Monthly Archives: September 2019

Coaching

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Recall then-judge Aaron Persky, the judge who thought a college swimmer’s future well-being was more important than the fate of the unconscious girl he raped. Recall further that he thought the rape was so inconsequential that he functionally condoned it with a slap-on-the-wrist sentence of six whole months in jail—reduced to three months because of the rapist’s “good behavior” in jail.

Persky lost a subsequent recall election, held because of his coddling of the rapist.

This is, also, the same…judge…who tried to freeload off the public, tried to get them to pay the legal costs he incurred from the steady stream of frivolous lawsuits he instigated in an effort to block that recall election from happening.

Now Persky has been hired by San Jose, CA’s, Lynbrook High School to coach the school’s girls junior varsity tennis team.

The judge who thinks it’s OK to rape unconscious college girls is going to coach high school girls….

After I wrote this, the Fremont Union High School District, which oversees Lynbrook, and Lynbrook had a change of heart.

Lynbrook High School held a meeting Monday with the parents of JV and varsity girls’ tennis teams in response to the community’s concerns over Persky’s employment.

Then FUHSD fired Persky.

We believe this outcome is in the best interest of our students and school community. The District will begin the search for a new coach immediately….

This is a better outcome. It would have been best, though, had Persky never been hired into this position in the first place. The school and its female athletes never should have been jerked around like this.

But neither should Persky have been.  His attitude toward young women shouldn’t be used to justify treating him like he treats others. We should be better than that.

Regulatory Capture

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America’s automotive companies want ever stricter emissions standards.  Or so says Fred Krupp, President of the Environmental Defense Fund.

This, of course, is nonsense.

If car companies truly want stricter emission standards, they can do so without the cover of a government mandate.  Nothing is stopping them from setting and meeting their own stricter standards.  This is, after all, a (largely) free market economy, and it’s at the heart of a (largely) free nation.  Car companies can make their own decisions without Big Brother’s instruction.

Unless, of course, they have a different agenda.  Like, for instance, writing the regulations in a way to protect them from competition from upstart (as in impudent) companies that might have better products or better consumer appeal, or both. That’s classic regulatory capture.

Or, maybe it’s a path to writing the regulations in a way that beats the EDF climatista drum but that has little or nothing to do with producing quality, efficient, cost-effective cars that consumers actually want.

Unions for Socialism

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That’s the situation in Oregon, the new front-runner for socialism in the US, surpassing even California.

[T]he Oregon AFL-CIO wants voters to limit self-checkout kiosks in grocery stores.

The State’s Attorney General still has to sign off on the union’s ballot measure, ironically titled the Grocery Store Service and Community Protection Act, but that’s a formality in a State that favors Antifa violence over law and order and actual protection of communities.

The union claims—and it’s serious—that

self-service checkouts add “to social isolation and related negative health consequences” for shoppers.

And

…contribute to retail workers feeling devalued….

Because, the union insists, Oregon’s citizens are such snowflakes, so easily triggered.  Such infantilization of grown, adult human beings ought to be insulting to the people of Oregon, consumers and workers alike.  We’ll find out whether they’re insulted, though, from how they vote in 2020 when the measure is on the ballot.

If the good citizens of Oregon do show their tenderness by voting up the measure, we can look forward to the unions demanding sackers in stores be featherbedded.  Make-work is, after all, how the socialists keep their populations (more or less) employed.  And how the Precious find comfort.

A Different Sort of National Security Threat

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This one demographic; it’s the potential for population collapse in the People’s Republic of China.  Most of the nations of the world outside Africa face population declines, but none seem as severe as the PRC’s is looking to be.

In 2016, after the one-child policy was abandoned, there were 17.86 million births. This dropped to 17.2 million in 2017 and 15.2 million in 2018—the third-lowest rate since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

That might be an accelerating drop, although three data points don’t make for a strongly measured trend.

There’s this datum, too, from Yi Fuxian, Senior Scientist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Medical School Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology:

In China in 2017, the ratio was six workers in the 20-64 age bracket supporting one senior citizen at least 65 years old. This will decline to 2.0 workers in 2039 and 1.6 in 2050.
“No social security net, no family security, and a pension crisis—this will evolve into a humanitarian catastrophe. As women live six to seven years longer than men on average [and are usually a few years younger than their husbands], they will be the main victims of population control,” said Yi.

And this from George Magnus, an Oxford University China Centre Research Associate:

Measured by the proportion of 65+ and the old age dependency ratio, China will age as much in the next 22 years as most Western economies have done in the last 60-70 years—and at far lower levels of income per head, and with a much less developed social security system[.]

It’s unlikely to get better in time to do anything meaningful: the PRC’s fertility rate, the number of children born per woman, as of 2018 is 1.6—far below the 2.1 rate required just to maintain the population at its current level.

But it’s more than just aging women or aging generally.  This is the size of its labor force in absolute terms, too, with its production capacity. The number of Chinese in the labor force is the economic underpinning of the nation and its ability to keep itself armed—to the degree the Communist Party of China and its People’s Liberation Army deem sufficient—and able to face the enemies perceived by the CPC and the PLA.

That economic underpinning also is critical to the nation’s ability to keep its people, including those actively working, fed and housed.

What will a desperate Xi Jinping or Xi-successor do in the face of this crisis?  We need to be prepared diplomatically, economically, and humanitarianly.  And militarily, since neither Xi nor his successor are likely to accept this crisis without resorting to force and invasions to “capture” workers and baby-makers.

“Impartiality Is the Source of a Newspaper’s Credibility”

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That’s the headline of Walter Hussman’s piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.  Impartiality certainly is a contributor, but the Critical Item for a newspaper’s credibility—for any journalistic entity—is integrity.

To set themselves on the path back to honesty, and so to believability—not just credibility—members of the journalism industry must address these items:

  1. identify at least some of their sources
  2. if an anonymous source refuses to be identified, show two things

-the source actually exists
-why the source should be believed

  1. if the anonymous source is a whistleblower, show that the source has exhausted all internal whistleblowing channels before deciding to leak

4. most importantly, journalism used to have a standard that required two on-the-record sources to corroborate the claims of anonymous sources. An editor-in-chief must address the following:

-why his news outlet has chosen to walk away from that standard of journalistic integrity
-explain the standard he currently uses in place of that one.

These questions have been asked before, and journalists continue studiously to duck them.  Interestingly, Hussman, as publisher of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, is among those ducking the questions.

None of this does anything for newspapers’ or other journalistic outlets’ credibility.  After all, merely impartial lying is still lying.