URLs du Jour

2017-04-14

■ Proverbs 27:9 strikes an optimistic note on this Good Friday:

Perfume and incense bring joy to the heart, and the pleasantness of a friend springs from their heartfelt advice.

■ Hey, kids, what time is it? Well, I'm not sure, but according to Veronique de Rugy, It's Past Time to Dump the OECD. The US provides 21% of the budget for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). And for that, we get…

In practice, despite the OECD's heavy reliance on American taxpayer funds, the organization persistently works against U.S. interests, arguing for international tax cartels, the end of privacy, redistribution schemes and other big-government fantasies.

So, yes, if we must keep the zombie Export-Import Bank around, maybe we could spin off the OECD?

■ At Granite Grok, Skip notes the decline of a TV show: “Designated Survivor” just went full anti-gun SJW. Things were pretty OK until…

[…] It was one of the few (VERY few) network shoes that I would watch; I actually liked it! For a show about politics in DC, it stayed rather un-political. Except starting last week, it went full SJW-auto concerning “gun violence” and did a PR commercial on the behalf of the Brady Campaign for Civilian Disarmament to Prevent Gun Violence who helped them to come out all guns blazing (see what I just did there?) on the issue.  The BCPGV made it quite clear on their purpose when they briefed the DS staff on their gun demands views.  This group, if you discard its title and burrow into its real purpose, truly does believe that Force should be only held by Government;  Second Amendment be damned.  And this week, the show doubled down and pretty much made it clear the entire show – guns are too scary for we plebes to have and we MUST have more gun control.  And they did it in a way that was not “fair and balanced”.  In fact, those characters that are pro-Second Amendment are put into a dim light indeed. While it was about “universal background checks to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people”.  Yeah, and never mentioned the under story that UBCs is all about Government violating the Right to Private Property and outlaws private sales.

As I said at a GG comment: We watched last week's show here at Pun Salad Manor. (Haven't watched the latest episode yet.) Mrs. Salad did not appreciate the moaning, groaning, and eye-rolling coming from my end of the sofa.

The show is OK when it concentrates on the original premise: a massive bombing during the State of the Union Address has killed most of the top levels of all three branches of the federal government. So it's up to nebbish Kiefer Sutherland and a small group of allies to (a) discover whodunnit and why; (b) keep the country going.

But now the show seems to have developed a West Wing-done-poorly vibe, where Sutherland gets all earnest and preachy.

And even the find-the-evildoers plot has its limitations: does it have to keep going for as long as the show lasts? I think Sutherland's old show, 24, did this right: at the end of the season, the bad guys were unmasked, and things were done. I fear Designated Survivor is just going to sputter along until the plug is pulled, then they'll weakly pull something together.

■ KDW@NR profiles Peter Navarro: Trump’s Nutty Economics Professor (an article from the print magazine now available online).

In the collected works of Peter Navarro, there is a peculiar paradox: Some of the dullest prose imaginable challenges the sharp edge of Hanlon’s razor, the aphorism that advises us: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Professor Navarro of the University of California at Irvine has hanging on the wall of an office or a den somewhere a doctorate in economics from Harvard; barring some Forrest Gump–level chain of coincidence, it does not seem likely that anything as innocent as stupidity explains his literary output, which consists of a few how-to-make-money-in-the-stock-market books (an actual title: “If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks”) from earlier in his career and a half dozen or so low-minded books about China with such talk-radio-ready names as “Death by China” and “The Coming China Wars,” two books that contain 80 exclamation points between them, as well as several pamphlets summarizing the main points of his books.

Hang on: you'll be convinced that, like Elizabeth Warren, Navarro is "battier than Bruce Wayne’s basement."

■ And what's a factor of a thousand between friends? Or between a newspaper and its readers? The Washington Free Beacon notes: USA Today Tweets Out Massively Inaccurate Chart About Power of Atomic Bomb.

USA Today significantly misstated the power of the atomic bomb used against Hiroshima in a chart it tweeted out after a U.S. bombing conducted in Afghanistan on Thursday.

The bad tweet is at the link above. Here is the corrected tweet:

Pretty much the same except for that pesky "kilo" prefix. But as a commenter tweets: "But the MOAB is still a much *longer* bomb. Point stands. So there."


Last Modified 2018-12-25 3:18 PM EDT