TGIF: Get Rich Quicker!

TGIF: Get Rich Quicker!

by | Sep 17, 2021 | , , , , ,

"I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” --John Stuart Mill, 1828 We mustn't let the wrongdoing of politicians and bureaucrats blind us to the good things going on in the world. Outside the political realm, many things are doing pretty darn well. The long-term trends for many indicators have been positive for the last couple of centuries. Short-term disturbances, most often the result of political mischief, are temporary, and the progress resumes when the politicians loosen...

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TGIF: Bad Sign?

TGIF: Bad Sign?

by | Sep 10, 2021 | , , ,

When I see four of those yard signs on my morning walk, I chuckle. If I'm in a mischievous mood I might someday suggest a couple of memes that the owners might add. I could embrace all of those memes, but not without some qualification and in several cases, a good deal of qualification. But that's for another day. Today I want to focus on numbers 5 and 6: "Science Is Real" and "Water Is Life." I wouldn't comment on these were it not for their ominous implications for government policy. Some people are ready to spend trillions of other people's money because of what they suppose those sayings...

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TGIF: Why Do We Question Motives?

TGIF: Why Do We Question Motives?

by | Sep 3, 2021 | , , ,

I don't know if we're in the heyday of questioning the motives of people we disagree with rather than simply rebutting them--character assassination, that is--but it's got me wondering why this is such a popular pastime these days. Think about how often we hear people's motives impugned--even when they have impressive credentials--because of their positions on COVID-19, climate change, nutrition, racial policy--you name it. Considering motivation is not a bad thing per se, but too often it substitutes for a counterargument. That's a confession of vacuity. To oversimplify a bit, let's assume...

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Really?

by | Sep 1, 2021 | , ,

Someday our descendants will laugh with embarrassment at the people today who pore over weather records prepared to proclaim an existential threat from a fraction-of-1-degree rise in the average global temperature over any previous year "on record," that is, unless the government spends trillions of dollars on a program of virtually totalitarian control of our lives. "On record" actually means "in the last century and a half" because that's how far back "the record" goes. And that, by the way, roughly coincides with the beginning of the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850, which continues to...

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TGIF: Safety Can Be Hazardous to Our Health

TGIF: Safety Can Be Hazardous to Our Health

by | Aug 27, 2021 | , , , , ,

Kudos to Glenn Greenwald, a rare leftist voice of sanity on so many issues, for opening his recent article this way: In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to...

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TGIF: Thinking about Energy

TGIF: Thinking about Energy

by | Aug 20, 2021 | , , , , , ,

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its sixth "assessment report" earlier this month. As usual it generated its share of alarmist headlines. The report is several thousand pages long, and I'm certainly not qualified to digest, much less judge, it. I do think it's wise, however, to view the headlines and politicians' statements about it critically. The poppycock quotient of rhetoric about the supposedly looming environmental catastrophe is extremely high, not to mention toxic. At the risk of being accused of cherry-picking, I will point out that one expert on the...

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Afghanistan Aftermath: No Firings? No Resignations?

by | Aug 17, 2021 | ,

Joe Biden, who says the buck regarding Afghanistan stops with him in the White House, claims that the Taliban's final takeover of the capital, Kabul, provoking mass panic reminiscent of Saigon, 1975, happened more quickly "than anticipated." If that's true--spoiler alert: it ain't--then we taxpayers should demand the mass firings and resignations of anyone in the America intel apparatus having anything to do with Afghanistan. We should also demand our money back. Intel isn't cheap. The U.S. government has been in that country for nearly 20 years with a political, military, and intel...

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TGIF: Evict the President

TGIF: Evict the President

by | Aug 13, 2021 | , , , , , ,

President Biden has reversed himself under pressure from his progressive flank and has given the go-ahead for a new moratorium on renter evictions throughout most of the United States for individuals making up to $99,000 a year (couples, $198,000). The twist is that Biden acknowledges that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which reports to his secretary of health and human services, has no legal authority for the action. Most courts have agreed about the lack of authority, syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum reports, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh said in June...

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