Own it. Say what you mean.

"The president is going to act," said Biden, giving some comments to the press before a meeting with victims of gun violence. "There are executives orders, there's executive action that can be taken. We haven't decided what that is yet. But we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required."

Same guy who railed against signing statements for subtly proposing to change the law but without the constitutional process for changing the law. Mr. Platinum Coins, Mr. Fast & Furious, Mr. Executive Action on Guns.

See Drudge for a headline that gets to the point.

Posted by: Ace at 08:52 AM | Comments (557)
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I was just writing about this basic idea yesterday (and I've written about it a lot, and I'm sure you've noticed it plenty on your own).

As I mentioned with regard to Piers Morgan, there is a certain level of pride that attaches to being ignorant of those one considers his inferiors. After all, it's the natural duty of the simple shopkeeper to know the names of the Great Lords, but it is not the duty of the Great Lords to know the names of the shopkeepers. In fact, it's the Great Lords' class obligation to go out of their way not to know the names of the shopkeepers, because this Duty to Know flows in one direction -- upwards -- and hence ignorance of one's lessers tends to solidify and reify the assumptions of certain castes being superior to others. It makes certain that everyone understands who's important, and who's not.

(I know, I sound like a communist-- I can't help it. I have to agree with Dennis the Peasant -- "I mean, class is what it's all about." I guess I would say I'm agreeing with the communist critique of the rigid reification of class structures, but I happen to think the communists and their pink fellow travelers have largely captured the upper classes. I guess by my theory they're so good at this because they've spent so long plotting vengeance for the exact same slights (which they largely imagined). In a similar way they've gotten quite good at blacklisting and guilt-by-association, eh?)

At any rate, it is your duty to know the values and customs of living of Piers Morgan, but due to his high station (ahem) he is proudly ignorant of yours. As is so often the case in our increasingly dysfunctional and nasty politics -- in which certain parties refuse to even admit that their opponents are free citizens entitled to have beliefs at all -- the Out-Classes are deemed all-but-officially Beneath Notice.

Michael Totten has written a crackerjack piece -- or at least I think it is -- about this principle in action among our foreign policy sages, the internationalist "elite." He detects the exact same sort of phenomenon going on when the International "elite" visit foreign nations -- because anyone who doesn't share 90% of their cultural values (and the wealth that permits/encourages these values -- the International Elite is not middle-class!) is beneath notice and not worth knowing about, they don't bother asking anyone but the 3% of the population which largely shares their beliefs and cultural inputs about their intentions and their political agenda.

Which means, in Egypt, they only ask the jet-setting wealthy Westernized elite about the prognosis for Egyptian democracy. And in Lebanon, they only ask the educated, urbane population of Beirut about their desires for the country.

And they ignore all the "Dirty People," the low people who aren't worth networking with and probably wouldn't be any fun to have a sexual affair with. Unfortunately -- and this has huge consequences for American foreign policy -- it turns out those Dirty Poor People greatly, greatly outnumber the small coteries of educated elites that cluster in every capital country.

And we don't know about them, because they're Beneath Notice, and our elites are too busy clinking champagne glasses in the main ballroom of the local Ritz-Carlton franchise.

And so our "elites" -- and honestly, we need to start looking for a more accurate discriptor -- come back with completely-wrong information about foreign countries.

Why, as Totten says (changing the words a bit), "All of these Egyptians are swell, educated, moderate, sexually-loose cosmopolitans! Why, democracy has a smashing chance of working out here!"

Yeah, not so much. Not so much.

Yet Another Example... of our current practice of making important policy decisions based upon little except the learned habit of ostentatious class disdain.

You notice that at this late date, with a major policy campaign against the dreaded Semi. Automatic. Weapon., that most of these guys still haven't bothered to discover what a semi-automatic is?

That's a learned habit. They are signalling to other members of their class (or the class they aspire to) that they consider such knowledge base, the sort of thing known by the dirty callous-handed illiterates of the rabble and certainly not by the Lords of Intellect.

I mean, it's like a recipe for 'Possum Stew. To even know the thing would reduce you in status. Knowledge about guns is something the lower classes have; the criminal class, the agrarian workers (the peasantry), the lesser Servitor Classes of policemen and armed guards and military betas.

What could possibly explain such ignorance at this point, except a calculated, learned ignorance of the habits of one's putative lessers?

Posted by: Ace at 07:36 AM | Comments (481)
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Gawker, a meritless hit-whoring hype site written by, and written for, the dim and the malignant, decided they weren't getting enough attention and published another list of legal gun owners, these located in Manhattan. (The last attention-shriek by the small no-account newspaper published names and addresses of those in Westchester County.)

Ann Althouse links the story without linking Gawker, instead linking the Daily Mail talking about Gawker's latest calculated attention-seeking outrage.

Which is, as Instapundit says, the right way to do it.

The list of people who are quite certain they are worthy of your attention grows daily.

For God's sake, Gawker isn't even original about it. They just do the same damn thing someone did last week, and try to dress it up as novel.

I have an idea: Sites that do this, that do nothing but Search Engine Optimization sort of crap, should just implement a fully automated system, no human thinking involved. Why be dishonest about things? Just straight up take human thought officially out of the process. At least then we'll have a computer to blame, and we'll be spared of having to feel embarrassed for a human.

Posted by: Ace at 06:40 AM | Comments (257)
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• ESPN Fires Racist Rob Parker
  
• Obama Groupie Hammers Hagel
  
• How The Fact Checking Press Gives Obama A Pass
  
• Apparently Michael Moore Still Exists And He Wants You To Know That
  
• David Bowie Releases First New Single In Ten Years
  
• Iowa Lawmaker Calls For Retroactive Gun Ban
  
• DC Attorney General's Office To Investigate David Gregory
  
• People Laugh At Piers Morgan, But Making Alex Jones Appear As The Representative For Gun Rights Was A Brilliant Move
  
• MSNBC Guest Calls Sandy Hook Victims "Little Martyrs" For Gun Control
  
• MattKibbe Addresses GOP Division And Groups Recent Split With Dick Armey
  
• Glenn Beck Set To Relaunch The Blaze As A Libertarian News Network
  
• Teachers In Ohio And Texas Flock To Free Firearm Training Classes
  
• Xi Jinping Faces First Real Test On Freedom Of Speech
  
• Pakistan's Revenge? Indian Soldier "Mutilated" And Killed
  
• The Tom Harkin Institute Of Cronyism
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:16 AM | Comments (218)
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Happy Wednesday.

If you, like me, were disgusted by ex-FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey's decision to give execrable troll-site Media Matters an interview dishing on FreedomWorks, you'll be relieved, or something, to hear that Dick Armey didn't even realize he was talking to Media Matters even though the interviewer clearly identified himself. Armey thought he was talking to the Media Research Center. This, to me, sounds like an admission that it's time to retire.

Democrats are still freaking out over the notion that if you raise the cost of labor, you get less of it. I haven't eaten at Wendy's before, but I could be persuaded.

Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal has a provocative column on the platinum coin trick. I spent a good chunk of yesterday explaining on Twitter that although the coin trick is a stupid, bad idea, it isn't illegal, nor is it unconstitutional, as some have argued. Quite simply, if Congress can delegate authority to Treasury to print $20 bills, it can delegate authority to mint a platinum proof coin. (And, in fact, it did in 31 U.S.C. sec. 5112.)

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:51 AM | Comments (326)
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Due to confluence of deadlines, random events, unscheduled meetings and a general sense of ennui tonight's ONT will be le dérisoire.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:17 PM | Comments (661)
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"The Enron scandal grew out of a steady accumulation of habits and values and actions that began years before and finally spiraled out of control." ~ McLean & Elkind, The Smartest Guys In the Room

Once upon a time, Enron had a real business that made real profits. They differentiated themselves from their competitors and stood atop the world, briefly, as one of the most successful, highly regarded and innovative enterprises ever. Then the roof caved in.

Or at least that's how it appeared, anyway.

In reality, as books like The Smartest Guys In the Room and Conspiracy of Fools well document, their focus changed rather early on from engaging in transactions that were good for the business economically to doing transactions that would best window-dress the financial statements by gaming the rules, accumulating massive amounts of debt along the way.

Their use of mark-to-market accounting was blamed, yet it was officially blessed by the SEC. Their hidden debt, masked by layers of special-purpose entities, was (mostly) accounted for within the rules, too, although they were straining at the outer edges.

Those rules, though, were made by man. The rules of economics, whether applied to companies or governments, are forces of nature that don't care that the FASB said 3% outside ownership in an SPE was sufficient to take it off balance sheet or that congress, in its infinite wisdom, created a loophole for the treasury secretary to mint an enormously-labeled platinum coin so the government can keep on spending.

When the end comes, it comes quickly.

"We were so sure of what we were doing and where we were going," one executive who attended [Enron's] San Antonio meeting said. "We didn't know we were living on borrowed time."

I couldn't help but think of Enron as I read the Business Insider piece Gabe linked yesterday, where the Smartest Guys In The Room are saying that the government can do this trillion dollar coin trick and keep the checks going out the door forever with no negative or unforeseen consequences.

"It's a one time thing", they say, ignoring the fact that we'll run a trillion dollar deficit this year that eats up the newly-minted room under the debt ceiling. Then what?

Mint another coin, I guess.

Meanwhile we'll continue to slog along at ~7%-8% U3 unemployment and ~2% real GDP growth (or lower, when you factor the government's deficit spending out of that number) because the tricks and gimmicks aren't really fooling anyone.

Most of the commentary on the trillion dollar coin idea has focused on its legality. That's the wrong question. The right question is: "Is this a wise thing to do?" And the answer is a resounding, "NO!"

So look for the Obama administration to press forward with it.

See also: Megan McArdle, Washington Goes Platinum

Seemingly, the most important thing is for the president to defeat intransigent Republicans—even if that means that the president “for all Americans” who once spoke of winning the future and healing the planet will be reduced to presiding over the Franklin Mint.

Posted by: andy at 06:00 AM | Comments (283)
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Nice thought.

One of the central weaknesses of radicalism is that radicals seem to lose track of the causes and foundations of the things even they value. They donÂ’t understand that peace is always and everywhere the end result of superior firepower, improved health the result of greater wealth, wealth the result of hardheaded and often greedy business dealing, and liberty deeply linked to a specific concept of manÂ’s relationship to God. They never consider that it may at least be questionable whether the cornerstone can be removed without the structure toppling over.

Conversely, one of the central weaknesses of conservatism is that conservatives see all too clearly how every good thing we have is linked to everything else. They can trace in a moment how any change in the system might lead to disaster. Expand the definition of marriage and civilization falls. Raise taxes and end up in chains. Allow women to vote and government will become an all-embracing over-protective mother state infantilizing the population. Okay, maybe that last oneÂ’s true, but you see what IÂ’m getting at.

...

Things, in other words, are almost as bad as they always are.

But while there are cycles and phases in history — and while everything made by mortals surely dies — modernity has shown itself full of unique moments and last minute rescues. I think of New York City before Giuliani; America before Reagan. Things can look pretty damn dark before the sun comes over the hill.

Posted by: Ace at 04:20 PM | Comments (363)
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Erika Johnson has a theory I like.

Quoting Reuters:

BidenÂ’s task force is examining legislation that would ban assault rifles, but is also looking at the role of violent movies and videogames in mass shootings and whether there is adequate access to mental health services.

Biden and his task force are slated to hold meeting this week with victims of gun violence, gun safety groups, hunting groups, and gun owners, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

“His group will also meet with representatives of the entertainment and video-game industries,” Carney said.

Allah's theory? They're floating this notion, that they just might come cracking down on Hollywood and Silicon Valley (is that a thing anymore?), in order to mau-mau them into giving them lots of media support for their gun-banning agenda.

In any case of a lunatic killing people with guns to live out his power fantasies, the fantasy industry blames the gun industry and the gun industry blames the fantasy industry. It's hardly a surprise that Obama will side with the fantasy industry, as he likes them and hates gun owners.

The only knock against the theory is that these people were almost all on Obama's side in the first place.

I suppose we'll have some minor new thing, some more ratings or whatnot, and an agreement in the entertainment industry for "voluntary" restraint (and any restraint which is exercised to head off the implied threat of actual censorship isn't voluntary, by the way).

This will be a fig leaf. Obama seeks to take away Americans' rights and will sell the idea that he is a man of moderation by also taking away some rights to free expression. See? A "balanced approach."

More: I speculated yesterday that NBC is already fishing in troubled waters -- trying to get CBS roughed up by the government for its violent programming, and thus to better position itself to finally move out of fourth place.

Given that Obama's talking this way, I think my speculation is reasonable.

Posted by: Ace at 01:54 PM | Comments (282)
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Alas, my regular diet of bacon came to an abrupt end Monday morning in an aseptic room with bright lights and knockout juice. After months of painful attacks, my gall bladder was yanked out, and with it, my ability to gorge on pound after pound of succulent pork belly.

Just before the surgery, the wife surprised me with a trip to what will be your favorite bacon spot in Southern California the entire world. A fitting trip, as it would be my last bacon hurrah.

I could do a thread on the beer selection alone, but the focus here is on the pig, and there is plenty to discuss. Two things first.

1 This is the best bacon you will ever eat. Period. If you think you've had better, you are wrong. Seriously. Don't bother arguing. Drive/fly/walk to it and tell me otherwise. You'll just end up in total ecstasy, begging to bow before me in thanks, and that gets awkward fast.
2 Unlike your garden variety trash food at the local fair where fry daddies and bacon are used to create gastronomic monstrosities, this is a place where bacon has become high art. Bacon that is the best-on-earth deserves nothing less. Owner Ronaldo Fierro is the Bellini of bacon. I have always felt bacon to be the perfect food with unlimited versatility, and Mr. Fierro has proven this beyond my wildest dreams.

Brace yourselves. more...

Posted by: CAC at 08:30 AM | Comments (83)
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