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Sunday, November 15, 2015

Miscellany: 11/15/15

Quote of the Day
So great has been the endurance, 
so incredible the achievement, 
that, as long as the sun keeps a set course in heaven, 
it would be foolish to despair of the human race.
Ernest L. Woodward

Tweet of the Day
Rant of the Day: Jonah Goldberg: On Today's College Protesters
You kids think it is somehow rebellious to be liberal. So let me see if I get this right. The administrators at this school are liberal. The professors are liberal. Your high-school teachers were probably liberal. Your textbooks are, for the most part, liberal. Hollywood is liberal. The music industry is liberal. The fashion industry is liberal. Publishing is liberal. The mainstream media are liberal. Silicon Valley is liberal. Believe it or not, most corporations and the overwhelming majority of charitable foundations are liberal. And yet, you think you’re sticking it to the man by agreeing with them?

Image of the Day
A Veterans' Tribute at Chick-Fil-A


Facebook  Corner

(National Review). An excellent Jonah Goldberg rant on this.
As a former MIS professor, I can attest that I felt I had to keep my libertarian-conservative views to myself. As a new UWM hire, I remember going to a cocktail party; having worked and earned 4 degrees in Texas (which has no state income tax), I mentioned sticker-shock at roughly a 7% state income tax to one well-dressed guest. She looked at me in disbelief: "How do you think all these wonderful state parks are funded?" I quickly changed the subject.

 There were a number of incidents I could discuss during my 3 years of hell in Milwaukee, but one particularly comes to mind showing the coddling of students, even then over 20 years ago. I had a frivolous grade appeal filed against me which materially violated policy. (Policy said that subjective reasons, like "The professor doesn't like me", are unacceptable; they had to point at objective evidence, like unfairly marked exams, violations of published grading policies, etc.) This one student filed an appeal literally during the final hour before appeal expiration. There was no specific allegation of a mismarked exam or assignment, the computation of his final grade, just this vague belief that I used my grading policy maliciously against him.

 I was not allowed to prepare a response, because it would be "unfair" to the student for me to post something after the deadline. I was promised a copy of what the student filed; that was also denied because there was "too much of it". I was later allowed under observation to see what the student filed for fear I would "destroy evidence"--it was literally nothing more than a dump of class notes, computer assignment printouts, etc. No allegation whatsoever about any particular grade of anything. There was a fellow junior MIS faculty member on the inquisition panel, and I later asked him if he even looked at it; he told me no; there was just so much of it, i.e., where there's smoke, there's fire. So much for due process.

 During the hearing itself, one topic of discussion was particularly notable during this student's slanderous rant against me. I had allowed student to turn in their final computer assignments by the last day of the regular semester (before finals). There had been something like a 28-inch snowfall overnight. I had walked in knee-deep snow to campus to post a note saying I would allow a 3-day extension and to answer the phone calls of desperate students. The student was venting as if to imply I had summoned the snow gods to frustrate him. In fact, this student had known and used the extension. I had given him a good grade on the assignment. When I objected to this irrelevant discussion, I was sharply reprimanded for trying to intimidate the student. There was absolutely no attempt to critically question anything the student said. In fact, the student tried to gripe that I hadn't published test data for his program early enough. I pointed out that students can and should devise their own test data. My MIS colleague spoke up, pointing out what I said was fairly standard; the other panel members immediately admonished him for siding against the student.

 The committee later decided to expand their query, wanting me to supply other exams, etc., even though the student had made no allegation about exams. This had turned into a witchhunt. I was in a difficult position because I knew they would view noncompliance as a red flag. What stopped me was a visit from my one friend on faculty, a junior finance professor. He said he was speaking on behalf of other professors who were afraid if I gave in, it would set a bad precedent for them. When I later asked my panel colleague why they had done this, he replied that they were simply exercising "due diligence". I decided to stand firm and dare the committee to come to a decision on the evidence the student had provided in accordance with policy. The committee found in my favor, but griped that I had not been cooperative.

(Stossel). This week I tape a show on THREATS TO LIBERTY. Give me your best examples and I’ll read them on my show.
Bureaucratic rule-making, delegated by accountable legislators.

(Jeffrey Tucker). Hatred of commercial capitalism was a theme of the Paris attacks. Concerts, restaurants, bars, people having fun, spending their own money in an exchange economy -- these were the targets. Here we see the violent core of the atavistic longings of the anti-capitalist mind. 
This is blowback from Western imperialism. We funded and trained those people who became ISIS, then it came back to bite us in the ass. They did this in response to Francois Hollande deploying troops in Syria. Its sad that you are exploiting this tragedy to make a generalization about anti capitalists that ignores the existence of agorists, mutualists, anarcho pacifists, voluntarists, post scarcity anarchists and other peaceful political vectors that are anti capitalist, but not marxist-leninist.
This is pretentious nonsense. I don't underestimate unintended consequences of meddling, but ISIS had an anti-Western mentality from the get-go, and a lot of it has to do, as Tucker pointed out, with a bourgeois lifestyle and sexual licentiousness, which are seen as unIslamic. Now one could argue that many prototypical capitalist concepts emerged during the Islamic Golden Age, but there are religious concepts against usury and monopoly, which are highly consistent with a Marxist-like critique of capitalism.

(IPI). Since its implementation, the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity has given out hundreds of millions of dollars more in tax credits than it should have.
In fact, some businesses even received tax credit awards without hiring any new employees at all.
This week, Governor Bruce Rauner announced plans to restrict tax breaks for companies for retaining existing employees – putting an end to excessive tax credits that have cost taxpayers dearly.
Enough corrupt dealmaking at the expense of state taxpayers. The only problem I have here is that Rauner is denying only a fraction of the deals To give an example, if the tax break is worth more than hiring a couple of lower-wage workers to do nothing, you can expect the business to respond to perverse incentives.

 The problem is that government should not pick winners and losers but work under the rule of law. Tax gimmicks really serve to raise the government burden unfairly on others. If you really want job growth, you want consistently low tax and regulatory policies where economic growth is across the economy, not just for the politically connected.
While most of what you said is true we are in a state that is almost bankrupt. We need to do something to bring in companies that will create jobs.
 No. Do you think other states under better financial conditions aren't in a better condition to trump whatever Illinois does? Do you think existing businesses which pay more than their "fair share" should draw the short straw and they don't have an opportunity to migrate their operations across state lines?

 Desperation makes for bad public policy. Rauner needs to make politically painful decisions; whereas cutting off deals netting no new jobs makes for good populist policy, we need a more comprehensive approach. Will Illinois lose some deals? Perhaps.

(Lew Rockwell). I saw George Stephanopolous and his panel of Bill Kristol and 3 other neocons this morning. They all agreed: Trump is dead because people will want a man experienced in government and foreign and intelligence affairs, like the puppet Rubio. Or like the heads of the French state? Also, the US must invade Syria, murder Assad, install al-Qaeda, and finish the destruction of that country for the benefit of the empire and the local mini-empire. An anti-Islamicist Arab leader cannot be allowed to continue in office.See Sadddam Hussein and Khadaffi.
No hint anyplace of Ron Paul’s warning about blowback. France has been killing Muslim civilians in North Africa and the Middle East for more than 2 centuries, to maintain its control and its looting. Now it does so as a US satrap. In all modern wars, civilians comprise the vast majority of deaths and maimings. Of course, the Muslims were horrifically wrong to attack civilians. But only (some) Christians agree with Jesus Christ on such matters. Not anyone else. But is direct terrorism worse than the remote terrorism of drones and fighter-bombers? Like all forms of warfare, it is to be bitterly condemned. But the Kristolian notion that the answer to terrorism is more killing and destruction, and a massive, new war, is insane. Or, it would be insane if he were not, like all neocons, a destructivist, a the-worse-the-better kind of guy, like Lenin. “Destroy and Rule” is the evil motto.
Want to stop terrorism? Ron Paul had it right: get out of Muslim countries. Stop bombing. Stop installing dictators. Stop stealing. Stop intervening. Stop killing.
No. I am no neocon and I do realize that meddling results in unintended consequences, but the concept of blowback implies that the victims are somehow responsible for State-based intervention.

 "Want to stop terrorism?" This is a joke. Do you think the outnumbered, persecuted religious minorities (including the Christians) somehow brought the ISIS purge on themselves? These genocidal fanatics don't need any excuse or rationale to violate the non-aggression principle. They are recruiting natives from the western democracies to commit unprovoked atrocities against fellow citizens. (Think the Boston Marathon massacre.)

My Greatest Hits: Nov. 2015

I'm hesitant about the first 2 posts, because there's been an abnormal number of hits over the past week or so. It's always possible someone came across a post and drew attention to it. Now I've occasionally had posts where it seemed that I was being spammed, where the hits on a post were accumulating like an auto odometer in fast motion. I had to delete the posts in question. The current situation is extremely odd, because they are in my signature miscellany format. The normal pattern is that the most recent post usually collects a majority or plurality of hits, maybe a few hits to preceding posts, and a steady number of hits to one-off posts; I'll sometimes get a few random number of hits to posts up to a few years old, which I attribute to Google searches on topics. On the other hand, this month I had some one-off posts that I thought would gather some pageviews, e.g., on Carson and a couple of debate reviews. Quite often one or more one-offs generate enough pageviews to reach my top 5, but not over the past month. In descending order:
Choose Life: Father and Son



Political Cartoon


Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Aretha Franklin, "Bridge Over Troubled Water".The song always had gospel overtones; I think I read an interview where Simon had said that he had written the song specifically for Aretha. It's totally different from Garfunkel's soaring performance, which I prefer, but Aretha does have a way of covering

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