Archive for 2016
June 1, 2016
THE TORRICELLI SOLUTION TO THE COMING CLINTON IMPLOSION?
As Michael Graham warned in 2004, “Don’t assume you know who’s on the Democratic ticket until Election Day.”
JOURNALISM: MSNBC interrupts Libertarian candidate to talk to Clinton.
MSNBC interrupted an interview with Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson and running mate William Weld on Tuesday evening for a phone interview with Hillary Clinton.
“Governors, I want to pause here for a second because we’ve got a rare opportunity – we’ve got more presidential candidates than we know what to do with today,” MSNBC host Chuck Todd said.
“You get the treat of being able to respond to what Hillary Clinton has to say,” Todd told Johnson and Weld in introducing Clinton’s phone interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
After Clinton’s interview, which lasted a little over 7 minutes, Todd introduced the Libertarian presidential ticket back to the program to finish their interview.
“Perhaps this is a preview for later in the fall,” Todd quipped, referring to the back-to-back interviews.
The MSNBC appearance was billed as the Libertarian ticket’s first joint interview.
GENTLE HUMANOIDS, START YOUR BLADDERS: The LGBTI 600 has begun!
QUESTION ASKED: How long before North Korea can nuke a U.S. city?
ARNOLD KLING ON THE ERA OF EXPERT FAILURE:
I have faith in experts. Every time I go to the store, I am showing faith in the experts who design, manufacture, and ship products.
Every time I use the services of an accountant, an attorney, or a dentist, I am showing faith in their expertise. Every time I donate to a charity, I am showing faith in the expertise of the organization to use my contributions effectively.
In fact, I would say that our dependence on experts has never been greater. It might seem romantic to live without experts and instead to rely solely on your own instinct and know-how, but such a life would be primitive.
Expertise becomes problematic when it is linked to power. First, it creates a problem for democratic governance. The elected officials who are accountable to voters lack the competence to make well-informed decisions. And, the experts to whom legislators cede authority are unelected. The citizens who are affected by the decisions of these experts have no input into their selection, evaluation, or removal.
A second problem with linking expertise to power is that it diminishes the diversity and competitive pressure faced by the experts.
A key difference between experts in the private sector and experts in the government sector is that the latter have monopoly power, ultimately backed by force. The power of government experts is concentrated and unchecked (or at best checked very poorly), whereas the power of experts in the private sector is constrained by competition and checked by choice. Private organizations have to satisfy the needs of their constituents in order to survive. Ultimately, private experts have to respect the dignity of the individual, because the individual has the freedom to ignore the expert.
These problems with linking expertise with power can be illustrated by specific issues. In each case, elected officials want results. They turn to experts who promise results. The experts cannot deliver. So the experts must ask for more power.
Read the whole thing.
SCENES FROM ANGELA MERKEL’S GERMANY: 3 asylum seekers arrested for sexual assaults at music fest.
In total 26 women have made statements to police about cases of sexual assault at the Schlossgrabenfest, a free music festival in the central German town, a spokesperson told The Local.
Of the 14 reports, some involve several women and only after further investigations will it become clear how many of the women were victims of sexual assaults, police said.
Three of the women had gone straight to police who were on patrol at the four-day festival on Saturday night.
The women complained that they had been encircled and then sexually harassed by a group of men they described as being of south Asian appearance.
Police were then able to arrest three men at the site of the festival. All three were between the ages of 28 and 31 and are asylum seekers from Pakistan, a spokesperson confirmed to The Local.
Darmstadt police added that “Up until this year we have had no cases of sexual assault where men surround women, like we have this year.”
Lovely.
NOW THAT’S RICH: Clinton launching national security case against Trump in California speech.
Word not used in Anne Gearan’s Washington Post writeup? “Email.”
SHOE, MEET OTHER FOOT: Greenpeace, which has called for RICO investigations of many companies, now facing RICO suit. “Earlier today, Resolute Forest Products filed a civil RICO suit in a federal district court in Georgia, alleging a pattern of defamatory and fraudulent behavior by Greenpeace and allied organizations. According to the 100-plus-page complaint (and appendix), Greenpeace and its affiliates are a RICO ‘enterprise’ that have waged a deliberately defamatory campaign against Resolute, misrepresenting the company’s practices and environmental record in order to raise funds and promote Greenpeace’s environmentalist agenda. . . . I confess that I’m no big fan of RICO, particularly when used to fight what is ultimately a political battle, but if the statute may be deployed against climate skeptics (as Greenpeace has urged), I see no reason why it can’t be used against environmentalist groups as well, particularly if (as Resolute alleges) some groups are deliberately fabricating evidence as part of their media and fundraising campaigns. This last point is important, for Resolute is not merely disputing Greenpeace’s rhetorical claims or disputing its conclusions (though it does this). Resolute also maintains that Greenpeace officials and affiliates deliberately falsified evidence (such as by doctoring photographs).”
I wonder if any state attorneys general will be named later. And expect a sudden onslaught of worries about RICO’s extreme reach.
WHY ARE UNIVERSITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM? Former Assistant Dean For Bar Prep/Academic Success Sues Law School For Gender Discrimination, Says ‘All-Female Management Team’ Made Him Fall Guy For Poor Bar Results Caused By Systemic Problems At School.
May 31, 2016
ANOTHER BLACK MAN BROUGHT LOW BY THE SYSTEM: Husband charged for beating would-be rapist to death with tire iron. If this is true, he should get a medal. But that’s #NewYorkValues.
AT AMAZON, 50-80% off Jewelry.
KNIFE RIGHTS: New York Times weighs in against NY’s stupid “Gravity Knife” law.
More here.
LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Lumber Union Protectionists Incited SWAT Raid On My Factory, Says Gibson Guitar CEO.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Crazy New Tongue Brush Lets You ‘Lick’ Your Cat.
This isn’t the 21st century I was promised.
THE LONDON DAILY MAIL’S GOT A FEVAH AND IT NEEDS MORE GORILLA STORIES!
I count at least nine on its homepage at the moment.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: NOAA Warns Against Taking Selfies with Seals.
DID LYNDON LaROUCHE TURN HIM DOWN? THE GHOST OF HAROLD STASSEN? Bill Kristol Pushing David French (!) for President?
CROOKED HILLARY’S ALLIES STONEWALL: State Department Fights Request to Depose Hillary Clinton.
When when Hillary’s former boss promised his administration would be “the most transparent in history?” Good times, good times.
I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN LOYALTY TESTS WERE CONSIDERED TO BE AWFUL MCCARTHYISM: Political Tests For Faculty?
Of course, that was back when they were expecting faculty to be loyal to the United States.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: George Korda: UT’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion: legislators reach their limit, the governor goes along, and an opportunity to learn. It’s the learning that’s key.
YES. THIS. EXACTLY: Victor Davis Hanson makes cogent observations on the “high IQs” of the establishment political class:
Turn on an evening cable show and ask which interviewer is married to which anchor on another channel, or which of the pundits are former politicos, or how many in the White House worked for Big News or are married or related to someone who does. How many pundits were advisers to political candidates or related to someone who was? How does Ben Rhodes do an interview on CBS News or George Stephanopoulos interview Hillary Clinton or a writer expound on the primaries when he is also an adviser to a particular campaign? The problem is not just that all this is incestuous or unethical, but that it blinds a tiny elite to what millions of quite different Americans value and experience.
Charles Murray recently wrote in anger, addressing those who would vote for Trump because “Hillary is even worse”: “I know that I am unlikely to persuade any of my fellow Establishmentarians to change their minds. But I cannot end without urging you to resist that sin to which people with high IQs (which most of you have) are unusually prone: Using your intellectual powers to convince yourself of something despite the evidence plainly before you. Just watch and listen to the man. Don’t concoct elaborate rationalizations. Just watch and listen.” . . .
Murray has a point that Trump’s crudity and buffoonery should be taken seriously, but when he says establishmentarians have “high IQs,” what exactly does he mean? Did a high IQ prevent an infatuated David Brooks (whom he quotes approvingly) from fathoming presidential success as if he were a sartorial seancer, from the crease of Senator Obama pants leg? What was the IQ of the presidential historian who declared Obama the smartest man ever to be elevated to the White House? . . . Or perhaps the conservative wit who once wrote that Obama has a “first-class temperament and a first-class intellect,” and that he is the rare politician who “writes his own books,” which were “first rate”?
Establishmentarian high IQs? The point is not to castigate past poor judgment, but to offer New Testament reminders about hubris and the casting of first stones — and why hoi polloi are skeptical of their supposed intellectual betters.
So how did a blond comb-over real-estate dealer destroy an impressive and decent Republican field and find himself near dead even with Hillary Clinton — to the complete astonishment, and later fury, of the Washington establishment? Simply because lots of people have become exhausted by political and media elites who have thought very highly of themselves — but on what grounds it has become increasingly impossible to figure out.
Indeed. If I hear one more of my conservative/libertarian “high IQ” colleagues (many of them long-time friends) denigrate Trump as stupid, racist, sexist or (I kid you not) not “really” successful–I may puke.
One certainly may oppose Trump’s policies on a principled basis. But to hear the right-of-center intelligentsia (who may be well-educated and perhaps even have high IQs, but are not necessarily intelligent) denigrate the presumptive GOP nominee–selected by We the People–using the same leftist tactics used to denigrate George W. Bush and many other conservative standard-bearers, is nauseating.
These “high IQ” members of the GOP intelligentsia simply cannot hide their disdain for ordinary Americans’ selection of a GOP nominee, yet they simultaneously claim that the GOP represents ordinary Americans’ values. The GOP intelligentsia is behaving like a delusional narcissist, reveling in its (false) superiority over the little people.
JOEL KOTKIN: A ‘diet’ to give California drivers indigestion.