Links - 20th December 2019 (2)

Why a Great U.S. Economy Doesn’t Feel So Great - Bloomberg - "Over the longer term, Americans have been suffering from steadily falling mobility. Only about half of 30-year-olds now make more money than their parents did at a similar age"
This is why continual economic growth is important, though many people including environmentalists mock it - people want to earn more than their parents

Will & Grace stars Debra Messing and Eric McCormack call for Hollywood to blacklist those attending Trump fundraiser - "Will & Grace stars Debra Messing and Eric McCormack have called for Hollywood to out and blacklist anyone attending a forthcoming fundraiser for Donald Trump."
The tolerant left strike again

Hollywood conservatives say more stars stay quiet to avoid public backlash, being blacklisted - "Celebrated singer and actor Pat Boone noted in a recent interview that conservative stars in Hollywood are wary of publicly discussing their personal politics for fear of public backlash.“There used to be more of us,” the 84-year-old told The Hollywood Reporter Monday. “Tom Selleck, Jon Voight, Bruce Willis, who were outspoken, but they’ve been browbeaten and ridiculed, which is the main instrument on the left to shut us up.”... Bryan added that the political divide in Hollywood reminds him of high school cliques.“The party of tolerance and acceptance is only accepting if you agree with them”... “Eyes Wide Shut” actress Julienne Davis told Fox News one of the riskiest decisions of her life was coming out “of the conservative closet.”“Since then I haven’t fared well,” she said. “My ‘unfriendings’ on social media have been many – from acquaintances and close working associates to good friends – including even my best friend. It is interesting to note that all of them just stopped calling and quietly ‘ghosted’ me, and then later unfriended me. Unfriendings aside, the written and very public insults from Hollywood peers on social media and elsewhere have been numerous. I’ve been attacked with obscenities, called a racist, and had one person tell me he hoped I would die.” Some agree being vocal about their conservative views can put their careers at risk. In October 2017, just weeks after James Woods revealed he was blacklisted in Hollywood because of his conservative beliefs, the Oscar-nominated actor said he was retiring from the industry.He claimed being a proud conservative made it difficult for him to find work in Hollywood.Woods was a Democrat until at least 1998 when he broke ranks with the party after former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. He declared on Twitter that he switched parties because of his disgust with the former president.“Every single #Democrat without exception stood behind a convicted perjurer,” tweeted the 71-year-old. “That was the end.” Woods added there are many conservative stars who don’t speak up because “the blacklist against conservatives in Hollywood is very real.” And actors could lose more than work in Hollywood for speaking out. In 2016, John Rhys-Davies, best known for his role as Gimli in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, told Fox News his views have cost him friends... Davies added he feels it is the actors' responsibility to explore other beliefs and to constantly question, which can actually enhance their performances when taking on a variety of roles that are different from their real-life personas. Instead, Davies claimed many of his actor friends believe their political opinion is the only right one. “I love my fellow actors but sometimes I think that their opinions are wrong,” he explained. “True art asks uncomfortable questions and if you find yourself agreeing with everyone around you all the time, you should wonder what your significance as a citizen and as an artist is. But that’s not really important. What matters is that a civilization is kept alive and vital by debate.”"

Man's Uber ride cost $2700 after he dozed off and woke up other side of country - "A man has been left furious, claiming his Uber left him with a $2800 bill after a driver took him on a 480km-round-trip to the UK's midlands, instead of his home south of London.Musician Chris Reed said he had ordered an Uber after a late night out, but fell asleep in the back.He was expected to be taken home to Croydon, just 20km south of London. Instead, when he woke up, he was in Lincolnshire, nearly three hours north of London."

'Shy and awkward' student, 19, faces JAIL after sex assault conviction - "A 'shy and awkward' student is facing jail after he touched a teenager 'in an attempt to befriend her.'Jamie Griffiths, 19, Googled 'how to make a friend' then came into contact with the 17-year-old during two attempts to engage her in conversation... Griffiths was convicted at Manchester Magistrates' Court and will be sentenced later this month. The offence carries a maximum sentence of ten years jail if dealt with at a crown court and he faces being ordered to sign the Sex Offender Register... 'As soon as he moved I moved and said: 'stop' and he touched my arm. I sort of jolted out of the way and went into the road to avoid him and he very quickly walked away... She said she encountered Griffiths a second time: 'He suddenly moved to walk in front of me, looked me straight in the eye, touched me on my side and walked off... 'She was walking towards me and I recognised her and I knew that she was a student at the school, I didn't say anything but I really wanted to - the words just didn't come out. I touched her but I believed that it was the arm I was touching.'I smiled at her, I was just trying to be friendly. I tried to get her attention and she ignored me. Touching someone's arm to get their attention I would have thought was normal. I was looking for a friend.'"
Apparently the arm and side are sexual organs

Diners walks out of Laughing Buddha restaurant Maidstone, complaining of bad service - "Jin Cheng admits to losing his cool when the group complained about the food and slow service at his Chinese eaterie.One customer, who was so irate at the delays at the Laughing Buddha, stormed into the kitchen and started shouting at the chef.Mr Cheng told the group they should leave if they didn’t want to pay - and all 36 got up and walked out after finishing their food and drinks... one customer who didn’t walk out posted a review describing his experience on the night as ‘absolutely shocking’.They wrote: 'Had the worst dining experience of my life."

Parents fury as pork sausages are banned from the school menu and replaced with halal meat - "Parents have condemned a school's decision to ban all pork products from the menu and replace other meats with halal versions.Pupils aged between three and 11 at Brinsworth Manor Infant and Junior Schools in Rotherham - which Ofsted identifies as having only a small number of pupils from minority ethnic groups - will no longer be able to enjoy sausages, bacon or ham... parents have branded the decision 'a scandal' as only twenty per cent of the 600 pupils are Muslim and the decision to provide halal meat was up to individual schools in the town... 'My daughter has been anxious about the change as she has concerns about if it is humane killing. I believe in animal welfare rights and standards of meat production that halal does not follow... 'I feel as strongly against eating meat that had been blessed in the name of a god I don’t believe in and the animal killed in a way I do not agree with, as Muslims do against eating non-halal meat.'The children love pork and it’s a scandal to take these meats off the menu to please, what I consider to be, a low number of children who require halal meat.'The majority of the children are now having school meals that are made for the minority. The halal children have always had the vegetarian and fish options. '... The school governors at both schools are understood to have agreed to the menu change to ensure the meals are more inclusive."

Vegetarian GCSE student disqualified for 'obscene racial comments' about halal meat in RS exam - "A GCSE pupil was disqualified after examiners mistook her vegetarian views on Halal meat for Islamophobia.Abigail Ward, 16, who attends Gildredge House school in Eastbourne, East Sussex, was told by exam board OCR that she had made 'obscene racial comments' while answering her Religious Studies exam in June.On the subject of halal butchers, the student had written, '...which I find absolutely disgusting.'... Her mother, Layla Ward, said the examiner has been 'over-zealous, over-righteous'. Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, the 36-year-old said the family were shocked by the decision to disqualify her daughter, and the exam board has since been overturned the decision.She said:  'Abbey is an animal lover and a very strict vegetarian.'It made me angry … when asked a question in the exam, you can't even express your feelings... A Daily Mail investigation found this week that OCR - which oversaw 163,000 A-level entries this year – offered A-level ‘assessor’ roles to a reporter in two subjects in which she had no qualifications... OCR insisted the reporter would have been put through ‘robust’ training and ‘standardisation’ tests before actually being given any papers to mark, but did not explain why its staff had failed to check references before approving the application."

Spalding single dad Jon Coupland outraged after police storm Jury's Inn hotel with daughter 13 - "A single father was left outraged after police stormed his hotel room because he checked in with his teenage daughter.Jon Coupland, 58, of Spalding, Lincolnshire, travelled to Nottingham for work earlier this week.He checked in to the Jury's Inn with his daughter Jessica, 13, after she asked to come with him so she could take advantage of the city's shops.But he was horrified when minutes after check-in, police officers stormed their room following reports of 'suspicious behaviour involving a child'... 'I am absolutely disgusted by the behaviour of the hotel and the police. We were made to feel very unwelcome and they knew I was her dad but they kept asking questions.'I felt that it was like what happened before all over again. They would not have done this if my daughter wasn't half Thai... The ordeal brought back bad memories of when Jessica was six and Mr Coupland was falsely accused of abusing her.Social worker Suzi Smith falsely claimed she saw the single father sexually assault his daughter and he was handcuffed, publicly humiliated and interrogated by police for hours.Mr Coupland claims Ms Smith made the allegation after he criticised the way she handled the custody battle between him and Jessica's mother, Kajchi Jiraekkaphob, an illegal immigrant from Thailand... He was later given an £86,000 compensation payout.On Wednesday they decided to leave the hotel and stayed at the Premier Inn instead where they had no problems."

Why Thousands of College Grads Start Their Careers at a Rental-Car Company - "Enterprise is one of the biggest employers of college graduates. It sees soft skills as critical. Many accounts of where graduates land focus on the extremes: The art-history graduate working as a barista and living in his parents’ basement. The polished Ivy League alumna scoring a six-figure job on Wall Street. The iconoclast who developed an app and dropped out to start a lucrative company in Silicon Valley. College, according to those tropes, is, respectively, a waste of money, an amplifier of privilege, or simply irrelevant.The more common postcollege destination, though, looks a lot more like working at Enterprise. And according to Enterprise, college does matter, a lot.To the company, a college degree matters mostly because it suggests that a candidate has acquired the right mix of skills to succeed in an entry-level job —and to move up the ladder from there. Its hiring philosophy and practices —which have been in place for decades —can tell us something important about what a B.A. truly signals.But the company doesn’t see higher education the way higher education sees itself. Enterprise doesn’t pay much attention to where prospective trainees went to college, what they studied, or their grades. The company does care, though, that they finished college: Trainees are required to have a bachelor’s degree. Why? The big benefit of a bachelor’s degree is soft skills... While a bachelor’s degree is often the baseline credential for an entry-level job, employers don’t traditionally recruit from the broad category "college graduates." They recruit a subset of them. The big bank has a preference for business majors. Plenty of employers use hard GPA cutoffs to narrow their pools. And elite destinations —think investment banks and management-consulting firms —focus on a handful of feeder schools.This approach takes advantage of the fact that higher education has already sorted students. But it also assumes that the sorting has been done effectively.Such an assumption risks doubling downon the inequities that play into where students go to college and what they study. And it risks missing a candidate like Sheck, who brings more to the table than his résumé might suggest... Casting a wider net makes particular sense for Enterprise. Its entry-level workers, who earn $40,000 to $50,000, are generalists, which makes the specialized knowledge conferred by a college major less crucial. And, in a model many employers have abandoned, the company invests in training its new hires."We almost kind of give you a master’s degree in rental"... Enterprise Rent-A-Car regularly ranks among the top companies in hiring for entry-level positions, which are defined as permanent, salaried jobs that require college degrees"

Bell Epoque - "O’Brien’s incredulity, however, speaks volumes about the academic mainstreaming of fringe anti-American theories. Critical race theory has next to nothing going for it as a descriptive analytic of how American jurisprudence works. It doesn’t fit the facts of American life from Brown v. the Board of Education, to court enforcement of the Voting Rights Acts, the Civil Rights Act, or hundreds of other pieces of legislation. Critical race theory is weirdly and wildly wide of the mark in either explaining how Americans have made and interpreted their laws for at least the last fifty years, and arguably long before that. CRT might have been useful as a historical frame for interpreting the Jim Crow era, but even then it fails to provide any sort of reasonable account of the 14th Amendment and Reconstruction. But CRT is not a theory about the Jim Crow era: it is a theory about the present. Its pretense, as Pollak accurately says, is that the Civil Rights Movement was hollow and that we continue to live in a nation the laws of which are pervasively racist.Of course, there are few theories aggressively disdainful of American society, however manifestly absurd, that lack a cheering section in contemporary academe. So “critical race theory” does now have a place in the curriculum. Indeed, it is now widely taught in law schools and in some undergraduate programs. That doesn’t make it any less absurd. It just specifies what kind of absurdity it is: an academic one, brought to us originally by a radical Harvard law professor and sustained by faculty members committed to the promotion of grievance ideology. And given academic racial politics, it is more or less exempt from “critical thinking,” serious academic criticism, or the simple scorn which is its rightful due."
From 2012