Science fiction writer Damon Knight once claimed that the popularity of conspiracy theories could be explained by our “desire to believe that there is some group of folks who know what they’re doing.”
Wishful thinking. And few “groups of folks” have displayed less aptitude in the art of keeping secrets than government.
Yet no matter who is in power, no matter how incompetent they may be, there always exists this irate minority that believes politicians possess supernatural powers of deception.
The mystery the nation faces isn’t President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. The mystery is how any American could believe that all the president’s former political opponents, both the Republican and Democratic parties, Hawaiian officials and two Honolulu newspapers (nay, the entire press corps) could work in concert to conceal the biggest con of the eon.
David Harsanyi, “Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind: What the Obama birth certificate conspiracy says about American politics”, Reason Online, 2009-07-29
July 29, 2009
QotD: Conspiracy theorists
July 28, 2009
QotD: Re-interpreting that number
There have been two trends in US health care over the last decade. On the one hand, a lot of Americans have become, in any rational sense, over-insured: They get tested for things they’ll never get. On the other, there has been an abandonment of health insurance by the rich. If you peel the Census Bureau and DHHS figures, of those alleged “45 million uninsured Americans”, one-fifth aren’t Americans; another fifth aren’t uninsured but are covered by Medicare; another two-fifths are the young and mobile (they don’t have health insurance, but they don’t have life insurance or home insurance, either: they’re 22 and immortal and life’s a party); and the remaining fifth are wealthier than the insured population. Really. According to a 2006 Census Bureau report, 19 per cent of the uninsured have household income of over $75,000. Since the last round of government “reform” in the Nineties, wealthy Americans have been fleeing insurance and opting to bring health care back to a normal market transaction. And, if you look at the “uninsured discount” offered by doctors, one can appreciate that, for everything but chronic disability, it’s not an irrational decision to say I’ll get a better deal for my broken leg or my colonoscopy or my heavy cold if I just write a check for it.
Mark Steyn, “The Nationalization of Your Body”, National Review, 2009-07-28
July 26, 2009
QotD: Over-eager fans
Whoever asked “What’s next?” Note that I just finished the book on Tuesday.
There are people who inquire brightly of new mothers, as they are being wheeled out of the delivery room, “So, when are you going to have another?” These people would deservedly be in want of their kneecaps, if only the mothers could get up.
Lois McMaster Bujold, posting to the Bujold mailing list, 2009-07-26
July 25, 2009
QotD: the last honest trash collector
There are lots of levels of fear and complaint about the government getting involved in business. First and foremost, of course, is incompetence. We actually have experiential evidence about this. In England, all the English car companies were beginning to circle the drain in a series of well-deserved failures and bankruptcies, earned by making lousy products with very poor production at high prices. So, the government, back in the ’70s, nationalized all the British car companies. The result was British Leyland, a name that perhaps doesn’t resonate much with you. Many of your friends probably drive Humber Super Snipers, or perhaps not. [Laughs.] That’s certainly one thing that we’re headed for. The other thing is that there’s a very good reason that governments aren’t supposed to compete with private-enterprise companies. Governments have monopolies on certain things, like eminent domain and deadly force. What’s another example of an organization that gets into the same business that you’re in, except that their guys have got guns? That would be the Mob. Ford is like the last honest trash collector in the New York metropolitan area, the last one that’s not mobbed-up. How long is that gonna go on for?
P.J. O’Rourke interviewed by Gregg LaGambina, A.V. Club, 2009-07-16
July 24, 2009
QotD: Government waste
For the people in government, rather than the people who pester it, Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.
P.J. O’Rourke, “The Winners Go to Washington, D.C.”, Parliament of Whores, 1991
July 23, 2009
QotD: The Gates Arrest
It needs to be said that, though I casually threw it out there, I really have no clue whether race played a role in Gates’ arrest. It’s important to say that. I don’t know what I would have done if I were in [his] shoes, but I don’t know that I’d [have] assumed [it was based on] race. I think the decision to arrest a guy for, at worst, being rude in his own house is shockingly stupid. The thought of someone like that carrying the power of life and death is mind-boggling.
That said, the wind is leaving my sails over this one and I’m not sure why. I keep getting this “doth protest too much” vibe every time I read Gates’s interviews. It’s interesting that it took his own arrest for Gates to decide to make a doc about this. Maybe he’s had a Come To Jesus moment. Who can know? Who can really know?
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “On Gates”, The Atlantic, 2009-07-22
July 22, 2009
QotD: Republican government
Republican government is impossible in an age where not only are the bills too long for a reasonably engaged citizen to read, not only are they too long for a legislator to read, but they’re too long to write down before they’re passed into law. We just have to trust our rulers, and they just have to trust whichever aides negotiated whichever boondoggles with whichever lobbyists.
Mark Steyn, “Jacksonian America”, National Review, 2009-07-20
July 21, 2009
QotD: ” . . . Apollo was a government boondoggle”
To keen spacenuts like yours truly, the moonshot was a brilliant climax. That was the problem, it was THE climax. Nothing since has some close in daring or accomplishment. The moon, the wisemen told us, was only the first step. Mars was next, by 1990 surely. 1990 came and went. Whatever the scientific merits of sending men rather than machines to the planets, the spacenuts wanted Captain Kirk to follow logically from Neil Armstrong. It was the future. It was progress. It was inevitable.
We didn’t notice, until rather late, the problem with Apollo. The clever crew cut men, hard cold and objective, gazing at their computer screens — ancient to modern eyes, but so beautiful — using mind boggling math to do the amazing. Beneath the math, the engineering and the hard science was the dismal science. Apollo was a government boondoggle, a creature of politicians it died when its political masters saw that it was no longer a vote getter.
Publius, “Destination Moon”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2009-07-20
July 20, 2009
July 18, 2009
QotD: Leverage
American debt levels are hugely out of line with other countries. I’m a big fan of American exceptionalism, but in this case, I’ll say that we’re at least partially in error. We need to take the downside of leverage much more seriously, starting with our nation’s business schools. OF course, I don’t expect people taking on $100,000 worth of debt to be too easy to persuade of the dangers of leverage.
Megan McArdle, “Asymmetrical Information: Learning to (un)Love Leverage”, The Atlantic, 2009-07-17
July 17, 2009
QotD: CanLit
To mark Dominion Day (as you’d expect a squaresville loser like me to call it), the New York Times asked 11 Canadian expatriates to write on “what they most miss about home.” The cutting-edge funnyman Rick Moranis riffed on toques and beavers and the lyrics of God Save the Queen, raising the suspicion he’d simply recycled his beloved Dominion Day column of 1954 — which is not just environmentally responsible but very shrewd given New York Times rates for freelance contributors.
But thereafter the expats got with the program. The musician Melissa Auf der Maur, after years in the “American melting pot,” pined for “the Canadian mosaic.” But the great thing about the Canadian mosaic is that it engages in “a national conversation about literature like a big book club,” so the bookseller Sarah McNally said she missed “the pride and simplicity of a national literature, which probably wouldn’t exist without government support. We even have a name, CanLit, that people use without fearing they’ll sound like nerds.”
Multiculturalism, government books, using phrases like “Canadian mosaic” with a straight face, hailing the ability to say “CanLit” with a straight face as a virtue in and of itself . . .
[. . .]
Canada has done everything David Rakoff, Sarah McNally and Melissa Auf der Maur want—not least in their own fields. It taxes convenience-store clerks to subsidize books and writing and publishing and that wonderful “national conversation about literature like a big book club” in which everyone’s membership dues are automatically deducted from your bank account whether you go to the meetings or not. And still Mr. Rakoff and Ms. McNally and Ms. Auf der Maur leave. They applaud the creation of a “just” and “equitable” society, and then, like almost all the members of the Order of Canada you’ve actually heard of, they move out. Despite commending the virtues of a social “safety net” for you and everyone else, they personally can only fulfill their potential somewhere else, without one. Usually in a country beginning with “Great” and ending in “Satan.”
Mark Steyn, “Why do you leave the one you love? Our ‘funny creative people’ adore our social safety net, not that they stick around to use it”, Macleans, 2009-07-16
July 16, 2009
Rephrasing Ben Franklin’s old aphorism
Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as having said “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”. Here’s a modern rephrasing, “The more you cede your own well-being to an 800-pound gorilla, the more that 800-pound gorilla is going to act like a thin-skinned asshole.“.
(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005589.html.)
QotD: Canadian Sharia courts
An Iranian artist has been sentenced to a five year prison term for setting the Koran to music. I would express outrage and alarm but I am writing from Canada and am in no position to point fingers. In Canada, we call our sharia courts “human rights commissions”.
Nick Packwood, “Provoking the faithful”, Ghost of a Flea, 2009-07-14
July 15, 2009
QotD: The Matriarchy
[Alan Oak]: In a correspondence with feminist scholar Sylvia Kelso, published in Women of Other Worlds (1999), you wrote:
“Where has anyone experienced a matriarchy for test comparison?” you may ask. In fact, most of us have, as children. When the scale of our whole world was one long block long, it was a world dominated and controlled by women. Who were twice our size, drove cars, had money, could hit us if they wanted to and we couldn’t ever hit them back. Hence, at bottom, my deep, deep suspicion of feminism, matriarchy, etc. Does this mean putting my mother in charge of the world, and me demoted to a child again? No thanks, I’ll pass . . .
This leads me to another thought [. . .] Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal. Nothing is more likely to set any subordinate’s back up, whether they be male or female, than for their boss to come the “mother knows best” routine at them. We need a third place to stand. I’m just not clear how it became my job to supply it.
Lois McMaster Bujold, interviewed by Alan Oak at WomenWriters.net, 2009-06
