Dec
28
2018

URLs du Jour

2018-12-28

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  • At Reason, Ronald Bailey notes some recent bad news: New Useless and Costly USDA Bioengineered Food Disclosure Regulations Issued.

    The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has just issued its new National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard (NBFDS). "The NBFDS is not expected to have any benefits to human health or the environment," admits the agency. "Nothing in the disclosure requirements set out in this final rule conveys information about the health, safety, or environmental attributes of BE [bioengineered] food as compared to non-BE counterparts," adds the USDA.

    But wait, there's more. A study commissioned by the agency reported that "USDA estimates that the costs of the proposed NBFDS would range from $598 million to $3.5 billion for the first year, with ongoing annual costs of between $114 million and $225 million. The annualized costs in perpetuity would be $132 million to $330 million at a three percent discount rate and $156 million to $471 million at a seven percent discount rate."

    Brought to you by people who (I'm pretty sure) will proclaim that they "bleeping love science": a regulation that has no basis whatsoever in science.

  • Ah, as I type, there are only 56 days until the Red Sox play their first spring training game (against the Northeastern Huskies, but that's OK). But conservatives, and other people who don't like Commies, have a bone to pick with Major League Baseball, as described by Elliott Abrams at NR: MLB’s Foul Cuba Deal: Trump Should Veto This Payoff to a Communist Regime.

    Major League Baseball has made a foul new deal with the Cuban regime, and the Trump administration can and should block it. The deal rewards and perpetuates Cuba’s Communist-style system in which players are the property of the state, not free individuals who can sell their talents on the open market.

    Click through for the ugly details. But it's just another reminder that a lot of American institutions have internal Progressive rot.

    But Elliott also notes that MLB folks aren't at all Commie sympathizers when it comes to their own pocketbooks. Witness the "Save America's Pastime Act". Which purports to "Save America's Pastime" by "exempt[ing] from minimum wage and maximum hours requirements any employee who has contracted to pay baseball at the minor league level."

    I'm not a fan of minimum wage laws, but selectively exempting some employees at the behest of their employers is … unseemly.

  • A funny piece from Thomas Lifson in American Thinker with a somewhat overwrought headline: With identical tweets, Schumer and Pelosi reveal themselves as mouthpieces for the same propaganda puppet master.

    I have long wondered about who writes the talking points that keep Democrats reading from the same script. That person – or more likely, persons – evidently issues instructions that the office holder branch and the journalist branch of the Democratic Party mimic in their public statements. But in order to appear slightly authentic, they are supposed to speak extemporaneously and make it appear that they all came up with the phrases-of-the-day spontaneously. This works for interviews with print and television journalists, but the rise of Twitter has introduced new danger of exposure. Now we have proof that the current ostensible leaders of the Democrats’ party are often just actors reading from scripts supplied to them by people hidden from public scrutiny. Christmas Eve saw the presumptive new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi issue a tweet that was identical, word-for-word, to one issued 23 minutes earlier by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

    You can click through for the tweets, but (trust me) they are exactly what you would expect. You would think the MSM might be slightly interested in finding out exactly who is writing the Schumer/Pelosi tweets.

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    At Quillette, Michael O'Keefe writes on Refighting the Usage Wars.

    [Sorry, can't resist: <voice imitation="yoda">Begun, the usage wars have!</voice>]

    Anyway: Michael notes the declining ability of young people to write coherent, grammatically correct prose.

    It sounds hyperbolic, but according to a 2001 essay by David Foster Wallace entitled “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” it’s been undeniable since the early 1980s: “In neither K-12 nor college English are systematic [Standard Written English] grammar and usage much taught anymore.” Again, this doesn’t sound plausible. How could teachers instruct students to write well without giving them any rules or basic conventions? No reasonable answer exists, but thanks to Wallace’s observations, I can assure you that our current condition was inevitable.

    It all starts with the “Usage Wars,” a somewhat arcane but fiercely political battle over the English language that’s been raging for decades. “The average citizen” would actually know something about this conflict, Wallace wrote, “if [he or she] read the different little introductory essays in modern dictionaries.” No one actually does, of course, because they’re excruciating. A slightly less obvious reason, however, is that two tribes of nerdy lexicographers (i.e., people who decide what goes in the dictionary) are the target audience.

    You might think "there's no excuse for this", but (indeed) there are plenty of people out there who are willing to make excuses for this.

    Michael's essay draws heavily from the linked Harper's article from David Foster Wallace, which you can read in its original glory online. Or (recommended) you can buy Consider the Lobster, a collection of DFW's essays that includes it.

    I miss DFW.

  • And, just for fun, a site recommended by Katherine Mangu-Ward in a recent Reason podcast and in this tweet:

    (Since she saved that screenshot, the extreme poverty count has gone under 593 million. By the time you click…)


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT