A review, from Elizabeth Lopatto.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Trump’s Wealth
I’m sure that you’ll be as shocked as I was to learn that he probably greatly exaggerates it. This is a great end quote:
“A fellow asked me that once and I said, ‘I don’t know,” Nelson Bunker Hunt once told a congressional panel grilling him about his net worth. “But I do know people who know how much they are worth generally aren’t worth much.”
Similarly, people who are always bragging about how smart they are generally aren’t that bright.
Trump 42, Clinton 37
Those are the latest numbers from Rasmussen. I’ve never been one to say that Trump can’t beat Hillary; I just think that would be almost as terrible an outcome as him not beating Hillary.
But what I find interesting is not who gets a higher plurality, but how many people share my desire for another candidate (at one in five, by that poll). And that doesn’t count the number who would switch from Trump or Hillary if someone else were in the race. There has never been a more promising year for a good independent candidate than this one.
[Update a while later]
Get ready for a Bernie third-party run.
It would be interesting to see a four-way race, if there were an actual conservative running. I think he or she would have a good chance.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Pop the corn, “liberal” pundits eating their own.
The Shirtstorm Social Experiment
Thoughts on how disconnected gender feminists and SJWs are from normal people.
Trump Versus Clinton
Tim Carney: You don’t have to choose the lesser of two evils:
As a conservative, I weigh the candidates against each other by considering the worst-case scenarios. On that score, there’s an irony: Hillary’s time as secretary of state — especially her disastrous and illegal war in Libya — doesn’t suggest supreme competence; Trump’s rhetoric, meanwhile makes many people think of fascism. But the “fascism” threat (an overblown word, of course) is probably greater with Hillary, and the incompetence threat is far greater with Trump.
They’re both incompetent fascist wannabes.
Bill Nye
…the climate huckster guy:
Admittedly, climate science is complex. There might be perfectly reasonable scientific justifications for what’s happening on the tornado front. Although, surely, there are just as likely interesting scientific arguments that challenge The Science Guy’s chilling and reckless assertions meant only to scare you into adopting leftist economic policy, not to teach you anything. Nye’s “science” is, at the very least, arguable.
But that’s not the reason Nye is dishonest. Or, at least, not the only reason. His biggest lie—and he makes these sorts of claims all the time—is that people are increasingly suffering because of global warming, and thus by extension they are suffering because of the use of fossil fuels.
This is simply untrue. Life, by nearly any quantifiable measurement, is better today for more people than it has ever been. One of the externalities in the spike of comfort and health is that more people are emitting carbon into the air. Fewer people are suffering. On top of the huge, if inadvertent, moral benefits of oil, gas, and coal, we should add that far fewer people are dying from drastic weather events—or any weather, actually.
These charlatans shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t take them seriously.
Aging
I’ve always believed that there is no law of physics that makes it inevitable, that it’s a matter of learning how to continue doing the cellular-level repair that occurs when we’re young. But here is an article that says it is caused by thermal chaos.
Not sure I buy it (it still doesn’t take into account artificial techniques for doing error checking in transcription), but it’s an interesting read.
The Latest Book Review
Roger Launius has reviewed it over at Quest, but for subscribers only (I think it will become available when the next issue comes out). It was interesting, in that it was more of a good summary, with no value judgments, though in an email he did say it was “thought provoking.” And he had no criticism of facts or history, so that’s a good thing. It may be the first “peer reviewed” review I’ve gotten. FWIW
Against Trump
In light of comments at this post, interesting to note Ross Douthat’s conservative case against him this weekend.
Collapse Proofing Our Society
Glenn describes the dangers of the complexity of the current sociopolitical structure.
It strikes me as a dangerous situation, what Perrow has described as a tightly-coupled complex system, that is vulnerable catastrophic collapse. He was describing physical systems, such as nuclear plants, but social systems can have similar failure modes.