My only question is: Why is it that this tugs at the heartstrings, and yet millions of human beings do the same thing with cute tiny human beings every single day and we shrug? And lots of humans help other adult humans too, and we consider that admirable, but we're not emotionally moved by it. Are we too jaded to appreciate human altruism? Or is there so much of it we don't recognize it for what it is?

No kidding, there are Miracles all around us that we miss.
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Posted by: Ace at 04:06 PM | Comments (183)
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I'm learning, by the way: This video is auto-play (and blares hardcore Afro-French rap) so I'm linking it rather than embedding it. The video isn't particularly spectacular so don't click if you're only marginally interested.

Here's an article about it in French; it doesn't say too much, except that a dozen participated in the attack, and three, aged 14-17, have been arrested. They're charged with dangerous destruction of property but not attempted murder.

For a possible preview of our own future, the article also contains the euphemism "Sensitive Zone," referring to the area they come from, which I believe means "Riot-Heavy No-Go Zone."

Thanks to "Golem Bar."

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Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (228)
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Piers "Geraldo" Morgan got a little roughed up last night and is very butthurt about it today. Warning: Auto-Play Video.

Via Hot Air, a Washington Post blogger calls the fight early.

Where Jones proved needy of a background screening, Shapiro was rational and on point. Where Jones failed to directly address MorganÂ’s points, Shapiro went right at them. Where Jones monologued, Shapiro got through his points quickly and shut up.

Shapiro made a point whose power was initially lost on me, so, personally, I'd like to see this fleshed out completely so that no one else misses it:

SHAPIRO: This is what I wanted to ask you, Piers, because I have seen you talk about assault weapons a lot, and I have seen Mark Kelly talk about assault weapons. The vast majority of murders in this country that are committed with guns are committed with handguns, they are not committed assault weapons. Are you willing to ban handguns in this country, across this country?

MORGAN: No, thatÂ’s not what IÂ’m asking for.

SHAPIRO: Why not? DonÂ’t you care about the kids who are being killed in Chicago as much as the kids in Sandy Hook?

To continue that: If Morgan says he defends the right of people to own handguns because counterveiling considerations demand it -- namely, the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms and engage in self-defense -- why is Morgan's acceptance of some murder (due to an important external consideration) praiseworthy whereas a stronger 2nd Amendment advocate's exact same position, applied to so-called "assault weapons," is callous and extreme?

In both situations someone is accepting a moral evil (gun deaths) because a related moral good (the right to bear arms) has priority. Morgan draws a line and says on one side of it (his own) are the righteous and the caring, but on the other side of it are the corrupt, the delusional, the paranoid and the muder-coddling. But in fact Morgan's exception for handguns results in far, far more actual murders than Shapiro's exception for "assault weapons." (A category I know doesn't exactly exist in gun terminology but this is the made-up terminology they're using.)

Anyway, great point, lost on me at first. Probably lost on others as well.

CNN is behaving in a very MSNBC-like fashion as its producers are now denigrating Ben Shapiro -- an invited guest, invited by the network to do precisely what he did, that is, offer a reasoned and strong defense of gun rights -- as a lunatic, simply because he damaged their dubious Musket Morgan brand by showing him up.

CNN is laying down its policy: Anyone who effectively disputes its foppish idiot version of Jerry Springer will be subject to a negative publicity campaign by its "objective newsman" staffers. (Also: CNN is offering l'esprit d'escalier on behalf of their purple-bruised star employee, or "staircase wit" -- "The jerkstore just called, and it's all out of you. The winner of a debate doesn't need third parties to rush in and make collateral attacks on the other guy.)

A few years back CNN announced its big attempt at brand differentiation from the other cable networks: It would offer more objective "hard reporting" and less partisan shouting and political theater.

But it's now putting all its chips on a disgraced former tabloid editor and Reality TV show whore. And what's even stranger is that Piers Morgan's ratings are very low and is show is always on the bubble of possible cancellation.

Which should tell you something about CNN's politics, in case you weren't quite sure about them. Because I guarantee you CNN would not be straining to prop up a right-leaning carnival barker who was getting abysmal ratings and losing the company money.

And not so ironically -- while CNN claims to want a more reasoned, fact-based discussion of the issues, the moment Ben Shapiro offers just that, they go into PR overdrive to brand him a maniac.

They claim they want discussions like Shapiro offered -- but in fact they want the political theater of Alex Jones, hapless pro-wrestler tomato-cans that Piers Morgan actually has a shot at beating. As Michael Moynihan says,

These are the intellectual equivalents of Mike TysonÂ’s post-prison boxing matches; a chump fight, designed to make the former champ look good.

Update: I deleted the auto-play video. It's now clickable in the first paragraph, above. But still auto-play, of course.

Posted by: Ace at 10:57 AM | Comments (325)
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Congratulations-- you now need to find a second job to make up hours, and that one will also not provide health benefits.

So you now have a serious scheduling problem on your hands.

Posted by: Ace at 10:35 AM | Comments (193)
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Now that Booker's eyeing up statewide posts, and perhaps one day even a national one, he talks a reasonable moderate game on gun control, saying he doesn't fear a gun in the hands of a law-abiding citizen.

But when he had a narrower constituency to appease, he had a different position.

Watching Cory Booker in a 2000 interview with C-SPAN. Asked if he wants to ban guns: "I would, if I had the power to do so, I would."

Video at the link.

Booker is meanwhile running for Frank Lautenberg's Senate seat -- but he forgot to tell Frank Lautenberg about that, and is now in the uncomfortable position of having to ask Pop-Pop to step aside after having already announced he'd push him over the cliff.

If he had the power to do so, I mean.

Of course, this being New Jersey, Democratic primaries are more advisory than binding.

Posted by: Ace at 10:20 AM | Comments (68)
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Alright! Thank God it's Friday. But all is not well here. Looks like the flu bug has hit my humble abode. Oh well. Let's start off the ONT with a little Ode To The Pug.
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Posted by: CDR M at 06:00 PM | Comments (737)
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West Virginia's a bit odd. They vote Republican in presidential elections but in the last two major statewide races they picked the so-called "conservative Democrat" in both. Like many of the Great Plains states, their conservatism seems to be mostly social -- they seem to like some government intervention in economic affairs -- so any Democrat that calls himself pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life can win.

And then do things like vote for ObamaCare and taxpayer support of abortion and gun control and etc. And like the voters never seem to notice this pattern, but just vote for the next Democrat calling himself pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life.

But hope springs eternal.

Posted by: Ace at 09:29 AM | Comments (220)
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From CBD in the sidebar, Buchanan developed a theory which probably strikes you now as common sense but at one time was controversial.

The economic school he founded, known as public-choice theory, casts a skeptical eye on government officials and bureaucrats and points out that their work might serve the public less than a very private enterprise.

Previously economists had not studied the operations of government (at least not using the economic tools and assumptions of each person seeking to maximize his own wealth/power), believing government to be outside the scope of economic analysis. This cleared the field, at least intellectually, for political scientists to consider public policy choices in the same terms that politicians described them, that is, sanctimoniously, romantically, with the assumption that any public policy choice was about "the good."

Buchanan rejected that and applied the assumptions of economics -- political actors are self-concerned and act to maximize their own position -- and thus demystified and demythologized the Great Men of Politics, as conventional academic thought would term them.

I have always wondered whether Buchanan turned to the study of sanctimonious government officials and their interests because he spent time in graduate school on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1940s (the neighborhood where I was later born). Hyde Park was lively, but uneven. Little shops along 55th Street, just north of the university, might thrive, but poor black migrants crowded together in apartments with insufficient heat during the cityÂ’s tough winters.

Buchanan earned his doctorate in 1948, about the time the politicians and other civic leaders promised that bulldozing large swaths of the neighborhood and creating new public-private projects would yield a better Hyde Park, prettier and more racially integrated.

But the result felt wrong, especially to residents. The new apartment buildings, in the minimalist international style, themselves felt as cold as winter. Instead of bringing people together, they separated them: One complex quickly became known as Monoxide Island. With the stores gone, there was less life on the streets. Yet Hyde Park locals lacked the vocabulary to criticize the transformation we had been told was progress or reform. Who wants to be construed as “pro-slum”?

Buchanan supplied that vocabulary. Instead of calling urban renewal “reform,” as the officials did, he called it “politics.” It was important, he said, that all such projects, whether urban renewal in Chicago or elsewhere, be viewed honestly, that we look at “politics without romance.”

The housing redevelopment in Hyde Park worked to the advantage of certain interest groups, political or business. Yet the high-and-mighty tone of the anti-slum language masked something. No party involved was any better or any worse than anyone else: They were all pursuing their own interests. Politicians often promoted such ugly ambitious projects not because the projects were good. They did so because the projects enabled politicians to award contracts to important campaign donors.

It seems an obvious point now -- so obvious it doesn't even seem like it needs a full-fledged economic theory to support it -- but in fact he had to depart one university (the University of Virginia) because his heresies bothered the other professors there, who were thralls in the Cult of the Kennedys.

Per Wikipedia, the concept of "rent-seeking" flowed out of the public-choice school (though I don't know if Buchanan himself developed it, or if it was developed by other economists working on the theory):

A field that is closely related to public choice is "rent-seeking". This field combines the study of a market economy with that of government. Thus, one might regard it as a "new political economy." Its basic thesis is that when both a market economy and government are present, government agents provide numerous special market privileges. Both the government agents and self-interested market participants seek these privileges in order to partake in the resulting monopoly rent. When such privileges are granted, they reduce the efficiency of the economic system. In addition, the rent-seekers use resources that could otherwise be used to produce goods that are valued by consumers.

Again, very obvious... in retrospect. But there once was a world in which liberal academics took the claims of liberal politicians at face value.

Um.... I guess it's the same today. So putting it a different way: There once was a world in which liberal academics took the sanctimonious claims of liberal politicians at face value, and wasn't even any minority, contrarian theory to oppose them.

Posted by: Ace at 08:44 AM | Comments (130)
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In short, nothing good.

Message-sending. Obama won reelection. He no longer has to trim, to appear more moderate than his true instincts. He has the “flexibility” to be authentically Obama.

Hence the Hagel choice: Under the guise of centrist bipartisanship, it allows the president to leave the constrained first-term Obama behind and follow his natural Hagel-like foreign policy inclinations.

...

Hagel himself doesn’t matter. He won’t make foreign policy. Obama will run it out of the White House even more tightly than he did in the first term. Hagel’s importance is the message his nomination sends about where Obama wants to go. The lessons are being duly drawn. Iran’s official media have already cheered the choice of what they call this “anti-Israel” nominee. And they fully understand what his nomination signals regarding administration resolve about stopping them from going nuclear.

The rest of the world can see coming the Pentagon downsizing — and the inevitable, commensurate decline of U.S. power. Pacific Rim countries will have to rethink reliance on the counterbalance of the U.S. Navy and consider acquiescence to Chinese regional hegemony. Arab countries will understand that the current rapid decline of post-Kissinger U.S. dominance in the region is not cyclical but intended to become permanent.

Related: Byron York makes the case that there are certainly efficiencies and savings to be found in the defense budget.

Maintaining national security requires underwriting a lot of departments: Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and countless others. But looking just at the Defense Department, the Obama administration this year plans to spend (without sequestration) $550 billion on the basic operations of the Pentagon, plus $88 billion specifically on the war in Afghanistan -- a total of $638 billion.

Back in 2007, the Pentagon's base budget was just $431 billion, with $132 billion added for the war in Iraq and $34 billion for Afghanistan -- a total of $597 billion. Given that it was a peak year for war spending in Iraq, in part because of a costly troop surge, is there any reason the U.S. should be spending more on the Pentagon's base budget today, adjusted for inflation, than it did in 2007?

"If we go back to '07, we had the Army we have today, and it was surging in Iraq, with all the logistical support it needed," says one senior GOP Senate aide. "No one in '07 was screaming that we didn't have enough money for the military."

Republicans and conservatives shouldn't treat the defense budget as sacrosanct but letting Obama and Hagel use this opportunity to redefine our defense posture is dangerous and will have repercussions far into the future.

Republicans agreed to sequestration and Americans elected Barack Obama twice. It's the perfect storm of idiocy.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:58 AM | Comments (270)
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• NRA President: Congress Won't Ban So-Called Assault Weapons
  
• Dems Trying To Drive Wedge Between Limbaugh And The GOP
  
• Ben Shapiro Did A Good Job On Piers Morgan Last Night
  
• White House Now Considering Funding Police At Schools
  
• Former Abortion Lobbyist Nabbed In Pedophile Sex Sting
  
• Caveman's Assault Weapon For Sale On Ebay
  
• Electronic Systems Have Not Reduced Healthcare Cost
  
• Top U.S. General: Stopping A Syrian Chemical Attack Is Unachievable
  
• The Anonymous Style Threat To Expose More Journalists Personal Information Continues
  
• The Blue States Are Getting Bluer
  
• A California Drought: Not Enough Children
  
• Man Releases Mouse Into The Wild Only To See It Picked Off By A Hawk(video)
  
• Americans Prefer Genghis Khan To Congress
  
• Bloomberg To Restrict Pain Killers In Hospitals
  
• Police Have Kids Sign Non-Violence Pledge Only To Get Handwriting Samples
  
• Egyptian Pound Plummets
  
• Obama Signs Law Giving Him And Bush Lifetime Secret Service Protection
  
• Gangster Squad Review
  

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:25 AM | Comments (476)
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