URLs du Jour

2017-10-05

Gossip

Proverbs 20:19 offers a stern warning:

19 A gossip betrays a confidence;
    so avoid anyone who talks too much.

In these days of modern times, I wonder if the Proverbialist would add "… or who blogs too much."

Consumer note: searching Flickr for "gossip" brings up a bunch of pictures of women, many in attire inappropriate for work. Why is that?

Also, it tells me that I can see more gossip photos when I "Sign up with Yahoo". Yeah, no thanks, Flickr. Because Every single Yahoo account was hacked - 3 billion in all.


■ Robby Soave at Reason notes the latest college hijinx: Black Lives Matter Students Shut Down the ACLU's Campus Free Speech Event Because 'Liberalism Is White Supremacy'.

Students affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement crashed an event at the College of William & Mary, rushed the stage, and prevented the invited guest—the American Civil Liberties Union's Claire Gastañaga, a W & M alum—from speaking.

Coming soon to a university near you, I guess.

Another William & Mary alum was Jerry Robinson. Which led to one of the funniest sitcom episodes… Oh, heck, I'll just embed; skip ahead to about 11:45 if you'd like to get to the W & M content quickly:


■ One of the longest books ever written, in theory: What the Left Misunderstands. And at NRO, David French has written a short chapter therein: The Left Misunderstands the Power of the NRA. He notes the reflexive blaming of the NRA whenever "gun control" fails to win sufficient support to pass.

Journalists often treat the NRA differently from every other consequential activist group in the United States. Yes, they recognize that liberal groups like the National Education Association and Planned Parenthood are important, but they do not treat progressive politicians as those organizations’ puppets. Instead, they do the accurate thing: They cast progressive politicians and progressive organizations as part and parcel of a larger progressive community that shares certain ideas and values and speaks for tens of millions of American citizens.

Why not treat the NRA in the same way?

To ask the question is almost to answer it: the ideological bias of "journalists".


■ A related, impressive, WaPo op-ed from Leah Libresco: I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

A good debunking of progressive shibboleths on gun control. Ms. Libresco is identified as the author of the book Arriving at Amen, which chronicles her journey from Atheism to Catholicism. Which also sounds interesting.


■ And more Adventures in Professional Journalism: Politico Magazine Adds Massive Correction to Op-Ed Blaming Koch Brothers for Puerto Rico Crisis.

A recent Politico Magazine op-ed arguing that the Koch brothers were responsible for the condition of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria was corrected after publication to admit there was no evidence that was the case.

The correction is pretty awesome:

Corrections: An earlier version of this article stated that associates of the Koch brothers proposed and lobbied Congress to pass the law establishing Puerto Rico's fiscal control board. There is no evidence of any Koch involvement in the passage of the law. An earlier version of this article also stated that the fiscal control board had reduced the minimum wage in Puerto Rico to 4 dollars an hour. The board did not lower the minimum wage, the governor did. And the governor raised it this year. An earlier version of this article stated that the U.S. Congress imposed austerity measures on Puerto Rico. The fiscal control board established by Congress instructed the commonwealth to work towards balancing its budget. The governor decided what cuts to make.

The op-ed's author does (however) make at least one good point: the 1920 Jones Act has been strangling the Puerto Rican economy for decades.


Last Modified 2019-01-06 6:29 AM EDT