URLs du Jour

2018-07-18

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  • Proverbs 11:31 looks as if it should have a question mark at the end instead of an exclamation point. (Some translations go with the question mark.)

    31 If the righteous receive their due on earth,
        how much more the ungodly and the sinner!

    I question the premise. To put it mildly.

    As is not uncommon, "The Message" translation of 11:31 seems to be a botch:

    If good people barely make it, what’s in store for the bad!

    Well, just look around you, Proverbialist.

    But this made me look up "How many exclamation points are in the NIV Bible?".

    Spoiler alert: 313. As opposed to a hefty 1492 in the KJV. I guess the KJV translators were an excitable bunch.


  • J.D. Tuccille notes, for the rest of us, how Proverbs 11:31 has been overridden in Arizona, where Laws Are for the Little People. ("You mean the leprechauns?" "No.")

    For aww-shucks acknowledgment of abuse of power, it's hard to beat Arizona-style honesty. When informed by a sheriff's deputy that doing 97 miles per hour in a 55 zone was a tad excessive, state Rep. Paul Mosley (R-District 5) answered, "Well, I was doing 120 earlier...This goes 140. That's what I like about it."

    Under fire from the public and the press, Rep. Mosley apologized both for speeding and for his "jokes about frequently driving over 100 miles per hour." But he drove away from that incident free as a bird, and likely faces no consequences more perilous than what the voters can muster up at the ballot box. As he explained to the deputy, he enjoys "legislative immunity."

    Arizona, it turns out, has a pretty broad legislative immunity written into its constitution.

    For those of us wondering "what about the Live Free or Die state?", the NH Constitution Part 2, Article 21:

    No member of the House of Representatives, or Senate shall be arrested, or held to bail, on mesne process, during his going to, returning from, or attendance upon, the Court.

    That's from 1784. Interestingly, I can't find any such protection in place for NH Senators. In any case, I'd like to see a rep trying to do 120 on NH Route 4 to Concord.


  • Jibran Khan notes victims of Trumpian protectionism: Lobstermen Are Caught in the Net.

    Arguments over tariffs invariably cast the protagonists as large, impersonal units: the U.S., China, the EU, corporations such as Toyota and Harley-Davidson. We are asked to take a side between actors too big to comprehend, perhaps in the hope that we will slip into a team mentality and assume that any costs incurred are simply coming out of the pockets of the rich or abstract, with little real effect on the rest of us. This is a grave mistake. Tariffs, both those enacted by the U.S. and those they provoke in retaliation, impose limitations on the behavior and livelihood of individuals. This has been made vividly clear recently by the plight of Maine’s fishermen, who are caught right in the middle of the White House’s trade war.

    China is one of the largest markets for Maine shellfish, but because the Chinese have reacted to the U.S. tariffs by imposing some of their own, that is beginning to change. With tariffs now set at 40 percent for live lobster and 35 percent for processed lobster, Maine’s seafood producers are taking a hit. Rather than pay a considerably higher amount in taxes by importing from Maine, Chinese businesses are shifting to Canadian suppliers, whose lobster exports have not been subject to the new tariffs. Canadian waters are home to the same species of lobster, so the trade war makes their product a direct, cheaper substitute.

    The only bit of good news: this should make lobster cheaper for the rest of us, right? Sucks if you're a lobsterman, though.


  • Ma Belle Michelle Malkin takes on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic Party congressional twit: Boston University's Fake-O-Nomics Darling.

    The upstart New York congressional candidate has been hailed by pundits, newspapers and pols as "sharp," "smart" and "extraordinary." BU's Associate Provost and Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore gushed that Ocasio-Cortez is "brilliant -- she is boldly curious and always present. She makes me think and could always see multiple sides of any issue. ... I can't wait to see what happens when her time truly comes."

    But when the time came to put her BU economics education to work, Ocasio-Cortez flunked. On PBS last week, she asserted that "unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs." Moreover, the erudite B.A. holder in economics posited, "unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their kids."

    No, as Michelle points out, that's not how unemployment statistics work. And the fraction of people with multiple jobs is "less than 5 percent and has been declining for nearly 30 years."

    Maybe Alexandria could get some tuition money back from BU?


  • And our Tweet du Jour from the reliable Iowahawk:

    I believe the Hawk might be referring to…


Last Modified 2024-01-25 9:20 AM EDT