FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION, CANADIAN-STYLE: Investment flooding out of Canada at fastest pace in developed world — Money is flooding out of Canada at the fastest pace in the developed world as the nation’s decade-long oil boom comes to an end and little else looks ready to take the industry’s place as an economic driver.
Related: Fundamental transformation, America-style.
(Via SDA.)
WHY ARE LEFTY INSTITUTIONS SUCH HOTBEDS OF RACISM AND SEXISM? Yale frat had ‘white girls only’ policy at party, students say.
SO IS OBAMA SAYING THAT CHRISTIE . . . ACTED STUPIDLY? The Hill: White House rips Christie for saying Obama doesn’t back police.
The White House on Monday slammed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) for criticizing President Obama’s record on criminal justice reform.
Press secretary Josh Earnest called Christie’s claim that Obama does not support police “particularly irresponsible,” suggesting it’s an attempt to “turn around” his struggling presidential campaign.
“They’re not surprising for somebody whose poll numbers are closer to an asterisk than they are double digits,” Earnest said.
The war of words between the White House and Christie comes ahead of the president’s visit to the Garden State to promote his effort to overhaul the criminal justice system.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Christie suggested anti-police sentiment has contributed to an increase in violent crime in some major U.S. cities — and said Obama shares blame for the problem.
Given that Obama’s own FBI Director says the same thing, Christie isn’t exactly out on a limb here, politically. I’m sure he welcomes the Obama attacks, which can only boost those poll numbers.
And isn’t that a typically pissy remark from Earnest? Have we ever had a White House so petty and personal about, well, everything?
INTERVIEW: MICHAEL WALSH GOES INSIDE THE DEVIL’S PLEASURE PALACE.
As much as I’ve enjoyed Michael’s writing and spending time with him in person, after immersing myself in first Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and then Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses, I was a little weary about sitting down to read another history of “How the Left Was Won.” But Michael has managed to combine a much-needed history of the infamous Frankfurt School, which fled National Socialism in Germany only to import international socialism into the US in following decades, with a fascinating look at how socialism corrupted classical music in the 20th century, drawing upon his role as a music critic for Time magazine and his time spent behind the Iron Curtain in the last years of the Soviet Union. In addition to his history of the Frankfurt School and its corrosive invention of “Critical Theory,” Michael’s book does for the atonal horrors of 20th century classical music what Tom Wolfe did for the double-barreled disasters of modern art and architecture in The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House.
Over at Ed Driscoll.com, I have a 20 minute audio interview and transcript with Michael — read and/or listen to the whole thing, to paraphrase an Insta-leitmotif.
ANOTHER NARRATIVE FAILS: Dashcam video undermines Texas prof’s claim of racial profiling, says chief.
A Texas journalism professor’s explosive charge that police hassled her for “walking while black,” a claim lodged in a guest column in the state’s biggest newspaper, doesn’t square with the videotape, according to the police chief. . . .
Bland uses the column to lay out her case for allegations of being racially profiled claiming that she was not offered a reason.
“I guess I was simply a brown face in an affluent neighborhood,” Bland said in her column.
But dashcam video provided by Corinth Police shows Bland walking in the middle of the street, and captures the two police officers politely advising her to stay on the side of oncoming traffic, so she can see approaching cars. After viewing the footage, Corinth Police Chief Debra Walthall told FoxNews.com she was proud of the way her officers behaved.
“When I saw the video, those officers were nothing but professional,” she said. “[The incident] just didn’t lend itself to racial profiling.
“If we didn’t have the video, these officers would have serious allegations against them,” Walthall added. “It would be their word against hers. Every white officer that stops an African-American does not constitute racial profiling.”
The video shows the two police officers as they get out of their squad car, without turning on the siren as the professor claimed in her column. After telling Bland it would be safer to stay to the side of the street, one cop explains how a truck had earlier tried to pass her but she did not notice that she was in the way.
I always wonder how many lies achieved currency before ubiquitous video, given how many we see now even with ubiquitous video.
What’s not surprising: That a dean of a journalism school would peddle a false story to advance a narrative.
IT’S GOING TO TAKE MORE THAN THAT: ‘Hamilton’ is saving NYC’s education system.
I DON’T THINK OBAMA EVEN KNOWS HOW TO FIDDLE: Islamic State Gains Ground in Syria.
IS THERE ANYWAY TO FALSIFY THIS HYPOTHESIS? Antarctica is actually gaining ice, says NASA. Is global warming over?
FOUND, THE HOLE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS FLUSHING OUR WEALTH INTO: Not really. Just kidding. This is just a hole in the ground. That metaphorical hole would be a giant black hole swallowing universes. Mysterious “gash” forms on Wyoming Ranch.
TO NO ONE’S SURPRISE: For the first time ever, Israel is a real race issue.
YEAH, THIS WILL AFFECT OUR ECONOMY: Iran Launches Blockade On U.S. Goods.
SILLY KIDS, SCHOOLS ARE FOR UNIONS: How the teachers-union empire strikes back. [Yes, I do know the uses of the apostrophe. I used to teach ESL. Apostrophes for plural are one of my pet peeves. Let that be a lesson to you: never try to post while you’re exhausted from the day and dealing with three emergencies on pm. Thank you to Eugene Volokh for catching this.]
THE IRONY, IT BURNS: Deep-Pocketed Donors Behind Campus Anti-Koch Movement. On the left it’s always astroturfing all the way down.
WHY DO MUSCLES ACHE A DAY OR TWO AFTER EXERCISE? Good question. The harder I work out, the longer the delay seems to be. I find a jacuzzi helps.
PETER EGAN: How eBay Broke My Final Garage Rules.
WHEN PHILOSOPHERS ARE POLITICALLY PROBLEMATIC: “Germaine Greer is right about trans-women.” “In our society, to be a woman is to have arrived there by a certain route: for instance, by having been given a girl’s name, by having been made to wear girl’s clothes, by having been excluded from boys’ activities, by having made certain adaptations to the onset of puberty, and by having been seen and evaluated in specific ways. That is why the social significance of being a penis-free person is different for those who never had a penis than it is for those who use to have one and then cut it off.”
Sounds suspiciously conservative to me.
FINALLY: Rachel Dolezal Just Admitted That She’s White.
Well, I had a sneaking suspicion for a while. But presumably Milo Yiannopoulos won’t rescind his “Big Slobbery Welcome To My Newest Trans-Black Sister, Rachel Dolezal,” now that she’s officially come out as trans-black herself.
TOO BIG TO JAIL: “Hillary Clinton belongs in jail, but good luck getting her there,” Steve Green writes.
GOOD NEWS IS UNPLANNED: Ronald Bailey of Reason reviews The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge, by Matt Ridley:
Ridley also suggests that scientific central planning, especially in the form of public funding of research, poses problems. In 2015, for example, the Institute for International Economics found that research and development in “the business sector had high social returns, and hence contributed to growth, but there was no evidence in this analysis of positive effects from government R&D.” It would be really surprising if government R&D did not help give birth to some technological breakthroughs—nuclear power and the Internet leap to mind. Still, a 2014 paper published in PLoS Medicine estimated that 85 percent of public research resources are wasted.
What’s more, a 2015 study in PLoS Biology alarmingly suggested that half of all preclinical research is irreproducible. Replication and cumulative knowledge production are cornerstones of the scientific progress. This means that in U.S. that about $28 billion in annual public biomedical research funding, arguably, is squandered.
And then there is the evolution of government. States emerged from protection rackets in which a gang monopolizing violence demanded payment of goods and services—taxes—in exchange for promises to defend local farmers and artisans from predation by rival gangs. “Tudor monarchs and the Taliban are cut from exactly the same cloth,” summarizes Ridley.
But two to three centuries ago, the fractured polities of Western Europe provided an open, speculative space where novel ideas about property rights, free trade, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and limits on government could mutate and grow. Where those bottom-up conceptual mutations took hold, technological innovation sped forward, incomes rose, and civil liberties were recognized. Once established, liberal societies are veritable evolution machines that frenetically generate new mutations and swiftly recombine them to produce a vast array of new products, services, and social institutions that enable ever more people to flourish. So far liberal societies are outcompeting—in the sense of being richer and more appealing—those polities that are closer to the original protection rackets.
Perhaps one of the ultimate examples of good news being unplanned is how Bill Gates helped birth the microcomputer market:
Gates is now calling for top-down governmental control of free markets. As Jim Geraghty asks, “Has there ever been a bigger, better case of, ‘I’ve got mine, now you can’t get yours?’ You noticed Mr. “We’ve-got-to-do-something-about-climate-change-and-carbon-emissions” still has a giant private jet that can carry 19 people, right?”
How can you fight global warming without one?
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: The Public Sector: Standing In Our Way Until We Pay Up.
Over the years, economic success and administrative demands eventually transform bands of roving bandits into bands of stationary bandits. One popular theory of the state — one that is pretty well-supported by the historical evidence in the European context — is that this is where governments come from: protection rackets that survive for a long enough period of time that they take on a patina of legitimacy. At some point, Romulus-and-Remus stories are invented to explain that the local Mafiosi have not only historical roots but divine sanction. . . .
In reality, we have governments for lots of reasons, most of them illegitimate: That ancient instinct toward banditry is powerful, and the desire to make a living by simply commanding economic resources rather than earning them through trade or labor seems to be a fixed feature of a certain subset of human beings. Patronage and clientelism are very strong forces, too, and government can be used to create public-sector salaries or welfare benefits that are well in excess of the wages that political clients could expect to earn in honest work. In the United States, our swollen public-sector payrolls, particularly at the state and local level, are little more than a supplementary welfare state, providing a more dignified form of public dependency for relatively low-skilled and mainly unenterprising people.
That wouldn’t be so bad if they’d leave the rest of us alone.
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