Selective taboos

At Powerline, a refreshing look at when the concept of personal responsibility is allowed to intrude on policy discussions, and when it can be dismissed as cruel.

In the case of “Detroit,” we must decide how far to go in order to improve, in the short term, the material condition of the population. How much should we spend on welfare? How lenient should we be with criminals? Should there be monetary reparations? Should there be forced integration?

In the case of rural America, the policy questions prompted by Carlson are different. How much trade protection should certain American industries receive? To what extent should we limit legal immigration?

The answer in both cases depends in part on how much weight we place on the concept of personal responsibility. Those who take the concept seriously will be less inclined to transfer vast amounts of money, or to tolerate high risk associated with the early release of criminals, than those who don’t.

They will also be less inclined to think Americans should pay more for consumer goods as a result of trade barriers and restrictions on the number of people who can work in the U.S. They may ask how much more they should pay for cars because males in rural America are making irresponsible personal choices.

The best answer might well be “somewhat more.” Even for conservatives, the concept of personal responsibility isn’t absolute. We are willing to spend a considerable amount of money on welfare even though we know that if recipients made better choices, we would be able to spend considerably less.

Storm memento

A too-infrequent guest from Houston arrived this year with a bowl turned from a downed oak trunk that he took home with him last year.  I'd forgotten he took it, so the gift was a delightful surprise.

Citizenship Tests

Perhaps we should consider stripping voting rights from anyone who can't pass the test? I am saddened to see that the South does particularly badly here, although only Vermont has a majority with a passing score (and that barely).

Seizing and pouncing

Or is it pouncing and then seizing?  Let's go to the video:



Whatever it is, I'm sure it's very unfair to tasty Democrats.

Get To Work, Fellow Oppressors

Apparently we're really letting some people down by not being out there beating and harassing our opponents. I blame myself; I haven't threatened anybody in at least a week or two.

Well, not intentionally. Some people seem to be threatened by our very existence, but apparently that's not enough.

UPDATE: And then there were two.

Small Victories

The border fight we've been having has faced stiff opposition from both Democrats and some Republicans, a few because they fear convincing Latinos that they are racists but most because they are interested in helping their donors depress the price of labor. Nevertheless, all the news isn't bad; there have been some compromises.

Trump and GOP negotiators led by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and his team blocked several moves by Pelosi and other Democrats to fill the deal with anti-wall moves like lowering spending for ICE and slashing the number of “detention beds” to hold criminal illegal immigrants.

“Pelosi lost. She knew her position on detentions beds was unsustainable and only playing to her fringe. She also said no new miles for the wall,” said the source. “She had to step back from all positions.”

Compared to a simple continuing resolution, or CR, with nothing extra beyond current spending levels set in fiscal 2018, Trump gained extra funding for the wall.... “nearly three times as much as would have been available under a CR,” said the source.

On detention beds, the number increased 13 percent over fiscal 2018. And when another $750 million in transfer and reprogramming authority is added in, it represents a 44 percent increase, said the source.

What’s more, the bill provides historic funding levels for ICE and Customs and Border Protection, a rejection of liberal efforts to kill the agencies. It was a 7 percent budget increase for a combined $21.5 billion.

In addition, the NYT reports, the tough border policies are causing some people to give up and go home -- or to choose life in Mexico, which offered them asylum.

[T]housands of caravan members who had been waiting to seek asylum in the United States appear to have given up, Mexican officials said, dealing President Trump an apparent win after a humbling week for his immigration agenda.

About 6,000 asylum seekers who had traveled en masse, many of them in defiance of Mr. Trump’s demands that they turn around, arrived in Northern Mexico in late November as part of a caravan that originated in Honduras. Since then, more than 1,000 have accepted an offer to be returned home by the Mexican government, the officials said. Another 1,000 have decided to stay in Mexico, accepting work permits that were offered to them last fall, at the height of international consternation over how to deal with the growing presence of migrant caravans.

There's reason to be annoyed that the Republican Congress never ponied up money for a wall, and there's reason to be annoyed about the use of unconstitutional emergency powers that no president should really have. If you believe that a nation has to control its borders to remain stable, however, there is some good news too.

Rye Whiskey

Gringo raises the similarity between two different folk songs in the comments below. In fact there's a fair number of folk songs who have similar lines. I like this one because it pieces very many of them together.



"Jack of diamonds, Jack of Daniels.."

They know a lot of the old songs.

Dwarves and Elves

Doc Crawford on Norse Mythology.

Cultural Appropriation!

No, no, that should be a good American version, like this:



Er, no, wait...

All those old Prohibition songs end up being better advertisements for a drop of the pure.



It's because they were wrong, of course. But that was an American song first, you Irish cultural appropriators!

UPDATE:

Not that cigarettes are good for you. Tex Williams is dead now, more's the pity.

The Man Who Strangled a Mountain Lion Gave an Interview

I haven't found the text yet, but it looks like he's doing all right.

What's with these crushed Asians?

(Who remembers that Gilda Radner skit?) Actually what I wanted to write about is a Department of Labor lawsuit against tech giant Oracle for discriminating against the usual suspects.  This caught my eye as a complaint about how Asian-heavy the tech jobs are at Oracle:

Some of the new claims also substitute broad statistics for refined analysis. For example, as the Wall Street Journal points out, the DOL relies for its hiring discrimination claim on evidence that 82 percent of employees hired by Oracle for technical positions are Asians, whereas Asians were “only” 75 percent of applicants.

It sounds to me like being in the ballpark if the racial quotas for applicants and hirees are within 10% or so, so I can't get too excited about the ratio of 75% to 82%. But seriously, 3/4 of the applicants are Asian? Are we not supposed to notice this? Are we supposed to think that's irrelevant to questions about what aspects of race might be important in job statistics besides allegations of racism?

And this is what the Asian statistics look like even with the Ivy League schools grinding them into the dirt as hard as they know how.

Got That Gentrification Problem Licked

I had thought that it was part of a Congressperson's job to try to obtain investment in their communities, but apparently that's wrong.

“Anything is possible: today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world."

Yeah, you sure showed him.

Lufthansa sues passenger

Okay, with a headline like that, you know it has to be good stupid.  Oh boy, is it.

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/13/694352593/lufthansa-airlines-sues-customer-who-skipped-part-of-his-return-flight

In short, the passenger booked a round trip flight from Oslo to Seattle (with a layover in Frankfurt) for about $741.  While returning from Seattle, he then got off in Frankfurt and thence flew to Berlin on a completely separate ticket.  Lufthansa says that the cost of his flight ought to have been about $2300 more if he had bought it "properly", and wants him to pay the difference.

So let's make this simple.  Let's say you want to get from New York to LA.  But the flights are more expensive than a flight from New York to Lake Tahoe that has a layover in LA.  So by buying the NY>LA>Tahoe ticket and just getting off in LA, you save money.  But then the airline catches wind of it and demands you to pay the difference since you really wanted a NY>LA flight.

One would hope you'd tell them to pound sand.  You took advantage of their pricing.  "But then they can't sell the seat from LA to Tahoe!"  Wrong!  That seat was sold, you paid for it.  Whether you use it or not is immaterial, it was paid for in full by you.  And this argument is doubly rich from an industry that thinks little of double-booking seats because they expect passengers to miss flights or not fly for some reason.

But what truly amuses me is that Lufthansa's argument explicitly says that if you buy a ticket you are obligated to use all parts of the ticket, or else they'll sue.  Which leads me to the idea that if they believe that missing (or not taking) a flight grants them the right to charge you for the price of a ticket from your origin to the layover city you actually stop at, then that allows them to demand money from every passenger stranded in a layover city every time there's a weather cancellation, or mechanical problem, or other flight delay.  Talk about perverse incentives!

"Demonic Males" and Morality

A piece of Darwinian theory, which I have not finished reading, and am posting here chiefly to remind me to get back to it. It may be of interest to many of you, too.

Yeah, That Makes Sense...?

Her office pushed back against the notion that it was hypocritical for Ocasio-Cortez, who has made housing affordability one of her top policy concerns, to move into a luxury building. A spokesman pointed out that her office also uses a car with an "internal combustion engine that runs on fossil fuels," even though she thinks their use should be eliminated.

Her spokesman said that.

Republicans sabotage Green New Deal... by calling for a vote?

It's true.  According to Senator Markey (co-sponsor of the Green New Deal), when Sen. McConnell called for a vote on the proposal, that's sabotaging it.

http://reason.com/blog/2019/02/13/green-new-deal-vote-markey-aoc-mcconnell

No honestly, you can't make this up.  "This is a list of things we want!"  "Okay, let's vote on it."  "You just want to avoid a national debate about it!"

No, what's more likely is that Sen. Markey realizes the same thing that Sen. McConnell has.  That it's unpassable, unworkable, and that by forcing Democrats (many of whom are running for their party's nomination for President) to vote on it, they will either have the albatross of this pile of Green dung tied around their neck, or they will be forced to repudiate it and this tick off their base.

It's not sabotage, Sen. Markey.  It's being hoist in your own petard.

Incandescent Beauty

An argument that the world is too beautiful to explained by natural selection, which begins with another bird example:

A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty. The hue of his plumage transitions seamlessly from molten red to sunshine yellow. But that radiance is not enough to attract a mate. When males of most bowerbird species are ready to begin courting, they set about building the structure for which they are named: an assemblage of twigs shaped into a spire, corridor or hut. They decorate their bowers with scores of colorful objects, like flowers, berries, snail shells or, if they are near an urban area, bottle caps and plastic cutlery. Some bowerbirds even arrange the items in their collection from smallest to largest, forming a walkway that makes themselves and their trinkets all the more striking to a female — an optical illusion known as forced perspective that humans did not perfect until the 15th century.

It's art, the scientists reason, and the development of such an elaborate courtship ritual is not adaptive. So why do they do it?

The way the theory works, of course, is that it's a kind of accident; natural selection doesn't necessarily mean that changes are useful, it just tends to strip away the ones that aren't via extinction. If the birds are 'good enough' at surviving in other ways, these kinds of extravagances can survive. But this is only one example; it turns out that nature seems to strive for beauty in many other ways.

It's a point Hannah Arendt made some years ago. She pointed out that animals are quite ugly internally -- intestines and the like -- but not externally. She reasoned that there was something about life that strives to be seen as beautiful. That's interesting, especially since so much of life lacks eyes that see; but even starfish are beautiful, in their way. In fact, it extends beyond life. Galaxies certainly are beautiful, and they're almost accidents. Waves on the ocean; sunsets.

Well, now that you've explained that it's economics

You all thought the Green Leap Forward was economic lunacy, but not so fast.  It turns out that it's really good economics:  the logical next step after the enemies of mankind crushed our hopes for the carbon tax. It's an "economic stimulus package for the planet." You love the planet, don't you? For you unsophisticated types, here's how it works. It's simple, just pay attention and shut up.

[T]he challenges and costs of relying solely on current technologies to address climate change are prohibitively high. We need investments in clean innovation to make it cheaper to reduce emissions in the future. . . . While carbon pricing is the most cost effective way to reduce emissions today, government subsidies are the most cost effective way to advance clean technologies tomorrow.

We know this, because government subsidies consistently produce cost-effective results. You have to spend money to make money! You can't afford NOT to buy this! We'll lose money on every transaction, but make it up in volume. A cautionary note, because, you know, these guys are serious and sober, not just snake-oil salesmen:

Of course, the effectiveness of the proposal at spurring innovation will depend on its design, the exact details of which have yet to be ironed out.

Now a nod to opposing arguments, to show we're considering all sides of the debate:

Opponents will also claim that the government is a bad venture capitalist, and that a Green New Deal will pour taxpayer dollars into clean energy boondoggles. While concerns about government waste are certainly real, they can be avoided through smart policy design.

Now that makes me sad. Who would say such mean things about the government's record as a venture capitalist? They're doing the best they can. Anyway, we're going to avoid any problems by going out right now and getting us some smart policy design. Not those old bad policy designs.

This almost makes me like the deal to avert the shutdown

"Journalist and Soros Equality Fellow" Michelle Garcia complains on CNN that Democrats "gave too much away":

If Trump signs off on the deal, he gets far less border wall funding than he initially demanded, in the immediate, but he wins critical credibility for the Republicans' unsubstantiated and false claims of a border security crisis.

I may try this

You'll say, no doubt, that it's an unconventional approach, but I'm thinking it would really liven up the next Commissioners Court meeting.

Actually it reminds me of the joke with the punchline, "You don't come here for the hunting, do you?"