MY OFFICE WAS FLOODED, BUT MY MOST VALUED WORK OF ART SURVIVED: It’s called Still Life with Dumpster Paintings, Schlitz and Grant Money, and yes, it’s an original Burge.
Archive for 2018
January 20, 2018
HEARTLAND DEMOCRATS TO WASHINGTON: You’re Killing Us!
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
Shot: Why do Californians pay more state and local taxes than Texans?
—The San Jose Mercury, this past Sunday.
Chaser:
A pair of California lawmakers want to claw back some of steep tax cuts that corporations will receive under the federal tax overhaul signed last month by President Donald Trump.
Democratic Assemblymen Kevin McCarty of Sacramento and Phil Ting of San Francisco announced Thursday that they will pursue a constitutional amendment to add a surcharge on large companies that do business in California, potentially raising billions of dollars to expand social services for Californians.*
“We’ve seen enough billionaire justice from the presidency,” McCarty said in an interview. “It’s time for middle class tax justice.”
—“‘Time for middle class tax justice’: California corporate tax bill offsets Trump cuts,” the Sacramento Bee, Thursday.
ROGER SIMON: Washington, City of Hate.
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: ‘Minnesota’ Woman Attacks Minnesota!
NO, THEY’RE PART OF THE EXPENDABLE SEX: Women have found their voices. Now it may be America’s boys who need our attention.
AT AMAZON, January deals in Wheels and Tires.
THE DECENCY OF HARD WORK: After Denver hired homeless people to shovel mulch and perform other day labor, more than 100 landed regular jobs. Quoth one: “When you take a good person (who’s) down, broken, discouraged, and you give them an opportunity to be proud of their self — to stand up and do something for their self — that’s one of the greatest gifts anybody can give to anybody.”
RUTH MARCUS TRIES TO EXPLAIN WHY ANTI-TRUMP PEOPLE HATE TRUMP EVEN THOUGH HIS ACTIONS AREN’T ESPECIALLY EXCEPTIONABLE, AND COMES UP WITH THIS: “Trump does not reflect who we are.”
Actually, and I think this is actually what goes to the horror of the political class, Trump reflects exactly who you are. Everything they hate about him, from the nonstop concern with what the press is saying, to the willingness to override traditions to do what he wants, is a characteristic that our political class has had for decades. He just does it with insufficiently-creased pants.
If our media and political class weren’t horrible, Trump would have stayed in the hotel and TV business, and the people who hate him now would have happily attended his parties and taken pictures with him. But he is forcing them to acknowledge, at least unconsciously, just how horrible they are and they can’t deal with that.
Likewise, note this overall surprisingly Trump-friendly column from Bret Stephens, which ends like this:
Donald Trump is a profoundly defective person who nearly every morning does grave political self-harm with no assistance from his opponents. But he is also president, and normal Americans — that is, those who hold the outcome of the next election in their hands — do not want him to fail. They want statesmanship, not schadenfreude.
Wouldn’t it be smart of all of Trump’s opponents to show they are superior to him in the former? And wouldn’t a good way of doing that be to abjure the latter, even if it sometimes means giving him some credit?
The thing is, they’re not superior to him, as the 15-month ragefest since the 2016 election demonstrates. And, what really burns is, the voters don’t think they’re superior to him. And when a sense of superiority is all you’ve got (and cultivated self-superiority is the core of the current leftist project), realizing that others don’t share it is a narcissistic wound from which there is no recovery. That’s what’s wrong with much of our political class, and it’s ugly and destructive — because much of our political class, at core, is ugly and destructive.
HOLLYWOOD ENDING: “The Hollywood Tide Turns on Woody Allen — Years after his daughter reiterated her allegation that the director sexually abused her, more actors are voicing their regret for collaborating with him.”
Woody Allen won an Academy Award, the fourth of his career, just six years ago for writing Midnight in Paris. He was nominated again two years later for Blue Jasmine, a film that won Cate Blanchett a Best Actress Oscar. The last year that Allen didn’t release a movie in theaters that he wrote and directed was 1981. Despite the controversy that has dogged him since the early 1990s—when he was revealed to be having an affair with his girlfriend’s daughter and was subsequently accused of molesting his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow—Allen has continued to make movies with the same once-a-year regularity as always, and usually with major stars. He has long denied that he abused his daughter.
But the film industry’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the allegations against Allen seems to be coming to an end. More and more actors who have worked with him in the past are announcing that they regret the collaboration, and it appears the sheen of Oscar-winning prestige he has relied on to attract big names to his projects is fading. Allen, who released Wonder Wheel last month and is set to come out with A Rainy Day in New York this year, may try to helm more movies. But with Hollywood finally beginning to grapple with his enduring presence as an artist, could that be enough to destroy his career?
Allen is 82 years old; this Atlantic article feels very much like Michelle Goldberg’s piece in the New York Times at the height of the #MeToo Weinsteinmania when she wrote “I Believe Juanita [Broaddrick].” Both Woody and Bill continued in the public eye, and were eagerly defended by the backers during the 1990s and right up until this fall. (Bill Clinton was fundraising for Democrats as recently as mid-December, at Andrew Cuomo’s birthday party; he doesn’t look to be going away quietly anytime soon.)
As Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon tweets, “there’s something grotesque (and, yes, totalitarian) about Hollywood collectively turning a blind eye to the allegations against Allen and now collectively ganging up on him because it’s the politic thing to do,” adding, “You f***ers knew all about this sh*t for decades, spare me your self-righteousness now.”
TAMARA KEEL ON WHY, EVEN THOUGH SHE’S A GIRL, SHE DOESN’T HAVE A LOT OF HELPFUL ADVICE ON HOW YOUR WIFE OR GIRLFRIEND CAN CONCEALED-CARRY:
I’m 5’12” tall, I work from home, and I dress like a hobo. I’m currently wearing jeans a size too big, a nylon web instructor-type belt, and an untucked and unbuttoned overshirt that I like not only for its gun burka properties but also because it has cavernous “document pockets” that will swallow small notebooks and an Olympus Pen E-PL1 and the other things I use in my day-to-day work.
Is this how your Significant Other dresses every day?
Having known her for something like 20 years, I can attest that she cleans up nice, but on a day-to-day basis she’s not rocking a derringer in a thigh holster under a miniskirt.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Knife Rights: Trio of knife law reform bills introduced in state legislatures.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Samantha Power Regrets.
TROLL LEVEL: TROLLER-IN-CHIEF:
TEST DRIVE: 2017 Porsche 718 Cayman S Manual.
REASON TV: Government-Approved Workouts? The Fight Against Fitness Licensing. With an appearance by Mark Rippetoe.
FIGHT AGAINST “FAKE NEWS” FRAUGHT WITH FAKERY: Our intellectual betters in the EU, including France, Ireland, Germany and England have been passing or flirting with all sorts of laws criminalizing “fake news.” Industry giants Facebook, Twitter and Google have consistently failed at sorting out “fake news” and more often than not, simply add an ideological filter skewed against conservative-leaning speech as if that would fix the problem. I, for one, think the “problem” is greatly exaggerated.
But to heck with what I think. As free-speech advocacy group Article 19 points out, “neither states nor business are getting it right on ‘fake news’ and free expression”:
“The notion of ‘fake news’ is too vague to prevent subjective and arbitrary interpretation, whether in legislation or the rules of online platforms. “Fake news” laws can be (and frequently are under some regimes) used to suppress media freedom and jail journalists, but it would not be much reassurance to have private entities like the tech giants making these assessments instead. Such efforts can lead to undue censorship as a result of flawed algorithms and ill-thought out assessments of what can be considered “true” – not to mention that these businesses may be subject to the influence of non-democratic governments in certain countries where they operate.”
Just last week the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that two Jordanian journalists were arrested for violating that nation’s Press Law, which criminalizes “false information.” In the US, as in Jordan, there is a reflexive impulse of government actors to decry news they don’t like or that may be factually incorrect without proof of malicious motive as “fake” or “false.”
The proof of the problem with these kinds of laws is concrete. In early January, pressured by the new German “fake news” law, Twitter blocked the account of German satirical magazine Titanic after it posted tweets that parodied a far-right politician. The German Federation of Journalists, which has criticized the law since it was first proposed last year, told CNN said that the suspension of Titanic was exactly the kind of censorship the group has warned about for months. Eurocrats countered by saying that “rules covering hate speech and illegal content on digital platforms [are] in line with those already imposed on print media.” Justice minister Heiko Maas said that “freedom of expression is not a license to commit crimes.” When a bureaucrat can’t tell the difference between “hate speech” and humor that actually lampoons “hate speech,” you know trouble is inevitable. (Not that the Germans are famous for their sense of humor anyway).
Worse yet, even The New York Times has admitted that the impact of the fake news propagated in social media may have been wildly exaggerated. While “fake news” is on the never-ending and always evolving list of reasons that Ms. Clinton lost an election she had thought was sewn up, it is emerging that these fake news stories and memes didn’t change votes, but rather reinforced the bubbles and bias of those who had already made up their minds.
Here’s a crazy idea: how about treating the polity as capable of thinking for themselves and embracing the “marketplace of ideas“? In the words of the great Nat Hentoff: “Let the asses bray.”
**Shameless Self-Promotion: I’ll be speaking on the keynote panel “Fake News Eats the World: Protecting Speech, Evaluating Truth & Validating our Decisions” at the Legaltech 2018 Conference in New York City on Thursday, January 31, 2018
LAWYERS I KNOW WHO DO DUI DEFENSE SAY THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME: Dashcam Recording Instantly Undercuts Officers’ Concocted Reason For A Traffic Stop.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: #MeToo and the Taboo Topic of Nature.
But it is strikingly obvious that for today’s progressives, humans are the sole species on this planet where gender differentiation has no clear basis in nature, science, evolution, or biology. This is where they are as hostile to Darwin as any creationist.
And this is stupid. The alternative explanation — that these core natural differences between men and women have been supplemented by centuries of conscious oppression — is staring us in the face. The fascinating conundrum is where one ends and the other begins. How much of this difference is natural and how much is social? That is the question. And the answer is a tricky one. Is the fact that the vast majority of construction workers are male and the huge majority of nurses are female a function of sexism or nature? Is male sexual aggression and horniness a function of patriarchy or testosterone? Is the fact that women now outnumber men among college graduates a function of reverse sexism or nature?
My suspicion is that it’s more about nature than about society, and one reason I believe this (apart from all the data) is I because I’m gay. I live in a sexual and romantic world without women, where no patriarchy could definitionally exist, a subculture with hookups and relationships and marriages and every conceivable form of sexual desire that straight men and women experience as well. And you know what you find? That men behave no differently in sexual matters when there are no women involved at all. In fact, remove women, and you see male sexuality unleashed more fully, as men would naturally express it, if they could get away with it.
All I know is that it becomes increasingly easy to make an argument for restoring the patriarchy, using nothing but what millennial feminists say about the irrationality and fragility of women.