I've always wanted to live-blog a movie.

Not sure when -- maybe Wednesday; gotta check with the cobloggers -- but we have to do a live-blog of Derrick Bell's Space Traders.

Gotta.

Unfortunately it's only 35 minutes long. Maybe we'll have ten minute intermissions to discuss what we've learned so far.

Here's part one.

I just asked John Sexton if Breitbart saw this before he died. He said he had, as they'd had this for some time.

So, at least he got to see this.
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Posted by: Ace at 03:17 PM | Comments (328)
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I forget who said that. I think it's insightful and correct.

There are two functions of real insurance: hedging against a risk and risk-sharing for those risks we choose to share.

One in ten thousand people might suffer rectal cancer. It probably makes sense for most people, on a voluntary basis, to decide (voluntarily) to pay in a little money for insurance so that if they suffer such a catastrophic and expensive illness, they'll be covered.

If they're one of the lucky ones -- well, they're out a little bit of money, but they are one of the lucky ones.

Insurance makes sense in this situation, for most people, as most people would like to reduce the impact of serious risks that strike like lightning. They are unpredictable, and when they hit, they require major changes in lifestyle. Most people -- especially with children, who must be planned for whether their parents are sick or healthy, alive for dead -- are willing to pay a little into an insurance pool to manage this risk.

On the other hand there are things which are not risks: Cost of housing. Food costs. Voluntary contraception costs. These are not risks, as the "odds" such costs will be incurred is 100%, and hence cannot be "insured" against.

Do you want to eat? You're going to have to budget for food. No one can insure you against the possibility you might need food.

You can buy some kind of food plan -- like they have at college eating halls, or diet companies like The Zone offer -- but that's not "insurance." That's just you paying for the cost of food, plus production and transportation costs, plus profit.

But increasingly we are going to see advocates like Sandra Fluke insist that each and every cost of everyday, workaday livin' be "insured" in some manner.

That each of these costs will have to be cross-subsidized.

That's just socialism, of course. If Man A and Man B are forced, by law, to pool costs, and pay for each other's costs, they're socializing each other's costs of living.

Now insurance isn't socialism, but it does have that socialism-like feature of risk-pooling and cost-sharing. What makes it "not socialism" is the fact that it applies only to catastrophic, rare, or unpredictable costs -- costs which are actually quite small per capita, because while the costs of cancer treatment are very high, fortunately very few people suffer from such a horrible disease.

And what makes it "not socialism" is that insurance contracts are entered into on a voluntarily basis. If the costs of insuring a risk are too high, people don't buy the product. It's cheaper to just absorb the cost.

But when you have "risk pools" paying everyone out for costs that are incurred every single day, it becomes very expensive indeed, because while the cost-per-purchase are low, if everyone is drawing out of the pool on a daily basis, that's a lot of money.

At this point, they're not "risk pools" of course. It's just a kind of Commune system. You take from the Pile of Free Money what you need, I'll take what I need.

This is an attractive proposition for those who have little money and high costs. For those who have some money, and manageable costs, well, their costs are now quite high because they're now paying for everyone in the country.

But this is how socialism will insinuate itself further and further into our lives: Virtually every expense that one incurs in one's daily life -- costs one once simply paid for out of pocket (what a hateful, retrograde idea!) -- will be moved into the pile of things we must be "insured against," and for which we must all "pool our risks" and cross-subsidize each other.

The endgame is just that no one actually pays for anything; the government, or a co-opted government-controlled industry which provides the functions of a socialist government ("insurance companies" which no longer insure anything, but merely send checks to people), simply takes over almost all costs in life.

And there we are.

Posted by: Ace at 01:58 PM | Comments (184)
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Polling numbers eight months ahead of election day rarely tell you the whole story.
Indeed, they will tell you conflicting stories as the state of American politics is fluid and always vulnerable to the unexpected.

Sometimes, the numbers turn downright schizophrenic.

Take, for example, Rasmussen.

I have a love-hate-hate-love-straight razor relationship with Rasmussen (and PPP, Marist, Quinnipiac, SurveyUSA, Zogby, Ipsos, PPIC, WNC, and every other company out there).

If you react to polling numbers as I do, like a child with attention deficit disorder, each new release is yet another big shiny thing. When the polls diverge, the usual response is confusion. When every poll contradicts the other, you may react like that guy who challenged Michael Ironside to a goofy faces contest in Scanners.

Sometimes, a polling firm will warp from a news source into your homless cousin who talks to the cats that aren't there. Take today's three releases, and tell me in 10 words or less what the hell are we looking at:
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Posted by: CAC at 01:50 PM | Comments (26)
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A video blasts the left's double-standards on "misogyny."

Whether or not any of this is "misogyny" I don't know. I know the left calls it that-- when they want to divert the country's attention from the 9.1% unemployment rate. (Whoops-- that's what the independent gold-standard survey organization Gallup found it was. Obama's own Shop of Understanding Accountants found it was 8.3%, as I guessed they would.)

I'd call it "mean jokes," myself. And generally comedians (or just anyone, acting as a comic) can tell them.

Except when the left decides you can't. Then it's the Worst Thing Ever.

And yet they never call out their own.

Allah's Quotes of the Day from last night features Kristen Powers making this obvious point.

“It’s not true that liberals never call out people for misogyny!” is the refrain. Of course it’s not true, and I never said it was. Many of the professional left seem incapable of distinguishing between a few blog posts and comments condemning left-wing misogyny and a full-scale war to remove someone from their job. This really shouldn’t be so hard to grasp: If you hate misogyny and sexism in the media, then react to the consistent and repeated misogyny of men on the left with the same fervor that you have reacted to Rush Limbaugh’s sickening outbursts.

President Obama has seen fit to wade into the Limbaugh kerfuffle, even telling reporters Tuesday that Limbaugh’s behavior was an attack on everyone’s daughter and “I do not want them attacked or called horrible names.” Speaking of daughters, do you remember when Bill Maher said that the real name of then-20-year-old Bristol Palin’s book should be “Whoops, There’s a Dick in Me?”

While there might have been a CYA tut-tut offered sotto voce over Maher's, or Letterman's, or Olbermann's, or Shultz's, or Taibbi's nasty jokes, there definitely was not this two week long -- and counting -- Flood the Zone coverage of it.

The media still chooses what the national debate will be about. I sort of think the 9.1% unemployment rate and $1.7 trillion annual deficits are worth talking about.

Team Obama thinks we should talk about what a Big Meanie Limbaugh is, and, shockingly enough, the media agrees. Even generally fair-minded reporters like Jake Tapper agree that Limbaugh's gag is worth two weeks of "debate" about, whereas the right strained to even get anyone in the media to take notice of Maher's twat-bombs and c-bombs.

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Posted by: Ace at 01:19 PM | Comments (110)
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They're not even making any sense.

The writer claims, at the end, that this episode is proof of the media's vigilance in vetting Obama in 2008.

He ignores the fact that the book he relies on for this proposition was published two years after that.

Meanwhile, Obama's favorite theorist to assign students when he was serving as a fake professor of law was, of course, Derrick Bell.

Open your hearts.

Is Derrick Bell really a racialist radical? Thomas Sowell thinks so. Video at the link, but here's what he says:

LAMB: [Derrick Bell] Threatened the law school if they didn't hire a black woman, he's going, he's leaving?

SOWELL: Well, if I understand it correctly, he's taking unpaid leave until such time as they hire a woman of color, as he says. Well, he's also said that by black, he does not mean skin color, he means those who are really black, not those who think white and look black. And so what he is really saying is he wants ideological conformity in the people that are hired to fill this position. That's not uncommon either. I know a black woman, for example, who had a Ph.D. -- she's had a book published, she has another contract on another book, she's taught at a couple of very nice places, she has a devil of a time getting a job -- not a job in a prestigious institution, a job teaching at a college. And the reason is that she gets shot down, blackballed, whatever, by people who don't like her ideology. That's happening not only racially, it's also happening where race is not an issue. In a law school, I learned recently, there's a woman who was being considered for a tenured position, and all the men voted for her and all the woman voted against her, because she does not follow radical feminism, and so you're getting these ideological tests, so that at the very time that there's all this mouthing of the word diversity, there is this extremely narrow ideological conformity that is being enforced wherever people have the power to enforce it.

LAMB: What did you think of Derrick Bell's whole plan?

SOWELL: Well, his chances of success will depend on whether or not he has overestimated his importance to the Harvard Law School. I think it would be a tragedy if they caved in, and I was very pleased to see that they seemed to show some backbone, which is quite rare among academics.

LAMB: Now, what do you think of the press treatment of him?

SOWELL: It's been quite gentle.

LAMB: You mean, is he a hero?

SOWELL: To me?

LAMB: No. Basically, I mean, from the press coverage, you've seen, is he a hero to the ...?

SOWELL: Well, he's looked at as an idealist who is self-sacrificing and so on. I suppose one could, if one wanted to look at it that way, have seen Hitler that way in his early days. It's just a question of where that kind of idealism leads. He has launched a despicable attack on a young black professor at the law school who doesn't go along with this. A young man named Randall Kennedy, who has written a very thoughtful, intelligent article last June in the Harvard Law Review, questioning some of the assumptions that people are making, people like Derrick Bell and doing it in a very gentlemanly as well as very logical way, empirical way, and that's not what they want. They want the conclusion to be that -- they want him to march in lock step and he won't do it, and they're doing their best to make life impossible for him.

Posted by: Ace at 12:49 PM | Comments (109)
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Apparently Christie's planning to fold the Rutgers (Camden) Campus into nearby Rowan University. I imagine this is a cost-saving move.

It might even be a prestige-increasing move, as there are three Rutgers campuses (another in New Brunswick, another in Newark) but the actual Rutgers is in New Brunswick. The other two seem to have been "branded" Rutgers or something.

I don't know.

So a second year law student at Camden, representing himself as a former SEAL, complained. Current students would still graduate with "Rutgers" on their diplomas. I guess that's the important thing (though is the Rutgers name actually worth much?).

He started asking, "What about my kids?" or something. Like, what about my kids who twenty years from now hypothetically go to a college called Rowan, not Rutgers. Will their degrees say Rutgers on them, Governor?

Um, no. If it's that important to them maybe they should Dream Big and apply to Rutgers.

Anyway, Christie got very hot with him, and called him an idiot.

Update: John Lilyea from This Ain't Hell checked with his Fake SEAL Busting sources and says this guy is definitely a SEAL.

Kind of whiny though. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (410)
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Absolute moral authority, but with a dose of campaign professionalism added.

We don't know if Anita Dunn is directly involved, but she works for the PR agency Fluke has hired.

Now, late today we found out that Ms. Fluke is now being repped by the progressive PR agency SKDKnickerbocker where Anita Dunn, the former Obama communications director is the managing editor... a-ha.

So, this whole deal comes back to the White House, at least indirectly.

Posted by: Ace at 11:02 AM | Comments (114)
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Posted by: andy at 09:52 AM | Comments (289)
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It's only "good" if you don't expect much. Welcome to the new normal.

The nationÂ’s unemployment rate remained unchanged at 8.3 percent in February despite better-than-expected job growth, according to government data released Friday.

The Labor Department said that the economy added 227,000 jobs last month. The gain was led by jobs in the professional and business services sector — many of them temporary positions — and the health care industry. Government employment held steady in February after shedding an average of 22,000 jobs per month last year. The number of jobs added in January was also revised upward to 284,000.

Just for fun, compare this "Happy Days are Here Again" coverage to how some in the media covered 4.7% unemployment under Bush.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:25 AM | Comments (388)
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Friday!

Posted by: andy at 02:27 AM | Comments (452)
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