Utopia, you are standing in it!

Summary: Sometimes, rarely, we get a glimpse of what the future would have been if we had chosen differently. The University of Arizona attempts to build its own stasi, a network of paid political officers (informing & indoctrinating) to enforce the dicta of its social justice warriors. It’s a inverted repeat of the late 1960s politics plus drugs and sex anti-establishment campus liberation movements. It’s what we might have seen across America during the Hillary years.

“Hegel says somewhere that all great historic facts and personages occur twice, so to speak. He forgot to add: ‘Once as tragedy, and again as farce.’”
— Opening of Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1869).

Turning the Wildcats into tame pussies.

University of Arizona: “Social Justice Advocates Recruitment Information”

“The Social Justice Advocates (SJA) Position is one that is grounded in the multicultural competency framework and allows student staff to gain…

Below is my column in the Hill Newspaper on the Comey termination and comparisons to the Nixon presidency.  Those analogies deepened this weekend after the President repeated that he thinks that they should just get rid of the daily press briefings that have been such a central part of White House operations for decades.  What is most striking is how, again, the White House has engineered its own undoing.  Many people had called for Comey to be fired, particularly Democrats. However, the timing and manner of the termination has created yet another scandal for the Administration. Only 27 percent of citizens support the decision according to a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.  The growing credibility crisis has made the appointment of a Special Prosecutor (or even the resurrection of the Independent Counsel Act) a priority for many. While I have been a dissenting voice regarding the need for a Special…

This story, of course, is covered by only right-wing sites (e.g., here, here, and here), but do you expect the liberal press to report on the left-wing vindictiveness of the student press? At any rate, we have video documentation and the testimony of the reporter himself.

The skinny: Andy C. Ngo, a student reporter who works for the student paper Vanguard, was covering (apparently unoffically) a student interfaith panel held April 26 at Portland State University, a notorious home of Regressive Leftist Students—and also of my friend Peter Boghossian, mentioned below.  The College Fix then reports what happened:

Ngo has covered the persecution of atheists and “apostates” in Muslim countries for The Vanguard, and he’s a member of Freethinkers of PSU, which was represented on the panel by student Benjamin Ramey.

After the Muslim student, who organized the panel, took a question about whether the…

One of the more sophisticated arguments for minimum wage stems from the Efficiency Wages Hypothesis (EWH).  The EWH asserts that firms will sometimes pay higher-than-market wages for their workers.  These wages reduce turnover and increase productivity, making the wages more viable for the firms.  However, it is important to note that with EWH, there is still unemployment in the industry: higher-than-equilibrium wages reduce quantity demanded and increase quantity supplied from the equilibrium point, creating a surplus of labor (unemployment).

Minimum wage activists will cite the EWH for reasons for the minimum wage, claiming the reduced turnover and increased productivity is a positive for the firms.  That much is true.  But howdoes the EWH increase productivity and reduce turnover?  Workers may be feeling better with a higher wage, so they’ll naturally work harder.  That’s possible.  But the real reason is the cost of losing the job is now higher.  With persistent…

Yes, what I’ll recount is blatant hypocrisy on Milo’s part, for he’s always called for free speech, and, demonized by the Left, he was for a while its poster boy. But now he’s joined Pamela Geller’s #CancelSarsour movement: a protest against the City University of New York’s (CUNY’s) invitation to Sarsour to be the graduation speaker at their commencement for Public Health students.

Sarsour is a nasty piece of work, a supporter of the BDS movement, a supporter of sharia law, and someone who once issued this tweet:

She apparently failed to realize that some of Hirsi Ali’s genitals have already been “taken away” by FGM

And these (at least two of all of these have been deleted):

You can see more of these tweets here.

Geller. who I’m not particularly fond of, details some of Sarsour’s other questionable views and actions. But in the doublethink endemic to…

Scientific American recently made its January, 1959 issue available free to the public, but you have to go through a complex procedure of registering, ordering it for $ 0.00, and then downloading it when your order is accepted. Reader Barry has done the work for us and sent me a pdf of the issue.

The reason you want it is that it contains an article by Fay-Cooper Cole, who was an expert witness at the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which lawyers like Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan fought it out over John Scopes, a high-school teacher arrested for violating Tennessee’s Butler Act forbidding the teaching of human evolution. Though it was mostly a show trial to attract attention to Dayton, Tennessee, Scopes was convicted and fined, but the judgement was overturned on a technicality about who levied the fine.

The death of Fay-Cooper Cole two years after…

There was nothing positive to be said about the previous Labour-led government’s approach to housing and house prices.  There is nothing positive to be said about the current National-led government’s approach.  The rhetoric while they were in Opposition had been encouraging.  The substance of reform has been almost non-existent, all the while cloaked in fairly brazen, even offensive, rhetoric from both Prime Ministers (Key and English) suggesting that it was all a mark of success, a quality problem, and so on, along with suggestions that the government’s approach was working.    By that standard, I hope I don’t live to see a failed housing policy.

There have been some hopes, in some circles, that the Labour Party, if they were to lead a new government after this year’s election, might be different.  Their housing spokesman seems pretty impressive, and seems to understand the issues.  In a no doubt mutually beneficial move, he and Oliver Hartwich…