JOEL KOTKIN:

“…The deepest blue cities — San Francisco, New York, San Jose, Los Angeles and Boston — may be ruled by social justice activists but, according to Pew research, suffer the largest gaps between the bottom and top quintiles. Long-standing minority communities like Albina in Portland are disappearing as 10,000 of the 38,000 residents have been pushed out of the historic African-American section. San Francisco’s African-American black population is roughly half that of the 1970s, constituting less than 5 percent of the city’s population. More than half of the Bay Area’s lower-income communities, notes a recent UC Berkeley study, are in danger of mass displacement.

A direct result of climate policies, high energy prices place enormous burdens on California’s working-class families, particularly in the less temperate interior. These policies also discourage growth of manufacturing and other blue-collar industries that long incubated opportunities for working people. As the state’s manufacturing sector has stagnated last year while industrial jobs expanded 14 percent in neighboring Arizona, 5 percent in Nevada and by 3 percent in arch-rival Texas.

Regulations in California have also slowed construction growth, and left employment considerably below the industry’s 2007 numbers. Residential sales have dropped statewide, and California’s rate of new housing permits has fallen behind the national average, making construction workers’ economic prospects even dimmer.

The diminishing prospects in these blue collar industries, as well as high housing costs, may do much to explain why so many minorities, and immigrants, are increasingly migrating away from multi-culturally correct regions like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco for less regulated, far less woke places like Phoenix, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Atlanta and Las Vegas…”

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ANDREW KLAVAN:

“…The corporate media — including social media — are now engaged in a full-fledged and collusive attempt to silence conservative voices in time for the 2020 election. On Sunday, just as YouTube was threatening to pull down thousands of “hateful” (i.e. conservative) videos, the New York Times printed a breathless and idiotic piece supposedly charting a YouTube viewer’s descent into right-wing radicalism.

How radical did this poor radical soul get from watching conservative videos? Well, okay, he “never bought into the far right’s most extreme views, like Holocaust denial or the need for a white ethnostate… “ But, “he began referring to himself as a ‘tradcon’ — a traditional conservative, committed to old-fashioned gender norms. He dated an evangelical Christian woman, and he fought with his liberal friends.”

The horror. The horror.

This suspiciously timed piece — clearly designed to give cover to YouTube’s censorship plan — featured a collage of faces of right-wing radicals. These included such raving hate-filled alt-right evil-doers as mild-mannered gay centrist Dave Rubin and of course Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro — whom various left-wing outlets have repeatedly identified as the one and only orthodox Jewish Nazi in all the universes!

But while branding Dave and Ben alt-right may be absurd, it’s not unintentional. It is part of a strategy. 1. Convince people that hate speech should be silenced. 2. Define hate speech as alt-right. 3. Label powerful mainstream conservatives “alt-right.” 4. Silence powerful mainstream conservatives…”

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Paul Caron via WSJ:

“…The U.S. student loan system is broken. How broken? The numbers tell the story. Borrowers currently owe more than $1.5 trillion in student loans, an average of $34,000 per person. Over two million of them have defaulted on their loans in just the past six years, and the number grows by 1,400 a day. After years of projecting big profits from student lending, the federal government now acknowledges that taxpayers stand to lose $31.5 billion on the program over the next decade, and the losses are growing rapidly.

Meanwhile, four in 10 recent college graduates are in jobs that don’t require a degree, according to the New York Federal Reserve. And many American colleges are dropout factories: At more than a third of them, less than half of the students who enroll earn a credential within eight years, according to the think tank Third Way.

The U.S. is shoveling more and more money into a highly inefficient system that, polls find, Americans are increasingly dissatisfied with. College tuition has soared 1,375% since 1978, more than four times the rate of overall inflation, Labor Department data show. The U.S. now spends more on higher education than any other developed country (except Luxembourg)—about $30,000 a student, according to the OECD. Meanwhile, college presidents are being handsomely rewarded for the success of their enterprises: Seventy of them, including a dozen at public colleges, earned over $1 million in 2016-17, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education…

…The combination of open access to schools and open access to loans turned the higher education market into a version of the Wild West. Schools of all types, banks, nonprofit guarantee agencies and Wall Street investors competed for federal student-loan dollars. In particular, the system gave colleges an incentive to maximize the tuition they extracted from students and the federal taxpayer by boosting fees and enrollment, which meant relaxing admissions standards. …

The voucher system, combined with a lack of government oversight, created perverse incentives: Colleges could raise money quickly by admitting academically suspect students while suffering little or no consequences if their students dropped out and defaulted on loans.

The market was suddenly flooded with cheap money, which led to a surge in the ranks of college-going students. Colleges responded to higher demand by raising prices, leading Congress to increase loan limits and grants. This cycle continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as Sallie Mae and private banks that fronted students the money for the federal student loan program made big profits—and schools collected more money. …

In several important ways, the student loan system has achieved the objectives set out by policy makers a half-century ago. More Americans gained access to college: The number of full-time workers with bachelor’s degrees has risen from 7.6 million in 1980 to 19.5 million today. The share of Americans age 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree reached 34.2% in 2017, double what it was in 1980, Education Department data show. And for the typical borrower, higher education is an investment that pays off: The college premium—the amount graduates earn over workers without degrees—remains at an all-time high. About 40% of all student debt goes to finance graduate degrees, including law and medical degrees, which typically lead to high salaries. …”

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David Bernstein:

“…No wonder Oberlin got socked with a huge punitive damages award for libeling a local bakery as racist after detaining students who wound up pleading guilty to shoplifting. Here’s Oberlin’s litigation position, from its court filings: “Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests. The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.” Get that? Whether the students accused of shoplifting had actually been shoplifting or not was irrelevant to whether it was fair to accuse the store of racism etc for detaining the students as shoplifters. The fault lay with the bakery owners for daring to actually stop and prosecute shoplifters!

This is the kind of b.s. that gets you A’s at Oberlin with a certain type of SJW professor, but that normal people rightly think defies common sense. But it can pay off in academia. A very prominent law professor got an Ivy League job after writing a silly book which, among other things, argued that whether the Al Sharpton-promoted Tawana Brawley hoax was true or not was besides the point, because the real issue was whether society was silencing African American girls like her who surely had something bad happen to them…”

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Dem?

Sis-Law

Emily Jashinsky:

“…As Variety noted in May, “Year to date, Fox News’ ‘Gutfeld’ has secured a bigger average viewership – more than 1.73 million – than any of TV’s late-night offerings except CBS’ ‘Late Show’ and NBC’s ‘Tonight Show.’” A Washington Examiner analysis of Nielson data for the year compared Gutfeld’s average audience on Fox News to his competitors’, and the results were illuminating:

Gutfeld’s show, which airs on Saturdays at 10 p.m. EST, has an average of 1.7 million viewers. Meaning his show averages more viewers than:

-HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” (1.5 million viewers)
-NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” (1.2 million viewers)
-CBS’ “Late Late Show with James Corden” (1.2 million viewers)
-HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” (1 million viewers)
-TBS’ “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” (835,000 viewers)
-Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” (732,000 viewers)

The difference between Gutfeld’s show and the programs eating his dust is a steady drumbeat of media coverage inflating their cultural influence. Outlets regularly pluck clips from every late-night show trailing Gutfeld’s while virtually ignoring him, despite the gaps in viewership…”

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Joy Behar: Climate Change Could Prevent Joe Biden From Curing Cancer

Hard to tell?

Walmart Self-Checkout Machine Wins Employee of the Month Award Again

JOHN HINDERAKER:

“…In my view, the main significance of the jury’s verdict is that is shows how normal people react when they are exposed to today’s campus leftism. You cannot sell to a normal person the idea that it is “racism” for a store to catch a student stealing a bottle of wine, and call the police, merely on account of the student’s skin color. Social justice warrior culture is insane, and is properly judged as such by normal people, who–luckily for them–tend not to encounter it often. The jury’s reaction to the demonization of Gibson’s bakery is, I think, a good indication of how most Americans will respond if, and when, they realize how depraved the Left has become…”

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J. Frank Bullitt:

“…At roughly the same time one Republican said he was thinking about co-sponsoring a carbon tax bill, another was tacitly telling Prince Charles to buzz off with his crackpot global warming theories.

Thankfully, the latter is president and can veto lousy legislation as well as withdraw from counterproductive international climate pacts.

Some Republicans in Congress, prominent among them Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, are warming (yes, warming) to the idea of enacting a carbon tax to do Al Gore’s work, which is “fighting” a windmill called “climate change.”

E&E news reports Romney is “considering co-sponsoring a carbon tax bill amid shifting attitudes in the GOP and increasingly strong advocacy for carbon pricing programs in corporate America.” The Wall Street Journal says “some Republican lawmakers” are breaking with their “party on climate change.” These congressmen “favor market-based solutions over government regulations.”

“Solutions” implies that there’s a problem. Can these GOP lawmakers clearly identify the problem? Where’s the evidence that human-produced carbon dioxide emissions are warming Earth? With what degree of certainty can any politician, scientist, or activist say that man is causing the climate to change in ways that threaten him? 100%? No one can say this. 75%? No serious person would make such a claim. 50%? A 50-50 chance simply isn’t worth the known costs of carbon taxes and other mitigation proposals (Green New Deal, for instance). 25%? No serious person should consider such low odds to be grounds for making significant policy changes — the unknown is too great.

Despite the 1994 revolution, the Tea Party protests, and the 2010 midterm turnaround, it seems little has changed in the GOP. It’s easily bullied by a hostile, agenda-driven media, and would rather incrementally surrender to Democrats’ big-government urges than put up a fight on principle.

But one Republican who has been a registered Democrat, and has even said “in many cases, I probably identify more as Democrat,” is refusing to give in to the demands that we have to let governments take over the global economy to neutralize a mirage. While on his recent visit to the United Kingdom, President Trump met with Prince Charles, who a decade ago said the we had “less than 100 months to act” to save the planet from irreversible climate change. Their scheduled 15-minute meeting went 90 minutes, during which, Trump said, the prince “did most of the talking.” Trump listened politely, but implicitly told the prince he wasn’t interested in joining him to bay at the moon.

Trump has said the global warming scare is a “Chinese hoax.” We don’t believe it’s a hoax, Chinese or otherwise. Or even a conspiracy.

It is, however, hysteria gone wild. Activists, politicians, and journalists want global warming. They have to have it. They can’t live without it. Nothing ever persuades them they might be wrong, not the deeply flawed warming models, not the unreliable and doctored temperature record, not the fact that multiple factors, not just CO2, affect the climate. Religious fervor overwhelms their rational thinking. They want to shame, shut up, and shun those who don’t share their mania.

This is the fanaticism that some Republicans have decided to give in to. We understand keeping an open mind, and we’re willing to change ours if the facts prove our skepticism wrong. But surrender is not a sound policy agenda. The GOP leadership needs to reel in its wayward lawmakers…”

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