Category: ideological culture

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Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies responsibility

Pollsters Are Political Players, Too

polling, polls, pollster, democracy, influence, elections, Common Sense, Bias, illustration

Is Trump electable? Can Carson nab the GOP presidential nomination? Does Rand Paul have a chance? Is Chris Christie finished — before a voter has voted?

It’s still pre-primary season, and it is worth remembering that — even as we judge candidates on  various capacities, including their ability to “handle the media” — one arm of the media possesses potentially the most influence along with too little scrutiny: the pollsters.

They are allegedly the most scientific and objective folks in the industry, with closest ties to actual intellectual disciplines, statistics and political science.

But they are also, willy nilly, political players, not just observers.

Though tasked to provide data on public opinion about matters of importance, they also influence public opinion in several crucial ways:

  1. By how they phrase poll questions. This is an art, and can be extremely propagandistic. Pollsters can often “get” the information they want — if they want something in particular, perhaps for partisan reasons — by wording those questions carefully.
  2. By ordering questions in particular ways. The first question sets up a context. The second is then interpreted by those polled in that context. Pollsters can nudge people to reverse their usual opinions by providing an alien context.
  3. By presenting the results, skewed or not. People are influenced by others. Voting for candidates, especially, partly depends on second-guessing other voters. Few people wish to vote for someone who “cannot win.” Therefore, a published poll result that shows popularity can increase popularity, in a sort of multiplier effect.

Polls and poll results can provide useful information. Hey, I’ve used professional pollsters. But we all have to be cautious . . . remembering that voting one’s conscience is a high-percentage play.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people nannyism national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Anti-Gun Barrage

guns, anti-gun, second amendment, Common Sense, illustration

America’s would-be gun-grabbers, chiefly in the media and “on the left,” don’t know much about guns.

But they know what they hate.

After the horrific terrorist shooting spree in San Bernardino, MSNBC and CNN went on a shooting-their-mouths-off spree, relentlessly pushing the need for stricter gun control. President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats echoed the theme.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks went full accelerando, unleashing a foul rant about how “we” are the terrorists and “we” are letting “us” get away with mass murder “every week,” ignoring the statistics that murder rates have gone down, are still going down, and that the rest of the world is being hit with mass shootings too, mainly from Muslim radicals.

When the news came out that the perps were, indeed, Muslim, the barrage of anti-gun talk didn’t stop, though their intellectual ammunition had fizzled.

The president went further off his rocker, calling the guns he wanted to ban “powerful” — though they are of lower caliber than many handguns — while Hillary Clinton talked about the need to ban “assault rifles.”

As has been noted by others, “assault rifle” only means what anti-gun folks say it means, and what they designate as assault weapons are not (contrary to their constant implications) the equivalent of machine guns (which have been illegal for citizen ownership for a long, long time).

Being scared of scary-looking guns is no excuse not to be able to define them. While it would be good to reduce incentives for folks to “go postal” or to commit terroristic acts, we aren’t going to prevent mass shootings by a simple prohibitionary or mere regulatory regime.

That’s for scare-mongers to push. And us to resist.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture nannyism too much government

A Handle on Global Warming?

Global Warming, Vancouver, gas, sticker, climate change, common sense

Folks in government are prone to overstepping their bounds.

Take, for example, the North Vancouver, British Columbia, City Council, which has instituted a mandatory sticker program for gas pumps. Starting in 2016, public service announcements will appear on North Vancouver gas pump nozzle handles.

What for?

To warn us of the danger of global warming.

Though the city government hasn’t accepted any particular message, Autoblog reports that the policy is clear: “The idea behind the warnings isn’t to shame people for filling up an internal combustion engine but instead to suggest that there could be more eco-friendly alternatives.”

Autoblog calls this new move a “small step to help fight the planet’s rising temperatures,” and that North Vancouver “will likely be the first city in the world” to enact such a mandate.

I am sure city pols are proud of themselves.

The ordinance was pushed by a not-for-profit Canadian group called Our Horizon. The goal? Make a “positive impact on the environment” with this “relatively low cost but highly visible strategy.”

The official estimate on costs? Between C$3,000 and C$5,000. Costs to businesses? “Gas station owners must display [the stickers] as a condition of their business license.”

Meanwhile, the unsettled science of climate change teeters ahead, as The Rebel Media reports: increased carbon dioxide may not cause extra warming (chlorofluorocarbons do that), but does induce greening, helping plant life to flourish.

When the truth finally emerges, out of the fog blown over the issues by groupthink, the findings of legitimate science probably won’t fit on a sticker.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Global Warming, Vancouver, gas, sticker, climate change, common sense

 

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First Amendment rights folly general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies privacy U.S. Constitution

Our Masters’ Malign Agenda

Constitution, Bill of Rights, Politics, Terrorism, populism, Common Sense

Reacting to terrorism, President Obama’s first thought? Scratch out the Second Amendment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of “due process” from the Bill of Rights. Why? To advance his mania for gun control.

Now comes Republican front-runner Donald Trump, one-upping the president. He wants to block any Muslim from entering the U.S. — whether immigrant, refugee or even tourist.

That’s after advocating a government database for tracking American citizens who are Muslim.

Terrorism is winning.

Ignore the Constitution? Disregard individual rights? Demonize an entire religion? Thus our leaders play into ISIS’s hands, encouraging Muslims worldwide to see the U. S. as their enemy.

Cooler heads must prevail. Or else. A Republican friend posted on Facebook that he “would gleefully vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump.” I just cannot muster any glee.

In fact, I’m beginning (again) to wonder if John Fund wasn’t on to something last June, when he wrote in National Review that “just maybe Trump is a double agent for the Left.”

Think “Manchurian Candidate.”

“It’s all very un-American,” my friend Suhail Khan, an American Muslim and conservative activist, told the Washington Post. “Our country was based on religious freedom.”

No more?

Surely, our experiment in limited government has not ended.

But we need to get serious.

We must demand a real commitment from any candidate seeking the country’s highest office. To be entrusted to execute our union’s laws, he or she must actually demonstrate allegiance to the rule of law.

That is, a willingness to fit one’s ego within the confines of the Constitution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies property rights responsibility

Climate Changelings

Paris, climate change, global warming, natural gas, fracking, Common Sense, illustration

Worried that the world is going to sacrifice progress for the mess of pottage that is “global climate change”?

Don’t. Years ago, economists specializing in game theory recognized that the governments of the world would be extremely unlikely to agree to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The incentives are all wrong for that.

Last month, the great debunker of junk climate science, Patrick Michaels, reporting on the recent Paris talks, concurred. The international agreement going forward is so worded as to be “free to be meaningless.” Countries can claim to be “doing something,” but effectively accomplish nothing. Which allows “the world’s largest emitter (China) and the third-largest one (India)” to balk.

But the ole USA? It is doing something . . .

and it’s going to cost. Here’s one reason: Under Obama’s Clean Power Plan, substitution of natural gas for coal in electrical generation isn’t going to increase, even though it produces only half the carbon dioxide per kilowatt of electricity as coal. Instead, his EPA says power companies have to substitute unreliable, expensive “renewables,” mainly solar energy and wind. These are mighty expensive compared with new natural-gas power. And even the Clean Power Plan won’t meet our Paris target.

Obviously, what we have to worry about are our martyrdom-prone environmental zealots and their power-hungry (political power-hungry) friends ensconced in government.

They just can’t leave well enough alone, for, as Michaels notes, even CO2 emissions improve with industrial progress — when markets are free and property rights established.

But anti-capitalists in and out of government don’t want improvements to come naturally. Apparently, they would rather make things worse even by their own standards than let markets work.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Enumerated Wrongs

Bill of Rights, Ten Amendments, Freedom of Speech, Bear Arms, Common Sense

Will the government soon quarter troops in your home?

The Third Amendment prohibits that, sure — but if prominent and powerful Democrats are so anxious to toss out the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution, who’s to say they wouldn’t jettison the Third?

Last year, every Democratic U.S. Senator voted to repeal the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and replace it with new, broad powers for them to regulate campaign spending, thereby speech.

Luckily, those 54 senators lacked the two-thirds margin needed for their amendment.

Now, in the face of “gun violence” and (pssst) terrorism, President Obama, presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton, and true-blue MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, want to scrap the Second Amendment. How? By first scrapping the Fifth, which guarantees that “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” They demand that Americans on the so-called “terrorist no-fly list” be denied the Second Amendment right to a firearm, despite the fact that the bureaucratically created no-fly list offers not a scintilla of due process: no charge, jury, trial.

Would this new regulation have prevented the San Bernardino murderers from getting guns? No — they had recently flown across the world.

The frequent-flying Boston Marathon bombers didn’t make the list, either.

But the list did label an 18-month-old girl a terrorist, snatching her rights like taking candy from a . . . toddler.

“Just what will it take for Congress to overcome the intimidation of the gun lobby and do something as sensible as making sure people on the terrorist watch list can’t buy weapons?” Mrs. Clinton asked rhetorically at a campaign event.

Answer: an illegal abrogation of the most fundamental and cherished rights in human history.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly ideological culture

Doing Anti-Racism Wrong

yoga, racism, political correctness, racism, colonialism, Common Sense

The number of crazies out there may be fewer than they seem.

This weekend, at Townhall, I wrote about the University of Ottawa’s suspension of a free yoga class. What was deemed “problematic” was the class’s “cultural appropriation” of an ancient discipline.

But why was yoga a problem, -atic or otherwise?

Well, in the words of the “fainting heart” who made the decision to nix the program, because yoga hails from cultures that “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy. . . .”

Robby Soave, at the Daily Beast, pushed a bit deeper than I did: “Cultural appropriation first became a talking point in sociology circles in the 1970s and ’80s. Explicitly racist and exploitative incidents from the past — like 19th and early 20th century blackface — were deemed wrong, not merely because they were horribly insulting to black people, but because they stole from black culture.”

On this ground, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is intolerably racist.

Idiotic. Let me repeat what I wrote this weekend:

  1. Cultural appropriation is a good thing; that’s how we progress. We emulate the good in other cultures. We discard practices that do not suit us. That is what good people do.
  2. Those people who, afflicted by the mind-virus of today’s neo-progressivism, think that “cultural appropriation” is racist are themselves racist.

How are they racist? By judging a cultural matter as racial.

Racists make too much of race. So does this new breed of self-defined anti-racists.

But remember, it was just one complaint that led to the yoga class being nixed. Had the person who addressed the complaint dared snort in derision, the whole absurdity might have stopped before it started.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

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Photo credit (endorsement of this message is not implied): Steven Depolo on Flickr

 

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folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture too much government

Bitter Pill

Martin Shkreli, Turing Pharmaceuticals, Daraprim, greed, FDA, ilustration, Common Sense

When Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, announced his August acquisition of Daraprim, the only available version of the anti-parasitic pyrimethamine, and his plan to raise its price from under $14.00 to $750 per dose, I did not comment. Everybody else seemed to know exactly how evil the man was, and how awful the system that allowed his machinations.

I knew only that I didn’t know enough.

After reading Mary J. Ruwart’s “The $750 Pill: Corporate Greed, Excessive Regulation—or Both?,” I’m glad I waited. According to Dr. Ruwart, who has worked in the pharmaceutical industry, even the barest facts in the case incite suspicion:

Daraprim was patented in the 1950s, and is used for treating parasitic infections in fewer than 13,000 people a year in the U.S.  Turing bought exclusive rights to distribute the drug in the U.S. from Impax for $55 million; drug sales are less than $10 million/year. Impax itself bought daraprim several years earlier. It upped the price from $1 to $13.50/pill, causing the number of prescriptions to drop about 30%.

As Ruwart explains, the drug is no longer patent-protected, and “any generic company could make daraprim. . . .” So, what gives?

A company cannot just jump into the market. It has to prove — to the Food and Drug Administration — that its new generic would enter the bloodstream exactly as the old one. With the FDA’s red tape, this costs millions.

Which allows companies like Turing to effectively reclaim a monopoly for a little-used generic. Blame the FDA.

Still, there is some competition, from a company with a similar drug, priced at $1 per tablet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly ideological culture

Trick-or-Merry Christmas?

Starbucks, coffee, war on christmas, outrage, offense, folly, Common Sense

So I’m sitting in Starbucks for a few hours, waiting for my youngest to emerge from a concert. I like Starbucks. Good coffee — at least “good enough,” though pricey. Good wireless Internet — at least good enough . . . and for free.

But, ’tis the season — the “Christmas Season,” if a tad early. And “the war against Christmas” season, too.

The brouhaha about the new seasonal red Starbucks cups has “gone viral,” but I’m pretty sure there’s more haha than brew here. We so feed off of taking offense, and (by extension) ridiculing others who have taken, or given, offense, that the current cultural tempest in a chai tea cup is more meta than earnest.

In case you haven’t seen it, a putative Christian man, vertically misusing his smart phone camera, records how he got around Starbucks’s alleged “anti-Christmas” policy, not by boycotting the coffee but by offering his name as “Merry Christmas,” thus forcing Starbucks employees to write the words on his red cup and say the allegedly prohibited greeting (one Starbucks website promises a future “Christmas blend”).

Funny? Sort of.

He misfired early, though.

Starbucks has never sported the words “Merry Christmas” on its seasonal cup, and this year’s design is minimal and elegant, red with the company’s green logo. Hardly worth a complaint, in my view, and I haven’t met anyone who thinks the cup is worth getting all riled up about.

As for “forcing” baristas to say the words, well, just how Christmas-y is that? Plus, it’s not Christmas yet. It is not even Thanksgiving.

Happy mid-November. This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

A Broken Fix

carrot, sticks, congress, compromise, influence, illustration, Common Sense

It is universally acknowledged that Congress is all screwed up, but ideas differ on how to reform it.

Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), in accepting the Speaker of the House position, admitted, “The House is broken. We are not solving problems. We are adding to them.”

But how to fix what is broken?

In my opinion — and according to virtually every survey of Americans for the last 20 years — term limits would be the best first step.

Speaker Ryan, sadly, is no term limits fan. But at least he calls for “opening the process up” and a “new spirit of transparency.” Ryan promises “not [to] duck tough issues,” while seeking “concrete results.”

Chris Cillizza, writing “The Fix” blog for The Washington Post, predicts Ryan will “probably not” succeed.

Cillizza cites four big problems, the last two are obvious, though undefined: “3. Polarization in the country” that results in “4. Polarization in Congress.”

His No. 1 reason for the dysfunction in the House? The ban on earmarks. “Without a carrot to offer wavering members on contentious legislation,” Cillizza complains, “leadership had to rely almost exclusively on relationships and goodwill.”

Forget persuasion on the merits; apparently, congressional leadership should bribe members for their votes.

Next, Cillizza bemoans the “rise of outside conservative groups” able to speak against incumbents they oppose and for those they support. This means “the party leadership could no longer choke off campaign funds to those who refused to fall in line.”

“Falling in line” isn’t the right reform goal.

Meet another member of the Washington press corps with a strange hankering for boss rule.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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