AMY ALKON: Fighting Sexism With Cross-Stitched Man-Hating: Welcome to openly toxic feminism. Quoth a feminist author: “To me, there’s nothing ironic about misandry. I really do hate men. A lot.” We’d kinda figured that out, lady.
Archive for 2013
November 25, 2013
BIG SAVINGS, NO WAITING: At Amazon, It’s Black Friday Deals Week.
Also, Deals Galore in GPS and Navigation.
Plus, today only: 20% or More Off Featured Windows 8 Laptops.
Also today only: Samsung Galaxy SIII – No-Contract Phones, $259.95 (35% off).
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The Real And The Fake of ObamaCare: Politicians can’t talk their way out of a technological mess.
All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle aren’t dumb. But they come from a background — law and politics — where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can be as good as, or better than, truth.
What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don’t is that in the world of things, as opposed to people, there’s no escaping the sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics, inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be rationalized away.
When our country has accomplished great things in the past, there has usually been a great engineer running the program: Hyman Rickover with the nuclear submarine program, or Wernher von Braun with the Apollo space program, for example. Rickover and von Braun were famously stern taskmasters, but they did not substitute wishes for reality.
Which may be why they were able to launch submarines, and rockets that astounded the world. While today, we can’t even launch a website.
Read the whole thing!
UPDATE: Reader G.L. Carlson writes:
For years, I told MBA’s working on new product programs that there are two kinds of laws. Man-made law is a mutable matter of opinion, persuasion, and convenience. Mother Nature has no pity, brooks no argument, and enforces HER laws absolutely with massive indifference to the consequences. Breaking the speed limit may get you fined; ignoring gravity will get you killed.
This understanding is a fundamental difference between those trained in science and those in liberal arts. The latter may get it; the former always do (or win Darwin awards, thus leaving the field).
Indeed. Though to be fair, this is precisely the sort of thing that a rigorous liberal arts education — as opposed to the sloppier modern alternatives — did in fact teach.
GENERATIONAL WEALTH TRANSFERS: Government books $41.3 billion in student loan profits: Figures come as concerns mount about growing loan debt for students, graduates. And, of course, the program is also mostly a subsidy allowing universities to charge higher tuitions.
OBAMA NOT LOOKING SO HOT IN NEW CNN POLL: “Obama’s woes are not limited to honesty and his managerial skills. Fifty-six percent say he is not a person they admire, and an equal number say he does not agree with them on important issues. Fifty-six percent also say he does not inspire confidence, and 53% don’t view him as a strong and decisive leader.”
He’s only strong and decisive when attacking his domestic political opponents.
ONE OF OBAMA’S FEW SUCCESSFUL POLICIES: Joel Achenbach on the Spaceflight Boom.
To hear the dreamers tell it, this is the next Silicon Valley. The Mojave Air and Space Port is the spiritual heart of the industry that people call “New Space.”
Old Space (and this is still the dreamers talking) is slow, bureaucratic, government-directed, completely top-down. Old Space is NASA, cautious and halting, supervising every project down to the last thousand-dollar widget. Old Space is Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman. Old Space coasts on the glory of the Apollo era and isn’t entirely sure what to do next.
New Space is the opposite of all that. It’s wild. It’s commercial, bootstrapping, imaginative, right up to the point of being (and this is no longer the dreamers talking) delusional.
Many of the New Space enterprises are still in the PowerPoint stage, with business models built around spaceships that haven’t yet gone to space. A bold attitude and good marketing aren’t enough to put a vehicle into orbit. The skeptics among the Old Space people will say to the upstarts: Where’s your rocket? How many times have you launched? Can you deliver reliably? Repeatedly? Safely? We put a man on the moon — what have you done?
If there’s one thing that New Space has going for it, it’s that Old Space is in trouble. Old Space and New Space turn out to be symbiotic. New Space companies need NASA contracts, and NASA needs New Space companies to pick up the agency’s slack.
The true believers imagine that, someday soon, robotic vehicles will mine asteroids for precious metals, including gold and platinum. Moon dirt will be transformed into rocket fuel for missions to Mars. Closer to home, FedEx will send a package from New York to Tokyo, via space, in half an hour.
Read the whole thing.
THIS SEEMS WORTHWHILE: Stewart Baker: Can We Crowd-Audit HealthCare.gov?
You don’t have to be very cynical to think that we’ll only hear about enrollment statistics on November 30 if the 80% goal is met, or can be spun.
Which leads me to the point of this post: We don’t actually have to wait for the administration to release the numbers. Because the government has chosen a target that can be measured by the public.
All we need is for a large enough group of consumers to go through the enrollment process on November 30 and report whether they succeeded or failed in choosing a plan and getting it into their shopping cart.
Read the whole thing.
MICHAEL BARONE: Will Republicans propose tax cuts to strengthen two-parent families?
As Utah Sen. Mike Lee has noted in speeches at the Heritage Foundation, “The problem of poverty is linked to family breakdown and the erosion of marriage among low-income families and communities.”
Lee is careful not to cast opprobrium on single or divorced parents. But he insists on pointing to the uncomfortable but undeniable fact that economic outcomes for their children have been far worse than those of children raised in two-parent families.
That produces many personal tragedies. And in cold economic terms, it means that society is losing gross domestic product because of less than optimal development of human capital.
Government policy can’t force people to get or stay married. But it may be able to encourage them to do so.
That happened in the years after World War II. A steeply progressive income tax combined with generous dependent deductions ($500 originally, later raised to $600) played some unquantifiable part in stimulating the Baby Boom and family stability for a generation after the war.
Lee proposes a $2,500 child tax credit — less in real dollars than the postwar deduction — applied to both payroll and income taxes.
He also proposes allowing employees to claim flex time when they have worked overtime, as federal employees can do. He wants Congress to hack away at the marriage penalties embedded in various benefits programs and Obamacare.
Lee also talks about devolving gas taxes and transportation policies to the states (to reduce commute times) and allowing states to accredit alternative forms of higher and vocational education (to help upward mobility).
Unmarrieds tend to vote Democrat. Marrieds tend to vote Republican. Dems have been pushing policies to boost the number of the former for years. The GOP needs to boost the number of marrieds, or it’s in trouble.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: A Culture In Ruins.
JIM EPSTEIN: Amtrak Is a Tax-Sucking Behemoth That Deserves to Die. I do enjoy the Acela Club Car, though. Of course, it’s so pleasant because it’s heavily subsidized.
VALERIE JARRETT now dating Ahmad Rashad. Is “Quranist” a word?
TODAY’S SPACEX LAUNCH: A Potential Game-Changer. Well, just remember that successful tech programs proceed by trial and error.
LET’S YOU AND HIM FIGHT: Former Rep. Pete Stark Out For Revenge On Successor Who Ousted Him In Primary.
INDEED: Salena Zito: For Obama, Everything Is About Politics.
As a president, his governing style always has required a bad guy, someone who is “against” him.
It is a way of operating that his staff has adopted. That is why, when senior staffers such as Pfeiffer are questioned by reporters, their default answers aren’t thoughtful or mindful of the office they represent.
Instead, the answers are laced with bitterness toward the questioners and with disdain for the people who might care about an inconvenient issue.
They’re not very nice people. They’re not especially bright or competent, either.
JOHN FUND REVISITS THE REPEAL OF THE DISASTROUS 1989 CATASTROPHIC HEALTH CARE ACT:
“These people don’t understand what the government is trying to do for them,” said then-chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Dan Rostenkowski in August 1989, after senior citizens angry over a federal health-care law booed him and chased him down a Chicago street. That law was repealed a few months later by a Democratic Congress and a Republican president who had supported it jus the year before.
Everything old is new again. We are starting to hear in D.C. that today’s unpopular health-care law might be in real trouble, spelled with a capital T, as The Music Man would put it. . . .
Even then, in 2010, some survivors of the Catastrophic Coverage Act debacle were unsure of Obamacare’s staying power. “When I saw this massive thing, I said, ‘Boy, if this is anything like catastrophic, they are going to be in trouble,’” former representative Brian Donnelly, a Massachusetts Democrat, told the New York Times. “It is a very good analogy.”
Let’s hope.
IOWAHAWK: On the u