News of the Week (March 16th, 2014)

 

News of the Week for March 16th, 2014


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The Ides of March (2014)

Caesar:
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue shriller than all the music
Cry “Caesar!” Speak, Caesar is turn’d to hear.

Soothsayer:
Beware the ides of March.

Caesar:
What man is that?

Brutus:
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

     A little mood music:

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Happy Pi Day!

     Happy π Day everyone!

     Here is what π sounds like:

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The last episode of “Free to Choose” will be shown next week.

In the meantime, Happy π day!

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Common Core Bonds in a Knot

     Some of the major problems with Common Core is that the materials are made by people who don’t understand what is being taught, teachers who don’t know how to teach it, and the use of jargon that makes Cockney rhyming slang seem transparently obvious.

     Take for example the following:

     If presented in a proper manner, it does make sense.  Adding 3 to 7 will result in 10, and taking 3 from the other 7 will result in 4, which makes adding the two numbers easy.  Of course, this only makes sense if the student already understands the basics of addition and subtraction, as well as intuitively understands that one is rounding up one number to 10 while rounding down the other numbers equivalently.  The problem with the above example, is that is does not explain why you split 7 into 3 and 4.  The student would just go through the motion without actually understanding why it is done the way it is!

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Yet More College Leftists Threatening Physical Action

     It has been previously noted that the University of Michigan Black Student Union threatened “physical action” unless their “more-Left-than-Academics” demands were met, and how the university caved.

     It turns out this was the first of many such threats of “physical action” unless their demands are met.

     These demands are:

  • Racial enrollment quotas for Black and Latino students to “at least 10 percent each”
  • “Ensure that 47 percent of post-doctoral students are people of color”
  • “Ban the use of ‘illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, wetback’ and any racially charged term””
  • Mandate cultural competency and sensitivity training for professors
  • “Ask staff/faculty to use students’ and employees’ preferred gender pronouns”
  • Enroll more students in the country illegally (undocumented students); and provide them free legal assistance and financial aid
  • Convert ethnic studies programs into full-fledged departments
  • Incorporate into each department at least one queer studies class
  • Increase the interdisciplinary academic focus on sexualities
  • Enact curricular changes to force students to study social justice and marginalization in depth
  • Provide gender-neutral bathrooms in every building on campus
  • “Create a policy with serious consequences against hate speech/crimes”
  • Create a policy penalizing and discriminating against students who use the Indian mascot
  • Require school’s conservative paper give up “Dartmouth” name if they use term “Indian”

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Six Californias: An Analysis of Splitting California Into Six States

     A Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Tim Draper, is circulating an initiative measure to split California into six states.  Here we present a quick look at what that would mean politically.

     First let us look how the state would be broken up:

     Let us assign House seats by simply taking the current number (53) and assign them according to the percent of the California’s population in each, rounding appropriately, and then assigning the 53rd seat to the state most likely to get it we have:

  • “Jefferson” = 1
  • “Northern California” = 5
  • “Silicon Valley” = 10
  • “Central California” = 6
  • “West California” = 16
  • “Southern California” = 15

     Thus in each state would have the following electoral votes:

  • “Jefferson” = 3
  • “Northern California” = 7
  • “Silicon Valley” = 12
  • “Central California” = 8
  • “West California” = 18
  • “Southern California” = 17

     To get a feel for the political situation in each of the new states, we’ll look at two recent elections:  The 2010 Attorney General election, which was a near win for the Republicans with Steve Cooley, and the 2012 Presidential election.  Though Sen. Feinstein received a slightly higher percentage of the vote, we will focus on Obama’s re-election to gauge the impact nationally.

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Obama’s Empty Ukraine Threats

     President Obama has been warning Russia of dire consequences if it interfered with the Ukraine, and again with dire consequences if they don’t leave the Crimea, which they are in the process of annexing.  Putin has been ignoring those pathetic threats and acted in the knowledge that the U.S. would not, and could not, stop him from taking over the Crimea.

     Putin got away with stripping South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia back when Bush was President in 2008.  Is there any reason to think that if he was willing to invade his neighbors while the U.S. had a President who was not only willing to invade Iraq and Afganistan, but to do so successfully where the old Soviet Union could not.

     Why does Putin think that he can do anything he wants without fear of reprisal from the United States?  Perhaps because Obama is turning the military into a LGBTQ social experiment:

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News of the Week (March 9th, 2014)

 

News of the Week for March 9th, 2014


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We Are Not The Masses

     The Progressives, and the broader Left in general, truly believe that people are but interchangeable widgets in a greater collective whole, i.e. the “Masses.”  They claim to speak for all of us, and for elected officials to speak for all of us in all things, rather than be stewards with but delegated powers.

     Even when it comes to “environmental issues,” the far Left presumes to speak for all of us and make sure we do what they think is best for each of us.  As has become common, the elitist few presume to ask of our elected officials a surrender of our freedoms to their political agenda.  We are not the masses to be molded by the few:

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