"Helping the Homeless"

A commenter on IMDB was lamenting a terrible film and said this:

why am i wasting away making less than $20 an hour helping the homeless while "people" continue to make millions producing *beep* like this? if you created the soul why do you continue to reward the soulless? answer me lord, please answer me.

I suppose that my answer would be, Because at the end of the day, all those homeless people you "helped?" -- still homeless. The way most people avoid being homeless is by getting these things they call "jobs." How many jobs did you create "helping the homeless" today? And where do you think that lousy $20/hour you earn came from. It came from either voluntary donations or taxes, that's where. From people who have jobs. Jobs like those created by producing *beep* movies.

Even the most modest Hollywood production employs dozens of people, maybe hundreds. All those people earned money to keep them in a home, pay taxes and donate to charity by helping to produce a product that people voluntarily buy.

You should be so soulless, Mr. Homeless Helper.

It's embarrassing when conservatives don't understand the free market.

National Review's moderators have a history of deep-sixing some of my more pointed comments, so here's my response to this fantastically idiotic article by Bradley Scott on NRO.

I really hate articles like this that have a distinct flavor of class envy and puritannical condemnation:

"Another way of saying that is that the cake cost 5,195 gallons of premium gasoline. But who’s counting?"

Another way of saying *that* is that the cake allowed the owner and employees of some bakery to get paid and put gas in their cars another day.

I am not aware that the Kardashians are presumed to have acquired their money by illegal means, so I find it puzzling that anyone should complain that they spend it lavishly, enriching the pocketbooks of the many small businessmen and laborers who were no doubt required to plan, prepare, supply and execute that wedding.

Why, do we call it "stimulus" when government spends the money, but when the Kardashians spend it, it is "blissfully detached from grim economic reality?"

That's the most economically illiterate thing I've ever heard. "Grim detachment from economic reality" would be if the wedding was leaving the Kardashians impoverished and indebted. In actuality, what is happening is that famous "spreading the wealth around." Why don't foolish progressives like "wealth transfer" when it isn't the government doing the transferring?

Submitted for your consideration: The Death of Morality

In Confessions of an Ex-Moralist, Joel Marks blithely, even happily, describes his descent from believer in God to atheist "secular moralist" to contented denier of the existence of morality.

It takes very little imagination to imagine a world run by people such as Marks. And, apparently, Marks is a man of little imagination.

When one's own likes and dislikes represent the apex of moral thought, then virtually any monstrous behavior can be justified -- or, rather, doesn't even need to be justified -- as a result.

Marks writes: "For instance, I used to think that animal agriculture was wrong. Now I will call a spade a spade and declare simply that I very much dislike it and want it to stop."

So Marks would like us all to be vegans, apparently, and since he acknowledges no moral truths, there would be no barrier, were he to be in a position of power, to him implementing his dislike in whatever way he deemed most effective.

Marks is so blinkered, he sees his lack of morality as some magic empathy-enhancing condition: "For to argue that people who use animals for food and other purposes are doing something terribly wrong is hardly the way to win them over. That is more likely to elicit their defensive resistance."

Well, that's great Mr. Marks, as long as you are working from a position of weakness. What if you are in a position where their defensive resistance isn't a barrier to you achieving your goals?

He goes on to write "I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument. I am simply no longer in the business of trying to derive an ought from an is. I must accept that other people sometimes have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly."

Has Marks even considered the marriage of this idea with the natural human tendency toward coersion and totalitarianism? It is as if he has never even considered the parallels between his happy amorality and every single society that has attempted to govern from such a world view?

Does he comprehend what happens when the people in power think like him? "Morality has nothing to do with it." "I very much dislike it and want it to stop." "I desire to influence the world in such a way that my desires have a greater likelihood of being realized."

When a person whose world view and ethics are guided by statements like that has power in his hands, there is nothing to stop him from exercising that power. You can't rely on him to have some innate respect for the rights of others, because in his world view unalienable rights don't exist! We have numerous edifying recent examples, starting with the USSR, so it is sometimes astounding to me that people like Marks exist, so wrapped in the comforts of a nation that respects his individual rights that he can't even recognize the value of it.

There are existing countries -- North Korea, the Peoples' Republic of China, and numerous other uniformly terrible societies -- where the fact that the leaders desire an outcome is sufficient justification for them to use whatever brutal methods they desire to implement it.

This article appeared in the New York Times -- the same newspaper where Thomas Friedman is allowed to repeatedly wax wistfully about Chinese governmental efficiency and the wonderful things that could be done in the U.S. if only we could be "like China for a day."

By surface observation, people like Marks and Friedman -- the New York Times constituency -- are the epitome of civilized leftism. They've probably never beaten the crap out of someone, kicked a dog, or stolen candy from a baby.

Yet, they are monsters. They blithely endorse a mentality and a mindset that disparages individual rights and liberties, that sets the stage for totalitarian horrors.

They live in a society where they are free to do this, because it was founded on the idea that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

Yet they want to replace that with "I very much dislike it and want it to stop."

Men like this are to be despised and opposed as thoroughly as one would oppose a terrorist with a vest full of explosives, because they, by seeming so reasonable and civilized on the surface, are an even more pernicious threat than the terrorist, whose essential brutality is on display for all to see.

Thoughtcrime

You are not allowed to disapprove!

In the link above, a Florida teacher has been suspended because he expressed objections to gay marriage on his Facebook page -- his personal page on his personal time, not even in the classroom.

Note this comment:

Michael Slaymaker, president of the Orlando Youth Alliance, told the newspaper that gay students might feel uncomfortable in Buell’s class.

How come this never works both ways? Why is there never concern that a straight student might feel "uncomfortable" in an openly gay teacher's class? You know what would happen? The kid would be called a homophobe and told to "suck it up."

If straight people have to just get over their discomfort with gay people then ought gay people just have to get over their discomfort with people who don't approve of them?

Since when was there a right to not have anyone disapprove of you?

This teacher could lose his job because he doesn't hold the politically correct views. He holds views that are legal and by no means uncommon in this country, but they're not the views the academic elite wants him to hold.

Hopefully if he loses his position, a good Christian or Catholic school will be happy to have this talented teacher who was once voted "Teacher of the Year."

I've always urged parents to abandon the public schools. Home school, private school, pick any option other than to allow your child to be propagandized by those government indoctrination centers.

Kids and Guns

In the article California Police Sticking to Guns in Defense of Letting Kids Hold Automatic Weapons some of the anti-gun types are pretty funny about their irrational fear of children being allowed anywhere near guns:

Community organizer Attila Nagy, who took the photos, told FoxNews.com that he was concerned it might encourage kids to use guns in the future.

"My main concern is for kids who handle these things. They're fascinated by them, and it makes them familiar with guns," he said.

Wow, community organizer, eh? That tells us a lot right there.

Well, Attila, it's my fervent hope that it will encourage the kids to use guns in the future, just as millions of Americans safely do every year.

As near as I can tell this supposed "controversy" was almost entirely ginned up by Mr. Nagy. That, of course, is what "community organizers" do.

Eagles vs. People vs. Climate change

It turns out that wind power kills about 80 eagles per year in California alone.

Environmentalists seem to be always sticking the foot of unintended consequences in the mouth of grand plans to "save" the environment.

Back in the 60s they banned DDT to save eagles, which led directly to the deaths of millions of people to malaria, and the science later showed that the DDT to thin eggshell link was falacious in any case.

But, eagles are more important than people by several orders of magnitude to environmentalists, so I'm fascinated to see how they'll come down on this latest conundrum. To environmentalists:

Eagles, good.
Wind power, good.

So, how will they prioritize? On the side of the Eagles (good), wind farms (good) are run by humans (bad), and corporations (worse!), for the benefit of humans (bad), but they supposedly help mitigate climate change (good).

By my accounting, eagles, an unmitigated good in environmentalist-speak, trump wind power, which carries a lot of bad baggage.

Oh, but I forgot the most crucial factor! $$$$! The big government money being doled out these days is to renewable energy, not to saving eagles. As they say, follow the money. Sorry, eagles.

Ironically if hunters were killing 80 eagles a year in California, they'd want their heads, and to ban hunting, and guns, and rednecks. But I'm afraid with renewable energy involved, well, if you want to make the omelet of saving the planet, you've got to, ahem, break a few eggs.

AP's Misleading "fact check" on the first Iowa GOP Debate

The AP has produced a "fact check" of last night's Iowa GOP Presidential candidate debates that I thought was notable mostly for being a series of uninteresting minor quibbles, but the first item really stands out. It's a pet peeve of mine and really burns me up:

BACHMANN: Spoke of "the unconstitutional individual mandate" several times, a reference to a requirement for people to carry health insurance, a central element of the 2010 federal health care law.

THE FACTS: Nothing is unconstitutional until courts declare it to be so. The constitutionality of the individual mandate has been challenged in lawsuits in a number of states, and federal judges have found in favor and against. The Supreme Court will probably have the final word. But for now, the individual mandate is ahead in the count. And the first ruling by a federal appeals court on the issue, by the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals in June, upheld the individual mandate.

Members of all three branches of government as well as the armed forces take oaths to protect and defend the Constitution. This is not accidental. Nowhere does the Constitution grant the court system the sole power to make Constitutional judgments. Not only does this grant the courts undue power, it strips the legislative and executive branches of their own Constitutional obligations.

It's also deeply undemocratic and anti-intellectual. When President Bush signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, he notoriously admitted when signing that he thought parts of the bill were unconstitutional, but decided to leave it to the courts to decide.

Instead of exercising his obligation to use his veto power to protect and defend the Constitution, he ceded his responsibility to another branch of government, burdening the country with an unconstitutional law. Congress had already shirked its responsibility by passing such a clearly unconstitutional law, and the issue is still being fought out in the courts at great cost and great expense, when it was in the President's power and obligation to save us this trouble with a simple exercise of his veto power.

There is a reason not all Constitutional authority is vested in the courts. The Supreme Court is just nine unelected, fallible human beings. By the theory that the AP proposes, Congress and the President can violate the Constitution in the most egregious fashions (they routinely do), but citizens, such as Mrs. Bachman, are not allowed to identify the actions as unconstitutional unless the courts say so?

That's utterly ridiculous and puts us at the mercy of the courts. It is any citizen's right to label a law unconstitutional if she believes it to be so and if the courts do not yet agree with her that does not make her wrong: if we cannot exercise our own judgment as citizens about the nature of our Constitution and act on it in the public sphere, then we are not citizens, but subjects.

It is incumbent upon a candidate for President even moreso than ordinary citizens to clearly and publicly state her views on the Constitutionality of major issues with which she will have to deal as President.

As President her opinion of the Constitutionality of laws carries weight and force with the power of her veto pen and she, as both candidate and President, should not be timid about holding forth on her view of the Constitutionality of various laws of the land, nor should she be timid about vocally disagreeing with the judgment of Congress and the courts -- that tension is deliberately built into our system to protect our Constitution from any one branch of government.

Even if the courts find a law Constitutional or unconstitutional, that does not mean they are right! If that were the case, then we would still be bound by the Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott. Instead, the unwillingness of a great portion of the public, and of Republicans, to accept the consequences of the ruling led to the abolition of the shameful practice of slavery in the U.S. If the public, President and Congress had simply accepted the primacy of the Supreme Court in this matter, then slavery might logically still be a "Constitutionally" protected practice today.

Two Photos. No comment.

How smart is Obama?

I can't deny that this article, "How Stupid is Obama," has a disrespectful title (and to an extent, the tone matches), but I also can't find much in it with which to disagree.

It is interesting that Obama's grades and academic history at Columbia and Harvard are nearly a complete mystery. I wonder how Obama would fare if all the products and records of his college days were subjected to the same scrutiny given Sarah Palin's emails. Or, comparing apples to apples, I wonder how Obama's emails as state and U.S. Senator would compare to Palin's emails.

It is very odd that there are no teams of citizens and journalists poring over those.

A lot of the comments on the above article debate whether Obama's actions are due to stupidity or ideology.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. There are many educated, high-IQ people who are proponents of Keynesian economics and socialist, redistributionist leftist policies. However, despite their intelligence, there must necessarily be a strong thread of "stupid" running through the brains of anyone who supports these destructive policies. There's nothing shocking about that -- I work with many Ph.D.'s in my profession. They are clearly highly intelligent people, but they are capable of impressively stupid behavior outside their areas of expertise.

What is really impressive, and sadly common, are intelligent people who are persistently stupid within their supposed areas of expertise. They may have an impression command of individual facts, but they arrange those facts in a wholly fictitious narrative. Being intelligent doesn't prevent you from having enormous blind spots in your world-view that are created by your upbringing and education.

One of the most pernicious and persistent base assumptions of the left is that people are, by default morally neutral, or even good, and that deviations from accepted morality can be corrected by state action. The state can make you eat better, manage your health care better, plan for your retirement better, and direct your charitable contributions better than you can yourself: if you disagree with the state choices, you are mistaken, and if you agree with the state choices, well, then you should be happy they're saving you the trouble of managing it all yourself!

I think the individualist film "Serenity" captures it well in two brief sections of dialog:

River Tam: "People don't like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don't run, don't walk. We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right. We're meddlesome."

Capt. Malcom Reynolds: "Y'all got on this boat for different reasons, but y'all come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."

Quantitative Easing

I had never heard of the term "quantitative easing" before 2008. Whenever you read a term that is so obviously, egregiously euphemistic, you know you're in trouble. In prison terms -- you better be careful about bending over to pick up the soap, lest you get Quantitatively Eased.

Quantitative Easing (the capital letters seem obligatory) is a euphemism for a very, very simple concept: printing boatloads -- nay, fleetloads -- of worthless paper money.

Imagine if you went to your bank and told your bank representative, "The balance in my account is totally inadequate to support my lifestyle. Could you please add one or two zeroes to my dollar balance?" -- and they did it!!

That's Quantitative Easing.

Actually, the Federal Reserve creates the money out of thin air and loans it to the government, but that's really just the government loaning money to itself. Ever try to loan yourself money?

It represents an enormous threat to the future prosperity and stability of our country. That's why they had to come up with a euphemism, because if Bernanke, Geithner or Obama had a press conference and said "print a huge load of worthless paper money" instead of "Quantitative Easing" normal people would have said "What the fuck? Hell, no!"

There's that soap, right there in the corner of the shower. Go on. Bend over. Pick it up. Do it. They've got your back....

Nixon's liberal legacy and Obama the conservative

I think it's been common knowledge among conservatives that Nixon was a very liberal President, domestically (just as G.W. Bush was).

But apparently it's something of a shock to the left, who just seem to be coming down from Nixon Derangement Syndrome to finally add Nixon to the long list of "Republicans we really like (now that they're dead and out of power)." Kevin Andersen writes wistfully about Nixon in the New York Times.

The column itself is unremarkable:

• Republican Nixon was really a big ol' liberal (and wasn't it great?)


• Modern conservatives are actually unhinged, reckless fanatics


• Obama, "Mr. Transparent and Reasonable" (said unironically!), is "so prudent, straightforward and even-keeled", so full of "nonconfrontational reasonableness," so full of virtuous traits he sucks as a negotiator against those unhinged, reckless fanatics.

But what's really amazing is the comments section. It truly demonstrates that leftists are living on a different planet (emphasis below is mine):

"The tragedy is that [Obama], a true conservative, has taken the whole Democratic Party with him to the right."

Would that were true.

---

"Obama is a Republican in his behavior. The health care law was a boon for pharma and HMOs. Continued futile wars. Broken Guantanamo promise. No tax increase for multimillionaires and billionaires. Fake Wall Street reform. He doesn't cave. He talks a liberal line and walks a conservative one."

Because Republicans were all in favor of that health care law, right? Oh, wait... As for the wars and Guantanamo, I think we on the right put that down to "facing up to reality," and why has the left not gotten wise to the fact that you could confiscate everything the "multimillionaires and billionaires" own and not fund the country through the end of the year? And why would you expect Wall Street Reform from the candidate most in the pocket of Wall Street? Of course, the biggest problem with Wall Street is that the government keeps messing with it. We're beyond fixing the fixes now, we're fixing the fixes of all the fixes and "reforms" that have gone before.

---

"Nixon's dirty tricks, his bigotry, his military escapades, and his Watergate burglars seem positively quaint when measured against the standard of today's Republican leaders. The shocking things Nixon said that were preserved for posterity on the Oval office tape recorder pale in comparison to comments made publicly against Mr. Obama by the current crop of esteemed conservatives."

Obama is a victim! Evil Republicans actually criticize him!

And of course there's the obligatory tea-party and Republican bashing, because, somehow, trying to take a stand against out-of-control spending is just crazy.

NCAA "Amateur" Status

I'm not even a huge sports fan, but I was a varsity NCAA athlete at a Big Ten school, so I think I am qualified to have an opinion on this.

The NCAA's rules preventing athletes from financially profiting from their participation in collegiate sports are utterly immoral and unfair to athletes -- especially those at the top of their game in sports where they could be expected to earn good money from sponsorships.

I went to OSU. OSU Buckeye football is big business. It probably rivals some professional franchise for the size and strength (and fanaticism) of its fan base.

Everybody associate with Buckeye football -- the school itself, the athletic director, the coaches, the people who are licensed to sell Buckeye branded clothing and paraphernalia -- everybody makes out like a bandit, except the eleven guys working their asses off down there on the field.

They are gambling their bodies and their futures that their performance will attract the attention of an NFL scout. That and a scholarship are about the extent of their official compensation. Now, a full scholarship to OSU is nothing to sneeze at, but it's a far cry from the money being made by everyone else on their behalf.

And, at any time, a college player can be injured, and all that hope they've been banking on goes down the drain, or they can make it to the NFL and get injured early on, or never really make the transition and become a bench warmer, or get traded frequently -- there are a thousand ways things can fail to pan out for a would-be NFL player.

But those three or four years in college, when they were packing the horseshoe every game, when multi-millions were being made on their behalf, they weren't allowed to profit from it.

This doesn't apply to any other activity at school, only sports. If you're an engineering major and you come up with a really hot idea and exploit it, nobody comes and tells you "Oh, you're in college, you're only an amateur engineer, you're not allowed to profit off your engineering skills while you are in college. The guys who invented Yahoo!, one of the first big internet success stories, were students at Stanford and originally ran Yahoo! on Stanford computers -- it was something like http://www.stanford.edu/yahoo or something like that back in its early days. But there were no rules in place to keep them from profiting. Thank goodness, or they probably would have just shut the whole venture down when it got to be a big deal and enormous amounts of innovation in search portal development would have been lost.

The fact that I got paying part-time and then full-time jobs in my field before I even finished my degree didn't mean I was somehow compromising my "amateur" student status.

The idea would be considered ridiculous anywhere outside of sports.

I was on the fencing team at OSU. Fencing's not a huge sport in the U.S. and it's even a fairly eclectic sport in Europe. But, if I had been one of the few fencers good enough to maybe earn some modest sum in equipment sponsorships in the insular world of fencing, what right does the university have to tell me I can't profit from my own hard work and talent? It's ridiculous.

It's exploitative of the student athletes, for colleges and universities to garner so much prestige and money from top athletic performers, but to not allow them to directly profit from their use of their talent, it's criminal and I'd go so far as to say un-American.

Generic Republicans

In a recent Power Line article, John Hinderaker says:

For some time now, Obama has trailed a generic Republican opponent in likely voter polls. Next year, that is probably what the GOP needs: a generic Republican. The Democrats will try to distract voters’ attention from Obama’s record by making the race about his Republican opponent. As a result, we are in for the dirtiest campaign ever, and the Republicans need a candidate without unnecessary loose ends and eccentricities.

I respect Mr. Hinderacker's opinions immensely. Power Line is one of my must-read blogs. However, I can't agree with him on this.

No doubt he is correct, a "generic Republican" will be the easiest to get elected.

But I think this is short-sighted thinking. The goal isn't winning the election. The goal is changing the direction of the Federal government.

It's easy to forget, after 8 years of Bush Derangement Syndrome and more than two years of Obama blaming all his failures on the mess Bush left him, that Bush was a generic Republican. That's what "compassionate conservative" was.

And it wasn't just a campaign slogan. That's how Bush governed. No Child Left Behind was a bipartisan effort between him and Ted Kennedy. The Medicare Drug Prescription benefit was the biggest entitlement increase (at the time) since Lyndon Johnson. He signed McCain-Feingold. He championed combatting the spread of AIDS in Africa -- there was a reason why Bono was so friendly to him.

If Bush had just been a Democrat, he would have been hero to them.

As a conservative he was a disappointment, domestically, despite the man's many admirable qualities. (And he has many, many admirable qualities. I believe he is an honest, forthright, caring man who did his very best, in his view, to promote the well-being, not only of Americans, but people around the world -- I just disagree with how he went about it in come cases).

If we put another generic Republican in office, we'll get another four or eight years of frustration, disappointment and half measures. As with Bush, we may be sliding down the path to hell a bit slower than under Obama, but that's just not good enough.

Even if we lose this election. The people have to be able to say "This candidate would have made a real difference." I believe Ron Paul and maybe Sarah Palin have the courage of their convictions to actually chart a course away from economic failure. I'm fairly certain Mitt Romney and Huntsman don't. The rest I reserve judgment on, but I'll be watching.

Unlikable protagonists

Sometimes it seems like Hollywood goes out of its way to make its protagonists unlikable right off the bat.

Take "Going the Distance" which I just started watching right now.

Our first encounter with the heroine, played by Drew Barrymore. She's sitting in the editor's office at the newspaper where she's an intern watching the editor drown her story in red magic marker corrections. He tells her "good reporting, it needs to be completely restructured, and running through a spell checker couldn't hurt. 'Munincipal Court? I don't think I know where that is."

OK, set aside the fact that this is what copy editors do all day. It's their job -- a lot of stories filed in a hurry for daily deadlines have spelling errors and perhaps sub-optimal structure. Producing a story for the morning paper is a team effort.

Set all that aside (again, please), she leaves the editor's office and her friend asks "Where are you going?"

"I'm 31. I'm an intern. I'm going to get wasted."

OK, you have now caused me to despise your main character. Thanks. Hmm, just because your boss doesn't shower you with praise, you're going to go get wasted? Don't suppose that could have anything to do with why you're 31 and an intern, could it hon? Nahhh. Wouldn't be any point in sitting down and ... ohhh ... maybe doing that restructuring your boss recommended.

In one vignette, I've learned that the character is an irresponsible loser and I don't care if she gets hit by a truck in the next scene. Doesn't bode well for the rest of the movie.

Our hero's opening scene is similarly uninspiring. He's a kind of a thick doofus who won't commit, but who can blame him because his shrill girlfriend is the type who likes to play the "when I say I don't want you to get me a birthday present, it means I want you to get me a really great birthday present" game. As an older guy, I have to say, the guy is better off without her. Imagine that kind of mind game. The. Rest. Of. Your. Life.

Thanks for hauling me right into the story, Hollywood. Shallow bland, loser main characters. Mmm, way to make me want to keep watching.