Turkey's upcoming election

Claire Berlinski, a free-lance reporter living in Istanbul, writes here about the Kurdish uprising and recommends an article here.   Reading both of these brief articles provides a solid basis for understanding what's happening politically in Turkey today.  Most interesting since Turkey is often referred to as the model for the ME's political development.  It is clear that Turkey's model needs serious tweaking before others adopt it.

Punka's worst nightmare

This product sells for $42 on Amazon and looks like it might work.  Yoiks!  What this would have done to The White Mountain Freezer Company had it been around 100 years ago or so!

Where the money is

This useful chart courtesy the IRS says it all:  if the dems want more revenue from taxation they have to go to the middle class.

George Soros -- watch out!

Peter Raymond, an obvious Milton Freidman free market advocate, deconstructs here George Soros's latest move to reorganize the world's financial structure via a new study group he's putting together.  It's clear from his statements about his intentions that he wants to come up with a plan that involves central planning and perhaps some form of world government.  This would be consistent with his activities in other countries in eastern europe where he has made investments and exerted influence in sovereign countries's financial/political activities.  Not enough is known about Soros's motivation, IMHO.  He seems to have a master plan for controlling events, but to what end is not clear. We know he has backed several far left organizations (Moveon.com, etc) in the US that in turn have pushed Obama's agenda and election.  The man is in his 80's, not exactly in the prime of life.  What's irksome about Soros and his "career", or life's work,  is finding the value of his contribution to the working of the economy.  On the surface, at least, he appears to be nothing more than a high stakes gambler, largely with other people's money now guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers, who is perhaps better at evaluating the risk of his bets than most.  But, in the end do his bets make a value contribution to the system that merits the support of the American taxpayer if his bets fail catastrophically and he and his creditors go belly up.  Meanwhile it might at least be of interest to know if any of his creditors received TARP funds when the meltdown occurred in '07-'08.

Yale's latest PC encounter

Receiving an email letter from President Levin describing Yale's latest encounter with politically correct forces, this time involving 16 Yale students and recent graduates and the federal government's Civil Rights office, probably no longer comes as a  surprise to most graduates of the school.  Formal speech codes have been in place on many college campuses for a number of years and have been written about and attacked by David Horowitz's FRONT PAGE Magazine also for years.  Warrior that he is,  Horowitz travels to campuses all over the country trying to convince students and school administrations that these codes are the antithetical to the mission of a liberal education, free speech, and the democratic way of life.

In this WSJ article by Peter Berkowitz, a Yale College and Law School graduate, makes many of these same points.  The bottom line argument of both Berkowitz and Horrowitz is that limiting free speech in any way by schools or the federal government, other than with "suasion, example, and discussion"* is a dangerous and slippery slope leading inevitably to thought control and a loss of freedom.  What muddies the water at Yale, and other schools, is the federal purse strings and the threat that if the government endorsed and sanctioned correct language and speech is not observed, the subsidy spigot will be turned off.  In Yale's case that amounts to 500 million dollars directed largely to the school of medicine for research.  The prospect of losing these dollars results in the servile email from Levin announcing university-sponsored study groups and the like to get at the bottom of the complaints registered with the Civil rights Office by the 16 graduate and undergraduate female students.  It grates to think that the head of a leading institution of higher education could possibly value federal subsidies over freedom of expression and inquiry.  Just maybe Yale would be better off dipping into its juicy 15 billion plus endowment and funding research that way as opposed to groveling before some statist bureaucrats in the federal government who could care less about free speech and inquiry.

** The conclusion in 1975 of a committee appointed by the then president of Yale, Kingman Brewster to explore the conditions of free expression on the Yale campus:  "If the university's overriding commitment to free expression is to be sustained, secondary social and ethical responsibilities must be left to the informal processes of suasion, example, and argument."