Archive for 2017
May 29, 2017
BUT OF COURSE THEY DID: ‘Be ashamed’! Vox marks Memorial Day by crapping on the Marines.
FLASHBACK: The Secession Of The Intellectuals.
We have already noticed that there has come into being during the last quarter century — through mass education, through the media, through widespread quasi-literacy — a rather large class of people located somewhere between the few who exercise direct responsibility in governing and a large body of others who, though not necessarily stupid, are preoccupied by the immediate and the local. This vast, intermediate and as they say “educated” class is affected at least intermittently by the adversary culture, and sometimes is profoundly affected.
It is also energetic and, in a confused way, anxious to do good. To the individuals in this class, correct opinion, virtuous opinion, is very important, though the opinions they do form lack the anchorage of direct involvement and specific responsibility. The chips are seldom really down, and they are seldom faced with the alternatives of correct judgment or concrete loss. Nevertheless, the educated class — perhaps we should call it merely the Bachelor of Arts class — does succeed in defining the terms in which matters of public importance can be discussed; its views prevail in our public discourse, and though our statesmen often act in contradiction to those views, they do so only with great circumspection.
As Edward C. Banfield, the Harvard urbanologist, has aptly pul it, we once were governed by the smoke-filled room, but now we are increasingly governed by the talk-filled room. And yet, for all its power, the contemporary educated class has succeeded in imposing upon our public discourse a structure of ideas that is suffocating in its narrowness.
Dissidents in the East Bloc referred to this group as the New Class. It was not a compliment.
MALE PRIVILEGE: With The Old Breed.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY YOU KNOW: Special forces are getting a stealth motorcycle that’s silent and deadly.
MY DOCTOR USES THIS WITH EVERY PHYSICAL: In The Age Of Digital Medicine, The Humble Reflex Hammer Hangs On. Also, you can tell a lot more from a manual pulse than one that’s taken electronically, though I think that interpretive skill is a dying art.
Nice to know that the tools are readily available.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Nanogenerators Could Charge Your Smartphone.
GIVE ‘EM PARTICIPATION TROPHIES: Democrats still aren’t winning elections.
ANN ALTHOUSE SLAMS ANDREW SULLIVAN AS “ethnocentric and arrogant.”
Two thoughts: (1) That Sullivan thinks Trump isn’t a proper Christian is unlikely to move either Trump or Christians. (2) Pagans as “pre-religious?” Really? Perhaps Camille Paglia would like to weigh in on this howler.
SECURITY THEATER: U.S. might ban laptops on all flights into and out of the country.
Kelly said the move would be part of a broader airline security effort to combat what he called “a real sophisticated threat.” He said no decision had been made as to the timing of any ban.
“We are still following the intelligence,” he said, “and are in the process of defining this, but we’re going to raise the bar generally speaking for aviation much higher than it is now.”
Airlines are concerned that a broad ban on laptops may erode customer demand. But none wants an incident aboard one of its airplanes.
“Whatever comes out, we’ll have to comply with,” Oscar Munoz, chief executive officer of United Airlines (UAL.N), told the company’s annual meeting last week.
No one has yet to provide an adequate explanation for why a cargo hold full of laptops is safer than a cabin full of laptops.
TO BE FAIR, SHE HAS ADMITTED THAT SHE DRINKS HEAVILY: Hillary Clinton Still Thinks She Beat Donald Trump in Election.
Guys, Hillary Clinton is okay. It’s super important that you all know that—and the media will try its darndest to make sure that message gets out. She’s just been dealing with a hard breakup: the American people left her for Donald Trump.
Thankfully, New York Magazine dedicated its cover story to covering Clinton’s journey from a one-time presidential loser to a two-time presidential loser. Deep inside the coverage is a key kernel of wisdom: Even if you lose, just pretend you didn’t so people keep giving you money.
It’s always about money with the Clintons, except when it’s about sex.
IN THE MAIL: From Larry Correia, Monster Hunter Siege.
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EMANNUEL MACRON: White-Knuckle Handshake with Trump Was ‘Moment of Truth’
DAMION DANIELS: No, You’re Not More Likely to Be Killed by a Right-Wing Extremist than an Islamic Terrorist.
The fact that the two deadliest attacks upon the U.K. in recent memory were at the hands of Islamic terrorists is not simply pub trivia. I mention it because when these apologists for Islam get bored of claiming that jihadists are incessantly and inexplicably lying about their religious motivations, they invariably engage in the crass exercise of throwing around skewed data in a desperate attempt to deemphasize the danger posed by Islamic terror. As far as I can tell, this is not due to some well-meaning concern for people worrying unnecessarily, or to ensure that counter terrorism strategy is accurately focused upon the most serious threat, it seems rather to be a tactical attempt to prioritize the protection of odious 7th century folklore over the welfare of real human beings.
More than that, it’s about keeping the proles in line and feeling guilty.
And do read the whole thing, which is chock full of fact and figures.
MEGAN MCARDLE ON HEALTHCARE AND THE CBO: Republicans are on the right path with their health-care plan: Give so much authority to states that a federal agency can’t even forecast what will happen.
Forget the headline numbers from the Congressional Budget Office’s latest score for the Republican health-care bill. The score tells us something much more important, and much less remarked: Republicans have broken the CBO. They’ve passed a bill that, for all intents and purposes, cannot be scored by the normal CBO process. I don’t say that they’ve done this deliberately, mind you — in fact, I’m pretty sure they it wasn’t premeditated. But they’ve done it just the same.
Oh, the fine folks at the CBO have gone in and given it their best try, and that’s what produced the headline numbers you’ve read: 14 million fewer people insured by 2018, 23 million by 2026, and a net reduction in the deficit of $119 billion in the coming decade. But after that, it starts getting a little weird. Premiums will go up for a while, and then maybe down for some people but up for others, and it’s hard to get an average … this score has a whole lot of caveats, more “difficult to predict” and “estimate uncertain,” than longtime CBO watchers are primed to expect.
The CBO process has never been perfect, for there has always been an uneasy tension between realistically outlining uncertainties and providing enough precision to guide the policy process. This nonpartisan office has at times irked Democrats, other times Republicans. Its estimates are not necessarily accurate — as the saying goes, “predictions are hard, especially about the future” — but they are consistent, giving politicians and the public a single, if imperfect, framework for comparing policy choices.
CBO estimates prefer a single number to a range. They limit the term over which they project the costs, because projecting the policy environment 50 years out is a mug’s game. They have declined to consider some sort of uncertainties, such as “Will future congresses have the guts to see this thing through?” because however real those risks are, analyzing them would put the CBO in the position of political advocate rather than budget wonk.
Naturally politicians have long striven to exploit those tensions. For example, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was stuffed with dodgy “pay-fors” of dubious political economic or viability. Many of these were clearly not ever going to take effect, but they allowed Democrats to claim tidy budget savings from passing the bill. The timeline of the program’s rollout was also set up so that a lot of the costs fell outside the budget window, while new revenue showed up pretty quickly. The CBO tried to make it clear that these things were problems, but ultimately, they were restrained by their principles from saying: “Guys. We’re going to make everyone in America start issuing 1099s to stores? Really?”
Jiggery pokery.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Liberals Are Shocked To Find We’re Starting To Hate Them Right Back.
Cue the boring moralizing and sanctimonious whimpering of the femmy, bow-tied, submissive branch of conservatism whose obsolete members were shocked to find themselves left behind by the masses to whom these geeks’ sinecures were not the most important objective of the movement. This is where they sniff, “We’re better than that,” and one has to ask ,“Who’s we?” Because, by nature, people are not better than that. They are not designed to sit back and take it while they are abused, condescended to, and told by a classless ruling class that there are now two sets of rules and – guess what? –the old rules are only going to be enforced against them.
We don’t like the new rules – I’d sure prefer a society where no one was getting attacked, having walked through the ruins of a country that took that path – but we normals didn’t choose the new rules. The left did. It gave us Ferguson, Middlebury College, Berkeley, and “Punch a Nazi” – which, conveniently for the left, translates as “punch normals.” And many of us have had personal experiences with this New Hate – jobs lost, hassles, and worse. Some scumbags at an anti-Trump rally attacked my friend and horribly injured his dog. His freaking dog.
So when we start to adopt their rules, they’re shocked? Have they ever met human beings before? It’s not a surprise. It’s inevitable.
It’s also inevitable, or nearly so, that the Left won’t enjoy the end result if they continue down their path of violence.
COMEY’S FBI BROKE ITS OWN RULES AND SPIED ON AMERICANS: James Rosen at Fox News.
REMEMBERING MEMORIAL DAY’S COST: Prize winning photo “Husband’s final request.”