Month: November 2014

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Vox: The most biased speakers, the most obvious questions

The midterm elections have come and gone. Predictably, the Republicans retook the Senate, profiting off a feeling of general unease with the Obama Administration. The commentariat class was abuzz with speculation over the meaning of the election and what it portends for the pomp and decadence show known as the presidential election. Nick Gillespie of the libertarian Reason magazine naively believes the election results mean nothing because both parties are “going extinct.” Politics is a team sport with intense loyalties. The jackass and elephant aren’t leaving American life any time soon.

As journalists debate over how a Mitch McConnell-run Senate will govern, they all agree on one thing: the sanctity of the process that brought Republicans to power. Progressives, in particular, love the voting process. They revere it like a religion, and treat casting ballots as no different than worshiping at the altar. Every Election Day brings columns and blog posts about the importance of “making your voice heard.” These puff pieces laud democracy as the god that brought simpletons to the promised land.

Likewise, the writers often play a cunning game of pretending to be open-minded and independent, while simultaneously hacking for their preferred political party. No other media outlet wears this veil better than Vox. Run by former Washington Post blogger and self-styled “wonk” Ezra Klein (and financed heavily by the corporatist giant General Electric), Vox is supposed to be a home of objective analysis for plebes too busy to read stacks of white papers. It’s just a coincidence that every conclusion Klein and crew come to happens to be über progressive. Vox is the journalistic embodiment of the hack Stephen Colbert trope “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Such ideological motives should arouse suspicion in conservative-minded observers.

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Should Google run a city?

The Freeman was nice enough to publish my piece asking whether Google should run a city.

Would you want to live in a private city?

No? What if Google were running the city? Would that change your mind? Google building and running cities is less crazy than you think.

Google has expressed interest in constructing cities, and Larry Page wants to create autonomous zones that can experiment with social rules. Combined, these two ideas have the potential to transform the world. Institutional change can jumpstart economic growth while competent, efficient administration can ensure those gains are not lost to corruption.

I think Silicon Valley could become an extremely powerful force for local autonomy. They have the money and interest. That being said, I believe they have much to learn on the political and legal side. However, they are hardly alone in that respect. Few understand the importance of legal institutions to economic development.

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Secession lagniappe

Catalonia’s unofficial referendum has 81 percent voting for independence according to preliminary reports, though many pro-Madrid groups boycotted it. The government also moved in a significant amount of military assets prior to the vote. How Madrid is making things worse.

Go read that whole thread, it’s a nice overview of progressives’ ambiguous feelings about secession.

Don Gonyea:

Well, for the Republicans, they are in their best position in the states in a century. For Democrats, they’re in their worst position since something called the Civil War.

The North-South divide is deepening

Marriage and union membership

Why the GOP should embrace Rand Paul’s “conservative realist” foreign policy

Hawaiian restoration activists are continuing to hold the bootlicking Office of Hawaiian Affairs accountable

Independent joins the Arlington County Board

Secessionist joins the Anne Arundel County Board

Left-wing secessionist calls for Portland to leave Maine

Interesting New York partition thread

Ed Sebesta gets quoted in this story on UDC renting a Richmond church

Matthew McConaughey signs on for a movie about the Free State of Jones

Malibu wants its own school district

Rod Dreher: “No bishop will die for religious liberty

Patrick Deneen in Cato Unbound:

Those Christians and other religious believers who resist the spirit of the age will be persecuted – not by being thrown to lions in the Coliseum, but by judicial, administrative, and legal marginalization.  They will lose many of the institutions that they built to help the poor, the marginalized, the weak, and the disinherited.  But finding themselves in the new imperium will call out new forms of living the Christian witness.  They will live in the favelas, providing care for body and soul that cannot not be provided by either the state or the market.  Like the early Church, they will live in a distinct way from the way of the empire, and their way of life will draw those who perhaps didn’t realize that this was what Christianity was, all along.  When the liberal ideology collapses – as it will – the Church will remain, the gates of Hell not prevailing against it.

*****

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Sacred Harp 47t: ‘Primrose’

Salvation! O, the joyful sound!
’Tis pleasure to our ears;
A sov’reign balm for ev’ry wound,
A cordial for our fears.

Buried in sorrow and in sin;
At hell’s dark door we lay,
But we arise by grace divine,
To see a heav’nly day.

Salvation! Let the echo fly
The spacious earth around,
While all the armies of the sky,
Conspire to raise the sound.

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Not that kind of bonfire of the vanities

Hoo boy, is that Lena Dunham a laugh riot or what? The lifelong paragon of wholesome living has upped the ante of revealing Millennial self-expression with her latest round of oversharing buried within the pages of her latest offering, Not That Kind of Girl.

The novel at first appeared to underwhelm expectations and strain the sweet $3.7 million deal extended by its proud publisher, Random House. Dulledbut encouraging!reviews floated with little fanfare upon its September release before some good old-fashioned class war redirected observers’ attentions to the more pressing injustice of Dunham’s mercilessly exploitative book tour labor practices. But the favorable comparisons to fellow Great New Yorker Woody Allen quickly proved unfortunate.

Somehow, the celebrated cultural critics of the New York literary world missed the learned Dunham’s candid confessions of bawdry youthful predation. While her trendy regret-sex-cum-“rape” by a mustachioed Oberlin College Republican detailed in Chapter 6 stimulated a flurry of vicarious clucking from the sisters of perpetual grievance, disturbing passages in which Dunham describes a strange, manipulative obsession with her six-year-younger sister, Grace, received no mention in the mainstream press.  It took the muckracking of unsavory radical right-wing fringe outfits like the National Review to bring these intimate disclosures to public light.

Lest the Dunham family lawyer sees fit to threaten this humble blogger with a taste of Yankee justice, as is apparently the proper practice of the day, I’ll let the self-appointed voice of our generation speak for herself:

“Do we all have uteruses?” I asked my mother when I was seven.

“Yes,” she told me. “We’re born with them, and with all our eggs, but they start out very small. And they aren’t ready to make babies until we’re older.”

I looked at my sister, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at her tiny belly. I imagined her eggs inside her, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte’s Web, and her uterus, the size of a thimble.

“Does her vagina look like mine?”

“I guess so,” my mother said. “Just smaller.”

One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist, and when I saw what was inside I shrieked. “My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”

My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things that I did. She just got on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been such a success.

Don’t act like you didn’t regularly plan elaborate pranks by inserting fun surprises into your precious cavities at the tender age of one, you Judgy Judys. Their mother was supervising, it’s cool.

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