Archive for 2019
May 29, 2019
ALL THE BEST PEOPLE TELL ME THAT ELECTION FRAUD IS A MYTH, EXCEPT WHEN PERPETRATED BY RUSSIANS: How Ballot-Harvesting Became The New Way To Steal An Election: With ballot-harvesting, paper votes are collected by intermediaries who deliver them to polling officials, presumably increasing voter turnout but also creating opportunities for mischief.
THE SCANDINAVIAN MODEL: The Welfare State is Tearing Sweden Apart.
With a welfare state as a punching bag between groups however, cultural divides become much harder to bridge. Large scale immigration will always be culturally demanding, even when there is access to market mechanism to bridge cultural differences. But the welfare state largely nullifies such avenues.
1. The attractive welfare state lures non-productive economical migration, deters labour-market entry for migrants who do want to contribute, and cements welfare dependency. Beyond cultural effects, we therefore must add resentment fueled by the predominant culture having no choice but to fund absolute strangers.
2.While not specifically related to the welfare state; minimum wage requirements and other protectionistic union regulations exacerbate this mechanic. In Sweden, hardly a day goes by without some enterprising tax-paying immigrant getting a deportation notice because of having “taken too few vacation days,” or having “accepted too low a salary.” Yes, migration authorities actively enforce union edicts! In the face of this, who can blame a migrant who simply decides to play it safe and remain on welfare?
3. In Sweden, the welfare state is enormous and encompasses everything; from a plethora of transfer payments, to schools (including university), and health care. There is literally no way of escaping its grasp if you wish a lead a semblance of a normal life.
When a welfare state subsidies migration we get a direct burden on existing net taxpayers, who tend to be ethnically and culturally Swedish, above and beyond the burden already imposed by native welfare-recipients and rent-seekers.
Cloward and Piven, call your offices.
NARRATIVEBUSTING: Gallup: Trump leadership rating jumps, beats Obama on issues, ideology.
More Americans believe that President Trump has the personality and leadership qualities to be president than two years ago, and he topped former President Barack Obama’s rating for working on issues most important to them, according to a new survey.
Gallup found that 47% agree with Trump on the issues, edging Obama at the two year mark of his presidency. In April 2007, 45% agreed with Obama on issues, said Gallup.
And Trump was graded more in line with the political ideology of Americans than Obama and former President George W. Bush. Asked about Trump’s ideology, 38% said it was “about right.” Some 35% said the same thing about Obama, and 36% for Bush.
Which is funny because you’d never guess that from the tenor of the news coverage.
ABOUT THE ANY-MEANS-ALL FALLACY OF THE LEFT: It’s a commonplace argument from advocates on the Left and in the Mainstream Media, especially among those seeking to force everybody to pay for benefits awarded to a few on the basis of group identity.
Consider Chad Felix Greene’s description in The Federalist today of a recent claim by LBGT advocates concerning a Catholic hospital refusal to perform a certain procedure:
“It is preposterous to jump from a surgeon working in a Catholic hospital refusing to perform an elective hysterectomy on a perfectly healthy female body to arguing that an emergency room worker would deny life-saving care to a transgender person in a car accident. But LGBT people and media constantly conflate the two.”
The occasion for Greene’s analysis is the Trump administration’s proposed rule recognizing sex biologically rather than the Obama administration’s previous “gender identity.” Greene’s point has application across virtually the entire social issue horizon.
THERE MAY BE SHORT-TERM ADVANTAGE IN THIS, BUT LONGER-TERM IT WILL JUST DRAW OUT MORE SUPPLY: China Gears Up to Weaponize Rare Earths in Trade War.
For example: Japan finds a huge cache of scarce rare-earth minerals. Also: China can’t control the market in rare earth elements because they aren’t all that rare.
THERE ALREADY IS ONE: Japan’s deal to buy F-35 Lightning jets from US ‘may fuel arms race with China in region.’
China is engaging in one of the largest naval buildups and military modernizations in history, but Japan is at fault for buying 105 fighters?
IT’S AS IF THE WOKE YAMMERING CLASS IS UNREPRESENTATIVE OR SOMETHING: Brits support Trump visit: poll.
KARIN MCQUILLAN: Trump Dominates The Opposition By Taking Them Seriously. And they make things worse by not returning the favor.
LIFE IN THE OIL-RICH OPEC-MEMBER SOCIALIST PARADISE: Venezuela’s gas shortages create days-long lines.
CHINA WANTS WAR WITH THE U.S.? No, this is not about trade war, this is about China being “prepared to fight a protracted war” against America. The Washington Free Beacon’s Bill Gertz — who, by the way, is likely the best informed, most honest journalist writing anywhere about China — quotes a knowledgeable Chinese expert on the four-minute video placed on a state-approved video-sharing service.
“This is not a joke from the CCP because they are really embedding a kind of a message in this video to prepare to confront the U.S.,” said the expert, dissident Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.
Wengui said the video may be part of the Chinese regime’s preparation for an assault on Taiwan, a confrontation with the U.S. military in the disputed South China Sea or a new crackdown on individual freedoms in Hong Kong.
SOME OCCUPATIONAL-LICENSING GOOD NEWS: Texas’ Plumbing Board and Licensing Laws Abolished.
OH: British ex-spy will not talk to U.S. prosecutor examining Trump probe origins. “Christopher Steele, a former Russia expert for the British spy agency MI6, will not answer questions from prosecutor John Durham, named by Barr to examine the origins of the investigations into Trump and his campaign team, said the source close to Steele’s London-based private investigation firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.”
PERFECT: AOC to Bartend for a Day to Advocate Policies That Closed Former Employer.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, N.Y.) is set to bartend again for a day to advocate for policies that led to one of her former employers shutting down its business. . . .
Charles Milite, co-founder of the Coffee Shop, where Ocasio-Cortez previously worked, said that the increased minimum wage to $15 per hour for businesses with more than 11 employees led him and his partners to reevaluate their business and shut it down.
“I know it doesn’t sound like much—$2 an hour,” Milite told Crains New York Business in April. “But when you multiply it by 40 hours, by 130 people, it becomes a big number. It was going to increase our monthly payroll $46,000.”
Ocasio-Cortez mourned the loss of the Coffee Shop and stopped in before it closed its doors. “The restaurant I used to work at is closing its doors,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted last August. “I swung by today to say hi one last time, and kid around with friends like old times.” The freshman congresswoman, however, never acknowledged the policies that led to its demise.
After being in business for 28 years and attracting big names, 130 employees ultimately lost their jobs when the company was driven out of business.
Getting AOC elected, along with Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, remains Roger Stone’s best-ever dirty trick.
YEAH, THAT’S ALL IT COULD BE: Outgoing Maine Dean Blames ‘Implicit Bias Of Sexism And Racism’ For University’s Refusal To Adequately Fund Law School. Sounds like excuse-making to me. She was a black woman when they hired her, too. And the law school has been in the red for 7 years.
COLLUSION AND COVERUP: Self-Preservation Is The Only Reason Democrats Could Object To Declassifying Spygate Docs.
Related: Lindsey Graham says intel officials concerned about exposure of 2016 misbehavior.
Also Related: Overwhelming Majority Want Investigation into Obama DOJ Spying of Trump.
Flashback, March 2017: “Hypothesis: The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.”
OVER AT AMAZON, A NICE REVIEW FOR MY NEW BOOK, from Paul Boutin:
The author, a prolific and popular blogger, USA Today columnist, and frequent TV guest pundit for the past two decades, has curated a set of concise, pointed quotes — some his, many from others — that accurately describe the symptoms of a widespread malaise regarding Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Look at us — have we lost our minds?
Yes, Reynolds writes in all seriousness. Just as haphazardly assembled cities once unwittingly bred lethal plagues, he sees today’s social media platforms as a viral breeding ground for the coinciding mental health epidemics that scholarly studies have already documented — not just among young adults, but at all ages.
Beyond the personal damage is the civic. Reynolds, a law professor, says viral outrage and retaliatory posts almost never meet the U.S. legal bar for “incitement,” but he admits that the online free speech he still champions frequently causes real-world harm. At the personal scale, careers ended and lives shattered for one ill-considered joke. At the national scale, the reaction in political campaign circles to online meddling in the 2016 election is clearly, “We need to do that ourselves.”
Rather than playing expert, Reynolds as a writer builds his case through excepts from news articles, punchy opinion essays, and academic studies. You probably already know the gist of most, but the author — as much editor as writer in this book — constructs a structured, easily-read briefing punctuated by other writers’ well-honed prose. One accurately labels the “gleeful savagery” of online justice. Another bemoans that she now reads “more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.”
You may arrive at The Social Media Upheaval feeling you already know all this stuff, but you’ll leave with much better words to describe it.
The judge I clerked for said that he was more persuaded by briefs featuring quotes from cases than lawyers’ characterizations of what those cases held, as lawyers would stretch their characterizations, but not change a quote. Likewise, I find a similar approach more persuasive when writing about contested matters, especially when the people I quote aren’t likely to be thought of as ideological or political allies.
“WE WILL ONLY HAVE PEACE WITH THE ARABS WHEN THEY LOVE THEIR CHILDREN MORE THAN THEY HATE US”: Palestinian Authority TV Series Features Uncle Teaching Nephew How to Shoot at ‘the Jews.’
It’s a terrible feeling to discover that your country is full of strangers. For some in India, the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, with a majority that India hadn’t seen in three decades, was that moment. Everyone knew there was discontent with the status quo; everyone knew that Modi was doing well, better than anyone had expected before he became a candidate – but to win an unprecedented majority? It meant that far more Indians than imaginable were willing to trust a leader with so disquieting a record.
Since then, I have seen that feeling of shock replicated elsewhere, and often. In Britain, for example, in the summer of 2016, as the country voted narrowly for Brexit. And again, in the U.S. that fall.
After a while, you refuse to believe what happened. It was special circumstances that led to this shock result, you’re told. Voters who should have known better were carried away with anger and enthusiasm, responding to a government floundering in corruption, or to years of feeling left out and ignored by mainstream parties, or to economic policies that didn’t sufficiently take their interests into account. Voters are sensible, people say; when they see how their choices aren’t working out as hoped, they will come around. Of course they will, that’s how democracy works.
In India, Narendra Modi’s premiership was certainly not working out as hoped. The jobs he had promised to create weren’t there. Rural distress was spreading, as the government’s tight control on food prices kept farmers from making the sort of profits they wanted. The prime minister took controversial, indefensible decisions like the overnight ban on 86% of India’s cash. And he lost several crucial midterm provincial elections, some by unusually large margins. Yes, he remained popular, but politics seemed to be snapping back to normal.
And then came May 23, 2019, when — instead of voting out Modi, or chastening him by reducing his majority, Indian voters instead rewarded him with an even greater majority. His party’s share of the vote jumped by more than 6%. Instead of seeing his term as a disappointment, his supporters retained their allegiance — and gained converts. Losing once to the populist might be bad, but you just have to look at India to realize twice is infinitely worse.
It’s been a tough few years for the New Class all over the world, but it’s still mostly in denial.
Flashback: Donald Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad. “But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.”
May 28, 2019
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Are Facebook, Twitter, Google evil or just everywhere? What we have to do about big tech.
I’m not sure I mentioned it, but I have a book out.
R.I.P., TONY HORWITZ. I haven’t read his new book, but Confederates in the Attic was really good, and much more sensitive than the brief description in this obituary makes it seem.
Somewhat related item here.
CHARLES LIPSON: ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ on Obama’s Bad Cops and Spies.