RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=6952
A liberal arts education was once a gateway to wisdom; now it can breed ignorance and arrogance.

The humanities are in their latest periodic crisis. Though the causes of the ongoing decline may be debated, everyone accepts the dismal news about eroding university enrollments, ever fewer new faculty positions, the decline in majors, and the lack of jobs for humanities graduates. Less than 8% of current BA degrees are awarded to humanities majors. The New York Times recently reported that while 45% of the undergraduate faculty at Stanford teach in the humanities, only 15% of the students major in them.

Of course, the numbers of humanities majors have been in decline since the 1970s. But what seems different today is that the humanities are less sacrosanct in the university. Literature, philosophy, and art are no longer immune from budget cuts by virtue of their traditional intrinsic value to the university. Either humanities professors can no longer make the case for the traditional role of their subjects or no one cares to listen to what they have to say.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/01/29/216301/how-does-obama-stack-up-on-womens.html#emlnl=Afternoon_Newsletter

NOTE FROM E-PAL JHA:

The left-of-center McClatchy news service makes another point on the false
generalization brought up by Obama on sex discrimination in pay….

It is also true that in the pre-marriage and pre-child-rearing age of their
20’s, women across all jobs, using the same broad generalization used by Obama ,
make more than men of that age…

JHA

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama calls it “wrong” and an “embarrassment” that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, saying women deserve equal pay for equal work.

“At a time when women make up about half of the workforce, but still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns – we’ve got to finish the job and give women the tools they need to fight for equal pay,” Obama said Wednesday in Maryland, calling for an end to “workplace policies that belong in a ‘Mad Men’ episode.” His remarks echoed what he said the night before in his State of the Union address, and which he’s said before, always to applause.

But a McClatchy review of White House salaries shows that when the same calculations that produced the 77 cents is applied to the White House, the average female pay at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is less than the average male pay. When counted the same way that produced the 77-cent figure, the analysis found, women overall at the White House make 91 cents for every dollar men make. That’s an average salary of $84,082 for men and $76,516 for women.

Asked about its own payroll, the White House said Wednesday that it should be measured by how it pays men and women in the same jobs, but not the kind of broad brush that compares overall male and female pay.

White House aides said that overwhelmingly, the president’s employees with the same position make the same money: all press assistants make $42,000 regardless of gender; most presidential assistants, including Press Secretary Jay Carney and Lisa Monaco, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, make $172,200.

Two Israeli college students were brutally murdered 30 years ago. Their murderer has been given his freedom, a huge cash prize, a job, a military promotion and an all-expenses-paid wedding. He has no regrets. http://www.jewishpress.com/news/murderer-of-israeli-students-given-cash-prize-employed-promoted/2014/01/30/ THE MURDERED On October 22, 1984, two Hebrew University students went hiking. Revital Seri, 22, and her friend Ron Levi, […]

http://www.timesofisrael.com/170000-rockets-are-aimed-at-israels-cities-says-idf-intel-head/ The head of Israel’s most powerful intelligence agency depicted Wednesday a changing battlefield in which offensive cyber capabilities will, in the near future, represent the greatest shift in combat doctrine in over 1,000 years. For now, though, he said, the 170,000 rockets and missiles pointed by enemy states at Israel represented the most pressing […]

http://www.meforum.org/3733/michael-oren-peace For an accomplished historian, Michael Oren seems to have an extraordinarily short memory. In a recent article on CNN’s website, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States argued that in the absence of a two-state solution, “One solution could be a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian population centers in the West Bank.” This, […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4148/hamas-islamic-jihad-west-bank If anything, the rally that saw Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah join forces in a rare show of power means that Abbas’s claim that he is fully in control of the situation in West Bank is baseless. For the first time since 2007, Hamas and Islamic Jihad militiamen this week made a public appearance […]

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2012/01/24/state-of-the-union-trivia-and-history

The identity of the first president to deliver a State of the Union address before Congress probably won’t surprise anyone—George Washington. But readers might be interested to learn that the first president to deliver a speech known as a “State of the Union address” was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

First State of the Union speech. Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution mandates that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” So it’s no surprise that George Washington delivered the first such address, before a joint session of Congress in New York on January 8, 1790.

Shortest speech. Washington’s first State of the Union was the shortest (by word count), at 1,089 words.
Speech versus written message. Washington and his successor, John Adams, delivered their annual messages to Congress in person. Thomas Jefferson thought that a president lecturing Congress was too “kingly” (like the British “speech from the throne”) and so he opted for annual written messages instead of orally delivered ones. So did the next dozen presidents, until Woodrow Wilson restarted the tradition of orally delivered speeches. The notion of the State of the Union as a speech being the standard didn’t take hold until FDR, however. Over all, 78 out of 222 such annual messages have been delivered in person.

No message at all. Two presidents—William Henry Harrison (1841) and James Garfield (1881) didn’t live long enough to actually deliver an annual message of any sort.

Longest message. Outgoing President Jimmy Carter produced the longest annual message, at a ponderous 33,667 words. Thankfully it was a written, not oral message.

Longest spoken message, in words. Is anyone surprised to hear it’s Bill Clinton? His 1995 address weighed in at 9,190 words. But even that wasn’t the…

Longest spoken message, in minutes. Clinton’s 2000 State of the Union speech, at 1:28:49 was actually longer than the ’95 address (1:24:58), even if the text was shorter (at a mere 7,452 words only his third longest State of the Union).

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/27/bolton-obamas-vision-of-a-little-america/ Obama’s foreign policy based on belief that weaker U.S. is key to peace On the eve of his annual State of the Union address, Barack Obama’s five years as president have brought innumerable national security failures. However, beyond the long, growing list of ideologically driven errors, missed opportunities and generally inattentive stewardship of foreign […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/369755/print Right at the very end of President Obama’s State of the Union address, when he started talking about “feet planted firmly on the ground,” I thought he might break out into at least a recitation of the “Soliloquy” from Carousel. And no, I’m not being the least bit disrespectful by noting this, as never has […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/369735/print I’ll leave it to others to fact-check the thing. There were more than a few statements that struck me as the sort of thing that wouldn’t bear up well under close scrutiny — particularly on Iran’s nuclear program, women’s pay, and domestic energy — but I’m too tired to do the scrutinizing now. My […]