I LOVE THE IDEA OF doing this sort of thing with anti-discrimination laws. There’s opportunity for a lot of instructive monkey-wrenching here.
Archive for 2013
November 3, 2013
RICK MORAN: Remembering the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Why lefties are always going on about replacing the Constitution.
LIVE IN JUST A FEW MINUTES: Amy Alkon on BlogTalkRadio: Dr. Christopher Chabris: How intuition can lead us astray. Call in and ask a question!
WELL, YOU COULD SEE THIS COMING: Virginia Democrat Calls For Forcing Doctors To Accept Medicare And Medicaid Patients.
Polycsytic kidney disease causes cysts to grow, continually, throughout my kidneys. It will eventually clog them, and they’ll stop working. PKD affects 600,000 Americans and costs taxpayers more than $2 billion per year. It also occupies an estimated 5,000 spaces on the kidney transplant waiting list. In late August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it would not approve tolvaptan—the only PKD treatment that has been shown to work.
The decision deeply upset many Americans with PKD. But another, very small group of people—those who sought to prevent tolvaptan’s approval—must have felt some kind of satisfaction. . . .
Denigrations of “Big Pharma” are now commonplace. Some panelists clearly saw themselves as the only honest brokers standing between an allegedly rapacious drug company and the suckers—PKD patients like me. Perhaps I would see things that way, too, if I were not counting on one particular drug company to extend the lives of my loved ones, my many friends in the PKD community, and myself.
I’m pro-choice on this sort of thing. The FDA, not so much. Maybe we need to revisit Eugene Volokh’s right of medical self-defense.
BILL CLINTON: “Happy birthday to my brilliant & extraordinary wife.”
Jim Treacher: You cheated on her. And then you lied about it.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Everyone in the world needs at least 4000 kwh and $5000 per capita PPP for developed life expectancy and quality of life.
So Norman Cook’s recommendation is inaccurate? Or maybe just incomplete.
SHOULD MARK STEYN lighten up? “In a funny way, the very quality of Steyn’s writing tends to make me suspect his conclusions a little. It’s too seductive. Reading him always gives me an uneasy feeling that I’m being lured down the path of despair by dazzling turns of phrase.”
COUPONS GALORE in Grocery & Gourmet Food.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The Book Obama Didn’t Read, And Should Have.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 178.
SHOCKING: Benghazi Whistleblower Says He Was Smeared. “Davies was angry that his real name was published by The Washington Post and was not redacted in the Blue Mountain Group incident report leaked to the media, even though the report redacted other names. ‘It means I won’t work in the industry again and I can be tracked down pretty quickly with that name,’ he said.”
The real point of such behavior, of course, is not to punish, but to discourage others from coming forward.
I LIKE THE TAX AND POLICY IDEAS I’M HEARING from Mike Lee.
YES, LET’S: The Left is trying to rehabilitate Karl Marx. Let’s remind them of the millions who died in his name.
I can’t quite believe that I’ve just sat through ten minutes of BBC television in which British journalists Owen Jones and Zoe Williams have defended Karl Marx as the prophet of the End of Capitalism. Unbelievable because I had thought Marxism was over with the fall of the Berlin Wall – when we discovered that socialism was one part bloodshed, one part farce. But unbelievable also because you’d have to be a pretty lacking in moral sensitivity to defend a thinker whose work sent millions of people to an early grave.
I don’t want to have to rehearse the numbers but, apparently, they’re not being taught in schools anymore – so here goes. Sixty-five million were murdered in China – starved, hounded to suicide, shot as class traitors. Twenty million in the USSR, 2 million in North Korea, 1.7 million in Africa. The nightmare of Cambodia (2 million dead) is especially vivid. “Reactionaries” were sorted out from the base population on the grounds of being supporters of the old regime, having gone to school or just for wearing glasses. They were taken to the side of paddy fields and hacked to death by teenagers.
Adherents of Marx at some level must like the mass killings. Perhaps they make them feel powerful.
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Why Aren’t More Women Libertarians? Probably something to do with hypergamy.
REVIEW: 2014 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. More shocking than the 12-second quarter mile time? “Our manual-transmission model is rated at 17 mpg in the city and 29 highway.”
SHOCKING NEWS: No ship with an armed security team aboard has been successfully pirated.
In 2011, the U.K., Greece, Norway and other major maritime nations began letting their merchant ships carry armed private-security personnel for self-defense in hazardous waters. This overcame longstanding legal and cultural barriers such as stringent local firearms laws and fears of liability.
The result? Successful hijackings off Somalia fell by half to 14 in 2012 from 28 in 2011, and overall attacks dropped to 75 from 237. Through the third quarter of 2013, there have been just 10 incidents, with two hijackings.
The main reason for this drop is that Somali piracy is an industry like any other, albeit far more brutal. When risks are low and profit margins are high, piracy flourishes. Investors on land buy shares in a piracy venture, funding weapons and equipment in exchange for a stake in any ransom. Thus to suppress piracy, the return on investment must be made unfavorable.
A major step toward making piracy less attractive to investors has been merchant vessels’ increased adherence to the industry’s Best Management Practices, which advise ships to travel at over 18 knots, fortify access points and take evasive action when attacked. Yet many vessels, such as bulk carriers and large tankers, are too “low and slow” to fully comply with these practices and need additional protection.
Armed private security fills the breach not by winning high-octane gunfights against pirates—although there have been a few—but through deterrence. Security companies know that most pirates are profit-seeking criminals, not fanatical terrorists. Armed guards, either on merchant ships or in their own escort boats, make their presence known, firing warning shots if pirates approach. This almost always persuades hijackers to abort their mission and seek out easier prey.
The firepower necessary to achieve this deterrence has proven cheap enough that private security has been widely adopted by the shipping industry.
Yes, just as homeowners with guns make home invasions less likely. Given that merchant vessels have been armed for nearly all of human history, the real surprise is that anyone finds this surprising. On the other hand, the near-elimination of piracy was a major accomplishment of the two centuries of British/American naval dominance that appears to be coming to an end. This is just one small way in which the world will pay a price.
OH, YEAH, THAT FIRST KISS tells you a lot.
READER BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Reader Amy Hansen emails to recommend Portal to Mescalahem, by her father, Larry Forkner.
OKAY, HERE’S ANOTHER QUOTE FROM THAT SULTAN KNISH PIECE I LINKED EARLIER:
Competence is the real modernity and it has very little to do with the empty trappings of design that surround it. In some ways the America of a few generations ago was a far more modern place because it was a more competent place. For all our nice toys, we look like primitive savages compared to men who could build skyscrapers and fleets within a year… and build them well.
Those aren’t things we can do anymore. Not because the knowledge and skills don’t exist, but because the culture no longer allows it. We can’t do them for the same reason that Third World countries can’t do what we do. It’s not that the knowledge is inaccessible, but that the culture gets in the way.
It’s our very hollow modernity that gets in the way of our truly being modern. We can no longer build big things because the ability to implement vision on a large scale no longer exists. We can still do impressive things as individuals, but that’s also true of Kenya or Thailand. And in China, they can carry out grandiose projects, but those projects have no vision or competence.
We used to be able to combine the two by competently implementing grandiose visions, but our “modern” culture is the roadblock that prevents us from working together to make the great things that we can still envision individually.
Our modernity is style rather than substance. It’s Obama grinning. It’s the right font. It’s the right joke. It’s that sense that X knows what he’s doing because he presents it the right way. There’s nothing particularly modern about that. In most cultures, the illusion of competence trumps the real thing. It’s why so many countries are so badly broken because they go by appearances, rather than by results.
Yep. And that’s a mistake, but an easier one to make in a media-driven culture, especially when the media that drive it are lousy.
IF YOU GAVE ME A BATTERY THAT WOULD LAST LONG ENOUGH TO NOT NEED A MOPHIE, maybe I wouldn’t buy a case for my iPhone. And you could do that by making the iPhone a quarter-inch thicker, which would not be much of a design compromise.