(no title)

Better Than Drudge

about

September 23, 2013

Americans’ Pre-existing Condition of Childishness

By Selwyn Duke

“Because!” This was a common childhood justification. A kid wouldn’t
be able to provide a good reason for his little agenda, but, well,
children want what they want. So he just might say, “Because!”

One sign of having truly reached emotional adulthood is the ability
to accept life’s harsh realities, yet many positions people take today
amount to little more than a stamping-of-the-foot “Because!”

A good example concerns medical coverage and “pre-existing
conditions.” I’ve actually heard people say things such as, “Insurance
companies have their pre-existing-condition policies only because they
don’t want to pay for things.” Well, yes. And?

Now, what if I said the following to such a person: If paying for
someone’s pre-existing medical problem is such a moral imperative, why
don’t you foot the bill? The individual just might reply that he’s not
in that business.

Neither are insurance companies.

Read the rest here.
September 22, 2013

Why Millennials Won’t Turn “Conservative”

By Selwyn Duke

Every so often the wonks of wishful thinking give us an
article about how blacks are becoming Republicans, how Hispanics are supposedly
a natural GOP constituency, or, as is the subject here today, how the
millennial generation is turning “conservative.” Perhaps pundits asserting the
last thing recall Winston Churchill’s observation, “If you're not a liberal at 20,
you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.” And
perhaps they overlook that it’s possible to raise a brainless generation.

Don’t think, as one might, that this will be a typical
analysis sneering at the proverbial “next generation” using the perceived gold
standard of one’s own. After all, I realize that my generation is the tree the
millennial nut fell from. Placing matters in further perspective, it’s true
that older and younger generations ever slam each other; it’s also true that
they both are always partially right. Lastly, I’ll say that I don’t at all
consider the WWII FDR voters the “greatest generation,” though it makes for a nice
narrative. The greatest generation was the one that founded our nation and wondered if we could “keep” its
republic, and there has been a consistent, but accelerating, degeneration ever
since.

(more…)
September 9, 2013

Homosexual Lobby: Let the Christians Eat Cake

By Selwyn Duke

“The goal is to rehabilitate,” said the bureaucrat about a
Christian-owned bakery that refused to bake a cake for a lesbian
wedding. The man who uttered that comment was Oregon labor commissioner Brad Avakian, and he’s obviously
come to bear the secular man’s burden. He insists he doesn’t want to put
the bakery, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, out of business. He just wants
owner Aaron Klein and his wife Melissa to think doubleplusgood thoughts.
But now the Kleins have in fact shuttered their doors in deference to
their principles and a local community that has all the wrong ones.

Unfortunately, such stories are becoming more common. Just yesterday, in fact, the San Antonio City Council passed an ordinance
prohibiting business owners with faith-based policies against
homosexuality and “transgenderism” from engaging in commerce in the
city. It’s the realization of a prediction homosexual activists made in
the 1989 book After the Ball. To wit: Once they could “produce a
major realignment solidly in favour of gay rights, the intransigents
(like the racists of twenty years ago) will eventually be effectively
silenced by both law and polite society.” And this is where I’d normally
start writing about freedom of association, but today I want to address
something else first: a novel way to fight back against the statist
equality jackboots.

Read the rest here.
August 26, 2013

Despite Cooling, Warmists Haven’t Cooled on Global Warming

By Selwyn Duke

Perhaps we could say that old mistaken theories never die — they just
keep pace with government funding. A case in point is the vaunted
scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They
cannot explain why the Earth, defying their climate models, hasn’t
warmed now in 15 years, but they’re still “‘95% sure’ humans are to
blame for climate change,” writes the Daily Mail.

Theorizing about why they (the IPCC scientists) were all wrong, the Mail quotes environment reporter Alister Doyle, who said,
“‘Scientists believe causes [of the lower temperatures] could include:
greater-than-expected quantities of ash from volcanoes, which dims
sunlight; a decline in heat from the sun during a current 11-year solar
cycle; more heat being absorbed by the deep oceans; or the possibility
that the climate may be less sensitive than expected to a build-up of
carbon dioxide.’”

Read the rest here.
August 24, 2013

Communism Now Big in Japan; Still Little in Virtue

By Selwyn Duke

Will the grinding poverty and initiative killing of collectivism soon
wear the label “Made in Japan”? Such a prospect is likely a ways off,
but it could become a reality if Yoshiko Kira has her way. Kira is one
of a slew of Japanese Communist Party (JCP) candidates who won office in
her nation’s July elections, which saw the JCP increase its presence in
the House of Councilors from 6 to 11 seats — enough representation to
propose legislation.

In point of fact, the JCP won more votes in the major metropolises of
Tokyo and Osaka than all but Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party,
and the JCP has been on the rise for some time. As the Telegraph’s Danielle Demetriou wrote
in 2008, “New [JCP] recruits are signing up at the rate of 1,000 a
month, swelling its ranks to more than 415,000. Meanwhile a classic
proletarian novel is at the top of the best-seller lists, and
communist-themed ‘manga’ comics are enjoying soaring success.”

It isn’t just the Land of the Rising Sickle, either.

Read the rest here.
August 13, 2013

The Babe and the Cynic

By Selwyn Duke

A certain very erudite and ever entertaining social critic
remarked recently that he always thought the worst of people. He went on to say
— perhaps, at most, half jokingly — that he was always right about them, too. He
then revealed that he actually had been very trusting as a boy, that he
believed everyone and often got taken advantage of. He certainly doesn’t get
taken advantage of much now, I’m sure. But what he doesn’t know is that in one
significant way he hasn’t changed at all.

The man’s admission of his boyhood as a doormat didn’t
surprise me, for gullibility and cynicism are two sides of the same coin. They
are both a function of naiveté, which can be defined as ignorance about
reality. The gullible person proceeds as if everyone is good and trustworthy,
whereas the cynic proceeds as if everyone is essentially bad and untrustworthy.
But reality is quite different: there are, practically speaking, “good” people
and “bad” people, the well-meaning and the self-serving. And possessing
discernment enables one to distinguish between the two groups. Yet the gullible
person trusts people even when he shouldn’t and the cynic fails to trust them
even when he should.

(more…)
August 12, 2013

Are Children Dumber Today Than a Century Ago?

By Selwyn Duke

Seeing high-school student Rachel Jeantel — who can’t read cursive or
speak proper English but boasts a B average — testify at the recent
George Zimmerman trial certainly could make one wonder what passes for
education in 2013 America. And now this question has been brought into
even sharper focus by the publication of a 1912 Bullitt County,
Kentucky, test required for eighth-grade graduation — a test that most
of today’s college graduates couldn’t pass.

The exam, published at Lew Rockwell,
asks questions such as “Adjectives have how many Degrees of
Comparison?” “Through what waters would a vessel pass in going from
England through the Suez Canal to Manila?” “Define Cerebrum; Cerebellum”
and “Name three rights given Congress by the Constitution and two
rights denied Congress.” And such apparent academic rigor has prompted
many to ask, as a Daily Mail headline
on the topic puts it, “Were children smarter a century ago? Test for
eighth graders in Kentucky dated 1912 ignites debate over kids'
intelligence today.”

Read the rest here.
August 2, 2013

When Atlas Shrugged at Detroit

By Selwyn Duke

Many of us have seen the striking video footage.
Dilapidated homes and buildings, whole neighborhoods abandoned, large
areas being reclaimed by nature and people growing vegetables where
businesses once stood. It looks a bit like a post-apocalyptic world.

Some would say it’s the apocalypse of government policy.

Detroit, Michigan’s recent declaration of
bankruptcy serves as a warning about the bankruptcy of bullying, bloated
bureaucracy. So says businessman Don Wilkie, who tells us that “in
1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit. Today,
there are less than 27,000.” And in an article entitled “How Detroit Almost Killed My Business,” he presents his explanation for why.

Read the rest here.
July 30, 2013

Diploma Disaster?

By Selwyn Duke

When Joshua Baron works delivering food for a local delicatessen, the
customers wouldn’t guess that the man handing them their delectable
fare is a law-school graduate. But neither the New York City resident’s
undergraduate degree in International Affairs nor his law degree has
translated into a career. And while he hasn’t yet passed the bar exam —
and hasn’t tried in recent years — he still is qualified to work as a
paralegal or in compliance. But not only are employers reluctant to hire
attorneys for paralegal positions (they worry that they’ll become
licensed and resign), says Baron, “There’s a glut of lawyers.”

While
Baron is now pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors and thus no longer
pounds the pavement for work as some might, his story is not unique. As
the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) tells us in
“From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: Why College Graduates Are Not Getting
Good Jobs,”

Colleges and universities are turning out
graduates faster than America’s labor markets are creating jobs that
traditionally have been reserved for those with degrees. More than
one-third of current working graduates are in jobs that do not require a
degree, and the proportion appears to be rising rapidly. Many of them
are better described as “underemployed” rather than “gainfully
employed.” Indeed, 60 percent of the increased college graduate
population between 1992 and 2008 ended up in these lower skill jobs,
raising real questions about the desirability of pushing to increase the
proportion of Americans attending and graduating from four year
colleges and universities. This, along with other evidence on the
negative relationship between government higher education spending and
economic growth, suggests we may have significantly “over invested”
public funds in colleges and universities.

Ticket to the Good Life?

Read the rest here.
July 26, 2013

The Post-racial President’s Profiling: DWW (Defending While White)

By Selwyn Duke

What would it have taken for the jury that acquitted George
Zimmerman to find him guilty? Well, try this on for size: imagine that instead
of emerging from his encounter with Trayvon Martin bloodied with a broken nose,
he didn’t have a scratch on him. Imagine he had also admitted he confronted
Martin with gun drawn and hadn’t actually been attacked — but had shot Martin simply
because the teen was running at him. Lastly, imagine Zimmerman was built like a
brick outhouse, had trained in a few martial arts and even competed in
martial-arts tournaments. Is it conceivable there could have been an acquittal?

Luckily for Zimmerman, the above was not his scenario. But
those were the facts in the
case of another man who shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old.

And there was an acquittal.

The case was however, different in two apparently
significant ways: the teenager was white and the shooter was black.

(more…)