This is Week 1, day 3 of my New 13 Weeks Radical Reading Experiment. I keep a daily journal of the most interesting media I encounter each day. See or create something I should check out? Email me at [email protected].
1. From Veruca at Everlasting GOP Stoppers, a progressive blog, as shared by the Being Liberal Facebook page,: THIS Is What “Living” On Minimum Wage Looks Like
The post is meant to advocate for a higher minimum wage and who did they pick? Un-notated explicitly in the post is that this minimum wage earner’s paycheck is being garnished for child support. This is a man working on minimum wage and just over half of what he makes is going to his kids. He’s the one progressives want to hold up to make us feel sorry for minimum wage earners?
Unasked questions: how much money does this guy get from the government in assistance? Food stamps? How much does he make in off-the-books business transactions for cash?
What’s the real problem going on here? The fact that the law does not require businesses to pay people more per hour than they are capable of creating in value? Or that some men choose to abandon their children, forcing the government to garnish their checks to support them?
2. At the Daily Mail: ‘Serious and quiet’ teenage son of Boston Globe columnist goes missing
3. J. Christian Adams, cross-posted here at PJ Lifestyle: How the DOJ’s Radical Race-Based School Discipline Policies Will Outlast the Obama Era
Today the Drudge Report covers the Justice Department’s racialist attack on school discipline policies. The DOJ policy is based on the idea that school discipline policies are racially discriminatory because black students comprise a greater percentage of students disciplined than their percentage in the general population. Call it exceeding the bad-behavior quota.
That this four-year-old federal policy exists wasn’t news. I covered it in my 2011 book Injustice. What is newsworthy is how these radical racialist education policies will outlast the Obama administration, and Republicans are ill-equipped to reverse it even if they win the White House.
As I wrote in Injustice:
The DOJ’s reasoning goes like this: if minorities face school discipline at rates greater than their overall percentage in the population, then the school is engaging in racial discrimination. As Civil Rights chief Tom Perez explained, “Black boys account for 9 percent of the nation’s student population, but comprise 24 percent of students suspended out of school and 30 percent of students expelled.” This preposterous racial bean-counting is an affront to the very concept of individual responsibility.
4.Ben Shapiro at Breitbart: CHRISTIE SCANDAL EXPLODES: ‘TIME FOR SOME TRAFFIC PROBLEMS IN FORT LEE’
According to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, a senior staffer for Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) sent an email to a Port Authority official that seems to direct the official to jack up traffic in an area run by a Christie political opponent.
In September, two of three local access lanes from Fort Lee were closed on the George Washington Bridge, stymying commuters from the city. The mayor of Fort Lee had refused to endorse Christie’s re-election effort. For two months, the Port Authority was silent on why the lanes were closed.
This is the straw that breaks the camels back for Christie. There shouldn’t have been any more talk of him in 2016 at this point but any that remained should be shut up by this. New Jersey political thugs are only moderately wimpier than Chicago’s breed.
5. Politico: The HuffPo-ization of the Right
Even as the movement begins to cohere, it’s not all neighborliness and camaraderie. Over the course of numerous conversations, I heard the Daily Caller called “kind of a three-ring circus” and the Free Beacon, “a vanity site about Israel.” Breitbart and the Blaze get sniffed at as unserious.
Still, nearly all the conservatives I talked to said the new range of right-wing outlets is a good thing. “The only thing that I think is hurtful to the movement is if you didn’t have that kind of variety,” Domenech of the Federalist told me. During the Bush era, he said, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina showed that partisan media’s failure to question its own leadership can lead to a collective lurch into the political wilderness. The remedy is an array of sites playing complementary roles—a “weaponized” hit piece here, a clicky slideshow there, anti-Obama video snippets nearly everywhere.
They don’t mention us. I suppose that means we’re not HuffPo enough to fit the narrative.
6. Ben Shapiro’s op/ed column this week: Why Socialism Is on the Rise
It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression. It’s taken socialism half that time to come back from the collapse of the Soviet Union. In New York City, avowed socialist Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared that his goal is to take “dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities” — the gap between rich and poor. In Seattle, newly elected socialist city Councilmember Kshama Sawant addressed supporters, explaining, “I wear the badge of socialist with honor.” To great acclaim from the left, columnist Jesse Myerson of Rolling Stone put out a column telling millennials that they ought to fight for government-guaranteed employment, a universal basic income, collectivization of private property, nationalization of private assets and public banks.
The newly flowering buds of Marxism no longer reside on the fringes. Not when the president of the United States has declared fighting income inequality his chief task as commander in chief. Not when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has said that America faces “no greater challenge” than income disparity. Not when MSNBC, The New York Times and the amalgamated pro-Obama media outlets have all declared their mission for 2014 a campaign against rich people.
…
So what is the moral case for capitalism? It lies in recognition that socialism isn’t a great idea gone wrong — it’s an evil philosophy in action. It isn’t driven by altruism; it’s driven by greed and jealousy. Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don’t give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution. Socialism violates at least three of the Ten Commandments: It turns government into God, it legalizes thievery and it elevates covetousness. Discussions of income inequality, after all, aren’t about prosperity but about petty spite. Why should you care how much money I make, so long as you are happy?
7. Glenn Reynolds Interview At National Review about new book: The School of the Instapundit
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: So what’s the cocktail-party answer to what “the new school” is?
GLENN REYNOLDS: Both higher and K–12 education in America are based on models imported from 19th-century Germany. In 21st-century America, those models are woefully out of date.
LOPEZ: How is education like the newspaper business?REYNOLDS: A decade or more ago, I used to have conversations with journalists who reflected that their industry’s business model was collapsing, but who somewhat sheepishly hoped the collapse wouldn’t come until they reached retirement age. Now I have the same kind of conversation with academics.
….
LOPEZ: How should higher ed “sacrifice for the common good”?
REYNOLDS: Back in the 1930s, economist John Hicks said that the best monopoly profit is “a comfortable life.” The quasi-monopolies that have been set up by unionized teachers in K–12 and the tenured professoriate in higher education have given the guild members a comfortable life, but at great expense to students and families. If you favor redistribution from the well-off to the less-well-off, then academics’ lives should probably become less comfortable in exchange for cheaper and more responsive educational models.
….
LOPEZ: Would you abolish the concept of teenagers if you could?
REYNOLDS: People think that teenagers act the way they do because of biology, but the teenager is mostly a modern social invention. We turned young adults into teenagers by taking away anything productive for them to do. A century or more ago, they were important parts of a family’s economic picture. Now they’re consumers, not producers. In pre-modern times, they were around mostly adults, and tended to try to act in ways that earned respect from those adults. Now they’re herded together with other teens, and tend to try to act in ways that other teens respect, ways that are usually a lot less constructive.
I cannot wait for my copy to arrive!
8. Jonah Goldberg’s column for the week at National Review: Millennial Communists
The relevance of the Soviets’ effort to provide every goody imaginable isn’t to suggest they came up with the idea; it’s to demonstrate that when such ideas are put into practice and allowed to run their course, they fail — and often crush both kinds of freedom in the process.
Regardless, the failure of Communism didn’t put the debate to rest because the debate is eternal. Like those summer fireflies, it is a permanent fixture of the human condition, particularly among the affluent and fashionably rebellious young who are always eager to explain why this time is different.
9. Betsy Woodruff at National Review: Marijuana Group Rips into Cuomo’s Medical-Marijuana Plan
And Cuomo’s plan, per MPP, won’t do that. Instead, MPP expects the program — which reports indicate will let some hospitals give marijuana they receive from the federal government (or, if that doesn’t work, confiscated marijuana) to some patients — to be “unworkable and problematic.” They give a host of reasons for this. Among them: Hospitals, which are federally regulated, usually don’t want to break federal law (and marijuana is still federally illegal). Also, the program would actually cost the state money, instead of generating tax revenue. And the bureaucratic hoops patients and hospitals would have to jump through to get medical marijuana from the federal government are nigh insurmountable.
Something I hope to eventually write on more at length: I think that California’s model of medicinal marijuana is a better approach for easing a state culturally into a way of regulating the drug better than the full blown legalization of Colorado. As more states strive to figure out how to deal with this issue the fight that will count will be a cultural one. Is marijuana going to be just a party drug, a different kind of alcohol? Just another vice? Or are its medicinal qualities yet unknown and untapped? Just what is being regulated here? Defining marijuana as just a way to get high misses the plant’s potential.
10. Cinema Blend, Hat Tip to SLM Goldberg: Disneyland’s Long Rumored Tomorrowland Remodel Will Be Influenced By Star Wars Episode VII
Operating a theme park is quite a challenge. Guests have their favorite rides and love certain things about how the park looks now, but at the same time, change is exactly what convinces a whole host of other people to come back. These proposed updates would cost fans Autopia and the current version of AstroOrbitor, but if it means introducing a slew of new rides, I’m a big thumbs up on that. Progress has to be made at some point. Despite losing some great rides, I think we can all agree it’s better Disneyland doesn’t look exactly as it did when it first opened back in July of ’55. Besides, Tomorrowland looks like a dated mess anyway.
If the remodeling does away with Autopia then I say good riddance! Lousy ride that should have been phased out in the 1970s!
11. Walter Hudson here at PJ Lifestyle: 6 Lies Millennials Must Reject
Outrageous though it may seem to suggest, the American economy better resembles fascism than capitalism, with actors constrained by ever more intrusive controls. Like all words, capitalism does not mean whatever an author wants it to mean. It requires the condition of liberty, a condition unseen in American jurisprudence and made incrementally more elusive which each “progressive” reform. We cannot blame capitalism when no such thing exists in practice.
12. A newspaper write-up about my wife’s art exhibition in the Bahamas: ‘Picky Head’ To Provoke Conversation Of Black Hair And Identity
APRIL BEY’s Hair has always been used by people to place her in a comfortable race category.
Her mother is white and her father is black. When growing up in the Bahamas, April was told and in some cases bullied into chemically altering her hair to conform to a euro centric notions of beauty while masking her blackness.
After educating herself by doing comprehensive research into black hair and identity, she decided to put together an exhibition provocatively titled “Picky Head”. It brings together a number of observations and features from her research. The exhibition is set for 5.30pm, Friday at the Liquid Courage Gallery, featuring 8 to 9 pieces of her work.
“The ironic part of this is that black women are the highest consumers of hair relaxer and to blend in with them you must straighten your hair to appear white. This seemed like the protocol to me until about the age of 23. It flabbergasts me that I spent over 17 years of my life having no idea what my natural hair looked or felt like because I chemically destroyed it to blend in with the black women I lived, worked and went to school with. Even more disturbing was that I wasn’t alone,” April told Tribune Entertainment.
I’m very proud of her.
13. Two excerpts from Jews, God and History, by Max I. Dimont, from page 140 and 142:
Perhaps these might be of use to my friend Rhonda Robinson who has been blogging on the similarities and differences in Judaism and Christianity for many months now.
“He became to Jesus what the Talmud became to the Torah — a commentary and a way of Life.” — Dimont on the Apostle Paul:
“The schism between Jew and Christian was total.” — Dimont after explaining the theological changes Paul made to transform Christianity from a Jewish sect into a global religion made up mostly of converted Pagans:
14. An excerpt from page 267 of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, the chapter discussing Goethe, and the seeds of Decadence in Romanticism, and their origins in Paganism:
15. Think Progress: What ‘Anchorman 2′ And Will Ferrell’s Career Tell Us About Masculinity And Feminism
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, the sequel to director Adam McKay’s 2004 smash and cultural touchstone Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy, is by no means a good movie. The film, which follows titular news anchor Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) from San Diego to the big time in New York and the rise of cable news is too eager to repeat comedic beats from its predecessor, and is hampered by confused character motivations and a long diversion involving a not-so-tame shark. But what Anchorman 2 does do is solidify the most significant theme of Will Ferrell’s career: the ways in which masculine ideals harm men even as they help them, and the desperate need for a feminist movement that helps men figure out what they actually want out of life.
Gee if it wasn’t for a feminist movement and the progressive comedy stylings of Will Ferrell then what would men know to do with their lives?
Meanwhile recall the first story linked in this round-up wherein the check used to advocate for a raise in the minimum wage was of a father getting his paycheck garnished to pay child support.
How much more could so-called liberal feminists do to improve the world if instead of devoting their energies to analyzing dumb comedies and supporting male politicians who will give them free birth control, they instead stopped tolerating the millions of men who abandon the children they create and the women who chose to get involved with them in the first place?
See Also At PJ Lifestyle Today:
PJ Lifestyle Sunshine: A Rainbow at Sunset in Michigan
PJ Lifestyle Cute Animal Videos: 4 Videos of Maura the Siberian Husky Inaugurates a New Feature
Becky Graebner: I Had a Bad Day, So I Decided to Roast Something
Andrew Klavan: Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: A British Twilight Zone for the Digital Age
Helen Smith: What is the Difference Between Sociopathy and Psychopathy?
PJ Lifestyle Sunshine: Sunrise on Lake St. Clair, Just Outside Detroit
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