I found this very funny.
If the authors of computer programming books wrote arithmetic textbooks pic.twitter.com/4VkWlbz9c8
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) May 11, 2017
What he said (14)
December 1, 2017What he said (13)
October 19, 2017Former V.P. Joe Biden talks about free speech and the First Amendment during a conference at the University of Delaware.
Can we find more regulators like this?
October 15, 2017Nick Gillespie interviews FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.
What he asked
October 14, 2017Ben Sasse asks Trump’s supporters a good question, following the President’s tweet about licensing TV news networks. (Something that doesn’t even exist, of course.)
Question for conservatives:
What will you wish you had said now if someday a President Elizabeth Warren talks about censoring Fox News?— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) October 12, 2017
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But the larger point about Trump & his tweeting is how he manages to keep everyone reacting to him. I have to wonder whether he’d shut up if everyone just ignored him. So I liked Charles Cooke’s article asking Trump to keep quiet (even though I think it’s a futile request).
I could write this every day: https://t.co/T09ZNu80dA
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) October 12, 2017
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“Just shut up and president,” as I’ve said before.
The day Trump kicked over the tweet-hive again, I happened to get email from the Cato Institute about Gene Healy, who wrote The Cult of the Presidency. And the attitude toward the presidency that Healy describes is the root of the matter, IMO. This situation’s been a long time coming.
The Imperial Presidency in the Age of Trump
“I alone can fix it,” Donald J. Trump proclaimed during his unlikely rise to the White House: “all of the bad things happening in the U.S. will be rapidly reversed!” It’s proven to be a bit more complicated than that.
More than eight months into the Trump presidency, the office that’s supposed to be “a symbol of our national unity” is the source of bitter division, as the president vents his frustration with Twitter attacks on Saturday Night Live skits, “so-called judges,” and the United States’ nuclear-armed rivals. Abroad, where the president’s authority is alarmingly unchecked, Trump has already launched some 20,000 airstrikes, threatened North Korea with nuclear annihilation, and refused to rule out a “military option” in Venezuela.
And yet, Donald Trump didn’t invent the Imperial Presidency: he inherited it. As Gene Healy warned in his widely acclaimed book, The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, the “most powerful office in the world” has become far too powerful to entrust to any one fallible human being. Moreover, “We, the people” bear an enormous share of the blame for the presidency’s transformation into a constitutional monstrosity. As Healy argues, it is the public’s demand for presidential salvation from all problems great and small that drove that transformation: “the Imperial Presidency is the price of making the office the focus of our national hopes and dreams.”
What they said…
September 30, 2017I couldn’t care less about the NFL and Trump’s recent tempest-in-a-tweet-storm struck me as just throwing red meat to his crowd of easily-played supporters. Mostly, I’m wondering if we’ll ever get past this Cult of the Presidency thing that’s been going on.
But I did come across a couple of good responses to Trump’s tweet storm this week. My emphasis below.
Matt Welch at Reason gives a good analysis from a libertarian view. It’s pretty long, so I’ve only listed the ‘lessons’ without their explications. But it’s worth a read.
9 Lessons from the Trump/NFL Anthem Wars
1) The most offensive aspect about mixing politics and sports is the conscripted tax money and police power. […]
2) Donald Trump made the conscious choice to revive a near-moribund social controversy for political advantage. […]
3) Almost every sentence containing the phrase “we must” in reference to strangers is a bad sentence, particularly coming from a president. […]
4) Freedom of political expression for athletes is directly proportional to their freedom of contract. […]
5) Trump is on the opposite side of the criminal justice reform cause that sparked all this stuff in the first place. […]
6) Fantasizing about ordering ungrateful “privileged” athletes around is one of the lower tendencies in American sports fandom. […]
7) Public patriotic rituals are already political, and should not be a one-way ratchet. […]
8) Telling the president to get bent is a healthy democratic response. […]
9) Culture-war dissidents deserve a shout-out, too. […]
And Jay Nordlinger gives his conservative take at National Review.
[…] I never had any use for Colin Kaepernick’s stunt. I don’t like this exploitation of national-anthem time. I also believe in safe zones — zones free of politics, such as concerts and games. I’m semi-famous for it (though only semi-)! An essay on safe zones is included in my recent collection, Digging In.
Kaepernick really disgusted me when he wore a shirt touting Fidel Castro — and socks depicting cops as pigs.
At the same time, I counseled benign neglect, borrowing Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s (radioactive) phrase from the late ’60s. […]
The issue was dying out. There were just a few embers. Then Donald J. Trump got into it, of course. He is an arsonist in American politics. We used to call Sharpton & Co. “racial arsonists.” The president is his own brand of arsonist. (Actually, Trump and Sharpton are a lot alike, as I’ve argued before: two New York media creatures.) Also, Trump insists on being at the center of attention, always.
There’s an expression for such men: “the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.”
You heard Trump, revvin’ up that crowd: “Get that son-of-a-bitch off the field right now! Out! He’s fired!” Blah blah blah. Roar roar roar. And that changed everything.
We Americans are a patriotic lot. We’re also a cranky, independent-minded, nonconformist lot. We don’t like to be told what to do, especially by Authority. We don’t like to be bossed around. So, pre-Trump, kneeling meant one thing — and then it meant a big middle finger to the Man, a.k.a. Trump, a.k.a. POTUS.
Context is everything. Everything. It took Donald J. Trump to make anti-kneelers sympathetic to kneelers. Indeed, he turned some anti-kneelers into kneelers themselves.
He crudifies everything he touches — including conservatism, including patriotism. There is a difference between patriotism and jingoism. Between patriotism and crude nationalism, crude flag-waving. […]
Strange sights
September 17, 2017“Postcards from Saturn” is an NPR video about discoveries made by the Cassini probe.
And “How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster” is a short tutorial from SpaceX.
Constitution Day
September 17, 2017Here’s John Stossel (again).
It's Constitution Day! What's your favorite part? Here is mine, plus picks from @senmikelee, @repthomasmassie, @justinamash & more: pic.twitter.com/pGfTKkb8hp
— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) September 17, 2017
Raise a glass to its authors.
Athens on the Potomac
September 12, 2017Hey, we’ve done it! $20,000,000,000,000! To quote Feynman again:
"There are 1011 stars in the galaxy," [Richard] Feynman once said. "That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."
Take it, John.
And Andrew does a parody of Cosmos.
Jon Gabriel joins in:
The problem no one in DC wants to talk about. https://t.co/qEvw3nQa5e pic.twitter.com/yGJtw3froh
— jon gabriel (@exjon) April 8, 2017
But John Stossel gets the last quote.
— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) September 12, 2017
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…
August 28, 2017From today’s Washington Post, news about the Antifa clowns:
Black-clad antifa members attack peaceful right-wing demonstrators in Berkeley
Left-wing counterprotesters clashed with right-wing protesters and Trump supporters on Aug. 27 in Berkeley, Calif. Violence erupted when a small group of masked antifa and anarchists attacked right-wing demonstrators. (The Washington Post)
Their faces hidden behind black bandannas and hoodies, about 100 anarchists and antifa— “anti-fascist” — members barreled into a protest Sunday afternoon in Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park.Jumping over plastic and concrete barriers, the group melted into a larger crowd of around 2,000 that had marched peacefully throughout the sunny afternoon for a “Rally Against Hate” gathering.
Here I am, stuck in the middle with… well, with this Canadian in Vancouver for one. He appears to have given a fair amount of thought to the alt-right Jokers.
[…] There comes a point where taking the aloof, sociological approach to documenting an unpleasant fad reaches its useful limit, and a point where its partisans simply deserve to be judged for their personal choices. The Charlottesville episode proved mainstream alt-rightism wishes to define itself primarily through racist performance art and “unity” with any and every faction of the self-proclaimed “right” respectable society has agreed, over the course of centuries, to scorn and marginalize. The leadership of this movement, such as it is, clearly comprises an enormous amount of delusional, ignorant, self-obsessed people content to embrace all the discredited ideas of the 20th century’s leading crackpots in a pained effort to seem, ironically enough, relevant. […]
As Tim Kennedy tweeted recently, "I believe both these idiots have the freedom to say what they want. But they are still assholes and I hate them equally."
#SAD
August 27, 2017What happens when one pandering, camera-hungry politician looks out for another one.
I am pleased to inform you that I have just granted a full Pardon to 85 year old American patriot Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He kept Arizona safe!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 26, 2017
The late Friday, end-of-the-week announcement is a cute touch.
The only good news is that I don’t live in Maricopa county.
A Phony Murder Plot Against Joe Arpaio Winds Up Costing Taxpayers $1.1 Million
Taxpayers spent $1,102,528.50 this year to settle another of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s lawsuits, New Times has learned through a public records request. The suit was brought by a man whom Arpaio framed in 1999 in a staged murder plot against the sheriff. […]
In 2004, victim James Saville’s family sued Arpaio for $10 million, after Saville was found not guilty of attempting to kill the sheriff. The county recently settled with Saville for an undisclosed amount. It only had to pay the above amount out of public coffers; its insurance policy covered the rest. […]
In 2004, a jury found Saville innocent of all charges. Not only that, but it ruled that Arpaio’s minions helped buy the bomb parts themselves and “entrapped” Saville in a TV-ready murder plot.
Arpaio was re-elected just months after the jury verdict. (Journalists John Dougherty and Janna Bommersbach unraveled the tale in separate articles).
“Jurors listened in disbelief as testimony showed it was the sheriff’s money that purchased the bomb parts, and an undercover officer who drove Saville around to buy the parts,” Bommersbach wrote.
Records show that the final payment to Saville went out on August 28, 2008. The total $1.1 million that taxpayers spent to settle with him doesn’t include money that the county attorney spent prosecuting him, or funds paid to deputies who worked long hours to frame him.
But wait! There’s more…
GR8 PL8
August 27, 2017What is seen and what is not seen.
— Christian Heiens (@ChristianHeiens) August 25, 2017
What he said (12)
August 23, 2017I believe both these idiots have the freedom to say what they want. But they are still assholes and I hate them equally. #America pic.twitter.com/XIKxJAuPWS
— Tim Kennedy (@TimKennedyMMA) August 13, 2017
Word from the Terminator
August 21, 2017"The party of Lincoln" indeed. Poor old Abe is likely spinning in his grave.
.@Schwarzenegger has a blunt message for Nazis. pic.twitter.com/HAbnejahtl
— ATTN: (@attn) August 17, 2017
Heh…
August 3, 2017I love a good pun.
At least President Trump has helped American socialists realize their dream of a classless society.
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) August 2, 2017
The rise of victimhood on campus
March 8, 2017Here’s an interesting excerpt from a presentation given by Jonathon Haidt last October at Duke University.
The full, hour-long presentation was called “Two incompatible sacred values in American universities“, if you care to watch it.
Haidt’s comments reminded me of ones by Thomas Sowell in this clip from an C-SPAN interview in 1990. This clip is a 13-minute excerpt (also by YouTuber Gravitahn).
Here’s the full, hour-long C-SPAN interview.
Update: And here’s a third excerpt; this one’s from Nadine Strossen’s keynote address at a conference held by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). Ms. Strossen was formerly the president of the ACLU.
Strossen’s full presentation (42 minutes).
Since I don’t spend any time on college campuses, nor much time around college students, I can’t say how accurate these assessments and recommendations are from first-hand knowledge.
But I find these interesting because they seem to agree with so much of what I read in the daily news. It’s always possible that the news is full of hyperbole, of course, but there seems to be a lot of reports on this topic and they tend to agree with one another, regardless of their sources.
More on language
March 5, 2017Here’s Jonathon Pie (Tom Walker) with another good rant.
Mind the volume; Jonathon gets a little salty – as usual.
Tweet of the week
February 26, 2017Re Bannon: Does GOP understand that "economic nationalism" inevitably builds up the administrative state they claim to want to destroy?
— Bret Stephens (@StephensWSJ) February 26, 2017
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I think this is a great question for GOP senators and representatives. Do they understand that?
But the more important question is: what are their priorities? Economic nationalism or a smaller administrative state? Which one will we see more of?
No Truce With Kings 