URLs du Jour

2022-08-31

No, I don't understand what "NOBUCHAR" means on our Amazon Product du Jour. If someone enlightens me, I'll update.

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
  • You say that as if it's a bad thing. Jennifer Huddleston takes a look at one bit of legislation Senator Amy is pushing: Klobuchar's Media Bill Won't Save the Press.

    Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) likes to paint herself as a 21st century trustbuster. However, her latest antitrust proposal, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), is pro-collusion and provides an antitrust exemption for politically well-connected news media companies.

    What this bill reveals is that the heart of the antitrust crusade by Klobuchar and other neo-Brandeisians is not actually about consumer protection or small businesses. They seek to use antitrust and the force of the government to protect the companies and industries they prefer.

    The JCPA pits digital platforms like Facebook and Google against "traditional" media services such as newspapers. To "help" these traditional media companies against the supposedly big, bad tech companies, the JCPA mandates that platforms pay news publishers to link to their articles, creates an artificial limit discouraging news platforms from expanding their newsrooms' reach to reap the law's benefits, and creates an eight-year safe harbor from existing antitrust laws including allowing news companies to collude with one another. In short, this proposal empowers the government to help out its favored, eligible news services while also attacking today's successful tech companies. The real losers, however, are the American people.

    The left-leaning folks at Techdirt aren't JCPA fans either. Disappointing to see Rand Paul on the cosponsor list.


  • A contrarian view on Salman Rushdie. A couple weeks back I glibly stated that the bravery exhibited by Liz Cheney could be measured in micro-Rushdies. I'm still tentatively holding to that judgment, but Lee Siegel has me wavering, with his question: Don’t You Have to Do Something Heroic to Be a Hero?.

    The proverbial visitor from another planet dropping into today’s America might think that, from the constant proliferating references to this person or that person being a “hero,” the country was not just populated by selfless, noble, courageous human beings, but that heroic figures were constantly bumping into other heroic figures at the supermarket, on the beach, or in the train station. It might have been yesterday that Byron wrote the opening lines of Don Juan, his great hymn to the antihero:

    I want a hero: an uncommon want,
    When every year and month sends forth a new one,
    Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
    The age discovers he is not the true one

    The recent re-anointment of Salman Rushdie as “heroic” and “courageous” after the heinous attack on him by an Islamic fanatic is a case in point. There has never been anything heroic or courageous about Rushdie. A super-privileged, non-practicing Muslim raised in a secular Muslim family who has lived his entire adult life in the West, he published a second-rate novel that insulted an already inflamed Muslim world, which responded with irrational fury and called for his murder. This was a despicable response to a work of culture, but the awfulness of the response, and the appalling violence of the attack, does not necessarily make heroic the act that provoked them.

    If Rushdie had published his novel in the Muslim world, it might have brought him closer to hero status, but even then, satirizing an entire religion is not the same thing as taking a stand defying a particular injustice or system of oppression. Nelson Mandela was a hero. Alexei Navalny is a hero. Rushdie would at least have been making a moral point by positioning himself in the center of the system he was satirizing. As it was, he published his novel in the safety and comfort of the United States, with the clear intention of making a provocative splash, and with no apparent intention, as in the case of a hero, of acting upon reality in order to change it.

    Among Seigel's observations: "Mike Pence wasn’t a hero for refusing to stop the congressional certification of the 2020 election, any more than I am a hero for refusing to rob a bank." Good point, that.


  • And not a funny one. David Harsanyi notes: Loan 'Forgiveness' Proves 'Inflation Reduction Act' Was A Joke.

    Let’s, for the sake of argument, momentarily take the Dems at their highly dubious word and accept that the “Inflation Reduction Act” was not only a “historic” Earth-saving “investment” but one that also saved taxpayers $300 billion by implementing a new tax hike on consumers and a six-fold expansion of the IRS. And let’s suspend our disbelief and ignore the fact that virtually every welfare-state program ends up existing in perpetuity, experiencing mission creep, and costing vastly more than initial projections.

    A new Penn Wharton Budget Model study finds that President Biden’s “student loan forgiveness” will cost taxpayers $605 billion—or approximately $300 billion more than the historic recently passed inflation-reducing law was allegedly cutting. That’s using “static” assumptions. The Penn study also finds that probable variations in behavior, due to an income-driven repayment program that caps monthly payments (as if the moral hazard of nationalizing loans wasn’t bad enough), is likely to drive the cost of the program over $1 trillion:

    It was only about a week between the signing of the "Inflation Reduction Act" and the "Forgiveness" announcement. Biden is betting that voters have shorter memories than that. He could be right.


  • Is the lab-leak theory dead? You might be forgiven for wondering that. But Thomas Fazi says nay: The lab-leak theory isn't dead.

    For more than a year after the onset of the pandemic, talking about the possibility that the virus might have been lab-engineered was taboo. Then, as the evidence continued to mount, it suddenly became acceptable to talk about it in “respectable” circles. Today, however, we appear to have gone full-circle: a determined effort is once again underway to dismiss the lab-leak theory for good — even though no new evidence has emerged to disprove it.

    Considering the endless ways in which the pandemic and our response to it have changed the lives of every human being on the planet, it’s astonishing to consider how little is actually known about the origins of the virus. Two and half years on, we are still very much in the dark as to when, how and even where SARS-CoV-2 first made its appearance.

    This isn’t because our efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery have proved fruitless, but rather because those efforts have been systematically thwarted by the world’s two most powerful governments: America and China. This is the mother of all Covid conspiracy theories — but it’s also true.

    I attach about an 80% credibility to lab-leak.

    Note that the relative lack of media attention to Covid origins vs. the coverage of January 6. Covid killed millions; January 6 killed (to be generous) maybe five?

    My working theory there: it's not in the interest of Democrats to look too closely at Covid.

    But speaking of January 6…


  • Dostoevsky needs updating. And who better to do it than Kevin D. Williamson? (Political) Crime and (Legal) Punishment.

    Republicans really want to talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Democrats want to talk about January 6. Every partisan has his favorite story.

    What if I told you, those are the same story?

    They are, in a sense.

    By the numbers, there isn’t much reason to care about January 6. The Capitol architect estimates that property damage was something around $3 million, and there were five deaths associated with that tornado of rage, filth, and stupidity. In term of loss of life, the fiasco at Travis Scott’s Astroworld show in Houston was twice as bad — ten dead — and, if you ask the lawyers, the dollar damages were a whole lot worse: They’re currently asking $3 billion in total, with 387 lawsuits from 2,800 alleged victims at last count. (The dollar figures are not strictly comparable: The $3 billion in damages sought in the Astroworld mess includes both property damage and bodily injury.) But I care a lot more about January 6 than I do Astroworld, because — this part matters! — it was an attempt to nullify a legitimate election and thereby effect the overthrow of the government of these United States. I care about that. There are lots of riots and lots of other crime. When those riots take on a particular political character, they are of much more urgent interest.

    There are a lot of Hunter Biden types in the world, and I don’t care about most of them. Coke and hookers and all that? I’m a libertarian — that stuff isn’t very good for you, but I’m not inclined to throw anybody into prison over it. Corrupt business practices? I’m not going to say those don’t matter, but I’m a lot less fussy about that than many Americans are — I’m not convinced insider trading should be a crime, for instance. There are a lot of people who have gone to jail for financial crimes who shouldn’t have, in my view: Michael Milken, Martha Stewart, Conrad Black. (I’d be more inclined to put Baron Black of Crossharbour in a dungeon over that Trump book, even if the Supreme Court legalized that kind of performance in Lawrence vs. Texas.) There are a lot of idiot sons on a lot of corporate payrolls. But there is reason to believe that Hunter Biden was accepting payments for political favors secured through his father, and some reason to believe that he was acting as a conduit for payments to his family that amounted to bribes. There is very good reason to believe that Hunter Biden should have been charged with other serious crimes — crimes for which people without his family connections have been charged in similar circumstances. To be clear: There have been no such charges filed, much less charges that have been proved beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. But the Hunter Biden situation is serious in a way that the shenanigans of your average moneyed and coddled and drug-addled mediocrity are not — because of their political character.

    For the nth time: An NRPlus subscription is highly recommended.


Last Modified 2024-01-16 3:53 PM EDT