In America, we constantly, almost obsessively, wrestle with the “legacy of slavery.” That speaks well of us. But what does it say that so few care that the Soviet Union was built — literally — on the legacy of slavery? The founding fathers of the Russian Revolution — Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky — started “small,” merely throwing hundreds of thousands of people into kontslagerya (concentration camps).
By the time Western intellectuals and youthful folksingers like Pete Seeger were lavishing praise on the Soviet Union as the greatest experiment in the world, Joseph Stalin was corralling millions of his own people into slavery. Not metaphorical slavery, but real slavery complete with systematized torture, rape, and starvation. Watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, you’d have no idea that from the Moscow metro system to, literally, the roads to Sochi, the Soviet Union — the supposed epitome of modernity and “scientific socialism” — was built on a mountain of broken lives and unremembered corpses.
As he points out, imagine the outrage if similar language were used to describe the Nazi regime, complete with Swastikas. In a sane world, the hammer and sickle would draw just as much, if not more opprobrium.
…yesterday the president issued an executive order (probably preempted by the Fair Labor Standards Act, Service Contract Act, Davis-Bacon Act while violating the Walsh-Healey Act) raising the minimum wage for employees of certain federal contractors to $10.10 an hour. He did so, according to the text of the Order, to increase productivity and improve the economy. If a $10.10 minimum wage for a narrow sliver of the workforce will improve the economy, why not raise it to $20.10? Come on, boost it to $50.10 and really get the economy humming. A Mercedes in every garage.
Then there’s Obamacare. The president’s granted so many waivers and extensions completely contrary to the plain text of the statute it’s hard to keep track. He’s ostensibly done so to, among other things, give individuals and businesses time to comply with the law and avoid some of the immediate costs associated with compliance. Again, why stop with Obamacare? Why not extend this year’s income-tax filing deadline to 2017? Give taxpayers more time to comply and adjust to the costs of compliance. It’s the right thing to do.
Why indeed is $10.10 the right number? This complete arbitrariness reminds me of the story of how Roosevelt determined the daily price of gold:
…the exposure to investors that Morgenthau was getting through the gold purchase project of 1933 was already teaching him something. Investors didn’t like the arbitrariness. It took away their confidence. One day Morgenthau asked FDR why the president had chosen to drive up the price of gold by 21 cents. The president cavalierly said he’d done that because 21 was seven times three, and three was a lucky number. “If anyone ever knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers etc., I think they would be frightened,” Morgenthau wrote in his diary. And they were: In the second half of 1933 a powerful stock rally flattened.
There is no more basis for the $10.10 number than there is for Roosevelt’s lucky number. But there are no limiting principles, as far as I can see. This is the totalitarian impulse.
Nutrition science and climate science share some common challenges: complex system(s) and many confounding factors. Severe tests for nutrition science can in principle be done, but they are very expensive and take decades. Severe tests for climate science require better observational evidence, particularly in the past.
When there’s no evidence to falsify what is merely a supposition,we are left with ”magical theories that explains absolutely everything – including diametrically contradictory phenomena, lack of logic and absence of evidence.”
There’s a lot of junk science associated with both.
I think the Ninth Circuit majority’s analysis is correct on this, and the dissent’s is mistaken. The dissent keeps stressing that the case should be about whether the California ban on concealed carry is constitutional, and that Heller says that the concealed carry ban is indeed constitutional. But the California ban on concealed carry is part of a general scheme that bans the great bulk of all carrying in public for self-defense (unless one has a permit that the police may choose not to grant). It is this general scheme that violates the Second Amendment, even if a ban on concealed carry that left people free to carry openly would not do so.
The California ban was just an attempt to get around the Second Amendment, and even the Ninth Circuit recognized that.
It’s interesting how the thing first tumbles, then stabilizes as it probably hits terminal velocity. Also that it stabilized looking down, and not up, which made it all the more interesting.
Peter Robinson has a tribute. His peak was before I was born, but my parents (who were the same generation — he was my mother’s age) used to rave about him when I was a kid. The Carl Reiner character in the Dick Van Dyke show was modeled on him.