Another fine book by Christopher Moore. This is number three of a
series; the first two were
Bloodsucking
Fiends (read back in 2011) and
You
Suck (read in 2016). As you almost certainly guessed from the titles (because
I can tell you are a good guesser, reader), vampirism is involved.
I don't much care for vampire books, but it's Christopher Moore, and he
does a great job of infusing the genre with humor, profanity, likeable
and interesting
heroes, nasty villains, and
unexpected sweetness. As a consumer note: if you decide to tackle the
series, I don't recommend taking a span of seven years to read them.
Important plot details fade on that timescale.
Many surviving characters from the previous books are here: Tommy, the
aspiring writer from the Midwest, now turned undead, and trapped inside
a bronze statue. But he's trapped therein with the lovely Jody, also a vampire.
Unfortunately, their help might be needed because there was another
cliffhanger in the previous book: Chet, the huge shaved cat, was
also vampirized, and he's busy vampirizing other cats, and
they've taken to terrorizing the Streets of San Francisco. Initially
removing street people, mostly the homeless and hookers, but on their
way to eliminating everyone.
Also present is the delightful, R-rated, teenage goth, Allison Green. She calls
herself Abby Normal, and she's thrown herself into the vampire thing
with a passion. She desperately wants to be one. And (small
spoiler) she gets her wish. But (another small spoiler) this turns out
to be a very bad idea.
Success, for me, is synonymous with making money. I want to write
books, but I really want to sell books. I want advances that make my
husband gasp and fat royalty checks twice a year. I want movie
studios to pay me for option rights and I want the screenwriting
comp to boot.
To accomplish this, I spent months researching the publishing
marketplace before sitting down to write my first book. I pushed to
be the one to adapt it for the studio. Now I am working toward
producing, directing or running my own show. TV is where the money
is, and to be perfectly blunt about it, I want to be rich.
I think this is the point where I'm supposed to say: "You go, girl."
We commented
yesterday
on UCSD's demand for "Ideological Purity Statements" for wannabe
faculty.
Don
Boudreaux has a pretty good response:
If I were applying for a faculty position at the University of
California at San Diego, I would boast that I spend lots of time
promoting so-called “diversity” by arguing against minimum-wage
legislation – legislation that inflicts disproportionate harm on
low-skilled minority workers.
It sounds crazy, but it just might… no, wait, sorry, there's no way that
could work.
But speaking of "what works": you might think that progressive
academics would take a step back and take a hard look at whether all
their initiatives toward "diversity" and "inclusive excellence" were
actually working. Do they have any objective measures of their
efficacy?
No, of course not. They don't have much, if anything, to show for all the
resources they fling at this ill-defined problem.
Which should lead us to wonder: do they really want to "solve the
problem" at all? Or are they simply interested in
virtue-signalling, flaunting their saintly motives?
It's uncharitable to believe the latter. But… well, I'm sure there's
a lot of self-deception going on, too.
So (you may have heard) there was a White House Correspondents'
Dinner, and there was a lady named Michelle Wolf who gave a talk
containing a lot of … well, some say "jokes". The most tasteless
were aimed at White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders,
who was in attendance. And some people are
upset. But Katherine Timpf has an interesting take:
Don’t
Be Mad at Wolf’s Sanders Jokes if You’ve Never Been Mad at
Trump.
Sanders was visibly upset the entire time, and many people on the
right rushed to her defense — saying that Wolf’s jokes were
inappropriate and an outrage. Here’s the thing, though: Many of
those same people have absolutely no problem with it when President
Trump makes fun of people, no matter how low the blow.
Yes. In case you’ve forgotten, Donald Trump also really likes to
make fun of people. On the campaign trail, he referred to Marco
Rubio as “Little Marco” and Jeb
Bush as “low-energy Jeb.” During a debate, he readily
agreed that he’d compare Rosie O’Donnell to a “fat pig,” “slob,”
“dog,” and “disgusting animal.” He mocked
Carly Fiorina, saying “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for
that?” During his presidency, he made
fun of Mika Brzezinski, saying he once saw her “bleeding badly
from a face-lift.” The list goes on and on.
As I've been told by various people nearly my entire life: "I'm not mad. I'm just
disappointed."
Trust me: I'm easily amused. So why am I so often like Homer
Simpson here?:
Teachers are now installing digital devices after pupils sitting their GCSE and A-level exams complained that they were struggling to read the correct time on an analogue clock.
Silly pupils.
… although my kids grew up in a nearly-all digital
household, and I do remember the (otherwise brilliant)
Pun Daughter struggling a bit when I told her I'd pick her up
somewhere at "a quarter to four" one afternoon. That's 3:45, kiddo.
Proverbs
13:7 breaks out of the usual Proverbial boilerplate.
7 One person pretends to be rich, yet has nothing;
another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth.
I see the premise here for a pretty good comedy movie. Could we get
Steve Martin, in either role? That would be cool.
Or the Proverbialist might have something more subtle in mind. The
Message "translation" is: "A pretentious, showy life is an empty life;
a plain and simple life is a full life." But I'm not sure if that's
due to the "translator" stamping his own wishes onto the text.
One of the great intellectual and philosophical divides — a chasm
really — is between those who believe in the “perfectibility of man”
and those who side with Kant’s observation that “out of the crooked
timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” The
perfectibility of man comes with a lot of associated intellectual
baggage. It tends to rely on the idea that we are “blank slates.”
How could it be otherwise? If we come preloaded with software that
cannot be erased, we cannot be perfected. Rousseau, one of the great
advocates of the perfectibility of man, got around this by arguing
that, in our natural state, we were perfect: “noble savages,” as
John Dryden put it. According to this theory, what makes us sinful
isn’t our nature but the oppressiveness of our civilization. “Man is
born free, and everywhere he is in chains” is the way that Rousseau
put it, arguing that civilization was unnatural and
soul-warping.
But, since we couldn’t go back to our blissful state of nature, the only choice was to go forward and create a new perfect society — an idea that is only possible if you believe that the crooked timber of the people can be shaped.
(paid link)
This is not a new idea. I'm pretty sure it's the same one Thomas
Sowell pointed out in
A Conflict of Visions (originally published over 30 years ago
in 1987). But it deserves repeating.
Similar ground is covered at Commentary by Noah Rothman:
The
Fatalist Conceit. Neither left nor right are immune.
Unexciting governance is limited governance. And the fatalists are
driven mad by the limits our system imposes on them because they
don’t want governance to be limited. That is exactly why those
limits are so necessary and why, rather than getting dirty fighting
inch by inch for the things they believe in, fatalists write
themselves out of our political life. The danger the fatalists pose
is that they are convincing tens of millions more that our system
doesn’t work when it most certainly does, just in a fashion they
wish it wouldn’t. In doing so, they are encouraging mass despair—and
that is an entirely self-imposed affliction.
I may be a partial fatalist myself, given that the two-party system
seems to supply us with a steady stream of dolts, demagogues, con
men, and would-be messiahs.
All candidates applying for faculty appointments at UC San Diego are required to submit a personal statement on their contributions to diversity. The purpose of the statement is to identify candidates who have the professional skills, experience, and/or willingness to engage in activities that will advance our campus diversity and equity goals.
Haven't done anything diverse? Well, if you want to work at UCSD,
you better promise to do better:
Some faculty candidates may not have substantial past activities. If
such cases, we recommend focusing on future plans in your statement.
However, please note that a demonstrated record of past effort is
given greater weight than articulating awareness of barriers or
stating future plans. A more developed and substantial plan is
expected for senior candidates.
Perry suggests that such "Contributions to Diversity Statements"
might more accurately be called "Ideological Purity Statements".
I
loved
the book The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven M.
Teles. At Reason, Gary Chartier is less enchanted:
Getting
Crony Capitalism Half Right. It's a real review, unlike my
brief impressionistic reports. What's the problem, Gary?
But in many cases there are good reasons to wonder whether their
proposals would really reduce the risks of rent-seeking.
Concentrated interests are quite capable of finding ways to navigate
a reshuffled policy making system.
Consider their call for fast-tracking domestic legislation. If Congress were required to vote up or down on policy proposals put forward by the president, dealmaking wouldn't be eliminated; it would be relocated from Capitol Hill to the White House. Instead of bringing rent-seeking to an end, they would concentrate it in a more powerful and less accountable arm of the government. Would that really be an improvement?
A fortune cookie compare-and-contrast from
Proverbs
13:6:
6 Righteousness guards the person of integrity,
but wickedness overthrows the sinner.
Which is better? Let me think on that and get back to you.
From behind the WaPo paywall, Megan McArdle bids
A
farewell to free journalism. The occasion is her former
employer, Bloomberg, moving to a paywall model.
But by the time The Post approached me, I’d already concluded that
the battle for the open Internet was lost. Sooner or later,
virtually everyone in the industry is going to put his or her
content behind a subscription wall. And in general, you should bet
on “sooner” rather than “later.” This week, Vanity
Fair became just the latest in a long line of publications to
say “If you want to read us, you’ll have to subscribe.”
As New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen noted on Twitter, Bloomberg already has “one of the greatest subsidy systems ever invented”: the terminals that it sells to financial companies at a cost of $20,000 per user per year. If they still want a paywall, we should be bearish on the chances that anyone else in the news business will make a go of the “free content” model.
Just sayin': I've noticed that a lot of paywalls can be evaded, at
least for the present time, via
the
Google Chrome
Incognito
Filter. This includes the WaPo.
Disclaimer: I have print subscriptions to Reason, National
Review, Wired, and the Wall Street Journal which
(after some legerdemain)
let me surf freely on their websites. Three out of those four I
highly recommend (guess which).
As long as I'm on the topic: you can subscribe to dead-trees Consumer
Reports and they still don't give you full access to
their website content; that's extra. You suck, Consumer Reports.
The Grace Cathedral church near Akron, Ohio, found itself in big
legal trouble for running a (money-losing) cafeteria open to the
public in which much of the labor was provided free by volunteer
members of the congregation. Beginning in 2014, the U.S. Department
of Labor investigated and then sued it on the grounds that for an
enterprise, church or otherwise, to use volunteer unpaid labor in a
commercial setting violated the minimum wage provisions of the Fair
Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938. A trial court agreed with the
Department and found liability, but now, in Acosta
v. Cathedral Buffet et al., the Sixth Circuit has reversed the
ruling and sent the case back for further proceedings, noting that
“to be considered an employee within the meaning of the FLSA, a
worker must first expect to receive compensation.”
Judge Raymond Kethledge, writing in concurrence, takes issue with what may be the most remarkable argument advanced by the Department of Labor: that the congregation volunteers should count as employees because “their pastor spiritually ‘coerced’ them to work there. That argument’s premise — namely, that the Labor Act authorizes the Department to regulate the spiritual dialogue between pastor and congregation — assumes a power whose use would violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.”
That whole Church/State "wall of separation" thing doesn't work when State can
breach it in order to push Church around. What's next? A demand that
church choir members be paid union scale?
When California Gov. Jerry Brown was defending SB 1—last year's
transportation funding package, which included $5.4 billion in
annual gas tax and vehicle registration fee increases—he had an
uncharitable term for his opponents: freeloaders.
"The freeloaders—I've had enough of them," he said at an Orange County event. "Roads require money to fix." The state was strapped for cash, he argued; drivers needed to pay up, lest the roads and highways devolve into gravel paths.
And—yes, you guessed it—"A total of 28 projectswere awarded SB 1
money. None of them involves road upkeep at all." Suckers.
CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy] regulations implicitly assume that every carmaker offers a full assortment of vehicles. They treat the “fleet” as the relevant unit to regulate. Higher average requirements distort corporate strategies and encourage companies that are good at making trucks to make compact cars as well, even if their customers don’t want them. This artificially induced competition, often at giveaway prices, hurts manufacturers that are good at making small cars. The credit system ameliorates this effect by allowing small-car specialists to sell their credits to competitors who produce larger vehicles, but only in a roundabout way.
In the real world, on real streets, emissions depend not on car dealers’ full offerings but on individual vehicles and the people who drive them. One drawback of CAFE standards is that they apply only to new cars, a tiny fraction of those on the road. So they take a long time to reduce actual emissions. The rest of us happily go on driving our out-of-date vehicles, using just as much gasoline as ever.
It appears the Trump Administration is looking to "freeze" current
CAFE standards. Which is better than nothing, but better would
be nothing: get rid of them entirely.
While almost nobody is willing to defend Bill Cosby any longer after
he was convicted of sexual assault Thursday, the former television
star and comedian found an ally in abortion provider Planned
Parenthood.
President Cecile Richards came forward to claim that since sexual assault is only about 3% of what Bill Cosby performed over his long and illustrious career, the egregious offenses should be overlooked.
This relatively short book by Mary Eberstadt documents the efforts here
in the US and elsewhere to delegitimize traditional Christian beliefs,
to deny their believers an equal place in the public arena, and (what's
more) to ostracize and exile those believers from positions of responsibility
in private and public institutions.
Ms. Eberstadt explores a lot of case studies to support her views, most
of which will be familiar to people following the news. There's
Brendan
Eich, forced out as Mozilla CEO when it was revealed that he backed
the Proposition 8 ballot initiative against same-sex marriage. There's
the Obama Administration's attempt to force
the
Little Sisters
of the Poor to provide "contraception coverage" to
their employees. There's the effort to compel
Catholic
Charities
to
offer adoption services to same-sex couples. Various efforts to
restrict/ostracise
religious
home schooling. And more.
It's a tough life out there for a conservative Christian, in other
words. Eberstadt's anecdotes are many and telling.
I think her argument is slightly off-center; there is some hostility to
Christianity, but it drops off significantly for the "respectable"
fraction of believers; you know, the ones who mix in a healthy dose of
Progressivism and avoid saying much about sin when it comes to matters
dealing with the naughty bits.
And (for example) James Damore found himself out of a sweet Google job, not
because he was too religious, but because he dared to utter heresies
against the Progressive social justice gospel of diversity and
inclusion.
So I suspect that it's not Christianity per se that gets one in
trouble; it's one's dissent from Progressive orthodoxy that brings out the
witch hunt.
That said, after adjusting the target, Eberstadt makes a lot of sense
that we need to bring back a modicum of respect into the argument, a
willingness to deal with opinions that some might find wrong-headed, in
order to (say) put babies into adoptive homes more efficaciously.
This month Surgeon General Jerome Adams issued
an advisory that touted the lifesaving potential of naloxone, an
opioid antagonist that reverses potentially fatal overdoses. He
called for wider distribution of naloxone to opioid users, their
relatives, and their close associates.
Naloxone, approved for use since 1971, works by blocking opioid receptors. It is an effective remedy that can be safely administered by laymen wth minimal training, using either a nasal spray (sold under the brand name Narcan) or an intramuscular auto-injector (Evzio).
Well, that's one option. Another is to just let these losers die.
Most days, I'm indifferent.
Drew Cline writes at NR with advice to one of our
institutes of higher ed:
Take
a Hike, Penn State.
Penn State University’s Outing Club can no longer organize
student-led hiking and camping trips, which the club has done for 98
years. This decision is not about the inherent risk of hiking. It is
about letting students be independent adults.
At first, the university explained that the outing, scuba, and caving clubs are “losing recognition due to an unacceptable amount of risk to student members that is associated with their activities,” as a university spokesperson put it.
The real issue, Drew contends, is that Penn State (like many
universities) is committed to keeping its students in a state of
perpetual, dependent, irresponsible childhood. He may have a point;
it certainly helps explain a lot of other stuff.
One of the great academic debates of our time revolves around how
people make choices. On the one side, neoclassical theory assumes
that individuals generally act in sensible ways in order to advance
their individual self-interest. They are motivated to control
aggression and monopoly, and to let private parties in competitive
markets strike what bargains they like.
In recent years, this neoclassical approach has come under attack from the field of behavioral economics. Its proponents argue that the neoclassical model of behavior, premised on the fact that human beings are rational decision-makers, does not sufficiently account for the many false heuristics and biases that lead people astray as they make decisions.
Epstein details why "libertarian paternalism" isn't that
libertarian.
Our Google LFOD alert rang for a cofessional article by Ted Slowik in the
Chicago Tribune, in "honor" of (I am not making this up,
unless Ted is) "Illinois Distracted Driving Awareness Week":
I’m
guilty of distracted driving, but I will keep trying to stop.
Last year, I drove out to New Hampshire and visited a friend who
lives there. New Hampshire — whose motto is “Live Free or Die” — is
the only state that does not require drivers to wear a seat
belt.
Because I could, I tried driving a short distance without wearing a seat belt. The ringing alert was annoying, though, and I felt uncomfortable. I fastened my seat belt, not because I had to but because I wanted to.
Jeez, Ted. Don't wet your pants. The whole point of LFOD is
doing what you want in such matters, according to your own standards of comfort and
risk.
Ted's article is filled, by the way, with the usual horrendous stats
about distracted driving.
Distracted driving kills 10 Americans
every day and contributed to the deaths of 37,000 people killed in
crashes on U.S. roadways in 2016, according to the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration.
It sounds as if Ted thinks there were 37,000
distracted-driving fatalities in 2016. But that overstates the count
by
over
a factor of ten. You think he could have been trying to scare
us?
You ever wonder if you can get a "Don't Tread on Me" doormat? Talk about
a mixed message! Anyway, you can, and it's our Amazon Product du Jour.
Proverbs
13:4 goes after another favorite Proverbial punching bag, the
sluggard:
4 A sluggard’s appetite is never filled,
but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.
I don't find that last part to be consistently true, but close
enough.
Readers may have noticed that I am a sucker for state comparisons,
and the despised-by-progressives American Legislative Exchange
Council does a bang-up job on a dedicated website:
Rich States, Poor
States. And (spoiler) New Hampshire is ranked 17th overall.
That's tops in New England, compared to MA (#25), RI (#39), CT
(#40), ME (#42), and lowly VT (#49).
There's a lot to quibble with, if you're a quibbler.
You can also play with the underlying policies and numbers driving
the rankings. Fun fact: if you (hypothetically) switched NH to a
right-to-work state (which we came close to doing recently), it
would lift our rank from #17 to #11 in the country.
Megan McArdle offers
her take of the wacky senator from a neighboring state
(the one ranked #49 in the previous item) and his jobs plan:
Bernie Sanders wants you to have a good job. But there’s a catch.
Well, there's probably more than one. For example, the cost,
unestimated by Bernie, but ballparked by Megan:
Perhaps we can help the senator out. With two weeks of paid
vacation, each worker would make roughly $31,000 a year. Adding,
conservatively, about $10,000 for benefits, would bring the total
cost to about $40,000.
The United States has between 25 million and 50 million workers
making less than this total compensation package. Millions more are
unemployed or fully out of the labor force. Assuming most of them
did the rational thing and signed on, that would make for a $1
trillion to $2 trillion annual program — rivaling or exceeding our
total expenditure on Social Security, with maybe Medicaid thrown in
for good measure.
And is it possible that extracting that much money from the private
economy would have
no negative effects? Well, to ask that question is to answer it.
This wacky scheme has been signed onto by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand
(N.Y.) and Cory Booker (N.J.), showing that economic illiteracy and
raw political ambition are positively correlated.
When you visit a grocery, literal-mindedness is a handicap. Apple butter is actually not a dairy product. Grape-Nuts cereal omits grapes as well as nuts. Corn dogs don't need leashes.
The U.S. Cattlemen's Association, however, is appalled that new forms of protein are being sold under names such as Beyond Beef and Impossible Burger. Vegetarian and vegan substitutes for meat have gained a significant share of the market, partly because of health considerations and partly because of aversion to killing harmless animals for food. But the livestock group fears that consumers are being cruelly misled.
It wants the Department of Agriculture to stop not only the use of these brand names but any term suggesting that there is such a thing as "synthetic beef" or "vegan meat."
Well, that's nice. Chapman takes us on a brief tour of the
regulatory rent-seeking by entrenched food industry groups. (Don't
get Wisconsin started on "Almond Milk".)
With respect to that first paragraph: I was recently shocked to learn that an
egg cream
contains neither eggs nor cream. Who knew? A lot of people, it turns
out. But not I.
The thing is, though, the story that Moneyball illuminates
the insights of behavioral economics regarding the persistence of
systematic error and inefficiencies, doesn’t quite work.
Moneyball is the story of how Billy Beane exploited
systematic error and inefficiencies in the then-existing market for
baseball players to turn a low-payroll baseball team into a team
that competed with, and won against, teams with much heftier
payrolls.
That’s not a story of systematic error; that’s a story of eliminating systematic error in a market. Billy Beane was essentially an arbitrager, taking advantage of new information to identify and exploit differentials in market evaluations player values versus the values indicated by his.
Why is this important? As fun as it is—and it's a lot of
fun—behavioral economics can be,
as
Deirdre
McCloskey memorably said—the "applied theory of bossing people
around". If you only see the mistakes people make in their economic
decisions, it aids and abets those policy makers who think that
whole economic freedom thing is a bad idea.
Each year since 2011, the security firm SplashData has released a list of the most commonly used
passwords, based on caches of leaked account credentials. The annual
list, intended as a reminder of humanity’s poor password practices,
always includes predictable entries like “abc123,” “123456,” and
“letmein.” But one entry, finishing in the top 20 every year, has
stood out since the beginning: "dragon."
But why? Is it because of the popularity of the television adaption of Game of Thrones, which first premiered the same year as the popular passwords list? Is it because so many Dungeons & Dragons fans got their accounts pwned? Well, maybe, in part. But the most convincing explanation is simpler than you might think.
A volcano is an unlikely explanation for the mysterious red storm observed on the surface of Jupiter since the early 19th century. The planet has been found to be mostly gas, lacking a defined crust to rupture in an Earth-style volcanic eruption that would release hot materials from the interior of the planet.
OK, I'll do a spoiler: nobody knows what lies beneath Jupiter's
Great Red Spot. Just that it's almost certainly not a volcano.
About 20 years ago—this is before I started keeping track of such
things—I realized that I'd read a lot of Dick Francis novels
haphazardly. So, probably due to some undiagnosed OCD-like mental quirk,
I made a list, in chronological order, of his novels up until that
point in time, and resolved to read through them, one by one.
This involved a bit of re-reading, but that's OK.
(I think that was the genesis of my
bookpicker
system.)
And now I've finished that "little" project by re-reading 10 Lb.
Penalty, published in 1997. Mr. Francis went on to write seven more
books, some co-authored with his son Felix, but I caught those as they
came out.
10 Lb. Penalty is a goodie. It has an unusually young Francis
hero, Benedict Juliard, who's only 17 when the book opens. And it opens
inauspiciously for him, as he's getting fired from his dream job with a
horse trainer, wrongfully accused of drug abuse.
But that turns out to be a scam orchestrated by his father, George.
George is standing for Parliament in England's "Hoopwestern" district. And he
wants Benedict to help out, mainly to demonstrate to the voters that he
has a family.
Unsurprisingly, since it's a Dick Francis novel, there are dark doings
afoot. George stepped on a few feet to grab his party's nomination, and
at least two of those feet aim to do him harm. Benedict, because he's a
Dick Francis hero, turns out to be
invaluable in detecting and thwarting these efforts.
In addition to the usual mix of danger and action, there's a lot of
subtext here
about father-son relationships, and the process of growing up, realizing
that you might not be able to achieve your childhood goals, figuring out
how to bounce back from that to have a good life anyway. Wise and
moving.
In my recent Wall Street Journal essay on the politics of Twitter mobs, I noted that the episode was accompanied by a great deal of sloppy journalism—remarkably lazy journalism. Of all the mostly denunciatory articles about me that appeared in the big-name press (at least four in the New York Times alone) not a single writer of any of them bothered to ask me about my views on the subjects in question: abortion and capital punishment. Naturally, practically all of them got it wrong (see the corrections) never having bothered to perform the characteristic act of journalism and, you know, ask a question or two.
KDW offered New York magazine a free essay describing his
views on the abortion-punishment issue. They turned it down. The
only way you'll hear KDW in New York is through the hostile
filter of its editors.
One imagines that a quixotic proposal like this polls quite well. I mean, who doesn’t want everyone to have a job? You don’t possess a skill-set that enables you to find productive work? You don’t want to learn a new trade? You don’t want to attain a better education? You have no interest in moving to an area where your work might be in demand? You don’t want to start your career with a lower wage even if the long-term prospects of doing so might be worthwhile? Don’t worry. The government’s got an incentive-destroying job opportunity just for you.
So: an absurdly expensive program that would destroy important signals
in the labor market. What's not to like?
How much lower? [Researchers Nicholas Lewis's and Judith Curry's] median ECS estimate of 1.66°C (5–95% uncertainty range: 1.15–2.7°C) is derived using globally complete temperature data. The comparable estimate for 31 current generation computer climate simulation models cited by the IPCC is 3.1°C. In other words, the models are running almost two times hotter than the analysis of historical data suggests that future temperatures will be.
Well, it's not good news for everyone.
This doesn't help those making the argument that we need immediate massive, global controls
over energy production, accompanied by huge coerced rich-to-poor
income transfers. Too bad for them.
Poor Uranus: After years of being the butt of many schoolyard jokes, the planet's odor lives up to the unfortunate name. According to a new study by researchers at the University of Oxford and other institutions, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the upper layer of Uranus's atmosphere consists largely of hydrogen sulfide—the same compound that gives farts their putrid stench.
Next up, the discovery that the next planet out has an atmosphere
that generates harmonious
audio vibrations. Yes: Nep Tunes.
Disturbing fact: searching for "Uranus" on Amazon displays a number
of non-astronomical items.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming…
Proverbs
13:2 hits three common Proverbial tropes: (1) reference to the
mouth area; (2) good people vs. bad people comparsion; (3) not
making a lot of poetic sense.
2 From the fruit of their lips people enjoy good things,
but the unfaithful have an appetite for violence.
That's our default NIV translation. I think the KJV does it a little better:
2 A man shall eat good by the fruit of his mouth: but the soul of the transgressors shall eat violence.
And the "Message", as always, goes its own way:
2 The good acquire a taste for helpful conversation; bullies push and shove their way through life.
The underlying message, readers: be good, not bad.
The Atlantic’s decision to fire the conservative columnist Kevin D. Williamson has occasioned an avalanche of think pieces, the latest of which is a Wall Street Journal article from Williamson in his own defence. All these commentaries swirl around the same question: Exactly how important is political diversity in media? For some, Williamson’s firing is proof that the mainstream media practices something like institutional discrimination against conservatives. For others, Williamson’s views were so beyond the pale that hiring him in the name of ‘diversity’ would be no more justifiable than a university astronomy department hiring a flat-earther. Diverse, yes, but also disqualifyingly wrong.
Of the latter group—those who are skeptical of the need for media outlets to pursue political diversity—the ablest pen currently belongs to Osita Nwanevu, who laid out his argument in a piece for Slate entitled “It’s Time to Stop Yammering About Liberal Bias.” There are two layers to his critique: firstly, the media actually has plenty of political diversity, but secondly, this diversity isn’t a particularly important value for publications like the Atlantic to pursue.
Phillips does a simple head count on Nwanevu's assertion that there
are 18 (or maybe 19) "conservative" writers for the ‘big tent’ publications
(Atlantic, NYT, WaPo), and that's plenty. But,
even if you buy the characterization of those writers as
conservative,
that's a relative sliver of the 105 regular opinion writers at those
publications. Everybody else is a reliable lefty.
Whatever side of the debate you're on, net neutrality is, at least
for now, a dead letter. Supporters will continue to push for its
return and could ultimately prevail. All of this sets up a powerful
and, I hope, illuminating natural experiment. Before 2015, we had an
internet that was lightly regulated. From 2015 til now, the net was
governed by stricter rules. From now until the rules may be
reinstated, we'll
be back to a light-touch regime. Let's see if anyone notices a
real difference in his or her online experience.
My bet: The internet will continue to improve, both in terms of the speed of connection and the range of content, applications, and experiences we'll be accessing. As economist and net neutrality critic Tom Hazlett suggests, there may well be "paid prioritization" and continuing attempts to build "walled gardens" like Facebook's, but they will flourish or die based on whether they serve consumers' interests and needs. The advent of 5G and other technologies that will add to the competitive marketplace for internet access will make current arguments about net neutrality completely moot.
That's one take, and one I agree with. To see what the other side's
saying…
Parts of the Federal Communication Commission's
repeal
of net neutrality
is slated to take effect on April 23, causing worry among
internet users who fear the worst from their internet service
providers. However, many experts
believe
there won't be immediate changes come Monday,
but that ISPs will wait until users aren't
paying attention to make their move. "Don't expect any changes right
out of the gate," Dary Merckens, CTO of Gunner Technology, tells
Inverse. Merckens specializes in JavaScript development for
government and business, and sees why ISPs would want to lay low for
a while before enacting real changes. "It would be a PR nightmare
for ISPs if they introduced sweeping changes immediately after the
repeal of net neutrality," he says.
In the modern version of the story, Chicken Little doesn't exclaim
"the sky is falling!". Instead, he says, "The sky will fall someday,
don't expect it soon,
it would be a PR nightmare if it fell right away, but don't worry,
experts tell us the sky is out there, just waiting to screw us over."
The Google LFOD News Alert rang for an LTE from Matt Simon (the New
England political director of the Marijuana Policy Project) in my
local fishwrap, Foster's Daily Democrat.
Marijuana study commission chair shows true colors
The chairman of New Hampshire’s study commission on marijuana legalization, Rep. Patrick Abrami, R-Stratham, thinks Granite Staters who support ending marijuana prohibition should have waited for his commission’s report before supporting reform efforts in the Legislature (“Commission
to deliver pot report on Nov. 1", April 8). While all three
neighboring states have already approved legalization measures, Rep.
Abrami seems to believe advocates in the “Live Free or Die” state should be content, at least for now, with the fact New Hampshire is finally bothering to study the issue.
Abrami and Simon seem engaged in a pissing contest about the
legalization process (or lack thereof). Can't help but think there
is at least one elephant (and maybe more) in the room that neither is talking about.
The Greenwood, South Carolina Index Journal marks
A
fitting conclusion to tragic day in Abbeville. That tragic day
was December 8, 2003, and the death of Abbeville County Sheriff’s
Deputy Danny Wilson and former deputy, turned state Constable Donnie
Ouzts at the hands of Steven Bixby. At issue was a 20-foot easement
onto the Bixby's property that the state's DOT wanted to widen the
adjacent
state highway. And the "fitting conclusion", over 14 years later, is
the razing of the Bixby house.
The Bixbys apparently were not about to give an inch, much less a
20-foot wide strip. Having lived in New Hampshire, they took to
heart that state’s motto, “Live free or die.” They threatened the
DOT, and when Wilson showed up to try to discuss the matter with the
Bixbys he was shot by Steven. His mother proudly told someone her
son had shot his first law officer. Steven dragged Wilson inside the
house, handcuffed him and let him die. When Ouzts and another
officer showed up to check on Wilson but turned from the door to
wait for backup, Steven shot Ouzts in the back and the constable
died in the yard.
As the gratuitous LFOD reference shows, the Index Journal
editorial writer is a hack. Does our motto make our state a hotbed
of homicidal maniacs? No. New Hampshire's homicide
rate was
lowest
in the nation in 2016; South Carolina's relatively optimistic
motto,
"Dum Spiro Spero" ("While I breathe, I hope") does not stop its
inhabitants from racking up the eighth-highest homicide rate, about
5.7 times higher than New Hampshire's.
Meanwhile, Steven Bixby still sits on Death Row, according to the
IJ,
because "the state does not have the drugs to perform lethal
injections".
It would be easy, all too easy, to dismiss this flick as a
politically-correct attempt by a major motion picture studio to cater to
the Hispanic demographic. I was apprehensive, myself. But my doubts were
quickly swept away, as the movie hit all of my right buttons: a paean to
family, honesty, love, and courage. Which still crosses ethnic lines.
It's also gorgeous to watch.
The hero is not Coco. Took me a few minutes to get that straight
in my head. It's Miguel. He's a young boy with big dreams in a big
family. Unfortunately, his big dreams do not involve the family
business, which is shoes. He wants to be a musician, like his hero, the
late Ernesto de la Cruz, a movie star/crooner.
Miguel's problems also involve the Day of the Dead, the Mexican holiday
where everyone's passed-away ancestors are officially remembered. Due to
some supernatural mixup, Miguel is transported to the Land of the Dead,
where everyone's a skeleton except him. He gets to know his non-living
ancestors. But—hey, just maybe—he can meet up with de la Cruz and get
his blessing…
One amazing thing about this movie is its consistent rules about the
interactions between the real world and the dead world. Yes, once you
buy the premise, and why shouldn't you, it all makes a certain amount of
wonderful sense.
Small hint/spoiler: as is common in Pixar movies, the villain is… I can
say no more.
Also, I liked the doggie. Pay attention to the doggie. More there than
meets the eye.
A page 3 article in the Sunday, April 21 edition of my local paper, Foster's Daily
Democrat, caught my eye:
"UNH
task force pushes for more inclusive campus". The news hook is the
release of the long-awaited Final Report of the "Presidential Task Force
on Campus Climate". Which you can read, if you like,
here.
It is the crowning achievement of the task force, set up last year to
mollify dedicated campus activists. People familiar with academia will
recognize the report's word-salad muddle, filled with euphemism,
obfuscation, and general fog.
But I wanted to point out a few paragraphs from the Foster's
story, which is also dreadful:
UNH senior Gabrielle Greaves, BSU co-chair and task force member, said
Friday the task force’s almost 40 members have spent months creating
recommendations aimed at growing a campus where a diverse student body
and faculty is welcome and safety is a mission for all persons of
color.
Now look at that last phrase: "where … safety is a mission for all persons of
color." Does that even make sense? Is "safety" reasonably described as a
"mission"? And is it correct to say that only "persons of color" are
on that mission?
No, of course not. This is the mark of someone typing boilerplate
phraseology, without really paying much attention to what the words mean.
However, she said the 61-page report and many diversity training events
this school year were developed in response to racial incidents after
Cinco de Mayo last spring, yet students of color are already unnerved as
they have begun to see sombreros on campus. A student of color last year
posted a video of her interview with a student wearing a sombrero and
this sparked increased violence and threats on social media, which
resulted in a sit-in and march and the creation of 16 student demands.
Yes, we are "unnerved". The sombreros are sprouting even before the
tulips and crocuses!
But what really bugs me is categorizing that infamous video as an
"interview". You can read a contemporaneous, sympathetic article about
the incident at
The Tab:
Video
shows sophomore taking on a white student for wearing a poncho on Cinco
de Mayo. Note: "taking on", not "interviewing". You can also see a
short excerpt of the video, made by the "student of color", Danique Montique.
(You'll also notice another signal of Foster's sloppiness: the
student is being berated for wearing a poncho, not a sombrero.)
One of the student’s companions attempted to explain that they were simply “celebrating” the holiday, but was interrupted by Montique, who shouted, “celebrating what?” and “it’s not your holiday!”
This prompted another student to ask which holiday would be appropriate for him and his friends to celebrate, but the query was only met with another lecture about Cinco de Mayo.
“That’s stuff for you white people to figure out. I don’t fucking know! Cinco de Mayo is not your holiday,” she again declared. “You’re perpetuating the stereotype that Mexicans drink and wear ponchos for a living. That’s what you’re doing, and you also have to keep in mind the racial tension that’s happening right now where your president claims that Mexicans only come here, drink, and steal your jobs.”
[…]
Michael then attempted to suggest that his interlocutors were making “too big a deal out of it,” but they quickly dismissed his attempts to settle the dispute, saying “that’s how you feel because you’re not a part of the culture.”
“This stuff actually affects people’s lives, and I don’t think you understand that,” Montique carried on. “You’re perpetuating the stereotype, Michael. It’s not just about you wearing it. It’s about you as a man—a white man, who has the most privilege in this whole fucking country—knowing what’s happening in this country right now.”
Can this be fairly categorized as an "interview"? Only by someone
attempting to downplay the aggression and hostility displayed by the
"student of color".
Why it seems only a few weeks back
(because
it was only a few weeks back) that we read Alan Jacobs' How
to Think, in which he observed that books about thinking have a
trait in common: "they're really depressing to read."
I don't find them depressing, but I get his point: such books concentrate on
all the myriad ways our thinking can go seriously wrong.
Reader, beware: The Elephant in the Brain is one of those books.
The authors, Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler, purport to report on why we act the way we do, specifically our
motivations for our social behavior. Those motives are not as pure as
they appear to be. Down deep, our brains are a product of millions of
years of survival-of-the-fittest evolution, looking out for our own
procreation and safety. But we've also evolved as a social
animal, so our selfish motives are also channelled by the need to get
along with others of our tribe. So we've adapted elaborate disguises for
our motives, a network of deceptions that outwardly display as noble.
As an added feature, this often amounts to self-deception as
well: we convince ourselves we're being nice and socially virtuous, ignoring
the "elephant" of our baser instincts. Why? Because, as an evolutionary
adaptive strategy, fooling ourselves makes it easier to fool others.
Hanson and Simler develop this thesis in (what I've come to think of as)
the standard way: accumulating evidence from psychological research,
animal studies, evolutionary theory. They then show how this model plays
out in various specific aspects of life, devoting one chapter to each
of: Body Languuage;
Laughter;
Conversation;
Consumption;
Art;
Charity;
Education;
Medicine;
Religion; and
Politics.
The book is accessible, insightful, and fun to read. And made me a tad uncomfortable
in trying to find out about my own "hidden" motives. (Yup, there I am:
page 302. And probably other places I glossed over.) All in all,
recommended to anyone interested in stuff like this.
And yet, I kept telling myself: Hanson and Simler are telling a
plausible story, but they are not telling the whole
story. The very existence of the book confirms that while we can and
do engage in fallacious self-deception about our motivations, we
don't
always do so. What's typical? Who's better, who's best?
How do we improve? How would we measure such improvement? (The book, to
its credit, does make a nod toward these issues in its "Conclusion"
chapter.)
But I keep coming back to Deirdre McCloskey's "Great
Fact": the amazing
relatively-overnight improvement in human standards of living after
millennia of relative stagnation. That's
another real "elephant" that needs explaining. I think
Hanson and Simler could have had something insightful to say
here, but don't.
We move (backwards, sue us) to a new Proverbial chapter today, with
Proverbs
13:1:
1 A wise son heeds his father’s instruction,
but a mocker does not respond to rebukes.
Stupid mockers again.
At the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Ryan Young writes on
Peter
Navarro's Economic Ignorance on Trade. Longest article ever
written? No. But it may not be comprehensive. Skipping over a couple
of points, I liked this bit:
Third, Navarro thinks in aggregates, not individuals, joining the
Keynesian and Harvard-MIT traditions in error. Countries don’t trade
with each other, people do. “China” and “America” do not trade with
each other; people who live in China and people who live in America
do.
Remember this every time Navarro’s boss tweets something like “We are on the losing side of almost all trade deals. Our friends and enemies have taken advantage of the U.S. for many years. Our Steel and Aluminum industries are dead.” As Ludwig von Mises points out on p. 44 of “Human Action,“ “It is always single individuals who say We”. Also, domestic steel production is above its 40-year running average, according to the St. Louis Fed. Ditto aluminum.
I pulled my dusty copy of Human Action off the shelf, and:
yes, there it is on page 44. And, reading on, I was reminded that
Mises was not known for his punchy prose.
And Young reminds me, if I needed it, that Trump is dangerously ignorant.
And proud of it.
I’m someone who agrees with Comey that Donald Trump is morally unfit
for office. I tend to like Comey and (for the most part) find the
universal disdain for him and his book befuddling. But this post
constitutes a harsh criticism of Comey, because it’s the thing that
has most bothered me about him — and it’s the part of the book that
I found most jarring. It’s his inexplicable decision to let Hillary
Clinton off the hook. And to my way of thinking, Comey just keeps
digging that hole deeper in his book. To me, nothing demonstrates
his elevation of the FBI’s reputation over equal justice under the
law like his mishandling of the Hillary investigation.
The "Iron Law of Bureaucracy", by the way, is from the late
Jerry
Pournelle:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic
organization there will be two kinds of people":
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the
organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an
educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians
and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors
in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself.
Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many
professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA
headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Patterico considers Comey to be an example of the second group. He
makes a convincing argument.
Our Google LFOD News Alert rang (unexpectedly!) for a site called
"SNEWS", and an article by Amelia Arvesen:
The
greenest states in the U.S..
Spoiler: Greenest is Vermont; least green is West Virginia. But
NH made the top 10. Kate Paine, VP of Marketing for a company called
NEMO Equipment, based just down the road in Dover:
"Interestingly, in New Hampshire, famously the 'Live Free or
Die'
state, a lot of this progressive action is driven from a grassroots
movement of individuals and businesses who care and therefore act,"
Paine said. "There’s a lot of organizing around renewable energy,
local agriculture, land conservation, and waste reduction. We’re a
member of New Hampshire Businesses for Social Responsibility, which
offers a great forum for connecting with businesses who share the
same goals. I’ve been really impressed by the motivation and
intentionality of the business community in New Hampshire."
Yes, it's a bullshit-heavy article. The WalletHub article on which
the rankings are based is
here.
Did you know, for example, that NH has the fourth-lowest total
municipal solid waste per capita?
And a Milwaukee-based news site, Shepherd Express, writes a fawning
story about the earnest kids walking out of school (again) to
push their ignorant opinions about guns:
Area
High School Students Continue to Push For Gun Reform. But:
Two pro-gun advocates were also present at the really, wearing
jackets that said “Loaded and Ready,” and “Live Free or Die.”
William Polster of Plymouth said he was simply observing the
event.
“I think it’s interesting hearing their concepts, because right now they are being protected by people with firearms,” said Polster, referring to multiple police officers who were parked nearby. “It’s a shame when people fight for their rights, and then their own rights are being taken away.”
Your experience will probably vary, but when I view the article,
there's an add from the United States Concealed Carry Association
urging me to click over to their site to "Find Your Perfect
Handgun".
35 A king delights in a wise servant,
but a shameful servant arouses his fury.
Yeah, it's hard to find good help these days. Even if you're King,
and living off the backs of the 99.99% of your subjects trapped in
dire poverty.
Kevin D. Williamson relates the story of his brief employment with
the Atlantic:
When
the Twitter Mob Came for Me.
Might be paywalled, which is nature's way of telling you: get a
Wall Street Journal subscription, already.
Anyway: this paragraph is why I will read KDW anytime, anywhere:
Which brings us back to that event at South by Southwest, where the
Atlantic was sponsoring a panel about marginalized points of view
and diversity in journalism. The panelists, all Atlantic writers and
editors, argued that the cultural and economic decks are stacked
against feminists and advocates of minority interests. They made
this argument under the prestigious, high-profile auspices of South
by Southwest and their own magazine, hosted by a feminist group
called the Female Quotient, which enjoys the patronage of Google,
PepsiCo, AT&T, NBCUniversal, Facebook, UBS, JPMorgan Chase and
Deloitte. We should all be so marginalized. If you want to know who
actually has the power in our society and who is actually
marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and
Pepsi and which get you fired.
And, as they say, to ask the question is to answer it.
A liberal can believe that government can do more good or less, and
one can debate how much to conserve. But progressivism is inherently
hostile to moderation because progress is an unmitigated good. There
cannot be too much of it. Like conservative fundamentalism,
progressivism contributes to the polarization and paralysis of
government because it makes compromise, which entails accepting less
progress, not merely inadvisable but irrational. Even when
progressives choose their targets strategically — Hillary Clinton,
for example, called herself “a progressive who likes to get things
done” — the implication is that progress is the fundamental goal and
that its opponents are atavists.
Progressivism is very like a religion. And not a "nice" one, like
Episcopalianism, either: One of those nightmarish ones where
devotees hunt down heretics
with an eye toward ostracism and ruin.
Since the late 1950s, economists have paid attention to “housing
starts” — the number of times in a month that ground is broken to
build a home. In recent years, however, economists have started to
pay closer attention to something we might call “housing stops”: the
thicket of laws and regulations that make it harder for communities
to build.
Since at least 1950, notes housing economist Joseph Gyourko, there has been a growing price divide between low-cost areas where housing is plentiful and cheap, and desirable areas where housing is scarce and expensive. In 1950, housing in the most expensive metropolitan areas cost twice what it did in an average market. By 2000, it was four times as expensive, and Gyourko expects that difference to keep growing.
Again, see
The
Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles, where
land-use regulation is one of the prime components of the American
game of rent-seeking. Contrary to Megan's headline, it's bad in
areas where Democrats are in full control, but it's not great in
(for example) New Hampshire, either.
Next week in New Hampshire, Yang will announce an initiative to give
one citizen of the Live Free or Die state the monthly windfall. He’s
asking citizens to nominate someone they know who could use the
extra income, to offer a real-time test case of his central policy
idea. Shortly after, he’ll repeat the process in Iowa (each are
swing states, of course, and the first to vote in the primary
process).
<voice accent="yankee">Ayup, nothin' says "Live Free or Die" than becomin' dependent on the
government for your financial future</voice>.
And xkcd once again looks into
my shameful trashy behavior:
Mouseover:
"I found a copy
of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but the idea of reading it
didn't spark joy, so I gave it away."
This is number six in Roger Zelazny's ten-book series of novels
revolving around the denizens of Amber and its associated realities.
The
first five books (published between 1970 and 1978) concerned Corwin's
efforts to (first) rule and (then) save Amber, the "true" world. (The
universe you and I know is a mere "shadow" of Amber, one of a great
many. Sorry.) Zelazny began the second set of five books with this one,
published in 1985.
In it, Corwin's son Merlin becomes the narrator. Corwin is MIA,
variously reported to be dead or insane. Merlin is dwelling on Shadow
Earth, a recently-graduated Computer Science student. His main problem
being that every April 30, his birthday, someone tries to kill him. The
perpetrator is unknown, as is the motive.
But this April 30, the victim is Merlin's ex-girlfriend Julie,
who's been killed by a wolflike beast from a different shadow. Merlin
sets off on a hunt to find out what's going on, which mainly reveals his
cluelessness. But also his carelessness in developing "Ghostwheel", an
automated gadget that flips through Shadow like Google flips through web
pages. Which turns out to be pretty dangerous.
Lots of characters, all of whom lie about their motives and natures without compunction.
A universe with a lot of made-up behavior and rules.
I can tell I'm going to have a lot of trouble keeping things straight as
I march through subsequent books.
Hey, kids! How do you feel about collective guilt?
Proverbs 14:34
provides it:
34 Righteousness exalts a nation,
but sin condemns any people.
That's easy to make fun of, but there's a kernel of truth there.
Specifically (since I am at least a part-time libertarian), let's
see what
James
Madison had to say:
To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or
happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.
On my more pessimistic days, I think that the US is severely testing that
assertion.
A new issue of American Consequences is out, with quite a few
P. J. O'Rourke articles. I liked his take on
Greed and
Fear.
Markets are ruled by greed and fear. Or so they say.
For example, Warren Buffett famously declared, “Two super-contagious
diseases, fear and greed, will forever occur in the investment
community… We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to
be greedy only when others are fearful.”
Which is just a wordier version of the old stock trader maxim: “Buy on fear, sell on greed.”
And since Pun Salad has long been interested in risk, I enjoyed the
bottom line, as expressed by P. J.'s friend Jay Caauwe after they
attend a heavily technical
session on "Risk Management":
The quants talked about portfolio performance alphas, volatility
betas, standard deviation sigmas, and all the risk sensitivities and
hedge parameters expressed in Greek letters – delta, vega, theta,
rho, lambda, epsilon… I felt like I was in some awful fraternity
initiation shotgunning coffee instead of beer.
I said to Jay, “I can’t understand a single word they’re saying about
measuring risk.”
Jay just smiled.
“P.J.,” he said, “if you could measure risk, it wouldn’t be risk.”
The decline in opioid prescriptions that began in 2011 accelerated last year, according to the latest data. Meanwhile, opioid-related deaths continue to rise. The opposing trends show the folly of tackling the "opioid crisis" by restricting access to pain medication.
Fearless prediction: the people who assured us that restricting
opioid prescriptions would save lives will not accept any
responsibility, nor incur any penalty, for their role in increasing
pain and death.
I know you've been wondering: should conservatives try to punish radical professors for offensive
speech? At NR, David French has the answer for you:
No,
Conservatives Shouldn’t Try to Punish Radical Professors for
Offensive Speech. The recent test case is Fresno State's Randa
Jarrar, who tweeted out attention-seeking vileness on the occasion
of Barbara Bush's death. (Warning: picture of Prof Jarrar at the
link.)
But culture drives law, and law drives culture. Every time that we
refuse to tolerate offensive expression, we incentivize the culture
of crocodile tears. We motivate government officials to expand state
power over speech until the silencing exceptions swallow the
free-speech rule. California’s recent efforts to compel crisis-pregnancy centers to
advertise for free or low-cost abortions represents what happens
when the people, to borrow my friend Greg Lukianoff’s excellent
phrase, “unlearn liberty.” Periodic conservative efforts to expel
radical professors from the academy demonstrate the pernicious
effects of a “fight fire with fire” mentality. In both cases, a
culture of coercion triumphs and liberty loses.
French's solution: deny the lefty trolls the
attention they crave. The worst punishment of all.
If you’re looking for heroes, though, think about the flight
attendants. They’re in the back of the plane with 140+ screaming
passengers. There is a hole in the airplane. At least one person has
suffered injuries that will prove to be fatal. Others are injured as
well. They have received no training for this scenario. (Most flight
attendant training, as I understand it, is directed at evacuations
once the aircraft has landed.)
Not to take anything away from pilot Tammie Jo Shults, but she'd be
the first to tell you that a single-engine failure is something
pilots are extensively trained to handle via simulator, without
drama.
LEBANON, NH—In a calculated move intended to demonstrate the power
of the free market, libertarian man Patrick Wallace drove his SUV
through dozens of other peoples’ back yards, across several open
fields, over a stretch of rocky terrain, and even off a cliff into a
small ravine in order to avoid using any government-funded roads,
sources confirmed Thursday.
According to witnesses, the man got into his vehicle to head to
work, started it up, and immediately barreled across his lawn, down
his neighbor’s side yard, through a row of back yards, and right
into an adjacent wood, all while carefully preventing his tires
from ever touching any road built by tax dollars.
Heh! I'm pretty sure, though, that a True Scotsman
Libertarian would have more respect for private property rights than
that demonstrated by Mr. Wallace.
33 Wisdom reposes in the heart of the discerning
and even among fools she lets herself be known.
A little bit of optimism there for the foolish; even in their sorry
state, they catch a glimpse of something different and
better. There's still a chance.
Note that
"The
Message" "translation" seems to botch this:
33 Lady Wisdom is at home in an understanding heart—
fools never even get to say hello.
I.e., fools helplessly lost in their foolishness. Sad!
When one side of a scientific debate is allowed to silence the other
side, this is an impediment to scientific progress because it
prevents bad theories being replaced by better theories. Or, even
worse, it causes civilization to go backward, such as when a good
theory is replaced by a bad theory that it previously displaced. The
latter situation is what happened in the most famous illustration of
the dire consequences that can occur when one side of a scientific
debate is silenced. This occurred in connection with the theory that
acquired characteristics are inherited. This idea had been out of
fashion for decades, in part due to research in the 1880s by August
Weismann. He conducted an experiment that entailed amputating the
tails of 68 white mice, over 5 generations. He found that no mice
were born without a tail or even with a shorter tail. He stated:
“901 young were produced by five generations of artificially
mutilated parents, and yet there was not a single example of a
rudimentary tail or of any other abnormality in this organ.”
People acquainted with the term "Lysenkoism" know what's coming
next.
But the real punchline in Perkins' article is right at the
top:
Editor’s note: this is a shortened version of a speech that the author was due to give last month at King’s College London which was canceled because the university deemed the event to be too ‘high risk’.
Perkins has argued for a genetic basis for a number of socially
dysfunctional traits. That is blasphemy. It must not be
allowed.
Timothy Sandefur recently wrote a biography of Frederick Douglass in
which he emphasized Douglass's antipathy toward socialism. In
today's mail bag
he replies to a reader who attempts to claim socialism as the true
"anti-slavery" movement. The reader's bottom line:
It could be said that libertarians are, on the whole far, more opposed to individual liberty than any true socialist.
Sandefur's response (in full, because it's brilliant):
Well, I suppose all sorts of stupid and false things "could be
said," but they remain stupid and false.
Douglass was right to see that socialism posed a risk of enslaving
all of mankind instead of just one race, and Frederic
Holland's warning about what would happen if it were attempted
on a national scale proved correct. "True socialism" is, of course,
a fantasy concocted by enemies of liberty to excuse the inevitable
results that have flowed from their doctrine ever since their
advent--and, no doubt, every time a socialist country degenerates
into the typical symptoms of chaos and tyranny, they will continue
to deploy that worn, pathetic excuse, "That's not true
socialism"--like some hallucinating patient in his death throes
insisting "This isn't true syphillis."
But the reality of the matter is that slavery is, as its great
advocate George Fitzhugh called
it, the truest form of socialism, because it subordinates the
individual to the interests of others, and compels him to work for
others' benefit. Socialists may indeed, for pragmatic and tactical
reasons, take stands against particular incidents of slavery, just
as one religious sect boldly opposes the cruel religious
establishment that oppresses the natives of some foreign land--not,
indeed, because they believe in liberty, but because they desire the
opportunity to oppress those people themselves, without competition
from their rivals. The true doctrine of liberty, as Douglass rightly
saw, is that each person be free from compulsion, to live his own
life for his own sake on his own terms, without being subordinated
to the interests of anyone else, and free to enjoy the fruits of his
labors in freedom.
Now, please, don't go telling me that that's what "True Socialism" is about. I've heard it all before.
I have placed Sandefur's book on the things-to-read list.
At the NYT Christopher Buckley remembers Barbara Bush as
Mrs.
No-Nonsense. He was a speechwriter for GHWB, and occasionally
observed… well, I liked this story:
If she was Mrs. No-Nonsense, she also had a playful, even girlish,
side to her. On one occasion, I was alone in a freight elevator with
Mr. and Mrs. Bush and their Secret Service detail when it got stuck
between floors. Stuck elevators are viewed grimly by the Secret
Service. The atmosphere inside quickly elevated (as it were) to
Condition Red, with hands reaching for the holstered Glock 9’s,
orders barked into wrist-mics and all the rest.
The Bushes were blithe. I was standing behind them. Mr. Bush’s
fingers reached for Mrs. Bush’s derrière and gave it a pinch. She
turned to him and grinned like an 18-year-old. “Hi ya, fellah,” she
said. So I can claim to have witnessed a primal scene between Mom
and Dad Bush.
I am somewhat surprised by the amount of media coverage devoted to
Mrs. Bush's passing. But it allows us to remember a decent lady.
The governor called the Bushes “honorary Granite Staters.”
“They spent a lot of time here,” he said. “They really understood
what New Hampshire was all about. I think they shared a lot of the
values that folks in New Hampshire really believe in – that ‘Live
Free or Die’ spirit. It was something they really grew fond of and
appreciated.”
New Hampshire State Rep. Bill Ohm (R- Nashua) joins the Heartland
Daily Podcast to talk about lawmakers’ work to reform occupational
licensing and get people back to work in the Live Free or Die State.
Ohm, the sponsor of House Bill 1685, says the bill will create a state commission to review and overhaul the state’s many burdensome and arbitrary regulations requiring individuals to obtain occupational licenses before entering a job.
Unfortunately, the
bill was
killed earlier this month, thanks to six Republican state
senators (Birdsell, Carson, Gannon, Gray, Innis, Reagan). Joining
nine Democrats voting "inexpedient to legislate". Innis is
especially painful, I liked him.
The "Message" translation
favored for those who like their translations not to be
accurate translations: "The evil of bad people leaves them out in the cold;
the integrity of good people creates a safe place for living."
Ssh, there's no need to mention that death thing!
It’s interesting, for example, that Chait makes the argument just as the California State Assembly is set to vote on a bill that would actually — among other things — ban the sale of books expressing orthodox Christian beliefs about sexual morality.
Such beliefs are heresy against the new secular religion whirling around issues
of sex and "gender expression". And heresy cannot be allowed.
As we argue over the propriety of Facebook hoovering up personal
(but not especially sensitive) information that users voluntarily
gave to the social media company, it's a good time to remember that
many of us are right now surrendering delicate details of our life
to an even less trustworthy entity—the Internal Revenue Service
(IRS)—and we have no choice.
Using a feature of Facebook that was abandoned in 2015, third-party apps were, for several years, able to compile fairly detailed profiles on users who installed them. Among other destinations, the information made it to political campaigns for use in targeted electioneering (variously characterized as innovative when the Obama campaign bragged about its tech savvy, and nefarious when it benefited Trump). This info-siphoning struck many people as creepy as hell (almost certainly why Facebook killed the feature three years ago), but it was based on freely surrendered data through a service that nobody was compelled to use. Anybody uncomfortable with Facebook's policies can just close their account (or creatively populate it with bogus info).
J. D. alludes to something we've mentioned in the past: you have no
obligation to tell the truth when answering nosy questions from social media sites.
In fact, when you're asked to provide answers to "security
questions" to "protect your account", it's far more secure to
lie
your ass off.
Dave Barry shares his sweet memories of the late
Harry
Anderson. Harry played a fictionalized version of Dave on TV,
"Dave's World".
We haven't had a lot of Proverbs recently about the poor, but
Proverbs 14:31
attempts to make up for that:
31 Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker,
but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.
Note that these Proverbs were written when nearly everyone
was dirtier-than-dirt poor. The Proverbialist needed an ancient
Israeli version of
Deirdre N. McCloskey (e.g., our Amazon link du jour) to discover the
best way to stop oppressing the poor: use trade-tested betterment to make them unpoor.
A soundproof phone booth built for Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) chief Scott Pruitt cost more than $43,000 and circumvented
federal rules for office renovations, according to the Government
Accountability Office (GAO).
In an eight-page letter to congressional Democrats, who had
requested a review of Pruitt's phone booth project after reports of
it surfaced in the press, GAO General Counsel Thomas Armstrong wrote
that the EPA violated two federal laws by failing to notify Congress
before spending the money and by using those funds in a manner
prohibited by law. The second violation is a function of the
first—because the agency did not notify Congress, the funds used to
build the phone booth were not legally "available" when the EPA used
them.
The bigger question might be why Pruitt needed a phone booth that costs as much as a brand new BMW.
Boehm lists off some of Pruitt's admirable EPA reforms, and people
who favor prosperity instead of overregulation should check that
out. But (bottom line) maybe we could get those same reforms
established by someone who doesn't spend taxpayer money like a
drunken sailor.
Censorship by social media giants is the new front in the “war” on conservative thought — and conservatives are badly losing it, according to a comprehensive study released Monday by a media watchdog group.
OK, so here's the thing. Well, actually, a number of things. The
study is brought to us by the Media Research Center (MRC), which is
fine.
But in order to see the "study", you (apparently) need to go to
https://info.mrc.org/censored,
a page which will allow you to enter your first name and e-mail
address in exchange for "an email containing your digital copy of
the full report". And (unless you uncheck some boxes) also subscribe
you to some MRC newsletters.
Uh, no thanks.
In addition, the summaries of the MRC study suggest that it may be
primarily, if not entirely, based on news reports and research done
elsewhere. (E.g., this
2016
Gizmodo story that quoted "former Facebook workers" claiming
they "routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative
readers".) Any original research that I haven't seen elsewhere, MRC?
It was supposed to be the laptop that saved the world.
In late 2005, tech visionary and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas
Negroponte pulled the cloth cover off a small green computer with a
bright yellow crank. The device was the first working prototype for
Negroponte’s new nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, dubbed “the green
machine” or simply “the $100 laptop.” And it was like nothing that
Negroponte’s audience — at either his panel at a UN-sponsored tech
summit in Tunis, or around the globe — had ever seen.
It didn't work out, yet another—literal—academic scheme to end-run
mainstream hardware manufacturers to commodify cheap computing for
the third-world masses.
I played with one once, wangled by a UNH education prof who asked me to help
get it on the wireless network. And then I forgot about this
would-be world-saving device until now.
Good thing to remember when some guru comes up with the next
grand scheme.
A senior Trump administration official said Monday that 150 invited
guests will be in the audience at the Derry Opera House on Tuesday
for a discussion of the Republican tax reform plan signed into law
in December by President Donald Trump.
As WMUR reported Sunday, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, who is officially an advisor to the president, and Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin, will be in New Hampshire on Tax Day to discuss the plan. Former Gov. John H. Sununu will moderate the event, which is not open to the general public.
But where's LFOD? Ah, there:
The [aforementioned senior Trump administration] official said that Sununu “celebrates the fact that New
Hampshire has a history and tradition of being a state that lives by
its motto, ‘Live Free or Die,’ and that includes lower taxes.”
But, agin, LFOD does not imply that you can just show up at the
Derry Opera House and expect
to get in to chat up Steve and Ivanka.
And one confused user remembered his parents rather unique way of
dealing with tantrums, writing: 'Whenever my brother threw a tantrum
as a baby my parents would chant 'live free or die' until he calmed down it was weird'.
Must have been Granite Staters.
And James Lileks also brought back memories of old Mac Warehouse
ads at the
Bleat.
After some discussion of tax procrastination:
Don’t think I was ever that bad, but I had a few years of shaving it close, because the anxiety produced by contemplating the forms - THE GOVERNMENT FORMS - made me put it off, and then I’d say “it’s time to get down to it” and I’d drive to Prof. Egghead for software. Ah, damn. They’re out. Well, let’s call Kerry at MacWarehouse. Maybe she’ll pick up.
Don't remember Kerry? Well, if you're a computer geek of a Certain
Age (basically, alive in the 80s), click over. You will.
[Note: for some reason I appear to have spaced on posting this book
report when I read the book back in February. Doing it belatedly, for
completeness.]
Winding up the original Amber pentalogy with The Courts of Chaos.
After the shocking and fantastic events of the first four books, the
hero/narrator Corwin sets of on a perilous, probably futile, quest to
save Amber from destruction by the forces set in motion by a rogue
Amberite.
Not that it matters, but:
I read these books when they first came out in my college/grad school
days. On re-reading, I find it's more difficult to keep track of the
characters.
Also: I note that there's an alleged
TV
series in the works. (That's from the summer of 2016 though, so I'm
not holding my breath.)
So we went to the cinema to see Steven Spielberg's latest. I liked it a
lot.
Set in a mildly-dystopic 2045, where (seemingly) most of the US
population has decided to spend its spare time in the virtual reality
world of the "Oasis", a huge cyber-environment set up years ago by the
late James Halliday. The hero, Wade Watts, lives in a Columbus trailer
park slum, but he's gained a measure of virtual fame, via his Oasis
avatar "Parzival". His ambition, like that of millions of other players,
is to find an Easter Egg Halliday hid in Oasis before his death, and
thereby become heir to the Halliday cyber-empire. He is joined by some
other plucky young people, and finds himself in conflict with a greedy
corporate behemoth.
It's kind of a wonderful mishmash. Let's see if we can sort it out:
50%: gorgeous, amazing, over-the-top CGI virtual-reality exploits
and battles, with piles of inside jokes and pop-cultural references.
30%: a standard story of young misfits against the previously
mentioned corporate behemoth.
20%: a surprisingly bittersweet backstory of two friends and business
partners
in love with the
same girl, which eventually breaks up their friendship and their
business.
Me, I thought Spielberg could have played up the backstory more, and
toned down the CGI stuff. Good as it is, it's not the reason we go to
the movies, Steve.
Hardcover picked up at the Barnes & Noble remainder piles for a cool
$5.98. An excellent deal, although I'm not sure how much C. J. made on
the deal. Something, I hope; judging by his recent book signing in
Portsmouth, he's a heck of a good guy.
On the other hand, I'm RetiredOnAFixedIncome, and do not have any
NYT best-sellers in my quiver, so I'm pretty sure he can stand
it.
Two EPA enforcers are sent out from the Denver office to serve ruinous papers on
one Butch Roberson, who is sinning against the environment by attempting
to build a cabin on his own land. Unfortunately, by page 13, the EPA
guys are
dead or dying of gunshot wounds. A manhunt ensues, into which Joe
Pickett is swept; he knows Roberson pretty well, can't believe he's
become a murderer. And a lot of the details smell fishy to Joe. Why,
it's that red herring over there…
Before it's over, there's a few more deaths (one spectacular),
and a nasty forest fire (no spoiler, it's on the cover).
As usual, Joe barely makes it out alive. But will he have a job at the
end?
This is, I think, C. J. Box's most political book of those I've read.
The dangerous arrogance and arbitrariness of Federal bureaucracy is a
primary theme; it's based on the true story of
Mike and Chantell
Sackett in Idaho.
With a photo ID and cash or a credit card, almost any of us (18 years or older) can walk into the Kittery Trading Post and purchase a semi-automatic assault rifle like the ones used in the massacres at Stoneman Douglas High, the Las Vegas music festival and Sandy Hook Elementary School – and some high-capacity magazines of 40 rounds each.
It goes on from there, a remarkably detailed fantasy about which
nearby schools a dedicated murderous psychotic could then proceed to shoot up.
A disturbing, albeit probably unintentional, look into the dark
corners of one Progressive's mindset. Shea urges his readers to
join in a boycott of Kittery Trading Post until they stop selling
the scary guns.
I almost titled this post: "Urge John Shea to Mind His Own
Business".
Literally.
Students at Somersworth High School scored an average 32% of
students proficient for math and reading as tested by the NH Dept of
Education. Performance is well below the
state high school median of 50%
proficiency and places the school's
test performance in the bottom 12.8% of New Hampshire high schools.
I haven't been to Kittery Trading Post in a while. I don't currently need a
gun, but I could use a
new
pair of shoes
and maybe
some
work gloves.
Jonah Goldberg's G-File is (mostly) about Paul Ryan, and his title
is a classical reference:
Cincinnatus
Lays Down the PowerPoint. A long, but worthwhile, excerpt:
The fact that Paul Ryan was a man out of place in his own party says
far more about the state of the GOP than it does about the man.
Consider this week alone:
A president who cheated on his first wife with his second and “allegedly” cheated on his third with a porn star is tweeting that Jim Comey is a “slimeball.”
The president’s personal PR team over at Hannity HQ is calling Robert Mueller the head of a crime family.
The CBO just announced that we’re in store for trillion-dollar deficits for as far as the eye can see.
The president is tweeting taunts about how his missiles are shinier toys than Putin’s.
The president’s nominee for secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, a once passionate and thoughtful defender of Congress’s sole right to authorize war, is now invoking law-review articles as justification for a president’s right to wage war on a whim.
The president’s lawyer’s office was raided by the FBI (not Bob Mueller’s team, by the way) after getting a warrant from a judge and following all of the onerous protocols of the Justice Department, and the former speaker of the House — and avowed historian — is insisting that the Cohen and Manafort raids are morally equivalent to the tactics of Stalin and Hitler. I’m pretty sure the Gestapo didn’t have “clean teams” to protect attorney-client privilege (particularly of dudes named “Cohen”), and last I checked the KGB wasn’t big on warrants.
On Monday evening, the president convened a televised war council and spent the first ten minutes sputtering about how outraged he was by an inquiry into a pay-off of his porn-star paramour.
And people are shocked that Paul Ryan isn’t comfortable in Washington?
Endangered species: GOP politicians with integrity. I know they're
out there, but …
Janice Brown looks at a local curiousity:
Samuel
Joy and His Spite Tombstone in Durham New Hampshire. No
excerpts, Janice discourages those, but it's an interesting bit of
diligent research about poisonous posturing preserved for posterity.
Space.com recommends:
This
NASA Video Tour of the Moon in 4K Is Simply Breathtaking. It's a
"greatest hits" compilation from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
(LRO).
I'm
glad they didn't say "literally breathtaking", because my breath was
not taken (but I didn't watch it in 4K either). It is very
cool though.
LRO data not only supports future human missions, but also provides more information about past landings from the Apollo program, all of which took place between 1969 and 1972. The spacecraft has imaged multiple landing sites, as well as the crash sites from the third stage of the mighty Saturn V rocket that lifted humans to the moon. The video zooms in on the Apollo 17 landing site in the Taurus-Littrow valley, revealing astronaut tracks, the rover and even the bottom half of the astronauts' lunar module, Challenger.
Sobering thought: It's looking dicey as to whether I'll be around to see more humans
on the moon. It was neat to be around to witness the first ones, though.
During his half-century spent defending Americans' civil liberties,
here's what has changed, according to lawyer Alan Dershowitz: "Now
conservatives have become civil libertarians, and liberals have
become strong supporters of law enforcement, the Justice Department
and the FBI," the professor and pundit said
after dining with President Trump on Tuesday night.
That snorting sound you hear? That's a thousand libertarians shooting coffee through their noses at the notion that the GOP is newly sympathetic to issues of law enforcement overreach and intrusive investigative tools. Republicans had an opportunity as recently as three months ago to rein in warrantless snooping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. What did they do? They voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize the practice for another six years: 191-45 among GOP members in the House, 43-7 in the Senate.
So (if you have patience) wait a few years until the
political winds shift, and you can watch the corresponding attitudes
mutate once again.
One area where the ACLU could make money is management consulting.
In the pre-filled letter to send to politicians, the organization
suggests that members write that, with this kind of law in place,
“employers save money by retaining better staff”. Thus any rational
employer should implement a paid leave system even in the absence of
a law forcing them to do it. But profit-seeking employers are
leaving money on the table, so to speak, by not paying workers to
not work. So the ACLU could charge employers to educate them on the
profit-enhancing technique that the ACLU knows about, but that
employers don’t know about.
The self-appointed experts that know everything about how businesses
should be better run are thick on the ground. Thick in other ways,
too.
Brought to us via the Google LFOD News Alert is this Union
Leader article:
Family-leave
bill faces veto. Our Governor explains one of a number of
reasons:
"While I believe access to a paid-leave program would provide a
benefit to some Granite Staters, it is not in our 'Live Free or
Die' nature to force citizens to pay for a service they do not want," states Sununu. "HB 628's current opt-out provision is unduly burdensome on both employees and employers, and the need to have the opt-out document notarized is absolutely unnecessary and cumbersome."
Now if he were only consistent. But the correct application
of LFOD is appreciated where we can find it.
Clearly, the winner of the war on drugs is the prison industrial
complex. The owners of federally and state contracted jails and
prisons are profiting from this crisis at a loss to taxpayers.
Disproportionate numbers of poor people and people of color are
being locked up for simple drug possession, often to meet
contractual detention quotas. These bad deals paved the way for
handing out murder convictions for people who share drugs that
result in death. These are called “death resulting” cases and have
become common over the past year and a half in the Live Free or
Die state. Most people who are charged this way are low-level drug users who simply share drugs. These policies help no one and conflict with Good Samaritan laws, keeping people from calling 911 during an overdose event.
It's my impression that relatively few people are locked up for
"simple drug posession" any more. Or even "share" drugs. But (nevertheless), Fowler's
correct about the fatal incentives of current law.
At the opposite end of our smuggling spectrum, there are source
states. The state with the highest outbound cigarette smuggling is
New Hampshire, at a whopping 86 percent. That is, for every 100
smokes consumed in the Live Free or Die State, another 86 are
smuggled out. This is not a function of New Hampshire having a
particularly low tax rate ($1.78 per pack), but of having one that
is just relatively lower than that of its neighbors. Idaho (25
percent), Wyoming (22 percent), Delaware (21 percent) and West
Virginia (20 percent) round out the top five.
New Hampshire's tobacco retailers give thanks every day to (a) God
and (b) neighboring state legislatures. Probably in that
order, but I'm not betting on that.
28 A large population is a king’s glory,
but without subjects a prince is ruined.
"I'm a prince!"
"Yes. Well, exactly how many subjects do you have, Prince?"
"Well, um…"
"Uh huh. You're ruined! I read it in Proverbs!"
<voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">Good
news, everyone</voice>: An excerpt from Jonah
Goldberg's new book
Suicide
of the West is up at NR, and it's apparently free
even to lowly non-subscribers. On the astounding fact of
capitalistic modernity:
Virtually every objective, empirical measure that capitalism’s
critics value improved with the emergence of Western
liberal-democratic capitalism. Did it happen overnight? Sadly, no.
But in evolutionary terms, it did.
Among economists and anthropologists, this is “settled science.” Economists left and right might bicker over minor details, but they agree that poverty is man’s natural environment. As economist Todd G. Buchholz puts it, “For most of man’s life on earth, he has lived no better on two legs than he had on four.” Nobel Prize–winning economist Douglass C. North and his colleagues write in Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History that “over the long stretch of human history before 1800, the evidence suggests that the long-run rate of growth of per capita income was very close to zero.” Economic historian David S. Landes is not exaggerating when he writes, “The Englishman of 1750 was closer in material things to Caesar’s legionnaires than to his own great-grandchildren.” For roughly 7,500 generations, everywhere in the world — ancient China and Rome, medieval Europe and Aztec-era Mexico — the average person lived on the equivalent of $3 per day.
In one of the eye-rolling events of the past few days, President
Trump has signalled his willingness to, um, revisit his decision to
pull the US out of the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP).
I.e., attempt to unbreak the dish he tossed on the floor. At
NR, Veronique de Rugy points out:
Rejoining
TPP Won’t Be Easy. There are a lot of hurdles. But the bottom
line:
One final note, I don’t know much about international negotiations
but I know that there is a reason why we tell our kids not be
obnoxious in their dealing with others, even when they think they
have the upper-hand or even if they believe they will never need
other kids again. Nasty behaviors may come to bite you you know
where at some point. This may be one of those moments for America.
We, the people, may learn that painful lesson once again. Will the
White House learn it too?
The Pun Salad
Magic
8-Ball says: "Outlook not so good".
The attack commences without two fundamental elements of any hostile engagement against another nation: authorization from Congress, and a clear understanding of the mission's aims. These are not mere technicalities, regardless of how often they have been brushed aside by various chief executives in the name of expediency.
The childish "do something!" urge is bad enough when it motivates
bad legislation; when it inspires warlike activity, it's certainly worse.
And of course, some CongressCritters object to the lack of
authorization. But Congressman
Justin
Amash points out just how hypocritical the objections can be:
Witness the hypocrisy that our two-party system breeds:
Check out these similar letters warning the president about
commencing offensive strikes against Syria without congressional
approval.
2013 signers: 119 Rs, 21 Ds 2018 signers: 15 Rs,
73 Ds Very few of us signed both. pic.twitter.com/40VEVtGwnq
For residents of New Hampshire CD1: Yes, of course Carol Shea-Porter signed
the letter. She wasn't in Congress in 2013, so I won't speculate on
her hypocrisy.
New Hampshire Commie Public Radio answers the perennial
question:
What Is The Free State Project?
(brought to us via the crack Google LFOD News Alert Team). It's very
nuts and bolts (or, you might say, fruits and nuts) about the inner
stresses of the FSP, and the tactics of the anti-FSP folks too. For
example, there's a movement to "out" current or former members of
the FSP who run for political office.
Yes: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Free State
Project?"
It’s a question that rubs Carla Gericke the wrong way, which isn’t
surprising. Carla stepped down from the Free State Project in 2016
and is now running for state senate for the second
time.
"It seems very McCarthey-esque," she told me. "I mean, I could break
down the Democratic Party into all kinds of little nuanced
groups...maybe I'll send out a thing that asks, you know, 'Are you a
socialist?'"
In addition to running for state Senate, Carla is now heading the Foundation for New Hampshire Independence. Their
mission is to “educate citizens on the benefits of the Live Free
or Die state peacefully declaring its independence and separating from the federal government of the United States.”
Proverbs 14:27
claims advantages for a certain attitude toward the Deity:
27 The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life,
turning a person from the snares of death.
The Bible refers to the fear of God a lot. It's a good thing.
Unsurprisingly—OK, somewhat surprisingly—there's a
Wikipedia
page on the topic, in case you're confused about what that
entails.
How stupid is the panic over Sinclair Broadcast Group's hamfisted, "must-run" promotional video decrying "fake news"? This stupid: Yesterday 12 senators, including reported presidential aspirants Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), officially requested that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) "investigate Sinclair's news activities to determine if it conforms to the public interest." If such an inquiry were to uncover "distorted news reports," the senators reckoned, that "could disqualify Sinclair from holding its existing licenses" and put the kibosh to its proposed purchase of Tribune Co. television stations.
FCC Chair Ajit Pai easily shot down this attempt at unconstitutional
thuggery.
I am (slightly) relieved that neither New Hampshire senator signed
the letter (linked above). However, I'm (again, slightly) disturbed by
Massachusetts senator Edward J. Markey's signature. It appears he
hasn't changed it since his fourth-grade penmanship class.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, confirmed on
Wednesday that it had been struck by at least 240 hack attacks and
another 800 suspected hacks, jeopardizing mortgage information,
Social Security numbers, and personal banking information of scores
of Americans, according to congressional testimony.
To repeat, "CFPB" stands for "Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau". And its idea of "protection" extends to sloppily putting nearly
every American's sensitive data at risk.
But (fearless prediction) there won't be anywhere near the outrage
directed at the CFPB that was aimed at (say)
Equifax
last year. Incompetence and misfeasance from government agencies is
measured on a different scale than that in the private sector.
KC Johnson relays the latest news in Laura Kipnis's legal troubles.
Her crime:
Unwanted
Candor.
Amid a national debate about due process and fairness in campus Title IX adjudications, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently observed, “there’s been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard, and that’s one of the basic tenets of our system, as you know: everyone deserves a fair hearing.” Few academics have more powerfully made these criticisms than Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, whose 2015 Chronicle of Higher Education essay lambasting Title IX’s application to campus sexual-assault and harassment allegations prompted a university Title IX investigation—against Kipnis herself. Though Kipnis was exonerated, the investigation was a form of punishment, since professors normally aren’t questioned by lawyers hired by their school as the result of publishing in their area of expertise. The experience prompted Kipnis to write Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, which explores how Title IX has come to threaten the rights not only of accused students but also of faculty.
One of the Title IX rights-threateners, Lauren Ledyon-Hardy, is suing
Kipnis, and (incredibly) this lawsuit has been greenlighted by U.S.
District Court Judge
(and Obama appointee)
Jack Blakey.
Pun Salad wrote extensively about Laura Kipnis last year:
here,
here,
here,
here,
a look at her book
here,
here,
and
here.
I wish her good luck and a speedy deliverance from her legal harrassment.
I don't read the Onion much any more, but this is pretty
good:
Nabisco
Snack Physicists Develop Highly Unstable Quadriscuits.
Especially recommended if you follow the quantum computing news. I
won't quote anything except the punchline: "Ellison added that the
snack’s existence cannot be explained by classical Fig Newtonian
physics."
In the year 2018, at the height of The Russia Scare, the Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg was hauled in front of a tribunal of
tech-illiterate politicians and asked to explain himself. “It was my
mistake, and I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg told senators upset
about the company’s exploitation (and fumbling) of user data –
which, unbeknownst to them, was social media’s entire business
model.
A number of panics have brought us to this preposterous place: The notion that Russian trolls on Facebook could swing the 2016 election and undermined our “democracy;” the idea that Facebook’s leftward bias is so corrosive the company should be regulated like a utility; and, finally, the general way in which social media tends to reveal the ugly side of human nature — which is indeed scary, but has little to do with any particular platform.
Harsanyi is, as usual, an insightful commentator, picking whatever
wisdom he can out of ongoing absurdities.
Tyler Cowan analyzes a Facebook regulatory proposal:
Zeynep
Tufekci’s Facebook solution — can it work? Spoiler: the
proposal is vague, loaded with the feelgood adjectives ("clear",
"concise", "transparent", "truly consensual"—as opposed to
falsely consensual, I guess.)
What instead? I would instead start with the sentence “Most Americans don’t value their privacy or the security of their personal data very much,” and then discuss all the ways that limits regulation, or lowers the value of regulation, or will lead many well-intended regulations to be circumvented. Next I would consider whether there are reasonable restrictions on social media that won’t just cement in the power of the big incumbents. Then I would ask an economist to estimate the costs of regulatory compliance from the numerous lesser-known web sites around the world. Without those issues front and center, I don’t think you’ve got much to say.
I am sick of reading about people who want to regulate Facebook. You didn’t come up with the idea. You didn’t build the business. Now that it’s here, who the heck do you think you are telling them how to run it?
Ah, if only Zuck had said something like that to the
Congresscritters. Like one of the heroic characters in an Ayn Rand
novel. Alas…
Arnold has a lot of ideas about what a better social media site
would look like. Facebook is stupid.
During Prohibition, drinkers never knew what they would get when
they set out to slake their thirst. Bootleggers often sold products
adulterated with industrial alcohol and other toxins. Some 10,000
people were fatally poisoned before America gave up this grand
experiment in suppressing vice.
So it was a tragedy but not a total surprise when three deaths were
reported in Illinois from synthetic marijuana laced with an
ingredient (possibly rat poison) that caused severe bleeding.
Nationally, in 2015, says the Drug Policy Alliance, "poison control
centers received just under 10,000 calls reporting adverse reactions
to synthetic cannabinoids, and emergency rooms received tens of
thousands of patients."
Nowadays, the politicos, aided by an uncritical media, measure their
"compassion" on druggies by directing a firehose of taxpayer cash to
those offering "treatment". E.g.:
As we continue to work on bipartisan legislation to combat
the opioid crisis, it is critical that we ensure that we are
adequately prioritizing funding for the states that have been
hardest-hit. https://t.co/PAKBA5ZoLG
Paul Ryan's going someplace saner than Congress next year.
Dan McLaughlin writes at NR on
Paul
Ryan’s Missed Opportunities on Spending. Specifically, he wasted
a lot of time and political capital on unfeasible entitlement
reform, when he could have…
Worse, over the past 15 months, Ryan failed to fix the system for budgeting, a goal that should have appealed to him as a Beltway veteran versed in the process from his time running the House Budget Committee. One of the reasons why it has been so hard to eliminate any individual category of spending is that the House deals only in massive all-or-nothing omnibus bills rather than break down appropriations into smaller pieces that can be individually debated and voted on. This excess of brinksmanship gives a massive structural advantage towards the passage of individual spending items that could not survive on their own, since the choice is literally one between shutting down the government and approving all the spending on everything. Of course, as the leader of the caucus, Ryan understood that those smaller fights could be politically painful for some of his members, but so is voting for a big, ugly omnibus, and the latter has no corresponding positives in terms of showing voters that the people they elected were actually serious about their promises on spending. (This is similar to the strategic failure on health care as well as the persistent and misguided effort to pass thousand-page “comprehensive” immigration bills.)
We could have done worse than Paul Ryan. We almost certainly
will do worse.
The nicest thing you can say about
Proverbs 14:25
is that it's timeless:
25 A truthful witness saves lives,
but a false witness is deceitful.
Yes. That's the definition of "false witness", Proverbialist.
As the kids today say: Duh.
The good folks at Heterodox Academy have put together a spiffy
illustrated
"good parts" re-explication of Chapter Two of John Stuart Mill's On
Liberty. From the intro of
All Minus
One.
Mill's main concern was not government censorship. It was the
stultifying consequences of social conformity, of a culture where
deviation from a prescribed set of opinions is punished through peer
pressure and the fear of ostracism. "Protection, therefore, against
the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough," he wrote. "There needs
protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and
feeling". Mill saw people even as brilliant as Charles Darwin living
in fear of the response their views would provoke.
I would guess it deserves to be read in tandem with every nebulous
jeremiad in favor of censoring "hate speech".
… or in concert with the current social panic about Facebook. Rich
Lowry writes at NR about
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Insufferable Tripe. (That's the current
attention-grabbing headline;
the URL indicates the original headline may have been something like
"Mark Zuckerberg Runs Facebook as a Business, Not a Nonprofit".)
It’s not Zuckerberg’s fault that he has suddenly been deemed on the
wrong side of history, but the Cambridge Analytica blowup is
bringing a useful spotlight on the most sanctimoniously
self-regarding large company in America. Facebook can’t bear to
admit that it has garnered the largest collection of data known to
man to sell ads against and line the pockets of its founder and
investors.
The problem isn’t that Mark Zuckerberg is a businessman, and an exceptionally gifted one, but that he pretends to have stumbled out of the lyrics of John Lennon’s song “Imagine.” To listen to him, Facebook is all about connectivity and openness — he just happens to have made roughly $63 billion as the T-shirt-wearing champion of “the global community,” whatever that means.
I don't begrudge him his $63 Billion; it's a small price to pay to
see what various members of my family, old classmates, and favorite
celebrities are up to. I just wish he'd play as nicely with honest
conservatives and libertarians as he does with leftists and
Progressives.
Since the whole Facebook/Cambridge Analytica thing broke, we've
[apparently this is a "royal" we] been pointing out that there
are many, many valid concerns about things Facebook has done, but
people seem to be freaking
out about things it didn't actually do and that's bad, because
freaking out about the wrong things will make things worse,
not better. Indeed, that seems to be the direction things are
heading in.
One thing I've noticed in having this discussion a few times now both online and off is that there's appears to be a bit of Facebook derangement syndrome going on. It seems to go something like this: Facebook did some bad things concerning our privacy, and therefore every single possible thing that Facebook does or Mark Zuckerberg says must have some evil intent. This is silly. Not only is it obviously wrong, but (more importantly) it makes it that much more difficult to have a serious discussion on the actual mistakes of Facebook and Zuckerberg, and to find ways to move forward productively.
Masnick offers his idea of an "independent judicial-type system"
that would check-and-balance the company's own interpretation of its
usage policies. Assuming it's workable, and voluntary, and
transparent, that's not the worst idea in the world. Much better
than getting browbeaten/coerced by the Feds.
Kevin Williamson. Sam Harris. Bret Weinstein. Bari Weiss. Dave
Rubin. Jason Riley. Heather Mac Donald. Jordan Peterson. Ayaan Hirsi
Ali.
The people above don’t have much in common. They disagree on matters
large and small. Ali is a militant atheist; Williamson is a
religious Christian. Peterson focuses on the metaphysical import of
myths; Harris focuses on verifiable science. Rubin is a gay Jew;
Riley is black. Mac Donald is a supporter of stronger policing;
Weinstein was a supporter of Occupy Wall Street.
But there is one thing that everyone on this list has in common: We’ve all been unpersoned by the Left. And that Left is creeping quietly into the mainstream.
All the more reason to skip back up to today's first item, and
download your copy of All Minus One.
The headline on Veronique de Rugy's NYT piece could indicate
a candidate for "Longest Op-Ed Ever":
How
Trump Misunderstands Trade.
President Trump recently tweeted, referring to the United States trade deficit with China, “When you’re already $500 billion down, you can’t lose!”
In 1776, Adam Smith observed that nothing “can be more absurd than
this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.” Sadly, almost 250
years later, the president — along with his economic adviser Peter
Navarro and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross — has elevated this
economic fallacy into a pretext for protectionism.
On this issue, Trump is doing his darndest to make us all poorer.
Sad!
The Chinese government wants to polish its terribly tarnished image
and one of the tactics it has been using is to influence the
education of American college students.
Since 2004, the Chinese have been sponsoring “Confucius Institutes” at colleges and universities around the world that are willing to host them. A Chinese government agency pays for most if not all of the cost of the programs that cover Chinese language, culture and history. Since many students want to learn about China, that seems like a good deal that saves the school money.
The catch: this gives the Chinese unacceptable leverage, dictating
the scope of allowable discussion about China's government and its
totalitarian policies.
"Little Marco's" idea: "make colleges choose between federal funding
and Chinese funding." Not bad.
This book was
positively
mentioned by Tyler Cowen. So I got it, thanks to the ILL staff at
the University Near Here, from Brandeis U.
And I am immediately saying: Professor Cowen, did we read the same
book?
Because I found it simplistic, meandering, and wrong-headed.
And I usually start out with a positive bias toward the books I take
the trouble to get from the library, because I want to believe that I
haven't wasted my time.
The author, Neil M. Maher, is a professor of history in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark.
The book purports to examine the odd coincidence during the 1960s and
early 1970s: we had the Apollo Project, a—literally—unprecedented technological
feat that (as
Ray
Bradbury
put it at the time) people would "look back upon a million years from
tonight". But we also had hippies, the dawn of modern feminism, the dawn
of modern environmentalism, civil rights struggles, Vietnam, Commies,…
I lived through that. I know. It was a weird time to be alive. So I kind
of assumed that Professor Maher would have some insights that
might make things a little less jumbled in my mind. But no.
It starts off with a promising anecdote: two Apollo 13 astronauts, Jim
Lovell and Jack Swigert, attending, post-mission, a Broadway performance of Hair.
How appropriate! Apollo 13's Lunar Module—the one that saved the
astronauts'
lives—had the callsign "Aquarius", and the most memorable song from
Hair was… yes, "Aquarius". But Lovell and Swigert walked out
after the first act, due to the production's disrespectful treatment of the American
flag.
Good conflict-of-cultures story, but then things get tedious. Maher tries to show the
interaction between NASA, Apollo, and all that other stuff: the
military, environmentalism, feminism, politics. But he never gets
beyond making tendentious conclusions and dubious interpretations of
conveniently-selected facts.
Part of the problem is that Maher seems weak on the technology, probably
due to lack of interest. Warning sign: on page 14 he says the
Saturn V "transported astronauts through space at 17,400 miles per
hour". Wince. That's near-earth-orbital velocity, Neil. The whole point
of Saturn V was to get Apollo into a
trans-lunar
injection
trajectory, requiring somewhere around 23,000 earth-relative mph.
Neither does Maher do a good job of portraying NASA's political history.
Give them a slight break: they were tasked with performing a mission
that was as much a cold-war gimmick with an arbitrary deadline as it was
a technological marvel. Once the post-Apollo been-there-done-that attitude set in,
it found itself in a desperate bureaucratic struggle for Maintained
Funding, which manifested itself in all sorts of strained efforts to
show relevance.
Not helping was the common fill-in-the-blank saying "if we can put a man on the moon, we
can surely ________". Where the blank was filled, as appropriate, with
whatever the speaker wanted taxpayer dollars spent on. Maher takes all
these claims with zero skepticism.
Another irritation was in the chapter on feminism. Much is made of the
first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, on Vostok 6 in 1963, and the fact that NASA's
crew of astronauts at the time was all-dude. Maher avoids noting how
much of a propaganda gimmick Tereshkova's flight was; the USSR didn't
bother to fly another woman until 1982. (Sally Ride was the third woman
in space in 1983.) The history of women in space is interesting, but
Maher only seems interested enough to indict NASA's (and America's) disgusting sexism.
24 The wealth of the wise is their crown,
but the folly of fools yields folly.
"If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is only a small step away
from "I'm rich, therefore I'm pretty smart." A logically invalid
step, but one that people make all the time.
Daniel J. Mitchell notes
the
WaPo opinion piece from five former [Democrat] members of
the Council of Economic Advisers, and calls it
A
Deceptive and Inaccurate Call for Higher Taxes. The quintet's
main point: "Don't blame entitlements" for our country's long-term,
entirely foreseeable, fiscal disaster.
Dan has the charts and links, so check that out. His bottom line is
that he's (perversely) happy that "Five top economists on the left
put their heads together and tried to figure out the most compelling
argument for higher taxes. Yet what they produced is shoddy and
deceptive. In other words, they didn’t make a strong argument
because they don’t have a strong argument."
Worried that their spending spree in the recent omnibus bill will suppress conservative turnout at the polls this November, Republicans are now considering a “rescission” package. The package of spending cuts—being designed by the White House—could be passed in Congress with simple majorities in both chambers.
That would be nice. And a refreshing change from the normal
GOP spinelessness. Chris has a number of suggestions about what
spending especially deserves rescission.
As Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg prepares
to testify before both houses of Congress this week, a little
more of the internet prepares to die.
We are in a social panic over social media, and the final outcome will almost certainly be some sort of government regulation or self-regulation-by-shotgun (think Comics Code Authority) that will ultimately serve only regulators and the dominant companies that help to write the new rules.
You know what's worse than Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg
running Facebook? The government running Facebook.
Medicaid was intended to be a safety net for the truly needy. But
over time, both federal and state policymakers have lost sight of
Medicaid’s core purpose and turned the program into a catch-all,
open-ended welfare program for non-disabled adults.
Obamacare made this problem even worse, giving states the option to
expand Medicaid to even more able-bodied adults. Nearly 13 million
have been added since that expansion went live in 2014. Today,
able-bodied adults in the program now outnumber individuals with
disabilities — the people Medicaid was largely designed to serve —
by a staggering 17.5 million.
Medicaid has clearly lost its focus, as I detail in a new report for the Foundation for Government Accountability. The most stunning finding: At least 21,904 individuals have died on Medicaid waiting lists in states since they expanded their programs.
As often happens, "compassionate" government programs wind up
killing people.
And—guess what, kids?—break out the party hats and noisemakers,
because it's "Equal Pay Day".
Mark
J. Perry has a different idea about what to celebrate:
The pathetic fallacy is a mental error in which people ascribe human feelings or thoughts to inanimate objects. This mostly leads to irrational behavior, such as resentment on behalf of robots that don't smart from mistreatment but instead grow smarter. It's the same shorthand of thought you indulge in when you say the robots are invading workplaces or stealing jobs. In fact, those are nonsensical concepts, at least for robots as they are currently constituted. Human beings are replacing some portions of many other human beings' jobs with labor-saving devices, as we have done for hundreds of years using tools such as tractors, blenders, and washing machines.
This is an article from the print version of the magazine, but it's
been annotated with the videos to which she could only allude on
paper.
So far, she's been doing a great job at editing one of my two
favorite magazines.
The "Enlightenment" has gotten a lot of good press lately, most
notably from Steven Pinker's fine book
Enlightenment
Now. David Brooks at the NYT has also been a
cheerleader.
At the WSJ, Yoram Hazony demurs strongly, revealing
The
Dark Side of the Enlightenment.
Boosters of the Enlightenment make an attractive case. Science,
medicine, free political institutions, the market economy—these
things have dramatically improved our lives. They are all, Mr.
Pinker writes, the result of “a process set in motion by the
Enlightenment in the late 18th century,” when philosophers “replaced
dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions
of truth-seeking.” Mr. Brooks concurs, assuring his readers that
“the Enlightenment project gave us the modern world.” So give thanks
for “thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant who argued that
people should stop deferring blindly to authority” and instead
“think things through from the ground up.”
As Mr. Pinker sums it up: “Progress is a gift of the ideals of the
Enlightenment, and will continue to the extent that we rededicate
ourselves to those ideals.”
Very little of this is true. Consider the claim that the U.S.
Constitution was a product of Enlightenment thought, derived by
throwing out the political traditions of the past and applying
unfettered human reason. Disproving this idea requires only reading
earlier writers on the English constitution. The widely circulated
15th-century treatise “In Praise of the Laws of England,” written by
the jurist John Fortescue, clearly explains due process and the
theory now called “checks and balances.” The English constitution,
Fortescue wrote, establishes personal liberty and economic
prosperity by shielding the individual and his property from the
government. The protections that appear in the U.S. Bill of Rights
were mostly set down in the 1600s by those drafting England’s
constitutional documents—men such as John Selden, Edward Hyde and
Matthew Hale.
I still strongly recommend Pinker's book, but (as I noted after
reading it) he can get "strident and simplistic" when he wanders too
far afield from his scientific roots.
Anyway: The slipper company sends me an e-mail every day, with a
promo code. I have attempted to unsubscribe, and I always get the
same huffy message: "You have been unsubscribed to our e-mails. It
may take several business days to process your request." Uh-huh.
Like someone has to find the hard drive where my e-mail address is
located, remove it from the rack and physically scratch the bits off
the drive with a sharp tool.
Click. Click. Click. Click. Cart. Buy. After you’ve bought
something, ads will follow you around the Internet for a week, each
offering the same thing. Imagine buying a toilet seat in a store,
then dealing with a guy who pops up at work, on the street, in your
garage, offering another toilet seat.
I have to delete my cookies so I’m not offered more toilet
seats,
you’d think. Another phrase that makes perfect sense these days.
You don't even have to buy anything. I made the mistake of checking
out the price on complete-season DVD sets of the great
misunderestimated David Janssen series Harry O. Spoiler: the
price is still exorbitant. But the Internet still remembers I looked, and
asks me to come back and look again, day after day.
But if anyone wants to buy it for me, it's today's Amazon link du
jour.
And we missed National Beer Day. It was April 7. But (eventually)
the Google LFOD alert pointed me to the UK [?] Yahoo! news article:
Interesting Facts For All Brew Lovers
New Hampshire consumes the most beer than any other state, according
to a report by 24/7
Wall Street. The 2017 report found that the Live Free or
Die state drinks 41.7 gallons of beer annually per capita. Montana and South Dakota followed closely behind with 39.1 gallons and 38.6 gallons of beer respectively.
My first thought, and perhaps yours as well: I am not doing my
fair share. Must try harder.
But my second thought was: probably it's due to out-of-staters
driving to NH to avoid onerous taxes.
But I can't back that up with obvious
evidence.
Our usual punching
bag, Massachusetts, has no sales tax on beer, and its excise
tax ($0.11 per gallon) is much lower than New Hampshire's
($0.30/gallon). Vermont has a slightly lower excise tax rate
($0.27/gallon) but also sticks you with a 6% sales tax. Maine has a
slightly higher excise tax ($0.35/gallon). and a 5.5% sales tax.
All in all, it appears we just like beer. A lot. And is it really that much?
41.7 gallons/year works out to 14.6 fluid ounces/day, just slightly
over a standard can or bottle.
Jesus was right about how ye shall know them
by their fruits, then we might have a good test case for
gleaning what the journalism establishment (such as a thing exists)
considers an important threat to a free press.
In one corner we have a must-run cookie-cutter anti-"fake news" promotional video ordered up by the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group to its most-in-the-nation 193 local-TV-news outlets, at a time when the company's controversial merger with Tribune Co. is being held up by anti-trust regulators at the Justice Department. In the other we have a Sex Trafficking Act passed overwhelmingly by Congress (388-25 in the House, 97-2 in the Senate) despite being vociferously opposed on free speech grounds by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and reliable civil libertarians such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), the latter of whom warned that "Civic organizations protecting their right to free speech could be [ruined] by their more powerful political opponents" and that subsequently there could be "an enormous chilling effect on speech in America."
Especially disturbing are the newspaper editorials demanding
government intervention against Sinclair. Do those editorialists
really imagine that a shredded First Amendment won't be used against
them at some point?
And, yes, all LFOD-state Senators and Congresscritters voted for the
"sex trafficking act".
When California reinstated bilingual education in a 2016 referendum, the text of the new law declared: “A large body of research has demonstrated the cognitive, economic, and long-term academic benefits of multilingualism and multiliteracy.” This argument that bilingual education is useful because it confers general mental benefits — such as improved “executive function” and “cognitive flexibility” — has proven irresistible for bilingual advocates. But it’s probably not true. As I detailed in an essay for The American Conservative last year, researchers have struggled to replicate the positive results from previous studies of bilingualism. Many are now skeptical that a “bilingual advantage” exists at all.
But "bilingual education" is a useful sub-scam in the much larger
scam that is the American education system, opening up another hole
in taxpayer wallets.
The First Amendment gives you the right to speak out — as well as
the right "to refrain from speaking at all," Chief Justice Warren
Burger wrote in 1977. That signaled a win for a New Hampshire couple
who covered up part of their home state's motto, "Live Free or
Die,"
on license plates.
The doctrine is up for grabs in three major Supreme Court cases this
term. It appears likely the justices will rule that an Illinois
state employee cannot be compelled to contribute
to his local union. They also seem inclined to say that
California cannot force anti-abortion
pregnancy centers to inform clients where they can get an
abortion.
The third case is a closer call: Must a deeply
religious Colorado baker use his creative skills to bake a cake
for a same-sex couple's wedding? Here the court seems split.
"The case isn't about same-sex marriage, ultimately. It isn't about
religion, ultimately," says Jeremy Tedesco, a lawyer with Alliance
Defending Freedom, which represents Jack Phillips. "It’s about this
broader right to free speech, the right to be free of compelled
speech.”
Unfortunately, the article also contains this bit:
[The government] can't restrict free speech — not even hate speech or flag-burning or protests of military funerals. But don't try shouting "Fire!" in a theater or threatening folks on Facebook.
We all should know that "true threats" aren't protected by the First
Amendment. But the fire-in-a-theater cliché is rooted in
a famous Oliver Wendell Holmes court opinion, and
Wolf should read
(for example, one among many)
Trevor Timm on that:
It's
Time to Stop Using the 'Fire in a Crowded Theater' Quote.
But those who quote Holmes might want to actually read the case where the phrase originated before using it as their main defense. If they did, they'd realize it was never binding law, and the underlying case, U.S. v. Schenck, is not only one of the most odious free speech decisions in the Court's history, but was overturned over 40 years ago.
Wolf is USA Today's "Supreme Court correspondent", and should
know better.
TV Overmind lists
Five
Things You Didn’t Know About Eliza Coupe. Make that six
things if you, like me, didn't have the slightest idea who Eliza
Coupe is. (Or what. Maybe a new car brand?)
Anyway: she's an actress. And here's why I read the article:
She also has several tattoos, one of which includes the official
state slogan of her birth state, New Hampshire. It reads, “Live Free
or Die.”
She is, as my diligent research discloses, from Plymouth.
Since I'd read some "new and uncut" versions of Heinlein novels
recently,
I thought I would put all the remaining Heinlein books on the
to-be-read
pile. Most of them I've read just once, umpty-ump years ago.
As for this one:
I found an Amazon pic of the same fifty-cent Signet edition I own. Yes,
that's a very nekkid, albeit artfully blurry, lady on the cover. You could get away with that in
those days.
Assignment in Eternity is a collection of four yarns (three
longish, one shortish) originally published in SF mags between 1941 and
1949, two under pseudonyms. I had dim memories of the first ("Gulf") and
the fourth ("Jerry was a Man"). Of the middle two ("Elsewhen" and "Lost Legacy") I had no recollection
whatsoever.
Bottom line: they don't hold up that well, although there are some
entertaining flights of fancy and prescient speculations about
technology. Example: one character mentions another's "pocket phone".
We have those now, Bob; they're just called "phones" though.
But one of the usual Heinlein tropes is here too: the wise and grumpy
old fart who stops everything as he pedantically lectures some wet-behind-the-years
young'un with some sophomoric-philosophical pseudo-scientific bullshit. Not to say
it's wrong (although it sometimes is), but it's a lot less
impressive to a guy in his sixties than it was to a lad in his teens.
"Gulf" starts out as an interplanetary secret agent yarn, but then
detours into revelations about a secret race of "supermen",
evolutionarily ahead of homo sapiens. They are opposed by an evil
cabal, led by "Mrs. Keithley", who just happen to have gotten their hands
on a doomsday device. Will the supermen be able to stop the Keithley
Kabal?
"Elsewhen" is more than a little loopy, positing a multiverse
(perhaps one of the earliest explications of that concept), which humans
can traverse simply by a sort of self-hypnosis. The adventures of
five college students and their professor, travelling between
here-and-now earth and barely-recognizable alt-universes is kind of
rollicking.
"Lost Legacy" is even more loopy; this time, the self-hypnosis
gag is used by a trio of young people to gain superhuman powers
(levitation, telepathy, accelerated healing, etc.) and
insights. But it turns out to be old news, as they are psychically
directed to Mt. Shasta, the redoubt of Ambrose Bierce (yes, that one)
and similar supermen who have already gained those powers. They decide
to bring their insights to the mass of humanity. Which would be cool,
except (yet again) there's an evil cabal determined to keep mankind
ignorant of their potential powers.
And finally, "Jerry was a Man" is a look into the future where genetic
tinkering is the norm, and can be used to design fripperies like tiny
elephants and unicorns. But a fantastically rich lady tycoon becomes
aware of a race of chimps that have been bred to near-human
intelligence, just enough to do all sorts of scut work. But they are
doomed to a lifetime of chattel slavery, and a quick painless
extermination when they become too decrepit to be profitable to their
owners. Oooh! What follows is a legal battle, funded by the tycoon, to decide whether this
arrangement can be maintained.
Bottom line: recommended only for people (like me) who are interested in
revisiting their reading youth.
Which brings me to my friend Kevin Williamson, who was fired from
his new job at The Atlantic almost before he
could figure out how to work the coffee machine. Ironically, he was
hired for the same reason he was fired. He has strong opinions and
he expresses them very well. Jeffrey Goldberg (no relation)
courageously hired Kevin because he wants his magazine to be a
public square for different points of view. Goldberg is also
fascinated with “homeless conservatives” in the era of Trump. Kevin
is a critic of the president — even more so than me. He is also
fluent in cultural idioms that few elite journalists have the
foggiest acquaintance with, by virtue of his humble origins and
peripatetic career. Goldberg rightly believed Kevin’s voice would
enrich and enliven the pages of The Atlantic (which, by the
way, I still think is an excellent magazine, for now).
The Woke Mob thought otherwise from the get-go, as they always do in
these circumstances. Indeed, before we talk about the specifics of
Kevin’s situation, it must be pointed out that whenever a
conservative or libertarian is hired outside the conservative
ghetto, the response is like that of Dutch Dominicans watching
Napoleon’s forces convert their church into a horse barn. The
excuses for why this or that writer is unacceptably extreme vary
with the writer. But the reaction is always the same, if not in
degree then in form.
I will have to take Jonah's assertion that the Atlantic is an
"excellent magazine" on faith. I'm
still
steamed
from their
2006
article about inequality with a
dishonest
graphic using one of the techniques
Darrell Huff described in his 1952 book How to Lie With
Statistics.
Two parts of the upcoming 2020 federal Census have gotten a lot of
people upset. First, it will ask people if they're U.S. citizens.
Second, it will not ask people if they're gay, bisexual, or
transgender.
In all likelihood, there's an overlap: People upset about one are
upset about the other, despite the contradiction. That's because
they care about the Census to the extent that the answers to the
questions can be used to control and influence government. Matt
Welch has
noted correctly that asking about citizenship is a deliberate
effort to undercount illegal immigrants in order to alter the
Congressional district map landscape in ways that will be more
friendly to Republicans. Democrats and progressives are definitely
not happy about that.
For the LGBT question, the exact opposite is happening: People who
want a head count of gays and transgender people believe the data
will then be valuable in influencing federal policies and spending
on projects that benefit LGBT people—or, more accurately, to benefit
certain LGBT organizations.
At least the citizenship question informs a relatively direct government
interest.
We'll take Kevin D. Williamson prose anywhere we can find it, and
that includes Commentary. He writes on the new
Roseanne show in
Class
Acts.
The politics are, as one would expect, pretty shallow. Metcalf’s Jackie shows up wearing a pussy hat and a “Nasty Woman” T-shirt, while Roseanne explains that she was attracted to Trump because “he talked about jobs,” as though that were something unusual in a presidential candidate. (One of the most maddening aspects of American political discourse is politicians’ insistence on talking about jobs as though they were ends rather than means. We don’t have farmers so that people living in rural areas can have incomes and something to do all day—we have farmers so that we can have food.) The show promises to touch on health care, aging, opioid abuse, and other highly marketable social issues. The Conner family is now multiracial and includes one gender-nonconforming member, and it soon will “have a different culture moving in next door,” as Barr puts it.
(paid link)
Williamson proceeds to meander unexpectedly into Presidential wristwatch styles,
which is—admittedly—interesting, because it's Williamson. My
seven-year-old Casio GW700A-1V G-Shock Solar Atomic Watch would
(apparently)
disqualify me for higher office.
Our Google LFOD alert rang for the admission from ex-candidate Mark
Hounsell. When it comes to Congress, Hounsell claims,
I
can’t get there from here.
The threat of a growing federal/central government pushed by the
liberal agenda of current leaders of the democratic [sic]
party is very real. Their blatant and unabashed attempts to buy New
Hampshire’s first Congressional District with out-of state money is
an obvious clear and present danger to our “Live Free or Die”
Granite State.
What is alarming is that despite the appeals of NH GOP Chairman Jeanie
Forrester to make New Hampshire Red Again, the factionalized Republican
Party in this state is hogged [sic] tied by right wing
extremists, passing as conservatives. As a result, many unaffiliated
independent moderate voters have no reason to feel needed or welcomed to
vote Republican this November for NH CD-1. There currently is no
candidate for Congress who emulates our successful Governor Sununu in
his genuine moderation from his honest conservative character. That is a
real problem for the GOP.
Hounsell (it appears) has a complex set of litmus tests to
distinguish between "conservatives", "right wing extremists", and
those exhibiting "genuine moderation". That might be interesting to
hear more about. Or not.
Portsmouth, New Hampshire hasn’t been widely thought to be a hotbed
of crypto activity. It just might be, and it probably has something
to do with the Free State Project (FSP). Yale doctoral student Jason
Sorens basically wrote about a secessionist movement of the most
personal sort. It wound up evolving into asking 20,000
freedom-loving people to build a political force in the state of New
Hampshire, the “Live Free or Die” state. “A large portion of the
people who moved to New Hampshire in search of freedom are bitcoin
users,” Derrick J. Freeman explained.
“That’s because they know about the Federal Reserve. Once you know
about that, and you know there’s an alternative, it’s pretty hard to
reconcile your personal responsibility for its perpetuation.”
I had some free time before attending
the
C. J. Box book signing in
downtown Portsmouth last night, so wandered by the "Shoppe". It was
closed, but it looks neat. The real estate in that part of town is
astronomical, so I guess they're doing OK.
And an LFOD editorial in the Concord Monitor reflects on the
over-representation of Granite Staters among the comic class:
The
state that keeps ’em laughing.
New Hampshire is a funny, marginally governable place. Consider
Australia. It takes up a whole continent and has nearly 20 times the
population of the Granite State, yet it has only 226 lawmakers. New
Hampshire, which is 317 times smaller than Australia, has 424
legislators plus five executive councilors whose job is to guard the
public purse.
States of old had forts and guard houses on their borders. New Hampshire has liquor stores, plus liquor mega-stores at its toll booths. If New Hampshire had a state tool it would be a corkscrew.
Ha. The editorial goes on to name-drop Adam Sandler, Seth Meyers, 
Sarah Silverman, Mike O’Malley, et al. But LFOD is where… ah,
there:
So really, is New Hampshire’s state motto Live Free or Die, or Live Free and Die Laughing?
Sigh. This is why Concord Monitor editorialists won't be
advancing to the Saturday Night Live writer pool anytime soon.
And, not that it matters, but a onetime co-worker claimed that Sarah
Silverman still owes him from a pot deal back in high school. Sarah, if
you're reading this, you know what the right thing to do is.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg confirmed in a statement Thursday that the magazine and internet outlet has discovered and successfully patched a leak in its echo chamber that had apparently been there for about two weeks.
“It was a dicey situation. We were exposed for a short while to a dissenting opinion on a social issue, which is unacceptable, and could have wreaked havoc on our homogeneous corporate culture,” Goldberg said in his statement. “We want to thank the frenzied and ruthless social media mob for bringing the abnormality to our attention—it has been successfully dealt with.”
“Homeostasis has been restored,” Goldberg added, his words echoing loudly and repeatedly off the inner walls of the chamber as the rest of the Atlantic staff cheered and hugged.
Once I lived the life of a millionaire, spendin' my money I didn't
care
I carried my friends out for a good time, buying bootleg liquor,
champagne and wine
When I begin to fall so low, I didn't have a friend and no place to
go
So if I ever get my hand on a dollar again, I'm gonna hold on to it
'til them eagles grin
Nobody knows you, when you down and out
In my pocket not one penny, and my friends I haven't any
Music fans of a Certain Age will remember this from the Derek and
the Dominos version on "Layla". But it's much older and (to my
slight surprise) written pre-Depression.
Williamson expressed the view that abortion is murder and should be
punished to the full extent of the law (although he also later
indicated that he has mixed feelings about capital punishment). I do
not share his view. But by declaring Williamson to be outside the Overton
window of acceptable political discourse because he believes
strongly that abortion is a serious, punishable crime, The
Atlantic is essentially declaring that it cannot stomach real,
mainstream conservatism as it actually exists in 21st century
America.
Williamson uses colorful and sometimes rash language. He didn't have to detail the grisly form of punishment he would inflict on women who decide to terminate their pregnancies. He chose to do so because he enjoys provoking a reaction. But The Atlantic knew that about him before it hired him.
A common pro-life slogan: "Abortion stops a beating heart." Also
stating the obvious. Williamson chose to deal with that obvious
point instead of ignoring it. The folks at the Atlantic can't
bear to be reminded of that fact.
The Atlantic has caved to the intolerant mob and fired Kevin
Williamson, and in so doing has contributed to a slanderous fiction
— that Kevin is so beyond the pale that he has no place at one of
the nation’s premiere mainstream publications. His millions of
words, his countless interviews, and his personal character were
reduced to nothing — inconsequential in the face of deleted tweets
and a five-minute podcast dialogue.
So, what are The Atlantic’s readers now missing? I ask you to read Kevin’s February 18, 2016, NR cover story about the opioid crisis. It’s not a chart-filled, graphics-heavy analysis. It’s a story about people. It’s a story told the way only Kevin can. It takes a reader who may not know or may never meet a heroin addict, and it puts you in their world. By the end, your heart breaks.
Williamson's too good a writer not to land on his feet somewhere or
other, so I don't worry about him much.
I was an Atlantic subscriber on and off over the last few
decades. I briefly considered resubscribing when I heard they'd
hired Williamson. But didn't. Dodged a bullet there. I don't worry
about them, either; I simply hope the magazine will spiral into
navel-gazing irrelevance and financial ruin.
Barr has never met a conspiracy theory she didn’t love. She’s a 9-11
truther who believes that “Bush did it,” and she has called
the Boston Marathon bombing one of many “false flag terror attacks”
perpetrated by the Obama administration to “remove” the Second
Amendment. For good measure, she also believes that the old man Bush
killed JFK.
You can find YouTube videos of her rambling about “MK ULTRA Mind Control” on RT, and she seems particularly fond of the notion that the American ruling class is running some manner of pedophile sex cult. Her views on Jews and Israel fluctuate wildly — in the past, she has called Israel a “Nazi state” and alleged that Zionism was created by the Third Reich (or something — I challenge you to succinctly summarize the opinions expressed here), though more recently she’s taken to accusing Hillary Clinton of plotting Israel’s destruction and labeling aide Huma Abedin a “Nazi whore.”
I confess I watched the new Roseanne. For about fifteen
seconds.
Here's a bit of trivia: New Hampshire’s tallest building was erected
by a general contractor unlicensed by the state of New Hampshire.
Before you decide to avoid forever Manchester’s 20-story City Hall
Plaza, you should know no building in the state, including your
house, was built by a state-licensed general contractor — because
New Hampshire doesn’t license general contractors.
The state doesn’t license carpenters, auto mechanics, welders or asphalt
layers either. Yet your home does not fall apart, commercial buildings
don’t tumble down, roads don’t dissolve in the rain.
It turns out that for many occupations that pose significant potential risks to others, the marketplace provides pretty powerful incentives for providers not to kill their customers.
Not for the first time, I recommend
The
Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles; the
book's chapter on occupational licensing is stellar and radical. As
I noted after reading: they don't just go after the "easy" targets,
like cosmetologists, but also the sacred cows: doctors, dentists,
lawyers.
This column has, on
occasion, been disparaging toward American journalism, but only
because it is now populated by the biggest bunch of knuckleheads
ever to be assembled outside of Knucklehead City on the planet
Knucklehead. Remember the sitcom news anchor Ted Baxter with the big voice and the slick
haircut and minuscule IQ? Well, if you added the emotional stability
of a three-year-old having a temper tantrum, you would have your
typical American journalist and commentator, not just on cable but
at the networks and newspapers too. I could lasso a gorilla, give
him a lobotomy, and teach him to do the job better than these clowns
in fifteen minutes/
Don't hold back, Andrew. Tell us how you really feel.
The president has been on a tear against the nation’s leading online retailer lately, suggesting in a series of tweets and comments that Amazon doesn’t pay sales taxes and takes advantage of special low prices from the United States Postal Service.
These allegations are false. But more to the point, it is wrong for the
president to target a specific company in this fashion — particularly
since Trump has openly tied his anti-Amazon crusade to his hatred of the
Washington Post, a newspaper owned by Amazon head Jeff Bezos.
Not that it matters, but: I would wager, dear reader, that I've been an Amazon customer for
longer than you; my first order was November 18, 1995, about a month
after it
announced itself
to the public as a retailer. I'm a fan. Trump's a dope.
Because where else would I get a "Set of 3 Flying Flingshot Howler
Monkeys Plush Toys with Sound"? I mean, really, where? I have no
idea.
White House economist Peter Navarro, whose boss claimed credit when
the stock market was rising, now thinks it should be ignored. After
Monday's plunge, he said, "The market is reacting in a way which
does not comport with the ... unbelievable strength in President
Trump's economy." Rest easy, Navarro advised. "The economy is as
strong as an ox."
He should hope so, because its burdens are growing. Donald Trump's trade
salvos against China moved Beijing to slap new tariffs on U.S. products.
He has threatened to end NAFTA, which would wreck the supply chains of
U.S. manufacturers and deprive farmers of vital markets. He's itching
for a full-scale trade war, and he's likely to get it.
The tycoon who raised high hopes in the corporate sector has revealed a powerful anti-business streak. Get on his bad side and you may kiss your profits goodbye. He's a perpetual danger to every company in America.
As we know, it's a mixed bag with the Trump Administration. Because…
The federal government’s auto fuel economy standards have for
decades posed a simple problem: They kill people. Worse, the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has covered this up.
The Environmental Protection Agency, which since 2009 has helped
manage the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, known as CAFE,
also played a role in burying their deleterious effects. But change
finally is coming.
On Monday EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced he is
re-examining the stringent standards set by the Obama administration
in 2012. This might finally bring some honesty to the issue of
CAFE’s lethal effects and push the safety issue to the forefront of
the debate over government efficiency mandates. Or it might not.
Out on a limb, there, Sam.
Sam is with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organization
that (among many other things) documents how government regulation
has given us
lousy
dishwashers and
bad washing
machines.
New Hampshire Attorney General Gordon MacDonald should do what his Republican counterpart in Arkansas, Leslie Rutledge, and his Democrat counterparts, Eric Schneiderman in New York and Xavier Becerra in California seemingly won’t. He should investigate the required state public filings of the charity started Oct. 23, 1997, and originally known as The William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation.
I'm not sure if NH law applies to the Clinton Foundation, which
(apparently) has its legal headquarters in Arkansas.
The National Institutes of Health spent $30,000 on a conference
dedicated to researching a "novel" practice: teaching people how to
cook.
The government lent its support to the "inaugural 2018 Research Day on Teaching Kitchens and Related Self Care Practices" held by the Culinary Institute of America and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health this February.
The conference was
back in February, held
in scenic Napa Valley, CA. Not previously known as an area where
people did not know how to cook. But I would imagine a lot of
pretentious wine was consumed.
And our Tweet du Jour from
Mark
J. Perry with one of his justly famed Venn diagrams:
[Kevin's] emphasis on electoral politics is rhetorically powerful
but ultimately misplaced. Williamson, a doctrinaire #NeverTrumper,
ignores any possible positives coming out of the current moment,
such as the deregulatory regime that is taking place at, among other
agencies, the FCC. Trump is blustering about the media and surely
has no scruples standing in the way of trying to use the FCC to
stifle dissent, just as Nixon and LBJ did in the not-distant past.
Good luck trying, though, because of both technological change and
Ajit Pai, the head of that particular agency, whose commitment to
free speech seems pretty damn strong. At places such as the FDA, the
EPA, and the Department of Education, a similar if partial
dismantling of the administrative state is under way. Despite his
obscene increases in Pentagon budgets, Trump has been less bellicose
in foreign policy than his two immediate predecessors; indeed, he's
being
attacked these days for planning to pull out of Syria, a country
with whom we're not technically at war (but never mind). He has also
managed to oversee the reduction and elimination of various tax
expenditures (mortgage-interest and state-and-local tax deductions)
and a thoroughgoing reform of the corporate tax system. During the
2016 campaign, Trump was clearly better on the drug war than Hillary
Clinton, believing that pot laws should be dealt with at the state
level. Despite his attorney general's recent assertions that he'd be
going after legalized marijuana, there's
no sign that's going to happen. I don't presume that Trump is
following any set of principles other than self-aggrandizement, but
as Wired's Louis Rossetto has
argued, he is downsizing the stature and ultimately the power of
presidency and the government more generally. Both Williamson and I
respect the hell out of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who
told me recently, "I will say that there are some things
President Trump has done that I like and there are some things I
don't like. Obviously, I like those tax cuts. I think they're good
for the economy and good for business. On the other hand, now we're
doing tariffs on steel and aluminum."
It's a mixed bag. It's always a mixed bag. At a certain point, you
get used to defeat, and just have to be content with being right
about everything, all the time.
There are hysterics about Scott Pruitt's EPA doing violence to the
Corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards. The (perhaps
paywalled) WSJ is OK with it, though, because CAFE is
The
Fuel Economy Fraud.
In 2012 the Obama EPA turned up the Cafe dial and mandated a
fleetwide average of 54.5 miles a gallon by 2025 with a midpoint
review in 2017. After President Trump won the election, Obama EPA
chief Gina McCarthy blazed through the review and upheld the 2012
targets no matter the economic and technological obstacles.
Passenger cars were about half of U.S. vehicle sales in 2012 when gas averaged $3.60 a gallon. But last year they made up only about a third of the fleet mix, and their share has been declining amid lower gas prices. This will make it nearly impossible to hit future targets even with cleaner technologies. By the Obama EPA’s own projections, fewer than 1% of gas-burning vehicles would meet its 2022 target.
What would be nice, instead of top-down arbitrary diktat: treating consumers as adults, able to make their
own calculations about the trade-off between fuel economy and other
features.
Ironically, the once-secretive CFPB has been more transparent since
Mulvaney throttled its External Affairs Division, the propaganda
machine Warren created in 2010 while leading the agency’s yearlong
start-up process as a presidential adviser. The division’s copious
press releases have been replaced by more-informative leaks from the
bureau’s overwhelmingly
Democratic employees. Contrary to the stale narrative that
liberals craft from the leaks, the acting director does not hate
consumer protection; he just hates the CFPB’s structure, which he
once described as
“a joke . . . in a sad, sick way.” Warren’s obstinacy has
only allowed him to validate the now-famous comment and delight in
the bully’s comeuppance.
See two items above: this may not be a "libertarian moment", but
watching an intrusive, aloof government bureaucracy get strangled
from within is kind of fun.
Economist Steven Horwitz writes in USA Today about
President Trump’s proposal to reduce legal opioid prescriptions by
one third. Such a drastic reduction would inevitably harm people
like Horwitz, who relates his experience with excruciating back pain
and how opioids were essential to relieving his agony and helping
his body heal …
Arguably, doctors and dentists shouldn't prescribe 30 days
opioids for pain expected to last less than a week; that's
apparently a thing. But arbitrary restrictions and targets—again, the top-down
diktat—will
cause more harm than good.
Sarah K. Hoyt hosts Frank J. Fleming at her blog, and Frank provides
a how-to for aspiring writers:
Woke-ify Your Fiction
A good rule for writing science fiction and fantasy these days: If
it’s not woke, it’s putting people to sleep. The key now is being
socially conscious. Most people are regular conscious — reactive to
basic stimuli like sight, sound, small rocks being thrown at them —
but the more pertinent thing to be is socially conscious — reactive
to microaggressions and the racism and bigotry that undercut all
human activity. And if you want people to buy your fiction these
days, it needs to reflect that social consciousness — as tedious as
that all sounds.
I know some are resistant to this idea. You’ve probably heard this quote: “Why do I have to worry about all this political stuff? Can’t I just write fun stories everyone will enjoy?” You know who said that? That’s right: Adolf Hitler.
I'm on the fence about buying Frank's new book. Didn't much care for
the last one.
In
Proverbs
14:17, the Proverbialist breaks away from the good person/bad
person compare-and-contrast format, and just describes the
shortcomings and perceptions of those of flawed character:
17 A quick-tempered person does foolish things,
and the one who devises evil schemes is hated.
<voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">Good
news, everyone</voice>: Kevin D. Williamson's
first article at the Atlantic website is available.
The GOP’s political situation is absurd: Having rallied to the
banner of an erratic and authoritarian game-show host, evangelical
leaders such as Jerry Falwell Jr. are reduced to comparing Donald
Trump to King David as they try to explain away his entanglement
with pornographic performer Stormy Daniels. Those who celebrated
Trump the businessman clutch their heads as his preposterous
economic policies produce terror in the stock markets and chaos for
the blue-collar workers in construction firms and manufacturers
scrambling to stay ahead of the coming tariffs on steel and
aluminum. The Chinese retaliation is sure to fall hardest on the
heartland farmers who were among Trump’s most dedicated
supporters.
On the libertarian side of the Republican coalition, the situation is even more depressing: Republicans such as former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who once offered important support for criminal-justice reform, are lined up behind the atavistic drug-war policies of the president and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose big idea on opiate abuse is more death sentences for drug traffickers. Deficits are moving in the wrong direction. And, in spite of the best hopes of the “America First” gang, Trump’s foreign policy has not moved in the direction of Rand Paul’s mild non-interventionism or the more uncompromising non-interventionism of his father, Ron Paul. Instead, the current GOP foreign-policy position combines the self-assured assertiveness of the George W. Bush administration (and many familiar faces and mustaches from that administration) with the indiscipline and amateurism characteristic of Trump.
Kevin also observes that if Democrats were smart, they'd make some
policy moves to appeal to libertarian-leaners. But they are not
smart.
One of the common talking points that liberals throw around in the gun debate is that Republicans have banned even studying gun violence. So you get headlines such as “Lift the Federal Ban on Gun Violence Research” (the New Republic), or “Why Gun Violence Research Has Been Shut Down for 20 Years” (the Washington Post’s Wonkblog), or “GOP Chairman: Congress Should Rethink CDC Ban on Gun Violence Research” (The Hill), or “What’s Missing from the Gun Debate. It’s Simple: Science” (an op-ed in Politico).The reality is different, and it illustrates two contending views of how America should be governed.
Dan's article is long, reality-based, and describes why "gun
violence" shouldn't be studied in the public health domain.
Many giant tech companies that were among the biggest
supporters of so-called net neutrality have increasingly turned
out to be enthusiastic suppressors of content when left to their own
devices. But don't look for help to government agencies for help—not
unless you want to empower authorities in a long and well-documented
effort to muzzle officially disapproved speech. Instead, people who
want to speak freely should actively seek out alternatives that let
them do just that.
This is why the cliché "the cure is worse than the disease" is…
yeah, such a cliché
Another book ticked off in my attempt to catch up to the output of the
funny, filthy, Christopher Moore.
It's the Shakespearean tragedy of King Lear, as told by one of the
plays' minor characters, the Fool, named Pocket. Pocket is a wise fool
who is in Lear's good graces, and can get away with R-rated insults to
the nobles that frequent the King's castle. He can also get away with
X-rated hijinks with the ladies, too.
Along the way there's a lot of wordplay, violence, anachronism, and theft from other
plays: dialog mostly, and the Macbeth witches show up to play an
important part in the plot. At one point, Pocket tells a sad lady of how
St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland; in return, he's told the
"most wondrous miracle of how St. Cinnamon drove the Mazdas out of
Swinden."
But since this is a Shakespearean tragedy, we already know pretty much
how things are going to end: with nearly everyone dead. (Moore
doesn't feel constrained by the Bard's story; there's at least one
significant difference.)
And amidst the humor, bloodshed, and smut, there's (surprisingly) a very serious
core, having to do with Pocket's origin story. No spoilers here however.
The recent bipartisan budget agreement, which indicates that
ten-digit deficits are acceptable to both parties even when the
economy is robust, indicates government’s future. So does
government’s pregnancy, which was announced nine months ago by this
tweet from Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.): “In America, no family
should be forced to put off having children due to economic
insecurity.”
The phrase “due to economic insecurity” is a way to avoid saying “until they can afford them.” Evidently it is now retrograde to expect family planning to involve families making plans that fit their resources. Which brings us to the approaching birth of a new entitlement: paid family leave after the birth or adoption of a child. This arrival will coincide with gargantuan deficits produced primarily by existing entitlements.
As always, Democrats are relying on Republican fecklessness,
spinelessness, and
gullibility. Usually a safe bet.
You had the right to remain silent. Now every word you’ve ever
uttered, and every one you ever will, can and will be held against
you.
I’m sorry to have to write you, for two reasons. Sorry, first, that you have to endure having your character assailed and assassinated by people who rarely if ever read you and likely never met you. Sorry also that your hiring as a writer for The Atlantic has set off another censorious furor in media circles when surely there are more important subjects on this earth.
This is in counterpoint to a
Michelle
Goldberg column that argued, no, KDW, should not be
permitted to write for the Atlantic. Outside the "parameters
of acceptable argument", dont'cha know?
I think I put this book on my to-get pile via recommendation from
Arnold Kling's
blog.
Thanks to the University Near Here's diligent ILL workers, who
snagged me a copy from—egads—Ball State University, out in Muncie,
Indiana.
It's a short book (156 pages), but it's full of insight, wit, and
wisdom. The author, Alan Jacobs, is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University.
But don't hold that against him.
It starts by noting that a lot of books about thinking have a trait in
common: "they're really depressing to read." (True, but I would
add: if you're in a certain frame of mind, they can be pretty funny
too.) But Jacobs' point is that they concentrate on all the many, many,
many ways our thoughts can lead us astray, by falling into one or more
of they myriad traps: all sorts of biases, fallacies, illusions, and
innumeracies. Jacobs observes: "What a chronicle of ineptitude, arrogance,
sheer dumbassery."
Jacobs doesn't shy away describing such pitfalls, but he has a number of
good ideas about how to avoid them. We can, and should, do better, and
here's how.
It would be weird if some of Jacobs' examples didn't come from the world
of politics. He handles them artfully and (to my mind, even though I am
a sensitive snowflake about such things) inoffensively. I came away with
no particular idea about what Jacobs' political positions are. As it
should be, I suppose.
I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of the authors Jacobs quotes and
draws upon are some of the ones I've learned from too: Daniel Kahneman,
Jonathan Haidt, David Foster Wallace, … But also some I probably should go
back and study: C. S. Lewis, Eric Hoffer, …
Spoiler alert: the book's Afterword contains the "Thinking
Person's Checklist", and some brave soul has Twitterized it:
In short: highly recommended to anyone honestly concerned with the
quality of their thinking. I should probably buy the damn thing and
re-read it every couple months.
I was going to say something clever about the Easter/April Fools coincidence,
but then I saw this t-shirt for sale at Amazon… which eloquently says it
all.
Probably too late to buy for this year, but you can save it
for 2029.
Joke's on you, Satan.
Proverbs 14:15
is another two-parter where the parts don't quite mesh:
15 The simple believe anything,
but the prudent give thought to their steps.
The first part isn't bad. Might be as close as the Bible comes to
the observation Chesterton
(never quite)
made: "A man who won’t believe in God will believe in anything."
As for the second part: isn't that, more or less, the
definition of "prudent"? I'm looking for a proverb, not a
dictionary entry! Proverbialist, you should have quit while you were
ahead.
I understand that Rogers has a D after her name and all, but isn’t
this still the state with the motto, Live Free or
Die? (It’s on all of their license plates.) It was only last year when they went full Constitutional Carry. You don’t need a license or special permit to carry handguns or long guns, either concealed or openly. They have the castle doctrine. They honor true reciprocity.
Yes, I know, Jazz. But it's also the state where
Bernie
whacked Hillary 60.4%-38.0% on the Democrat side in the 2016
Primary. NH Democrats are pretty much as goofystatist
"progressive" as Democrats in every other
state.
Professor Ahl teaches at
Plymouth
State and lives in Holderness. The interview concerns her new
book, Beating the Bounds, which refers to the
statute
requiring that the "lines between the towns in this state shall be
perambulated, and the marks and bounds renewed, once in every 7
years forever, by the selectmen of the towns, or by such persons as
they shall in writing appoint for that purpose."
Then, of course, there are also things like town meetings, and the
transfer station, and the Live Free or Die spirit that our touched
on in some of these poems. So it’s New Hampshire, but it is
particularly rural New Hampshire, and I think because of its age,
because of its oldness, its sense of American history and personal
family history, the generations at Old Home Day, really made an
impression on me.
4. Citizen by Claudia Rankine. "This genre-bending, heart-breaking, rage-stoking book is now required American reading, as far as I'm concerned. The retelling of such a range and accumulation of racist incidents -- from daily microaggressions to outright murder -- seems so burdensome to the book's narrator, yet the telling feels so necessary. The use of visual imagery is also highly compelling."
My guess: her classes might be tendentious.
Also: I think they should do a Saturday Night Live sketch
where she is played by Aidy Bryant. I'd watch that.
And our third LFOD alert was actually a false alarm, but
(nevertheless) worth a read. It's from the Irish Times, a
writer named Patrick Freyne, and a reminder that reality TV isn't
that different between Ireland and the US. The subject is
the series "Room to Improve", and the show's précis is: Irish folk submit
their homes to architect Dermot Bannon for renovation.
The penultimate episode (last Sunday, RTÉ One) is a classic. Dermot is faced with his worst enemy, farm folk who have no truck with his metropolitan notions. Bigger windows? An open-plan kitchen-cum-diningroom? Natural light? Would you go back to Dublin with yourself, we’re grand here in the dark. Over the course of the show, china-collecting teacher Katie and taciturn farmer Pádraig slowly drive Dermot to the brink of madness.
Ah, but what about LFOD? Ah, there 'tis, in the spoiler-filled
summary:
Anyway, it’s all building towards a twist ending in which it’s
revealed that Dermot Bannon had been a ghost the whole time, like
Nicole Kidman in The Others or Bruce Willis in Live
Free or Die Hard. But then, ultimately, everyone admits that the house does look pretty good, and Dermot tries to convince Katie that maybe he had something to do with this and tries to convince himself that he does, in fact, exist. “I’ll give him 10 out of 10, but don’t tell him,” Katie says to the camera, clearly happy that she has destroyed a man.
Disclaimers:
Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the
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