RUTHFULLY YOURS

How much of the money is spent on drivel….check out: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/2/golden-hammer-college-hid-95m-in-administrator-boo/?page=all Open the Books.org exposed:

“How a college hid $95 million in expense like booze, shooting clubs”

And: Is There Really a Lack of Funding in Education? The Books are Open.

http://forthegoodofillinois.org/blog/2011/10/is-there-really-a-lack-of-funding-in-education-open-the-books-and-find-out/

Earlier this fall, I published a story questioning the wisdom of Millennials’ above average desire to foot the cost of college for their kids. A reader named Morgan Ownbey commented to accuse me of using “shady stat tactics” by working from the median income and the projected cost of attending an elite private school to calculate the necessary savings rate. Ownbey’s point: “You do not have to save half a million dollar to send your kid to a good state school.”

I stand by my initial response — that my intentions were good and where to go to college is a personal and complicated decision between parent and child — I also stand by my concerns that young Americans’ will be able to save enough to cover the costs of both college and retirement. However, two recent reports suggest Ownbey and I both had a point.

According to a report out this week from the Urban Institute, across the country 81% of college-bound high school graduates enroll at home state schools or private institutions in state. (The latter arrangement can be a money saver if students live with their parents and commute to school.) Authors Sandy Baum, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, and research assistant Martha Johnson, however, make the larger argument that a true sense of the status of public higher education in America requires a state-by-state look.

Baum and Johnson write: “Because most students remain in-state to take advantage of lower tuition, a clear view of cross-state variation is vital for understanding the nature and extent of barriers to college affordability and for developing policies to address those barriers.”

Mississippi has the highest percentage of students remaining in state at 93%. According to new College Board data, Mississippi in state tuition and fees come to $7,147 this school year, while the 19% of Mississippi’s first-time college students coming from another state paid $19,480, making Mississippi among the ten least expensive states to attend public college in state and the 12 least expensive for out-of-state.

Last month, a majority of the states sued the federal government over the so-called Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of President Obama’s climate agenda. As the states explained, the president’s carbon regulation “unlawfully expands the federal government’s regulatory power over electricity production and consumption in nearly every State.” The suit will wind its way through the courts, with legal resolution years away.

Although legal challenges are necessary, they are not enough. If states have any chance of defeating the EPA’s attempt to take control over our energy choices, they must mobilize all three branches of government.

The EPA’s carbon regulation forces states to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent, on average, by 2030. The limits are so strict that many states will be forced to shut down affordable energy sources, mandate more-expensive sources, and join regional cap-and-trade schemes — all of which will drive up energy prices, to the detriment of the poor and middle class.

States have responded by suing the Obama administration and requesting a stay of the rule. And while legal scholars across the political spectrum agree that the EPA has a weak case, pinning our hopes on a legal victory is a mistake. In fact, it is a mistake the EPA is counting on states to make.

Much ink has been spilled blaming the state of U.S.–Israel relations on the poor personal rapport between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. The fact is that huggable Barney the Purple Dinosaur could have been Israel’s elected leader, and the relations would have been equally hostile.

For seven decades from the moment of Israel’s birth — through five wars, one campaign, eight operations, two “uprisings,” and years of terrorism — Palestinian Arabs have done everything possible to avoid living peacefully side by side with a Jewish state.

This isn’t ancient history. It’s today.

While St Peter’s heir no doubt means well, his encyclical is a master class in the treachery of good intentions. As Ian Plimer writes in ‘Heaven and Hell’, the green crackpottery Pope Francis embraces and endorses can only hobble the creation of wealth and mire the Third World in perpetual poverty

HEAVEN AND HELL: The Pope condemns the poor to eternal poverty
Professor Ian Plimer
Connor Court, 2015, 348pages, $29.95
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One hopes this new book by Professor Ian Plimer will shake the media from its gullible complacency and set it to confronting the gigantic fraud that the IPCC and hack scientists, avaricious governments, corrupted universities, and all the other self-interested parties riding the climate-change gravy train persist in preaching and promoting. While Plimer’s international best-seller, Heaven and Earth, did much to encourage scepticism and independent thought, the treatment it was meted by the liberal media, most notably at the shamelessly partisan ABC, won’t see me holding my breath.

Launched this month, Heaven and Hell is a frontal attack on the absurd, science-free claims peddled by, of all people, Pope Francis in his recent encyclical, Laudate ‘Si. As Plimer puts it, the documemnt is “science-free, an anti-development, anti-market enthusiastic embrace of global green left environmental ideology.”

Plimer goes straight for the jugular in demolishing the misrepresentations, false claims, erroneous predictions, fraudulent science and falsification of raw data –“a cardinal sin” — that represent the dubious basis for the papal pronouncement. The complete lack of any verified theory to explain, adequately and demonstrably, why and how carbon dioxide is heating the world is, of course, key to his critique.

The stabbing intifada may only just recently have come to America, but over in Israel, it’s now practically a daily occurrence.

A civilian security guard on Sunday shot a female Palestinian assailant who stabbed and lightly wounded him, as he stood at his post, just outside the Betar Illit settlement, which is located a short distance away from Jerusalem.

The incident was caught on the municipalities security cameras. An emergency dispatcher saw a Palestinian woman on one of the cameras who she believed looked suspicious. The woman, 22-year-old Halva Aliyan, was dressed from head to toe in traditional black garb, with only her face showing. She carried a purse and walked toward the gate of the city, which has a population of 47,000.

The dispatcher alerted the security guard who then stopped her and asked to see her identification card, which showed that she was born in the nearby Palestinian city of Bethlehem. As the guard focused on checking her card, Aliyan slowly reached into her purse and pulled out a knife. She then lunged at the guard and quickly tried to stab him.

Trigger warning — this will make your blood boil.

At the very heart of our troubles as a country is the degeneration of our educational system.
For many, the SAT is a hurdle long since cleared. For those who are parents, there is still the specter of having to relive the experience vicariously. Those parents, as well as the rest of the population, need to consider yet another instance of forced conformity and a closing of our collective American mind: the format of the new SAT essay. The original SAT did not feature an essay section, the revamped SAT of ten years ago did, and next year there will be yet another version of the test, with an essay section, but one that has a noticeably different format. Traditionally, on virtually every scholastic essay assignment the student is asked to evaluate and respond. As a tutor, I am quite familiar with the rolled eyes and deep sighs at the prospect of writing an essay. However, at its core, the traditional essay format affords each student the opportunity that far too many people on this planet never get: a chance to speak his mind. Whether it is a twenty-minute assignment, or one a kid mulls over several days, the opportunity for self expression is still there. But that opportunity is lost on the new SAT essay. Instead of having the liberty to speak his mind, the student is forced merely to evaluate an essay. The poor student must read an argument, often offensive and deeply flawed, and simply determine how the author made his argument — did he use persuasive language, or appeal to logic or to authority? As an educator, independent thinker, and free-born citizen, I find this change in format to be alarming and wrong.

Sheldon Whitehouse got his man. The Rhode Island Senator has been lobbying for prosecutions of oil and gas companies over climate change, and New York Attorney General and progressive activist Eric Schneiderman has now obliged by opening a subpoena assault on Exxon Mobil. This marks a dangerous new escalation of the left’s attempt to stamp out all disagreement on global-warming science and policy.

Progressives have been losing the political debate over climate change, failing to pass cap and trade even when Democrats had a supermajority in Congress. So they have turned to the force of the state through President Obama’s executive diktats and now with the threat of prosecution. This assault won’t stop with Exxon. Climate change is the new religion on the left, and progressives are going to treat heretics like Cromwell did Catholics.
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We mention Mr. Whitehouse because he has been the lead Cromwell in calling for the use of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute, a law created to prosecute the mafia, to bring civil cases against companies that fund climate research of which he disapproves. After we called him out in a recent editorial, Mr. Whitehouse denounced us on the Senate floor and compared everyone who disagrees with him to tobacco companies.

Of all bogus politically correct phrases, I think “people of color” is the most reliably emetic. What, after all, does it mean? Who gets to be a “person of color”? Not me, apparently, though I like to think of myself as a pleasing pinkish hue (I’m not talking about political complexion, merely my Crayola designation). To me, “people of color” is a bit like “native American,” only worse. I always identify myself as “native American” because (or so I have been reliably assured) I first came into this world just outside of Cleveland, Ohio, than which no more American place can be imagined. Why do American Indians get to be “native Americans” while I, whose natality was smack dab in the middle of America, must be content who some less privileged rubric? And why do blacks and other assorted ethnicities get to be “people of color,” with all the spurious rights and privileges pertaining thereto, while I, who most certainly possess a color, am left out of the great politically correct grievance-mongering sweepstakes?

I thought about this yesterday I was in New Haven participating in a conference on “The Future of Free Speech” sponsored by the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. [1] No sooner had I and my colleagues arrived in Elm City than we discovered, courtesy the Yale Daily News, that the delicate snowflakes at one of the richest and most coddled institutions in the world were angry, outraged, tearful, absolutely beside themselves with rage and horror. “Students Demand Admin Response to Racial Controversies [2],” screamed the front-page headline. The story went on to describe a 3-hour confrontation between 200 students and Jonathan Holloway, dean of Yale College. “Surrounded by a sea of upturned faces and fighting back tears,” the story began, Dean Holloway “stood on the Women’s Table [nice touch!]. . . to break the administration’s silence on allegations of racial discrimination that shook [shook!] campus this week.” [UPDATE: Why hasn’t this girl [3] been expelled?]

Image Courtesy of Oxford University

If you plan to work in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, you’d better get used to being hugged and kissed, and doing the same in return. It’s a touchy-feely business, even among acquaintances, but this sort of tactile familiarity isn’t the norm everywhere.

People are very particular about where they do and don’t like to be touched, and who’s allowed to put a hand on what. Now, Oxford University has released the findings from the largest study ever conducted on physical contact, creating maps that show what parts of men’s and women’s bodies are acceptable for contact to lovers, friends, relatives and strangers.

As explained in an Oct. 26 article in the U.K. Telegraph, the map shows that the hands are the only part of the body that both men and women don’t mind sharing to some degree with everyone, even strangers. Although men are somewhat less protective of their genitals than women — not listing them as taboo with female friends, acquaintances and even strangers — when it gets to male strangers, both men and women list almost the whole body as off-limits, especially the part between the chest and the ankles (men want male strangers to stay away from their heads as well).

A Pakistani woman, Sonia Bibi, 20, died on October 23, 2015, after she rejected a marriage proposal from Latif Ahmed and after telling the police that Ahmed had doused her with gas and then set her on fire.

Questions are being asked as to why the liberal media refuses to cover such stories of murder and honor killings of women in the Muslim world.

Jamie Glazov, who was born in the former Soviet Union (USSR), founder of the The Glazov Gang, and managing editor of FrontPage Magazine, is questioning as to why the leftists are ignoring such murderous actions done by Muslims, and of what resides in the heart of leftists to deny why Sonia Bibi was set ablaze for refusing a marriage proposal in the Muslim world.