Muda69

What political solutions have you personally had a hand in implementing, Dante? Please describe them.

So you don't believe black people wearing "whiteface" to caricature Caucasians is racist because Caucasians have "privilege"?

http://reason.com/archives/2019/02/08/is-gentrification-still-bad-if-local-own#comment These social justice warriors really have nothing better to do with their time?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/jeff-bezos-exposes-alleged-national-enquirer-extortion-scheme/ Kudos to Mr. Bezos for standing up to AMI and calling their bluff.

http://reason.com/archives/2019/02/08/nursing-shortages-will-put-californias-p Yet more inane government bureaucracy at work. Typical. Nursing seems to be a lucrative gig these days. I have a sibling who is a nurse with 20+ years experience that is on her probably 8th different hospital job. She has negotiated a significant pay increase at every stop.

'Not ashamed': Assman says his name shouldn't be rejected for personalized licence plate: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/melville-man-saskatchewan-government-insurance-assman-license-plate-1.5008302 As a comment to this story states: "And Dr. Michael Fucker's hopes were quickly dashed . . ."

Should Paul McCartney and Other Billionaires Be 'Abolished'?: http://reason.com/blog/2019/02/07/destroy-all-billionaires Reich links to a column by The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo with the eliminationist title "Abolish Billionaires: A radical idea is gaining adherents on the left. It's the perfect way to blunt tech-driven inequality." The column makes two large points that undergird the anti-billionaire movement. First is the idea that nobody deserves or needs a billion dollars. "Why should anyone have a billion dollars," asks Manjoo, "why should anyone be proud to brandish their billions, when there is so much suffering in the world?" Second is the notion that "inequality is the defining economic condition of the tech age." Did, say, Paul McCartney (net worth: $1.2 billion) make his pile through theft, as Robert Reich would contend? Would there be less suffering in the world if his money is expropriated and transferred to the wretched of the earth via higher taxes rather than through his own charitable donations and investments? Probably not, especially when you think about how much suffering, especially in the developing world, is the direct result of government action. More important, the creation of billionaires is a lower-order effect of a relatively free-market economy. Recall Joseph Schumpeter on this: Schumpeter's basic description helps to explain the ubiquity of all sorts of technology, from cell phones to pharmaceuticals, all around the world. Because of massive increases in global trade, more people have more stuff and are living longer than ever before. If one indirect consequence of this is that there are more billionaires than there used to be, so be it. It's become fashionable to assert that inequality is back at Gilded Age levels and that the concentration of power and wealth and everything good and decent is in smaller and smaller hands. This is simply not a good description of the world. For the first time in history, report researchers at the Brookings Institution: Income inequality among countries has been declining as well. The GINI coefficient, a measure of income inequality, of 146 countries that account for 95 percent of global production, declined from 67 percent in 1988 to 57 percent in 2015. Over the same time frame in the United States, it rose from 35 percent to 38 percent, an increase, to be sure, but a relatively modest one. China and India saw bigger increases, but the growth in inequality within those countries is more than overwhelmed by the absolute increases in wealth, especially among the poorest inhabitants. Click through image below for a fully functioning graph. Bruegel Within the United States, both the right and the left like to tell a story about wage stagnation, the end of upward mobility, and the death of the American Dream. Conservatives will tell you it's all liberals' fault and you need to roll with Trump or the Republicans if you want to make America great again. Liberals make the opposite case and push wealth taxes, Medicare for All, Free College for All, Guaranteed Jobs for All, and more. Both sides are describing a false version of reality. As Russ Roberts has shown, mobility is alive and well in the United States. The most stunning indicator comes from a study that looks at income changes for individuals between 1980 and 2014. If you simply measure statistical averages, writes Roberts, As libertarian economist Steve Horwitz writes, over the past 45 years, the consumption patterns of the poor and rich have become more similar. That's a point that gets lost if you're fixated on people in the top 0.001 percent: Neither Horwitz nor Roberts are panglossian; each details areas (particularly housing, education, and health care) in which outcomes could be vastly improved, typically by moving in a more free-market direction. As Schumpeter might put it, capitalism might make more billionaires, but it's achievement is creating many more things that virtually everyone can afford. "Abolish Billionaires" is a smart slogan, but that's all it is. Figuratively lopping the heads off of the richest of the rich will not make life easier for the poor and dispossessed, and it won't increase economic growth and living standards. It might sate the bloodlust of left-wing populists for a while, but certainly that outcome can be purchased for lower cost.

"Progressive" Attacks on Capitalism Were Key to Hitler's Success: https://mises.org/library/progressive-attacks-capitalism-were-key-hitlers-success Those who don't learn from history...........................

It's obvious. All those individuals are unrepentant racists and Hollywood should blacklist them from further work in the industry.

The 5 Most Hilarious And Insane Things In Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 'Green New Deal' Proposal: https://www.dailywire.com/news/43177/walsh-5-most-hilarious-and-insane-things-matt-walsh Yep, sounds like a plan.

Climate change is the excuse; radically remaking the American economy is the aim.: http://reason.com/blog/2019/02/07/green-new-deal-democratic-socialism-by-o Printing more money. Yeah, we'll see how well that works out.

Pelosi throws shade as Green New Deal unveiled: ‘Green dream or whatever they call it’: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pelosi-ocasio-cortezs-green-new-deal-the-green-dream-or-whatever-they-call-it

Trump's Absurd Claim that Americans Are Free from Government Coercion: https://mises.org/wire/trumps-absurd-claim-americans-are-free-government-coercion Here! Here!

http://reason.com/archives/2019/02/06/nevada-fighters-and-the-right-to-trash-t Yet another instance where government needs to butt out and let the private organization, this time the UFC, handle this. Like the article says the UFC already has a Code of Conduct which includes prohibitions on certain speech. Let the UFC fine or suspend the guilty parties, not the government. And whatever happened to "stick and stones" in our society? That is what my parents always drilled into me, and it's worked out pretty well.

lol.

How do you personally define a post as a QUALITY post?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/politicians-dont-fear-debt-they-fear-unpopularity/2019/02/05/7bb2e512-297a-11e9-b011-d8500644dc98_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2804e66c8a11 Yep, let someone else, like our children & grandchildren, worry about the future. 'Tis the uni-party's cowardly line.

You can't tell the score by quarters on Harrell's site, but the 2018 Frankfort team could have had this mercy rule invoked on 9 out of it's 10 games: http://pastfb.homestead.com/logs/Frankfort.htm#loaded

Surging Wealth Inequality Is Poverty's Greatest Enemy: https://mises.org/wire/surging-wealth-inequality-povertys-greatest-enemy Agreed.

3Points.mp4

Taxes Are Getting Weaponized for Partisan Purposes: http://reason.com/archives/2019/02/04/taxes-get-weaponized-for-partisan-purpos/

Do you volunteer to moderate such a subreddit? Good luck.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/blackface-controversy-zero-tolerance-retroactive-repudiation/ One problem with Bouie’s uncompromising stance is this: A policy that condemns public figures who have had “any association” with blackface would thin out the supply of reputable public figures rather quickly. Comics and movie stars would be the first to get “canceled.” Jimmy Fallon did blackface to impersonate Chris Rock; Jimmy Kimmel did it to impersonate Karl Malone and Oprah Winfrey; SNL’s Fred Armisen did it to impersonate President Obama; Ashton Kutcher did brownface to depict a stereotypical Indian man in a Popchips commercial; Robert Downey Jr. wore blackface in Tropic Thunder; Rob McElhenney and Kaitlin Olson, who play “Mac” and “Dee” on the critically acclaimed sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, have both donned blackface in the show. And there’s no reason to stop at the living. As demonstrated in a recent New York Times op-ed, “‘Mary Poppins’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting with Blackface,” the grave provides no protection from the professionally offended class. To that end, perhaps we should posthumously repudiate Judy Garland (of Wizard of Oz fame), Gene Wilder (of Willy Wonka fame), and Shirley Temple (of Shirley Temple’s Storybook fame), all of whom did blackface. In the sphere of music, we could start by “canceling” living artists such as Joni Mitchell, continue by denouncing deceased artists like Frank Zappa, and then finish by boycotting the Metropolitan Operafor portraying Othello in blackface until as recently as 2015. At the risk of giving the Twitter mob too many ideas, I’ll stop there. But suffice it to say that the listgoes on. Anyone uncomfortable with the liquidation of much of America’s artistic class should reject the idea of a retroactive zero-tolerance policy toward blackface. Instead, we should take a more measured approach, one that, without minimizing the ugly legacy of minstrelsy, allows a modicum of mercy for the accused and accounts for the intentions of the transgressor. We should also recognize the fact that “blackface” is an umbrella term. It covers everything from a white adult performing a nauseatingly racist caricature of a black person, to a pair of 12-year-old girls — who had probably never heard the word “minstrelsy,” much less studied the history of minstrelsy — having fun with makeup at a sleepover. That the same word is used in the media to describe both scenarios should not obscure the fact that, ethically speaking, they belong in separate universes. We should also consider the idea that blackface need not be considered radioactive for all time. Such was the position taken by Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategist and the chief organizer of the March on Washington. In 1951, referring to blackface, he wrote: Rustin recognized the deep hurt that minstrelsy caused in his day. But he did not see this as an eternal reality. He hoped that attitudes toward blackface would evolve over time in the same way that attitudes toward Irish jokes had evolved. He wrote: Having been arrested 23 times on account of his activism, Rustin probably understood racism more viscerally than any living activist you could name. Nevertheless, his goal, like King’s, was for everyone to play by the same social rules. For Rustin, this meant that if black people could do whiteface, then white people could do blackface. Some will object: America is not post-racial. We are not there yet, and until we get there, invoking the logic of color blindness is simply denying history. But the logic of color blindness doesn’t depend on the absence of racism. It depends only on our desire not to needlessly racialize the pursuit of justice. Moreover, those who say “we are not there yet” rarely specify what would count as evidence of our having gotten “there.” Indeed if nothing would or could count as evidence of our arrival, then saying “we are not there yet” is merely a surrender to eternal outrage. Such people are less concerned with making racial progress than they are addicted to the struggle for its own sake. In any event, the best way to never arrive “there” is to “cancel” anyone who questions how far we have to go. Let the professionally offended class continue their Noble Struggle. But don’t give them dominion over the public sphere. But isn't more fun to be perpetually offended?