BECAUSE IT’S AWESOME: Why the World’s Richest Man Wants Humans To Live on Floating Space Cities.
Archive for 2019
May 11, 2019
BLESS THEIR HEARTS: Snopes ‘Fact-Checks’ Another Satirical Article Mocking Freshman Democrat.
LIBERALS ENRAGED AS THE BBC ‘GIVES A PLATFORM’ TO ‘FASCIST’ BEN SHAPIRO.
Conservatives astonished that the man (aggressively) interviewing him on the BBC is the chairman of the London Spectator.
ENDORSED: Maybe It’s Time To Cut The Federal Government In Half. “This would leave Federal spending limited to: the military, debt service, retirement benefits for Federal employees, and “everything else.” This too could eventually be cut in half over time. At present, these categories constitute 38% of Federal spending, or 7.9% of GDP. This reduced spending commitment could be funded with a much simpler tax system. To produce revenue of 7.9% of GDP, a single, simple tax like a 10% Federal sales tax or VAT would suffice. No more Federal income or payroll taxes. This should probably be codified in a Constitutional Amendment, modifying or eliminating the Sixteenth Amendment.”
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot: Beto-Mania Sweeps Texas.
—Headline, the Politico, July 9, 2018.
● Chaser: Beto’s Long History of Failing Upward.
—Headline, the Politico, yesterday.
(As spotted by David Rutz of the Washington Free Beacon.)
Related: Is Beto Done Already?
E.O. WILSON: A Legendary Scientist Sounds Off on the Trouble With STEM. “I am unhappy about STEM. That is, I’m unhappy about how it’s presented as the principal portal for careers in science and technology. Young people — in some cases, young enough to be as far back as grammar school — are presented with this intellectual triathlon in order to go into science and technology.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ADMINISTRATIVE BLOAT EDITION: This public university will spend nearly $3 million on diversity this year alone.
CAMPUS FASCISM: Cal Poly students call for Chick-fil-A ban; compare chicken chain to porn, Hooters. Wait, you’re supposed to compare your enemies to bad things.
AT AMAZON, Deal of the Day, Gerber Truss Multi-Tool with Sheath.
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CALIFORNIA’S RENT CONTROL ADVOCATES ARE ABOUT TO GET WHAT THEY WANT, GOOD AND HARD:
Tenants’ rights groups are ecstatic that two major rent-control bills have sailed through the Assembly’s Housing and Community Development Committee. Democratic supermajorities and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s blessing may assure the bills will become law, thus offering the latest affirmation of H.L. Mencken’s infamous quotation: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
“We know that millions of tenants are one rent increase away from not being able to afford food, healthcare or even becoming homeless,” said Assemblyman David Chiu (D–San Francisco), author of one of the bills. He’s certainly right, but his “easy” solution will only make good housing harder to find and far costlier over the long term. He’s just pandering to voters angry about high rents.
But the housing crunch largely is the fault of the Legislature’s slow-growth land-use policies enacted over two decades, and local governments that have given in to the selfish demands of homeowners who are tired of congestion (and don’t want lower-income people living nearby in apartments). Instead of fixing the mess government created, lawmakers want to make private owners subsidize rents of their customers. It’s morally wrong and doesn’t work.
Related: Speaking slow-growth policies, Endangered Frogs Preventing Fire-Ravaged California City From Being Quickly Rebuilt.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Liberals Clarify: ‘Alt Right’ Means Everyone To The Right Of Stalin.
WASHINGTON’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: NO ONE IS RUNNING THE SHOW.
In other words, people have the power to try stuff in the same way generals have the authority to send troops into battle, but as General James Mattis likes to say, “The enemy gets a vote.” And in politics and public policy, the enemy isn’t merely the opposing party or hostile voters, but life — that vast realm of existence governed as much by Murphy’s Law as by Washington’s laws. Facts are stubborn things. The world is complicated.
After Barack Obama got his stimulus passed on the promise that there were millions of “shovel-ready jobs,” the stimulation never quite materialized as planned, and the shovels tended to stay in the shed. Obama later insisted that the theory behind the stimulus was right, but “the problem is that spending it out takes a long time, because there’s really nothing — there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”
This is a hard lesson for people who put immense faith in government to do big, important things.
Read the whole thing.
BECAUSE DEM-ON-DEM POLITICS IS GETTING ROUGH: I’m trying to understand why Anita Hill has another op-ed in the New York Times.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: ‘Outrageous!’ Proposed registration fee hike for electric cars in Illinois leaves progressives shocked by cost of progressivism.
There’s a lede that the media will probably not go with, and that’s “Democrats who bought $75,000 cars with help of big taxpayer subsidies are complaining about a proposed tax increase that would affect them.”
Insert Occupy Wall Street-era Libertarian Party ad here:
FLASHBACK: NPR (!) ON “THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS THAT WEREN’T.”
This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.
We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.
Related: America doesn’t actually lead the world in mass shootings.
The claim that the US has by far the most mass public shootings in the world drives much of the gun-control debate. Many argue that America’s high rate of gun possession explains the high rate of mass shootings.
“The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world,” President Barack Obama warned us. To justify this claim and many other similar quotes, Obama’s administration cited a then-unpublished paper by criminologist Adam Lankford.
Lankford’s claim received coverage in hundreds of news stories all over the world. It still gets regular coverage. Purporting to cover all mass public shootings around the world from 1966 to 2012, Lankford claimed that the United States had 31 percent of public mass shooters despite having less than 5 percent of the population.
But this isn’t nearly correct. The whole episode should provide a cautionary tale of academic malpractice and how evidence is often cherry-picked and not questioned when it fits preconceived ideas. . . .
Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the US ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia all have at least 45 percent higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.
When Lankford’s data is revised, the relationship between gun ownership rates and mass public shooters disappears.
How could that be? One possibility is that guns don’t just enable mass shooters; gun owners can also deter and prevent such shootings. Another is that culture — not gun ownership — is a bigger factor in shootings.
The media should be wary of any researchers who fail to let others look at their data.
Well, you know, unless the researchers help the narrative along.