Category: folly

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folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Farce and Fury

Grammys, hypocrites, Hillary Clinton, Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury,

NBC’s Today covered Sunday night’s Grammy Awards — the music industry’s shindig that I mark my calendar each year to be sure to miss — under the labels “The Grammys Get Political” and “Music & #MeToo Movement Take Center Stage.”

Reuters declared that “the surprise star of the night was former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton reading from Michael Wolff’s controversial book Fire and Fury.”

That the music industry wraps their product in partisan politics? Their business. And to be fair, Hillary’s part of the skit was actually kinda funny. 

What’s not so funny? Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Wolff lionized as exemplary #MeTooers … while being the opposite.

First, were Grammy organizers oblivious to the breaking story that Hillary Clinton overruled her 2008 campaign manager to keep, rather than fire, a male employee accused of sexual harassment, ultimately reassigning the female victim, instead? To make matters worse, in tweets Mrs. Clinton seemed to take great credit for the young woman being “heard.”

Liberal Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus called Hillary’s response “head-​exploding stuff.”

Second, CNN reports that the author of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff, “has been spreading a rumor that the President of the United States is having an affair, and in a coyly worded exchange on Real Time With Bill Maher implied that it was with [U.N. Ambassador Nikki] Haley.” Wolff told Maher that he was “absolutely sure” of it … but not quite certain enough to put it in the book.

Haley, the former South Carolina Governor, called the rumor “false” and “disgusting,” noting it is an age-​old, sexist slap against women. 

So, why were Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Wolff celebrated on this stage? 

And not Nikki Haley?

Makes no sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment folly general freedom local leaders moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Popular privacy Regulating Protest too much government

The Last Straw

plastic straws, nanny state, fine, crime, California, freedom

How much should we fine waiters who destroy our planet?

For how long should they go to jail?

I don’t know where you would hold such an evildoer after the earth has been destroyed. Or where he’d go when released. But we’re speaking hypothetically. Assume that planet-​destroyers can be imprisoned on the moon, which let’s just say still orbits the earth’s decimated remains. Or assume that after being destroyed, the planet can be reconstructed. After serving his sentence, then, the waiter would be released to a reconstructed earth.

In that case, a maximum $1,000 fine as suggested by Ian Calderon, Democratic majority leader of the California State Assembly, seems only fair. However, a maximum of six months in jail is excessive. In my opinion, planet-​destroying waiters should suffer no more than 100 days in jail.

Calderon has proposed a bill, AB-​1884, to fine and/​or imprison waiters who offer unsolicited plastic straws to restaurant patrons. In response to criticism of his silly and vicious bill, Calderon says hey, it’s “NOT a ban” on straws! Oh, okay. Anyway, “Penalties are based on the code section the bill is currently in, which it will be amended out of,” which sounds like Calderon was prior to the uproar … what, joking?

As long as we’re amending, let me amend my own implication that people who offer, use, make or sell plastic straws* are in fact helping destroy earth. Just kidding!

The earth will survive plastic straws. Will it survive the Calderons of the world? 

Open question.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Not that I’m confirming or denying ever using one myself. 

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crime and punishment folly general freedom moral hazard privacy too much government

Dutch Treat

Rotterdam, expensive, clothing, arrest, Netherlands, crime, rights

Rotterdam police are gearing up for a new crime reduction scheme.

“They’ll soon begin a pilot program targeting young men in designer clothes that the police believe they couldn’t afford legally,” reports Quartz. “If it’s not clear how the person paid for the clothing, the police may confiscate it.”

A police spokesman for the Netherlands city confirmed both the test program and their confidence in their own clairvoyance, “We know they have clothes that are too expensive to wear with the money they get.”

Beyond the complete disregard for everyone’s basic rights, people worry the law will be applied discriminatorily against minorities. As one young resident warned, “Police won’t consider a white guy walking around in an expensive jacket to be a potential drug dealer. But it’ll be a different story with minorities.”

But surely the poor of all races will become suspects for the new “fashion police.”

“What is the next step if police start asking you how you got the clothes you are wearing,” Rotterdam lawyer Jaap Spigt queried DutchNews. “Will they soon be going through your home asking how you paid for your television or sofa?”

Thank goodness, I don’t live in Rotterdam. 

Wait a second … the civil asset forfeiture policies at work right now in the U.S. permit police to take money and property — including clothing — without even charging a person with a crime. Simply taking stuff on the assertion of it being either involved in or the proceeds from criminal activity is precisely what’s happening in Rotterdam.

How long before Americans are stopped and partially stripped on the street by police who determine they are guilty of criminally overdressing sans trial?

At least, my poor fashion sense is trending up. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly ideological culture moral hazard

Through a Lens, Darkly

Matthew A. Sears, SJW, Social Justice Warrior, University, dialectic, truth, argument, protest

The “best debates” are ones in which one side shouts down the other side and threatens violence.

Well, that is what a Washington Post essay implies. In “Why ‘social justice warriors’ are the real defenders of free speech on campus,” Matthew A. Sears, an associate professor of classics and ancient history at the University of New Brunswick, offers a bizarre take on current campus controversies.

After two years of bizarre antics from leftist student bodies in colleges and universities all over the country, academics as diverse as Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, and Camille Paglia have denounced the intentionally disruptive and even violent tactics of student mobs. We need to go back to the Socratic method and “the disinterested pursuit of truth,” as Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind, put it.

Sears counters this by defending the “social justice approach” as better than a “disinterested pursuit of truth.” Instead of “constituting an attack on knowledge, the social justice lens reflects new ideas generated by academic disciplines and experts within them, and generally encourages expanding our knowledge and opening up subjects to new perspectives, much like Socrates advocated.”

Conflating Socratic “dialectic” with the screaming matches and overt force used by the social justice students who have shut down lectures, seminars and fora featuring non-​leftist figures such as Ben Shapiro, Heather Mac Donald and Charles Murray, is more effrontery than enlightening.*

And about that “social justice lens”? Lenses refract, mirrors reflect — and Sears’ argument, you will notice, defends bad behavior out of his classroom by focusing on how he teaches in class. 

We don’t need mirrors or lenses to see the deflection here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* It was heartening to read most commenters on the page engaging in a merciless “dialectic” against the author. 

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Accountability folly government transparency local leaders moral hazard porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

Babylon Goes Broke

California, pension, crisis, canary, cage, coal mine, spending, taxes

A few Babylonian, er, California cities going bankrupt — Stockton, Vallejo, and Bell — should be seen as more than dead canaries in a coalminer’s care. 

Indeed, you don’t need special prophetic gifts to see the dangers posed by over-​promising cushy pensions to government workers. Californians are coming around. And the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, appears to be “calling for reductions in gold-​plated, unsustainable public-​sector pensions,” as Nick Gillespie informs us at Reason.

But statewide reforms will not be easy. The problem is huge, presenting grave costs. “Absent the ability to alter pensions, states and localities have to devote more and more of their taxes to simply covering the costs of retired workers,” Gillespie explains. “Worse still, they often raise taxes to cover rising costs, typically at the expense of providing basic services such as police and road maintenance.”

Yes, over-​promising defined-​benefit pension packages effectively distributes wealth away from basic government services and into the pockets of the people with whom politicians work most closely.

Unfortunately, the courts long ago decided that politicians’ promises to employees outweigh basic government duties. That is, the courts determined that “public-​sector employees at all levels of government had an inviolable right to the pension benefits that existed on the day they were hired.”

But the courts seem to be lightening up on this “California Rule,” and the governor has dared mention that, come “the next recession,” some headway might be possible.

No matter what you may think of this rather desperate hope, the writing is on the wall. And it is in red ink and numbers, not Babylonian.*

As America’s Babylon is finding out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* And not “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.”

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

The Ninth and the Tenth of It

marijuana, constitution, intrastate, rights, legalization, decriminalization

When Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the Obama Administration enforcement guidelines regarding the states that have legalized (in their 29 different ways) marijuana, last week, supporters of freedom expressed some worry. 

But we had to admit, one excuse for Sessions’s nixing of the mostly hands-​off policy seemed to make sense on purely legal grounds. If we want to liberalize drug laws, then our Cowardly Congress should do it.

Definitely not the Executive Branch.

And yet, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Will Baude argues that “the rule of law” does not require “renewed enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act.”

If anything, he argues, it “requires the opposite.”

Baude mostly rests his case on the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which does not authorize regulation of intra-state trade. An issue on which the AG does possess a duty to weigh in.* 

This rubs against FDR-​Era constitutional theory, of course, which treats all commerce as regulate-​able interstate trade. But this makes no sense. The Tenth Amendment declares that states possess powers not given to the federal government. An interpretation of the Constitution cannot be justified if it effectively nullifies other parts of the Constitution. (If all trade is “inter” state, what’s left for the states? Powers to do what? And how could there be any constraints on federal power?)

And then there is the Ninth Amendment, which states that the people retain rights not listed in the Constitution. 

When citizens assert rights — such as the option to cultivate, sell, buy or ingest a common and quite hardy plant — in their states (largely through ballot initiatives), the federal government should butt out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* “Members of the executive branch have their own obligation to interpret the Constitution,” Baude writes, “and if a federal law is unconstitutional in part then the executive branch, no less than the courts, should say so. It is the Constitution, not the Court, that is the ultimate rule of law in our system.”

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