Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

To too many, a Bernie life takeover is a GOOD thing

by Leave a Comment

Sadly, not only Leftists, but beleaguered working and lower middle class voters will like the Bernie promise to make their lives safer and easier.

Bernie Sanders by DonkeyHoteyMonica Showalter of American Thinker, is one of the most astute political bloggers out there. Nevertheless, I believe her conservative outlook caused her to make a conceptual error. Today she wrote a short post about an Axios list of the things Bernie wants to bring under government control — and Showalter thinks that Axios published the list because it’s concerned about Bernie’s proposed power grab:

In a startling Axios summary list called “Bernie Sanders’ 2020 plan to restructure your life,” Axios publisher Jim Vanderhei (and Juliet Bartz), are sounding the alarm about the nightmare scenario of a potential Bernie Sanders presidency.

The piece was featured in Mike Allen’s widely read Top 10 — at the top. It’s a piece that looks like it belongs more at Issues & Insights than center-left Axios. Axios warns that Sanders is surging in the polls and influencing other Democratic candidates with his ideas and they don’t sound happy.

I have to disagree with Showalter. First of all, looking at the list from the purely Proggie viewpoint, I think it’s a very happy list. In the chart below, the left-hand column quotes verbatim from that Axios summary. The right-hand column has the reaction from the average hard-core, college-educated Leftist. [Read more…]

Wolf Notes for 11 Oct. 2018

by Leave a Comment

The IPCC’s latest just in time for Halloween

Everything about the global warming movement is a scam designed to transfer the wealth and political power of the West generally and the U.S. in particular into the hands of socialist apparatchiks at the U.N.  It has always been so.  The most recent effort to accomplish that was with the Paris Accords, from which, thankfully — and in perhaps the most consequential act of his Presidency — Trump withdrew.  But these watermelons in the U.S. and at the UN (green outside, red inside) are not going to give up.

The IPCC issued a new climate report several days ago, complete with dire projections and hands out for money. CNN was on top of it: Planet has only until 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change, experts warn

Governments around the world must take “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to avoid disastrous levels of global warming, says a stark new report from the global scientific authority on climate change.

The report issued Monday by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says the planet will reach the crucial threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by as early as 2030, precipitating the risk of extreme drought, wildfires, floods and food shortages for hundreds of millions of people.
The date, which falls well within the lifetime of many people alive today, is based on current levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
The planet is already two-thirds of the way there, with global temperatures having warmed about 1 degree C. . . .

[Read more…]

“Blexit” — It’s time for America’s blacks to vote themselves out of the Democrat Party

by 10 Comments

African Americans for TrumpFifty years of data show that Democrat policies harm American blacks. All the promises of the post-Civil Rights era have failed. Worse, America’s Democrat leadership, especially its black Democrat leadership, no longer makes even a pretense of serving the needs of the American Black community.

Democrat elites, both white and black, are just like the European Union’s elites:  serving themselves — their values and their bank accounts — without no regard for the people they ostensibly represent. Both the Democrats and the EU leadership ride roughshod over ordinary people’s values and ignore their needs. It’s high time, therefore, for American Blacks to have their own Brexit moment — call it a “Blexit” if you will — and turn their backs on the Democrat Party that has served them so badly.

In 1964, you had to give the Democrats credit for adaptability: After spending the late 1950s and early 1960s fighting desperately against the Civil Rights Movement, once it was a done deal they surveyed the landscape and realized that they could use the movement to their advantage. By attaching African Americans firmly to the government teat, Democrats figured that they could rely on a pacified black voting bloc to achieve perpetual political power. Indeed, LBJ is alleged to have made the politically incorrect boast that the Civil Rights act ensured that “I’ll have those n*****s voting Democrat for two-hundred years.”

Sadly, the Great Society legislation that LBJ and his Democrats instituted, while it has ensured those reliable black votes, has continued an American pattern:  Every bad thing that has happened to blacks in America has been the result of government forces. Slavery lasted because the Southern legal system brutally supported it. Likewise, the Jim Crow era lasted as long and as virulently as it did because, again, the Southern legal system brutally supported it.

It’s almost certain that, without rigorously enforced laws separating facilities, criminalizing “miscegenation,” and foreclosing education and work opportunities, the free market would have improved black lives in the South. As Milton Friedman explained, in Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, the free flow of wealth, without legislation and regulation impeding non-violent, non-fraudulent conduct, is the single best and fastest way to end just about any type of discrimination:

[Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 4/18/16 — the “tax day” edition and open thread

by 7 Comments

My little writing lady is paying the IRS today, which is why she looks sad.

My little lady is paying the IRS today, which is why she looks so sad.

Yes, it’s tax day, and what better day could there be to talk about all the distressing, expensive, and scary foolishness in the world?

Ripping off taxpayers with climate change craziness.  Today has been a “suffer the climate change” day for me, so it’s appropriate to open with a riff about California’s infamous — and incredibly expensive — high-speed train to nowhere.  The Independent Institute, a great libertarian think-tank located right here in the Bay Area, has this to say:

California’s “bullet train” is nowhere near completion, but already the high-speed rail system is taking the state’s voters and taxpayers for a ride. The gulf between the glowing promise and the gloomy reality is gargantuan. For this reason, the agency that manages the voter-approved project, which lacks transparency but not arrogance, has just won the California Golden Fleece Award, a prize Independent Institute gives each quarter to a state or local agency, official, or program guilty of egregiously fleecing taxpayers, consumers, and/or businesses.

[snip]

When voters approved a $9.95 billion bond measure in 2008 to help fund a high-speed bullet train connecting the San Francisco Bay Area with Southern California, they were promised nonstop service from S.F. to L.A. in 2 hours and 40 minutes, at a total cost of $45 billion—all without taxpayer subsidies. Since then the California High-Speed Rail Authority has planned on dropping nonstop service, changing to non-dedicated tracks, and raising the travel time to almost four hours—changes that would cut ridership and revenue while raising total costs, now estimated at $64 billion.

Read more here and do think about subscribing to the Independent Institute’s newsletter.

And while I’m on the subject of climate change.  A federal judge in Oregon has ruled that a bunch of kids can continue their climate change lawsuit against the United States government and the Fossil Fuel Industry.  If this insanity is not nipped in the bud, the Fossil Fuel Industry will be bankrupted, and all of us will be re-living the wonders of the pre-industrial era, complete with windmill power, Hobbesian mass starvation, and life expectancies in the 30s.

The gift of an “imperfect” child.  This segment probably deserves its own post, but I’ll try to pack it in here.  I was in a restaurant the other day and saw something one never sees any more in Marin, or anywhere in the Bay Area for that matter:  a young child who had clearly been born with Down Syndrome.

There are certainly older people around with Down Syndrome. That the young people are missing isn’t because they’re being cured; it’s because, thanks to amniocentesis testing, they’re being destroyed in utero.

[Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 4/6/16 — the “speed blogging” edition and open thread

by 4 Comments

Woman-writing-300x265If there were a speed-blogging competition, my goal would be to win it with this round-up post. I’d meant to blog at length and at leisure today, but life caught up, including a glitch with the bank, which lost the signatures that would enable me to liquidate my mother’s trust. Aaargh! Now I have to go through probate. Aaargh! Aaargh!

Thomas Sowell agrees with me that Obama is a classic fascist.  “What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands.”

Obama lied about every aspect of Obamacare.  No, really, he did.  Every one of the promises he made to public has proven false.

“How hard is it to understand that radical Islamist jihadis have declared war on the West? In simple English this means: they will find you and kill you wherever and whenever they can.”

Da Nile isn’t just a river in Egypt.  It’s also a state of mind in Europe, which refuses to acknowledge, despite the Islamists’ best efforts, that there’s a war going on.

England is a dhimmi nation that sold out its youth.  In Peter McLoughlin’s Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, he tells precisely how Britain’s dhimmi-fied laws, which were directly intended to silence any criticism of Islam or Muslims, resulted in England officially turning her children over to Muslim pedophiles. Janet Levy reviews the book and it’s a horrifying tale of Britain’s attacks on girls and their families for attempting to get protection and redress.

Obama’s administration isn’t in denial; it just lies.  If you didn’t already read or hear about it, when the French President acknowledged the Islamic aspect of the terrorism ripping apart bits and pieces of Europe, the White House, in true Stalin fashion, erased those words from Hollande’s speech.

Islam and crime.  You’re not imagining that prisons are incubators for Islamism.  An expert says that violent prisoners are ripe for any type of extremist ideology.  My cousin, the former prisoner minister, understands that Islam is a particularly attractive belief system:

It is not a contradiction to be a Muslim and a murderer, even a mass murderer. That is one reason why criminals “convert” to Islam in prison. They don’t convert at all; they remain the angry judgmental vicious beings they always have been. They simply add “religious” diatribes to their personal invective. Islam does not inspire a crisis of conscience, just inspirations to outrage.

Andrew Klavan likes Ted Cruz.  Klavan lists Cruz’s objective accomplishments and abilities, likes what he sees, and struggles to understand how people can say Cruz — a lifelong constitutional conservative — is no different from Trump — a sort-of conservative as of last July.  I agree with Klavan, of course.

[Read more…]

Government-imposed minimum wages: A world that cultivates every person’s inner Veruca Salt

by 28 Comments

veruca-salt-now2

A month ago, my Facebook feed (which reflects the fact that many of my friends are Progressives) was suddenly overrun by a series of posters, all pointing out that minimum wage work is insufficient to support the cost of a two bedroom apartment.  It’s unlikely that the new minimum wage laws that went into effect on January 1, 2016, in 14 states will change these charts:

minimum wage won't afford two bedroom apartment

Also, in a charming irony, that problem is worse in most blue states compared to most red ones, as you’ll see if you compare the two charts below:

Minimum wage two bedroom apartment

red state - blue state

There are three major bad ideas packed into the notion that minimum wage should be the Rolls Royce of salaries.

The first problem is basic economics: The reality is that a higher minimum wage benefits the few over the many:

Increasing the minimum wage is an inefficient way to reduce poverty, according to a Fed research paper that comes amid a national clamor to hike pay for workers at the low end of the salary scale.

David Neumark, visiting scholar at the San Francisco Fed, contends in the paper that raising the minimum wage has only limited benefits in the war against poverty, due in part because relatively few of those falling below the poverty line actually receive the wage.

Many of the benefits from raising the wage, a move already undertaken by multiple governments around the country as well as some big-name companies, tend to go to higher-income families, said Neumark, who also pointed to research that shows raising wages kills jobs through higher costs to employers.

On its face, then, the charts’ premise, which is that higher minimum wages will see everyone in better homes, is wrong.

[Read more…]

The stupidity of Leftist parody when applied to the iron law of economics

by 4 Comments

Stephen-ColbertMr. Bookworm likes Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I don’t but, because they’re nattering away on my television, I often find myself watching them anyway.

Colbert, who will soon be filling David Letterman’s vacant chair, has a shtick. His shtick is that he’s a conservative, so his humor ostensibly attacks conservatives at their own game.

What makes Colbert’s shtick fundamentally unfunny, though, is that he has no understanding of conservative ideas or, indeed, of anything at all. His starting point is a parody image of conservatives — hate women, hate minorities, love the evil rich, want to kill everybody with guns.  That’s not funny.  It’s just crude.

Then, his alleged humor attempts to build on this parody, looking at headlines through the stained, warped filter of his politic animus.  The result is something without any intrinsic humor. It only makes people laugh if they’re inclined to laugh at any insult directed to their political opponents, no wit or insight required.

My premise for this post, therefore, is that it’s not funny when ill-informed people try to parody something that they’ve already reduced to a parody.  Working off this premise, I want to introduce you to a video and, even better, its rebuttal.

The video came about when Funny or Die partnered with Kristen Bell (who is the voice for the redhead in Frozen) does a Mary Poppins parody supporting a hugely increased minimum wage. The video’s production values are wonderful. Kristen Bell has a lovely voice to begin with and does a very good Julie Andrews imitation. The melody is a nice, subtle homage of “Spoonful of Sugar,” without simply being a retread. Really, the whole thing is great, except….

Except that the premise is insanely stupid. It accepts blindly that, if the government forces employers to pay people above market rate, everyone (except the evil, abusive employers, of course) will have more money.

The video makes no effort whatsoever to rebut the fact that the iron laws of economics work no matter what DemProgs desire.  If the government forces employers to pay their employees more than the market will bear, employers will just hire fewer people. The result will be that a few people will have more money, although they’ll be expected to do more work for that money. Many small businesses may stagnate, rather than grow, shrinking further the employment pool.  Ultimately, instead of having lots of people employed for low wages, you’ll just have lots of unemployed.

You know why the video makes no effort to work through these problems, of course.  It doesn’t try because it can’t.  In a battle between the iron laws economics and witless Progressivism, the former always wins.  That leaves the latter with nothing more than superficial cuteness (a parody) justifying its simplistic economic demands (the parody piled on the parody).

The problem for conservatives, of course, is that their ideas, while inevitable, require some intelligence to explain and understand.  And, because they’re complex, they require a little time and space.  A short rebuttal to a well-produced video is hard to do.  Reason’s Remy, though, has taken a stab at simplifying the rebuttal, and he’s done a pretty fine job:

So, if your Facebook friends start touting Bell’s Poppins, feel free to tag them with Remy’s Bert.

Tuesday tidbits (and an Open Thread, of course)

by 9 Comments

Victorian posy of pansiesDennis Prager asks a very important question:  What do you learn when you compare what Leftists and what conservatives view as the greatest evils in the world today.  Using this analysis reveals just how bereft the Left is of any moral compass.  Or rather, it has a moral compass, only it works backwards.  As for me, I’m wondering if there’s any way I can slip the ideas in this article before my Leftist friends so that they think about the concepts without become too defensive to absorb them.

***

Wendy Davis got into a war of words with Bristol Palin, who pointed out that Davis’ actual life, as opposed to her imaginary life, is nothing to be proud of.  A few comments.

First, I was absolutely blown away by something Davis said in her defense, regarding her relationship with her adult daughters:  “I have always been and will always be the most important female in their lives.”  That’s a pretty monumental ego you’ve got there, Little Lady.  An ego that size much explains everything about Davis’s life choices and her lies.

Second, Palin is right, as Greg demonstrates in nice graphic form.

Third, Pat Sajak came up with the best tweets ever regarding Davis’s imaginary bio:

By the way, if you want an endless stream of humor, follow Sajak on Twitter.  He’s a gifted satirist and social observer who elegantly compresses his thoughts into 120 characters:

***

NPR tries to push a minimum wage increase with a story about Henry Ford’s decision to offer high wages to get the best employees.  It doesn’t seem to occur to the geniuses at publicly supported radio that there’s a difference between a business making a strategic decision to get the best employees possible, and a government forcing all businesses to pay higher wages to everyone across the board, whether they’re yutzes or the most wonderful employees ever.  Even more disheartening than this, well, stupidity is the only word for it, is my sense that there’s no way to get those NPR drones to understand that there is a difference.  Sigh.