The Moose Is Loose

Posted on | June 27, 2023 | 3 Comments

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON
“There’s one!” Bob said, as we drove through the base on our way from the airport. I squinted, but didn’t see the moose until we were within about 30 yards. It was a young cow, not even full-grown yet, but certainly it stood more than six feet tall. A full-grown moose can be eight feet tall, and they’re all around here, so that while sighting a moose may be exciting for a tourist, the locals don’t think much about it.

Speaking of locals, did you know Anchorage has a homelessness problem? On our drive in from the airport, we came through downtown Anchorage and my son gestured to his left, telling me the homeless encampment was about 400 yards that way, and I was like, “What?” Alaska is still very much a frontier state, with a population of less than 750,000 in a vast territory. People are still coming here to homestead, staking out claims in the remote wilderness, so it’s difficult for me to see how the usual excuse — “lack of affordable housing” — can be applied to homelessness in Anchorage. This ain’t San Francisco, OK?

From local media:

The Anchorage Assembly spent a large part of their June 6 meeting discussing the issue of homelessness in Anchorage.
Mayor Dave Bronson talked about the benefits of a proposed navigation center to help those who are homeless in his Mayor’s report, calling it a place that can “transform lives.”
The mayor also called the current situation where many homeless individuals are camping in the municipality’s parks and green spaces “untenable, and not quite even humane.”
“But if we spend another summer expending our time, our resources, and the public’s willingness to hear us out, I’m afraid we will never reach a modicum of solution,” said Bronson.
“I do not want people to freeze to death this winter. The nav center can prevent that.”
Hellen Fleming, one of the owners of Showdown Alaska, appeared before the assembly to testify about abatement at Cuddy Park.
Showdown Alaska is in charge of the Sundown Solstice Festival, which took place in Cuddy Park June 16 -18. The festival was a source of political controversy, as it was cited as a reason for abating – or kicking out – homeless individuals camping at the park for safety reasons.
Fleming said that Showdown Alaska wanted to protect the safety of the patrons of the concert and homeless people.
“For the sake of public safety, we were told that abatement was the right choice,” said Fleming, “My only question to the city now is, why? Why was the Sullivan closed with no plan? Why weren’t sanctioned camps created from the start? Why was there no communication to campers about this festival from the very start in the area?”
Fleming urged the Assembly to create sanctioned camps before abatement at Cuddy Park ended.
After Fleming’s testimony, the Assembly passed a resolution brought forward by Felix Rivera, who represents District 4, supporting the creation of “allowed” homeless camps in Anchorage. Mayor Dave Bronson opposed the use of the word “sanctioned camps,” citing possible liability issues with the municipality.
The passed resolution is more limited in scope compared to recommendations originally made by the Sanctioned Camps Community Task Force.
The task force originally recommended that five sites be established as homeless camps. These sites were: Centennial Park Campground, 1805 Academy Drive, land adjacent to the Clitheroe Center, the midtown National Archives site, and vacant land between Viking Drive, Reeve Boulevard, and Commercial Drive. Three sites were recommended to house up to 75 people, while the remaining two were recommended to house up to 40. The recommendation also provided names of other possible camp locations.

There’s a word for this situation, and that word is crazy.

You’re talking about homelessness in a state where the effective cost of land is zero. I mean, I don’t know how much a half-acre lot costs in the immediate vicinity of Anchorage, but if you’re willing to go further out into the boonies, land is dirt-cheap compared to what you’d pay almost anywhere in the Lower 48. Of course, this doesn’t address the major expense of living in Alaska, namely heat. The first snowfall in Anchorage is usually in October, and it lasts into April. Basically, you’ve got maybe five months of tolerable weather — May through September — amid the otherwise eternal winter. Not a good place for sidewalk sleeping.

As the mayor says, the proposal to create “allowed” homeless camps is not humane. Whatever their problems may be — drug addiction, mental illness, etc. — these people need to get someplace warm, with an actual roof over their heads, before winter arrives, and tolerating homeless encampments in Anchorage during summer is self-evidently foolish.

Did I mention that Joe Biden won Anchorage in 2020? Not by a Chicago-sized margin, but still . . . Maybe you don’t expect liberal foolishness in a GOP stronghold like Alaska, but this nonsense about creating “allowed” homeless camps shows how liberalism can be a problem anywhere. Given the harsh realities of life near the Arctic, I’d suggest a zero-tolerance policy toward homelessness. You simply can’t allow people to be sleeping outdoors in a place where the weather is so brutal most of the year. Better they should be occupying a jail cell than to let them freeze to death on the sidewalks. Or get eaten by a bear.

Did I mention there are bears all over Alaska? They’re not as numerous as moose, I don’t think, but there’s still a lot of them. If the bears ever decide to visit Anchorage’s homeless camps . . .

Well, that would be one way to solve the problem, I guess.

Category: Alaska

In The Mailbox: 06.26.23

Posted on | June 27, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.26.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Marvel & The No Accountability Superhero Movie, also, “Trust The Science” They Say
EBL: Asteroid City, The Gallant Hours, and Whose Side is Belarus’ President Lukashenko on?
Twitchy: London Breed Has Dumb Response To DeSantis’ Criticism Of San Fran, Publisher Says ALA Is Offering Guidance On Disrupting Conservative Events, and Kinzinger Enters Desperation Mode After Tweeting About Neo-Nazis At Proud Boys Event Being Feds
Louder With Crowder: Here’s some of what you missed from Pride parades happening in your city this weekend, Topless activists chant “we’re coming for your children” at a drag march because it’s not obvious enough, and Bud Light’s a glutton for punishment, sponsors parade that exposes kids to naked adults, puppy fetishists
Vox Popoli: The Wagner “Coup”, Debacle in Rostov, Mandatory Pride, Of Course They Knew, and Further Evidence
Stoic Observations: Robert Baer & Geopolitical Agency
Gab News: Forget Politics – Focus On This Instead

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Greasy Pole #29 – The First Black Woman on the Moon episode
American Conservative: Arms Must Cede
American Greatness: Speaker Kevin McCarthy Hints at Impeaching AG Merrick Garland, What the Left Has Left for America, and Kamala Harris Has the Worst Net Negative Rating of Any Vice President in NBC Poll’s History
American Thinker: Transgender Lawsuits Reveal Horrors of Procedures, also, Chattanooga Goes Brave New World
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Pope Francis once again displays his true colors at audience with artists, Cuban YouTuber who just arrived in America makes his first visit to Walmart, and Reports from Cuba: ‘Soon, polyclinics in Cuba will have to be closed due to lack of personnel’
BattleSwarm: Russian Coup Update for June 24, 2023 UPDATE: Coup Already Over?, also, Spam Denial of Service Attack Against James O’Keefe?
Behind The Black: Webb makes first detection of one particular carbon molecule, Japan’s military tests using Starlink for communications, A northern lowland ice sheet on Mars?, and The insidious presence of porn in K-12 public schools
Cafe Hayek: On Evidence of the Economic Consequences of a Policy of Unilateral Free Trade, Worrying About the ‘Balance of Trade’ Is Like Worrying About Witches, Economic Reasoning Shifts the Burden of Persuasion Onto Opponents of a Policy of Unilateral Free Trade, Let’s Dethrone the “Balance of Payments”, and Is This a Spoof?
CDR Salamander: Keeping The US Undersea Advantage, also, War Over Taiwan? Let’s Discuss This First
Da Tech Guy: Three Worst Case Russia Scenarios, Is the post office suffering from high crime?, and Under the Fedora
Don Surber: Another Reason To Vote Trump
First Street Journal: Killadelphia: 12-year-old killed on his birthday, Today’s left see landlords as Snidely Whiplash, tying Sweet Nell to the railroad tracks, and The main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website had, at 7:07 PM EDT on Sunday, June 25th, an interesting juxtaposition
Gates Of Vienna: The Defender of Europe, Culture-Enricher Attacks Grandma and Granddaughter in Bordeaux, Sweden: “This is a War Zone”, and When the Suckling Babe is a Sign of Right-Wing Extremism
The Geller Report: New FBI Whistleblower Says Agents Who Questioned Overblown Response to Jan 6 Were THREATENED By Director, also, European Union Now Warning Pregnant Women NOT to Get COVID-19 Vaccine Due to Possibility of Infertility and Miscarriage
Hogewash: Flying By Mercury, The Security of Russian Nuclear Weapons, Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, and Ultraviolet Mars
Hollywood In Toto: Shape of Things Is Neil LaBute at His Most Confrontational, Gal Gadot Blasts Gender-Swapped Action Heroines, Meet Pop Culture’s Free Speech Heroes, and ‘Office’ Alum Rainn Wilson: God ‘Freaks People Out’ in Hollywood
The Lid: STUDY: Attractive Women More Likely to Be Conservatives, also, Ohio School Board Reports Moms as Terrorists to FBI for Concern Over School’s Woke Curriculum
Legal Insurrection: Audio Of Trump Conversation About Secret Iran Attack Plan Contradicts His Denial, Dept. of Transportation Giving $1.7 Billion to States to Buy Electric, Low-Emission Buses, Harvard Expert on Dishonesty is Accused of Dishonesty, Questioning the Narrative of a Certain, Disturbing News Story in Canada is Now Called Denialism, and U. Wyoming Sorority Fights Back Against Members Who Sued Over Trans Member
Nebraska Energy Observer: Saturday – just for you, Third Sunday after Trinity, and The Not Very Funny Woke Joke
Outkick: Pete Rose Says He Can Finally Wear A Cincinnati Reds Hat In Public ‘Without Fans Throwing Rocks’ At Him, Professional Basketball Player Dies Of Heart Attack, Previously Blamed COVID Vaccine For Myocarditis, Deion Sanders Shares Powerful Prayer Amid Health Issues: ‘Thank You’, Peyton Manning Always Wanted Sean Payton To Be The Denver Broncos Head Coach, Omaha Drama Again! LSU Wins Championship Series Opener With Another 11th Inning Homer, and Antonio Brown Bashes Tom Brady While Finally Giving Full Story On Bizarre Meltdown, Mid-Game Exit With Buccaneers
Power Line: Impeach Merrick Garland, Hunter Biden’s “fair” tax share, and Disney’s Downhill Slide
Shark Tank: Gimenez Says Biden “Asleep At The Wheel” Against Red China
Shot In The Dark: Seven Year Plan, The DFL Owns This, and Tolerance!
STUMP: Podcast: Lying about Lying – and faking data in Excel
This Ain’t Hell: Prigozhin’s Moscow march, the aftermath, Marines Need a Few Drone Pilots, Wild Night of Drinking and a Fake Toothache Turned Into the US Marine Corps Deadliest Sniper, and Russians using WMDs?
Transterrestrial Musings: Computer Weirdness, After College, How Pride Lost The Public, The New Russian Revolution, and A Catastrophic Implosion
Victory Girls: Riley Gaines, Standing Alone And Shunned By Feminists, Iowa’s Quad City Times Apologizes For Bigoted Vivek Ramaswamy Cartoon, and What Stopped Prigozhin From Going To Moscow?
Volokh Conspiracy: Uneducating Americans on Vaping, also, What Does U.S. v. Texas Tell Us About The DACA Litigation?
Watts Up With That: Coal To the Rescue in Britain as Solar Panels Also Work Too Poorly in The Summertime, Sweden Deals Body Blow to EU Climate Change Agenda, and NYC Pizzerias versus Climate Change Busybodies
The Federalist: Google Attacks Christians In The Workplace With Blasphemous Drag Event, Church Attendance Is Down As America’s Mental Health Crisis Continues To Run Amuck, The Corporate Media Can’t Come Back After Playing A Key Role In Running Cover-Up For Biden Family Corruption, Naked Men Freely Expose Themselves To Kids At Pride Because The Right Bought The Left’s ‘Tolerance’ Lie, and NLRB Adopts A Dirty Union Trick To Infiltrate The Government With Marxists
Mark Steyn: Things Fall Apart: Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and the TV Documentary, Putin on the Fritz?, and Tal Bachman: Two Centuries of Rugby, Part VI

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Category: Linkagery

Science Fiction, Gatekeeping, And Why Awards Are Useless

Posted on | June 26, 2023 | 1 Comment

— by Wombat-socho

First, let me give a shoutout to Son of Silvercon‘s Guest of Honor, Maggie Hogarth, who has a new book dropping at the end of July, An Exile Aboard Ship. It’s the start of a new series set in her Peltedverse, which has a lot of cool aliens in it, and if you want some background to this new adventure, you should start with Earthrise, which is available (along with its two sequels) through Kindle Unlimited. Also, one of our other guests, Jon Del Arroz, has the sixth book in his Baron von Monocle steampunk series, The Crystal Conspiracy, out today. It’s been a while since I read For Steam & Country, the first in this series, but it’s good stuff, and I regret not having the time/money to pick up the other four books when they came out.

And speaking of buying books from authors that don’t hate you, The Big Based Book Sale continues on through tomorrow.

Pic unrelated.

I saw on the Twitter last night that the execrable John Scalzi has won the LOCUS readers award*, apparently for his recent work of lameness Kaiju Preservation Society, which judging from his earlier work is probably a “transgressive” riff on Pacific Rim, and no, I’m not reading it to find out. Someone posted a couple of embarrassing extracts from the book, which inspired a lot of mockery at Scalzi’s expense.** Anyhow, I grumped about how this was a good example of why nobody should be using awards like that to pick reading material, and this got me into an argument about gatekeeping.

Which, as I noted in this tweet, is silly because unlike gaming, where you can refuse to play with idiots, you can’t do that with SF. Anyone can go down to the library or the B&N, or log onto Amazon, and get them some skiffy. Or they can stream some Star Trek, or The Expanse, or Black Mirror, or Neon Genesis Evangelion…you see where I’m going with this. SF fandom is equally wide open thanks to social media. It’s a lot harder to blackball somebody from the Internet than it was to keep people out of your conventions – and as the old school literary fans found out in the 60s after Star Trek, they’ll just go off and start their own conventions ~~with Fizzbin and Orion slave girls~~. As a result of this mass influx of fans into the SF ghetto, which I sometimes refer to as the geek victory in the culture war, and the subsequent capture of SF fandom’s organizations by the woketards and other leftists, the awards given by those organizations became warning signs rather than recommendations as to what was good. The fact that (relative to the huge numbers of people who read or otherwise consume SF) most of these awards (except for the Dragon Awards) are handed out by a tiny community of fans makes them even more worthless, because most of these people suffer from a bad case of groupthink and don’t dare express Wrongthink for fear of not being part of the In Crowd any more. So instead of gatekeeping either science fiction in general or even fandom, I see my role as more of a native guide who’s been wandering around this part of town for 50+ years who advises the new folks not to read that stuff because it’ll make you barf, or at least make you regret spending $15 or three hours on Fuzzy Nation.

Now, on the other hand, there’s Ralts Bloodthorne. The Wordborg is up to ten books in the Behold, Humanity! series, of which I have just finished the tenth, Victory or Death. These are conversions from his long-running series of posts on r/HFY, and in some places duplicate material found in the Tales of the Terran Confederacy series because the shorter series focuses on individuals and their stories while Behold, Humanity! covers the wider war between the Terran Confederacy and its neosapient allies (Telkans, Hamaroosans, Tuknarn, etc.) against the Lanaktallan Unified Council Worlds and the Precursor Autonomous War Machines. Unlike a lot of the current Pink Goo authors, who like to pretend that nothing happened in SF before they were born (and if it did it was all written by Racist Male Wypipo so it doesn’t count), Ralts has clearly read a lot of the classics of SF, thought through the implications of the technologies, and had a lot of fun mixing it all together into a tasty stew of not just combat SF but a look at how humanity itself will adapt and change to technologies developed across 8,000 years of war with occasional brief periods of peace. Highly recommended.

*This says a lot about the kind of people who read LOCUS, who are mostly the kind of people that ante up the money to join Worldcons.
**Tor is paying him an insane amount of money to poop out crappy books, so what does he care?

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Category: Books

Checked and Ready for Boarding

Posted on | June 26, 2023 | 1 Comment

BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Remember the “Shoe Bomber”? In December 2001, would-be terrorist Richard Reid was aboard an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami when he failed in an attempt to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his shoes. Because of this botched terrorist attack, all commercial airline passengers to this day are required to remove their shoes and send them through the X-ray scanners before boarding their flights.

More than 20 years have gone by, and if this safety protocol has apprehended or deterred a single copycat “shoe bomber,” I’m unaware of it, but it keeps TSA busy, on the taxpayer’s dime, inspecting us all just to make sure we aren’t some kind of Al-Qaeda sympathizer.

There’s lots of time to ponder things like that, here at the Firkin and Flyer Pub in Concourse C, as my wife and I await the call for boarding. What I hate most about flying nowadays is the security protocols. I’m old enough to remember when you just went straight to the terminal gate — no waiting line for security — and your family could meet you at the gate when you returned. But now any airline trip requires you calculate not only the drive time to the airport (leaving a margin for possible traffic delays), but also leave yourself a little extra time in case there’s a backup at security. You don’t want to be sprinting to the gate at the last minute for fear of missing your flight, and so the total time required for any trip must be extended to account for such contingencies.

Thank you, Islamic jihadists!

Just popped into this pub to update the blog before our departure, and also to consume my traditional pre-flight beverage, which cost $10.89 and I tipped $2.11 to round it up to $13, but that’s OK, because it’s a tax-deductible business expense. As a journalist, anything you write about counts as “business,” so by telling my readers that the Firkin and Flyer serves a tasty Bloody Mary, I’ve covered myself with the IRS, and I’ve got the receipt to prove it. Meanwhile, I must express my gratitude to Mr. White, a resident of Cook County, Illinois, who was the first reader this morning to contribute via PayPal in support of this expedition to Alaska.

Are you feeling thirsty all of a sudden? You could order Bloody Mary mix from Amazon, but as to the vodka, you’re on your own. Now, it’s about 15 minutes until boarding, so I’ve got to head to my gate. Remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Category: Shoe Leather Fund

North! To Alaska!

Posted on | June 26, 2023 | Comments Off on North! To Alaska!

This afternoon, my wife and I will be flying the friendly skies, first to Dallas for a three-hour layover before heading to Anchorage. I’d told y’all about this trip earlier, when I thought we’d be leaving last week, but I was mistaken about the anticipated travel date.

Our Army son is stationed there with the newly formed 11th Airborne Division, developing America’s arctic warfare capacity. More importantly — at least for me — is that his wife recently gave birth to our newest granddaughter, little Juniper. So we’ll be spending a couple of weeks with little Juniper (and her big sister Eliza, of course).

While looking forward to seeing the kids, I’m dreading the long flights, and then there’s the matter of the time shift. We arrive in Anchorage at 11 p.m. local time, which is 3 a.m. Eastern, and I’m sure I’ll be disoriented by this experience: Working in the wee hours (locally) to get my dayjob work done by morning times on the East Coast, and did I mention it’s “Midnight Sun” season in Alaska? Oh, and there’s also the weather: High temperature tomorrow in Anchorage will be 59°F, with rain, but later in the week, it will get up to a sunny 62°F. Joy, joy . . .

John Wayne would never complain about the weather, of course. So I’ll endure my arctic excursion with stoic resolve, and perhaps I won’t even notice the conditions while I’m out stalking moose and bears with a Bowie knife . . . No, wait, that’s not on the agenda. Grandpa’s too old to be doing the Wilderness Survival thing. However, I did text my son to ask him to find me some kind of tavern or restaurant where I could blog with that “authentic Alaska” vibe — exposed wooden beams, moose head mounted on the wall, etc. He replied, “Every brew pub here, basically.”

We’re talking tax-deductible business expenses, see? Snap a few photos with my phone, post it under an Anchorage dateline, and it’s travel journalism. Save the receipts for the IRS, and no questions asked.

My wife just asked me, “Are you ready?”

“Honey, we don’t leave for another three hours.”

One of the secrets to a successful marriage is balance — I’m carefree and spontaneous; my wife is responsible and conscientious. So when it comes to a trip like this, I leave all the worrying to her. Why should both of us be stressed out? As they say in Alaska, “Hakuna matata.”

OK, that’s not authentic Alaskan culture, but the IRS isn’t going to notice the difference when I show them the receipts for all those meals and, uh, beverages at brew pubs in Anchorage — legitimate business expenses!

“Besides which, your honor” — here I’m imagining my testimony in a federal trial — “my son was serving his country in Alaska, and maintaining the morale of our troops is crucial to America’s combat readiness. So it was in our national interest that Bob and I had the grilled trout dinner and a few beverages. Don’t you love America?”

Just doing my patriotic duty, you see. So as I get ready to roll, I remind you of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Category: Alaska, Shoe Leather Fund

Rule 5 Sunday: Tracy Cortez

Posted on | June 26, 2023 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

UFC flyweight fighter Tracy Cortez is a tough gal (10-1) but also a cutie, as Outkick noticed since they’re always on the lookout for cute sports gals. Here’s a pic of Miss Cortez outside the ring – imao, she looks a lot better with her hair down.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Fascism Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, MAGA Double Standards Feat. Merrick Garland, Plague Dance, “I’m Henry The Eighth, I Am”, Jury Duty, Jonna Jinton, Sunrise At Stonehenge, Ann Wilson, Pinup Noir, and June Brides

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Raquel Petit – Keeping Her Nose Clean, Hunter Whistleblower Testimony Revealed, Fish Pic Friday – Ape Reel, Shy, Random Celebrity News, The Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday Tanlines, Gone Fishin’, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Check Out Her Mama, Flotsam and Jetsam on Father’s Day, Palm Sunday, Happy Surfing Day! and $30M for ‘The Big Guy’?

FLAPPR: 100 Alternative Words For Boobs, also, T.I.T.S. For June 23

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

Who They Think We Are

Posted on | June 25, 2023 | 1 Comment

The editor of Iowa’s Quad Cities Times has apologized for publishing the cartoon above, after being called out on Twitter by Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who lamented the “shameful” cartoon and said: “It’s sad that this is how the MSM views Republicans. I’ve met with grassroots conservatives across America & never *once* experienced the kind of bigotry that I regularly see from the Left.”

Several commentators have described the cartoon as “racist,” but that’s not really the point. Rather, it is the libelous attribution of hateful bigotry to Republicans which is so offensive. What this illustrates is the assumption of liberals that they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, especially in regard to racial issues, but really on every subject imaginable — economic policy, climate change, gay rights, you name it. “Hate” is now defined as disagreeing with liberals.

Thomas Sowell’s 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy remains the definitive analysis of the psychology of liberalism, and if you haven’t read it yet, what the hell are you waiting for? There is a tremendous irony, by the way, in my having been branded a “white supremacist” by the SPLC, in that it was Sowell’s book that really opened my eyes to one of the false premises that informs liberal beliefs about race, i.e., that white “racism” is to blame for every ill suffered by black people. Sowell doesn’t address this specifically in The Vision of the Anointed, although he has elsewhere. Rather, one sees the point in Sowell’s criticism of the liberal “anointed” as assuming that their own good intentions are sufficient to justify any policy, from which they derive the belief that the opponents of their policies (the “benighted”) must be motivated by bad intentions. When liberals advocate some policy intended to help the homeless, for example, their rhetoric will seldom address the questions about the efficacy or necessity of the specific policy; rather, liberals will routinely portray themselves as caring about the homeless, while accusing opponents of selfish greed or cruel indifference to the plight of the homeless who, as Sowell observes, function as “mascots” for the liberal crusade.

In this way, the “anointed” liberals transform every policy question into a test of moral virtue, attributing malicious motives to anyone who fails to support the liberal agenda. They are intelligent and educated; you are stupid and ignorant. They are generous; you are greedy. And, as always, liberals conceive of themselves as the enlightened benefactors of oppressed racial minorities, while their opponents are hateful racists. In other words, the disagreement is not about the pros and cons of any particular policy, but rather about giving the anointed another opportunity to display their moral superiority, hence Sowell’s subtitle, “Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.”

What I deduced from Sowell’s argument is this: It doesn’t really matter what your opinion is about race, in terms of whether any particular policy helps or hurts black people (or Hispanics, etc.). And as Sowell has demonstrated in several of his books, including Discrimination and Disparities, “racism” (however you may define it) is simply insufficient as an explanation for the problems affecting black Americans. Political arguments ought to be about policy, not mere sentiment, and policies ought to be evaluated with the kind of rigorous inquiry that includes examination of alternatives, including the alternative of doing nothing. Liberals are always running around pointing to some kind of “crisis,” insisting that we must do something about whatever problem they’re focused on, and whatever this something may be, it almost always involves more taxation, regulation and/or deficit spending.

Something else: Liberals never acknowledge that the problem they’re calling a “crisis” today may have been caused by the “solutions” they imposed decades earlier to address some previous “crisis.” If you ever feel neglected because you haven’t been called “racist” lately, try pointing out that many (perhaps most) of the problems now afflicting black America may be direct consequences of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Because it is seen as the signal victory of the civil-rights movement, the details of the 1964 bill — the final bill was 18,000 words long — are considered to be beyond criticism. Yet the bill was such a vast expansion of government authority, and subjected so many areas of life to supervision of federal courts, that its potential consequences were nearly infinite in scope.

Sen. Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 act, specifically citing Title II and Title VII as unconstitutional, and likely to lead to the government mandating racial quotas in employment decisions. Beyond the specific problems with the bill, anyone can see with the benefit of hindsight that 1964 marks a dividing line — a historical fulcrum — in terms of race relations and the situation of black people in urban areas affected by “white flight.” Whether or not any of the opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 predicted every harmful consequence of that legislation is beside the point. Because it represented The Vision of the Anointed — the good intentions of its sponsors — the possibility that the bill in some ways hurt black Americans is never even considered. To suggest that some of the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act need to be repealed or revised is to invite denunciation as a crypto-Nazi, as if you were advocating a return to Jim Crow segregation or worse. Emotion rules the day.

Thus we return to Vivek Ramaswamy and this insulting cartoon for which the Quad Cities Times was forced to apologize. Readers will recall how, at CPAC this year, I praised Ramaswamy as “an outspoken and articulate critic of the religion of ‘Wokeism,’ but more than that . . . an enthusiastic proponent of American exceptionalism.” And I suppose that any conservative who has paid attention to Ramaswamy feels the same way, whether or not they support his presidential campaign. Conservatives still believe America is, and always should be, the land of opportunity, where anyone willing to work hard can have a shot at the American Dream, and we are sick and tired of how Democrats depict America as a wicked oppressor, crammed full of helpless victims.

Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t buying any of this victimhood narrative, and conservatives applaud him for standing up in defense of a pro-America, pro-liberty worldview. Yet liberals evidently think GOP voters would respond to Ramaswamy’s message by shouting, “Get me a Slushee, Apu!”

Because liberals are anointed, and think we are benighted.

There is so much cause for discouragement about America’s future. And yet Vivek Ramaswamy dares to express hope. Were I asked to help write his speeches, I’d encourage him to quote a great American:

“My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”

Deo vindice.

Category: Iowa, Liberals, Racism, Thomas Sowell

FMJRA 2.0 Let It Ride

Posted on | June 25, 2023 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Another week of .500 baseball for the Senators; we took two of three from the Hated Yankees in New York and then came home to lose two of three in RFK to the Reds, getting 2b Cookie Rojas crunched for 60 days in the process. So we’ll have to make do with Mike Andrews, who is a latter-day Rogers Hornsby (good hit, no field) only without the obnoxious behavior. Perversely, we’re not getting any kind of home field advantage: between the wipeout against the Angels and this series against the Reds, we’re 1-5 at home. Ah well, it’s a long season.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.