The Righteous Punishment of the Sun
I am enduring it, having left my mountain fastness for another trip to the Swamp. I’ll be back when I return to places where it is cool enough to think. That will probably be this weekend.
Colloquialisms and Racism
Cross-posted from my blog.
Ron DeSantis, Republican candidate for Governor of Florida,
suggested in an interview shortly after his nomination, that his just-nominated
Progressive-Democrat opponent, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, would, if
elected, monkey up the Florida economy.
Oh, the hue and cry from the Progressive-Democrats, the NLMSM, and Gillum. A colloquialism that plainly
means to mess with things, or to mess things up, suddenly is a racist bull horn—much
more than a dog whistle according to Gillum.
How can this be? One
candidate says another candidate will mess things up, and this is racist!?
Oh, wait—Gillum is black.
Notice that. Gillum
isn't a political candidate who happens to be a black man; he's a black man who
happens to be a political candidate.
Americans for generations have worked hard to make race
irrelevant. All men are created equal, equal
employment, Martin Luther King's dream, and on and on.
But not anymore. The
Progressive-Democrat, his Party, and the Left in general insist that what's
important here is the man's race, not his policies. It's his race that gives meaning to the
colloquialism, not his policies.
This emphasis by the Progressive-Democrat, his Party, and
the Left in general on race is rank racist bigotry. That it's wholly artificial, done by
politicians solely for personal political gain and by pseudo-journalists solely
for click bait makes their racism even worse.
Gillum's cynically artificial racism should disqualify him
from public office.
Eric Hines
Update: I have no sense of time. I wrote this for my blog and scheduled it for tomorrow's posting there. Yet, here it is today in the Hall....
Bravo Sierra
This discussion of "b******* jobs" is very interesting, even though the move to support UBI as an answer is less so. I have definitely noticed this phenomenon, and it does seem to violate the logic of capitalism. Yet it seems to be growing, not shrinking.
FEMA insanity
The Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece today on one of my favorite subjects, the barking madness that is our federal emergency management jurisprudence:
Hurricane Harvey shows what can go wrong. It lumbered through Texas, unloading 5 feet of rain, one year ago. Yet 8% of survivors have not returned to their homes, as per a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study. Some low-income families had their aid requests denied by FEMA because of “insufficient damage” to their homes. But FEMA also denied aid to homes with roofs blown off or mold creeping up the walls.
A plausible explanation for at least part of the discrepancy is that FEMA’s comparatively strict aid policies are in conflict with Texas’ minimal housing regulations. FEMA aims to restore property to “safe and sanitary” condition while being careful not to make “improvements or additions to the pre-disaster condition.” At the same time, Texas allows families to build their homes to a lower standard than what FEMA considers “safe and sanitary.” In other words, a house can be good enough for Texas but not for FEMA. Consequently, the only way FEMA can rebuild it to the “safe and sanitary” standard is by contradicting the “no improvements” rule.Pro-regulatory do-gooders will respond by suggesting that benighted Texas should ramp up its housing standards. Here's what I would prefer: amend the FEMA rules so that federal emergency aid is available to return houses to FEMA's standard of "safe and sanitary," or the local code-mandated standard of "safe and sanitary," or the home's pre-existing condition, whichever is least. Even a bureaucracy need not tie itself up in this kind of Catch 22 unless it's plain bloody-minded.
Adventures of a Sock Puppet
Glenn Greenwald gets profiled in the New Yorker. This is a great line:
Leading American progressives—speaking off the record, and apologizing for what they describe as cowardice—call Greenwald a bully and a troll.
Dump on the English time
For all you Scots out there, Netflix is going to tackle the Bruce.
And so all you Irish won't feel left out:
Plenty o'mud and blood for all from looks of them.
And so all you Irish won't feel left out:
Plenty o'mud and blood for all from looks of them.