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At Overlawyered, Walter Olson flags Duane Oyen's "story of ADA’s arguably perverse effects on a shuttle bus service in Minneapolis-St. Paul."
Andrew Sullivan likes Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's take on the way low culture leads you to high culture on the internet.
There's been much discussion here of late about happiness and the disconnect between contentment and imminent doom, the latter with particular reference to Claire's and my neighborhood. Well, it turns out that either things really are swell in Israel or we are truly masters of denial. Gallup conducted a study of the happiness levels of 155 countries that surveyed thousands of respondents over four years. The results are in: Israel tied Canada, Switzerland and Australia as the eighth happiest country on earth.
Mt. Airy, NC: The name of this place is Brintles Truck Stop. One of the few mom and pop truck stops that isn't completely dilapidated, the staff is thoroughly friendly. Then again, what else could one expect in Andy Griffith's home town? Mt. Airy was the inspiration for Andy's town of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith show. Floyd's Barber Shop really does exist here. In fact, a portion of the truck stop is reserved for Mayberry paraphernalia. Everything from Mayberry coffee cups, Aunt Bea's Cookbook, Mayberry bibs, back scratchers, travel mugs, sheriff badges, thimbles, water bottles, dvds, and more can be found here. The restaurant has been remodeled, the rodents evicted, and flat screen televisions set to Fox News Channel adorn the walls. Supper last night was great. They don't serve dinner here, only supper, and that suits us just fine.
Reluctantly, I have to leave this quaint little place in a few minutes. The good thing about being a long haul trucker is that I get to spend some time in wonderful towns like this. The bad thing is, I invariably have to move on. ...
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So I'm thinking into the future here about Ricochet's answer to the National Review cruise. Why, you ask? Isn't that a little premature? Well, yes, but I've got another deadline, which always inspires me to apply my mind to any problem but the one I'm supposed to be solving.
My train of thought went like this. I found this great link to the best magazine articles ever written, and if you've got a deadline, too, I suggest you not click on it, because there goes your weekend. So instead of working on what I'm supposed to be doing this morning, I ended up re-reading, among other things, David Foster Wallace's essay Shipping Out, which is about his one-week trip on the cruise ship M.V. Zenith. It was later published as A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. That was the first piece I ever read by David Foster Wallace, and I remember reading it and feeling thrilled to see proof that America could, indeed, still produce that kind of incandescent talent, because for a time I wasn't sure. Now, of course, it's impossible to read his work without sadness.
But that's not my point. ...
Show moreDrudge is excitedly linking to this strange piece on Investors.com that asks rhetorically--but with more than a hint of enthusiasm--whether Americans might not be ready to overthrow their government by force. At least, that's how it reads to me.
The Internet is a large-scale version of the "Committees of Correspondence" that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington's failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.
People are asking, "Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?"
I don't disagree with many of the authors' observations about the failings of the Obama presidency. But they appear to be suggesting that if the upcoming elections don't succeed in getting rid of him, the emergency is such that other--unspecified--means of unseating the government might be considered. They ascribe this thought to unnamed "people," but you know, I rather doubt there are all that many Americans, named or unnamed, who are seriously discussing the virtues of a coup. (And yes, that's what they must mean: What else could topple an elected American government? ...
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This? In the New York Times? Yes, I know. I'm behind the cycle here--I'm only just now getting to the morning newspapers. But jeepers. A column that subjects to the most withering ridicule the Obama administration, environmentalism, the stimulus package, and the overhyped Chevy Volt--all in the pages of the grey lady. Get a load of this:
...G.M.’s vision turned into a car that costs $41,000 before relevant tax breaks ... but after billions of dollars of government loans and grants for the Volt’s development and production. And instead of the sleek coupe of 2007, it looks suspiciously similar to a Toyota Prius. It also requires premium gasoline, seats only four people (the battery runs down the center of the car, preventing a rear bench) and has less head and leg room than the $17,000 Chevrolet Cruze, which is more or less the non-electric version of the Volt.
I doubt the author intended it this way, but he's not merely providing automotive commentary. He's illustrating an ontological truth. Common sense is impossible to suppress. It pops up in the oddest places.
In an extremely rare move, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., has announced she'll go to trial rather than accept the ethics charges against her from a House ethics subcommittee. From The Hill:
Waters is accused of helping facilitate $12 million in Troubled Asset Relief Program funds for OneUnited Bank, of which her husband was a director and stockholder. OneUnited Bank executives had also contributed to Waters' campaigns.
More details in Politico, which broke the story. This Wall Street Journal story shows a role Barney Frank had in the scandal as well. This is probably the last thing Democrats want or need facing a tough 2010 election. Will President Obama ask Waters to resign like he none-too-subtly suggested to Rep. Charlie Rangel today?
On the Katie Couric show today, President Obama made his first public statement about the ethically-challenged Charlie Rangel, calling the more than dozens of ethics charges levied against him "very troubling."
Here's Obama:
He's somebody who's at the end of his career...I'm sure that what he wants is to be able to end his career with dignity. And my hope is that it happens.
Meanwhile, House dems--perhaps worried about what toll the Rangel effect will take on them in November--are calling on the him to resign:
Calls for Rep. Charlie Rangel's resignation rained down on Capitol Hill late Friday from House Democrats who said more than a dozen ethics charges against the 20-term lawmaker showed a disregard for the rules and undermined the public's confidence in Congress.
What should Rangel do?
But when they have to state their preference to other human beings, it seems they get paranoid.
I would have given this excellent, common-sense article by Warren Meyer a different headline. It's called "Why Keynes Was Wrong," but I think the real point, the interesting point, is the importance of economic policy being formed, or at least informed, by people who have actually had experience of running a business. I remember talking to Sir John Hoskyns, who headed the Prime Minister's Policy Unit in Thatcher's first term, about just this. "Something critical about the Thatcher revolution," he said, was
the introduction into government, for the first time, of people who have an idea of what happens inside a business. Britain is, compared to the United States, extraordinary because there had been, until Thatcher, such a limited number of people with any exposure to the business world in government.
He himself had founded and run his own information technology company. ...
Show moreA Ricochet reader sent this along, and I--well, I simply couldn't resist. My, but I loved that man.
It's a different take than many of those we've heard so far on Ricochet:
Show moreThe controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process. Therefore, under these unique circumstances, we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.
In recommending that a different location be found for the Islamic Center, we are mindful that some legitimate questions have been raised about who is providing the funding to build it, and what connections, if any, its leaders might have with groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values. These questions deserve a response, and we hope those backing the project will be transparent and forthcoming. But regardless of how they respond, the issue at stake is a broader one.
Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. ...
Sen. Graham, the Republican of South Carolina, has proposed a constitutional amendment to deny citizenship to the children of illegal aliens. In the fractious, many-sided debate on immigration, Sen. Graham has achieved something rare: unanimity. As best I can tell, everybody agrees that his proposal is nuts. Over at Contentions, Jennifer Rubin, who is very much in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, quotes Mark Krikorian, who very much isn't--and does so approvingly:
Although we agree on practically nothing concerning this issue, I fully concur with Mark Krikorian on this one….“I’m exactly against changing this,” [Krikorian] said. “I think it’s sort of a stupid thing. You would end up with lots of U.S.-born illegal immigrants. There’s something like 300,000 kids born here to illegal immigrants every year.”
This one's a head-scratcher. If Sen. Graham has contrived to offend both Jennifer Rubin and Mark Krikorian, just whose approval, exactly, was he hoping to attract?
I’ve always been an optimist when it comes to the ability of human beings to better their lives and their societies if only they are given the freedom to use their talents and abilities. That’s one reason News Corporation has always seen new technology as an asset (look at how the Wall Street Journal has embraced the iPad, for example) rather than a threat.
I have been reading two books that make a strong case that we ought to be even more optimistic today. Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, which is out, offers a compelling argument that the increase in exchange and communications is accelerating improvements in the human condition because it is bringing together many more people – in other words, many more brains – to solve our problems. I don’t want to spoil the debut of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation – which will be out in October – but he suggests the operative question is, How do we create the optimum environment for encouraging this innovation? I won’t give away his answers, but I can guarantee Ricochet members that you will find it a fascinating read.
The word is that China is now the world’s second largest economy, overtaking Japan this year and on track to surpass the United States in another fifteen or so.
China's economy expanded 11.1 percent in the first half of 2010, from a year earlier, and is likely to log growth of more than 9 percent for the whole year, according to Yi.
China has averaged more than 9.5 percent growth annually since it embarked on market reforms in 1978.
The United States embarked on its own set of market reforms in 1981, but these have lately been reversed. Can you tell?
Chinese growth is a good thing. What worries me is the cumulative impact of US capital flight from punitive domestic policies for friendlier climes.
California continues its trend-setting role, this time spearheading the decline of US leadership in high-tech entrepreneurship. For example, Sequoia Capital, the venerable Silicon Valley venture firm that backed such iconic high-tech firms as Apple, Yahoo, and PayPal, is focusing elsewhere. The firm now has three offices in China, three more in India, another in Israel, and a single legacy office in the US. ...
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Everyone, it seems, hates for-profit education. The Democrats, led by Senator Tom Harkin, are trying to regulate it by tightening up the federal rules on student loans. Famous hedge fund investor Steve Eisman has schools like University of Phoenix and DeVry in his sights. He's testified in Congress about shady loan practices at some of these places; about loose standards for job placement; about the practice of overburdening students with loans while preparing them for low-paying jobs.
(Eisman is also a major short-seller in the sector. So having him publicly run down the industry is not only good for Senator Harkin and the regulation-happy Democrats, it's also going to make him rich. Richer, I mean.)
No one, of course, worries that federal student loans are going to students at, say, Yale, with its sky-high tuition and plentiful course offerings in the -- how do I put this? -- less job-centered disciplines. Put it this way: they don't teach anything like "(Re)-Presenting the Modern: Studies in Gender Identity and Power in the 18th Century French Lyric" at DeVry. They teach things like how to maintain an office IT system and how to be a veterinary assistant. ...
Show moreWhat would happen if Obama sidestepped the fruitless and short-term stimulus debate and instead focused on the long term? He could explain that we’re facing deep fundamental problems: an aging population, overleveraged consumers, exploding government debt, state and local bankruptcies, declining human capital, widening inequality, a pattern of jobless recoveries, deteriorating trade imbalances and so on.
These long-term problems, Obama could say, won’t be solved either with centralized government or free market laissez-faire [...] the president could lay the groundwork for a whopping second-term agenda: tax simplification, entitlement reform, a new wave of regional innovation clusters, a new wave of marriage-friendly tax policies. [...] A chill sweeps over me: Gosh, what if the Democrats really did change in that way?
Conventional wisdom on the right is in danger of hardening into a kind of grim glee, certain that Obama will triple- and quadruple-down on policies so unpopular and deeply leftist that he'll be run out on a flaming rail come 2012. ...
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What is it about this era that we seem to be surrounded by such hubris? Whether it’s Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, oblivious to the danger in which he puts the lives of Afghans who trusted us, or Dr. Donald Berwick and his blithe willingness to be the arbiter of everyone’s medical decisions and practices, or the proposal --- coming from the same Congressional clowns who created the mortgage mess -- that it’s the mortgage brokers ought to be finger printed, there’s an entire class of people that is convinced that they are smarter, wiser, and more moral than the rest of us – when in fact precisely the reverse is likely the case.
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Episode 27: A Man of Letters July 29, 2010. Discuss |
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