Sobering Thoughts

Comments on politics, the culture, economics, and sports by Paul Tuns. I am editor-in-chief of "The Interim," Canada's life and family newspaper, and author of "Jean Chretien: A Legacy of Scandal" (2004) and "The Dauphin: The Truth about Justin Trudeau" (2015). I am some combination of conservative/libertarian, standing athwart history yelling "bullshit!" You can follow me on Twitter (@ptuns).

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Tuesday, September 30, 2014
 
Bill Gates confirms Common Core is about nationalizing education
Hit & Run's Robby Soave notes that Bill Gates, a major financial backer, told a Politico event that Common Core is about setting one set of national standards. He admits he is politically clueless because he didn't think that local autonomy would be "a political issue." Says Gates:
The basic idea of, 'should we share an electrical plug across the country?' Well, you can get partisan about that I suppose. Should Georgia have a different railroad width than everybody else? Should they teach multiplication in a different way? Oh that's brilliant [sarcasm], who came up with that idea? Common Core, the idea that what you should know at various grades, that that should be well-structured and you should really insist on kids knowing something so you can build on it, I did not really expect that to become a big political issue.
Soave responds:
There you have it. Gates views the education system—the many myriad ways Americans could pass on knowledge to their children—as akin to choosing the correct railroad track size. The implication is obvious: after all, there is only one right railroad track size! Similarly, there is only one correct way to teach children, and all children must be taught that way, according to Gates.
This way of thinking goes against everything the reform movement has come to understand over the last few decades about what works in schools: greater standardization is not the answer; schools languish under stifling centralization; every kid is unique and has different educational needs; and local authorities—especially parents—are best suited to the task of plotting their children's educational paths.
Nurturing the mind of a child is an infinitely more complex task than choosing an electrical plug. It's not as simple as plugging the right cord into a child's brain and flipping a switch.


 
Do you need to drink eight cups of water a day
Nope. At FiveThirtyEight University of Chicago economist Emily Oster has the details after looking at numerous studies. You need to remain hydrated and that includes other drinks (and the water in food). Water is better than pop, of course. For women three glasses of water will easily suffice; five for men. Oster ends with this gem:
Probably the best advice is some I got from a doctor colleague recently: “When my patients ask when is a good time to drink water, I tell them: ‘When you are thirsty.’”


 
US overtakes Saudi Arabia in petrol production
The Financial Times reports:
US production of oil and related liquids such as ethane and propane was neck-and-neck with Saudi Arabia in June and again in August at about 11.5m barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency, the watchdog backed by rich countries.
With US production continuing to boom, its output is set to exceed Saudi Arabia’s this month or next for the first time since 1991.
Much of that comes from natural gas from shale gas. As The American Interest says, "What a difference fracking makes."


 
2016 watch (Alan Grayson edition)
The Young Turks are encouraging people to sign a petition urging far-left Rep. Alan Grayson to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. The petition begins, "If you're disappointed that Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee for President in 2016 and would rather see Alan Grayson as the nominee sign this petition."


 
Hey women, if you don't want to be raped, don't break traffic laws: police captain
Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Hit & Run:
In less than two months, three Oklahoma police officers have been arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting women while on duty. One of the officers, state trooper Eric Roberts, was accused of raping women he pulled over for traffic violations. In the wake of this, Tulsa news station KJRH interviewed Oklahoma Highway Patrol Captain George Brown about how women can ensure they won't meet a similar fate.
His response?
First and foremost: Do your part, and do what it takes to obey the traffic laws and not get stopped.
This should be huge news. It won't be. We think this is how police in the developing world operate, not in America. Ignorance is bliss.


 
No surprise about Obama
Breitbart reports: "A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014." Of course, many of us have found Barack Obama to be a disengaged president.


 
Who cheer for in the World Series
Craig Calcaterra looks at the American League and National League contenders to help fans determine for whom to cheer if their favourite team isn't playing October baseball. My thinking about whom to cheer for:
Detroit Tigers: Not a chance. They've been in the American League Championship Series the last three years. Calcaterra calls it Tiger fatigue. I'm not against teams being in the playoffs every season -- I'm a Yankees fan after all -- but I'm not rooting for them. I respect them a lot. David Price and Justin Verlander don't seem to be their dominant selves, but this is still a rotation worth watching and they might have the second best hitter in baseball, the reigning MVP Miguel Cabrera (five consecutive seasons finishing in the top five for MVP, including winning the last two). The Tigers deserve success, but I'm not cheering for them.
Baltimore Orioles: They beat the Yankees for the AL East. Fuck 'em.
Kansas City Royals. Nope. The best thing about the Royals is reading Rany Jazayerli's writing about the team. So in some ways, it is worth them going far so I can read more Jazayerli, but I find the team itself boring. I'd rather watch an interesting team and game than read an interesting take on a game in which I have no interest. Also, the Royals have the underdog label for a reason: they have been very poorly run for a long time.
Oakland Athletics: They were unquestionably the best team in baseball at the trading deadline and tanked afterward. Do you really want to see a team who sucked for nearly two months rewarded? On the plus side, there is a terrific roster of players who deserve national attention. I loved the A's of the late '80s and early '90s, but I don't really care for them now, so I'll take a pass.
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim: They are my backup American League team after the Yankees. Mike Trout is by far the best (position) player in baseball and he deserves the World Series. And fans should have the pleasure of getting a closeup to the superstar. Contra Calcaterra I'd also like to see Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton do well after semi-struggling in recent years. The Angels have only one World Series (2002) so it would be nice for fans there to hoist another flag.
The St. Louis Cardinals: Could theoretically consider it. Great organization but most fans will be tired of them in the playoffs (this will be the fourth consecutive season); I'm not, but there are more compelling National League teams. Also, they just don't seem good enough to win it all and if you're going to cheer for an October team, you want them good enough to go deep.
Los Angeles Dodgers: Yes, if truly once-in-a-generation players is your bag. Some fans won't like them because of their $238 million payroll. But they have the best pitcher in 'ball (Clayton Kershaw), the best second starter (Zach Greinke), and the most exciting young player in baseball (Yasiel Puig). If winning is your thing, I'd get behind the Dodgers.
San Francisco Giants: No, but not for baseball reasons. They've won half of the last four World Series and there is something about cheering for a team from San Francisco. I don't know if hippies like baseball (I rather doubt it) but I don't want them to be happy.
Washington Nationals: Would jump on the bandwagon in other seasons. Great team. Maybe the best four-starter group in baseball. Good mix of young players (Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper) and veterans (Jason Werth and Ryan Zimmerman). Canadians might want to cheer for them because they were once the Montreal Expos. Canadians might not want to cheer for them because they were once the Montreal Expos. A good case could be made that the Nats are the best team in baseball and the best team should win the World Series. The Nats/Expos have never won a World Series.
Pittsburgh Pirates: Definitely. First time in two decades they have made the playoffs. I agree with Calcaterra about Andrew McCutchen, who could be the next big thing. But the reason everyone who loves baseball should want the Pirates to go far is that the more fans see of Pittsburgh's PNC Park, maybe the most beautiful ballpark in the game today. Baseball is better there, even on TV, and October baseball would be even better.


Monday, September 29, 2014
 
2016 watch (Ted Cruz edition)
Hot Air: "Ted Cruz advisor on 2016: 'At this point it’s 90/10 he’s in. And honestly, 90 is lowballing it'." Hot Air's Allah Pundit notes that foreign policy is the issue that might be the major issue that divides Cruz and Rand Paul:
Per National Journal, Cruz may be planning to jump in as early as the end of this year. Tough, tough break for Rand, who’s been running for president for at least two years now and was hoping to enter the race as the preferred choice of all but the most hawkish grassroots conservatives. Not sure what he does now to refine his message to counter Cruz. Probably nothing: The temptation will be to emphasize his libertarian positions more in the interest of distinguishing himself from Cruz, but there are likely few more libertarian votes to be gained and some conservative votes to lose in doing that. Meanwhile, if he tacks any further right on foreign policy to keep pace with Cruz, he’ll alienate libertarians and gain little respect from conservatives who already question his motives for making hawkish noises lately.
Also noted is that the excitement -- is that the right word? -- for Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney is mostly about preventing Cruz or Paul from becoming the party's presidential candidate in 2016.


 
What the hell is John Cornyn talking about?
I used to like Senator John Cornyn (R, Texas) but he's become another useless Republican. PJ Media reports he's talking about party unity, which is all fine and good for the party, but what does that do for movement conservatives. If you want the party united, give the base a reason to unite behind the party. Anyway, Cornym says, “We’ve been through a six-year experiment in big government ... We can’t let divisions between conservatives cause us to forfeit elections to big government.” What six-year experiment? It's been an 80-year experiment, John: New Deal, Great Society, Nixon's regulatory state (OSHA to EPA), Bush II's USA PATRIOT Act/No Child Left Behind/Medicare prescription drug expansion. Barack Obama did not invent Big Government. If Cornyn wants to take us back to the pre-Big Government of Bush II, no thanks.


 
'Former Imam Of Oklahoma Beheader’s Mosque Apologizes ...'
"To ISIS Day After Beheading." WTF? The Daily Caller reports:
The former imam of the Oklahoma City mosque attended by beheading suspect Alton Nolen apologized this week to ISIS for previously criticizing the group.
Suhaib Webb is currently the imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, which is part of the same entity under the same ownership as the Islamic Society of Boston, where Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev worshipped. Webb spoke alongside the late al-Qaida senior operative Anwar al-Awlaki at a Sept. 9, 2001 fundraiser for an Islamic radical who killed two police officers, according to FBI surveillance documents.
Webb previously served as imam of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, where Nolen reportedly worshipped ...
The day after Nolen beheaded a co-worker, and the same day that Webb was publicly linked to Nolen’s mosque, Webb apologized to ISIS in an online column he wrote for the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center entitled “Shame on Me: A Commitment to Discourse Instead of Demonization.”
In that online column, Webb states:
“I woke up the other day and decided to skim through my body of work over the last few years,” Webb wrote. “Boy was I surprised at some of my posts and talks — the tone and the demonization of others — I compared ISIS to Ebola. While I don’t agree with ISIS, al-Qāida, certain progressives and others, I’ve decided to apologize to anyone that I have spoken ill towards or demonized.”


 
NFL 'abuse scandal' is not hurting ratings. Not even among women
Carl Bialik of FiveThirtyEight looks at the actual ratings rather than repeat the narrative that the NFL's handling of Ray Rice (and other cases) is hurting ratings:
Nielsen ratings suggest even more than 92 percent of NFL fans haven’t let the incident prevent them from tuning in to games. Stephanie DiVito, who conducts audience research for ESPN’s research & analytics group, shared numbers through the first three weeks of each of the last three seasons. (She excluded Thursday night games and removed broadband-only homes to make the numbers comparable despite year-to-year changes in how the NFL is broadcast and how Nielsen measures possible viewers.) She shared live and same-day ratings for 10 demographic groups: males and females in five overlapping age ranges 12 and up. In just two of the groups were ratings down this year: boys age 12 to 17 and women age 18 to 34. Ratings for both groups dropped by 2 percent.
Among all women age 18 and older, ratings were up 2 percent. That’s a slowdown from the increase of 9 percent last year but isn’t consistent with less interest in the league among women.
Ratings are up slightly among all ages for both men and women except males under 18 (down 2%) and women 18-35 (down 2%), including age groupings that overlap amongst that female cohort.


 
'America's Multiple Partner Problem'
Mitch Pearlstein, president of Center of the American Experiment, writes at The Weekly Standard about NFL superstar running back Adrian Peterson and the American problem of siring children with multiple women (or being baby mama to numerous men). He starts with Peterson:
It’s not irrelevant to matters at hand that Peterson has fathered at least four children with perhaps four different women, including one who’s now his wife. At least one (unconfirmed) report saying he has sired as many as seven children with an unspecified number of women. And it’s decidedly not irrelevant that one of his children—a two-year-old son who he had known nothing about—was murdered last year by a boyfriend of the child’s mother.
To coin a cliché, how could Peterson even begin to be there more than every once in a while for so many geographically dispersed children, no matter how much money he is capable of sending their mothers every month or so? This is but one of many pivotal questions when it comes to scattered seeds, and not just those of a running back in this instance.
Pearlstein quotes Ron Mincy, professor of social work at Columbia University, who says:
“How should we think about establishing child support payments? It gets really, really complex when you recognize that the non-resident father of a child actually has another family, and another family, and another family. How should he be made to divide up a portion of his income across his multiple children?”
Decades of research has consistently demonstrated that the safest environment for children is to live under the same roof with their two biological parents. In contrast, children who live in situations in which men move in and out of mothers’ beds are dramatically more likely to be abused, sexually and in other ways, as well as sometimes killed. None of this should be the smallest surprise. Just one extraordinarily ugly statistic: Although boyfriends contribute less than two percent of non-parental childcare, they commit half of all reported child abuse by nonparents.
While Adrian Peterson makes millions, the parallel universe I’m talking about is mostly poor.
He concludes with a sad but telling anecdote of a mother lamenting the the loss of her murdered high school-aged son:
“I am never going to see him come home and say, ‘Mama, I got some girl pregnant.’”
And thus the tragedy continues.


 
What it means when voters take their cues from Lena Dunham?
Kevin D. Williamson on Lena Dunham, voting, and what abortion has to do with America's debased, infantile culture. It is a great, incredibly judgemental piece:
It is an excellent fit, if you think about it: Our national commitment to permanent, asinine, incontinent juvenility, which results in, among other things, a million or so abortions a year, is not entirely unrelated to the cultural debasement that is the only possible explanation for the career of Lena Dunham. A people mature enough to manage the relationship between procreative input and procreative output without recourse to the surgical dismemberment of living human organisms probably would not find much of interest in the work of Miss Dunham. But we are a nation of adult children so horrified by the prospect of actual children that we put one in five of them to death for such excellent reasons as the desire to fit nicely into a prom dress.
It’s not for nothing that, on the precipice of 30, Miss Dunham is famous for a television series called Girls rather than one called Women. She might have gone one better and called it Thumbsuckers. (The more appropriate title Diapers would terrify her demographic.)
Williamson also challenges the "fetish of voting": "Voting is the most shallow gesture of citizenship there is, the issuance of a demand — a statement that 'this is how the world should be,' as Miss Dunham puts it — imposing nothing in the way of reciprocal responsibility." Voting for Dunham -- and most people -- is therapeutic, about self-actualization and feeling good about oneself. That's not a reason to impose your wants on the world via voting, but what the heck. The Dunham voters are "adult-children."
Williamson then challenges Dunham's assertion that there are politicians that care intimately about her sex life. He says that conservatives actually want to "extricate ourselves from involvement in Lena Dunham's sex life" by not being forced to pay for her birth control. I"m not sure why the Left doesn't get this (or they do and they are liars).
There is also a description of why democracy is ridiculous and it represents my views exactly, but you'll have to read the piece. Also, the penultimate paragraph on what real civic-mindedness looks like is bang-on.
But the main point is that if a person is convinced to cast a ballot because of Lena Dunham, or thinks anything like this shallow celebrity, the Republic would be better off without that person voting.


 
Under-stated headline
Huffington Post headline on an AP story: "Man Accused Of Beheading Coworker 'Acted A Little Odd'."
(HT: Tim Worstall)


 
'Conservative Review' Congressional scorecard
Breitbart reports on a new project, the Conservative Review, which will grade members of Congress. It sounds like the American Conservative Union, but marks much, much tougher. Breitbart reports:
“One of the things I’ve learned coming off of an election season is that every candidate wants to project a conservative image on the campaign trail," [Daniel] Horowitz, the group's senior editor, told Breitbart News. “Yet when they get to Washington, they use smoke and mirrors from a complex legislative process to hoodwink voters into thinking they are conservative. CR will help expose the players, process, and legislative issues that are helpful or harmful to the conservative cause. Too many politicians are trying to redefine conservatism to comport with their political agenda; we seek to anchor current policy challenges in timeless constitutional conservative principles.”
They say the organization will feature scorecards for members of Congress, similar to the widely-known conservative scorecards from groups like FreedomWorks or Heritage Action or Club For Growth. This group’s scoring, however, is generally much harsher—there are hardly any As—and is designed to encompass the entire conservative movement. FreedomWorks, for instance, focuses its energies on specific parts of the movement often aligned with libertarian thinking. The Club For Growth similarly hones in on what's in the interest of true free market capitalism, and Heritage Action hammers members on a variety of issues, especially cronyism.
What the Conservative Review is trying to do, the group says, is help those other facets of the conservative movement coordinate its messaging better to correctly define what being a “conservative" actually is—and help people across America understand what their members Congress are actually doing rather than just what they’re saying.
Thus far, only three senators warrant an A grade (in the 90s): Mike Lee (Utah), Ted Cruz (Texas), and Rand Paul (Kentucky). (I presume there is no need to mention they are Republicans.)
There are only six B grades (in the 80s): Tim Scott (S.C.), Jim Inhofe (Oklahoma), Jim Risch (Idaho), Tom Coburn (Oklahoma), Mike Crapo (Idaho) and Jeff Sessions (Alabama).
If you check their website, both John McCain and Harry Reid get F grades, although McCain has a 55% vote record and Reid 2%.
Unfortunately you have to register to check profiles of individual members. You can follow CR on Twitter.
There is no shortage of conservative infrastructure in the U.S. Not sure if this really helps; there are plenty of ratings systems and I'm not sure what the GOP needs right now is a hardcore ideological litmus test. (I think original policy thinking that speaks to the needs of an anxious U.S. middle class is the Republican priority.) And yet any conservative organization that has Lee, Cruz, and Rand as the top three senators according to its Liberty Score is fine by me. And it's notable that Lee is among the most notable original thinkers among elected Republicans and he tops CR's list. Conservative Review will be worth following.


Sunday, September 28, 2014
 
Patrick Brown makes it four
Federal Tory MP Patrick Brown has entered the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership contest, joining a trio of Ontario PC MPPs: Christine Elliott, Vic Fedeli, and Monte McNaughton. I would guess that another MPP, Lisa McLeod, will join the race and that'll be it. Brown says that he wants to grow the PC Party membership so it has the base and organization to win elections, modelling the provincial party on its more successful federal cousins:
"With 10,000 party memberships right now, we're too small. We don't have the depth of an organization that we have to have to succeed," he said. "I want to grow the reach of our party in a huge way. I want to bring thousands of new people into the party so we can have that competitive organization.
"I look at the prime minister and the success he'd had in Ontario where he won 44% of the votes and over 70 seats in Ontario in place like Kenora and Scarborough and Toronto: all over the place.
"The lesson there is you expand the reach of your party. My goal is to invite (new party members) to participate in the leadership and to still stay involved after that."
The Barrie Examiner story quotes invisible backbench MPP Garfield Dunlop, who represents a neighbouring riding provincially but who supports undeclared candidate Lisa McLeod, saying, “He’s a federal member who’s made no headway whatsoever in the Harper Government in the eight or nine years he’s been there. How could I possibly think he could come to Ontario and do a good job when he couldn’t even make cabinet in Ottawa?” Coming from a complete nobody in a party of losers, this is quite something. Maybe it is this mentality that explains why the provincial Tories lose elections.


 
Two items about poverty from completely different sources
Economist Scott Sumner looks at the Guaranteed Annual Income, a solution to poverty he really, really, really wants to like, but can't come around to endorsing. He doesn't think the numbers add up. The fundamental question is this: How does the GAI not incentivize not working? Sumner says that no American would pick vegetables in the hot sun so the society created with a GAI would look like this:
1. An underclass of illegals doing the hard stuff, and living in shantytowns.
2. Tens of millions of poor Americans watching TV, and giving zero incentive to their kids to study hard in school, because they’ve got the GAI awaiting them too.
3. The upper class, in their gated communities.
At PJ Media, Kathy Shaidle writes about Linda Tirado's Hand To Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America and her story (well, not exactly, for as Shaidle says, Tirado leaves out a lot biogrphical details). Shaidle says of Tirado:
But she made some really stupid decisions, and actions have consequences. I’m still paying “residuals” on some of mine.
Whining about “the system” feels good, but accomplishes nothing, and let’s you divert blame away from where it so often belongs:
Yourself.
Shaidle links to Walter Hudson's "5 Ideas You Need To Rise From Poverty To the Middle Class," which includes two indispensable pieces of advice: "Understand Value and How to Create It" and "Live within Your Means." Needless to say, you won't find a lot of Hudson's ideas in Tirado's book.


 
Damon Linker get spontaneous order wrong, especially his defense of Obama's you 'didn't build that'
Damon Linker, Stephan Livera at Peace and Markets notes, gets a lot wrong about libertarianism and spontaneous order. Just one example, Linker says: "President Obama got a lot of flack during his 2012 campaign for re-election for saying that wealthy business owners 'didn’t build that' all by themselves, but his point was indisputable." Livera responds:
Actually, it is disputable. Firstly, absent the state, we would see private entrepreneurs providing all sorts of services – it’s just not so easy to see this currently because the government (whether intentionally or not) blocks it. This can be through regulation, taking resources that could be used to do it (crowding out) or outright outlawing competition to entrench itself as the monopoly. The efforts of the private sector can also be denied via regime uncertainty as Robert Higgs writes about.
Secondly, see Don Boudreaux’s article, Government didn’t build that – essentially making the point that all sorts of infrastructure is privately built -“FedEx, privately built oil and gas pipelines, private schools, private insurance companies, privately built skyscrapers.” And yet you don’t see people running around saying that Amazon ‘owes’ its success to the existence of FedEx. Government provided infrastructure might be important (in the current world) – but the existence of government infrastructure is not responsible for business people’s successes. Besides, there’s also the equivalent opposite argument – government wouldn’t have anything to tax (steal) if it weren’t for productive members of society.
HT: Cafe Hayek)


 
Decline of college football
John U. Bacon, author of Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football, has a long read at Yahoo's Post Game, "Michigan Wolverines Football: From Sellouts To Handouts In Just 4 Years." Michigan's $150 million football program is in trouble. (Yeah, you read that right.) Bacon notes "Michigan can boast the most wins in college football and the longest streak of 100,000-plus crowds, running 251 games, all the way back to 1975," but they are doing it with gimmicks: "The department has resorted to desperate measures to keep the streak going, selling deeply discounted tickets on Groupon, Livingsocial and Amazon, and dumping thousands of free tickets on local schools, churches, camps, the ushers, Michigan golf club members and the student-athletes -- and yes, through Coca-Cola giveaways -- urging them all to come to the games." Bacon says that while season ticket holders are happy with the team, the student fans are becoming indifferent. If you are interested in college sports or sports economics, this is worth reading.


 
Will on Iowa Senate race
George Will on the Iowa Senate race to replace retiring Senator Tom Harkin (D) between Republican state senator Joni Ernst and Democrat Rep. Bruce Braley:
Although outspent by her chief opponent 10-to-1 in the first quarter of this year, she won a five-candidate primary with 54 percent of the vote, propelled by an ad in which she said that having grown up castrating pigs, she would be able to cut Washington spending. She does, however, genuflect at the altar of Iowa’s established religion, the Church of Ethanol, a federally mandated Iowa sacrament made from corn.
The Ernst of the primary season talked about the Harley in her driveway, the pistol in her purse, and the possibility of impeaching the president. Today her less exotic persona talks about the feeble economy, the perils of Obamacare, and Braley’s record, including his pride in having given in the House the culminating argument for Obamacare, which he still thinks is splendid.
Here's the Ernst ad Will mentions and which I featured on this blog earlier this year:


 
Still.Running.
Fun new photo blog by a friend of mine that is subtitled, "I love cars. But probably not yours." Don't have to be a card nerd to enjoy this blog. I love the pic of the house with a V-8 Audi S4 in the driveway and 90s Lotus Esprit in the garage.


Saturday, September 27, 2014
 
Democratic senator wants to discriminate against workers with student debt who take private-sector jobs
The Daily Caller reports:
[T]he average college graduate under 40 who carries student debt currently has a median net worth of just $8,700. The Washington Post recently advised newly-minted college graduates to give up hope and go live in their parents’ basements.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wants to help.
Eschewing efforts to create the private-sector jobs that drive economic growth and wealth creation, the progressive Senator instead proposed a new law this week that would generously forgive the student loans of government workers and employees at qualifying nonprofits.
“Teachers, police officers, public health workers and other public servants should be applauded and supported — and not drowned in debt to pay for the degrees many such jobs require,” Blumenthal declared in a press release obtained by Red Alert Politics.
“The current Public Service Loan Forgiveness program should be expanded — and made more flexible — to enable student debt to be worked down or off completely,” the Senator added.


 
Religion and science
A Rice University study of scientists and religion:
The surveys and in-depth interviews with scientists revealed that while 65 percent of U.K. scientists identify as nonreligious, only 6 percent of Indian scientists identify as nonreligious. In addition, while only 12 percent of scientists in the U.K. attend religious services on a regular basis — once a month or more — 32 percent of scientists in India do.


 
Men smoking pot and playing video games vs. 'worthwhile' activities
Instapundit pot-smoking gender gap, which is a thing if you believe Slate:
The thing is, with the rewards for studying harder and socializing seeming less clear, men are rationally less motivated. Call it being “on strike,” or call it the loss of the “patriarchal dividend” that made men work harder at socially-approved activities to attract and support a wife, there’s just less reason now. And feminists can thank themselves for creating a society where firing up a joint and playing Call of Duty is a rational response.


 
Best comment on Trudeau vs. Levant
Lorrie Goldstein tweets: "Dear Justin: If you ever become PM, Vladimir Putin is going to be a lot tougher to deal with than Ezra Levant. Just so you know."


 
Polo beat Columbus?
The Daily Telegraph reports:
Conventional wisdom that the Americas were discovered by Christopher Columbus has been cast into doubt by centuries-old maps and documents suggesting that Marco Polo got there first.
According to Smithsonian magazine, a fresh analysis of 14 parchments by experts has prompted speculation that Polo could have set foot on Alaska during his 24-year odyssey through Asia in the middle of the 13th century.


 
Therapist rats out parent for non-crime
Lenore Skenazy: "Mom Tells Therapist About Briefly Leaving Kids Alone, Shrink Calls Cops." What the fucking fuck? Read the whole story, in which a toddler and eight-year-old stayed home fro 20 minutes alone and nothing bad happened -- except for the two-year ordeal with Child Protective Services. Skenazy says:
The laws in 48 states make therapists and other professionals—doctors, social workers, etc.—mandated reporters. If a professional has reason to suspect a child is in real danger from a truly abusive parent, it is his/her job to report the case to the authorities.
Since when is it the professional's job to snitch on a mom who confesses to one imperfect parenting moment? Only when imperfect parenting becomes illegal. Sadly, that's the moment we are in now.



Friday, September 26, 2014
 
Small is beautiful
Catalan president Artur Mas will sign a decree this weekend that calls for a vote to secede from Spain -- the Catalonian parliament passed the law permitting a referendum last week and the vote will be held on Nov. 2. I'm all for secession votes anywhere for five reasons: 1) smaller states should have smaller governments, 2) governments of smaller states should theoretically be more connected to their people, 3) smaller states screw up fewer people when government policies go awry (which they usually do), 4) theoretically it is easier to let small states fail, and 5) chaos in the political order is desirable as the political order today in most of the West is corrupt or stagnant.


 
America is falling behind on drone-flown package delivery
Reason's Zenon Evans notes that a German company is experimenting with delivering medical supplies with a drone and the United States is falling behind in this technological advance due to government regulations and other hindrances:
Amazon and Google are conducting tests, but not actual deliveries. Even though they're American-based companies, those trial runs are happening in Canada and Australia, respectively.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is weighing down the industry in The Land of the Free ...
There's a growing litany of airborne operations shut down by the FAA: taco deliveries, crop dusters, wedding photographers, and even a charitable search and rescue team. I've previously highlighted that even Russia has drone pizza delivery services, something prohibited in the U.S.
But the agency isn't just playing favorites with certain sectors, it's flatout inept and shortsighted.
Even though the worldwide drone industry is projected to be worth $89 billion over the next 10 years, the administration even shut down a college program geared at educating the first wave of America's drone-related workforce.


 
Good enough for me but not for thee
The New York Sun editorializes about Paul Krugman's complaint that the super-rich today live more ostentatiously than the elite did in the 1950s. The Sun takes issue with this assertion by noting at least one notable exception, the extravagant lifestyle of the Sulzbergers. The editorialist concludes with this delicious line: "the heirs to Arthur Sulzberger are hiring Paul Krugman to sneer at the newly minted masters of the universe, who aspire to live like the Sulzberger paterfamilias once did."


 
'What happened to the environment the last time people with radically anti-capitalist views had access to real power?'
Kevin D. Williamson:
Under a system that imposed heavy government regimentation upon the economy, direct government ownership of the “commanding heights” of the economy (and the commanded heights, too), a socialist vision of property, etc., the environmental results were nothing short of catastrophic.
It's not just communism -- see the Aral Sea disaster, Chernobyl, and the Door to Hell -- but state-run oil companies (Pemex has killed people and fish). Williamson concludes:
Everybody has a theory about what the future could look like, but if we look at the actual record — the record of history — capitalism wins, hands down, over socialism and other state-run economic models when it comes to environmental measures. There is no contest. And at the moment, many of the most interesting ideas about environmental protection are coming from explicitly free-market thinkers. It wasn’t socialism that saved the white rhino.


 
The Peace Prize President
Townhall: "Awkward: Pres. Obama Has Bombed Seven Countries Since Accepting Nobel Peace Prize." They are Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. I facetiously want to ask what he has against Muslims, but the real joke is that Obama, in the first year of his presidency was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."


 
'Lonely potato syndrome'
Dean Burnett in The Guardian on "how I invented a mental disorder." An amusing story about a serious issue, Burnett concludes:
What’s the point of this anecdote? Just to illustrate how easy it was to make people think they had a potential psychological problem. Many personality quirks or habits are actually manifestations of known conditions, but then it often goes too far; you get people who claim to be “a little bit OCD” if they’re a bit overly-neat, or the confusion between being “a bit miserable” and actual depression, or just anyone attributing some aspect of their behaviour to symptoms of a mental illness.
This isn’t to say they’re doing it on purpose; they may genuinely believe what they say, or see no harm in it if they don’t. But the potato story just serves to illustrate how difficult it must be to pin down an actual, clinical mental health issue, with people like me (and less bumbling but more cynical “pop” psychologists) out there spreading guff about it and having it believed due to some perceived authority.


 
Thomson Reuters and their Nobel picks
"Thomson Reuters Predicts 2014 Nobel Laureates, Researchers Forecast for Nobel Recognition." Good picks throughout, but one pair of their economics choices is long overdue: William J. Baumol (Professor of Economics and Harold Price Professor of Entrepreneurship, New York University) and Israel M. Kirzner (Emeritus Professor of Economics, New York University) "for their advancement of the study of entrepreneurism." The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, in its section on entrepreneurship, talks about Kirzner's contribution to the idea:
In contrast to Schumpeter’s view, Kirzner focused on entrepreneurship as a process of discovery. Kirzner’s entrepreneur is a person who discovers previously unnoticed profit opportunities. The entrepreneur’s discovery initiates a process in which these newly discovered profit opportunities are then acted on in the marketplace until market competition eliminates the profit opportunity. Unlike Schumpeter’s disruptive force, Kirzner’s entrepreneur is an equilibrating force. An example of such an entrepreneur would be someone in a college town who discovers that a recent increase in college enrollment has created a profit opportunity in renovating houses and turning them into rental apartments. Economists in the modern austrian school of economics have further refined and developed the ideas of Schumpeter and Kirzner.
The most relevant Kirzner book is Competition and Entrepreneurship for its criticism of traditional "perfect competition" theory which does not exist in real life and ignored real human beings.


 
Crime in Spain is about 5% of what it is in Italy
Quartz reports that drug trafficking, prostitution, smuggling, and illegal gambling accounts for $11.4 billion in Spain (0.9% of the economy) as compared to $230 billion in Italy. Italy's population and economy are both larger than Spain's, but 20 times bigger.


 
Assisted suicide's last report fantasy
Wesley Smith says, "Many supporters of assisted suicide are well-meaning, really thinking that it would only be done in the proverbial 'last resort' scenario. But that’s a fantasy ..." Smith then offers nine counter-arguments/facts to refute the idea that assisted-suicide is a last resort. For instance:
7. The most common reasons for committing assisted suicide in Oregon/Washington are not wanting to be a burden, worrying about losing the ability to engage in enjoyable situations, etc..These existential issues are very important and certainly need attention of caregivers–but they are not “last resort” problems, at least as that term is commonly understood.
Too often assisted suicide and euthanasia become the path of least resistance, not the option of last resort.


Thursday, September 25, 2014
 
Derek Jeter's final home game ...
Walk-off RBI. Ridiculous. And fantastic. And he had an RBI double on his first at-bat in the game.
Even if you're tired of the tributes -- and I am getting there -- this is worth watching:


 
An definition so expansive it makes term 'violence' useless
The Brock Press, the Brock University (St. Catharine's, Ont.) newspaper, reports:
“Sexual violence is anything that makes someone feel unsafe; it could be catcalls, peer pressure to act a certain way in a situation, verbal harassment and unwanted touching. Many of these things occur daily without anyone giving a second thought to them,” said Jami Coughler, Program Coordinator for the Brock Student Sexual Violence Support Centre.
A person's feeling cannot should not be a standard for any legalistic concept.


 
Food banks are not a bad thing
The Toronto Star reports on the Daily Bread food bank's latest Who's Hungry report. The story focuses on the fact that people with disabilities are more likely to use food banks because their disability cheques from the province of Ontario are not enough to cover necessities such as food or shelter. Researcher Richard Matern calls the social assistance program for people with disabilities "poverty-level benefits." The story ends with a quote from Ontario Disability Support Program Action Coalition co-chair Kyle Vose: "Even if you're on ODSP you are still living in squalor, dependent on food banks, and people's donations." Well, good. Not the living in squalor part, but the charity part. Charity is a good thing. People are not entitled to a certain level of food or shelter, certainly not from the government. Focusing on people with disabilities pulls at our hearts (or is designed to) but these social programs are not meant to be the sole income for anyone, including many with disabilities. It supplements income. And food banks and other donations help those in a tight spot. Why complain about charity, the kindness of strangers and (sometimes) loved ones? The answer is simple: these activists -- and the Daily Bread is part of the activist Left -- think that governments should provide for the basic needs (and then some) of everyone in society. That is why they disparage private charity and temporary or backup measures provided by the private and voluntary sector. Food banks are not a sign of society's unfairness, but of its fundamental goodness, that there is a provision for nutrition for those that need a little extra help.


 
7 not 17 = BS
The Toronto Star does a good job pointing out that John Tory's "7 not 17" transit line -- he brags his Smart Track plan will take seven years to build and Olivia Chow's downtown relief line will take 17 years -- is pretty bogus (or in the words of the Star, "misleading"). That John Tory would use these numbers shows he is either an idiot or a liar. Special bonus: Chow's plan was Tory's plan until he flip-flopped ("reversed himself" in the words of the Star) in May. John Tory will flip-flop a lot if elected mayor. Great reporting here by the Star, which, as predicted on this blog, would eventually turn against Tory.
Remember, when it comes to Toronto's Big Three mayoral candidates, they all suck.


 
Blazing Cat Fur
After the latest pussified blogger/Google warning --if you don't like the content, don't read it -- Blazing Cat Fur has a new address: BlazingCatFur.ca. It promises, "same cats are all here, just a new Litterbox!"


 
Choice for Kansas voters
George Will says that Kansas voters have a choice in the Senate election between career politician, Republican Senator Pat Roberts (who has been in Washington as a House Rep or Senator since 1981), and an interesting and thoughtful independent with a chance to win, Greg Orman, who donated to prominent liberals like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid, but who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. More importantly, Kansas voters are deciding between a senatorial candidate who could elevate politics in Washington and who might caucus with Republicans, and GOP control of the Senate as Republicans will probably need to keep all their incumbents to hold their seats if they have any chance to overtake the Democrats in the chamber.


 
Two good posts by Tyler Cowen with questions that are seldom asked
"Does New Zealand have the best-designed government in the world?" Steve Sailer responds in the comments: "New Zealand would seem like just about the easiest country in the world to govern well: a bunch of mild-mannered Brits, and minus the homeland’s feudal leftovers. Offhand, I don’t see much evidence that New Zealand has over-performed due to some secret sauce in its government structure." Sailer says a more interesting possibility is Switzerland because of its numerous challenges to being well-governed.
"Why so few Venice-like cities?" This is worth highlighting: "The greater the anonymity of exchange, and the greater the distance involved, the stronger is the role of a formal port as a centralized supplier of trust and also buyer-seller coordination. That will imply a small number of water nodes, all the more so as globalization and specialization proceed."


 
Voices vs. guns
Video from Fox News via Breitbart of George Will explaining how the U.S. and Russia conduct themselves on the international stage.


Wednesday, September 24, 2014
 
Barack Obama is like a bad boyfriend
Powerline points to an Americans for Shared Prosperity video on "How to break up with Obama." Very funny. Speaks the language of young women who fell for this huckster in 2008 And again in 2012.


 
A vote for Lee/Rubio
No, this isn't about a possible presidential ticket. James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute likes the budget plan put forward by Senators Mike Lee (Utah) and Marco Rubio (Florida):
On the right, however, many critics won’t like the plan because it isn’t their dream tax plan. (And if there is one thing I’ve learned after years of writing on tax reform is that pretty much everyone on the right has a dream tax plan.) It isn’t a 15% flat tax or a 23% Fair Tax or a 9-9-9 plan.
But developing a real-world tax reform plan — one that boosts family incomes, makes American companies more competitive, invests in human and business capital, simplifies the code, increases GDP growth, and achieves revenue neutrality without unrealistic assumptions — is tricky business. The Lee and Rubio plan — at least as outlined — already ticks a lot of those boxes. The senators have fashioned a pro-growth, pro-family, pro-innovation plan rooted in economic and political reality that deserves serious consideration as a key element in any agenda for reenergizing the American economy.
Some pundits, talking heads, and right-wing voters call for smaller government and tax cuts with no appreciation of how their policies work in the real world. I'm all for smaller government and lower taxes. But legislators need to be realistic and to understand the complexity of the issues they are trying to deal with. Lee and Rubio are trying to address real-world problems faced by families and businesses. It may not be perfect but it is doable (that doesn't mean it could pass the House and Senate, but rather it is policy realism) and would do much good if passed. Unlike many pet tax reforms, it addresses a broad swath of problems (mostly for wages and jobs). In other words, it isn't just rhetoric, but evidence of serious thinking about the needs of the country and how to address them. Lee and Rubio deserve plaudits. Lots of them.
Now let the Republican bickering begin.


 
Making sure the sex is consensual
There's an app for that, Good2Go. Robby Soave covers it for Reason's Hit & Run, reporting:
Lee Ann Allman, president of Sandton Technologies, created Good2Go with her husband, Mike. They were inspired to do something about sexual consent after listening to their college-aged children—and their kids' friends—wrestle with the issues.
"We had had ongoing discussions with them and a lot of their friends around issues of affirmative consent," Allman told Reason. "They have seen firsthand how students at their own colleges have been involved in investigations. They have come away from all of this with a lot more confusion and worry and stress about what to do. So out of those discussions, and legislation that has been happening at the federal and state level, we all talked about, well, is there something we can do? In this day and age, one of the logical answers to that is, there ought to be an app for that."
The app is not intended to be legally binding, although it could serve as evidence in an investigation if a dispute arose at a later time. But rather than clearing up matters after-the-fact, Allman is optimistic that the process will proactively reduce assault by clearing up misunderstandings before they happen.


 
Handling ebola waste (US edition)
Reuters reports that US hospitals may have problems dealing with waste from treating patients infected with Ebola:
U.S. hospitals may be unprepared to safely dispose of the infectious waste generated by any Ebola virus disease patient to arrive unannounced in the country, potentially putting the wider community at risk, biosafety experts said.
Waste management companies are refusing to haul away the soiled sheets and virus-spattered protective gear associated with treating the disease, citing federal guidelines that require Ebola-related waste to be handled in special packaging by people with hazardous materials training, infectious disease and biosafety experts told Reuters.
Many U.S. hospitals are unaware of the regulatory snafu, which experts say could threaten their ability to treat any person who develops Ebola in the U.S. after coming from an infected region.
People in the West are over-fearful of ebola considering how difficult it is to actually contract and the actual extent of the disease, but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a plan in place by hospitals (at least major ones) to deal with individuals who may be exposed to the disease, especially considering the number of aid workers and health care workers heading to west Africa to help treat sick people there.


 
Feminist logic and other crimes
Ashe Schow writes in the Washington Examiner:
Feminists have been arguing that it’s “victim-blaming” to suggest steps that women can take to reduce the risk of being sexual assaulted. But what if that same logic were applied to all crime prevention tips?
She provides several humorous examples ("We should be teaching people not to steal, not telling people to lock their doors and windows") before concluding:
In reality, outside of feminist dogma, it is not blaming the victims to suggest ways to reduce the risk of being violated in a world in which bad people exist. The tips aren’t even a hardship. It’s more dangerous to tell people not to suggest these tips.


 
'The Best Strategy to Handle ISIS'
Writing in the National Interest, Dov S. Zakheim, a former undersecretary of defense, says the best way to combat ISIS is "Good Old Containment."


 
'Declining Deficit Should Not Mean Rising Borrowing' -- or, 'we're not all Keynesians now'
Liberal Gregg Easterbrook in his politics-and-football column for ESPN has a long piece on the deficit and government spending. He doesn't sound all that liberal by modern political standards:
The latest deficit news is all positive. Fiscal year 2014 will be the fifth straight in which the federal deficit has declined as a share of GDP. The deficit was 10.8 percent of GDP in Barack Obama's first year, a scary statistic. This year it will be 2.9 percent, below the four-decade average of 3.1 percent. Growth in the rate of health care spending is moderating. In 2006, the Congressional Budget Office thought federal spending per health care recipient would rise to $14,000 in 2014; instead this year's actual will be $11,500. Projections now call for a mild decline in federal health care spending ...
He deserves applause for declining deficits -- but that hardly means government's fiscal house is now in order. Presidents get too much blame when things go poorly and too much credit when they go well. But since Obama was blamed for the deluge of red ink, he should now be credited for an improved national fiscal picture. Since Obama was broadsided for saying ObamaCare would have a positive effect on health care spending, he should be praised now that federal health care costs are in fact moderating.
Here's the rub. All that's happening is decline of the rate at which national money problems accumulate. Debt is not being paid down. The same Congressional Budget Office study cited above shows a bleak long-term forecast. National debt held by the public (the serious kind, government-to-government debt means less) is $12.8 trillion; at the current pace, that will increase another $7.2 trillion in the coming decade. So a debt that's taken 225 years to get to where it is today will jump another 56 percent in just the next 10 years. That's the improved picture!
These numbers assume the Fed can maintain "zirp" -- zero interest rate policy. If zirp gets zapped, debt-service costs on federal borrowing will rise and red ink will run in rivers. Meanwhile, health care subsidies aren't vanishing, rather, ballooning more slowly than feared. The CBO projects that on the current course, by 2024 federal payments for Medicare, Medicaid and ObamaCare will exceed Social Security spending.
With national elections this year and in 2016, some candidates might campaign on a theme that sounds like this: The debt problem is fixed, so let's increase spending, especially, let's increase entitlement benefits. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a possible presidential contender, already has said she thinks Social Security benefits should be increased. That would accelerate the rise of government debt; it seems Sen. Warren doesn't want to bankrupt the young in the future, she wants to bankrupt them right now! Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa has said he favors increasing payroll taxes not to make Social Security more secure for the long run, but rather, to spend all new revenue immediately.
Reasoning "the federal deficit is declining so let's increase spending" is akin is reasoning "I finally have my credit card debt under control, so I'm going to get more credit cards!" But politicians love to hand out money that someone else will have to repay after they leave office. If Sen. Warren's position sets off a pandering contest on the part of 2016 White House aspirants, the nation's long-term fiscal position could get worse. That would harm average people, not the 1 percent. The rich won't be the ones to suffer if Social Security or Medicare becomes insolvent ...
It's good that government aid to individuals is much greater today than in the past; no one should have to live as millions did during the Depression. The point is that today's federal spending for the poor, the working poor, the disabled and the retired is much more generous than commonly understood.
Nevertheless, you'll hear it said that Social Security benefits should be increased because there is no immediate emergency in this program. There isn't. But Social Security entails long-term planning. To say the program has no issues because there's money in the coffers right now is like signing a 30-year mortgage with only enough for the first year's payments and declaring that the mortgage is nothing to be concerned about ...
"We're all Keynesians now" is the saying in public policy circles. Are we? John Maynard Keynes advocated government borrowing and deficit spending during periods of slack economy, a view now universally held by Western governments. Those same governments conveniently forget Keynes also said that when the economy recovered, spending should be pared back to pay down any debt previously incurred.
Both parties in Washington have gotten really good at the borrow-borrow-borrow part of Keynesian economics; neither wants to deal with the spending cuts part that should come into play now that growth has resumed and unemployment has fallen.


 
Anti-capitalism is profitable
Investor's Business Daily editorializes about Naomi Klein, author, most recently, of This Changes Everything and other anti-free market tracts. IBD notes:
Born in Canada of U.S. draft dodgers who were "pretty hard-core Marxists," as she has admitted, Klein has made a lucrative career writing anti-capitalist screeds that get glowing reviews not just in The Nation and the Guardian but also in the New York Times and other pillars of establishment press, and now even Vogue. Its glowing profile this month portrayed her as a woman of great style with a weakness for shoe shopping.
It all contrasts sharply with the anti-free-market books she's written, one of which, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," was pure Marxist demagoguery ...
Which brings us to Klein's latest narrative — championing global warming as a vehicle for targeting capitalism. "Climate change isn't just a disaster," she revealingly told the Times. "It's also our best chance to demand and build a better world."
It's off-putting enough for someone who has so benefited from capitalism to be so keen to destroy it. But people like that are out there. What, however, is to be said of an establishment that can't stop adoring her?
The fact that Vogue could fit a few pages of a profile about an anti-capitalist icon between the hundreds of pages of ads for luxury goods is all too rich.
The profile is worth reading. The opening paragraph tells us a lot:
“I was never really a marcher,” says Naomi Klein, an author so politically committed that she discovered she was pregnant with her son, Toma, while among Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park. “Even though I believe in mass social movements, I’m uncomfortable in crowds.”
That's another way of saying she doesn't like people.
I did like this, though:
Although she may be the world’s most famous critic of consumerism, she understands the joys of shopping. At an appearance in London, somebody asked her to name one thing she liked about capitalism. She instantly replied, “The shoes.”
That is the thing about capitalism: it produces things people like and want.


 
This will confuse US hawks
Breitbart: "Russia considers joining the fight against ISIS." Islamists want to "liberate" Chechnya from Russia. Vladimir Putin isn't going to stand for that kind of posturing.


Tuesday, September 23, 2014
 
'Correlation is not causation'
Greg Mankiw points to some fun examples. My favourites are U.S. margarine consumption and divorce rates in Maine, and "US spending on science, space, and technology correlates with auicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation."


 
2016 watch (Ben Carson edition)
Hot Air: He's certainly running.


 
Inhuman government
Philip K. Howard in The Atlantic: "When Humans Lose Control of Government." The teaser explains, "A decades-long obsession with writing excessively detailed laws had made it impossible for real people to get anything done." Howard writes:
Modern government is organized on “clear law,” the false premise that by making laws detailed enough to take in all possible circumstances, we can avoid human error. And so over the last few decades, law has gotten ever more granular. But all that regulatory detail, like sediment in a harbor, makes it hard to get anywhere. The 1956 Interstate Highway Act was 29 pages and succeeded in getting 41,000 miles of roads built by 1970. The 2012 transportation bill was 584 pages, and years will pass before workers can start fixing many of those same roads. Health-care regulators have devised 140,000 reimbursement categories for Medicare—including 12 categories for bee stings and 21 categories for “spacecraft accidents.” This is the tip of a bureaucratic iceberg—administration consumes 30 percent of health-care costs ...
“Clear law” turns out to be a myth. Modern law is too dense to be knowable. “It will be of little avail to the people,” James Madison observed, “if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” The quest for “clear law” is futile also because most regulatory language is inherently ambiguous. Dense rulebooks do not avoid disputes—they just divert the dispute to the parsing of legal words instead of arguing over what’s right. Indeed, legal detail often undermines the regulatory goal. “The more exact and detailed a rule, the more likely it is to open up loopholes, to permit by implication conduct that the rule was intended to avoid,” Judge Richard Posner observed.
What’s the alternative? Put humans back in charge. Law should generally be an open framework, mainly principles and goals, leaving room for responsible people to make decisions and be held accountable for results. Law based on principles leaves room for the decision-maker always to act on this question: What’s the right thing to do here?
The reason government doesn't work this way is because lawmakers and regulators have a different question in mind: who's in charge here? Inevitably, they believe, it should be themselves.


 
Christina Hoff Sommers on feminism
Great six-minute Prager University video by Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute on feminism vs. the truth. CHS: "Women in America are the freest in the world, yet many feminists tell us women are oppressed. They advocate this falsehood through victim mentality propaganda and misleading statistics, such as the gender wage gap myth."
(HT: Instapundit)


 
ISIS targets struck
Business Insider reports:
The US and its allies have begun striking Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) targets in Syria, the Pentagon said Monday night ...
The US is joined by five Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, and Jordan. In a statement on Tuesday, the Syrian foreign ministry said the US informed Damascus of the strikes beforehand, the Associated Press reports.
Most of the targets Monday night were hard ones, like buildings, a senior US official told CNN. According to ABC, the strikes targeted up to 20 locations in Syria, most of which were in or around Raqqa, the militants' de facto capital.
Two things.
One, let's not refer to any territory as a "capital" and give the Islamic State any credence as an official body. It isn't a state. It is part of the great history of Islam with its band of murderous marauders. There is no state.
Two, I do fear that U.S. military action will create hundreds of thousands of new ISIS supporters; if U.S. involvement in the Middle East contributes to the radicalizing of an already volatile region and people prone to violence, why poke the hornets' nest with a stick?
Not doing anything doesn't seem like an option, but I'm not sure doing anything actually helps. Foreign policy isn't as easy as the hawks or doves would have us believe. And bombing people, even the bad guys, because it it cathartic is morally obscene. And as I say, maybe counter-productive if it creates more ISIS fighters.
There is great wisdom in Irving Kristol's comment about both Israel and (later) the former Yugoslavia: it is a condition to be endured rather than a problem to be solved. That is unsatisfying to the modern mind which fancies everything fixable if the right minds get together and we just find the resolve to act.
Back in the real world, real problems: Islamic terror against Kurds has worsened the refugee crisis in northern Syria along the Turkish border. The AP reports:
The Islamic State group's offensive against the Syrian city of Kobani, a few miles from the border, has sent 130,000 refugees to seek safety in Turkey in the last few days. The conflict in Syria had already led to more than 1 million people flooding over the border in the past 3 1/2 years.


 
If NFL playoffs began today
Using point differential as tie-breaker (to make things simple for now), the playoffs would be:
AFC: 1) Cincinnati Bengals, 2) San Diego Chargers, 3) New England Patriots, 4) Houston Texans, WC Baltimore Ravnes, WC Buffalo Bills (no Indianapolis Colts or Denver Broncos).
NFC: 1) Philadelphia Eagles, 2) Arizona Cardinals, 3) Atlanta Falcons, 4) Detroit Lions, WC Seattle Seahawks, WC Chicago Bears (no Green Bay Packers, New Orleans Saints or San Francisco 49ers).
Bengals are legit contenders for 1 or 2 position in AFC. Patriots look to be AFC East faves. Texans cold hold off Colts but it will be difficult. Could totally see the Chargers upsetting the Broncos as AFC West champs because they way the Bolts have played on the field through three games makes them a top five team in the NFL so far. Ravens have a decent chance holding their spot but the Bills don't. Whoever doesn't win the AFC South (Texans or Colts) will battle Ravens, Pittsburgh Steelers, and whoever is looking up at the West division winner (either Denver or San Diego) are battling for the pair of wild card spots.
Eagles could land a first week bye. I still expect the 'Hawks to finish in a spot where they get a bye. Cardinals look legit enough to land a wild card, probably displacing the Niners for second in the NFC West (San Fran has had some problems this season, but they are talented enough to right their ship). I see the Lions, Bears and Packers battling for the NFC North all year and injuries will probably end up being a factor. The Saints and Falcons battle for the NFC South. Loser of that race probably gets the second wild card spot.
Next week marks the quarter-way point of the season.


 
'A Pro-Family, Pro-Growth Tax Reform'
Republican Senators Mike Lee (Utah) and Marco Rubio (Fl) in the Wall Street Journal: "Two simple income-tax brackets: 15% and 35%. End the marriage penalty and increase the child tax credit." Lee and Rubio explain:
Today, parents are, in effect, double charged for the federal senior entitlement programs. They of course pay payroll taxes, like everyone else. But unlike adults without children, they also shoulder the financial burden of raising the next generation of taxpayers, who will grow up to fund the Social Security and Medicare benefits of all future seniors.
This hidden, double burden on parents isn't offset anywhere else in the system, and so true conservative tax reform needs to account for it. Children aren't consumer goods—they are investments parents make in their futures, and in the future of America, and therefore deserve to be treated as such in our tax code.
Our proposal would account for this and level the playing field for working parents by augmenting the current child tax credit of $1,000 with an additional $2,500 credit, applicable against income taxes and payroll taxes—i.e., the taxes that most burden lower- and middle-income families. The credit would not phase out, and would be refundable against income tax and employer and employee payroll tax liability.
I'll take it.
And three cheers for the senators challenging the mindless mantra of growth for growth sake:
Some conservatives we respect wonder if such tax relief for families would do enough to promote growth. But it bears remembering that the end goal of economic policy isn't simply growth, but freedom—clearing the obstacles from each American's unique pursuit of happiness. Millions of Americans up and down the income scale choose to invest their personal economic freedom in children and not just in commerce—in human and social capital rather than just financial capital. We believe it is wrong to punish such a choice.
I'm all for economic growth, but there are other worthy goals of government policy.


 
Why aren't climate change activists targeting China?
Investor's Business Daily editorializes:
Amid all the hoopla over the "world's largest march against global warming," one question went unasked: Why aren't the protesters carping about the real culprits behind the recent rise in CO2?
It makes no sense. America is a global warming success story, for those who believe in such things. CO2 emissions are on the downtrend in this country. In fact, they are lower today than they were two decades ago. When you account for all the economic and population growth over those 20 years, that decline is even sharper ...
China is a completely different story. It's tripled the amount of CO2 it pumps into the air each year over those same two decades, to the point where it now emits almost twice as much CO2 as the U.S.


Monday, September 22, 2014
 
Man wrongfully imprisoned for 23 years dies eight months after being set free
Reason's Jacob Sullum:
In 1989 William Lopez was convicted of killing Elvirn Surria, a Brooklyn crack dealer, with a shotgun while robbing him. Since there was no physical evidence linking Lopez to the murder, the Kings County District Attorney's Office relied on the testimony of two eyewitnesses. One was a courier for Surria whose description of the gunman did not match Lopez and who could not point him out in court. The other was a crack addict facing a drug charge who agreed to testify against Lopez in exchange for lenient treatment and later recanted.
Last January, responding to a habeas corpus petition filed by Lopez, a federal judge overturned his conviction, calling the prosecutor "overzealous and deceitful," the defense attorneys "indolent and ill prepared," the trial judge's decisions "incomprehensible," and the jury's verdict "bewildering." Lopez was released from prison a week later. On Saturday morning, The New York Post reports, he died of an asthma attack at the age of 55, having enjoyed eight months of freedom after serving 23 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Lopez had filed a lawsuit against New York City, seeking $124 million in damages. The trial was supposed to begin this week.
Fuck.
I don't like $123 million lawsuits, but what price does one put on losing all of one's adult life (apparently) and punishing the kind of half-assed prosecutions that go on like this. We need limits on civil suits like this, but I would favour adding criminal trials for cops and prosecutors that pull this kind of shit. More cops and prosecutors in prison would be a good thing.


 
Asking the wrong person
Sun News personality, one-time important Grit, and all-around blowhard Ray Heard wants to know if Hillary Clinton knows that Canada's Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has offered a chance to meet her at an Ottawa event next month to entice donors to give to the Liberals as part of their most recent fundraiser. Heard demands that the media ask Trudeau about this. But if Heard really cares if Hillary knows, shouldn't the media ask her?


 
The problem with media
In a single picture.


 
Lessons from Edmund Burke
Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (and William Kristol's mom) writes in The Weekly Standard about what we can learn today about the war on terror from Edmund Burke's "Letters on a Regicide Peace," published in 1796, on the statesman's warning about making peace with the authors of the Reign of Terror. Burke warned about "false reptile prudence, the result not of caution but of fear." There's wisdom in that, although I'm not sold there is a lesson to be learned. Perhaps there's something to chew on, which is one of the benefits of history. And that's fine, too.


 
2016 watch (Condi Rice edition)
Hot Air's Allah Pundit wonders why former secretary of state Condoleeza Rice isn't being considered a front-runner for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination:
The 2016 field is “insanely wide open,” after all, and she’s got plenty to commend her — sterling academic credentials, years of diplomatic experience at the highest level, popularity among both wings of the GOP, and a trailblazer narrative that can trump even Hillary’s. She’d be seen, rightly or wrongly, as the “adult” in a field of Republican neophytes, someone whose gravitas all but the most Bush-hating doves within the other party respect. If Jeb ends up passing on the race, Bushworld will be desperate for a familiar face to rally behind. What sounds better — Romney 3.0 or Condi?
I think that's the answer right there. The GOP and America wants to get past its disastrous Bush years. Dubya might have been better than Obama, but that ain't saying much.
There is another reason that Allah Pundit considers and takes care of too easily. She's pro-choice on abortion. I don't share the Pundit's view that she could easily mollify social conservatives with the promise to appoint pro-life judges. The more obvious problem for Rice is Iraq. Whatever the fallout of Barack Obama's getting the United States out of that hellhole, and even if Americans seem to want to do something about ISIS, bringing back one of the faces of that foreign policy disaster should be a non-starter.
There are also personal reasons, perhaps. Allah Pundit concludes:
Exit question: Is her reluctance about running mainly about not wanting to field “How come you aren’t married?!” questions for the next six years? I think the media would tread lightly there, but they’d tread.
Again I don't share Allah Pundit optimism. I think the insinuations would be unignorable.
There could be one other personal reason: she doesn't want to be president. She saw what the job does to someone (George W. Bush) about as close as one can without experiencing it. Perhaps, just perhaps, that makes her disinclined for the job.


 
Why we can't debate climate change
Adam Sterling tweets: "Precisely how much cost we are *willing* to bear to produce precisely how much benefit re climate change is a legit debate." And then in his next tweet he dismisses many of those who would take part in the debate. His first point is true about most things and is worth remembering.


 
Iranians sentenced to jail and lashes for dancing to Pharrell's 'Happy' in a YouTube video
Sun News reports:
Six Iranians appearing in a YouTube video singing the popular pop song 'Happy' were given suspended sentences of 91 lashes and six months in prison for "obscene behaviour."
Another defendant who faced heavier charges was given a suspended sentence of one year in prison and 91 lashes ...
The sentences are suspended for three years, meaning that if any of the seven are found guilty of committing a similar offense, the punishment is carried out.
The suspended sentence part should not fool you, this is a heavy-handed sentence for doing nothing particularly wrong. What does the regime fear from having citizens dance to a crappy (if catchy) song?
(HT: Eye on a Crazy Planet)


 
'The Rape Epidemic Is a Fiction'
After offering all the requisite all-sexual-assault-is-wrong mantra, Kevin D. Williamson notes:
It is probably the case that the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses is wildly exaggerated—not necessarily in absolute terms, but relative to the rate of sexual assault among college-aged women with similar demographic characteristics who are not attending institutions of higher learning. The DoJ hints at this in its criticism of survey questions, some of which define “sexual assault” so loosely as to include actions that “are not criminal.” This might explain why so many women who answer survey questions in a way consistent with their being counted victims of sexual assault frequently display such a blasé attitude toward the events in question and so rarely report them. As the DoJ study puts it: “The most commonly reported response — offered by more than half the students — was that they did not think the incident was serious enough to report. More than 35 percent said they did not report the incident because they were unclear as to whether a crime was committed or that harm was intended.”
If you are having a little trouble getting your head around a definition of “sexual assault” so liberal that it includes everything from forcible rape at gunpoint to acts that not only fail to constitute crimes under the law but leave the victims “unclear as to whether harm was intended,” then you are, unlike much of our culture, still sane.
Not only that, but "Sexual assaults today are a third of what they were twenty years ago."


 
'Blitzing the NFL With Moral Preening'
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein hardly whitewashes the seriousness of the issue of NFL players and their propensity for violence (which, was noted on this website on Friday, is less likely than the general public), but does note that the moral preening about the NFL is a little much, too:
Nora O'Donnell, the co-anchor with Charlie Rose on CBS's "This Morning," has already had her go at Commissioner Goodell. Watching her interview him about his knowledge of the security video showing the Baltimore running back Ray Rice punching his then fiancée (now wife) in an elevator, one notes that Ms. O'Donnell is wearing her game-face. This is serious stuff, that face is saying, as its owner, having dropped her fabulous frozen smile, digs to find points of contradiction in Mr. Goodell's account of what he knew and when.
Two minutes later, of course, she and the heavy-breathing Mr. Rose, having shed seriousness, will be laughing at a bit of film about a baby panda trying to eat an ice-cream cone. This past Friday, at a news conference with Mr. Goodell, their media colleagues had an opportunity to exhibit their own impeccable virtue by asking one inane question after another, which Mr. Goodell fended off with equally empty answers. A sample question: Was he, Roger Goodell, himself ever guilty of domestic violence? ...
Now, of course, more of it is being found. An Arizona Cardinals running back named Jonathan Dwyer is accused of aggravated assault in separate incidents with his wife. The Chicago Bears wide receiver Brandon Marshall has been dragged into the current mess by a former girlfriend, and her father, for violence allegedly done to her in 2006; they've turned the case over to Gloria Allred, who specializes in protecting women's rights, or at least those of women who are well-known or likely to become so. The sharks, one senses, smell blood.


 
People's climate march/UN climate summit
Iowahawk tweets about the climate change march thing that happened somewhere:
1 Earth is warming
2 because of humans
3 and this is bad
4 so let's drum circle
5 to give more power & money to government
#insanityscale
Drum circles aren't the only silly things seen at the People's Climate March; Reason.com has video. And Small Dead Animals points out the trash on the streets left behind by these environmentalists.
It isn't just the protesters that are engaged in a silly waste of time. The Wall Street Journal editorializes on the summit at Turtle Bay:
Tens of thousands of environmental protestors paraded through New York City on Sunday, in a "people's climate march" designed to lobby world leaders arriving for the latest United Nations climate summit. The march did succeed in messing up traffic, but President Obama won't achieve much more when he speaks Tuesday at this latest pit stop on the global warming grand prix.
Six years after the failure of the Copenhagen summit whose extravagant ambition was to secure a binding global treaty on carbon emissions, Mr. Obama is trying again. The Turtle Bay gathering of world leaders isn't formally a part of the international U.N. climate negotiations that are supposed to climax late next year in Paris, but the venue is meant to be an ice-breaker for more than 125 presidents, prime ministers and heads of state to start to reach consensus.
One not-so-minor problem: The world's largest emitters are declining to show up, even for appearances. The Chinese economy has been the No. 1 global producer of carbon dioxide since 2008, but President Xi Jinping won't be gracing the U.N. with his presence. India's new Prime Minister Narendra Modi (No. 3) will be in New York but is skipping the climate parley. Russian President Vladimir Putin (No. 4) has other priorities, while Japan (No. 5) is uncooperative after the Fukushima disaster that has damaged support for nuclear power. Saudi Arabia is dispatching its petroleum minister.
While the march and summit might be a waste of time because they will not achieve anything, the Journal also asks why they are necessary:
Rather than debasing economics, perhaps the climate lobby should return to the climate science and explain the hiatus in warming that has now lasted for 16, 19 or 26 years depending on the data set and which the climate models failed to predict even as global carbon dioxide emissions have climbed by 25%. Their alibi is that the new warming is now hidden in the oceans, an assertion they lack the evidence to prove.