minutes. It’s also cheap: state representatives say the method only requires a nitrogen tank and a gas mask, but financial analysts say its impossible to give precise figures, the Post reports.
If Oklahoma does get to use nitrogen, I am sure that the activists will go after pressurised gas supplies in short order. If they succeed there, they will then go after rope manufacturers.
The activists already belong to groups that go after manufacturers of ammunition and electricity, so probably not much change there.
I was, for a few days, mightily depressed — but not surprised, nowadays — that a premium cigar from an established maker would have such shoddy quality control as to let this hideous misspelling go out to the public:
Then I found out that it’s intentional and my hope for this generation was restored. All hail!
It is a very nice cigar.
Mother Jones magazine got together with some bigots and aimed for the sky
In collaboration with Miller, Mother Jones crunched data from 2012 and found that the annual cost of gun violence in America exceeds $229 billion. Direct costs account for $8.6 billion—including long-term prison costs for people who commit assault and homicide using guns, which at $5.2 billion a year is the largest direct expense. Even before accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence, in other words, the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.
Indirect costs amount to at least $221 billion, about $169 billion of which comes from what researchers consider to be the impact on victims’ quality of life. Victims’ lost wages, which account for $49 billion annually, are the other major factor. Miller’s calculation for indirect costs, based on jury awards, values the average “statistical life” harmed by gun violence at about $6.2 million. That’s toward the lower end of the range for this analytical method, which is used widely by industry and government. (The EPA, for example, currently values a statistical life at $7.9 million, and the DOT uses $9.2 million.)
Our investigation also begins to illuminate the economic toll for individual states. Louisiana has the highest gun homicide rate in the nation, with costs per capita of more than $1,300. Wyoming has a small population but the highest overall rate of gun deaths—including the nation’s highest suicide rate—with costs working out to about $1,400 per resident. Among the four most populous states, the costs per capita in the gun rights strongholds of Florida and Texas outpace those in more strictly regulated California and New York. Hawaii and Massachusetts, with their relatively low gun ownership rates and tight gun laws, have the lowest gun death rates, and costs per capita roughly a fifth as much as those of the states that pay the most.
Those are some big numbers. But these are progressives, and math is hard. So they told a huge lie with made up numbers to make sure it impressed their readers.
