URLs du Jour

2022-06-11

  • That's not funny. A TitaniaTweet provides our Eye Candy du Jour.

    From the linked article:

    At a recent “comedy” show in Los Angeles, a brave audience member peacefully attacked comedian Dave Chappelle in self-defence against his violent jokes. Some reports have suggested that the assailant wasn’t a social justice activist at all, but a victim of mental illness. But the two are by no means mutually exclusive. Many of my best friends are clinically insane.

    Chappelle is well known for literally erasing the trans community through his hate jokes. This is why it is so important that he is censored. Besides, the fact that Chappelle — a black man — was assaulted on stage is irrefutable proof that his comedy incites violence against minority groups.

    You go, girl.


  • Save us, Zeno's Paradox! You're our only hope! Megan McArdle notes the oncoming disaster: As our entitlements crisis gets closer, a solution moved farther away.

    The annual Social Security trustees report is once again upon us, and this year it actually bears some good news: The projections give us an extra year before the trust fund is exhausted in 2035.

    At least, this sounded like good news when I first heard it. Then I remembered that I have been writing about these trustees reports for more than 15 years. When I started, all these projections sounded comfortably far off — we had decades to fix the problem! Now we have 13 years. And in all that time, we have done nothing at all, except watch the date of insolvency advance.

    In 2008, it was 2040, and the people likely to be worst affected — those who would be eligible to retire just as the trust fund was exhausted — were 35. Now, the people facing the most disruption are 54, much closer to retirement than to their college graduation.

    Something about which you youngsters might want to query your "representatives" running for reelection. Accept no malarkey!


  • As we drive off the fiscal cliff, we can't even get a free lunch on the way? Nope. Because, according to Brian Riedl, The Era of Free-Lunch Economics Is Over.

    In American foreign policy, the period from 1990 through the summer of 2001 has been called the “holiday from history.” Between the collapse of the Soviet empire and the 9/11 attacks, the United States drastically reduced defense spending and celebrated what was optimistically assumed to be a permanent end to significant security threats. September 11, 2001, shattered that peace and returned America to its familiar posture of vigilance against security threats.

    We may soon look back on the 2009–2021 period as the era of “free-lunch economics,” when hubristic politicians and economists declared that traditional fiscal and monetary trade-offs no longer existed in any meaningful form. Advocates portrayed a new economy liberated from restraints, one in which money-supply expansions and congressional deficit spending could finance benefits that would make even Western Europeans envious, with no economic drawbacks. As in foreign policy, this utopian vision proved to be an illusion. Reality has intruded.

    I have a few decades worth of gloom-and-doom jeremiads on my bookshelves, all (pretty much) looking pretty silly now. I'd like to think we're experiencing more of the same, but… you know, these guys only have to be right once.


  • When dopes collide. David Harsanyi, now ensconced at the Federalist, stayed up past my bedtime to witness the witless: Jimmy Kimmel Asks Joe Biden Why He's Not Acting More Like A Dictator.

    Joe Biden is incapable of giving interviews to his allies in establishment media without looking like a centenarian overdosing on Xanax. So, the administration recruited a sycophantic late-night talk show host for the job. And, as expected, the interview with Jimmy Kimmel, who set up tee-balls for our dotard leader, was as cringe-inducing. Biden struggled to remember his canned talking points, promised a “mini revolution” if Roe was overturned (the same day someone tried to murder a SCOTUS justice), and rambled into the ether. Biden is an unserious person doing very serious damage.

    Dunking on Republicans and hating Trump might have been good enough to win in 2020, and it might get you frivolous applause from the automatons in Kimmel’s audience, but it isn’t political philosophy. That fact was evident last night as the host who once warned his audience about “fascists” asked the president why he isn’t unilaterally dismantling a constitutional right.

    “Can’t you issue an executive order? Trump passed those out like Halloween candy,” Kimmel asked Biden, when referencing gun control. “I don’t want to emulate Trump’s abuse of the Constitution and constitutional authority,” responded the president … the same week he unconstitutionally invoked the Defense Production Act, a cronyist gift to favored solar panels that is ostensibly meant to bring down the price of gas and oil.

    I'm no GOP fan these days, but a change in Congress is desperately needed to restore that whole checks-and-balances thing.


  • The definition of chutzpah is murdering your parents and then asking the court for mercy because you are an orphan. This story is a close runner-up to that classic definition: Uvalde School Officials Respond to Shooting With Plan to Hire More Cops.

    In the wake of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary that left 19 kids and two adults dead, Uvalde district officials have come up with a plan to make their schools ostensibly safer: Hire more police officers.

    "It is our goal to hire additional officers to be assigned to each campus for the upcoming school year," said Hal Harrell, superintendent of Uvalde schools, during a press conference on Thursday.

    But there's no reason to think that Uvalde schools employed an insufficient number of police officers. When the shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, entered the school, locked himself inside a fourth-grade classroom, and proceeded to indiscriminately murder children, 19 cops quickly arrived on the scene. They had the gunman completely outnumbered. And in any case, police training instructs officers to confront a mass shooter as speedily as possible, without waiting for background. The problem wasn't too few cops; the problem was the cops didn't do anything.

    Also see Steven Greenhut's article about the widespread failure of cops to act with alacrity against active shooters: Uvalde Shows Once Again That Cops Are Just Armed Bureaucrats. Tough but fair.