URLs du Jour

2017-12-16

Proverbs 17:6 is straightforward:

6 Children’s children are a crown to the aged,
    and parents are the pride of their children.

Pun Salad Fact Check: True.


■ Thanks to 19th Century American legislation, the Mississippi River is safe from the Viking menace! As reported by Scott Shackford at Reason: There Will Be No Viking Longboats Cruising the Mississippi, Thanks to Hard-Headed U.S. Protectionism.

There are 2,000 ports across the world where cruise ships dock for passengers to embark on fabulous getaways. Only 30 of them are in North America.

The market won't likely be calling for more docks in the United States anytime soon. Switzerland-based Viking Cruises, which wanted to build and send small cruise ships up the Mississippi River, leaving new tourism dollars for river towns in its wake, is backing off its plan.

We are being "protected" by the Passenger Vessel Services Act of 1886, which forbids foreign ownership of ships transporting passengers between American ports. So if you've wondered why those river cruises you see advertised on PBS are always on European rivers, that's why.


■ And it's not as if we're being protected from truly pernicious Scandinavian cultural influence. But fortunately, one of the worst may be fading away. At the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Lileks asks: Have we lost our love for lutefisk?

Let’s remind ourselves what lutefisk is. Most recipes involve cod soaked in lye, but there are alternatives:

A) Sunfish soaked in turpentine.
B) Crappies soaked in Listerine.
C) Fish sticks soaked in bleach.

Disclaimer: Even with my Norwegian heritage, I've never had any lutefisk-love to lose. Had it at Grandma's once, in the late 1950s. The most accurate description: Fish-flavored Jell-O. I don't need to do it again.


■ At NRO, David French notes what should be obvious: Constant Hysterics Damage Our Democracy.

Late last night, while reading a stream of apocalyptic rhetoric about the repeal of net neutrality and the “end of the internet as we know it,” I reached the shattering conclusion that one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies was wrong. The movie is the 2004 Brad Bird masterpiece, The Incredibles. The line comes from the villain, Syndrome, who outlines his plan to make “everyone super,” because when “everyone is super [he chuckles maliciously] no one will be.”

It’s a great line, and it seems to convey an important truth. When you make everyone or everything “the best” or “the greatest” or “special,” then you inevitably end up devaluing the superlative. When everyone gets a trophy, trophies matter less. The same truth applies equally in reverse. Not everything is “the worst” or an “emergency,” and when we pretend otherwise, it turns out that nothing is believed to be. That’s the essence of “crying wolf.”

Except in politics. In politics, when everything’s a crisis, it turns out that EVERYTHING’S A CRISIS!

At my age, I can't be in a constant state of ideological agitation. It's getting really tough to tease out the issues over which I should be going batshit insane.


■ For example, you might think this would be an issue going batshit insane over: Google Is Using Its Immense Power To Censor Content That Doesn’t Fit Its Political Goals. It's from the Daily Caller, a conservative site not on my usual web crawling map, but:

The Daily Caller released a funny video Tuesday of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai defending the commission’s upcoming net neutrality rollback. Through Wednesday and Thursday, liberals and others who dislike Pai’s political position lost their minds. And by Friday morning, Google, one of the most powerful companies on the planet, had censored the video based on a bogus claim from a politically motivated man.

It took seven crucial hours and the full force of our news site to push Google and YouTube to reverse this political censorship. We were able to prevail because of the sizable contacts and resources of TheDC. An average citizen showcasing a political viewpoint Google and the left disagreed with would almost certainly have had a far more difficult — and fruitless — time fighting back.

Google is a private company and can run its business the way it wants. And I'm a "customer" for a number of its products and services.

But when their thumb-on-the-scale Progressivism leaks out into censorship and biased search results, that's far more concerning than "Net Neutrality" regulation going away.