Category: media and media people

Categories
Accountability folly general freedom incumbents media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies political challengers porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

Twirling Towards Freedom?

Citizen Kang, Simpsons, Bernie Sanders, socialism, health care, income, welfare

Does Bernie Sanders remind you of “Citizen Kang”?

Vermont’s [S]ocialist Senator is whipping up a new plan for America: to “guarantee a job with at least a $15-per-hour wage and health benefits to every adult American ‘who wants or needs one,’” we are told.

What was it that the slavering alien Kang promised* in The Simpsons’ eighth season opening episode? Well, we know how that episode ended, with Homer Simpson revealing the ’90s’-era presidential candidates to be aliens in disguise, Kang being elected, humanity enslaved, and Homer uttering the immortal words “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”

And then Kodos, in cahoots with Kang, cracking the whip on Homer.

One shouldn’t have to read George Fitzhugh, the antebellum sociologist who attacked the very idea of free markets and free labor, insisting that slavery is a good thing and the very best form of socialism, to know that socialism and slavery go together hand in glove, whip in hand.

In an age of handouts for nothing, at least Sanders’ socialist proposal suggests productivity. But paying for it by nixing corporate “tax breaks”** is absurd. “Republicans have long opposed a federal jobs guarantee,” Fox News tells us, “saying such a plan would be too expensive and impractical.” And it’s productive people who would pay for it, making them de facto slaves to the system . . . even more than they are now.

But when socialists talk about “jobs,” worry about a more direct form of slavery.

And yes, I can imagine Bernie, with his four houses, flicking the whip.

I won’t be voting for him, if he runs.

Or for Kodos.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Actually, Kang was known not for a promise but for his campaign speech (as Bill Clinton), saying, “[W]e must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”

** The only funding source mentioned in the reports I read.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
ideological culture incumbents local leaders media and media people political challengers too much government

The Centre Cannot Hold

UK, British, politics, parties, centrist, left, right, partisan

The British may spell their words in funny ways, but their political problems do not seem all that foreign. Their left-of-center party has gone far left, Marxoid left; their right-of-center party has gone ultra-incompetent.

A healthy majority of Brits disapprove of both parties. So, no wonder many Brits are looking to create a new one.

A new centrist political party, no less.

Over at The Economist, the columnist writing under the name “Bagehot” (pronounced “badget”) predicts that this hope will be dashed, for at least three reasons:

First, Britain already has a centrist party, and it is not doing very well.

Second, there sure are a lot of contenders — 35 new parties have been formed just this year, including one called, with humble brag, “Sensible” — and all that competition fractionalizes the vote.

Third, the country sports the same system of vote counting and elections as America does, first-past-the-post, which “is hard on startups.”

That last point is worth thinking about. In multi-candidate races, the British-American electoral system declares as winners those who obtain a bare plurality of votes — thus ignoring the preferences of those who vote for minor party candidates. This means that those who “waste” their votes not only hurt the candidacies they like as second-best but also insulate the second-best parties from those voters’ influence. So the parties become narrow-minded and unhinged from an interested group of voters.

Bagehot thinks Britain’s centrists need to rethink, conjure up some new ideas. But what they need to do first is fix a system that prods political parties away from new ideas. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard

The Cuban Slavery-and-Freedom Sandwich

Cuba, New York Times, communism, socialism, freedom, slavery

How easy is it to mix freedom with just the right amount of slavery?

New York Times reporter Azam Ahmed regards the attempt to mingle political opposites as noble or at least understandable. He doesn’t call Cuban Communism and its destructive effects “bad” — it’s a “unique tapestry.”

He wonders, instead, to what extent the Cuban government can fine-tune the contradiction.

According to the article, Cuba’s newest Dear Leader “will have to foster the growing private sector . . . while guarding against the income inequality it often brings. . . . Move too slowly and it risks economic collapse and widespread discontent. . . . Move too fast, and it risks unstitching the unique tapestry of Cuba’s social project.”

“Unique”? With or without cigars and salsa, the “social project” of repressing a hapless populace is as old as civilization. And as a “tapestry,” we’ve seen this warp and weft before.

Under freedom, inequalities are unavoidable.* On the other hand, nothing is wrong with inequality per se. Nature, human beings and economic outcomes are inherently unequal. Equality arrives only with the grave.

A government working to phase out slavery and phase in freedom may have legitimate problems in transition. But it is wrongheaded to seek just the right “balance” of both. How can any degree of freedom and markets fail to threaten a revolution, the purpose of which is a thoroughgoing assault on freedom and markets?

My advice to Cuban social engineers? Abandon Communism altogether and embrace prosperity and freedom instead.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Speaking of inequality, Cuba’s head commies certainly have not lived like the masses they’ve kept down.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies property rights Regulating Protest too much government U.S. Constitution

That Something You Do

Congress, Facebook, hearings, control, regulations, Mark Zuckerberg, censorship, censor, regulate

Congress grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, last week, and as usual ended up roasting itself.

“Zuckerberg has already experienced the worst punishment of all,” quipped comedian Trevor Noah on The Daily Show. “He had to spend four hours explaining Facebook to senior citizens.”

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, retiring after his 42nd consecutive year in Washington, asked, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”

“Senator,” Zuckerberg incredulously replied, “we run ads.”

Inc. magazine reported the obvious: “several of our elected leaders asked questions that were highly uninformed, or in some cases just plain weird.”

Uninformed. Weird. That’s them, alright.*

Still, the Washington establishment seems to seriously think these same congressmen ought to be re-writing privacy rules.

“Elected officials know the public wants them to do something to protect their privacy,” announced Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. “The question now turns to what is that something?”

“Americans are largely together on this issue,” Todd said, citing a recent poll where a similar “66 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans say they want more control over the information companies have about them.”

But Democrats and Republicans are together on something else: Only 21 percent of Democrats and a tiny 14 percent of Republicans “trust the federal government” to act on the issue.

The senators, though obviously “confused about basic topics,” Emily Stewart wrote at Vox,  “seem to agree they want to fix something about Facebook. They just have no idea what.”

Please Congress: DON’T “do something.” Don’t do that thing you do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Reason TV has a very funny video on the Zuckerberg hearing.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
ballot access education and schooling folly ideological culture media and media people Popular responsibility

Fiddling with the Franchise

voting age, democracy, elections, adult, maturity

In 2013, Tacoma Park, Maryland, became the first place in the U.S. to allow 16-year-olds to vote in local elections.* Now, Washington, D.C., Councilman Charles Allen, “inspired by the high-schoolers who are campaigning for gun control and filled D.C. streets last month in a massive protest that mesmerized the country,” reports the Washington Post, wants to follow suit.

“It’s pretty hard for anyone to watch the events of the last couple of months,” claims Councilman Allen, “and not understand the pure power and maturity of incredibly young voices.”

Well, they do use adult words.

One has to wonder: would the “maturity” of these young adults equally amaze this politician, were they advocating opinions** with which he disagreed?

But wait a second . . . wasn’t one of the demands of the “March for Our Lives” to raise, not lower, the age when a person would be deemed mature enough to legally purchase a scary-looking rifle?

Lowering the voting age seems odd, at best, with society lurching in the other direction — raising the age of adulthood for everything else. Decades ago, the legal age to purchase alcohol was 18 in some places; today it is 21 everywhere. In Virginia, one may still drive at 16, as I could back in the day . . . but now there are limits on other young people riding in the car unless the driver is 18.

More ominously, facilitation by many public schools of the recent student walkouts and marches present the strongest argument against lowering the voting age: So long as government schools act in a partisan manner, indoctrination and intimidation would be rampant.

Who wants a captive audience of would-be voters most?

Unscrupulous ideologues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Greenbelt and Hyattsville, Maryland, as well as Berkeley, California, have since joined Tacoma Park in allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local elections.

** Term limits, say. Or school vouchers. Or the rights of gestating humans.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability general freedom government transparency media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Wag the Wolf

Syria, Donald Trump, Trump, war, wag the dog, diversion, antiwar, gas, gassing, chemical, chlorine, false flag

Once upon a time, President Donald Trump was against attacking Syria merely on grounds that its dictator is a murderously bad guy — despite numerous chemical attacks on civilians in opposition-occupied and -contested areas that had been blamed on Syrian dictator Bashar Hafez al-Assad.

Almost exactly a year ago, a sarin gas attack spurred President Trump to order a cruise missile strike on the Syrian airstrip where it was alleged the Assad regime sent those planes to drop weaponized chemicals on innocent populations. The strike was widely characterized as “Donald Trump’s most dramatic military order since becoming president.”

Since then, after another reported gassing — this time “chlorine”; this time a hospital as target — the drumbeat for war has gotten louder, despite Russia’s stern warning that there would be “grave repercussions” were the U.S. to attack its ally again.

Whoops and war cries even from the anti-Trump media.

But as Tucker Carlson argues, there are still legitimate disputes about previous gas attacks — about who really perpetrated them, and the uncertainty of proclaiming Assad the malefactor in the most recent one.*

Meanwhile, the FBI raided Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen’s offices. The rationale? Apparently unrelated to the “Russia investigation.” Instead, it is about “campaign finance law” — that is, the paid-off pornstar issue.

In the 1990s, we called Bill Clinton’s bombing of a “chemical weapons” factory in Africa — on the very same day that Monica Lewinsky testified before a grand jury about her affair with the president — “wag the dog.”

Trump cries “witch hunt!” but I wonder if the Deep State may not be trying to wag the wolf this time around.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* News stories about atrocities have been faked before in the Middle East — remember the hospital baby-murder story in Kuwait? “Both” sides in Syria are known to possess chemical weapons.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

Bias and Blindness

GAO, racism, race, boys, Roseanne, schools, education, bias

Neither stretching the truth nor ignoring it helps beat back implicit or explicit racism.  Yesterday, my Townhall.com column took the Washington Post to task for misstating the results of a recent GAO report.

The GAO noted wide discrepancies between the percentage of students facing disciplinary actions who are black, male and disabled and the relative percentages of these groups in the overall student population. Yet, the report also specifically stated: “Our analyses of these data, taken alone, do not establish whether unlawful discrimination has occurred.”

Nonetheless, the Post headline told readers: “Implicit racial bias causes black boys to be disciplined at school more than whites, federal report finds.” The article claimed that “a government analysis of data . . . said implicit racial bias was the likely cause of these continuing disparities.”

The same discrepancies regarding boys of all races? And students with disabilities? Even the crickets had no comment.

In the Post’s Outlook section, yesterday, readers were treated to further edification on race — this time via C. Nicole Mason with the Center for Research and Policy in the Public Interest. “I feel alienated and slightly betrayed by the reboot” of the sitcom Roseanne,” she writes.

The title of her piece proclaims why: “‘Roseanne’ was about a white family, but it was for all working people. Not anymore.”

The “not anymore” refers to Roseanne’s support of (and Mason’s derangement syndrome over) President Trump. Interestingly, a more legitimate “not anymore” angle was completely missed — or ignored. The Connors now have a black granddaughter. The new show isn’t “about a white family,” but a racially mixed family.

When racism is finally extinguished from this planet, someone remember to tell the race-hustlers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy property rights responsibility Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

The Myth of the Monoliths

NRA, monolith, March for our Lives, members, gun control, guns

According to organizers of the “March for Our lives,” the National Rifle Association is wholly evil, a corrupter of democracy, a malign presence straight out of Mordor, bent upon murder — a monolithic influence responsible for every mass shooting event.

The clearest expression of this is by young David Hogg, who figured that the NRA’s sum of contributions to Sen. Marco Rubio, when divided not by the number slain in the recent Parkland shooting but instead by the total number of students throughout Florida, came out to $1.05 per student.

Forget the computation — think nasty imputation.

What Hogg and his friends in the media elide is a simple little fact: the NRA is a membership organization. When critics of the Second Amendment point at the NRA and shout “evil!” they are really pointing at the organization’s millions of members.

People, not malign institutions.

Also neglected? The fact that, as near as I can make out, not one NRA member has mown down students in any school or church in America. Instead, at least one civilian NRA member took out his AR-15 to bring down one such mass-murdering shooter.

“Evil NRA” talk is misdirection and slander.

Also not a monolith? Students. Christian Britschgi, writing at Reason, notes that teenagers made up only 10 percent of marchers at the recent rally, and, catching a whiff of astroturf, cites a poll that found less than a majority of Millenials favoring an “assault rifle” ban.

Citizens of all ages disagree. Pretending that all kids are against guns, or that the NRA is anything other than a citizen advocacy group, distorts reality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

The Sitcom Society

Roseanne Barr, sitcom, sit-com, comedy, Television, controversy, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, satire

If we are entering a new Golden Age of television, it is for the most part passing the legacy TV networks by.

So, Roseanne Barr to the rescue!

The reboot of ABC’s Roseanne — a hit situation comedy of the late 1980s and much of the 1990s — should put the network and the art form back in the spotlight.

But though it is very popular, the show is not without . . . its political controversy. You see, funny-woman Roseanne plays Roseanne Conner, and she . . . (drum roll) . . . voted for Trump.*

Horrors!

Predictably, our modal mainstream media cultural mavens are not on board. Roxanne Gay, in the New York Times, complains that Roseanne’s views are “muddled and incoherent.”

Roseanne to Roxanne, hello-o-o: the character is fictional. Who said characters in a comedy should have coherent views? One would think the point of comedy would require the opposite.

Jezebel provides another fine example of this. In “What’s Up, Deplorable; Roseanne Is Back,” Rich Juzwiak opines that “[n]ever discussed was the laundry list of hateful, stupid, and wrong things Trump said, nor their even more nefarious implications.” On Twitter, Professor Jared Yates Sexton calls the character’s perspective “a cleaned-up lie,” and amounts to a turning a “blind eye to Trump’s many, many bigoted statements.”

Neither Juzwiak nor Sexton mentions any problem with the main alternative to the president in the last election — something Roseanne does in the show itself.

It’s almost as if what these (and many similar) critics want is a tidy propaganda piece for their opinions; it’s almost as if their objection is to the show’s realism.

Now that’s comedy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* In the season opener, Roseanne defends the president from her dippy Democrat sister, whom she had not been speaking with since the election. Her sister, Jackie (played hilariously by Laurie Metcalf), enters the tenth season wearing a red pro-Hillary t-shirt and one of those grab-em-by-the-x pink hats. Their reconciliation is a hoot.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

The Abortionists’ Cartoon Advice

planned parenthood, left, Trump, extremism, radical, Trump, funding

Let it not be said that Planned Parenthood lacks for principles.

When Donald Trump offered a deal, last year, to fund Planned Parenthood only if the organization would stop doing abortions, the company immediately clarified the situation. “Offering money to Planned Parenthood to abandon our patients and our values is not a deal that we will ever accept,” said the outfit’s executive vice president. “Providing critical health care services for millions of American women is nonnegotiable.”

And, for Planned Parenthood, abortion is indeed critical. “The Trump administration needs to stop playing political games that would put access to the full range of safe reproductive care at risk,” said Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand (D-NY), “or they will get the fight of their lives.”

Well, that fight was won by Planned Parenthood. The politician who once said he would “shut down the government” over the abortionist enterprise has caved after various roadblocks. Trump signed a stopgap omnibus spending bill, last week, which continues to funnel $500 million towards the outfit.

So, as if to celebrate, a Pennsylvania branch of the abortion mill — er, “reproductive care” service — engaged in a bit of ebullience, a “light-hearted” tweet:

We need a disney princess who’s had an abortion

We need a disney princess who’s pro-choice

We need a disney princess who’s an undocumented immigrant

We need a disney princess who’s actually a union worker

We need a disney princess who’s trans

This caused a firestorm.* And not because its Disney obsession was silly. The problem? The tweet showed that Planned Parenthood is really, really committed to valorizing the killing of fetuses. And that its agenda is far, far left.

The outfit should be left without taxpayer funds.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The Tweet was quickly removed.

Printable PDF