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Archive for 2015
December 7, 2015
OUT: MAN CAVES. In: The Man Tower.
ANDREW MALCOLM: Terrorism Isn’t Scaring Americans. Obama Is.
HILLARY’S REICHSFLUCHSTEUER EMERGES AS A NEW TAX STRAIGHT OUT OF GERMANY, Ira Stoll writes at the New York Sun:
Call it Hillary’s Reichsfluchsteuer. The former secretary of state and senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, reportedly will announce on Wednesday plans to impose an “exit tax” on companies that move their headquarters out of America or merge with foreign firms to escape America’s unreasonably high corporate taxes.
Back in 2012, when Senator Schumer, Democrat of New York, and the then-Speaker of the House, John Boehner, proposed a similar tax on individuals who chose to leave America, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, noted that a similar policy “existed in Germany in the 1930s.” Mr. Schumer, Mr. Norquist memorably suggested, “probably just plagiarized it and translated it from the original German.”
Indeed, the Reichsfluchsteuer, or Reich flight tax, was a 25% levy imposed originally not by the Nazis but, rather, on December 8, 1931, by the pre-Hitler, centrist government of Heinrich Brüning, who had a doctoral degree in economics. Not exactly something to try to emulate.
Yes, the socialism of the Weimar era and the National Socialism of its successor flowed into each other much more seamlessly than many earlier history books described, in part because, as Orrin Judd has speculated, we wanted to “rehabilitate [West] Germany into a worthy Cold War ally.” And it’s fascinating how the socialism of the Weimar era and the Frankfurt School flows so effortlessly into the corporatism and self-described “Progressivism” of Barry and Hillary.
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EVEN THEIR GULLIBILITY HAS ITS LIMITS: The NYT readers aren’t buying Hillary Clinton’s “How I’d Rein In Wall Street.”
FLASHBACK: Concealed Permit Holder Stops Attempted Mass Shooting In Chicago. “According to the Chicago Tribune, the driver was watching “a group of people” walk in front of his car on North Milwaukee Avenue just before midnight when 22-year-old Everardo Custodio allegedly ‘began firing into the crowd.’ The Uber driver pulled his own gun and ‘fired six shots at Custodio,’ wounding him in ‘the shin, thigh, and lower back.'”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Let’s kill them first: Answer to terror is tougher citizens, not tougher government.
Tough citizens don’t give government more power in a crisis. They know that government cannot always be there to protect them. Police and bureaucrats didn’t stop the hijackers of Flight 93 on September 11, the shoe-bomber later that December, the underwear bomber in 2009, or the Thalys train attacker this year. Neither did thicker cockpit doors or ineffective TSA screening. These acts of terrorism were stopped by ordinary citizens.
We should renew the American tradition of tough, self-reliant citizens who are not afraid to confront terrorists. Instead of fearing guns, they promote responsible gun ownership and training so that citizens can protect themselves and their communities. U.S. cities and states can reform their gun laws and educational programs to make it easier for those who are skilled and trained to have weapons in public places. In any major American city, 99.99% of people are not terrorists. Those are good odds in an attack, but only if citizens are equipped to defend themselves.
State and local governments should equip their citizens to defend themselves from acts of terrorism. Options could include a gun safety or survival training course in high school, or a basic terrorism-awareness exam that people take when getting their driver’s license. Federal bureaucrats cannot determine what programs will best empower citizens. Instead states and localities should have the freedom to experiment and tailor their programs to empower individual citizens to deal with the rare occurrences of terrorism themselves rather than relying on an extensive, and likely abusive, police state.
We don’t need more laws or regulations restricting what people can do. And we don’t need to give the FBI, CIA, NSA, DOJ, DHS, branches of the military and state and local police more money, more authority and more power. We need citizens who have the freedom and moral toughness to stand up to terrorism whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head. That will truly make the world safer from all terrorists, foreign and domestic.
Yep. But this approach offers insufficient opportunities for graft and political chicanery.
IS IT BECAUSE SHE’S A LATINA WHO’S RACIST AGAINST BLACK CITIZENS? Chicago State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez balks at charges in Ronald Johnson police shooting, says video shows gun.
Of course, she has a history of backing cops against black citizens, even of prosecuting black citizens who make recordings of cops’ misdeeds for “wiretapping.”
Why are Democrat-run cities such hellholes of racism and police impunity?
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: FDA the “rate-limiting factor” in developing cancer treatments, cures. “You have about a 1 in 2 chance of getting cancer in your lifetime and the FDA is slowing down the development of cures. If it was up to me this one issue would be the biggest issue of the US presidential campaign. It is a matter of life and death.”
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: A Single-molecule light-driven nanosubmarine.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Narrative Can Never Be Wrong: The Political Elite Is Willing To Lose Its Pants To Save Its Face.
Yet having coated his remarks with that syntactic sugar, Obama gets down to a very grim business. And what a contrast it is. He ticks off a program at cruel variance with the outward message. What we need to do to stay alive, he says, is control guns, clamp down on social media, review the visa-waiver program. The fine print of the speech is such a negation of the soaring rhetoric that it might as well be from another speech.
A moment’s consideration of the speech makes it apparent that “the only thing to fear is not fear itself.” The main thing to fear is falsification. The administration is deathly afraid of admitting it got it wrong from the beginning. Or worse yet, admitting where it was going all along. That would ruin its aura of benevolent omniscience. Hope and Change in conflict with Islamism can neither be explained nor managed within the framework of the Narrative. The result is two messages in the speech: the pablum of the Narrative overlaid with the creeping fascism of the details.
Yep.
A VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN OBAMA, WITH GOOD REASON:
The latest CNN/ORC poll tells the story: By a margin of 57 to 40 percent, Americans disapprove of President Obama’s handling of foreign policy. With regard to handling the Islamic State, they disapprove by a remarkable 64 to 33 percent. The same lopsided margin (60 to 38 percent) disapproves of his handling of terrorism and thinks the war in Iraq and Syria is going badly. Sixty-eight percent think we have not been aggressive enough, only 4 percent think we have been too aggressive in our military response and a robust 53 percent favor sending ground troops. Finally, 61 percent of Americans think it is at least somewhat likely we will have a terrorist attack in the next few weeks.
Obama’s perfunctory and vapid speech last night is unlikely to improve matters. We therefore have a public prepared to face up to our threats and a commander in chief who is not. There is, in effect, a consensus of no confidence in the president.
Related: Roger Kimball: Why Obama’s Speech Reassured No One But Our Enemies.
Plus: Marc Thiessen: Obama tries to re-gift his failed terror strategy. “Nothing has changed. After declaring the Islamic State ‘contained’ a day before the Paris attacks and assuring Americans a day before the San Bernadino, Calif., massacre that the United States was safe from a Paris-style attack, Obama is ‘staying the course.'”
JUST AN ALL-AMERICAN COUPLE, HERE TO LIVE THE AMERICAN DREAM.
UPDATE: ABC News has scrubbed the tweet for some reason, but here’s the news story, which still has the picture for the moment.
FASTER, PLEASE: The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop:
“We are very bullish about our cable business, and we are very bullish about ESPN,” said Robert Iger, CEO of Disney, ESPN’s parent company. “The bundle is not going away. Not only is it not going away, it is going to continue to grow.”
Except that it isn’t. No amount of wishing upon a star at the Disney offices in Burbank or the ESPN offices in Bristol, Connecticut, can hold back the forces of consumer choice that the Internet has unleashed. As a cable industry executive put it to Sports Business Daily recently, “The cost of goods is going up and sales are going down…that’s not a good trend.”
Every participant in the sports economy—franchise owners, athletes, programming networks, cable companies, and even the fans themselves—have benefitted from this broadband version of the hide-the-ball trick. That big fat $100 average household cable bill that everyone pays has served as a siphoning conduit of cash forcibly flowing from fan and uninterested non-fan alike.
The brazen economics of modern sports are being revealed and dismantled by the Internet, and the coming fumble-pile of desperate industry participants should make for some great viewing. That’ll be bad news for $30 million-a-year over-the-hill third basemen, the greater fools who pay them, and the unknowingly subsidized superfans who love them.
The rest of us will live in a world with a few more bucks in our pockets—and a few less braying Chris Berman-wannabes clogging up our iPad screens.
Read the whole thing. As with the news and record industries before them, if only pro sports leagues, sponsors, and their network enablers had been less contemptuous of their core customers during their zenith, we might be a bit more sympathetic during their decline.
Related: TV Advertising Falls Globally; Digital Poised to Overtake by End of 2017.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: So You’re Fighting The Fallout Flu, from Moe Lane at PJ Lifestyle:
Leisure time obsessions we have always had with us, but it does seem to be getting easier and easier in Western culture to get caught up in all the pretty pictures and sounds that come through the monitor screen. Heck, more and more of us aren’t even reading dead-tree copies of books anymore. Our grandchildren will probably have figured out how to adjust to this stuff, but that doesn’t really help us now…
Heh. In the meantime, Moe offers some handy tips for the obsessed.
DON SURBER: Pearl Harbor Remembered.
STEVE GREEN INTRODUCES PRESIDENT SERGEANT SCHULTZ:
I’ve been calling him Professor Ditherton Wiggleroom ever since his dissolved his own Red Line in Syria. Maybe we should start calling him Sergeant Schultz instead.
“It isn’t Islam,” he says of Islamists. “This isn’t who we are,” he says of Americans who want to defend themselves and their families. “We will overcome,” he claims about a threat he can neither recognize or even acknowledge. “I know nothing!” shouted Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes.
Schultz knew he was in denial, just trying to keep a low profile and waiting until the war was over and he could return home.
What is Obama waiting for?
Have at it in the comments, both on Steve’s post and below.
REMEMBERING USA NETWORK’S NIGHT FLIGHT (1981-1988):
While the rest of mankind uses A.D. and B.C. to divide history, I prefer to use BNF and ANF – before and after Night Flight.
Okay, not really. But it was an important show – it introduced a variety of music and movies that would otherwise have gone completely beneath the radar for most Americans. Created by Stuart Shapiro, Night Flight was a beautiful thing, running on the USA Network between 11pm and 7am every Friday and Saturday night. The show was four hours long, broadcasting til 3am before repeating in full.
It played an interesting variety of music videos, generally punk or new wave (although, reggae and more mainstream music were often featured). This was intermixed with wonderfully eclectic clips: everything from Cold War Era footage to stand up comedy.
I watched Night Flight pretty religiously for moments like this early ‘80s jam session featuring Les Paul, Jeff Beck, and Billy Squier.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Gun Control Push Intended To Distract From Obama’s Dismal National Security Record.
IN THE MAIL: From Vox Day, Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 942.