Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Linkage
Been busy -- reporting the quarter, immersing myself in the daily grind of corporate governance, agog at the idiotic way we regulate the preparation and auditing of financial statements, that sort of thing -- but that does not mean I have not been reading. Herewith, my open tabs, which need to be dumped before my browser crashes.
"Never have so few been blamed for so much by so many." Well, except for all the other times that the world blamed the Jews for their own incompetence.
A graphical look at the distribution of wealth, or at least income. Such as it is. Of course, one can never derive "what ought" from "what is." We note that this argument
Another example of another institution of "higher learning" standing four square against freedom of speech. This is getting tiresome.
"Occupy Wall Street vs. the Tea Party." Both sides have been filing "comparisons" of the two movements. Lefties emphasize the alleged racism of the Tea Party, with anecdotal videos of alleged encounters they deem offensive, and righties emphasize sheer hair-brained lunacy of the OWS movement's "demands," which are, indeed, hilarious, and available at the link.
And, then, there is the obvious difference in work ethic.
Juan Williams makes a very important point about the current extent of intolerance on both the left and right. As somebody whose positions on abortion, gay marriage, and immigration infuriate both "sides", I completely agree.
The list of Newt Gingrich's various transgressions, many of them against the very ideological purity that Juan Williams decries in the previous link, explained away by another conservative. None of these are reasons not to nominate Newt. Rather, there is not a shred of evidence that he would inspire optimism in Americans who actually produce, which we desperately need right now. He is, however, a creative and out-of-the-box thinker, and I very much hope that the next Republican president makes him Secretary of Health and Human Services so he can wield the vast power vested in that office by Barack Obama's health care reform law. That would be interesting. And hilarious in a schadenfreude way.
Release the hounds.
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Oct 25, 09:08:00 AM:
Great links. Thanks.
1. The OWS has run it's course, and now the stoopid lazyites need to go back to whatever Brooklyn bolt-hole they would normally inhabit. This has gone beyond politics. Bryan Preston nails it:
"So..if the police are right, we have a movement of rich white kids and assorted radicals and anti-Semites squatting on other people's land, mooching food ordinarily used to feed the homeless and now causing an increase in violence elsewhere in the city, while demanding that everyone else pay for their own poor choices to load up on student debt. While they're belatedly learning lessons the rest of us started learning as toddlers."
2. FIRE performs a critical service in defense of our rights. As time goes by, I lose patience with these institutions and their lame defenses.
Some time ago I sat with the dean of the college of Arts and Sciences at Cornell. He wanted something from me and so he had to answer my questions, as I asked why Cornell hired and awarded tenure to a Duke leader of the faculty abuse of students who happened to be lacrosse team members. Why countenance the faculty effort to reward this useless idiot, a fellow who had never written a scholarly book, never won a teaching award, and was hired only because his leftist totalitarian bona fides had been established?
Despite the Dean's earnest desire to answer me, he couldn't, because the hiring is indefensible. Similarly, schools make indefensible assaults daily on the rights to free speech of faculty, students and staff through "speech codes" and other forms of censorship. Institutions of higher learning need to have the same laws apply to them that apply to all of us, and perhaps should lose their tax advantages as well.
By 
Georg Felis, at
Wed Oct 26, 12:54:00 AM:
There is no way Newt could be appointed to the Sec. of HHS in a Perry/Romney presidency. The collective Left would go through a case of St. Vitus Dance right there on the Senate floor, and heads would explode all over Washington. However, it is possible he could be nominated as a ruse to draw fire, then step down to allow another conservative Sec. or twelve get appointed successfully.
OWS had the good fortune to happen in a period of low "News", organized by people with the Right Ideas for the press to cover, a combination the Tea Party cannot match for news coverage. Flip side: OWS will not be the driving force to put one single politician in office, the Tea Party has done that for hundreds nationwide, and will do it again in 2012.
By , at
Wed Oct 26, 03:37:00 AM:
"Juan Williams makes a very important point about the current extent of intolerance on both the left and right. As somebody whose positions on abortion, gay marriage, and immigration infuriate both "sides", I completely agree."
This I simply cannot abide.
For the first time since Reagan, independents, libertarians and fiscal conservatives have banded together to truly force a change in the country's course. A course that has, inexorably, been leftward for 100 years (Woodrow Wilson is, in my view, the first anti-Christ).
Now is categorically not the time for compromise. How does one compromise with Socialists and still maintain that one supports the Constitution? It is a physical, rhetorical, philosophical impossibility. It would be different if the Republicans and Democrats had some common ground, but it simply does not exist.
After 100 years of leftward nudging and drift, the Left finally got the opportunity to do what it really wanted to do with the election of BO and control of both Houses of Congress: total Gov healthcare, massive spending on entitlements, gigantic support of unions, government takeover of huge swaths of industry under the guise of "bailout", etc. List goes on and on.
But it all failed. And why? Because 100 years of Socialist rot has finally killed the Capitalist goose that lays the golden egg. They finally did it. After a century of inflicting tiny little cut after tiny little cut, the fruits of their labors are laid bare for all. For all to see, and more importantly, understand. The question is not whether Socialism works or not; it's clear that it doesn't. The question is: how long is it going to take a given level of Socialism in a given system of government to bring said government to its knees?
No, I say. Compromise now is tantamount to burning the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
By , at
Wed Oct 26, 08:36:00 AM:
I can agree with that, in principle.
In an election though I am willing to belts
More incremental. Just win, baby. I don't know if I can repeat that long enough to vote for that squib. Romney, though so I woukd be happier if he weren't nominated.
By Brian Schmidt, at
Fri Oct 28, 06:49:00 PM:
The Drill Baby carbon tax may be workable. OTOH,IIRC, that social cost estimate only looked at the US cost of US emissions that actually have global costs.
The US is about 4% of the global surface area and 20% of the global economy, so on an extremely rough level you could multiply the costs by 5 to 25 times to get a better estimate of the true social cost.
