HOCKEY STICK: Spending by the IRS, 1970-2014. Hey, those lame Star Trek videos don’t shoot themselves.
Archive for 2014
July 1, 2014
WHAT COULD EXPLAIN THAT, I WONDER? Political Class Idle as Tax Inversions Continue.
MICHAEL BARONE: Why government isn’t working and how to make it better.
FIGHT THE POWER: How a suburban homemaker humbled Illinois and Big Labor.
CATHY YOUNG: “Affirmative Consent”: The Sex Police on the Defensive.
While the bill has been criticized across the political spectrum as an intrusive and bizarre attempt to micromanage sexuality, its defenders are mobilizing as well. They claim that “affirmative consent” is meant simply to ensure that all sex is wanted sex and that its critics are either rape-loving misogynists or misguided folks confused about what this standard actually means.
So, how convincing are those defenses?
A rather strongly worded diatribe against “rape apologists”—and, specifically, yours truly—comes from firebrand feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte on RawStory.com. According to Marcotte, I am a “professional female misogynist” who thinks that women “exist in a state of consent all the time” unless they explicitly say “no.” Of course, what I actually wrote was that consent is usually given through nonverbal cues—often, especially in first-time sex, in a gradual buildup of physical contact.
So, nothing says “reasonable discussion of due process” and “understanding of normal mating behavior” like Amanda Marcotte, and Raw Story.
MAKE UP YOUR MIND: NSA director: The sky isn’t falling after Snowden’s leaks. Snowden’s actually probably the sharp end of a massive NSA disinformation campaign.
WELL, IT’S EASY TO SEE WHY: Gallup: Americans Losing Confidence in All Branches of U.S. Gov’t.
June 30, 2014
RUBBER STAMP: Court gave NSA broad leeway in surveillance, documents show. Most of this is about spying on foreigners, which is the NSA’s job and raises no serious concerns. But the “about” bit seems as if it might justify spying on Americans, which is rife with potential for abuse.
SAN FRANCISCO: America’s Largest Gated Community.
AS AUTOMATION PUTS JOURNALISTS OUT OF WORK, I EXPECT TO SEE A LOT OF ANTI-AUTOMATION STORIES: AP to automate earnings stories.
Until the robots take over completely. Then all the press will be positive.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: In Search Of What You Resent.
Maliki failed to grasp that Obama had even less trust in the influence of America to do good things abroad than did Maliki himself. But the larger irony is that now Maliki is begging for a return of American hard power to save his government from those killers that his policies helped create. In extremis, he understands that no other country would depose an oil-rich tyrant, stay on to foster democracy, leave the oil to its owners, and then leave when asked — and finally consider coming back to the rescue of an abject ingrate.
The Latin America narrative in the age of Obama — often best characterized in Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, or Venezuela — is little empathy south of the border for the Yanqui paradigm of free-market democratic capitalism. The stale 1960s rhetoric of colonialist, imperialist, racist, etc. is back in vogue in much of Latin America, and Mexico as well, encouraged by an administration that itself is unlikely to defend present or past U.S. conduct.
Likewise the themes of most Chicano-Latino studies programs in the U.S. are American culpability, racism, and colonialism — the same old, same old whine of the myriad faults of the U.S. In my community, the time it takes a first-generation foreign national to cross the border illegally, and then to develop a sort of resentment toward the U.S. and a romance about the birthplace he abandoned, seems about five years.
Why then are tens of thousands of Latin Americans willingly flooding into a supposedly racist country where cutthroat capitalism ignores the poor and the oppressed such as themselves? In most past polls of Mexican citizens, two general themes often show up: the majority of Mexican nationals believe that the American Southwest still should belong to Mexico, and a sizable minority would like to leave Mexico for the U.S. You figure out the mentality.
I don’t have to figure it out, and I don’t have to respect it. Or the people who do.
SHE BLOWS THEIR NARRATIVE: Teen huntress draws ire of animal rights activists. But given that animal-rights activists are people-hating morons, who cares?
WHY IT’S A GOOD THING THAT J.R.R. Tolkien Didn’t Write In The Age Of Political Correctness. Heh.
USA TODAY: Workers Handed Victory Over Unions. “When the U.S. Supreme Court today issued a landmark ruling for employee rights in Harris v. Quinn, it wasn’t just a victory for the Illinois mom who had the courage to stand up to the state’s public employee unions. The decision also bolsters hopes that all government employees will one day be free from paying forced union dues as a condition of employment.”
CONTROLLING RENEGADE BUREAUCRATS: “In America’s first 100 years, federal officials could be sued in state courts for acting beyond their authority. In his book Creating the Administrative Constitution, Yale law professor Jerry Mashaw chronicles how this helped temper bad behavior.”
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EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN: UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ON SNOWDEN.
While important details about Edward Snowden’s activities in Hong Kong remain shrouded in secrecy, the conventional portrait of his stay there and in Russia as one of improvisation and serendipity is at odds with the precision of his well-planned thefts.
Until March 15, 2013, Mr. Snowden worked at the NSA base in Honolulu for Dell, the outside contractor which supplied technicians to work on the NSA’s backup system. From this vantage point, he had access to the NSA Net, from which he pilfered most of the documents he later gave to journalists including the ones about NSA domestic operations that have preoccupied the world’s media.
But he quit Dell and moved to Booz Allen Hamilton, the outside contractor that ran the computer systems in the NSA’s Threat Operations Center. Here he could get access to the crown jewels, the lists of computers in four adversary nations—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran—that the agency had penetrated. He later told the South China Morning Post that his whole reason for making the job switch was to get “access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked.”
He carried out that theft, which included stealing passwords that gave him access to secret files, with great precision. There is no reason to assume that his getaway was any less deliberately planned.
Hmm. On the other hand, if Snowden was an actual spy, this makes the NSA look even worse for hiring him.
WAIT, I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Gigantic Ocean Vortices Seen From Space Could Change Climate Models.
WHEN THEY CAME FOR THE LIBERTARIANS, I MOCKED THEM, BECAUSE THEY ARE IDIOTS, AND LIBERTARIANS ARE WELL-ARMED: Libertarians Are the New Communists.
NOT SURE I BUY THIS: Android Wear smartwatches make Google Glass obsolete.
SHOWY NONSENSE, OR CONTEMPT FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS? Obama to take executive actions on immigration reform.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: If 3D-printed carbon fiber is the future, it’s already here.