The Warden

One possible answer is that Gosnell might be particularly depraved. On his own, he came up with the idea that murdering a fetus near the moment of birth was morally permissible, at least if the mother asked him to do it. That’s comforting. It lets us console ourselves with the thought that such brutality is a fluke and not likely to be repeated.

But that’s probably not the right answer. While murder rates for almost every group in society have plummeted in recent decades, there’s one group where murder rates have doubled, according to CDC and National Center for Health Statistics data — babies less than a year old.

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It could be that the teaching power of abortion law is eroding more than the moral sense of doctors. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, infant homicide is shockingly common. Its most recent 2002 report suggests that the day a person is born is, by far, the most likely day for them to be killed.

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A far better choice exists. As a society, we could agree that there really is little difference between killing a being inside and outside the womb. We should admit that our system of abortion law is dehumanizing. The better course is to protect even small voiceless human beings from more powerful people who would rather see them dead, whether that killing happens inside or outside the womb.

The answer to this question is pretty much 1986 (whether that’s a matter of “courage” or not), when automatic weapons — i.e., machineguns — were largely banned. There is an exception for pre-1986 automatic weapons, of which there are relatively few, since they have been heavily taxed since the 1930s. As a result, automatic weapons are very expensive, hard to get legally, and banned outright in many jurisdictions. Those grandfathered weapons are almost never used in violent crime.

As I have explained elsewhere, I am not opposed to the draft under all conceivable conditions. If, for example, having a draft were the only way to avoid getting conquered by an enemy that would impose a totalitarian state on us, I would support it. The draft is a great evil. Still, there can potentially be situations where it is the only way to stave off an even greater one. But the arguments advanced by Rangel and other modern draft supporters don’t even come close to meeting the burden of proof needed to justify such massive coercion.

Hence the basic irony inherent in the Obama presidency: He campaigned as a post-partisan, but his most lasting accomplishments will be those of a partisan.

The federal health-care overhaul is prompting some colleges and universities to cut the hours of adjunct professors, renewing a debate about the pay and benefits of these freelance instructors who handle a significant share of teaching at U.S. higher-education institutions.

The Affordable Care Act requires large employers to offer a minimum level of health insurance to employees who work 30 hours a week or more starting in 2014, or face a penalty. The mandate is a particular challenge for colleges and universities, which increasingly rely on adjuncts to help keep costs down as states have scaled back funding for higher education.

(via Todd Zywicki)

The mental health aspect of the response to the gun shootings is the one thing that everyone agrees we should act on. But the actual policy is a lot more complicated than that.

A provision in New York state’s new gun-control laws that requires mental-health professionals to report potentially dangerous patients is drawing concern from experts who fear it could discourage people from seeking treatment and treads on client confidentiality.

If you fear genetically modified food, you may have Mark Lynas to thank. By his own reckoning, British environmentalist helped spur the anti-GMO movement in the mid-‘90s, arguing as recently at 2008 that big corporations’ selfish greed would threaten the health of both people and the Earth. Thanks to the efforts of Lynas and people like him, governments around the world—especially in Western Europe, Asia, and Africa—have hobbled GM research, and NGOs like Greenpeace have spurned donations of genetically modified foods.

But Lynas has changed his mind—and he’s not being quiet about it. On Thursday at the Oxford Farming Conference, Lynas delivered a blunt address: He got GMOs wrong.

This book shatters the notion that affirmative action is helpful even for the students that are the so called beneficiaries. The premise of the book is actually quite simple and nonracial. The premise of mismatch theory is that people who enter a school with an academic index (some composite of GPA and standardized test scores such as ACT, SAT, MCAT, LSAT) considerably lower than their peers will do worse in school than their peers; whereas people who enter a school with an academic index comparable to the average will do much better. A second principle of mismatch theory is that how well one does compared to their peers largely predicts how successful their future schooling will be; even graduation rates. These two theories say that if one has a significantly lower academic index than their peers, then they will be ill-served by attending a more prestigious/elite/challenging university where they will likely struggle academically.

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The authors of this book are liberals, true blue bleeding heart liberals.  They even use the pronoun “her” generically instead of “his” sometimes because they are liberals and think that kind of stuff is important.  The authors of this book were not trying to find data to support their worldview, they both previously supported affirmative action but have changed their worldview because of the data. This should give confidence to liberals who might otherwise be prejudiced against the argument if it was made by a conservative, although ‘mismatch’ was a term coined by black conservative Thomas Sowell, who makes the same argument. 

The blowhard who often proclaims the end of the world is nigh because of fossil fuels sold his TV business to the emir of Qatar, king of the oil patch. But Gore’s scheming didn’t stop there. He also reportedly wanted to finalize the deal before the end of the year so his $100 million windfall wouldn’t be subject to new higher tax rates he zealously supported.

New Jersey Democrats have long argued that they would approve only “diverse” nominees to the state Supreme Court. But now, as liberal opposition builds against Gov. Christie’s most recent picks, the definition of diverse appears to be changing.

(via Orin Kerr)