■ It had been a rough day of parenting for the Proverbialist when he
sat down to write Proverbs
17:21:
21 To have a fool for a child brings grief;
there is no joy for the parent of a godless fool.
Fortunately, this doesn't apply to your humble blogger. My kids
might not be as religious as some, but they are nobody's fools.
Or, as I wrote in response to a different tale of parenting woe:
■ Sad news about one of the authors I read, Sue
Grafton, who passed away last Thursday.
“She was adamant that her books would never be turned into movies or TV shows,” her daughter wrote, “and in that same vein, she would never allow a ghost writer to write in her name. Because of all of those things, and out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.”
That would be Y is for Yesterday, which I read
earlier
this year. I loved her private-eye hero, Kinsey Millhone, very
much. Despite her wordy and sometimes pointless yammering about
stuff that didn't matter. She was a fine detective.
It's a funny feeling to be wistful about not knowing how
the lives of fictional characters transpired.
■ This is one of those things one does at the end of the year, even
despite lack of popular demand.
Here are 10 posts that you might have missed from 2017, ones I still kind of
like:
It's been a fun year for me. Hope to keep going in 2018.
■ Patterico looks at
a
recent column
by the
NYT's
"conservative" editorial columnist, Bret Stephens:
Why
I’m Still a NeverTrumper. Good point here:
As I get older, phrases like “I don’t know” and “I could be
wrong” seem more important. When I review the list of Trump
accomplishments in one year, I’m disappointed that we still have
ObamaCare and a huge debt with no prospect of relief in sight. But
I don’t know that Hillary Clinton would have been better,
and the list Stephens cites strongly suggests she would not have
been. And while I worry about the effect that Trump’s character will
have on our culture, the fact remains: I could be wrong
about that. Maybe we will bounce back the second he is out of
office, and there will be no lasting dent in our culture.
I’d like to gently suggest to Trump supporters that the opposite
just might be true. Do you know what damage is
caused to the culture by having a serial liar and bully in the White
House? Have you seen a normalization of mindless alpha-male
silliness since Trump became a candidate? Are you sure that
the damage to the Republican party and the country generally is
worth the tradeoff for the above-named policy gains?
Could you be wrong?
Confession: I was wrong about Trump's electoral prospects, of course. I think I
was also (arguably) wrong, or at least premature, when I
accused
him of backstabbing on the Export-Import Bank.
Patterico ends his post the way all bloggers should, at least
implicitly: But I could be wrong. That's a good New Year
Resolution to make.
■ Daniel J. Mitchell speaks truthfully, and I hope the wrong people
aren't reading: The
IRS Doesn’t Deserve Sympathy and It Doesn’t Deserve a Bigger
Budget. Here's an interesting bit he quotes from
an
October
Politico story:
The IRS will pay Equifax $7.25 million to verify taxpayer identities
and help prevent fraud under a no-bid contract issued last week,
even as lawmakers lash the embattled company about a massive
security breach that exposed personal information of as many as
145.5 million Americans.
Um, Equifax?
No, if the IRS is throwing no-bid millions at Equifax, there is little
doubt that its budget is too big.
■ Katja Grace wonders: Why did everything take so long?
One of the biggest intuitive mysteries to me is how humanity took so
long to do anything.
Humans have been ‘behaviorally modern’ for about 50 thousand years. And apparently didn’t invent, for instance:
And free-market capitalism is only
a
few hundred years old.
Dumb luck, I suppose.
■ And, speaking of luck, Michael P. Ramriez wishes Good Luck to New Year 2018
And good luck to you, readers, as well.