NBC at it Again

At link, NBC's deceptive edit of a grieving father's testimony to make it appear he was heckled by 2nd Amendment advocates.

Nice job, NBC News!

And be sure to continue down to see a recap of how NBC deceptively and deliberately edited the Zimmerman 911 tape to create a racially inflammatory "news story," a sickeningly irresponsible act.

NBC is a disgusting excuse for a news organization, even worse than CBS News, which at least did not itself produce the fake documents that Dan ("Fake-but-Accurate") Rather pedaled on the air -- and which cost him his job.  NBC has taken it to the next level by actually creating the garbage they peddle over the nation's airwaves. For some reason, they seem to operate without any fears for their broadcast licenses. NBC News executives should be hauled before a Congressional committee based on these two incidents alone. When that doesn't happen it only encourages them to continue this kind of journalistic malpractice.

Can't fool the market

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Investor’s Business Daily: Subsidies Create Glut of College Grads.

While colleges will churn out about roughly 19 million college graduates between 2010 and 2020, the market will likely create fewer than 7 million new jobs that require at least a bachelor’s degree. Weirdly, at the same time, the country faces a shortage of skilled labor — plumbers, electricians, carpenters and the like. . . .

If this all looks strange and mysterious, it is. Until, that is, you realize a big reason for all these distortions is the massive federal effort to encourage and subsidize college education.

Planner Disease:  A form of egomania, characterized by strong and persistent delusions characterized by an unshakable belief that the person's macro-economic plans will prove superior to market allocation of resources. The malady shows great tenacity, with affected individuals showing a general resistance to any form of rational argument or contrary evidence, suggesting the possibility of organic precursors. 

Attempted cures for Planner Disease having been uniformly unsuccessful, intervention is limited to amelioration, which consists in not allowing affected individuals to occupy any position of planning or decision-making authority whatever.

Byron

Schadenfreude

After all the pimping they did for Obama, I'm pretty sure these brilliant university faculty didn't think it would affect them. Where's the goddam gratitude?

UNIVERSITIES SLASH TEACHERS' HOURS TO EVADE OBAMACARE

Never fear, they'll find some way to blame Bush and the GOP.  Then the Dems will pass legislation to further re-define "full-time worker" -- which before ObamaCare had traditionally been an employee who worked 40 hours per week -- to be anything over, say, 12 hours per week. Gotcha!  If that doesn't do it, then maybe ObamaCare can define a full-time employee to be anyone who submitted a job application within the previous year, even it they weren't hired.  (I'm kidding. I think.) 

Employers can run, but they can't hide from ObamaCare!  The result, of course, will be even more people who find themselves working zero hours per week.

Forward!

Byron

ObamaCare saves money!

Bwa-ha!  Kidding!

ObamaCare's Health-Insurance Sticker Shock

I'm sure Obama is genuinely mystified.  Government Mandates are supposed to be magical, dammit, and prices can be arbitrarily set by Government at whatever level it wants.  There must be GOP saboteurs and wreckers at work here...

Barack Obama (2008):

I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.

Ha-haaa! What's doubly funny is that some people actually believed such nonsense.

The only way ObamaScam could cut your premiums by $2,500 would be to up your co-pays, cut your coverages, increase your taxes by $5,000 and euthanize you at 75 if you hadn't the good grace to croak before then.

It's redistribution at its finest: From the responsible to families and individuals who never in their lives paid a health insurance premium or a medical bill, and who never will.  For them, health care has always been, and it will always remain, an "entitlement" they're owed for just being them -- and for making nothing but bad choices since they were 12 years old.  In the unlikely event that they ever pause to wonder where the money comes from, I imagine they think it comes from Obama. Like their free cell phones, EBT card/food stamps, housing, legal services, and all the rest.

Someone wrote that all we needed to fix health care was a combination of catastrophic coverage and health care savings accounts.  Dream on.  Catastrophic coverage is just one more thing the "entitled" would refuse to pay a dime for, and they couldn't maintain a savings account at the point of a gun.  They do know which lever to pull at election time, however.

Byron

What's new?

Full Fathom Five: 5.0 Liberalism and the Future of the State

We are trapped into debates between the advocates of spendthrift compassion (maintain Medicare and add new entitlements whether or not we can pay for them because they are needed) or cut budgets even though some of the services lost are, in fact, necessary for millions of people.

What disappears from this debate is the possibility that the transition into a higher form of social organization and governance will make society so much more affluent, and so bring down the costs of important services, that we can strengthen our health care provisions without strangling the economy or busting the budget....

Right now we are having an argument about whether the blue model is in irreversible decline and whether its remnants should be liquidated or defended. But as the model continues to decompose, and it will, the argument will inevitably shift.

Unfortunately, Obama represents the senescent blue model, and the absurd idea that the future lies in expanding that template, to be paid for through redistribution.  It won't work, of course, because it can't work.  It hasn't worked anywhere, except as a temporary and destructive expedient, a way to forestall fundamental change that will not be avoided and that will arrive faster than nearly anybody now imagines. The key attribute of this new world will be the sheer speed of adaptive change through widely distributed decision-making, parallel to the way free markets operate. Centralized hierarchies and administered control structures of every kind are about to evaporate before our eyes. Obama does not represent that future in any respect; he's all about patching the old dikes and building new ones that are nothing but Version 1.1 of the old ones. Good luck with that, Obie. 

With his outmoded ideas and severely limited vision, all "Shovel Ready" Obama can do is to continue what he's been doing -- futilely piling up massive, inter-generational debt to keep the old arrangements in place and to shore them up by investing in Ver. 1.1. That doesn't even qualify as re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic -- it's burning them for fuel to keep a doomed ship afloat for another mile or two. But it's all he knows, and it makes him a conservative of the worst kind, in the worst meaning of the term.

The idea the Barack Obama represents anything like forward-thinking change is perfectly ludicrous. He's a man trapped in the New Deal past, championing an obsolete agenda. For one telling example, the web-distributed Kahn Academy represents the future of education, while public school bureaucracies and teachers unions represent the past. Does anyone have to ask which of those Obama champions? He might as well stand at the microphone with a sign that says "Look For the Union Label" and sing the "Internationale."  As he proved in his dealings with the DC schools, he's nothing but an obstacle, bought-and-paid-for by the old entrenched interests, and clueless about the future.

Barack Obama is a relic who comes dressed in the entire panoply of futile, played-out approaches and ideas. He has everything to do with the past, nothing to do with the future. 

Byron

Common sense shines through

NRA APPROACH TO SCHOOL VIOLENCE, CALLED “CRAZY” BY PRESS, SUPPORTED BY 55% OF AMERICANS

I wonder what the support for LaPierre’s proposal would be if he’d been given a respectful hearing in the press?

Respectful media hearing for LaPierre? When hippos fly. No such thing could ever get through the media sieve.

Media influence on public opinion almost never results from factual evidence fairly presented. Media influence occurs primarily through information control -- Creating a narrative and then making sure only information that supports the narrative gets through to the public. That kind of gate-keeping when it comes to guns and gun violence has been nearly absolute. 

It's a mistake to identify what the media does as "journalism," or "news gathering and reporting," because they're no longer in that business primarily, no longer see it as their defining function.  Their primary mission now is to promote "correct" political and social attitudes, as defined by "liberals" and progressives, while denigrating and vilifying any opposing voices. The focused, intensive -- and largely successful -- slandering of the Tea Party illustrates how single-minded such misinformation campaigns can be.  As does the media's worshipful treatment of Obama, which has been laughably one-sided from the very start.

The media will not be reformed because, excepting the deeply-hated Fox News, opposing ideas and their representatives have been mercilessly extirpated from media ranks, root and branch, top to bottom, leaving a virtually seamless liberal consensus. In fact, those outside the consensus are rarely credited with having any "ideas" at all, just racial hatreds, class resentments, and a general fog of hick stupidity.

It's pretty obvious that change can only come through economic pressures originating outside the media establishment altogether.

Byron

Privilege

The Elite vs. the Little People:

Obama Opposed Gun Ban Exception to Defend One’s Home

Obama Signs Bill Giving Him Armed Protection For Life

It's just too funny!  And then there's Bloomberg, surrounded by an armed security detail 24/7.  Anyone not deeply cynical at this point has simply not been paying attention.

Suzanna Gratia Hupp explains meaning of 2nd Amendment!

A tragic first-person story, followed by Penn & Teller with an interesting interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.  They read it to say that since having an armed militia is a necessity, it is THEREFORE also necessary that THE PEOPLE have the right to bear arms, because otherwise they would be at the mercy of the militia.

Byron

psychiatric hysteria

What role did psychiatric prescription drugs play in the Sandy Hook shooting?  (And many other mass shootings.)

The gun-obsessed media are strangely and utterly uncurious -- no investigation, and no reporting.

The giant, gaping hole in Sandy Hook reporting


Hysterical emotion always trumps reason, common sense, and evidence, at least initially.

Fanatics and axe-grinders of every variety know factual analysis and clear thinking are their primary enemy, so they always use the heat of the moment to try to get their bad ideas rushed into law:

5 Facts About Guns, Schools, & Violence


One proposal I could support would require all firearm transfers to be made through someone who holds a Federal Firearms License (FFL) -- a licensed dealer.  That would make private transfers (purchase, gift, or inheritance) subject to approval through the existing federal background check system; that is not required now in most states for private transfers.

That change in the law would tidy up an existing disparity that's hard to justify, and it would make some folks feel more comfortable, but it would be very unlikely to accomplish anything else. Colorado theater shooter James Holmes passed the background checks and bought his guns legally from licensed dealers; the guns used by the Sandy Hook shooter were also purchased from licensed dealers following background checks of the buyer, the shooter's mother.

Criminals steal their guns or buy them on the street, so none of this matters for how they acquire and use guns. But criminals do not perpetrate mass shootings of innocents -- lunatics do that. So, really, the problem is (a) how to identify a lunatic so he can't get a gun in the first place, or, (b) if he's identified himself by launching a shooting rampage, how to quickly put him down. There is no (c).

Byron

population decline

Suggested rule of thumb: "Take any prediction made by Paul Erlich in the first half of the 1970s and assume the precise opposite has happened since.”

Forget Overcrowding. The World Population Could Start Declining

Muslim fertility has remained high, relatively, but it's declining as would be expected. In poor African societies, high fertility is  partly due to high infant and child mortality -- have many kids to end up with a few -- partly to the status of women, partly to the usefulness of children in rural village life -- "every stomach comes with two hands for working." Muslims living in Europe have high fertility compared with Europeans, but it's already declined when compared with their countries of origin, and that will only accelerate the longer they live in Europe, for the same reasons the fertility of native Europeans is so low.

The reasons for the decline in birth rates are readily understood, and they have been repeatedly verified as economic development has proceeded in one country after another over the past century, and regardless of cultural and other differences.  There are no exceptions to the negative correlation between development and fertility.

And I know of no plausible scenario going forward that produces an upsurge in family size. A sudden decline in the independence and status of women? Raising kids suddenly becomes less and less expensive?  Age at marriage begins to drop? Masses of people decide to give up urban life and move back to a life of agricultural labor in the countryside? Social security systems are abandoned, so parents must depend on children for support in old age? Search in vain for anything plausible. Even countries that have adopted pro-fertility incentive programs have failed to move the needle -- for individual families the incentives to have fewer children are just too compelling. Once people move away from agricultural rural life where children are economic assets, to urban settings where children become economic liabilities, fertility decline becomes a virtual certainty. Against those economic incentives, even religious injunctions and condemnations have no force worth measuring -- your friend with the new house is a rare exception.

The one case where you do typically see a fertility upsurge is immediately following a war or natural disaster that involved a large loss of life. But even those are only temporary blips, make-up surges that do no more than reestablish the original downward trend line.

Byron

Virtue

WARREN FARRELL: Mass Shootings The Result of Abandoning, Abusing Boys

For boys, the road to successful manhood has crumbled. In many boys’ journey from a fatherless family to an almost all-female staff elementary school such as Sandy Hook, there is no constructive male role model. . . . There are few things a culture does as important as raising children. We can’t continue to fail half of them.

It sometimes goes beyond the mere denial and devaluation of traditional male virtues to the outright demonizing of them.

This will not be a cost-free exercise.  One predictable result is something we can already observe:  The cultivation and  encouragement of violent, crude caricatures of manhood among gang-bangers and other male misfits and losers.  This is the male not as the traditional protector and guardian of community life, but as its predatory destroyer.

Collateral damage:  If good men make women better, too (and vice versa), what can we reasonably expect women to be like where men are demoralized, devalued, and degraded?  I'm not certain of the answer, but the probabilities are depressing.

Byron

Decadent democracy

Our decadent democracy

Borrowing for current consumption is the Big Red Flag at any level -- individual, family, business, or government.

The US Government is borrowing at a mind-boggling pace for current consumption, with enormous bill to be inherited by our children and grandchildren.

Greatest Generation we ain't.

It may simply be that democracy always fails once people discover that they can vote themselves benefits paid for with Other People's Money. To resist that temptation would require significant, perhaps heroic, levels of integrity and forbearance, two moral qualities that an Entitlement Society systematically erodes and ultimately destroys.

Hobbes saw organized society as the way humans avoid a "War of All Against All," where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But a welfare state or entitlement society may promote a different form of internal warfare, in which the power of government is used to appropriate and redistribute what others have earned. For that system to collapse only requires that the earners finally lay down their tools and quit (see "Atlas Shrugged"), or pick up and leave for more encouraging and appreciative climes (see "France").

Byron