Jun
26
2024

Jeopardy! Clue: This Government Agency Should Be Privatized

And the correct response is: What is the US Postal Service?

But I will give them credit for putting out Alex Trebek Stamps.

Clever! And also expensive! 73¢/stamp!

The USPS reported that they lost $6.5 billion in FY2023. (Please imagine the Postmaster General looking around his office, muttering "I could swear I mailed that $6.5 billion to myself…")

Recent Pun Salad commentary on the USPS here, here, and here. And for a serious look at what should be done, I recommend Privatizing the U.S. Postal Service from the "Downsizing Government" folks at Cato.

Also of note:

  • Spoiler: it turns out that Scientific American sucks worse than ever before. Jesse Singal writes On The Urge To Think Things Suck Worse Now Than Ever Before.

    The other day I came across a Scientific American article headlined “We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality.”

    The article, by a pair of researchers at Stanford University and York University, attempts to argue that we are living in increasingly terrible, violent, chaotic times. 

    Is this true? It’s a widely held belief, particularly among academics and media, as well as an interesting horseshoe coalition of far-left (capitalism has destroyed everything) and far-right (multiculturalism and the collapse of traditional values have destroyed everything) thinkers and, perhaps more often, “thinkers.” Steven Pinker wrote The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, published in 2011, in part to rebut this sort of thinking, which is endemic in his own circles.

    So, the article: it’s bizarre. Let’s unpack it. The framing presents the thesis as an obvious, established fact, and immediately sets out to describe deniers as Part of the Problem and to explain their false beliefs. The subheadline: “We are living through a terrible time in humanity. Here’s why we tend to stick our heads in the sand and why we need to pull them out, fast.”

    Singal's substack has a paywall, but there's enough to verify SciAm has no intention of stopping its slide into ideological propagandizing. (Jerry Coyne has some further excerpts.)

  • The Streisand Effect combined with the Ellsberg Effect. Adam Goldstein writes at Greg Lukianoff's substack: A Tennessee journalist is being threatened with jail time for reporting on a school shooter’s ‘manifesto’.

    Last March, a 28-year-old former student spent 16 minutes revisiting his Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee. During that time, he killed three adults and three nine-year-old children before being killed by local police.

    The shooter, Aiden Hale (a trans-man sometimes referred to by his birth name, Audrey Hale), left behind a collection of writings documenting his thoughts in the months leading up to the shooting. As a statement from the Metro Nashville Police Department described them:

    “In the collective writings by Hale found in her vehicle in the school parking lot, and others later found in the bedroom of her home, she documented, in journals, her planning over a period of months to commit mass murder at The Covenant School.”

    As a commenter pointed out, it's certainly nice that we "respect the pronouns" of even mass murderers.

    And note that the murders were committed in March 2023, but:

    Police are claiming the writings are part of an ongoing investigation, and a judge overseeing an open records lawsuit ordered Tennessee Star Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy to explain why he shouldn’t be held in contempt for their publication. Threatening journalists with jail time for publishing truthful information isn’t something we’re supposed to be doing in this country.

    Just how long will the "ongoing investigation" ongo?

    I assume if Aiden/Audrey had been a Trump fanboy/girl, the journals would have been long since published, analyzed, and milked for any possible political advantage.

    Goldstein does a fine job of rebutting the (very poor) legal reasoning behind the jail threats.

  • Vivek Murthy! Is there anything he can't do? Well, yeah. As Charles C. W. Cooke points out Vivek Murthy Can’t Depoliticize Gun Policy.

    Here is the New York Times, reporting credulously on one of the more sinister habits that the modern progressive movement exhibits:

    The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, on Tuesday declared gun violence in America a public health crisis, recommending an array of preventive measures that he compared to past campaigns against smoking and traffic safety.

    That’s the soft version. As we soon learn, what Murthy actually means is this:

    “I’ve long believed this is a public health issue,” he said in an interview. “This issue has been politicized, has been polarized over time. But I think when we understand that this is a public health issue, we have the opportunity to take it out of the realm of politics and put it into the realm of public health.”

    We hear a lot these days about “Our Democracy.” I would invite the people who talk that way to step back for a moment and consider the above paragraph. Shed your personal preferences, puncture your partisan bubble, suppress the fuzzy feelings that the abstractions in Murthy’s rhetoric convey, and really stare at that argument for a while. Think about its meaning. Imagine its implications. Ruminate on its consequences. And, when you’ve done that, answer me this: What the hell is “take it out of the realm of politics and put it into the realm of public health” supposed to mean in these United States?

    CCWC's article might be behind the NR paywall, and I'm out of gifted links for June, sorry. But you can get a taste of Murthy's stretched logic from his tweet:

    Of course there's the usual fetishism, the language that implies that firearms have magical powers that allow them to act all by themselves.

    Also of course (as noted by a commenter), those scary numbers are from the Kaiser Family Foundation, based on some sketchy polling.

    And did you notice CCWC's characterization of the NYT story as credulous? If you Google "Surgeon General’s Advisory on Firearm Violence" you will find the NYT's credulity is no exception.

    But the most important point is the one CCWC hammers home: Murthy's efforts to paint this as a "public health" issue is inherently totalitarian.


Last Modified 2024-06-27 5:04 AM EDT