Background: I have taken to following my Congresscritter/Toothache Carol Shea-Porter
on Twitter. There's no doubt a certain amount of masochism involved
there, but
there's also a bit of fun in occasionally Speaking Truth To Power, like
yesterday.
A number of her tweets follow a certain formula: (a) link to an article
containing some morsel of left-wing Democrat outrage (pretty thick on
the ground these days); (b) prepend the
comment: "Republicans, speak up. Now!"
I don't know about you, but I find this remarkably petulant and
tone-deaf. CSP is a
"public servant". (If you don't believe that, just read her
press
releases.) Where does she get off making demands of her
constituents? And not all her constituents, mind you: just a
subset of them: Republicans.
It's especially mystifying in a practical-politics sense: consider CSP is only in office
by capturing a
bare
plurality (44.2%) of votes, eking out a 1.9% win over a weak, ethics-challenged
GOP opponent, Frank Guinta. Can she really afford this kind of strident
hyper-partisanship?
So I attempted to squeeze all that into a tweet:
@TeamSheaPorter Did some
PR guru suggest that tweeting imperious orders to GOPers would make your
constituents like you better? Not working.
As someone who supported neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton
during the recent election, I find myself surprisingly repulsed by
the anti-Trump protests on Inaugural weekend, and I’ve been puzzling
over why. Part of the answer is that I don’t accept the caricature
of the Trump administration that the mainstream media and the
Democrats supply, and I’m bothered that the masses are so willing to
do so. The campaign is over, and now Trump and the talented people
he has assembled deserve a chance to show us how they will govern
before they’re dismissed as monsters.
Reading Twitter for the last 72 hours proves my lame adage: nothing
is true and everything is plausible. It’s like events are a
high-speed train moving on tracks that occasionally narrow, diverge,
and cross - everything keeps moving forward, somehow, but there
aren’t any straight rails. The calm voices make sense. The skeptical
voices make sense. The furious voices make sense. You feel as if you
should be more suspicious of what you think you know, just to keep
yourself honest. You feel as if you should resist doubting what you
believe because there’s pressure to conform.
I especially enjoyed untangling that last sentence.
But enough mournful angst about the state of American political
discourse. Kevin D. Williamson has an idea we can all get behind:
a
blue-state
tax hike:
Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration will disagree
about many things, but it is rare to find a Republican of almost any
description who will turn his nose up at a tax cut of almost any
description. As Robert Novak put it: “God put the Republican Party
on earth to cut taxes. If they don’t do that, they have no useful
function.” And tax cuts are coming. But there are two proposals in
circulation that would constitute significant tax increases — tax
increases that would fall most heavily on upper-income Americans in
high-tax progressive states such as California and New York. The
first is a proposal to reduce or eliminate the mortgage-interest
deduction, a tax subsidy that makes having a big mortgage on an
expensive house relatively attractive to affluent households; the
second is to reduce or eliminate the deduction for state income
taxes, a provision that takes some of the sting out of living in a
high-tax jurisdiction such as New York City (which has both state
and local income taxes) or California, home to the nation’s highest
state-tax burden.
Do not hold your breath waiting for the inequality warriors to
congratulate Republicans for proposing these significant tax
increases on the rich. Expect lamentations and the rending of
garments, instead.
Well, that lamentations thing has much to recommend it. Given that
the blue states shout the loudest about Inequality and the Desperate
Need for Tax Revenue, it's far past time to make them put their
money where their speaking orifices are.
But enough about politics. I'm so steeped in it these days, that
when I saw a headline about
"Instant
Pot", I assumed it was related to Maine's recent
legalization
of
"recreational" marijuana. But no.
Chances are you or somebody you know has recently become the owner
of an Instant Pot, the multifunction electric pressure cooker that
can produce fork-tender pot roasts in less than an hour, as well as
brown meat, cook beans without soaking, and even do the job of a
rice cooker or crockpot. The Instant Pot isn't advertised on TV or
in the newspapers, and yet it's become a viral marketing success
story, with owners often describing themselves as "addicts" or "cult
members." That's the kind of word-of-mouth publicity Instant Pot
founders dreamed of when they first began designing the countertop
appliances.
Whoa, I want one! But (Mrs. Salad reminds me) we already have a
crockpot and a rice cooker. And, in our decades of cohabitation,
we've never, ever, needed a pressure
cooker. Still… buttons! LEDs!
But as long as I was talking about "recreational marijuana": that
adjective has always seemed a little off to me. Like you should at
least be playing badminton or something, concurrently with consuming.
Will use be regulated by towns'
Recreation
Departments? I swear, you don't have to be stoned to ask these
questions!
Another culinary item: Mr. Likeks
muses on the Zen of Taco Bell and Chinese takeout menus. At the
Bell:
[…] It's all the same stuff. Really. They remix the same five or six
ingredients into something new every other month. "Announcing the
Quesodillorita Crunch Supreme! Two Flavors: Ranch and Bold, neither
of which are really flavors at all! New! Limited Time! We'll yank it
away for no reason and never explain why! We will deny it ever
existed!"
I don't really get to go to Taco Bell as much as I'd like. Which is
probably why I'm blogging instead of in cardiac rehab.
Moan. I suppose we have to talk about refugees and immigration, teed off
by the reaction to President Trump's recent executive order that … did
something about that, I guess.
David W. French at NR concerns himself with
separating
fact from hysteria. He does a noble (but not difficult) job in
finding plenty examples of the hysteria. A welcome reality check on
anyone who's shouting "Muslim Ban! Muslim Ban!":
[… Y]ou can read the entire executive order from start to
finish, reread it, then read it again, and you will not
find a Muslim ban. It’s not there. Nowhere. At its most draconian,
it temporarily halts entry from jihadist regions. In other words,
Trump’s executive order is a dramatic climb-down from his worst
campaign rhetoric.
But French is not a mindless cheerleader:
However, there are reports that the ban is being applied even to green-card holders. This is madness. The
plain language of the order doesn’t apply to legal permanent
residents of the U.S., and green-card holders have been through
round after round of vetting and security checks. The administration
should intervene, immediately, to stop misapplication. If, however,
the Trump administration continues to apply the order to legal
permanent residents, it should indeed be condemned.
As near as I can tell, it's unclear whether (a) Trump's executive
order was meant to apply to green-card holders and (b)
whether it is being applied to green-card holders.
But, once we shed ourselves of the hysteria, is Trump's EO legal?
Writing at the NYT, David J. Bier of the Cato Institute
argues
"nope"
More than 50 years ago, Congress outlawed such discrimination
against immigrants based on national origin.
But, at NR, Andrew C. McCarthy rebuts:
yup,
is too.
Let’s start with the Constitution, which vests
all executive power in the president. Under the Constitution, as
Thomas Jefferson wrote shortly after its adoption, “the transaction
of business with foreign nations is Executive altogether. It belongs
then to the head of that department, except
as to such portions of it as are specifically
submitted to the Senate. Exceptions are to be construed
strictly.”
Bier and McCarthy are recommended to those who enjoy debates over
the applicability of Section 1152(a) of Title 8, U.S. Code as
opposed to Section 1182(f) and Section 1187(a)(12).
But for me, there is no better time to trot out the cliché disclaimer: I Am
Not A Lawyer.
OK, hysteria and legalities aside, how about the remaining
question: good idea, or not? The estimable Veronique de Rugy writes
at Reason:
"Taking
In Refugees Is Good for America" She dismisses the
terrorist-importing argument:
Arguably, no act of terrorism has been committed in the last 40
years by refugees in the United States (though a tiny number of
refugees have been arrested on terrorism-related charges, and
depending on the precise definition of refugees used, the Boston
marathon bombing or other incidents may count). And the long wait
time and high costs of entering the country as a refugee make that
an extremely inefficient way for terrorists to get in.
She also acknowledges and rebuts various economic arguments.
You can be a virtue-signaling moral narcissist and get all exercised
about Donald Trump's executive order suspending visas from seven
primarily Muslim countries for the next ninety days, but I have a
question for you: what do we do about Islam?
No quibbles for Roger about whether Trump's EO is a "Muslim Ban" or
not.
This is the very definition of an overheated argument. There's a surfeit
of finger-pointing, a dearth of good faith arguments for clear policy
goals backed up by realistic assessments of risk and economic impact.
You're either a slobbering Islamaphobe or a
let-em-in oikophobic elitist who worries nobody will be available to
trim the shubberies at the yacht club.
Worse: it's a fast-moving topic, and this post may be obsolete by the
time you read it. Hey, I haven't checked recently, it may be obsolete
as I'm typing it.
I'm slowly but surely catching up in Lee Child's Jack Reacher series,
a project started
back
in 2009. I've given up my quibbles and tergiversations about
Dickensian coincidences and convenient revelations; these books are
great fun.
A chance glance at the personal (note title) ads in a castaway Army
Times newspaper in Seattle causes Jack to get in touch with a supervisor from
his aforementioned MP days. Jack is jetted off to North Carolina, where he's asked to
participate in a desperate manhunt. A sniper has taken a shot at the
French president. A miss, and Jack doesn't care about that too much
anyway, but there are
indications that the attempt was a warmup for another assassination in a
few days.
Again, Jack asks, why me? Well, it turns out one of the prime suspects
was a gifted sniper Jack outwitted and brought to justice during his MP days. And
now he's out, looking for work. Aha! This time it's personal! Off
to Paris.
Jack brings his usual powers of observation, deduction, and lethal
violence to bear on the issue. He is assisted by a female sidekick
named "Casey Nice"; also teams up with agents from England and Russia.
But, as is the case with every character in a Reacher book: you have to
be skeptical whether or not they can be trusted. Things are never as
they seem at first, and you have to sort through the numerous red
herrings to find… what? The real herrings? I guess.
One character notes the combination of Reacher's vagabond lifestyle and
his detective skills, and dubs him "Sherlock Homeless". Heh! That's very
accurate.
The Doomsday Clock is the worst sort of pseudoscientific
claptrap, one given a veneer of respectability by the fact that
NOBEL SCIENTISTS are the ones who arbitrarily move the hands on its
face closer to, or further away from, midnight, the zero hour, the
time when we wipe ourselves from the face of the Earth. How do I
know that NOBEL SCIENTISTS are the ones who arbitrarily pick and
choose where to place the minute hand? Because many, many outraged
people on Twitter informed me that NOBEL SCIENTISTS are totes in charge of
it when I pointed out that calling a press conference to
announce the movements of a fake clock is the height of
silliness.
Wikipedia is
more
sober about the Clock, but you can't help but notice that when
we were actually close to nuclear war, the clock was
relatively copacetic:
In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis: 11:53 PM.
Well, almost. What Justin Gillis, the NYT reporter actually tweeted
was: "You really think those numbers would mean anything to the
ordinary reader?"
Well, actually, reporting actual numbers, and their
uncertainties, might indicate a healthy respect for the ability
of ordinary readers to make
up their own minds. But Gillis is more in the business of pushing
a one-sided narrative. Tracinski is not impressed:
In short, a New York Times reporter’s job is to repeat the
talking points of government agencies and transcribe quotations from
partisans for one side of the scientific and political
debate. Gillis refers to this as “a 1970s journalism model,” as
if that’s supposed to reassure us, but there’s another name for it.
It’s “press-release journalism”—journalism that consists, not of
questioning or investigation or skepticism, but of restating
partisan press releases. It’s the lowest, laziest form of
journalism.
Both are regressive, in the sense that they hit lower-income
citizens harder than the rest. And the benefits, such as they are,
flow to upper income families. Bailey concludes:
Levinson does not speculate on why politicians and advocates tend to
favor energy efficiency mandates over energy taxes, but I will.
Energy taxes are obvious to voters, while the effects of energy
efficiency standards are sneakier. The latter allow cowardly
politicians to avoid telling their fellow citizens that they'll pay
more for the privilege of consuming energy.
Cowardly politicians… but I repeat myself.
Looking to re-establish her theocracy,
Nancy
Pelosi.
Of Republicans, the Democrat congresswoman from California declared,
"They pray in church on Sunday and they prey on people the rest of
the week. And while we're doing the Lord's work, ministering to the
needs of God's creation, they are ignoring those needs which is to
dishonor the God who made them."
I, for one, eagerly await Nancy Pelosi going full
Matthew 21:12
and overturning tables in Congressional anterooms. Well, light ones
anyway. She's not a young woman.
At Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Steve Horvitz finds
"Liberalism
in the Balance". He has issues with libertarians who attempt to
"find a pony" in Trump's moves to deregulate, cut taxes and
(some) spending, etc., while ignoring the illiberalism in his other
rhetoric.
[Trump] is a baboon flinging shit at the liberal tradition and the
liberal order, while some libertarians sit around, covered with it,
thinking that the drink of water he’s promising them later somehow
offsets it.
Ouch! [Puzzled by the "find a pony" bit? Please click
here.]
At NR's Bench Memos blog
Adam
I. Klein takes apart a WaPo op-ed calling
Antonin Scalia a
"part-time
liberal". Klein knows what the WaPo writer does not:
Unfortunately, the piece makes the all-too-common error of
classifying judicial decisions by their policy consequences — a
valid metric for grading legislators, not judges — rather than their
reasoning. Justice Scalia was a full-time originalist, and that’s
what explains both his “conservative” and his “liberal” opinions.
It's not so much an "error" as a way of thinking, attempting to fit
everything into a right-to-left political spectrum, and getting
surprised when someone like Scalia doesn't fit neatly into your fallacy.
One can only hope that Scalia's replacement will do as good a job at
confounding the prejudices of WaPo writers.
I enjoy reading Rich Cromwell's
"The
Week in Weird Twitter" at the Federalist, and you might
as well. If you, as I, laugh out loud at stuff like this:
If I didn't leave everything till the last minute, I
wouldn't get to rush around singing the Mission Impossible theme
song nearly as much
If 2016 was bad for rock stars, 2017 seems to be shaping up as a bad one
for TV actors…
Yes, I was a devoted watcher of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
But also Mannix. (In fact, when I first joined Netflix,
I went through the Mannix DVDs, all eight seasons, in the first few months.)
James Lileks
has a goodbye for Mike Connors. RIP.
Not that it matters, but I'd also like to watch
Harry O again. Unfortunately, the DVDs are prohibitively
priced, and Netflix doesn't offer them. It's available on
Warner Archive,
$10/month, first month free, but I'd have to watch on my computer…
First world problems, right? Why can't I watch anything I want,
when and where I want, without spending any more money? Waaaahh…
At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux is
banging
his head against a wall. Specifically, the one President Trump
still wants to build between the US and Mexico. And, even more
specifically, the one that "will be funded by 20 percent import tax
on Mexican goods."
That's "making Mexico pay for the wall"? Not quite.
Because only people, not imports, pay taxes on imports – and because
the people who pay the bulk of the taxes on imports are the people
who buy the imports – and because the people who will buy the
Mexican imports that the Trump administration will tax are Americans
– the Trump administration’s plan will result in the bulk of the
bill for the border wall being paid by Americans.
We've said a few nice things about Trump in recent days. But his
economic illiteracy on trade and immigration is likely to make us
all poorer.
Another "benefit" of the Trump Administration is that we get to go
down some philosophical rabbit holes, unvisited since
that
class we took
as sophomores. For example, we could ask practically every day: "Is
it a lie if Trump believes it?" Fortunately, Jacob Sullum has an
answer:
"It's
Not a Lie If Trump Believes It".
Trump, perhaps the most openly narcissistic man ever to occupy
the White House, clearly wants to believe he won the
popular vote, just as he wants to believe his historically
narrow Electoral College victory qualified as a "landslide."
It is therefore plausible that he credulously latched onto crackpot
claims about widespread voting by illegal immigrants, just as he
credulously latched onto crackpot claims about vaccines
and autism. You could argue that his refusal to back down in the
face of persuasive debunking shows he is now consciously lying about
voter fraud. Presumably that was New York Times Executive
Editor Dean Baquet's reasoning when he approved
the use of the word lie. But Trump's stubbornness also can
be explained by his emotional attachment to a flattering fiction, a
general reluctance to admit error, and a tendency to dismiss
information from sources he views as hostile, which seem to include
pretty much anyone who questions him.
Trump and his acolytes are going full
John 18:38. You
never want to go full John 18:38.
Just yesterday, as an example, Sen. Bernie Sanders (most
Democrats use the same rhetoric) were telling voters that
Republicans who want to cut government funding for the abortion
provider Planned Parenthood are seeking to “deny”
2.5 million women “access” to clinics. This is a lie on a number
of levels. It is meant to misinform people for political gain. This
isn’t a debate about semantics or a dollar’s fungibility, it is
wholly untrue. This goes on all the time on all kinds of issues.
An honest press would… oh, why am I even thinking about what an
honest press would do?
The beauty of “The Resistance” is that it connotes scrappy bands of
righteous rebels across Europe fighting Nazis and their
propagandists at Breitbart. The term’s popularity may also owe
something to “The Force Awakens,” the 2015 Star Wars sequel that
features a rebel group with the same name. Basically, the liberals
are incipient Jedi preparing to take down the heir to Darth Vader
and Adolf Hitler.
In case you don't know (I did not): Christopher is Antonin Scalia's
son. Wit runs in the family.
(The article is probably behind the WSJ paywall. Here
is a tutorial on evading paywalls if you need it.)
Coincidentally, we watched the Finding Dory DVD soon after the
movie was
snubbed
for an Oscar nomination. While two non-Pixar Disney animations
(Moana and Zootopia got nominated? Pixar, it's time to
step up your game.
That's not to say it's bad. It's pretty good. But not in the league of
Up, The Incredibles, Toy Story [1..3], etc.
Anyway: you remember Dory from Finding Nemo, the cute little blue
fish with short-term memory troubles. She now realizes that, hey, she
had a mom and dad way back when. And she misses them. But all she can
remember is the phrase: "the jewel of Morro Bay, California". Can that
possibly be enough?
Well, (spoiler) sure it is. But only after numerous misadventures, involving a lot
of fishy characters, and general hilarity. And the voice of Sigourney
Weaver.
Nemo and dad Marlin are back, but there's also
Hank, a cranky octopus missing one arm. (So, as Dory points out, a
"septopus". With her memory issues, how did she get up to speed so well on ordinal prefixes?)
Consumer note: fans of Finding Nemo will want to watch a
post-credits scene.
Consumer note 2: the DVD also includes the short Piper, which
was Oscar-nominated. It's pretty good too.
Mary Tyler Moore, who
died Wednesday at the age of 80, did something no one else ever
did in the history of television: She starred in two landmark
sitcoms playing two very different characters.
FactCheck: true!
The only woman I can think of that's close is Patricia Heaton, but
even as hugely talented as she is,
you'd have to stretch about the "landmark" bit.
In an interview in 2009, Moore told Parade magazine,
“When one looks at what’s happened to television, there are so few
shows that interest me. I do watch a lot of Fox News. I like Charles
Krauthammer and Bill O’Reilly.”
When asked if that meant she was a “right-winger,” Moore replied,
“Maybe more of a libertarian centrist.”
Aw, I'm in love all over again.
Last but not least, the immortal Lileks
checks
out some of 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' Minneapolis locations on
a short video. Hat throwing, he points out, is not something
Minnesotans are prone to do.
But it's not all MTM at Pun Salad today. Andrew Napolitano is a
notoriously difficult guy to please, but (at Reason)
he finds President Trump's initial
moves to unwind Obamacare to be
"breeze
of freedom on a sea of regulation."
He ordered that regulations already in place be enforced with a
softer, more beneficent tone, and he ordered that no penalty, fine,
setoff or tax be imposed by the IRS on any person or entity who is
not complying with the individual mandate, because by the time taxes
are due on April 15, the IRS will be without authority to impose or
collect the non-tax tax, as the individual mandate will no longer
exist. Why take money from people that will soon be returned?
Then he ordered a truly revolutionary act, the likes of which I have
never seen in the 45 years I have studied and monitored the
government's laws and its administration of them. He ordered that
when bureaucrats who are administering and enforcing the law have
discretion with respect to the time, place, manner, and severity of
its enforcement, they should exercise that discretion in favor of
individuals and against the government.
Credit where credit is due.
Writing at one of our other libertarian go-tos, the Cato Institute,
Randal O'Toole
compares
and contrasts Trump's "infrastructure" proposals with the
Democratic alternative.
[… T]the Trump plan is more bottom-up than top-down, as most if not all
of the projects on the possibly fake priority list are supported by
state and local officials. And while Trump brought a new idea to the
table, the Democrats’ plan is the same old borrow-and-spend formula
that they have used in the past. This is actually worse than
tax-and-spend because taxing and spending doesn’t leave huge debt
problems and interest payments for the future.
While we can hope that Trump’s projects will rely more on user fees
more than taxes, at the moment the score has to be Trump 1/2,
Democrats minus 1.
As said above: credit where credit is due. But "better than the
Democrats" is kind of a low bar to clear.
News you can use from Kevin D. Williamson:
"How
to ‘Resist’ Trump". Seriously good advice, and I'll quote
this gem:
If you opposed (and oppose) Donald Trump, then you have a couple
of options. One is to make an ass of yourself by dressing as a set
of genitals and vandalizing a Starbucks in Oakland. (The Keynesians
may thank you, but Bastiat will not.) But we really shouldn’t
pretend that that is politics — it is only adolescent
self-gratification, and those engaged in it aren’t the Resistance,
but the Nursery.
The next paragraph begins "The more intelligent option is…" but
those intelligent to care enough will have already clicked over.
Google presents
"The Year in
Language 2016". They make a living out of the
data they scrape out of people's searches, but this is
non-commercial and fascinating. Example, what words puzzled people
enough to ask the big G for a definition?
In 2016, these 10 words led
the pack: Triggered, Shook, Juju, Broccoli, Woke, Holosexual,
Shill, Gaslighting, Bigly, and SJW.
I think I'm OK on most of those. But "broccoli" has some new
meaning?
I guess
this.
And I'm OK with not ever knowing what a "holosexual" might
be.
I will freely admit to watching Saturday Night Live since its
inception. Yes, even now. But it's been in the news this week with
its obvious partisan biases: (1) Writer Katie Rich tweeted that
10-year-old Barron Trump would be the "first homeschool shooter."
(2) The show closer this past weekend was a completely creepy
rendition of "To Sir With Love" by two cast members, a "goodbye"
to President Obama. At Reason, Robby Soave provides
advice:
"SNL
Should Have Suspended the Writer Who Planned the Obama Song, Not the
Writer Who Made Fun of Barron Trump". Fact check: True!
My take on the episode: I didn't laugh once during the
opening
bit
(shirtless Brent Bell as Putin). Aziz Ansari's
monologue
was also laugh-free. But it got
better. Then it got much worse.
At NR, Jonah Goldberg is
"Missing
All That Racial Healing", noting Melissa Harris-Perry's
"poem-essay-thingamabob" at the Women's March, a long rant on
America's shortcomings.
But what does it say that, after eight years of Obama’s
transformational leadership, some of his biggest fans think — at
least in some figurative, imaginary, paranoid way — that slavery and
other evils are once again live questions in American life? Everyone
here knows I am not Donald Trump’s biggest booster, but he is not
poised, or interested in, dragooning blacks into the hulls of ships,
and suggesting otherwise with haughty sanctimony to great applause
is not the path back to winning the White House for Democrats.
Nor is making Angela Davis a featured speaker, but I've said that
before.
I have slagged the Trump Administration's thin-skinned ego-driven
approach to truth. But Power Line's John Hinderaker does an
able job
in
defense, noting the Associated Press's "war" on Trump.
Here, as we saw during the campaign, Trump can be accused of
exaggeration. But the liberal press is far more guilty of outright
falsity, and its accusations vastly overstate Trump’s purported
sins.
Contra Hinderaker, I think Trump's problems with the truth go beyond
"exaggeration". But his point remains: the press, associated or not,
should play it straight.
The 2017 Oscar nominations were announced Tuesday morning, and it
was immediately clear that after last year’s #OscarsSoWhite fiasco,
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had gone out of its
way to improve diversity in the acting categories.
But a number of activists are already suggesting that it’s is just
tokenism.
If you want to play that game, you'd have to argue that
Asians
are pretty low in representation. (The lone nominee this year in the
major categories seems to have been Dev Patel, for Lion.)
With the WSJ's "Best of the Web Today" feature on hiatus
awaiting a new curator, someone's gotta do it:
True story: in my 1974 graduate dorm at the University Near Here, I was
down with the flu. Miserable, unable to do anything, just lying in my
tiny thin-mattressed bed listening to the Boston rock station WBCN on my stereo.
But then: on comes a song like nothing I'd heard before. A majestic symphony of
drums, guitars, and saxophone. Incandescent lyrics of young love and desperate hopefulness.
My heartrate spiked, and I truly believe all the illness was flushed
from my body within the four and a half minutes song duration. After it
was over, I arose from my bed, feeling fine.
The song was Born to
Run. And I had been healed by a guy
named Bruce Springsteen.
So I was kind of a natural reader of this book, and I got it as a
Christmas gift. Not slim, at 500 pages of main text, and I took my time
reading it.
Compared to the other celebrity memoirs I've read, this one falls in
between "just the facts in chronological order" (e.g, Clapton)
and a consciousness-stream of impressions and interactions (e.g.,
Dylan's Chronicles). Bruce is big on YELLING IN UPPERCASE
sometimes with EXCLAMATION POINTS! And he often overwrites, lapsing into
colorful and wacky prose about his artistic influences and opinions.
Fine. But I'll also say: sometimes he is, to my ear, exactly on
target: when he writes about his parents, or getting stuck in a
mountain-pass blizzard
while crossing the Rockies on his way to California. You are there with
him.
I read these memoirs, I think, because I'm looking for some clue about
the secrets of creative genius and talent. So far I've failed, and
Bruce's book is not an exception. The common thread seems to be pretty
pedestrian: work hard, learn from your musical heroes without copying
them, keep your eyes on the prize, practice.
Oh yeah: you also might want to get a good accountant (so you don't get
in trouble with the IRS) and have an honest lawyer check on those
contracts your manager wants you to sign. Two things Bruce didn't
do.
Bruce is relentlessly honest, while being nothing less than gracious to
bandmates, family members, managers, etc., even when (maybe
especially when) the underlying relationship was contentious.
Even though his personal politics are annoyingly left-wing, his
professional dealings with his bandmates are hard-nosed; you might call
him a benevolent dictator, but the "benevolent" bit is kind of a
stretch. (There's a telling and funny anecdote about how he responded
to one of the E Streeters
asking for a raise.)
One surprising anecdote: Bruce became buddies with fellow Garden Stater Frank Sinatra.
Did not see that coming. In fact, he and wife Patti were invited to the Chairman's 80th
birthday bash. And there:
"Sometime after dinner, we find ourselves around the living room piano
with Steve [Lawrence] and Eydie Gorme and Bob Dylan."
Kaboom. As the kids say, "mind = blown".
I don't even think of those people living in the same universe.
Given his cheerful public persona, I was also surprised to learn about his
psychological problems. He's been on anti-depressants for decades, and
in therapy for even longer. I might be reading more into this than
I should, but it seems that anti-depressants haven't been good to his
creativity. To my ear, there are no recent Springsteen songs that have the spark of
Born to Run, Rosalita, or Promised Land.
But that's a quibble. Because, once again: Bruce healed me.
Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy
(paid link)
The Daily Signal said:
"Here
Are 21 Books You Should Read in 2017". This was one of 'em, and I
said OK, I like comedy, and asked the University Near Here to obtain it via
Interlibrary Loan.
It's written by a guy with the unlikely name of "Kliph Nesteroff", and
he brings an amateur enthusiasm to his project, a "History of American
Comedy". (But he doesn't go all the way back to 1776; for Kliph, history starts
with vaudeville in the 1920's.)
Roughly chronological, the book moves on from vaudeville to increasingly
modern venues: radio, nightclubs, early TV (primetime and late night),
Vegas, comedy clubs, cable.
The book makes some efforts toward scholarliness: there's a "Notes"
section at the end and an index. But overall, the tone and coverage is
uneven. That's somewhat forgiveable, because there are a lot of
interesting stories to tell, and Kliph tells a lot of them. People
looking for
insights or broad lessons will probably be disappointed. The history is,
for better or worse, just a bunch of guys and gals struggling to make a
living at making people laugh. As with other celebrities, there's a lot
of sex, licit and illicit Substances, unprofessional behavior, and even criminality along the
way.
Especially interesting was the tale of "Jack Roy", whose "persona
was combative and unlikeable. It didn't matter how funny the material
was—the audience despised him." So he quit comedy, went into the home
improvement business, which involved criminal scams, which led to his
racketeering arrest. So (after an implied plea bargain), he went back
into show biz, using the name Rodney Dangerfield. Which, you may have
heard, worked out better than his previous try.
Kliph's prose occasionally descends into blog-style commentary. For
example,
after relating Jack Paar's 1960 walkoff from The Tonight Show:
"Talk about a drama queen." And all too often, we get sentence after
sentence about how X was represented by Y, but moved on to Z, after
being accused of stealing jokes from W, U, and T. Zzz.
Well, I pulled out one broad lesson, actually: The postwar nightclubs
were mostly mob-controlled. Comics were basically OK with that—for one
thing, it made their access to drugs easier.
During the 50s and 60s anti-organized crime efforts shifted ownership to
legitimate businessmen. But the comedians tended to prefer the
mobsters—they were pretty genial and generous when they weren't engaged
in their profession, while the businessfolk were less humorous, more oriented to the
old bottom line.
I mentioned there's an index? Yeah, but it's kind of spotty. One of my
first lookups: Jimmy Durante. Not there! Outrageous! But Durante
does show up in the actual text.
Given the non-comprehensive index, it's difficult to say for sure that
someone is not mentioned in the book. There's a lot of
name-dropping, especially near the modern-day parts. But one comic
apparently missing from the book is Steven Wright. Incomprehensible! And
also outrageous!
Madonna may
fantasize
about blowing up the White House. But I am fantasizing about replying to
thousands of blog articles, tweets, and Facebook posts with:
"Your logical
fallacy is tu quoque".
The
ongoing spat
about the size
of the audience at Donald Trump's inauguration, in itself a trivial
issue, is significant because it highlights the new president's
vanity, pettiness, lack of discipline, and casual disregard for the
truth. Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway took that last
character flaw to a new level in a Meet the Pressinterview
yesterday when she described White House Press Secretary Sean
Spicer's verifiably false assertions about attendance at the
inauguration as "alternative facts."
If you feel compelled to respond to that with something about "If
you like your plan, you can keep your plan", fine, but see above:
your logical
fallacy is tu quoque.
Our politics is devolving into the pathetic spectacle of liars
indignantly calling out liars for lying. Rule-breakers are outraged
that other rule-breakers break rules. Norms that could be violated
with impunity for “social justice” can’t be violated for
“nationalism.” We stick with our tribe, through thick and thin —
through truth and lies.
Our tendency toward tribalism is probably innate and unavoidable.
People who think they're free from it are deluding themselves. But
step one is recognizing it for what it is.
Also at NR, John Fund relates
Obama’s
Final Whopper as President. (Soon to be followed by "Obama's
First Whopper as Ex-President", but let's not get ahead of
ourselves.) The issue is Voter ID, Obama's attempt to link it to
Jim Crow, and his claims that (1) voter fraud is negligible, and (2)
no other "advanced democracy" requires ID.
Fund observes, sensibly, that nobody knows how widespread voter
fraud is, because Democrats do their darndest to thwart any
efforts to measure it. But Obama's claim about Voter ID's absence
in other countries? "Demonstrably false."
All industrialized democracies — and most that are not — require
voters to prove their identity before voting. Britain was a holdout,
but last month it announced that persistent examples of voter fraud
will require officials to see passports or other documentation from
voters in areas prone to corruption.
Also worth noting is Fund's conclusion:
Which is precisely why it’s so disappointing to see Barack Obama use
it to raise baseless fears that voter ID is a racist form of voter
suppression. Even as he leaves office, the president who promised to
unify us is continuing his level best to polarize and divide us.
Obama's methods of "racial healing" will continue, in other words.
We’ve just had a weekend of political rioting after
progressive-leaning and Democrat-affiliated celebrities and public
figures called for, among other things, a military coup d’état to
overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States
and the imposition of martial law. But after the hysteria dies down
— and it will die down — we’ll still be back where we were before: a
prosperous, stable, healthy nation with some very serious problems
that need addressing, and that cannot be addressed until we learn
how to speak and think about them intelligently and until we — we
citizens — demand that our leaders do. And that means, among other
things, that we forgo rewarding political and media figures with
money and power for peddling lies and stupidity. A politician is
like any other dumb animal: He’ll do what gets him fed and avoid
what gets him whipped. And lament “the system” as much as you like,
we citizens still control both the carrot and the stick.
Which most clear-eyed folks have known for decades. But this is a
new data point, and it only cost $7 Billion-with-a-b to get this
extra smidgen of confirmation. Quoting the WaPo:
The money went to states to distribute to their poorest-performing
schools — those with exceedingly low graduation rates, or poor math
and reading test scores, or both. Individual schools could receive
up to $2 million per year for three years, on the condition that
they adopt one of the Obama administration’s four preferred
measures: replacing the principal and at least half the teachers,
converting into a charter school, closing altogether, or undergoing
a “transformation,” including hiring a new principal and adopting
new instructional strategies, new teacher evaluations and a longer
school day.
The Education Department did not track how the money was spent,
other than to note which of the four strategies schools chose.
Yet another thing to remember when Democrats blather about Betsy
DeVos's "lack of qualifications". This is what happens when the
"qualified" people have been in charge for eight years.
Also commenting on this is
Nick
Gillespie, who uses it as a springboard to advocate for school
choice. Video:
Adds Gillespie: "Extra credit if you can guess what letter the
asterisk is for." I got it, did you?
Vanity plate seen on an approaching car at Walmart yesterday: "IDNTW8".
Made sure to yield the right of way to him.
The Trump Administration continues to hand rhetorical ammunition to
its enemies. Take it away,
Patterico:
[On Meet the Press,] Chuck Todd asked Trump spokespiehole Kellyanne Conway about Sean
Spicer’s pack of falsehoods in yesterday’s press
conference on the trivial (but important to Trump’s ego) issue of
crowd size at the inauguration. Conway did her usual shtick of
aggressive deflection combined with aggressive horseshit, but one
moment stood out: Conway’s statement that Spicer was simply offering
“alternative facts” […]
"Spokespiehole". Heh. You may see me steal that. The twitmemes came
thick and fast:
"I cannot tell a lie...but...perhaps I can interest
you in an alternative fact?" pic.twitter.com/bGIMf3b9wT
But seriously
people, the degree of utter nincompoopery in the last
days has just gotten completely out of control. It was bad enough
with the moron who thought it was a good idea to harass Ivanka
Trump, her three kids, and her husband on an airplane, and the
nincompoops who defended the moron; then we got Kevin Williamson,
who rightly suggested this was unmannerly—but
really spoiled the effect by adding "Uday and Qusay" to the Trump
family. (Pro tip, Kev—adding two psychopathic mass-murdering rapists
to the Trump family really plays hell with your paean to
manners.)
Yes, a rare misstep for KDW.
But the general point remains. For all the Trump-side prevaricating
buffoonery, the anti-Trump side seems dominated by shrieking
left-wing crazies and thugs.
Mickey
Kaus notes the fearful Reductio ad Hitlerum articles and
memes sprouting like kudzu.
Of course, you don’t need these examples if you have Democratic
Facebook friends. Just read their posts — alarms about
journalists jailed and killed, brownshirts, ethnic cleansing,
pervasive surveillance, people living in fear, exterminationist
violence, the whole nein yards. They’re scared.
Speaking as someone with Democratic Facebook friends: this is so, so
true. Another data point provided by MSNBC fembot,
Rachel
Maddow,
asked what "first question" she would hypothetically pose to
then-PETOUS Trump.
“Are you going to send me or anybody I know to a camp?” she said
she’d ask the Republican.
[Obvious response: "Of course not, Rachel. Who do I look like,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt?"]
But (true enough) it's not as if the ongoing verification of
Godwin's
Law started this year. Last November,
Larry Elder
sifted through enough history to conclude: "Comparing Republicans to
Nazis has long been a national pastime of the Democratic Party." A
memorable example from (I think) 2005:
Former Vice President Al Gore said: "(George W. Bush's) executive
branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news
organizations, from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. ... And every day, they
unleash squadrons of digital brown shirts to harass and hector any
journalist who is critical of the President."
Ah, digital brownshirts. Al Gore called me that. Good times.
So, yes, Charlie Martin, I'm with you.
Speaking of crazies and thugs:
Ashley Judd sucked enough air out of the room so that
relatively little notice was given to one of the other featured speakers
at Saturday's "Women's March".
Angela
Davis. Who the MSM blandly termed an "activist". David Horowitz
provides
a non-whitewashed bio of her bloodstained career. A high point:
In 1970 Davis was implicated by more than 20 witnesses in a plot to
free her imprisoned lover, fellow Black Panther George Jackson, by
hijacking a Marin County, California courtroom and taking hostage
the judge, the prosecuting assistant district attorney, and two
jurors. In an ensuing gun battle outside the court building, Judge
Harold Haley’s head was blown off by a sawed-off shotgun owned by
Ms. Davis. To avoid arrest for her alleged complicity in the plot,
Ms. Davis fled California, using aliases and changing her appearance
to avoid detection.
So (a) the march organizers were hard-left enough
to be just fine having Davis as one of
the faces of their movement; (b) they didn't think this would
detract from the march's respectability in the eyes of the nation;
and (c) it seems they were correct about that, because
the :watchdog" MSM totally bought it.
I guess I find this disturbing.
Over 24 hours into the Trump Administration, and no nuclear holocaust
yet. I'm cautiously optimistic.
At Reason, Ronald Bailey asks the musical question:
"Is
President Trump a 'Climate Menace'?". Answer: everyone seems to
think so, based on selective snippets of tweets and speeches. But,
Trump being Trump, he's not especially coherent or consistent on the
issue.
Looking at the Cabinet picks, Bailey picks up a different vibe:
In the hearings for various cabinet nominees, Democrats have
sought valiantly to unmask them as "climate change deniers." So far,
not one has questioned the scientific
reality of man-made global warming. On the other hand, they have
tended not to be as alarmed as their interlocutors, and/or have
failed to endorse the climate policies that Democrats prefer.
That last bit is key. It's possible to stake out a middle ground,
accepting the reality of anthropogenic climate change without buying
into massive scaremongering and proposed statist power grabs.
Jonah Goldberg's
G-File
is online, written on January 20 from D. C. But:
I didn’t go down to the Mall today, but it’s not because I was
“boycotting” Trump. A team of scientists could harvest the DNA of
Abe Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, Phil Gramm, William F.
Buckley, Winston Churchill, and Rowdy Roddy Piper and create some
sort of super president with laser vision and a Kung Fu grip and I
still wouldn’t want to go down to the Mall, get bumped by other
people, and stand in the cold for hours only to hear a speech in the
rain.
The truth is that President Trump’s choppy, rambling self-expression
is not so exotic. A great many thoroughly intelligent people talk
more like Donald Trump than they might know. What’s new is that
someone who talks like this in public has become the president of
the United States. Yet it isn’t surprising, and if we are not to
spend the next four to eight years alternating between exasperation
and confusion as he sounds off, we need to learn a new way of
listening.
Yes, the New York Times does, on occasion, still print things
worth reading. I know, I was surprised myself.
Trump discoursed on the media, "among the most dishonest human
beings on Earth", drawing applause.
Apparently feeding off the applause, Trump doubled down and claimed,
without any evidence at all, that the media had covered up the size
of the crowd at his inauguration. He claimed to have seen a report
this morning claiming turnout of 250,000 for his speech, but the
president said that could not have been true because he saw people
lined up "all the way back to the Washington monument" when he
spoke.
This was a "same old Trump" moment, displaying one of his most
worrisome traits, one
noted
during the campaign: he's obsessed with
crowd numbers, applause, TV ratings. Trump's self-aggrandizement
combined with his thin skin is
notable, even for a politician.
As Boehm and
Patterico
note, this obsession leaked into last evening's press conference
with Sean Spicer, who … well, let's turn it over to this guy:
Banner start for the Trump administration: An inaugural
press conference that featured a flagrant, jaw-dropping lie and no
questions.
But (unless I've missed something) all the Kristallnacht-style
violence and overheated rhetoric is still coming from the other
side. So that's something. Although that "something" is far from
reassuring.
Inspired by
Jay
Nordlinger: fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, reactionaries (like
me)
gotta react. So:
Gee, I wonder whether
Robert
Higgs liked the Inaugural Address?
[…]
I would rank
it among the very worst political speeches I have ever had the
displeasure to hear. Its recipe seems to have been: combine three
parts mercantilist fallacies, three parts offensive nationalist
bombast, and four parts sheer populist hot air about how great the
American people are and how great they will soon be again, thanks to
Trump. Serve accompanied by half-hearted applause from the assembled
members of the political criminal class. All in all, simply an
appalling performance, even by the abysmally low standards
applicable to such egregious ceremonies.
Before the Republican convention, I had this thought: that Trump’s
acceptance speech would be artful, nuanced, pretty — not the true
Trump. Trump with a mask on. I was wrong. It was pure, 100 percent
Trump. Total Trump.
Same with today’s speech. Same with the inaugural address. Exactly
the same.
People waiting for Trump to turn down the thermostat on overheated
political rhetoric should not hold their breath.
Walter
Olson notes missing words from the address:
[…] I wish the speech had used the word “Constitution,” or “law” in a
way beyond the phrase “law enforcement,” or “Framers” or “Founders,”
or “Declaration” or “Amendment” or “individual” or perhaps “rights.”
The one occurrence of “right” was in a passage about “the right of
all nations to put their interests first.”
OK. For other entrail-readers out there,
Aaron
Bandler does some textual analysis and comparisons of Inaugural
Addresses past and present. For our porpoises, the most interesting stat:
It was well-written, well-delivered, and very powerful. He
struck many of the right themes. There was plenty to like about
it.
As did Granite Grok's esteemed founder,
Skip
Murphy:
[…]
My initial takeaway
is that this was the antithesis of Barack Obama’s Presidency. I
think its theme, America First (and screw the references back to
WWII and Charles Limburgh), summarized why people voted for him.
The last 8 years has been the Progressive Period on steroids and
Flyover Country got short shrift.
I'm not sure if the "Limburgh" is a pun. America First has a stinky
history, for sure.
But puns are my thing,
Skip!
We can only take so much reassurance from the plain fact that, while
Our Side's reactions are mixed at best, The Other Side has gone
off-the-rails deranged. The
Daily
Signal provides a photo essay of the vandalism and violence
committed by the forces of Peace, Love, and Understanding. KDW's
tweet is spot on:
I, for one, will never forget the Republican riots that
greeted Barack Obama's election and re-election.
There was a lot of rhetorical bomb-throwing as well.
Stacy
McCain notes Chris Matthews' Reductio ad Hitlerum (with
bonus Mussolini reference). And
Andrew
Stiles at Heat Street noticed:
ABC News’ Chief Foreign Correspondent Terry Moran criticized Donald
Trump’s use of the phrase “America First” in his inaugural address
on Friday, saying the term contained “anti-Semitic” “overtones from
the 1930s.”
I don't believe Trump is antisemitic. But it's stupid to resurrect
"America First" in any context.
Funny word, “adult.” We use the word communicating “maturity” to
describe the most immature forms of expression. “Adult
entertainment” should mean Moby-Dick. But this is a time of
childishness, which, in some ways, should give us hope: If the
Democrats really thought President Trump were going to be some sort
of Hitler figure, they’d be acting differently. They’d be
stockpiling firearms and that freeze-dried apocalypse lasagna
they’re always peddling on talk radio, or looking very closely at
the real-estate listings in Zurich or Montreal. They would be
acting like adults.
In reality, they are doing the opposite.
If you must Read only one Whole Thing today, make it that one.
I
read
and enjoyed Jason Brennan's book Against Democracy, which
argued that there was little to recommend investing so much
political power to the thoughtless and irresponsible masses. So I
also enjoyed this Bleeding Hearts Libertarians post where he
responds to a critic, one Claire Lehmann:
"Hurting
Low-Information Voters’ Wittle Feelings".
Let’s be clear: Part of my mission is to downgrade the status we
attach to politics. I argue for elitism about politics in the same
way I argue for elitism about plumbing. The average person knows
jack shit about plumbing, but that doesn’t make him an inferior
person. Still, the average person’s opinions on plumbing aren’t
worth much more than the stuff we flush down the pipes. Same goes
for the average person’s opinions on trade policy, immigration
policy, and so on. To have a reasonable point of view requires
knowledge of particular relevant facts (let alone social scientific
knowledge), but we have 65 years of data showing most people lack
awareness or are uninformed about even the most basic relevant
facts. “It hurts my feelings when you say that!” Sorry, precious,
but I ain’t your mommy.
The book makes the same point in more academic prose.
And the Washington Post beclowned itself by labelling David
Gelernter, being considered for Trump's science advisor, as
"fiercely anti-intellectual".
Heatstreet's Ian Miles Cheong
debunks,
while noting Gelernter's political sorta-conservatism.
Regardless of Gelernter’s contentious politics, there’s no way call
him an “anti-intellectual” at face value – unless your definition of
the term only refers to leftist politics in academia. A computer
scientist by trade, and a vocal critic of the academic
establishment, Gelernter might just be the right person for the job.
Note that Gelernter isn't afraid to depart from the conservative
mainstream either.
Here
he notes "the next time a multi-billionaire tech bigshot tells me
how wonderful capitalism is, I’m going to throw up."
Simply put: Don't believe everything you read, especially if
you basically agree with the outfit reporting it and want to believe
whatever moral lesson is being imparted (this goes for Reason
loyalists, too, of course). I write this not as a Trump
supporter or even as a Trump apologist. I would rather that he not
be president of the United States. But he is and much of the media
despises him while a solid chunk will also explain all of his
bullshit moves. In either case, caveat lector, friends: Let the
reader beware. We are entering one of the least-expected and
weirdest episodes in American history and I remain optimistic that
what we are witnessing are the
death throes of a post-war Leviathan that is ideologically
exhausted, financially unsustainable, and wildly unpopular. Almost a
year ago, as the GOP presidential debates got underway, the need for
a new political and cultural operating system, one based one mass
personalization, de-politicization of everyday life, and
self-regulating systems was plain
as day.
Warning: disturbing GIF of Rick Perry at the link.
A stanza I could have added to my
Updating
Niemöller poem a couple days ago:
Then the HHS came for the Little Sisters of the Poor, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a nun.
At NR, James Capretta advocates
Trump undoing the Obamacare mandate that would force religious
institutions to fund "health care" that runs against their
fundamental beliefs. One interesting point:
The Obama administration seemed to have two motives for waging this
entirely unnecessary fight. First, for ideological reasons, it
seemed to want to take the position than any objection to the
provision of free contraceptives was illegitimate and therefore not
worthy of being accommodated. Second, for political reasons, the
Obama administration found it useful to be in a fight over the
provision of free contraception. During the 2012 presidential
campaign, as the proposed rule was rolled out, supporters of
exemptions from it were accused of waging a “war on women.”
A twofer, in other words: soothing an anti-religious ideological
itch, and implementing a cynical political ploy.
Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has aroused
much lefty ire for her support for educational choice. "Unqualified"
is the cri de cœur. So I got a chuckle (albeit heavily tinged with
bitterness) at the WSJ article:
"Student
Debt Payback Far Worse Than Believed".
When The Wall Street Journal analyzed the new numbers, the data
revealed that the Department previously had inflated the repayment
rates for 99.8% of all colleges and trade schools in the country.
An Department of Education spokesdroid blamed the previous misreporting on a "technical programming
error." No doubt adding, in a whiny voice: Math is hard!
This is what the Ed Dept does when the qualified people are
in charge. I'm pretty sure Betsy would be an improvement.
Apparently The American Interest website allows non-subscribers only
one free article per month. Unless you're familiar with cookie
surgery. But whether you are or not, I suggest you spend it on Elliot A. Cohen's
"Truth
in the Age of Trump". Cohen notes, correctly, that conservatives
(which I am, around half the time) have a special responsibility to call out
Trump on his lies. And, make no mistake, Trump will be a target-rich
environment:
Trump lies because it is in his nature to lie. One suspects that
there is nothing inside this man that quivers, however slightly, at
an untruth.
It is not uncommon for
politicians, to a greater extent than most people, to believe what
they want to believe, or to change their take on reality depending
on what is convenient for them. With Trump, however, this will to
believe is pathological: his psyche is so completely besotted by
Trump that there is no room for anything, or anybody else.
Trump is pissing off "the right people". We can take whatever
comfort we can from that. It's fun and somewhat useful to
hoist
those folks on their own petards.
But—I've said this
before—schadenfreude is not something on which
you want to anchor your
intellectual life.
On Jan. 3, outgoing Attorney General Loretta Lynch secretly signed
an order directing the National Security Agency — America's
60,000-person-strong domestic spying apparatus — to make available
raw spying data to all other federal intelligence agencies, which
then can pass it on to their counterparts in foreign countries and
in the 50 states upon request. She did so, she claimed, for
administrative convenience. Yet in doing this, she violated basic
constitutional principles that were erected centuries ago to prevent
just what she did.
Yeah, bad idea. There are a lot of Obama decrees that Trump could
un-decree, but I fear this won't be one of them.
Ever wonder why liberals just love to set terrorists free? Find out
at the New York Post, where Bob McManus reveals
"Why
liberals just love to set terrorists free". The occasion is
(1) Obama's commutation of the life sentence of Puerto Rican
nationalist-terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera, and (2) NY Governor Andrew
Cuomo's early release of Weather Underground conspirator Judith
Clark. Both with body counts to their credit. Why?
To wit, in Progressiveland, some lives matter more than others; that
dead and maimed cops and unlucky bystanders matter less than justly
convicted and incarcerated radicals — and that in the final analysis
benevolent government is meant to stand with the bad guys. (And
gals, as the case may be. Isn’t everybody a victim these days?)
Clark and Rivera should have been left to rot. Maybe sharing a cell
with Bradley/"Chelsea" Manning.
Megan
McArdle discusses the Obamacare "death spiral", worthwhile
reading as Trump and Congress fumble their way through "repeal and
replace". Megan is pessimistic about that process:
In a normal administration, we could make at least some broad
predictions about where health-insurance policy was likely to end up
in six months. But at this point, any number of wildly divergent
scenarios seems possible. Congress could repeal the whole thing --
or just the subsidies and the individual mandate. This would
unquestionably send the market into a death spiral.
The big unknown is just how much of a loose cannon Trump is going to
be. That uncertainty is itself contributory to possible disaster.
The company in question is Zimmer Biomet, which makes knee and hip
implants.
Power
Line notes the problem with the alleged timeline, credited
to the Trump transition team:
Why this is a non-issue: (a) the account (and the associated
purchase) was broker-directed, not directed by Dr. Price; (b) the
extremely small purchase of Biomet was part of a larger portfolio
rebalancing of Dr. Price’s portfolio (which involved the sale and
purchase of dozens of stocks in a wide variety of sectors – again
directed and chosen by the broker); (c) Dr. Price did not become
aware of the stock purchase until 4/4/16 (as noted in the timeline)
– a date well after the bill in question in the CNN story was
introduced; and (d) Dr. Price was engaged on the general issues
involved in this legislation dating back to 2015 (as described
below), including putting out a Dear Colleague letter to that effect
in September 2015.
[…] the Zimmer Biomet purchase was made by Mr. Price’s Morgan Stanley
broker and became known to him only for financial-disclosure
compliance. The broker bought 26 shares whose total value has risen
by about $300 in the months since. If Mr. Price really is
self-dealing, he’s doing a lousy job.
The WSJ recommends that all elected pols, Democrat and
Republican, direct their stock investment into index funds. (That's a
decent idea for anyone, by the way.)
And your tweet du jour, on the Supreme Court case on whether the
Asian-American band "The Slants" can be denied a trademark on their
name because of "disparagement":
This is a make-or-break case for my new microbrew brand
Your Mom Is A Whore https://t.co/oVLUdIOm94
In honor of the upcoming Trump Administration, some overly dramatic friends have been
posting the
famous
poem
by anti-Nazi German Pastor Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Because Trump is Hitler, you see.
But it got me thinking about what a more honest, updated version would
look like. And so:
First the
FEC
came for Citizens United
, and I did not speak out—
Because I did not want to defend an anti-Hillary movie.
Then the
IRS
came for Tea Party
groups, and I did not speak out—
Because those teabaggers irritated me.
Then the authorities came for
Nakoula
Basseley Nakoula, and I did not speak out—
Because he was a convenient scapegoat for Benghazi.
Then the DOJ came for
a
Fox News correspondent, and I did not speak out—
Because, hey, Fox News.
Then the social network mob came after
Brendan
Eich, and I did not speak out—
Because I did not agree with him.
Then Donald Trump got elected, and I'm now really concerned about arbitrary abuses of power—
And all these people are just laughing at me!
Obviously, I could have added more verses.
Disclaimer: despite the "then"s, I didn't bother to put things in
chronological order.
True story: I was doing the
acrostic
in the Saturday WSJ, and one clue was:
Grammy-winning
singer whose career
began in the Cotton
Club chorus line in
1933 (2 wds.)
Nine letters. Hm. An older African-American woman, obviously. Eartha
Kitt? Maybe, but the letters didn't fit well into the grid.
Oh, well, let's think about it…
But later that day, I was reading a book I got from the library,
The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves,
Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy. And there on page
129 was a story about Steve Allen getting hate mail from a bigot because
Allen had dared to kiss a black woman on the cheek
after her performance on his 1950s TV show.
The woman: Lena Horne. Hey! Where did I put that puzzle?
Coincidences can be … pretty coincidental sometimes.
Kevin D. Williamson offers a
remedy
to all those oleaginous Obama flacks deeming his tenure to be
scandal-free. The VA? Spying on the press? Weaponizing the IRS and
the BATF? …
It is one thing to have a degenerate president. It is something else
— something far worse — to have a degenerate government. Barack
Obama may have spent the past eight years as sober as a Sunday
morning (his main vice, we are told, is sneaking cigarettes) and
straight as a No. 2 pencil, but he leaves behind a government that
is perverted.
… something the MSM reported as little as possible, and has now
memory-holed.
In New
Hampshire, those who commit rape or sexual abuse without witnesses
present could be all but guaranteed to get away with it under a new
proposal from state Rep. William Marsh (R-District 8). The measure,
House Bill
106, stipulates "that a victim's testimony in a sexual assault
case shall require corroboration" when the defendant has no prior
sexual-assault convictions. It does not elaborate about what kind of
corroboration would be sufficient.
As the article notes, Marsh's bill would require a higher
standard of proof for sexual assault than exists for other violent
crimes.
Meanwhile, the much-ballyhooed "Women’s March on Washington", should
more properly be renamed "Some Women's". Katrina Trinko at the
Daily Signal:
"Once
Again, Feminists Silence Pro-Life Women"
The Women’s March on Washington, scheduled to occur the day after
President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, had listed a pro-life
group, New Wave Feminists, as a partner organization. After The
Atlantic highlighted the group’s participation as a
partner in the march, the Women’s March took the group off the list,
saying its inclusion had been an “error.”
In any case, this is all happening against a background of what is
indeed an unspoken calamity for the media, Lewis, his ideological
cohorts, and whoever it is investing all this money (Soros, et al.).
Liberalism and progressivism are dead. They're out of ideas. That's
the untold story behind the failure of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
She had no plan to run on because there is no longer a
liberal-progressive plan to have, one that works anyway. There was
no longer a there there. Trump won because of that, even with all
those forces aligned against him.
"Out of ideas." Exactly. These days, it's all about the accumulation of political power.
Speaking of which, my own CongressCritter/Toothache has announced
where she will be during the Inauguration:
Instead of going to the Inauguration, I'll go to religious
services to pray for all of our leaders and people, then will serve my
district.
Steely
Dan once dreamed about a time "when the sidewalks are safe
for the little guy". Now that I've taken on dog-walking chores, I'm
hoping the sidewalks are safe for the big geezer. It's hip-breaking
season in New Hampshire!
We slag on the New York Times a lot, and deservedly so. But
this is pretty neat:
"You
Draw It: What Got Better or
Worse During Obama’s Presidency". You are invited to "draw your
guesses" on a number of charts "to
see if you’re as smart as you think you are." Who could resist a
challenge like that?
Unfortunately there's no scoring, but I think I did OK. It's fun,
try it out, see how well your educated guesses match up with
reality.
Shaub noted that government employees are prohibited from "Endorsing any product,
service, or company".
Fine. It's a good thing Trump isn't a government employee yet.
Still, Geraghty asks:
Is it an ethically problematic area when a president or
president-elect starts touting a particular company? Sure. But how
different is “Buy L. L. Bean” from Obama heading to the factory of a
soon-to-be-defunct solar-panel manufacturer and declaring, “It’s here that companies like
Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous
future.” That’s not an endorsement?
Whatever. Nary a peep from the Ethics cops at the time, though.
Geraghty runs through a few more examples, and requests a clearer
standard than “it’s bad when the presidents I don’t like do it but
okay when the ones I do like do the same.”
You can't swing a dead cat these days without hitting someone who
has made fun of congressional Republicans for not having a plan to
replace Obamacare. And the critics are right: Republicans don't have
a plan. They have
a whole bunch of plans. House Speaker Paul Ryan has
one. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has another.
HHS nominee Tom Price not only has a plan, he has a bill:
The Empowering Patients First Act. The trouble is that Republicans
haven't collated all those plans into one single, omnibus
proposal.
Hinkle has some good ideas. The GOP, earning its "Stupid Party"
moniker, will probably ignore them.
The funny bit for us Granite Staters: our state's senior Senator,
Jeanne Shaheen, owns three of the ten. Example:
8. New Hampshire senator Jeanne Shaheen asked [Secretary of State
nominee Rex] Tillerson, “In your
view, is it helpful to suggest that as Americans we should be afraid
of Muslims?”
No indication of how much Tillerson's eyes rolled at that point.
Just
a few days
ago, I incredulously speculated that of the four women in NH's Congressional
delegation, Shaheen seemed like "the smart one". Now it's looking
more like a race to the bottom.
The gap between the super-rich and the poorest half of the global
population is starker than previously thought, with just eight men,
including Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, owning as much wealth as
3.6 billion people, according to an analysis by Oxfam released
Monday.
But the article's headline turns that claim into:
Half of the World’s Wealth Is in the Hands of Just Eight Men, Study
Says
Prof Mankiw notes, gently:
Of course, this conclusion does not follow from the fact reported in
the story and is not even close to being true.
Deeming this to be "careless" is overly diplomatic. In the MSM, such
carelessness only seems to work in one political direction.
Our nearly-annual commentary on the MLK celebration at the
University Near Here is
here.
Note that the actual festivities don't take place for another month.
Since I wrote that, the U has added
more
events, taking place February 1-22. Don't (for example) miss Mr. Ken Nwadike
and his "Free Hugs Project"! Although Mr. Nwadike's politics
are a bit too
predictably
tedious, still … free hugs!
Kevin D. Williamson gets a
predictably
amusing column out of NPR editor Marilyn Geewax's dark
implication that HHS Secretary-to-be Tom Price was pro-cancer
because he failed to clap sufficiently at the proper point in Obama's last State of the
Union Address.
Applause was a serious business in the Soviet
Union, as it is in Cuba, as it is in Venezuela, as it is in all
unfree societies and at our own State of the Union address, which is
modeled on the ex cathedra
speeches of unfree societies. The less free you are, the more
you are obliged to applaud. Joseph Stalin’s pronouncements were
greeted with perfervid applause, which would continue, rapturously —
no one dared stop — until Stalin himself would order its
cessation.
"Perfervid." Heh. (My vim spellchecker is flagging that for a
possible misspelling, but, c'mon vim,
its a
perfectly cromulent word.)
The first shot across the bow appeared in the November 8 Journal of the American Medical
Association, where esteemed Stanford University health
economist Victor Fuchs published a paper on the problem of
life expectancy in the black community. Near the end of his
lamentation, Fuchs asserts that increasing life expectancy in the
black community “depends more on public health measures such as gun
control than on medical care.” The second shot came with the release
of the January issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, which has four
papers and an editorial devoted to firearms violence, with a heavy
emphasis on suicide prevention, which would benefit whites much more
than it would the black community.
Public health initiatives were once about clean water and polio
shots, but activists increasingly use "public health"
to justify controlling
people "for their own good".
It would be difficult to find a better example of everything that's
wrong with education in America: a Maryland public school fired the
woman who ran its Twitter account because she corrected a student's
spelling.
As she was escorted from the building, her co-workers consoled/advised:
"Forget it, Katie. It's Frederick."
Andrew
Klavan manages to capture my own feelings about the current
political climate.
Look, I don't care if the Trump fan-bots rail against me, Trump is
an unreliable chap, to put it mildly. He doesn't know what he
doesn't know and he throws away his promises too easily and a lot of
his instincts are leftist in the worst way. Everything he's done so
far could be scuttled on the rock of his personality.
But that hasn't happened yet and every day is another day. And
today, after eight years of a dishonest, undemocratic, anti-American
scold in the White House, I am feeling gleeful. Almost pretty. Okay,
gleeful.
Andrew's optimism/pessimism ratio is higher than mine, but
otherwise: yeah.
Those painful Chevy commercials assure us that the folks oohing and
aahing about their cars and trucks are "Real People. Not Actors."
I wonder how actors feel about the implication that they're not real
people? Pretty bad, I bet.
At Reason, Nick Gillespie has a
long
and thoughtful post about John Lewis's remark that he doesn't
see Trump "as a legitimate president."
I write as a #NeverTrumper (I voted for Gary Johnson), but I find
Lewis's comments and broader attempts not simply to disagree with
political opponents but to delegitimate them troubling for several
reasons.
First, they are simply a continuation of a tedious, decades-long
unwillingness by losers to acknowledge the basic rules of the very
game they have rigged. Remember when George W. Bush was not
"elected" but "selected" in 2000? Listen closely any time someone
from The Nation shows up on MSNBC and there's a good chance that'll
still come up.
To use a different metaphor: politics is a rhetorical arms race that both
parties keep escalating. It's hard to see how this ends well.
Keokuk, Iowa is stocked with chic diners and many are open late.
Sometimes you start shopping for later and you ask the trusty, old
cell: “Where can I buy organic corn and chickens in Iowa?” And then
you realize it would be easier to let a professional handle dinner.
The article seems to have been generated by some sort of Mad Libs
algorithm, but the designer didn't know English very well.
But in any case: Keokuk chefs, you can't have our motto!
Peeve of the day: when did it become
de rigueur for ensemble crime/action shows to set aside long stretches of
touchy-feely interactions between members of the "team" of good guys?
I'm looking at you, Hawaii Five-O. I like Masi Oka, and his
character Max, as much as the next guy. But his farewell at the end of
last night's episode was interminable and dramatically pointless.
Maybe the point is to show the characters as "human", with "feelings"?
Sigh. Fine.
But can't you do it by weaving it into the story? Preferably
while there are chases, gunplay, and explosions going on concurrently?
Exception: family dinners on Blue Bloods. Because Tom Selleck.
We can't get enough commentary on Obama's Farewell Address. Charles
C. W. Cooke
muses
on what it shows about Obama's old "hope and change" motto. The
subtext of "change" was always "change we approve of" and
"hope" always implied … "hope we get away with it"?
Cynical as it may be, Obama’s trick is a clever one, for it has
allowed him to cast even his most reactionary instincts as downright
futuristic, and to portray the critics of his agenda as the enemies
of progress per se. On the question of, say, entitlement reform,
this president has been an unabashed champion of the status quo,
whereas Paul Ryan is a radical and a reformer. That, though, doesn’t
fit into Obama’s model. That’s bad change, and bad
change must by rights be conservative. Nod as he might to the
sanctity of democratic control, there has always been something of
the millenarian about Barack Obama. Properly understood, politics is
the process by which free people work out their civic differences
without resorting to arms. In his rhetoric, Obama implies otherwise:
There’s a path toward History, he is fond of contending, and he is
walking straight down the middle line.
One of Trump's better picks: Betsy DeVos for Education. (I'd prefer
someone who would oversee the shutdown of the department, turning
out the lights and locking
the doors on her way out, but that's not going to happen this year.) So,
naturally, she's the one drawing the most nasty flak.
At Reason, Robby Soave
points
the finger
at "teachers unions
and Title IX zealots". In regard to the latter:
Title IX supporters portray their critics as radicals who believe
that every rapist should go free and that every woman is a liar. Of
course, this is not the case. The Education Department's Office for
Civil Rights's (OCR) interpretation of Title IX has come under fire
precisely because OCR has taken a radical position: It
believes that university students accused of sexual misconduct
should be left with very little means of proving their innocence
before poorly trained bureaucrats. It is OCR's opinion—not Congress'
or the Supreme Court's—that federal law requires universities to
investigate wrongdoing in accordance with a definition of sexual
harassment so broad that it threatens academic freedom and free
speech while denying fundamental due process to the accused.
The WSJnotes
that Ms. DeVos "has committed the unpardonable sin of devoting much
of her fortune to helping poor kids escape failing public schools."
Progressives and their media allies have spent the last week
roughing up Mrs. DeVos in preparation for her Senate confirmation
hearing on Tuesday, which will feature the charms of Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders. Liberals claim that Mrs. DeVos, wife of
former Amway president Dick DeVos, is unqualified to lead the
Education Department because she’s never been a teacher.
Yet the same crowd howls that bankers shouldn’t be regulating banks.
Which is it? Managing a bureaucracy isn’t like running a classroom,
though both require a steely resolve. Most Education secretaries
have been former teachers or school superintendents—not that student
test scores are better for it.
Political rhetoric forecast for the coming week: overheated phony
bluster accompanied by periods of brain-freezing insults to our
intelligence.
A Wuppertal judge last Friday upheld a lower court’s 2015 ruling
that German-Palestinians convicted of arson against the city’s
synagogue did so merely to “criticize Israel” and “bring attention
to the Gaza conflict.” Fire damage caused by 31-year-old Mohamad E.,
26-year-old Ismail A. and 20-year-old Mohammad A. (full names
withheld by German authorities) totaled almost $850.
Hey, when I want to criticize Israel, I always go looking for
a synagogue to torch. Who's to say this isn't a First Amendment
protected activity?
Oh, yeah: in another one of his on-my-way-out-the-door-so-who-gives-a-shit
moves, Obama ended a couple of policies that made it easier for
Cubans to escape the Communist hellhole and come to the US.
At Cato, David Bier
deems
that a "mistake".
President Obama is abandoning America’s five decade-old policy
on asylum seekers that guarantees Cubans asylum in the United
States The change comes at
a time when more
Cubans will have arrived at
U.S. borders than at any time since 1980, and it is a major win for
the Cuban regime and opponents of immigration,
both of which oppose Cuban immigration
to the United States. But the sudden reversal is bad policy that
will harm efforts to secure the border and aid the regime most
hostile to human rights in the Western Hemisphere.
I'm not a fan of unrestricted immigration, but I'm fine with making
plenty of exceptions for people seeking liberty. But is Bier
accurate in calling Obama's move a "mistake"?
At the Daily SignalMike
Gonzalez argues that Obama pretty much knew what he was doing:
[…] that’s the thing about Obama: his apparent desire to please the
octogenarian American-hater [Raul Castro] in Havana is only matched by his obvious
disregard for the Cuban people’s legitimate desire for freedom.
He seems to forget that they are trapped inside an authoritarian
military dictatorship. In his announcement he once again said that
“the future of Cuba should be in the hands of the Cuban people”—as
if they lived in Ohio or the south of France.
What Obama can decree, Trump can un-decree, though. It would be nice
if he found some totalitarian dictator to piss off.
Megan
McArdle notes that PEOTUS Trump managed to wipe out $25 billion
of market value in 20 minutes with some of his loose-cannon press conference
remarks on Wednesday.
But those were "Big Pharma" companies, so good luck in getting any
sympathetic attention.
Megan—I call her Megan—debunks the notion that there's some basic
magic in "price negotiation" that will lower
consumer drug prices. You have to look at the reality of bargaining power.
That bargaining power does not come from sheer size. America’s large
health insurers and pharmaceutical
benefit managers each cover more people than, say, Norway. These
companies -- which also cover a lot of Medicare and Medicaid
beneficiaries -- negotiate quite fiercely on drug prices, because
every dollar they shave off the price is either a dollar in their
pocket, or a dollar of savings they can shave off their own prices,
thus giving them an advantage over their competitors.
Negotiators need to be willing to not pay for expensive
drugs. But, Megan notes, that's less likely to happen in the US.
And finally, Granite Geek (and Concord Monitor reporter) David Brooks
tells
the story of NH legislative efforts to remove "bonding and
licensing" regulations for selling Bitcoins. Which is kind of
interesting in itself but I liked this bit:
* If you’re a reporter is New Hampshire, you get really
tired of hearing people intone “As it says on the license plate,
Live Free or Die!” to support any point of view about anything.
Heh. But I doubt that. And I enjoy living in a state where license plate
words can be
used to support some point of view. Unlike, say,
"Lobster"
in Maine. That's not going to be a Bruce Willis movie any time soon.
Obama loves to conflate progressivism and patriotism, pitting the
forces of decency and empathy—his own—against the self-serving
profiteers and meddling reactionaries who stand in the way. All of
it is swathed in phony optimism.
Barack Obama formally ended his presidency the way he came in,
talking to adoring fans about how lucky we are to have him in our
lives.
And at the WSJ, Richard Beneddetto asks the musical question:
"How
Can We Miss a President Who Won’t Go Away?" Because, unlike most
other ex-Presidents, Obama is sticking around in D.C., at least for
a while. Interesting:
One must go back nearly a century, to Woodrow Wilson, to find
another president who stayed in Washington after leaving office. But
Wilson was too ill to become a political force.
All modern presidents are probably above average on ego, but both
Obama and Trump are outliers.
At NR, Alexandra Desanctis
notes
two tweets from Marilyn Geewax, Senior Business Editor at
National Public Radio:
When it comes to clapping at
#SOTU, @RepTomPrice is resolute:
one of the few who did not applaud the idea of curing
cancer.
Yes, Ms. Geewax thought her year-old tweet was so insightful, she
resurrected it yesterday.
Reader, if you think Price is pro-cancer because he declined to join in the
mindless clapping at a State of the Union speech, congratulations:
you have the policy analysis tools necessary to become an NPR senior editor!
You don't think you need something until you see it: the
"Animal
Fart Database" Yay!
I must quote the entry for "Domesticated Dogs". Do they fart? Yes,
[…]
but often takes blame from nearby hominid, Boston Terriers are
famous for their farting; known to scare selves with their farts
Pun Salad Truth-O-Meter: True!
Maybe I've overdosed on so many pretentious celebrity videos that my
judgment is skewed, but I kind of liked this one:
Looking forward to sharing the following with you:
A
few days ago Pun Salad proclaimed irritation with politicians'
use of "common sense" and "smart" to describe their own policies.
There's a flip side to that: using "extreme" or "extremist" to
deride people or policies you oppose. Nearly always meaningless,
question-begging, and intelligence-insulting.
Which made me wonder about President Obama's
Farewell
Address. Yup:
For the fight against extremism and intolerance and sectarianism and
chauvinism are of a piece with the fight against authoritarianism
and nationalist aggression […]
Call in the airstrikes on Fox News Headquarters!
When Congress is dysfunctional, we should draw our districts to
encourage politicians to cater to common sense and not rigid
extremes.
Yes, a twofer: for "common sense", against "extremes".
That last bit was Obama's advocacy of "redistricting reform".
Comments
Kevin
D. Williamson:
In his final presidential speech, Obama proposed redrawing
congressional districts to make them less partisan. Who in his right
mind would trust the people who weaponized the IRS — and who are at
this very moment using prosecutors’ offices across the country to
try to criminalize global-warming dissent — to do that in a fair and
honest way? He proposed new campaign-finance rules that would
purportedly reduce the role of money in politics, but who in his
right mind would trust him and his colleagues — Lois Lerner, Loretta
Lynch, Harry Reid — to oversee such regulations?
Since I am in my right mind, I would not. (Nor would I trust Trump
and his colleagues, but they're not the ones with the
proposals.)
Arizona Senator Flake has issued this year's
Wastebook:
"50 examples of egregious government spending including fish on a
treadmill, loans repaid in peanuts, and a Desperate
Housewives-watching computer". See if you can get to number ten
before smashing your computer screen against the wall.
Number One is "Spaceport to Nowhere":
A rarely used rocket launch facility in Alaska that was constructed
as part of an illegal
kickback scheme between midlevel Department of Defense (DOD)
employees and contractors,
is being kept in business by a “sole source” contract awarded by the
Missile Defense Agency
(MDA) that “could total up to $80.4 million.”
There have been no launches since 2014, and that one blew up.
When you throw in [with depressed politicos]
folks who are terrified that global warming is
about to swamp the Midwest along with good old-fashioned religious
end-timers, just about everybody is convinced these are the last
days of modern Rome. Against such a background, Poulos' The Art
of Being Free isn't just a pleasant diversion from the
dog-eat-dog world of 24/7 news and partisan bickering. It's an
all-you-can-eat buffet for the mind, groaning with allusions to
history, political science, economics, literature, and pop culture:
Socrates, Nietzche, Netflix, The Smashing Pumpkins, Seinfeld,
Stendahl, and Scooby-Doo all make appearances in this essay about
getting beyond superficial politics to the parts of life that
really matter. And along the way, he charts a path that
just might lead back to politics that will help us all be free to
become whomever we think we want to be.
Definitely going on the things-to-read list.
Samantha Harris of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education, is incredulous about people trying to make Betsy DeVos's
contributions to FIRE an issue.
Honestly, do these ppl truly not see the problem with
making it easier to discipline "accused," rather than
"guilty," people? pic.twitter.com/IKdCuZDtsm
Time Requirements: Don’t let the fact that there
are only 10 episodes of the show in its first three seasons fool
you. Because each episode is a 90-minute movie, those three seasons
equal a total of 900 hours of viewing. [...]
Once you've started slapping the "fake news" label on anything
that looks like sloppy reporting or ideological bias in the
alternative press, you've pretty much guaranteed that people will
start flinging it when they think they've spotted sloppy reporting
or ideological bias in the mainstream. No media-machine efficiency
was required. Ask the right who taught them how to do this stuff,
and they can look up from their bed and tell you: You, all
right? I learned it by watching you!
Kids, if the reference in that last bit isn't obvious to you, please
click over to have your horizons widened a bit.
Speaking of fake news, our state's new US Senator, Maggie Hassan,
has only been on the job a few days, and already she's been falling for the
"Russkies hacked the Vermont power grid" yarn, as reported both by
Granite
Grok and the
Daily
Caller.
Think on it: of the four people in NH's Congressional
delegation, it seems that Jeanne Shaheen is the smart one.
New Hampshire Sen. Maggie Hassan (D.) joined the ranks of Senate
Democrats attacking Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos, despite
her own support for charter schools as governor.
If you want to keep the teacher-union support, I suppose you
have to alter your positions accordingly.
Ann Althouse
shakes
her head in wonderment
at a different line of
attack on Betsy DeVos: she contributed to FIRE, the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education! Prof A quotes the Politico
article:
“Ms. DeVos must fully explain whether she supports the radical view
that it should be more difficult for campus sexual assault victims
to receive justice,” said Sen. Bob Casey, (D-Pa.), a member of the
[Health, Education, Labor & Pensions] Committee.
She wonders (as do I): "When did due process become a 'radical
view'?!"
I’ll bet this story falls apart faster than a Dan Rather memo on
national guard service.
I'm kind of irritated that all the journalistic malpractice devoted
to smearing Trump and delegitimizing the results of the election
are… making me sympathize with Trump! I have to keep
reminding myself that he's more of a petulant loose-cannon jerk than you really
want the US President to be.
It’s all well and good that Joe Biden is
now lecturing us that “the worst sin of all is the
abuse of power,” but where the hell was he—and where were you—for
the past eight years, when the president was starting wars without
Congressional authorization, passing major legislation with zero
votes from the opposing party, and ruling almost exclusively through
executive orders and actions?
Perhaps when someone asks Trump where he got the idea he could act
this way, he could say "You, all right? I learned it by…".
Oh, wait, we already used that today.
A recently
published study in the Journal of Public Economics concludes
that the attractiveness of a candidate does correlate with their
politics. They find that politicians on the right are more good
looking in Europe, the United States and Australia.
OK, but are the results significant if you toss out Mitt Romney?
Kevin D. Williamson asks the musical question:
"When
Do Deficits Matter?" According to NYT writer/weathervane
Paul Krugman, it's…
Like homelessness and military casualties, U.S. government deficits
are an issue that bleep into visibility on the progressive radar
almost exclusively during Republican presidencies. On October 23,
2016, Professor Krugman wrote that the “debt scolds should be
ignored,” and that Hillary Rodham Clinton, then presumed to be the
next president, should engage in “years of deficit-financed
infrastructure spending, if she can.” A grand total of 78 days
later, Professor Krugman declared, “Deficits matter again.”
As the article makes clear, Krugman was once a respectable
economist. These days, his economics takes a back seat to politics.
Wondering why America hates Hollywood, or should? Fortunately, there's Paul
Mirengoff to tell us
"Why
America Hates Hollywood, or Should". Concentrating on Meryl
Streep's widely noted speech at the Golden Globe Awards ceremony:
[…]
David French points out that during the same event in which
Streep condemned Trump, she applauded a man who did something far
worse. She, and most of the other assembled Hollywood worthies,
applauded Roman Polanski who received a Golden Globe award.
Anyone need reminding why that's problematic should click over.
Unlike the late Nat Hentoff,
Meryl tailors her condemnations and celebrations
to fit in with those of her tribe.
I can't help but think, however, that in all probability
Linda
from The Deer Hunter would have been a Trump voter last year.
When will Hollywood stop doubling down on its bubble? An
entertainer’s job is to entertain. A steady diet of smug lectures,
or bitterly partisan jokes, does neither — certainly not for the
average Joe or Jane looking for an evening of escape.
I, for one, welcome
next few years of unremitting partisan rancor from the
entertainment/news media! Daily
Show-style political attacks coming to a sitcom near you!
Newspaper restaurant reviews will rate based on owners' political
contributions!
Miss Sloane II: You Will Be Made to Care! Bring! It! On!
Continuing in the Hollywood vein…
We hear all the time about one big tech company or another meekly
giving in to the demands of one totalitarian government or another.
So it's nice to hear about one website saying "Shove it." And that's
the
Internet Movie Database.
A full week into 2017, IMDb has not only chosen to ignore the new
law, but has also filed a lawsuit in a bid to stop California from
implementing Assembly Bill No. 1687. The reason? IMDb believes that
the law is a violation of the First Amendment and it says the state
has "chosen instead to chill free speech and to undermine access to
factual information of public interest" rather than trying to tackle
age-discrimination in a more meaningful way.
Granted, it's just California. But still, a welcome move. Where does
Meryl Streep stand on this?
Planned Parenthood is an industrial-scale baby abattoir responsible
for more than 300,000 American deaths annually and a degradation of
human dignity on the order of Josef Mengele, and the urgent issue of
the day is whether it should be privately or publicly funded.
Democrats are for the latter. Republicans are of the more modest
opinion that if you want to slaughter your child in utero, you
should have to pay for it yourself. That is what would happen if
congressional Republicans succeed in defunding Planned Parenthood,
which they currently plan to do as part of the process of
dismantling President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Government funding of PP is a symbol, one that the pro-abortion
crowd would desperately like to keep in place.
Executive summary:
it was fine when we were calling out fake news sites. But
then those icky conservatives starting calling us out for
our errors and biases using the term. Hence, "tainted".
Concord Monitor reporter David Brooks writes an obituary for
a Wikipedia article:
"chess-related
deaths". It's a surprisingly violence-inducing game, and it makes one
wonder why Meryl Streep hasn't called for its prohibition.
Number three in P. J. Tracy's Monkeewrench series, which my
sister recommended. Summary: I didn't like it as much as the first two.
It's clear from Chapter One that something nasty is going on in the
remote village of Four Corners, Wisconsin. A milk truck overturns
because of careless driving on a bumpy road, and… hey, wait a minute,
that's not milk at all!
Also, down the road a bit (sorry, my Wisconsin geography is weak), a kid
diving to retrieve his beer in an abandoned quarry is startled to find…
eek, corpses!
Into all this drops three women: Grace and Annie from the Monkeewrench
software company, and Sharon, a cop from the first book, now
an FBI agent. They're on their way to Green Bay, but have taken a detour
to view an unspecified attraction. (Spoiler:
this.) But their
car breaks down, they need to walk for help, they witness brutal
murders, they get chased by the same guys,…
It's an interesting departure from the first two books in the series,
which were murder mysteries, a tad gimmicky, but that's OK. This one is
more like Lee Child, a massive conspiracy threatening the lives of
thousands. (But also gimmicky, because the pulse-pounding climax depends
mightily on the sheer coincidence of genius hackers just happening to be
in the area when needed.)
The writing style seems to have taken a turn for the worse here, too,
with pointless floweriness cropping up throughout, when you just want to
say "get on with it already." But I'll keep reading the series.
Given the stakes in the global-warming debate — trillions of dollars
in economic costs and/or climatic catastrophe — conservatives should
not simply dismiss the Copenhagen talks, even though the revelations
of Climategate may tempt us to do so. The debate is polarized, and
it is natural to throw one’s lot in with one camp or another — The
World Is Ending vs. Global Warming Is a Hoax — but there are more
than two propositions to consider. And those propositions are not
mostly scientific in character, but political.
Kevin—I call him Kevin—goes through Propositions One through Six, in
"increasing order of unlikeliness".
All I ask: a "solution" that doesn't make us worse off than the problem.
Nat Hentoff died, one of those rare birds who came to his opinions
as an individual, not to get along as a member of one tribe or
another. There are a lot of tributes out there, but I liked
Jesse
Walker's.
Hentoff was less likely to be called a liberal later in life.
That's partly because his brand of free-speech absolutism was
growing less common on the left, and it's partly because of his heterodoxy
on abortion. (Hentoff was pro-life, arguing against abortion on
the same grounds that he argued against capital punishment and war.
Or, at least, against some wars—he eventually rended his
seamless garment to support interventions in Rwanda and Iraq.) But
you couldn't really cast him as a man of the right either: Besides
his intense distrust for the police agencies that conservatives tend
to revere, he was a longtime democratic socialist who held onto a
lot of his leftist economic ideas in old age. It's not even quite
right to call him an ACLU liberal, because he kept butting heads
with the ACLU. (The nation's most prominent civil libertarian
organization wasn't always civil libertarian enough for him.) Best
to think of him as his own man, with at least a couple of views to
offend pretty much anyone.
That's a good goal to shoot for. If I haven't offended you yet, keep
reading.
James Lileks' The Bleat is a weekday stop for me, a
tour of his quick and witty observations on life in Minneapolis.
Today's
entry contains his reaction to Rogue One.
The Empire continues to make questionable tactical decisions, such
as poorly-defended access points to entire planets, easily
recognizable data-centers, failure to observe sensible distances
between Star Destroyers, and the Rebel Alliance continues to burn
through their X-Wing fleet at an alarming rate; it’s a wonder they
had anything left for that run on the Death Star. But these were
passing thoughts that didn’t interfere with the enjoyment, and the
gratitude.
As many folks have observed over the years: there's no OSHA in the
Galactic Empire.
They have a
website, where it's
put more delicately: "An artisanal process whereby the finest
Arabica coffee cherries have been naturally refined by rescued
elephants."
35 grams of Black Ivory coffee will set you back 73 US
Dollars. (But free shipping.)
Intriguing! But sticking with Folgers here at Pun Salad Manor,
thankyouverymuch.
I'd had this 2011 book on my to-be-read list for years, but it kept
going on "course reserve" lists at the University Near Here library. I
finally broke down and ordered the Kindle version from Amazon. It's very
good. The author, Daniel Kahneman, won the 2002 Nobel Economics Prize
for his research into how humans make decisions, and that research, and
more, is reported here. It is a wonderfully written and accessible book;
it's clear that Kahneman really wants to tell you interesting stuff, and
he wants you to understand it.
It's the kind of book that makes you think Big Thoughts. Like:
Darwinists tell us, and they're probably right, that our brains are
the product of eons of evolution; for nearly that entire time,
that meant the basics: figuring out
how to reproduce, get food,
try to avoid becoming food, defend against the elements,
etc. But somehow that brain, developed for brute survival, has in a
relative eyeblink in time, allowed us to plumb the secrets of the
universe, develop all sorts of gadgets, construct art, language, Major
League Baseball …
How could that possibly have happened? It's enough to make one
believe in Intelligent Design!
But, as Kahneman demonstrates convincingly, our "intelligence" is quirky
enough to argue against that thesis too. If God designed our brains to
act this way, He's open to a lot of criticism. They work OK, but not
that OK.
Anyway: the book discusses (as you might guess from the title) two
distinct modes of thinking. Kahneman nearly anthropomorphizes these
modes, calling them "System 1" and "System 2". (He's careful to note
that this is a shorthand for what's actually going on.)
System 1 is the fast thinker. It's responsible for most of the
activities we carry out "without thinking" (although it is
thinking). It is impulsive, liable to reach conclusions on the basis of
incomplete information, therefore gullible, and does a decent job most of the time. Its
operations are mostly subconscious.
But it's overmatched on any issue that requires deliberation,
calculation, or other higher reasoning, for which
it calls in "slow" System 2. Problem is, System 2 is—Kahneman's own
word—lazy. (I think this implies that the brain areas involved in
System 2 thought gobble up a lot more energy; evolution-wise, it makes sense to use
System 2 only when absolutely needed.)
Now, if you're a researcher into how this all works, as Kahneman is,
your methods involve mostly trickery: lead System 1 into error, see
under what conditions System 2 is invoked, see when System 2 rolls over,
goes back to sleep, tells System 1 to just deal with it already. It
turns out to be absurdly easy to lead our brains into fallacy, bias, and
irrational choices. Kahneman tells these tales with a lot of sly
humor—which makes sense, because such mental errors seem to be the
source of a lot of comedy as well. Some of Kahneman's humor is
refreshingly self-deprecating; he's not shy about discussing the
episodes in which he was led into fallacy.
He details a large variety of those biases and how they manifest
themselves in everyday life. Another "big idea": most entrepreneurship
and innovation is, strictly speaking, based in fallacious optimism about
how things could turn out. Most entrepreneurs crash and burn, most
innovations aren't necessary, many new businesses fail, etc. But the
ones that do prevail, against the odds, drive economic
prosperity.
So we may be rich, not in spite of our flawed mental processes,
but because of our flawed mental processes. Hm.
Now it's not all wonderful. Kahneman veers into the political in his
final chapters, arguing that Research Shows the untenability of the
"Chicago School" economics as explicated by (say) fellow Nobelist Milton
Friedman. Instead he seems to advocate "libertarian paternalism" like
"Nudge" authors Sunstein and Thaler. I remain skeptical.
Today's pet peeve: labelling your stupid policy
proposals as "common sense" or "smart".
Today's
example:
President Obama advocated for more gun control measures in an
editorial he wrote for the Harvard Law Review on
Thursday.
In a lengthy essay titled “The President’s Role in Advancing
Criminal Justice Reform,” Obama urged the country to “take
commonsense steps to reduce gun violence” while celebrating the
executive orders he has enacted.
The about-to-be-ex President's essay contains multiple occurrences of
"commonsense". (I don't know why he spells it like that.)
"… adopting commonsense measures to keep firearms out of the
hands of those who are a threat to others or themselves …"
"Here are commonsense steps that I am hopeful could be
accomplished in the next few years,…"
"I believe we can take commonsense steps to reduce gun violence
that are consistent with the Second Amendment.…"
"Congress should pass the kinds of commonsense reforms supported
by most of the American people …"
Even more common is "smart":
"… the Department of Justice has made important changes to federal
charging policies, starting first and foremost with the “Smart on
Crime” initiative …"
"… equal justice depends on individualized justice, and smart law
enforcement demands it."
"One promising proposal in my second term was the Smarter Sentencing
Act,…"
"… smarter ways to integrate new technologies, like social media, to
enhance public trust and public safety …"
"A few years ago, the Department of Justice also launched the Smart
on Juvenile Justice Initiative …"
"… I have pushed for reforms that make the criminal justice system
smarter, fairer, and more effective …"
Now, let it be said: it's not just Obama. Or even those on the left.
Everybody wants to be on the side of "common sense".
Everybody wants to be "smart".
But slapping "smart" or "common sense"
into an argument is pointless, dishonest, and lazy:
Pointless because it never adds anything useful to the
discussion;
Dishonest because it's almost never true, it's just there to
sound good and sway the easily gulled;
Lazy because it's not an argument; it's meant to substitute
for an argument that the writer is unwilling, or unable, to make.
Bottom line: don't tell me you're smart, and that your
proposals embody "common sense", show me. I bet you can't.
At Reason,
Baylen
Linnekin notes Congressional efforts to protect us all from the
dangers of…
Last month more than 30 Members of
Congress wrote
a letter to the FDA asking the agency to require makers of non-dairy
milks—including almond, rice, and soy—to stop using the term "milk"
to describe their milk. The congressional letter is ridiculous, and
reeks of a mix of unconstitutional protectionism and
unconstitutional restrictions on free speech.
Leading the effort is Rep. Peter Welch (D-Ben&Jerry's).
A little searching finds
the
referenced letter; NH CongressCritter Ann McLane Kuster signed
on to the ridiculosity. (My own CongressCritter/Toothache, Carol
Shea-Porter, has only been in the job a few days, give her time.)
I like Linnekin's alternate modest proposal: the dairy industry should be
required to label their own product more honestly: not "Milk", but
"Cow Milk". I would go further.
In the interest of providing consumers useful information,
the cartons should replace "milk" with "cow lacteal
secretion, practically free from colostrum". Which is actually
shorter than the
full
legal definition. But I don't want to be unreasonable.
Back in the campaign, Trump issued a list of his possible Supreme
Court picks. On the list was Texas state Supreme Court Justice Don
Willett. That wasn't enough to make me vote Trump.
Yesterday's print WSJ had a funny article: "A Week in the Life
of Justice Don Willett".
ICYMI—
"A Week in the Life of Justice Don
Willett"—in today's print edition of the @WSJ.
I’m probably the tweetingest judge in America, which, admittedly, is
like being the tallest Munchkin in Oz. Americans can debate whether
the judiciary remains government’s “least dangerous branch”
(Hamilton’s description). But “the branch with the costumes” (my
daughter’s description) is certainly the least understood.
Fingers crossed that Trump will keep this promise, in this specific
way.
A team of geniuses has figured out how to get two Google Home devices
to
literally converse with each other. The result is pretty
amusing.
After nearly thirty years' residence at Pun Salad Manor, I've finally
acquired a snow blower. Looks as if I'll get a chance to take it out
later today.
Why now? Mrs. Salad was worried about me keeling over while shovelling. Fine,
honey. But reading through the manual shows the snow blower can kill (or
maim) me
in all sorts of different ways.
So, if this is my last post, you'll know what happened.
Whether it’s dictating to private companies their work-leave
policies, redistributing earnings, put[t]ing the safety of Americans at
risk by ignoring immigration laws, taking over healthcare decisions
from individuals and families, demanding use of public restrooms by
the opposite sex, pushing for violation of Second Amendment rights,
suppressing free speech on college campuses, violating religious
liberty, or telling fellow Americans that they have to pay for
women’s contraception and abortions, this group’s agenda is about
taking power from the individual and private sector, expanding the
role of the Washington in our lives, and increasing dependency on
the state.
Today's Getty pic: women marching in Washington, wondering: "Where is
everyone?"
The "Russia hacked our election" story will peter out and die
someday, I suppose, but today is not that day. The Director of
National Intelligence
released a
declassified
version of their evidence of Russian meddling. Disturbing!
But, as Power Line's John Hinderaker
notes,
the report is long on assertion, short on actual evidence, that
Russia was behind the break-in of John Podesta's e-mail account. Fact
remains: it was an unsophisticated hack that any moderately
talented black-hat could have managed.
But as Hinderaker
also
notes in a separate post, the report is pretty credible in
documenting Russia's history in interference in other areas
of US politics (continuing the tradition of the USSR).
The Russia Today (now "RT") cable channel, for example, put its thumb on
the scale for Trump over Clinton, true enough. But they also
were pro-Obama before that, provided aid to the Occupy movement,
engaged in anti-Diebold voting machine FUD, and are notable in their
anti-fracking propaganda. Hinderaker concludes:
So, while it is pathetically inadequate as support for the claim
that Putin’s regime somehow influenced our 2016 presidential
election, today’s report provides interesting and long-overdue
perspective on Soviet and Russian efforts to influence American
politics through the decades.
We don't get RT at Pun Salad Manor. Sad!
At NR, Andrew
C. McCarthy recommends a new US policy toward the UN: goodbye,
get out, good riddance. Bottom line:
It is not enough to cut off funding from a bad organization. We
should disassociate from that bad organization. We should stop
helping it be a consequential bad organization by denying it
legitimacy. Don’t defund the U.N. Just say, “Go!”
Works for me.
Oh, yeah. The GOP promise to "repeal and replace" Obamacare is
probably going to be a disaster.
Peter
Suderman has been one of the most knowledgeable critics of
Obamacare since it was first proposed, and now he notes:
Republicans have talked about repealing and replacing Obamacare for
years, but it's not clear that many of them ever thought much about
how they would do so or what the consequences might be. At this
point, it's enough to make you wonder whether the GOP really wants
to repeal and replace Obamacare—or simply say they did.
I don't like to keep mindlessly appending "Read the Whole Thing" to
these pointers, it should be obvious, but… really, if you want to understand what's going
on with Obamacare repeal, Read the Whole Thing.
Hey kids, remember when Bernie Sanders stressed that he was a
"democratic socialist", and simply wanted the US to be more
like Denmark? Where they have, like, free college and stuff?
The Danish parliament on Monday passed a bill that will bar students
from taking a second university degree.
They need the money that would have paid for that "free" stuff, and
use it to pay for different "free" stuff.
As Margaret Thatcher
(not
quite, but essentially)
observed: "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out
of other people's money."
Back on
December
27, I blogged the story about Bill Murray getting assisted by
Rochester, NH civilians after a rental car breakdown. I speculated
that it might be fake news at the time.
Guess what?
It
was! Other celebrities getting good-samaritaned by local yokels:
Adam Sandler, Miley Cyrus, Bruce Willis, … And all over the country,
too, not just Rochester.
But I stand by my original position: I really wanted that
story to
be true.
Now, I understand why so many on the left want to force Republicans
to choose between these two statements. They'd like to delegitimize
the democratic validity of Trump's presidency (in much the same way
they did with President George W. Bush) and smear those who don't
join them in this endeavor as unpatriotic Putin-defending lackeys.
Considering their own past and Obama's accommodating attitude toward
the Russians (and the Cubans, the Iranians, Fatah, Hamas and other
illiberal regimes), this seems an uphill battle.
I wonder if there's some way to invest in political double
standards. It's a booming market.
John Ekdahl set off a Twitter storm by idly wondering how
many of his co-journalists knew anyone who owned a pickup. As a
metaphor for the journalistic bubble, this worked great. Kevin D.
Williamson offers his thoughts:
"The
Search for the Real America".
The responses were predictable: The sort of smug progressives who
are proud of their smugness scoffed that pick-ups,
pollution-belching penis-supplements for toothless red-state Bubbas,
are found mainly in the sort of communities where they’d never deign
to set foot; the sort of smug progressives who are ashamed of their
smugness protested that it is a silly question (which it is — that’s
part of the point) and made strained connections with pick-up-owning
childhood friends back home in East Slapbutt; conservatives mainly
said “Har har stupid liberal elites.”
But, really: Read the Whole Thing.
Personal note: as I was musing to my co-workers, friends, and family
about retirement, I said I was gonna get (1) a dog and (2) a pickup.
Because every week I went to the Rollinsford NH "Transfer
Station" (AKA the dump), it seemed that everyone there but me had
both.
Now retired, I did get a dog. He's a sweetheart. And I take him to
the dump with me.
But when I looked at pickup
prices, and thought long and hard about whether I actually needed
one, after decades of not needing one, I wimped out and got a
Subaru Impreza instead.
Speaking of my ex-coworkers, the Portland Press Herald has a
great article touching on one of them:
Marty
England. And there's a Rollinsford connection too.
At the time, Martin England never understood why his father made him
mow the lawns of the old ladies who lived in downtown Rollinsford,
New Hampshire, where England grew up. But whenever the lawns needed
mowing, England’s dad dropped him off with a lawnmower and paid him
for his time.
Marty's now doing good works in North Berwick, Maine, running an "arts
collective"
that helps aspiring kids from rural Maine pursue music
and art by providing instruments, mentoring and incentives." All
while leading a band and keeping his day job at the IT Department of
the University Near Here.
Marty also kept a "Bernie 2016" bumper sticker on the back of his
car way after Bernie's campaign was over. (It may still be there, I
haven't checked lately.) (Update: checked today. Yes, still
there.) So we don't share a lot of political common
ground, but he's a fantastic guy.
When the E-115 was adopted by Mattel as an addition to the Barbie™
product line, it was aimed mainly at girls with a minimum age of 5
years. For this reason the product was given a pink-and-purple case
and the Barbie logo and image were printed on the body. As it was
probably thought that secret writing would not appeal to girls, the
coding/decoding facilities were omitted from the manual.
Nevertheless, these facilities can still be accessed if you know how
to activate them.
The encoding is a weak substitution cipher, but would-be spies have
to start somewhere.
Pet peeve du jour: sites that post huge generic pictures at the
top of each article, forcing you to scroll down to get to content. Maybe
that's impressive on some mobile devices, but to the Rest of Us, it's
just pointless and irritating.
I'm looking at you,
Daily
Signal.
You'll hear it over and over: ohmygod, repealing Obamacare will be
so disruptive!
Don
Boudreaux says all there is to say about that:
I have little respect for those who, when seeking to maintain
interventionist legislation, argue that repeal will be disruptive,
but who, when seeking to implement such legislation, either ignore
or dismiss concerns about the disruption that the legislation will
unleash.
In other double-standard news:
Patterico
notes the eminently predictable partisan weathervane that is the
editorial section of the New York Times on the US Senate
filibuster. History is recited, and the bottom line is:
You could get whiplash trying to follow the way they careen back
and forth between positions — unless you kept their actual
principle in mind: we support whatever helps
Democrats. Then their positions become very easy to
follow.
I like the idea of a filibuster, but it's kind of pointless if it's
only used to obstruct one party.
You may have seen the latest video with a bunch of self-righteous
celebrities urging Congresscritters to oppose, oppose, oppose… oh,
you know who.
At Reason,
Robby
Soave takes it to the dumpster. (I especially like the article's
literate subtitle: "A boot stomping on a human face and muttering
'Dear members of Congress,' forever.")
Too many people in the media and entertainment industries don't seem
to understand that folks hate being treated like morons. I'm not
thrilled about America's choice for president, but I wasn't thrilled
about the other choice, either. I'm supposed to be shamed for not
wanting Hillary Clinton, a key supporter of the disasters in Iraq
and Libya, to fly the plane?
Personal note: I've found some of those celebrities (the ones
I recognize, anyway) have given powerful performances portraying
nuanced, human characters in the past. It somehow makes those
performances even more impressive when you realize they're such
partisan political airheads.
At FEE,
Steven
Horwitz says what needs to be said about Trump's trade policy.
Although his (vague) promises to deregulate many areas of economic
activity are promising, everything else … not so much.
It’s good to hear Trump talk of regulatory relief – every sector
desperately needs this! – but true regulatory relief, as well as
broad economic growth that will benefit all Americans, comes through
the free movement of goods and people. Genuine free trade requires
no new regulations or bureaucracies – in fact, it requires that we
eliminate things like the Ex-Im bank and the intrusive and
rights-violating immigration bureaucracy.
ObMovieQuoteInvocation:
Horwitz, you magificent bastard,
I read your book!
President-elect Trump complains that trade with China is
"one-sided." Does he speak English or what? One-sided trade is like
one-sided triangle: you can say it, but you can't mean (think) it.
Chinese folks deliver goods to Americans (through Walmart, etc.),
and we willingly buy them. The Chinese then invest some of their
proceeds in the United States. Well, I guess that is one-sided --
but wait! They later reap rewards from their successful investments.
ObOrwellQuote: "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
Trump has waged war on clear language for many months.
In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published
two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one
on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the
other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles
were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor’s
note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story
were fiction: The first note was posted a
full two weeks later to the top of the original article;
the other was buried
the following day at the bottom.
Greenwald provides other examples of MSM hyping of scary Russkie stories
detailing how the inevitable corrections and retractions never quite
catch up to the original allegations. It's an important story.
James Taranto did Best of the Web Today for the online
WSJ for many moons, but
yesterday
was the final entry for him; he's moving on to a new position at the
newspaper and James Freeman will be taking over BOTWT. Taranto was
funny and insightful, and he had the philosopher's gift of making
fine distinctions.
He also accepted a few suggested links I thought he'd
find appropriate for the column, which shows… I was going to write
"good taste", but let's not get carried away: it probably just shows we find the same things
amusing, which is not the same thing at all.
Many folks have made the parallel between the "intelligence
community's" last-decade findings on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction"
and the recent allegations about Russia's election-hacking.
Jesse
Walker looks beyond the obvious.
And keep your eye on the ball. Just as focusing on WMDs yielded too
much ground to the argument for war, focusing on Russia's alleged
election antics yields too much ground to Trumpism. We may be
entering an ugly age of paranoid nationalism. If you want to fight
that, you shouldn't put paranoid nationalism at the center of your
critique of the new order.
Good advice. Don't assume there are Russians under the bed,
but (on the other hand) it doesn't hurt to keep checking under the bed.
Suppose that Mr. Trump is your neighbor and that he complains that
the auto mechanic who you regularly hire is from another
neighborhood. So he threatens to have his bodyguards confiscate a
portion of your income until and unless you hire a more-pricey
mechanic from your immediate neighborhood. Would anyone excuse such
unethical – indeed, predatory – behavior? Of course not. So what
is it about such behavior that makes it excusable if it is simply
carried out on a larger scale? Answer: nothing at all. This
behavior, regardless of scale, is that of a thug.
Also, bad economics that will hurt Americans. Twofer!
Matt
Ridley notes that 2017 is the centennial of
Communism-in-practice.
Human beings can be remarkably dense. The practice of bloodletting,
as a medical treatment, persisted despite centuries of abundant
evidence that it did more harm than good. The practice of communism,
or political bloodletting as it should perhaps be known, whose
centenary in the Bolshevik revolution is reached this year, likewise
needs no more tests. It does more harm than good every time.
Nationalised, planned, one-party rule benefits nobody, let alone the
poor.
Nick
Gillespie thanks Gary Johnson, "the best thing in 2016".
Gary wasn't perfect and I still don't really comprehend anything
about that tongue-thing while talking to NBC reporter Kasie Hunt,
who was understandably all like, Get
me the hell out of here. But in the end, Johnson pulled
almost 4.5
million votes (3.3 percent of the total), compared to 1.3
million votes (1 percent) four years ago. Of course, all of us who
voted for Gary Johnson wanted him to do better still, but the world
exists to disappoint us believers in small government.
I'm OK with that, too. It was nice having someone to vote for
without gagging.
Would it be ungenerous to say this is the kind of movie Pixar doesn't
seem to want to make any more? Probably. But I'll add another data point
when Finding Dory shows up this week.
The opening scene is chilling as a young woman on a flimsy boat battles a raging storm
and is washed up, barely alive, on a beach. A cry from a nearby pile
of flotsam (or is it jetsam) reveals… Kubo! A baby down to one eye.
It's clear that they've just
barely escaped a perilous situation.
Skip forward a few years. Kubo and his mother live in a hidden cave
above a small town of friendly folk. Mom is near-catatonic, and Kubo
makes ends meet by showing off his magical origami talents to throngs in
the town's marketplace. But (of course) one night he disobeys Mom's
strict rule to get back to the cave before nightfall. And (of course)
disaster strikes.
This sets Kubo off on a mission of revenge. He's accompanied by a
monkey, mystically generated from an old talisman. And (eventually) a
samurai warrior created from a beetle. Perils abound and (slight
spoiler) there's eventual victory, but it's bittersweet at best.
Highly recommended. I know it sounds grim from my description, but there's a lot of funny
stuff along the way too. Best movie I've seen so far this year. (Heh.)
Finally managed to put up my new Futurama calendar.
<voice
imitation="professor_farnsworth">Good news,
everyone!</voice>
Only January, and it's already much better than last year's lazy effort.
I think this is a good omen.
For the American press
and many partisans, one of Donald Trump's very gravest sins is his
"bromance" with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. It's a sure sign of
The Donald's stupidness, ignorance, naiveity, or flat-out lack of
any moral seriousness that he seems to be OK with the Russians
grabbing Crimea, edging its way into Ukraine, helping an even-bigger
POS, Bashar al Assad, in Syria, and even "hacking" an election (or
maybe not).
I'd work the causality the other way: MSM partisans hate Trump so
much that that hatred overwhelms their normal biases.
I do hope, however, that David Filipov is not this century's
Walter
Duranty.
Skeptics drilled down into the actual evidence for that claim. And
what do you
know?
[T]he more accurate summary would be “About twice as many economists
believe a voucher system would improve education as believe that it
wouldn’t”
Hm. Maybe Susan Dynarski is this century's Walter Duranty.
And speaking of MSM fake news: I've been fascinated by the debunking
of the WaPo's "Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid"
story. At Forbes,
Kalev
Leetaru writes at how the story "evolved", nearly hour by hour,
as the original sky-is-falling yarn fell apart. The newspaper, as Leetaru tells
it, has been memory-holing its blunders as much as possible, and has
been mostly opaque in describing how it got things so wrong.
[P]erhaps most intriguing is that, as with the Santa Claus story,
the Post did not respond to repeated requests for comment regarding
how it conducts fact checking for its stories. This marks twice in a
row that the Post has chosen not to respond in any fashion to my
requests for more detail on its fact checking processes. Given the
present atmosphere in which trust in media is in freefall and
mainstream outlets like the Post are positioning themselves as the
answer to “fake news” it certainly does not advance trust in the
media when a newspaper will not even provide the most cursory of
insight into how it checks its facts.
Leetaru's brutal
analysis is good as far as it goes, but misses what is
(for me) the obvious chain of causation: (a) the WaPo is heavily invested in
delegitimizing Trump; (b) part of that effort involves painting the
Russkies as dangerous, nefarious super-cyber-hackers that threw the
election Trump's way; and so (c) when
something appeared that seemed to further bolster that narrative,
the paper jumped on it like a trout at a May-fly.
Which brings us, naturally enough, to the much-ballyhooed "election
hacking" that the Obama Administration blames on Russia and Putin.
But, according to Power Line's John Hinderaker: the
"Evidence
For Russian Involvement in DNC Hack is Nonexistent". Not just
weak, mind you: nonexistent.
Hinderaker's argument is plausible and compelling (he refers to the
same Wordfence analysis we referred to on New Year's Day); so is his
conclusion:
Nevertheless, the Democratic Party operatives who masquerade as
reporters in the U.S. have uncritically swallowed the
administration’s line, and are hectoring Donald Trump and his aides
to admit that Vladimir Putin was responsible for “hacking the
election.”
Pun Salad loves the Constitution to death, but as Tyler
Cowen points out, the so-called Emoluments Clause is getting a
hard look, because (guess what) anti-Trumpers see it as a possible
line of attack. But it's far from clear what it covers, and how it
might be enforced.
But what I really wanted to quote is Cowen's final sentence:
I would gladly learn more about this topic, and I am afraid that
this year I am about to.
Wow, I'm hitting seven out of seven there. (Assuming you're generous
with the "Christian" and "Able-bodied" items.)
And I just finished up reading the January 2017 issue of
Reason and noted this quote in their
"From
the Archives" feature.
If education is truly valued, why do we allow the state to become
involved?
That's Manny Klausner from their January 1977 issue, forty years
ago. How long will it take for more people to realize that there's
no good answer to that question?
While Leia Organa’s letters, doctrines and later, command directives
formed the ideological-strategic core of the Alliance, she avoided
the leadership roles assumed by her father and Mon Mothma. Indeed,
she used the courtesy title Princess (afforded by her adopted
parents, as elected officials in Alderaan’s post-monarchic
democracy) sparingly, and purely for political effect. She became a
field operative instead, managing diverse intelligence assets under
the cover of diplomatic and sapient-relief travel. Before the Battle
of Scarif, her missions shared intelligence with numerous Alliance
cells. Her uncanny ability to predict the actions of enemies and
allies alike made her essential, but the Alliance treated her
warily, concerned she might manipulate its forces for her own ends.
When Arthur Freed and his directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
cast Debbie Reynolds in Singin' In The Rain, she was a
19-year-old who was good at gymnastics. But she wasn't a dancer, and
she was supposed to dance with two of the greatest screen dancers of
all - Kelly and Donald O'Connor. MGM wanted her youth and sweetness
and wholesomeness - which were vitally important in a cast of
wisecracking cynics and fakers. But they also needed her to move
around at a high level of fluidity and competence. Kelly was
impatient, and cruel and dismissive. (Afterwards, he was amazed that
Reynolds was still willing to speak to him.) At the end of shooting
one day, MGM's other dance star Fred Astaire happened to be
wandering past the sound stage and noticed sobbing sounds coming
from the piano. Underneath he found a distraught Debbie. Astaire
offered to help teach her the routines. Her pep and pluck got her
the rest of the way. If you watch "Good Morning" carefully, you can
see Kelly and O'Connor are the two old pros and she's the neophyte.
But so what? That was kind of her character in the plot, and she
keeps up, and holds her own. At the end of the sequence, her feet
were bleeding - and, as she famously said, the two hardest things
she ever did were childbirth and Singin' In The Rain. And on
the latter there was no CGI to serve as a production epidural.
I own the Singin' in the Rain DVD; after I watch that movie,
my face hurts from all the smiling.
Ah, but it's not all about dead movie stars at Pun Salad today. At
NR, Kevin D. Williamson puts the grades on
"Obama’s
Last Report Card". Parallels with LBJ are drawn, because neither
guy performed up to the expectations implied by their elections.
Republicans know what Barack Obama has accomplished: The GOP
practically has never been in a better position politically, with
the state legislatures and governorships, the House and the Senate,
and a newly minted Republican president. (A ritual acknowledgement
of Hubris, who is also a jealous god, is here appropriate.) But
Democrats should be asking themselves what Barack Obama has
accomplished, too: He has decimated their party. The things they
care the most about are, from the progressive point of view, mostly
either in stasis or in regress: climate-change legislation, economic
inequality, abortion, transnational governance, etc. The Left is
strangely focused at the moment on exotica such as which dressing
room transsexuals use at the gym and whether nonconformist bakers
can be obliged at gunpoint to bake a cake for Bill and Ted’s
excellent wedding. Their national leaders are elderly,
intellectually narrow hacks of the kind who give hacks a bad name.
Their great hope is an author of self-help books who smoothed her
academic career by pretending to be a Cherokee.
Heh! Save that last sentence for 2020.
Megan McArdle
notes
the latest proposed Democrat hack to get Merrick Garland on the
Supreme Court. How would they manage that feat?
That’s a very good question! The answer some progressives have
come up with is that there will be a nanosecond gap between when the
outgoing senators leave office, and the new ones are sworn in.
During that gap, there will be more Democrats left than Republicans.
So the idea is to call that smaller body into session, vote on the
nomination, and voila! -- a new Supreme Court
justice. Alternatively, President Obama could use that gap to make a
recess appointment.
Megan submits this plot to a deserved amount of scorn, both
theoretical and practical.
James Lileks: his
resolutions
are better than yours and mine.
I resolve not to ask the dog who's a good boy, because not one of
the male children I've met ever chewed up a lame chipmunk. I will
ask, "Who's a familiar representative of his species? You are! Yes,
you are." And the tail will thump just the same.
I will adopt that one too, assuming I can remember it.
The post-election Donald:
The world was gloomy before I won - there was no hope. Now
the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a
trillion dollars!
The only thing we have is a phony, artificial stock market. So
people think—But I’ll tell you what, nothing relates to the stock.
Even in New York, on Wall Street and stuff, people think Wall
Street. It’s a whole different world. The stock market is a phony
number and it’s gotten there because nobody is paying any interest.
When interest rates go up a little bit, you’ll see some very bad and
very interesting things happen.
Less than five months between these two statements.
Why, it's almost as if he's making stuff up as he goes along!
"Laci Green", according to Wikipedia is "an American
YouTube video-blogger, public sex educator, and feminist activist.
She has hosted online sex education content on behalf of Planned
Parenthood and Discovery News." And she's moody.
I got a little (actually, a lot) lazy about blogging this year. I
toyed with making a New Year Resolution about blogging more. But
then I said: why wait until the New Year? So far I've managed
slightly over a week of daily blog posts.
Can I keep up that pace? "Time will tell."
For those who might be interested: my yearly summary pages of the
61
books I read
and
58
movies I watched
in 2016. Turn off thy ad-blocker, lest you miss the attractive
and tasteful Amazon links therein.
The Washington Post managed some fake news recently. Their
headline screamed: "Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid
through a utility in Vermont, officials say". Aieee!
The significantly less scary reality emerged a few hours later.
A routine scan of the computers at the Burlington Electric
Department turned up a malware signature of "Grizzly Steppe" on a
single laptop, one that had no connection to the electricity
grid.
According to
"Tyler
Durden" at ZeroHedge it's worse than that: the "evidence"
used to blame this all on Putin & the Russkies is worse than
shaky.
According to some cybersecurity specialists, the code came from
an outdated Ukrainian hacking tool. As RT
notes, IT specialists that have analyzed the code and other
evidence published by the US government are questioning whether it
really proves a Russian connection, let alone a connection to the
Russian government. Wordfence, a cybersecurity firm that specializes
in protecting websites running WordPress, a PHP-based platform,
published
a report on the issue on Friday.
The analysis in the Wordfence article is impressively detailed. But
the bottom line seems to be as Durden claimed. "Grizzly Steppe" is
publicly available to black-hatters; its presence doesn't
demonstrate "Russian hackers" at work, let alone a Russian government connection.
As a conservative, I'm supposed to buy into every
Commies-under-the-bed conspiracy theory that comes down the pike.
But come on.
PowerLine provides "The Year in Pictures". You'll enjoy it.
Disclaimers:
Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the
blogger.
Pun Salad is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates
Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for the blogger to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
![[Amazon Link]](/ps/asin_imgs/0804178747.jpg)
![[Amazon Link]](/ps/asin_imgs/B075GZPC81.jpg)
![[4.0 stars]](/ps/images/40stars.gif)
![[IMDb Link]](https://ia.media-imdb.com/images/G/01/imdb/plugins/rating/images/imdb_46x22.png)
![[Amazon Link]](/ps/asin_imgs/B01FJ4UGFK.jpg)
![[Amazon Link]](/ps/asin_imgs/1501141511.jpg)
![[Amazon Link]](/ps/asin_imgs/0802123988.jpg)
![[Amazon Link]](/ps/asin_imgs/0451218159.jpg)
![[Amazon Link]](/ps/asin_imgs/B01902BGOW.jpg)
![[Amazon Link]](/ps/asin_imgs/B00555X8OA.jpg)
![[Amazon Link]](/ps/asin_imgs/B07D1PCNX3.jpg)
![[Amazon Link]](/ps/asin_imgs/1440848912.jpg)
![[4.5 stars]](/ps/images/45stars.gif)
![[Amazon Link]](/ps/asin_imgs/B01KMKM5NW.jpg)
![[The Blogger and His Dog]](/ps/images/me_with_barney.jpg)
