…have cut short another EVA.
Mark Steyn And Me
Happy holidays to us. The appellate court basically mooted the flawed rulings against us from last summer, and the new judge (who actually seems to understands the law and the respective cases) will rehear them. Thanks to ACLU, the media organizations and others for their amicus briefs which, while they didn’t address the merits of the case, were helpful in getting this decision. I suspect that it won’t be a happy holiday for Professor Mann.
[Update a while later]
What’s amusing about this is that Mann sort of screwed himself by amending his complaint against us after we’d filed our appeal. That gave the appellate court an excuse to just pass it back to the Superior Court, with the new judge who will likely be much less sympathetic to him.
Olives
I share Lileks’ attitude:
Wife wanted Olives for the Christmas snack tray. There is an Olive Bar. I hate olives, so the olive bar is interesting: so many things to dislike and ignore. Just like the DirecTV options. The amount of choices you can passively reject is just astonishing; it’s a defining feature of modern life.
I suppose I should try a couple different ones, just to see if maybe there’s one I like, but I’ve never gotten into them.
The ObamaCare Generation
The Millennials have been had by the Democrats. Here’s hoping they’ve figured it out.
Breaking Up California
Tim Draper has an interesting idea. Make it into six new states.
Just looking them over, I’d say that Jefferson would be very similar to Oregon, North California would probably lean Republican, despite all the Democrats in Marin, Central CA would be heavily Republican, Silicon Valley and West California would almost certainly be Democrat, and South California would be Republican. I’d say, at worse, that it would be six new Senators of each party, though it would actually only be four new Democrats, since they’d lose the two from the current monstrosity. But the Central Valley would finally have some senators willing to fight for them and their water needs.
MRSA
…has escaped the hospitals.
In the book, I talk about how potentially useful research in this area on the ISS is being held back by NASA’s obsessions with safety.
Jobs For Young People
Want to destroy them? Raise the minimum wage.
One of the reasons that I’m not a Republican is that they won’t argue over principle. They’ll concede it to the Democrats, and then just negotiate the price. They shouldn’t be arguing that it shouldn’t be raised — they should be arguing that it shouldn’t exist, on both principle of freedom of contract, and on its devastating effects on youth unemployment, particularly in the inner cities. The notion that there should be a single minimum wage applicable to all fifty states is both odious and ludicrous.
The Republicans’ Obsession With Debt
Are they overdoing it? Jimmy Pethokoukis thinks so. The best way to get out of debt is to grow our way out, with less regulation and lower tax rates, but entitlements have to be reformed, and soon.
[Update a while later]
Bad link. Fixed now, sorry.
How Dare You?!
Daniel Hannan has a good piece on the NHS:
The elision of the “hardworking doctors and nurses” with the state monopoly that employs them is what allows opponents of reform to shout down any criticism. People who complain are treated, not as wronged consumers, but as pests. People who argue that there might be a better way of organising the system are treated, not as proponents of a different view, but as enemies.
Any organisation that is spared criticism becomes, over time, inefficient, insensitive, intolerant. It has happened to the United Nations. It has happened to the mega-charities. It happened, for a long time, to the European Union (though not over the past five years). The more lofty the ideal, the more reluctant people are to look at the grubby reality.
We can’t let that happen here. I’m sure that many of the people behind this legislative atrocity would love to jail its critics, if they could.
Pajama Boy Nation
Some thoughts on pajamas and duck calls from VDH:
How bizarre that the Duck Dynasty characters and Pajama Boy reverberated the same week. I have never watched Duck Dynasty, and have only glanced at the expanding genre of white working class reality dramas, from tree cutters and gold miners to ice truckers and boat captains: Cussin’ good ol’ boys, who lose their temper when failing to start the generator, have big arms and bigger guts, and are to remind us (within limits) that once upon a time we all used to be more like them than Ezra Klein and Jay Carney.
Who watches these shows? Perhaps the majority of viewers are those who still admire muscular strength and the earthy ability to make a living from nature (and not work for the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the local Department of Motor Vehicles), and a smaller percentage who find these aborigines odd, but also oddly compelling in their reminder that the people like themselves who run our country could not sharpen a chain saw, change the oil in their car, or unplug their own sewer line. This latter group is curious about the uncouth people who can do these things.
The A&E controversy grew even stranger in that pet white aborigines from the rural south are supposed to shock us by their blunt talk and religious hocus pocus, but only if they stay inside the bars of their zoo cage and thus only ham it up within the parameters of politically correct hillbilly-ese. The Pajama Boy mob at A&E must know that the Ducks, should they speak like those in Silicon Valley or act in accordance with Upper West Side protocols, would have zero audience. Is the logic of Duck Dynasty that the few left in America of the 1940s can spout off in a neat way to us — but only without putting their paws and snouts too far through the bars of their cage?
Apparently.