Only a Harvard professor could be surprised that when government grows, private enterprise shrinks. Well, OK, that’s not fair. Lots of schools could have professors who would be shocked at that. And at least the business school professor finds it concerning.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Taking The “New” Out Of News
But I’ll bet that Pinch Sulzberger still doesn’t know why his paper is going out of business.
And more thoughts from Matt Welch on the media narrative and its double standards:
Constituents Using a Forum to Register Displeasure With Representative: Spooky!* 700 Angry Protesters on a Bankster’s Front Lawn: “About damn time”
Can you imagine if DC police had escorted a mob to the house of a news exec during the Bush administration? See, that would be fascism. But Obama’s purple-shirted thugs? Not so much.
How A Regime Works
As the professor notes, imagine the White House press corps accepting a private lecture on what kinds of questions to ask from, say, Ari Fleischer. They’re supposed to be watchdogs, but when there’s a Democrat in the White House or running Congress, they’re lap dogs.
“Progressives”
Lileks finds an interesting quote from prohibition days:
There may be no clearer demonstration of the drys’ pragmatic acceptance of every variety of ally than a comment made by Mabel Willebrandt – a federal official, a feminist, a progressive – when she was asked about the faithfully dry Ku Klux Klan: “I have no objection to people dressing up in sheets, if they enjoy that sort of thing.”
I’m always amazed at how many “progressive” ideas (gun control, minimum wage, unionization) have their roots in racism (the fascist dictator Woodrow Wilson being a canonical example). People who want to call themselves “progressive” today (like Hillary Clinton) might be amazed too, if they knew their own intellectual history. Speaking of which, I loved this:
True story. A few years ago, when Katie first came to CBS News, I worked as the editor of her blog “Couric & Co.” One afternoon, I had a meeting with her in her office overlooking the CBS newsroom. Her suite of offices is gorgeous: white-on-white, with a marble desk and gorgeous black-and-white prints on the walls.
(Think “The Devil Wears Prada,” and you’ll get the picture. Staffers used to refer to it as “The White Palace” or, more derisively, “White Castle.”) On the back wall is a lovely, dramatic picture of Jackie Kennedy and her children. Other iconic women on the walls included Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Audrey Hepburn. When Katie arrived for our meeting, I was admiring the pictures, but noticed one woman who was unfamiliar to me. “Who’s that?,” I asked.
“Margaret Sanger,” she replied.
So is Katie into eugenics, too? Is she a fascist, or an historically ignorant dolt?
The Cooked Books
The country is being run by blatant liars and charlatans.
[Update a few minutes later]
So, now the Donkeys and “liberals” think that “ObamaCare” is a pejorative? When did that happen? I thought that once they passed it, we were all going to love it. Now they don’t want to take creditblame for it?
I like the suggestion of one commenter that we call it National Socialist Healthcare.
It’s Not About The Excitement
It’s about the space economy, stupid.
I agree that developing lunar resources should be part of the mix, though we have a lot of work to do to prove out the techniques to do so in a way that makes economic sense. But as I’ve said before, I’m not that concerned about abandoning that goal for now — it was many years off in any event, and if it’s the momentary price we have to pay to kill off the misbegotten Ares program, it’s one well worth it. We can decide to go to the moon any time, and it will be a lot easier with a low-cost infrastructure than with a high-cost one.
Prepare To Be Shocked
California’s insane “go it alone” “green” energy policy is going to damage the state’s economy. But the idiots keep going into the voting booth and reelecting these morons.
“Little-Noticed”
Actually, many of these things were noticed at the time by people who actually read the bill. Which of course doesn’t include most of the people who voted for it, one of whom told us we’d have to pass it to find out what was in it. Here’s hoping that she’s not running the House next January.
The Subjects Of The Constitution
Randy Barnett points to a revolutionary groundbreaking article on constitutional review:
[T]he important point is that any legislative violation of the Constitution is complete at the moment of enactment, and any subsequent facts must be irrelevant to the merits; whereas an executive violation of the Constitution happens later, and the facts of execution may be essential to the inquiry. So if the who is Congress, then the challenge is more likely to be ripe earlier—indeed, most strikingly, it might be ripe immediately after enactment, and before any enforcement whatsoever.
I haven’t read the whole thing, so it may be covered, but from the excerpt, it seems to me that it isn’t just Congress that is the “who.” Once the president signs an unconstitutional law, he becomes a violator as well (as Bush knowingly, even admittedly did when he signed McCain-Feingold, willfully violating not only the Constitution, but his oath of office — if you wanted an impeachable offense, that one seemed prima facie to me).
The True Scientists
…win a debate at Oxford Union on climate change:
Lord Monckton, a former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime Minister of the UK, concluded the case for the proposition. He drew immediate laughter and cheers when he described himself as “Christopher Walter, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, scholar, philanthropist, wit, man about town, and former chairman of the Wines and Spirits Committee of this honourable Society”. At that point his cummerbund came undone. He held it up to the audience and said, “If I asked this House how long this cummerbund is, you might telephone around all the manufacturers and ask them how many cummerbunds they made, and how long each type of cummerbund was, and put the data into a computer model run by a zitty teenager eating too many doughnuts, and the computer would make an expensive guess. Or you could take a tape-measure and” – glaring at the opposition across the despatch-box – “measure it!” [cheers].
Lord Monckton said that real-world measurements, as opposed to models, showed that the warming effect of CO2 was a tiny fraction of the estimates peddled by the UN’s climate panel. He said that he would take his lead from Lord Lawson, however, in concentrating on the economics rather than the science. He glared at the opposition again and demanded whether, since they had declared themselves to be so worried about “global warming”, they would care to tell him – to two places of decimals and one standard deviation – the UN’s central estimate of the “global warming” that might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. The opposition were unable to reply. Lord Monckton told them the answer was 3.26 plus or minus 0.69 Kelvin or Celsius degrees. An Hon. Member interrupted: “And your reference is?” Lord Monckton replied: “IPCC, 2007, chapter 10, box 10.2.” [cheers]. He concluded that shutting down the entire global economy for a whole year, with all the death, destruction, disaster, disease and distress that that would cause, would forestall just 4.7 ln(390/388) = 0.024 Kelvin or Celsius degrees of “global warming”, so that total economic shutdown for 41 years would prevent just 1 K of warming. Adaptation as and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective.
Mr. Mike Mason, founder and managing director of “Climate Care”, concluded for the opposition. He said that the proposition were peculiar people, and that Lord Monckton was more peculiar than most, in that he was not a real Lord. Lord Monckton, on a point of order, told Mr. Mason that the proposition had avoided personalities and that if Mr. Mason were unable to argue other than ad hominem he should “get out”. [cheers] Mr. Mason then said that we had to prepare for climate risks [yes, in both directions, towards cooler as well as warmer]; and that there was a “scientific consensus” [but he offered no evidence for the existence of any such consensus, still less for the notion that science is done by consensus].
As usual, the opponents employed the logically flawed precautionary principle.
I think that the tide has really turned on this nonsense, at least over the Pond, if not quite hear yet. That may have to wait until November.
Speaking of which, there was an awful story on ABC Sunday night, where the focus was on death threats to climate scientists. Note that they make no mention of the threats against climate skeptics in the emails. And they set up a straw man, when they say there’s a “conspiracy” to foist a “hoax” on the world on the part of the scientists. Yes, some people have made such allegations, but that’s not the point. I’m willing to believe that most climate scientists are sincere in their beliefs. The problem is that they drink too much of their own bathwater, and suffer too much from confirmation bias. Not to mention that it’s difficult to get funded if you don’t hew to the party line. But that kind of story wouldn’t accomplish ABC’s purpose — to present the noble scientists trying to save us from ourselves as victims of conspiracy mongers.