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Archive for 2012
April 12, 2012
LOOKING FOR WAR ON TERROR NEWS? Check out Fred Pruitt’s Rantburg.
Or you can go in an entirely different direction and check out One Cute Thing A Day.
#WARONWOMENFAIL: Attacking Ann Romney — yeah, that’s the ticket! “Needless to say, the ‘war on women’ has taken on a whole new tone. Let’s count the ways this is just awful for Obama and/or Democrats more generally. There are a few, so find a comfortable seat.”
FASTEST-SELLING CAR IN AMERICA? the Toyota Prius C.
Alex Nunez emails to take credit for prescience: “When it was unveiled, I said (on the Autoblog podcast) that the Toyota Prius C ‘would sell like bananas on the Planet of the Apes.'”
TIM LYNCH: “Stand Your Ground:” Law and Evidence.
ANDREW MALCOLM: Latin America’s Giving Up on Obama, Too. “Just as his favorable rating and job approval have plunged during these past 39 months at home, the same is happening all across Latin America. According to a new Gallup Opinion Briefing out this morning, Obama’s median job approval rating in that region was 62% right after he took office in 2009. Today, it’s 47%, a drop of 15 points or 25%.”
PUTIN FEARS shale gas competition. Well, Vlad, just make some donations to the Greens and you can probably slow it down. . . .
WELL, COMPARED TO JOE BIDEN, HE IS: Biden: Al Franken is a ‘leading legal scholar.’
STOP CYBERBULLYING YOUR MASTERS! “As further evidence that ‘cyberbullying’ (with cyber-stalking close behind) has become the ‘disorderly conduct’ of the online world—-an all-purpose legal bludgeon with which to thump people in the kidneys when the authorities don’t like what they’re doing but can’t find a real crime about which to complain—-three San Francisco high school seniors were suspended for saying mean things about their teachers in Tumblr posts. They were reinstated only after civil liberties groups stepped in to remind school officials that there are actual limits to their power, and lawyers with pro bono time on their hands willing to make those limits stick.”
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Ann Romney on Twitter rebuts critic who says she has ‘never worked.’ The Democratic “critic” is Hilary Rosen, whose main role has been a paid shill for the record companies’ efforts to take over your computer. That may be a sort of “work,” but it’s nothing to be proud of.
Related: Democrats’ “War on Mothers” Sparks Twitter Tempest. “The Obama administration, sensing a Waterloo in its silly ‘war on women’ theme, quickly sent David Axelrod to disavow Rosen’s comments. And all of this happened before the Twitter tempest was three hours old. We will be hearing more about Rosen’s insults in the days to come, but for the moment, this story raises–like so many others–the question, why are so many liberals so mean-spirited?”
UPDATE: Reader B. Coleman emails: “After reading Ann Romney’s response, it it appears the Democrats are waging war on children and families as well as women. Who DO they like and represent?”
ED MORRISSEY: Obama Impugns Romney In A Flagrant Abuse of Power.
Recently I observed that fracking created an oil boom in Kansas. This follows fracking oil booms in North Dakota and Texas, and fracking natural gas booms in Pennsylvania and West Virginia — red state territory (Philadelphia’s blue keeps Pennsylvania in play). The red states frack. Blue states don’t New York state banned fracking.
Because this helps red states, the people in the blue states are desperately seeking some junk science to stop it.
Methane in well water won’t work because the well water already had methane.
Earthquakes. That’s it. There has been an increase in earthquakes worldwide.
Wait — I thought the earthquakes were being caused by global warming climate change.
JOHN HINDERAKER: How Should Republicans Respond to the Buffett Ploy? I love the part about it being “the dumbest issue since Qemoy and Matsu.”
But here’s an answer from InstaPundit reader George P. Apostolicas: “The Republicans should support the Buffet Rule with the contingent rider that no one (retroactively ) can shelter more than $100 m from estate taxes by use of charitable deduction provisions.”
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT PLAY: GSA spent week in Hawaii for one-hour ribbon cutting. “When the IG office suggested that the employees were working hard the whole time, the GSA employee replied, ‘I doubt it.'”
HOSTILE WORKPLACE: Female employees in the Obama White House make considerably less than their male colleagues, records show. 18% less is considerable indeed.
But it’s a boys’ club over there. Has been since day one. Related: In Early Obama White House Female Staffers Felt Frozen Out.
Gosh, I wonder why?
JUSTICE: Eric Holder Praises Al Sharpton.
DAMON ROOT: IN DEFENSE OF HERBERT SPENCER:
Kitcher, like so many of Spencer’s other lazy critics, appears not to have understood what Spencer actually wrote. Yes, Spencer coined the potent phrase “survival of the fittest,” which Charles Darwin later added to the fifth edition of his Origin of Species. But by fit, Spencer did not mean brute force or ruthlessness. In Spencer’s view, human society was evolving from a “militant” state, which was characterized by violence and coercion, to an “industrial” one, characterized by trade and voluntary cooperation. So not only did Spencer think labor unions could be a useful check on the “harsh and cruel conduct” of employers, he also believed “the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other” to be a necessary and proper element of true liberalism. Indeed, Spencer devoted 10 chapters in his Principles of Ethics to spelling out the importance of “Positive Beneficience,” or private charity. So much for not taking “steps to protect the weak.”
There are other reasons to still admire Spencer and his work today, including his pioneering support for feminism and women’s equality and his principled anti-imperialism (in 1881 Spencer even invited Charles Darwin to join him in supporting Britain’s new Anti-Aggression League, which Darwin politely declined.) For more on how this libertarian individualist became smeared as one history’s greatest monsters, check out my 2008 article “The Unfortunate Case of Herbert Spencer.”
Don’t expect leftist critics to actually know history. Why should they, when their historical demands change so often? Easier just to create a fresh batch as needed.
IN RESPONSE TO MY EARLIER POST ON THE TITANIC, reader Steven Postrel (yes, that Steven Postrel) writes:
The economist’s perspective: If you never have an accident or disaster, your precautions are too strict. One Triangle fire and one WTC disaster over the observed timespan may well be optimal or too few when balanced against the present value of the costs of having codes strict enough to prevent such tragedies.
If you prefer not to put dollar values on human life, shift to risk/risk analysis and note that a) wealthier is generally healthier, b) building codes add to costs and reduce real wealth (gross of the prevented losses), and therefore c) building codes strict enough to prevent ever having something like the WTC collapse may well kill more people over time than the collapse itself. Or you can look at how costlier building codes lead to an increase in the average age of structures (all else equal) and so may result in more people spending time in older, less-safe buildings.
You’d need to do detailed empirical work to tell what the magnitudes are for these effects; possibly the optimum safety level is more stringent than what we have now. My armchair guess is that it goes the other way, though.
Good point.
April 11, 2012
PASCAL BRUCKNER ON the uses and abuses of apocalyptic fears. Mostly abuses, these days.
#GAWKERFAIL: Well That Was Quick… GAWKER’S FOX NEWS MOLE EXPOSED.
THE DEMOCRATS’ WAR ON WOMEN (CONT’D): Hilary Rosen: Ann Romney never worked a day in her life.
Hillary Rosen — longtime paid shill for the recording industry’s efforts to seize control of your computer — has never done a day’s honest work in her life. That’s more truthful than what she says about Ann Romney . . . .
UPDATE: Reader Ignatz Kant writes: “Ann Romney raised 5 children, fought multiple-sclerosis and beat cancer. Rosen just fired the first volley in the Democrat’s war on stay-at-home moms.”
When John Edwards pretended to stick by his wife with cancer, the media made a big deal out of it. When Mitt Romney actually did it, it was a nonstory. Keep rockin’!
MALCOLM GLADWELL observes the idiocy of airport security.
It’s a good piece, and you should read it. But really, everybody knows this. I mean, everybody knows this. And yet it stays idiotic. That’s not giving me much faith in the whole “homeland security” effort. After all, if the part that everyone can see is idiotic, what does that say about the parts we can’t see?
Some things don’t change.