WHY DO THE RICH AND FAMOUS always sunbathe topless?
Archive for 2012
December 27, 2012
WHY DO PEOPLE BLINK SO FREQUENTLY? “In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of scientists from Japan offers up a surprising new answer—that briefly closing our eyes might actually help us to gather our thoughts and focus attention on the world around us.”
READER BOOK PLUG: Reader Martin Archer asks me to plug his new book. If the book is as memorable as the title, it’ll be a hit. But that’s a stiff challenge. . . .
PLENTY OF ROOM AT THE INN: D.C. Hotels Not Exactly Overflowing For Obama’s Second Inaugural.
CHANGE: Polyamory On The March.
SHOCKING SCIENCE: Kids eat more healthy foods at family meals.
HOPEY-CHANGEY: Consumer Confidence Plunges, Unadjusted New Homes Sales Slide To Lowest Since February. Forward!
GREG GUTFELD RIPS INTERACTIVE MAP OF GUN OWNERS: Makes non-gun owners ‘the easiest marks.’ That’s right, of course. When criminals don’t know who has guns, gun ownership generates positive externalities. A searchable map undercuts those.
JUDGING WOMEN BY THEIR WAIST SIZE IS WRONG, BUT JUDGING MEN BY THEIR WALLETS IS FINE: A Bad Credit Score Is A Good Reason To Dump A Guy.
WELL, I GUESS WE’RE SCREWED THEN: Faster Growth Will Come, If Governments Raise Their Game. I really don’t think that the problem is too much “fiscal tightening,” though.
IN THE MAIL: From Robert Sapp, Lunar Dance.
TALKLEFT: Are Gun Owners Now Going To Be Stigmatized Like Sex Offenders? “I think it’s an attempt at intimidation. I wonder if any of those whose addresses were published are immediate family members of federal officials or employees, and covered by 18 USC Section 119, which prohibits publishing home addresses for intimidation. Or if the internet publication of home addresses of gun owners can be considered cyber stalking, cyber-bullying, harassment or invasion of privacy under state laws? Just because the information is available under a FOIA request, does that mean it can be publicly disseminated? I’m sure they checked with their lawyers and felt like they were on safe ground, but I hope somebody sues them.”
Of course, my first thought on seeing the map was “That’s more gun owners than I would have expected for such a deep-blue area where guns are demonized.” Instead of marginalizing people, the effect may be more like How bad can it be if so many respectable people are doing it?
ANN ALTHOUSE: Why Was That Prop So Important To David Gregory?
MEGAN MCARDLE ON THE FUTURE OF TAX RATES:
First, for all the talk about “going back to the Clinton-era tax rates”, that is not exactly what we’re doing. Since Clinton, other tax hikes have been passed, most notably to pay for Obamacare, which raise the marginal tax rates on the wealthy well above their Clinton-era levels.
Second, we’re getting to a marginal income tax level on top incomes that I’m personally uncomfortable with. As libertarians go, I’m not particularly fussed about taxes–I am, for example, on the record as in favor of letting the Bush tax cuts expire.
But I am uncomfortable when the government makes more money off your labors than you do. Yes, some people don’t work very hard to earn their money, or earn it in ways that seem illegitimate. But the solution is to change the law so that it’s harder to earn money in illegitimate ways, not to take the majority of their money in taxes–and the majority of the money of other people who work quite hard indeed.
And third, we’re pushing surprisingly close to the limits of the “raise tax rates on the rich” strategy. Oh, they can maybe go up another 10%, which would raise some real money–about $150 billion a year. But it’s not nearly as much money as we need. And my back-of-the envelope calculation assumes, fairly unrealistically, that raising the top marginal tax rate to 60% produces no income-shifting, doesn’t decrease capital formation, and doesn’t encourage anyone to lessen their work effort. While the literature on the income elasticity of taxation is varied, no one thinks the effect is zero–and one thing that people often don’t understand is that the higher the tax rate already is, the harder it is to raise it further.
Obama, et al., aren’t likely to be especially constrained by revenue limitations, though, as their real motivation is to hurt people they don’t like. It’s all about the punishment.
NAKED DC: A Year Of Crazy Hippies.
THE BIG FREEZE: Cold Weather Across Europe, Asia Kills Hundreds.
Cold weather in the past few days has sadly gone from severe to deadly. While unusually high snowfall has disrupted the travel plans of millions of Americans, freezing temperatures have taken the lives of hundreds of people from Central Europe to South Asia. The BBC reports that in Poland, 49 people have died; in Ukraine, 83; in Russia, 88; and in India, at least 93. The majority of those dead are the elderly and the homeless.
Besides being an obvious tragedy for many across the world, this is a reminder that “weather” is not “climate,” unless it suits the needs of environmental hotheads to claim that it is. When there’s a hot spell or a dry spell or a wet spell that can somehow be connected with the climate change narrative, the media resounds with panicky warnings. But when people die of frostbite in Punjab and temperatures hit -58F in Russia, the silence of the alarmists is deafening.
In the past few years we’ve seen climate change blamed for hot weather, for floods and for droughts. It’s been blamed for both the presence and the absence of storms. It’s been blamed for excessive snow as well as for the absence of snow. We don’t blame the smart greens for these recurring epidemics of media foolishness, but we wish they did more to focus the public discussion on practicalities and realities.
For the record, Via Meadia accepts the scientific evidence pointing to rising temperatures around the world. But we remain deeply skeptical that the nostrums proposed by green activists offer much in the way of practical steps, and the more green policies we see that fail due to ‘unexpected’ complications the less confidence we have.
More significantly, we’ve seen how the press selectively conflates weather and climate to advance a predetermined narrative. As they do in so many areas. I think it’s because they’re insufficiently diverse, like the all-white New York Magazine.
ORIN KERR ON LINDA GREENHOUSE ON THE INHERENT ILLEGITIMACY OF PEOPLE WHO DISAGREE WITH HER.
LAW, JOURNALISM, AND DOUBLE STANDARDS: David Gregory, Meet James O’Keefe.
Howard Kurtz dismisses the legal concerns. Gregory may have violated the law, but he was just engaged in a media stunt. ”I don’t think Gregory was planning to commit any crimes,” Kurtz writes — no crimes other than violating D.C.’s gun laws that is. But who cares if it was illegal, it was good TV! Tell that to James O’Keefe who, Kurtz may recall, was prosecuted for his own legal indiscretions when trying to film some stunts of his own. Prosecutors wisely allowed O’Keefe to plea to a minor charge, but he wasn’t let off the hook just because he was attempting act of journalism. Why should David Gregory and his NBC colleagues be held to a different standard?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall Kurtz springing to O’Keefe’s defense.
UPDATE: This is all over Facebook.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Guns And Posers: Why Isn’t David Gregory In Jail?
MORE: The David Gregory meme started at Legal Insurrection with this post: Feds and media jump to David Gregory’s defense as race card goes missing.
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Subjecting Law School Officials to Professional Discipline for Deceitful Marketing to Prospective Students. “Law schools have misled prospective students for years about the value of legal education. In some cases, law school officials have engaged in outright deceit, knowingly spreading false information about their schools. More commonly, they have presented statistics—especially those concerning the employment outcomes of law graduates—in ways nearly guaranteed to confuse readers. These deceptions and sharp practices violate the norms of the legal profession, a profession that scrupulously regulates the advertising of legal services. The deceptions also violate ethical rules prohibiting lawyers from engaging in dishonesty, misrepresentation, and deceit.”
INSTAVISION: Cult of Perfection: How Women’s Magazines Make Women Feel Ugly and Worthless. I talk with Verily magazine editor-in-chief Kara Eschbach about women’s media and her new magazine.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: We Still Need A Comprehensive Libya Policy Review. “The Benghazi attack was one small chapter in an an expensive and still unfolding tale of policy failure, in which U.S. forces were committed to Qaddafi’s ouster without proper assessment of risk, analysis of policy costs, or preparation for consequences.”
According to a State Department spokesperson, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was unable to comment because of “a really bad eczema outbreak.”
MICKEY KAUS: Is Starbucks A Cult?
Isn’t there something creepy about Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz having [in Politico’s words] “asked his Washington-area employees to write ‘Come Together’ on each customer cup today, tomorrow and Friday, as a gesture to urge leaders to resolve the fiscal cliff”? Did Schultz take a poll of his employees–sorry, “partners,” he calls them–before ordering pressuring asking them to join in this lobbying effort? What if he were, say, the CEO of Chick-fil-A and he “asked” his “partners” to write “Preserve the Family” on the outside of cups and containers?
That would be evil and political.