Fun with charts
Take a look at this chart and think about which of the listed items are those in which government has managed to get more deeply involved during the time-frame noted. Interesting how, when largely left alone, the market functions to the benefit of all, isn’t it?
Who or what entity is the biggest thief of all?
Is this the sort of government the United States of America should have or will we finally admit that civil asset forfeiture is tantamount to theft and do something about it?
The entire “global warming” scam debunked in one chart:
If you’re interested in the particulars, here’s the link. Bottom line, the science is anything but settled and if you believe in trends, it’s going to get a lot colder before it gets warmer.
Last, but not least, a cartoon instead of a chart. And the point may seem mundane – a “soda tax”. But if you really think about it, such a tax is an example of the depth and breadth of which government today feels it can rightfully interfere in your life and choices. Here’s a clue: that’s not “freedom” folks.
~McQ
Observations: The QandO Podcast for 05 May 17
Steven Colbert tested conservatives’ commitment to free speech this week. Many didn’t pass. Hillary Clinton is convinced that she’d be president if only the election had been held on October 27th, before that meddling busybody Jim Comey butted in. Donors are suing the Democratic Party for not being, you know, democratic. The Republicans passed a big spending bill that made the Democrats happy, and a health care reform bill that will enable Democrats to tar the GOP with every hospital death that occurs in the future. Just how crazy IS Kim Jong-Un, and what, if anything, we can do about it?
This week’s podcast is up on the Podcast page.
All around the mulberry bush
Is ESPN paying the price for attempting to take sides in the culture wars? In the past 4 years, the network has lost 12 million subscribers and just last week laid off 100 employees. Why?
Travis’ theory is that politics at ESPN is a symptom rather than a cause of the changing business landscape. For years, ESPN’s flagship show, SportsCenter, built its success by offering sports highlights that couldn’t be found anywhere else. But now highlights are available on-demand and in real time. Greenfield, the media analyst, agrees that ESPN has had to adapt. “SportsCenter, which is half of ESPN’s programming, doesn’t work the way it used to,” he said. “So now you have to stand out in the marketplace—and you have to figure out how you do that.”
ESPN has made no secret of its attempts to evolve by promoting debate shows and opinion on its airwaves. So in a politically charged time, it makes sense that the network has become more political, as hosts and talking heads are expected to provide hours and hours of hot takes. As athletes have increased their political activism—from Colin Kaepernick to LeBron James—politics has become even more of a focal point. But the question persists: Are the on-air hosts pushing an agenda or covering a beat where the subjects themselves are using their celebrity to advance liberal causes?
It’s likely a combination of problems, as pointed out here. You don’t have to go to SportsCenter anymore for sports news or highlights, you likely have a phone app that will fill that bill. So that meant the format had to change. But really, since when has sports and politics (or a political agenda) ever been successfully mixed in the past? Yeah, I don’t know of an example either. And just like Target has discovered, when you get into political activism when your focus should be on maximizing retail sales, you’re going to suffer the consequences. So while ESPN’s woes may not be entirely because of the choice to mix sports and politics, it certainly has had an effect. Just cover sports ESPN – and can the SJW nonsense (and the attitude). ESPN needs sportsfans. Sportsfans don’t need ESPN. When they rediscover that, maybe they’ll see a resurgence in their subscriber base.
Is UNC undergoing a UVA type of rape hoax? There are some serious questions about a supposed rape there, but the victim has managed to turn the alleged event into a sort of career. We all know that rape is a crime and should be punished as such. But now days, the “cult of the victim” is something to which some people are attracted. Questions need to be answered:
While the authors do not explicitly accuse Pino of fabrication, they certainly seem to imply as much—even pointing out parallels to Jackie, the University of Virginia rape hoaxer at the center of the later-retracted Rolling Stone story on campus rape. It is an explosive charge on a highly sensitive issue. Many argue that sexual assault victims are often re-victimized by being unfairly branded as liars because of the way trauma affects memory.
No one can know for sure what happened to Pino. But Johnson’s and Taylor’s analysis points to very real problems with her story, which has been uncritically accepted not only by the makers of The Hunting Ground but by other mainstream journalists. And those problems are even more extensive than Johnson and Taylor reveal.
Meanwhile, the absurd attempt to find new levels of absurdity. In the UK:
Students who whoop, cheer and clap should face “consequences” because they are excluding deaf people, delegates at the National Union of Students conference said.
No really … they did say that. Said it. Ironic, no? One assumes that saying it also excluded deaf people. Concerts exclude deaf people. Let’s ban those. Plays should be banned – they exclude the blind. Dancing? No-go. There are those among the disabled that can’t walk.
You just can’t fix stupid.
FBI Director Comey testifies before Congress about Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails. “Unexpectedly:”
Comey says Huma Abedin had a regular practice of forwarding Hillary Clinton’s emails to Anthony Weiner; some contained classified info.
And yet she’s still walking free and hasn’t yet been called to account. Law … it’s for the little people.
Anyone else as tired of that apparent truth as I am?
Wait, didn’t I just say you can’t fix stupid?
I’m right again.
~McQ
Is “contemporary liberalism” dying?
Apropos of my post yesterday, there’s this by Shelby Steele:
The recent flurry of marches, demonstrations and even riots, along with the Democratic Party’s spiteful reaction to the Trump presidency, exposes what modern liberalism has become: a politics shrouded in pathos. Unlike the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, when protesters wore their Sunday best and carried themselves with heroic dignity, today’s liberal marches are marked by incoherence and downright lunacy—hats designed to evoke sexual organs, poems that scream in anger yet have no point to make, and an hysterical anti-Americanism.
All this suggests lostness, the end of something rather than the beginning. What is ending?
America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence and correctness in which it mires us.
White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.
White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.
It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism.
Interesting take. And I agree that the nonsense about “white guilt” is largely based in the success of the stigma of “America’s old bigotries” being laid on anyone, but mostly whites, who even hint a bias toward other races, the opposite sex, gays or immigrants (but mostly illegal immigrants).
Here’s the thing – as Dale stated in the podcast, for the most part Americans (and yes that includes whites) don’t really give a filp if you’re gay. Or an immigrant (as long as you played by the rules and came in legally). They really don’t care who you love. And, as far as the opposite sex goes, they’re pretty darn happy they’re around. Race has had a tougher time here, but as Steele points out, those that won the race war in the ’50s and ’60s did so with dignity and heroic but peaceful resistance. They made a point that couldn’t be ignored. Those that are trying to feast on the scraps of the remnants of racism in America are none of those things.
But Dale’s larger point was when no one gives a flip about your sexual orientation, race, sex or whether or not you’re an immigrant, you’ve won! It means all those nasty stigmas have died.
If you’ll let them.
It seems, however, the left refuses to do so. Division is their strength, or so they think. And so it invents this nonsense about cultural appropriation, white privilege, pussy hats and “black lives matter”. They are rebels without a cause. They are a shadow of the movement that defined the 50’s and 60’s so it is appropriate that their “reasons” for this movement today is as vapid as it is pathetic.
That’s not to say there aren’t a certain percentage of whites out there that don’t buy into the nonsense – obviously there are. But the irony is they’re mostly to be found in the “woke” of the left – the “contemporary” liberals. The rest of white America sees through the scam and calls it for what it is, feeling no guilt for something they had no hand in. Common sense America, the same people that rejected Clinton and elected Trump. And they’ve rejected the contemporary liberal nonsense out of hand. You have to ask, “has contemporary liberalism reached it’s culmination point?” You wouldn’t think it could get any loonier.
So maybe this is a bit of a turning point (even as the even more pathetic GOP manages to fumble about everything it touches in Congress) in terms of culture. But it is a long road back. A very long road It is time to demand a return to the basics that made us both great and unique. Like we mentioned yesterday, civics, history, basic founding values – taught, in detail, to new generations of America.
Instead of this nihilism that is percolating through our educational system and manifesting itself in colleges where free speech is denounced and terms like “hate speech” invented. Where violence is now the weapon of choice of the so-called “anti-facists” who will do all in their power to keep speakers they disagree with from speaking.
I have a feeling these confrontations – now physical – aren’t going away anytime soon. But they do make the point that a certain segment of American society is fed up with the behavior of some on the left.
Frankly, that’s a good sign. It’s about time.
~McQ
Last gasp or first shot?
Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a different world when I read about what is going on elsewhere – especially on the left and colleges and universities – and then look around at where I live. It would be easy to ignore the nonsense out there because it doesn’t seem to exist in my small community, or at least to any recognizable degree. I’m sure, in fact I’m positive, there are those in my small community who are very in-sync with the left and their loopy agenda. It simply doesn’t effect my daily life – at least it doesn’t yet.
But I can see a day where it might. It’s a creeping thing I think, that slowly wends its way into the minds of the young as transmitted by those with an agenda who populate our schools. And then those minds are exposed to a repeating message through something they see daily – television. The values of the left infect much of the programming made for the young. And so this sort of indoctrination without rebuttal slowly takes place as they grow with it becoming more intense as they age.
There are those who will look at me and say “how tight is that tin foil hat you wear”? But I’ve lived almost 7 decades now. I’ve always been an observer. What I see now is vastly different than what I saw in my early years as far as the values this nation holds dear. In fact, those values – the ones I remember when young – are under assault now. The culture that supports them is under assault. And the purposeful “ignorance” displayed about those values and the culture supporting them is despicable. But it enables the purveyors of this cultural assault to redefine the values free of any historical or philosophical context. Since the dead white men who founded the country and jump started the culture that supports its values were slave holder, straight, white and male, well, per these “Red Guards” of the campus, they can be safely ignored. Nothing they said or did is of value because they were the wrong race and gender not to mention … slaves!
Richard Dryfess of all people is touring the country talking about civics. He says we have almost 2 generations that haven’t a clue about our culture and its values because we stopped teaching civics in the ’60s. He’s right. And the result has been this contextless rejection of those values as somehow bad because of … race, or gender, sexual orientation or … slaves! Political correctness trumps all.
Ideas are either worthy or unworthy not because of who expressed them but because they either have an intrinsic positive value or they don’t. If Joe Stalin said that “free and unfettered speech is an absolute requirement for a free citizenry”, I’d have to agree with him 100% because the idea put forward is intrinsically correct. The fact that Stalin was a monster doesn’t change that fact one bit.
So this rejection of our founding values because of who our founders happened to be (and, in historic context, they were pretty terrific people) is as facile and ignorant as those who think one can simply pass a law and government will somehow provide the perfect solution for a problem.
This indoctrination has to be stopped. I’m not sure how, but it is certainly a long game and that game is approaching its end. I can’t quite decide whether Trump’s election is the last gasp of the old American culture or it is the first throat punch in a reversal of what has been happening for the last few decades. I hope it’s the latter. This is a great place with a great culture and outstanding values.
It is better than those assaulting it.
It’s is past time to punch back (and I’m using the term metaphorically) twice as hard.
~McQ
Observations: The QandO Podcast for 28 Apr 17
The Fyre Festival in the Bahamas turned into a modern Lord of the Flies experience. Once again we were reminded that hate speech isn’t free speech. We wonder why, if 25% of women are raped at college, any parent would send a child to college. When do people start pushing back against this creepy narrative? Socialism continues to fail so badly in Venezuela, that we’re almost at the “That isn’t real socialism” point. The Democratic Party is starting to split along ideological lines, like the Republican Party. New Yorkers remain surprised that the hicks in Flyover country wear shoes and receive dental care.
This week’s podcast is up on the Podcast page.
Turning back the clock
Remember when white supremacists required literacy tests to keep black voters away from the polls?
Well, everything old is new again:
A Clemson administrator has proposed requiring student government candidates to pass an “intercultural competency” test before being permitted to run for or hold office.
Several student senators objected to the “awful” plan, saying it amounts to an ideological purity test that contradicts the very purpose of having a democratically-elected student government.
The fact that I’m siding with the students in this and against the administration tells you how screwed up our public colleges and universities have become. By the way, in case you are wondering, the administrator in question is the Director of the Gantt Multicultural Center. I know, it’s that shocked, shocked look, you have on your face.
As one student noted:
“Ms. Richardson’s comments about multiculturalism at the last Senate meeting unnerved me,” Sen. Samuel Thompson told Campus Reform. “Vetting the candidates ideologically before elections even happen, through a process of measuring their level of commitment to ‘inclusivity’ and ‘multiculturalism,’ represents a kind of creepy totalitarianism that has no place at a true university.
“It reminds me of the kind of political totalitarianism that one sees in modern-day fascist and communist regimes,” he concluded, noting that “the purpose of having a student government is so that ALL views of students are represented—not just the ones that fit your ideology.”
Spot on. The irony, of course, is that you have someone in this day and age calling for a litmus test – an arbitrary one at that (who gets to decide what a passing mark in “intercultural competency” looks like and what it includes?) given the history of such litmus tests.
But then, it’s the left we’re talking about. Didn’t the new DNC chair claim that in order to identify with the Democratic party that one must fully and completely support abortion on demand? Well, yes, of course he did. Is Ms. Richardson doing anything different in suggesting an ideological purity test be administered to candidates for office? How long after that will such a test be required of all who want to vote, for heaven sake.
Glad to see, in this case, the students pushing back hard.
~McQ
Observations: The QandO Podcast for 21 Apr 17
The week’s big argument is that hate speech isn’t protected hy the 1st Amendment. Which is a spectacularly stupid argument. The Antifa movement started to learn the difference between commie LARPing and actual street violence. The Trump Administration: He hasn’t failed yet. So, that’s good, I guess. Is the Berkeley city government in cahoots with the Antifa movement? Venezuela continues to collapse. Even the Russians managed to make Communism creep along for 70 years. Bill O’Reilly is out at FOXNews, so I guess there’s no one left to look after The Folks.
This week’s podcast is up on the Podcast page.
Around the horn
We’ll start with this:
I know, you’d like to believe this is a joke. Humor. Frankly, it’s likely more ironic than funny.
The cultural infiltration continues:
Fakhruddin Attar, 53, and his wife, Farida Attar, 50, of Livonia, were both arrested and have been charged with conspiring to perform female genital mutilations on minor girls out of Dr. Attar’s medical clinic in Livonia.
Authorities say Dr. Attar owned Burhani Medical Clinic in Livonia, which is where a Detroit emergency room doctor who was arrested last week is accused of performing FGM on minor girls. Authorities say Dr. Attar’s wife is employed at Burhani Medical Clinic as an office manager. Authorities believe the husband and wife arranged and assisted in the FGM procedures performed by the Detroit doctor, Dr. Jumana Nagarwala.
But remember, multiculturalism preaches all cultures are equal. That’s why the feminists don’t go wild about this sort of thing. Well, that and the chance of pissing of the wrong group of Muslims that might have a propensity toward violence. Too bad it doesn’t have anything to do with toxic white males. We’d see herds of feminists in their pussy hats prancing around Livonia.
Howard Dean bobbed to the top of the liberal septic tank yesterday to declare “Hate speech is not protected by the first amendment.”
Despite his declaration to the contrary and the obvious fact that the man hasn’t a clue as to what the First Amendment stands for, it indeed protects what others might arbitrarily classify as “hate speech.” If it didn’t, it wouldn’t have any reason to exist. Incitement to violence? No. But speech we deplore, detest and dislike – you bet.
And to think, that guy might of been one screech away from the presidency.
Meanwhile, in case you missed it, November’s loss still isn’t Hillary’s fault:
Shattered is sourced almost entirely to figures inside the Clinton campaign who were and are deeply loyal to Clinton. Yet those sources tell of a campaign that spent nearly two years paralyzed by simple existential questions: Why are we running? What do we stand for?
If you’re wondering what might be the point of rehashing this now, the responsibility for opposing Donald Trump going forward still rests with the (mostly anonymous) voices described in this book.
What Allen and Parnes captured in Shattered was a far more revealing portrait of the Democratic Party intelligentsia than, say, the WikiLeaks dumps. And while the book is profoundly unflattering to Hillary Clinton, the problem it describes really has nothing to do with Secretary Clinton.
The real protagonist of this book is a Washington political establishment that has lost the ability to explain itself or its motives to people outside the Beltway.
Political sabotage. It was the bad guys in the Washington political establishment, or the VRC, or the Boy Scouts or someone. No one will say she simply stank as a candidate.
Heck, she couldn’t even beat an old white male socialist in the primary without shenanigans. She didn’t have a chance against Trump.
As they always do, the SJWs have headed to the absurd extreme to voice their displeasure at those who simply aren’t “woke” and don’t get it. This time on the “cultural appropriation” front. The cultural appropriation you ask? Tiny houses:
And it’s not just the Tiny House Movement that incites my discontent. From dumpster diving to trailer-themed bars to haute cuisine in the form of poor-household staples, it’s become trendy for those with money to appropriate the poverty lifestyle — and it troubles me for one simple reason. Choice.
[…]
It’s likely, from where I sit, that this back-to-nature and boxed-up simplicity is not being marketed to people like me, who come from simplicity and heightened knowledge of poverty, but to people who have not wanted for creature comforts. For them to try on, glamorize, identify with.
Such appropriation isn’t limited to the Tiny House trend, or even to the idea of simplicity. In major cities, people who come from high-income backgrounds flock to bars and restaurants that both appropriate, and mock, low-income communities. Perhaps the most egregious example is San Francisco’s Butter Bar, a trendy outpost that prides itself on being a true-blue, trailer park-themed bar, serving up the best in “trashy” cuisine and cocktails.
That’s right, poverty is now a “culture” and you may not use or borrow it’s cultural icons – like tiny houses without being viciously called out as an “appropriator”, whatever in the hell that is.
Yes, you really have to have an SJW scorecard to know what is or isn’t culturally appropriate. They come with a disclaimer that contents are subject to change on whim or daily as suits the high priests, priestesses and keepers of the SJW flame. Oh, wait, I need a gender neutral pronoun in that last sentence don’t I? I must have an old scorecard.
~McQ
The left and free speech – it ain’t what those old dead white guys meant it to be
There’s a lot to talk about and not much I even care to talk about. Mostly politics. You only have to see this cycle repeated a few times to understand what probably comes next. Has it gotten more extreme? Of course. But as you watch the parties head toward their extremes (one party much faster than the other) it certainly no longer presents many surprises and, surprisingly, little interest – at least on my part.
The culture, on the other hand, is why we see the politics we see today. And I can’t say I’m particularly pleased with what I see there.
I talked about what’s going on at Wellesley a little while ago on the free speech front. Or more accurately the lack of free speech front. Well, they’ve doubled down now. It seems they’re of the opinion that speech they don’t approve of invites, even deserves, “hostility” (or violence if you prefer). From an editorial in The Wellesley News:
“Wellesley students are generally correct in their attempts to differentiate what is viable discourse from what is just hate speech,” the paper declared. “Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech. The founding fathers put free speech in the Constitution as a way to protect the disenfranchised and to protect individual citizens from the power of the government.”
First of all, the founding fathers (you know those old dead cisgender white dudes who owned slaves but are, in this case, useful) did not guarantee free speech “to protect the disenfranchised”. Instead they guaranteed free speech for all. Period. End of statement. Full stop. And, that guarantee implicitly, profoundly and undeniably carries with it the same guarantee to those who say things with which we don’t agree. So what Wellesley has done is go along with the leftist trend of redefining and categorizing speech so they can give lip service to “free speech” while essentially outlawing anything they arbitrarily decide, per their ideology, is “hate” speech. Thus offensive speech becomes hate speech and, well, per their new reading on what those old dead white guys did, it’s not protected by the 1st Amendment.
What are they heading for with this twisted logic?
As for speakers and student who do not conform to what the paper deems acceptable speech, the editorial says violence may be justified. “(I)f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted,” the editorial states.
“If people continue to support racist politicians or pay for speakers that prop up speech that will lead to the harm of others, then it is critical to take the appropriate measures to hold them accountable for their actions. It is important to note that our preference for education over beration regards students who may have not been given the chance to learn. Rather, we are not referring to those who have already had the incentive to learn and should have taken the opportunities to do so,” the paper concludes.
Interesting, no? I you are a person who has had a “chance to learn” and therefore should apparently know better (i.e. understand and agree with their ideological points), then there is no protection for you – either from shaming, bullying or overt violence. Because you earned it by not agreeing with them. And your disagreement, your stated refusal to agree, is “hate speech”. QED.
Result? Fairly easy to predict.
Have you heard of the “Antifa”, or in terms you might recognize if you’re educated – Red Guard or Brown Shirts. Here is the NYC version’s web page. They are what they claim to hate and deplore.
We were treated to their attempts to squelch free speech this weekend in Berkeley, where their aggression was met and they got their rear ends soundly beaten.
I have to admit – it did bring a smile to my face.
~McQ