URLs du Jour

2022-10-08

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  • Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. Veronique de Rugy knows better than to wonder Are Deficits Actually Going Down?.

    The president is annoyed. On Saturday, during a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus, he complained that "I'm so sick of Republicans saying we're the 'big spenders.' Give me a break. Give me a break." He all but said in one portion of the speech that he is spending a lot of money on special interests and yet "doing all of this while reducing the deficit — last year, $350 billion, and this year by $1 trillion." It's magic.

    It's amazing to watch a speech in which so few fiscal facts are correct. First, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that "the Biden administration has enacted policies through legislation and executive actions that will add more than $4.8 trillion to deficits between 2021 and 2031." That's exclusively his administration, and these sums will be added to the trillions in debt accumulated by previous administrations.

    And let's not forget that the $4.8 trillion figure would be significantly larger if he and his Democratic friends in Congress had passed the roughly $2.5-to-$5 trillion Build Back Better legislation they pushed so hard for. The figure also rests on the dubious assumption that the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which was passed in lieu of BBB, will reduce the deficit. Last but not least, this figure doesn't include Biden's student-loan forgiveness order, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculates will alone add over $400 billion in deficit spending over 10 years.

    You can read that Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget report that Vero talks about here.

    With respect to our Amazon Product du Jour pie chart, I'm not sure if Biden's rhetoric goes in the "lies" or "dementia" slice.


  • Or perhaps too many people don't want you to know. Jim Geraghty quotes former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb: ‘The Search for Covid’s Origin Seems to Have Stalled’.

    I wish I had a cheerier or more optimistic outlook, but I doubt we will ever definitively know the origin of Covid-19 because a lot of people are comfortable not knowing, and deeply uncomfortable with the ramifications of confirming a pandemic that has killed as many as 27 million people around the world was the result of a lab leak. As I wrote last month, “I think the Chinese government would prefer that the origin of the virus remain a mystery; that way, it doesn’t have to admit any fault, permanently shut down any wet markets, or allow international inspectors into its biological-research labs. Our current confusion, division, and waning interest is exactly the outcome that works out best for China.”

    As long as the origin of Covid-19 is a mystery, life can go on, and people – including those with deep economic interests in China, and U.S. policymakers – can more or less live their lives the way they did before the pandemic. The moment someone finds smoking-gun evidence that it was a lab leak, everything regarding China and the rest of the world changes, and likely in dangerous and unpredictable directions.

    We don’t know, because we don’t know. But we also don’t know because we don’t want to know.

    27 million people is 4.5 Holocausts. Just sayin'.


  • Worse, those "conversations" always turn into "shut up and listen". Adam Thierer questions the narrative: We Really Need To ‘Have a Conversation’ About AI ... or Do We?.

    Last month, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose wrote a piece entitled “We Need to Talk About How Good A.I. Is Getting,” even while admitting how, “It’s a cliché, in the A.I. world, to say things like ‘we need to have a societal conversation about A.I. risk.’”

    He doesn’t even know the half of it. If you’ve read enough essays, books or social media posts about artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics—among other emerging technologies—then chances are you’ve stumbled on variants of these two arguments many times over:

    1. “We need to have conversation about the future of AI and the risks that it poses.”

    2. “We should get a bunch of smart people in a room and figure this out.”

    Who can possibly disagree with those two pearls of wisdom? Well, I can—because they have become largely meaningless rhetorical flourishes which threaten to hold up meaningful progress on the AI front.

    Thierer quotes himself: “[L]iving in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy on them—means that best-case scenarios will never come about.”

    He gets a lot of flak from flacks, perhaps deserved, for palling around with Trumpian "national conservatives". But his article here seems pretty reasonable to me.


  • I probably shouldn't complain about laziness of others. I mean, I'm not the most energetic guy myself. Case in point: I'm outsourcing criticism of The Laziest Politics to Kevin D. Williamson.

    Our politics is upside-down in several different ways, but one of the most important of them is that politicians and activists seem to have forgotten how to ask for votes and how to engage in old-fashioned democratic persuasion. Instead of saying, “What can I do to earn your support?” our contemporary politicians insist that we are morally obligated to support them no matter what. After hearing the stories about Herschel Walker, purportedly a pro-life Republican, paying for an abortion for one of his many extramarital attachments, Dana Loesch gave the definitive Republican answer of 2022: “I don’t care if Hershel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles—I want control of the Senate.”

    Never mind that such a figure as Dana Loesch will never have control of the Senate: She will be at most an instrument of someone else’s control. Nobody on the right seems able to stop and ask: “Why? Why do we want a party whose leading lights are such figures as Donald Trump and Herschel Walker to control the Senate? Why would we want such figures as Lindsey Graham or Josh Hawley to control anything?”

    Maybe there is a case for that. But I spend a lot of time around politicians, especially Republican politicians, taking copious notes on their emissions, and I have not heard a case for Republicans worth repeating in years—only a case against Democrats.

    Democrats, for their part, are in essentially the same rhetorical position.

    I think I should take a nap for about six weeks or so.


  • I had no questions but… I knew Jeff Maurer's Answers to queries posed by his subscribers would be entertaining.

    Do you think that you have more in common ideologically with the Woke Left or a good-faith conservative? By "good-faith" I mean that they come by their beliefs honestly, appreciate dialogue, and are passionate about Founding Values like Free Speech, Due Process, etc.

    This is an easy one: I have more in common with a good-faith conservative. Or really a good-faith anything; there are good-faith leftists whose opinions I respect.

    The problem, in my opinion, is rigid ideology. Some people decide “this is what I believe” and then reverse-engineer the justifications. These people aren’t rare; I think they’re probably a majority. I find that approach to politics pretty useless; it’s like playing Pictionary and just yelling “boat!” over and over again no matter what your partner draws.

    We should also never forget how fucking boring it is to be ideologically pigheaded. I don’t want to talk to blinkered an uncurious people partly because I already know what they’re going to say. If I’m talking to someone who actually is acting in good faith and truly is interested in finding solutions, we might find common ground. Talking to those people is also a good reminder that I should approach politics with clear eyes and an open mind, and not scroll Twitter seeking out opinions I already agree with, even though I’ve been known to do the latter from time to time.

    I have a pretty rigid ideology. I think so, anyway. Maybe.


  • And finally, a quote from Steven Hayward's periodic Loose Ends post at Power Line:

    Can someone explain to me the difference between “lived experience” and “experience”? Isn’t all experience “lived”? Is “lived experience” some kind of extra-super-dooper kind of experience, special to that extra-special class of people known as “millennials”? Isn’t this ubiquitous phrase redundant—yet another example of linguistic inflation that turns a clear term like “library” into “learning resource center”? I earnestly wish “lived” experience would die.

    Yes. Someone should compile a list of such warning signs of bullshit.


Last Modified 2024-01-16 4:54 AM EDT