Via Ed Driscoll:
No seriously - if you're going to make the environmentalist catch-22 argument as Democrats John Kerry and Claire McCaskill have, that a shrinking economy is good for the environment because of less carbon emissions, then you have to agree that the same holds true for shrinking the government as well. Radical environmentalism isn't my religion, but the Book of Saul demands that its practitioners stay faithful to their own tenets.
"Contra Mother Jones, though: I don't think that Scott Walker deliberately set out to lay off those folks on Earth Day itself," Moe Lane posits.
"Instead, I simply think that Scott Walker doesn't give a flying leap about Earth Day one way, or the other. Which is, frankly, more entertaining." As Jonathan Chait's bete noire would say, heh, indeed.™
Certainly, Walker's doing more for the environment than this plutocratic carbon-destroying One Percenter.
Shot:
Chaser:
That level of carbon waste is so bad, Hollywood director Joss Whedon is pondering if he would withhold penicillin from the president should, Gaia forbid, he become ill. Particularly since Mr. Obama has been jetting away on "Earth Day" since the very start of his administration.
Also read: Bill Nye Celebrating Earth Day With...An Air Force One Flight?
Mark Steyn and The Passing Parade
Mark Steyn is no stranger to apocalyptic doom, having written two best-selling books on societal dissipation and collapse, America Alone and After America.
But in addition to doom on a macro level, as the Washington Post has dubbed him, Mark is also the "world's wittiest obit writer," as exemplified by his anthology of obituaries, Mark Steyn's Passing Parade, newly updated and available on dead tree format (appropriately enough), and finally for the Kindle as well.
Featuring obituaries of figures ranging from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, all the way to show business personalities as diverse as Bob Hope, Tupac Shakur, Evel Knievel, James Doohan, and Michael Jackson, the Passing Parade is a brilliant time capsule of popular and political culture at the dawn of the 21st century.
During our 35 minute long interview, Mark will discuss:
- How his career as an obituarist began.
- The secret Tupac Shakur, Evel Knievel, Wayne Newton connection — revealed!
- What's the status of the legal imbroglio involving Mark and Michael Mann?
And much more.
Also read: The Kafkaesque Show Trial of Mark Steyn
Mallory Factor on Big Tent Conservatism
"I'm a professor at the Citadel; it's a military college in South Carolina, which is a very conservative college to begin with. And my students had no idea what conservatism was. Some thought it was being religious; others thought it was being a member of the Republican Party; and I can go on from there," author, professor, and Fox News contributor Mallory Factor tells me during our latest interview. "So I decided on putting together a course on what conservatism is, where it came from, how it came about, what are its pillars. And I found out that I knew very little about it."
However, Factor knew 17 people, all of whom had lectured on conservatism at the Citadel, who knew quite a bit about the topic, and asked them to contribute the essays that make up the new book, Big Tent: The Story of the Conservative Revolution - As Told by the Thinkers and Doers Who Made It Happen. Such people who make conservatism happen as Michael Barone, Newt Gingrich, Ed Meese, Rand Paul, Donald Rumsfeld, frequent PJTV contributor Yaron Brook, Phyllis Schlafly, and others.
During our interview, Mallory will discuss:
- How the philosophy of conservatism was born.
- How William F. Buckley crafted a post-World War II, Cold War vision of conservatism.
- How neoconservatism began.
- How do the various strains of social conservatism, neoconservatism and libertarian conservatism coexist?
- Which vision of conservatism will ultimately prevail for the foreseeable future?
And much more...
Also read: The Truth About the Buckley Rule
Charles Murray on The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead
What is a curmudgeon? "Well, the technical definition is a grumpy old man, and I fit that pretty well," Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute says kiddingly in our latest interview. But curmudgeons of both sexes are people "who are inwardly somewhat grumpy about the sensibility of the world in which their new employees are coming to work and make hasty and pitiless judgments when they don't like something."
And one thing they really don't like, he adds, are young people entering the corporate world after graduating from elite colleges, where they've been taught that they were special, delicate snowflakes. To help young people negotiate the minefield that is their first corporate job, Murray recently wrote, The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life.
During our interview, he'll discuss:
- The inspiration of the new book.
- What does the average curmudgeon think about tattoos, piercings, and hair colors not found in nature?
- Now that age of the mandatory suit and tie has passed in many industries, how does a new employ navigate the complexities of contemporary office dress?
- How did young people gain such a sense of supreme entitlement?
- What's wrong with being "nonjudgmental?"
And much more...
Also read: Did Azusa Pacific College Join Leftists in Censoring Charles Murray?
James Delingpole on The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism
"I'm not a scientist and actually given what I've seen of scientists in my experiences following the global warming scam, I'm glad I'm not a scientist because a lot of these guys are basically shysters and crooks. They're not some kind of white-coated elite with a special hotline to the truth. In fact, they're just ordinary guys and girls trying to earn a living like the rest of us but slightly more dodgily than the rest of us in the one or two egregious cases," James Delingpole of Ricochet.com, the UK Spectator and the executive editor the newly launched Breitbart London tells me in our latest interview. And that's one of the kinder things that the author of The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism: The Left's Plan to Frighten Your Kids, Drive Up Energy Costs, and Hike Your Taxes has to say on the subject. He'll also discuss:
- If Mark Steyn loses his lawsuit to Michael Mann, who gets the top bunk in their cell at the Global Warming Stalag, James or Mark?
- Prying open "The Drawbridge Effect" to see what's inside Al Gore's and Thomas Friedman's mansions.
- How can the media alternately tell us the world is coming to an end in five years if we don't radically change our lifestyles, then cheerfully promote high-carbon footprint pro sports, such as the NFL and NASCAR?
- How James both discovered American politics while living in England and joined the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.
And much more...
Also read: The One Percent Embraces Global Warming, Ditches Capitalism
Dave Barry: You Can Date Boys When You're Forty
"One day at 4:30 in the afternoon," Dave Barry writes in his latest book, his 13-year old daughter Sophie, "went into her bathroom, which is pink, and WHOOM!, some kind of massive hormone bomb went off there."
The result has been utter chaos, both for Sophie, and especially for Dave himself, who's having to deal with a massive influx of boys visiting his house. "They come around. They come around all the time now. There didn't used to be boys in our life. And now there are boys on the lawn, on the roof, in the trees. They're like squirrels; they're just boys coming around."
"And I don't like it, Ed," he insists. "I used to be a boy. I've been a male my entire life. And let's be honest. We're scum. Of all the genders, we're the worst one. And that's exactly the gender that is showing up now around our house. And I Don't. Like. It."
Which is why the title of Dave's latest book is based on reading the Riot Act to his daughter: You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About.
Perhaps Barry is overreacting just a minuscule amount to the situation. On the other hand, you'd be feeling a bit harried too, if you recently returned from the following nightmare scenarios:
- Going to your first Justin Bieber concert and listening to a stadium full of teenage girls shouting "I loooooove you!!!! I loooooove you, Justin!!!!!!" into your ear all night long.
- Paying a fortune for tickets to take your daughter to said Justin Beiber concert, only for her to eventually discover that the Bieb is an idiot. Which Barry had pointed out to her before plunking out money for the concert.
- Pondering what women see in 50 Shades of Grey, and asking your wife if she wants to try out the book's scenario.
- Visiting Israel on a quest for free Wi-Fi throughout the Holy Land.
- Rappelling down an Israeli desert cliff and risking pooping on a rabbi due to total loss of sphincter control.
- Having people approach you constantly to praise your article on the importance of colonoscopies.
- The easy way for first time authors to promote their works by get booked on nationally-watched network talk shows by showing up at the studio door unannounced 15 minutes before airtime.
For those who aren't aware, Glenn Reynolds is the OG blogger Instapundit. He is also a law professor at the University of Tennessee. His new book is called The New School: How The Information Age Will Save American Education From Itself. It's a 20-minute interview that is well worth a listen. In it Reynolds discusses the following:
- How today's education system is an industrial age one-size-fits all dinosaur in today's diverse Internet-driven world.
- "It's not white flight now. It's just flight," Glenn notes: Why families of all backgrounds that can afford to are increasingly pulling their kids out of urban public schools.
- Why technology alone won't repair the current education system.
- Could education reform help break the logjam that political correctness has imposed on education?
- What does Glenn make of parents' recent complaints over Obama's Common Core agenda?
- Plus some thoughts on where Obama goes next as his administration reaches its nadir.
You can read the full transcript of the interview here.
Read his related article in USA Today: Don't fear innovation. Nobody ever got shot or pregnant from online or home schooling
Read his related article in the Wall Street Journal: Degrees of Value: Making College Pay Off
Read Kyle Smith's related article in the New York Post: US education model creates assembly-line workers
Leslie Eastman at Legal Insurrection has written a review of the book:
College Insurrection posts are often inspired by a pithy synopsis of campus news by Professor Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit).
So, with great joy, I wanted to share items from a new book featuring his wit, wisdom, and expertise on the subject of higher education, K-12 schooling, and possible technology-based transformations of how students learn that we may be seeing in the near future. One word for his newest publication, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself: Compelling.
I am the mother of a 6th grader who is currently attending public school. While my son's school is a good one, I find myself supplementing his education with trips to Kahn Academy (his math "coach" describes the program in a great article). A core theme in The New School is that online courses are one of the many new tools that will allow parents to customize an educational approach that makes sense for their children. In fact, he is an "early adapter" himself.
He also gave an interview to Kathryn Jean Lopez for National Review:
LOPEZ: Who are the audiences for this book and how do you hope they'll read it and make use of it?
REYNOLDS: There are basically two audiences: parents who are unhappy with things as they are but don’t quite understand why, and educators (and investors in educational innovation) who want ideas on where things are going. I hope that both will find it helpful and interesting.
LOPEZ: What was so wrong about Horace Mann?
REYNOLDS: I'm not sure "wrong" is the right word, exactly. But when he brought the Prussian system to America, the response from his critics was that it was in some sense un-American: The Prussian system, the critics said, was based on the idea that the government was smarter than the people, while American society was founded on precisely the opposite belief. I think that the critics were onto something here, and I think subsequent history proves it.
LOPEZ: At what point do we stop thinking of college "as a path to prosperity"?
REYNOLDS: As soon as possible. Some students do better by going to college. Others do worse. Four out of ten students, according to Gallup, wind up in jobs they could have gotten without a college degree. That makes the time, and money, spent in college a waste, at least as far as prosperity is concerned. And some students actually do worse by going to college, developing problems with drugs, alcohol, or sex that may plague them for years, or a lifetime. Then there’s the debt, which can run into six figures, and isn't dischargeable in bankruptcy.
I'm not asking you to listen to the interview and follow all the links...I'm telling you to do it! Heh. But seriously, Glenn Reynolds knows what he's talking about and this is important stuff. Make the time!
