“Media Bias”

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In his WSJ op-ed regarding Effective Altruism and media bias, Andy Kessler had this remark:

Mr Stewart says he isn’t a journalist, but he and others like him helped kill media’s credibility.

Not at all. Journalists—the “media”—killed their own credibility, beginning as far back in my lifetime with Cronkite’s manufactured anger embedded in his “What’s going on here?” in the early stages of the Tet offensive, when he knew full well that what was going on was the utter destruction of the Viet Cong as a political and military entity in that war. From the end of Tet on, that side of the war was fought exclusively by the North Vietnamese Army.

Nor was it Stewart and others like him, or comedians generally, who printed on the NYT front page that tabloid’s decision to take sides in its news “reporting;” they would no longer print news objectively.

Nor was it anyone else that prompted CBS‘ Bob Simon infamously to declare that there not two sides to every story. Some had only one side, and he and his fellow “journalists” were the sole determiners of when and where that would be determined.

Nor was it Stewart, et al., who caused the “media” to spike the Hunter Biden laptop story. “Journalists” did that all by themselves.

Nor was it comedians who censored viewpoints on social media. That was social media managers doing that all by themselves, even as they cowered behind the fig leaf of government “pressure.”

The list is pretty extensive, and this is just politics.

The list extends into “climate” hyping. For instance, the Los Angeles Times print “news” outlet announced that it would no longer print letters to the editor that rebutted global warming arguments, since the science was settled and there could be no rebuttal.

Kessler needs to get out more.

Wealth Taxes and Irrationality

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In their house editorial regarding the degree of wisdom of wealth taxes, the WSJ‘s editors noted this regarding a collection of celebrity economists’ position on such taxes.

M Zucman and his fellow French celebrity economists, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, don’t believe high taxes and a generous welfare state materially affect the incentives to work and invest. When people respond predictably to the perverse incentives that politicians create, French economists claim they are acting irrationally. So with a wealth tax.

Stipulate that’s true, and that people do act irrationally in response to incentives, perverse or otherwise. It’s still how people behave, even the wealthy.

Zucman and his fellows insist on living in their idealized fantasy world, rather than handling reality.

Defeat Iran with Slow and Steady?

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That’s the recommendation of Michael O’Hanlon, Research Director of the Foreign Policy Program of Left-leaning Brookings Institution. His rationalizations include these:

[A]s Iranian oil inventories on ships around the world diminish, overland supply routes are pressured, and other sources of Iranian regime income are gradually curtailed, it is increasingly likely that time is on our side in the economic dimension of the war, even if the global pain from the conflict is significant. … Iranian leaders aren’t like the Taliban; they like money, pomp, and power. Today they are hurting.

Lacking money, pomp, and power though doesn’t mean the Iranian terrorists are hurting. To conclude that assumes—naively or cynically; you decide—that their pain points in any way resemble ours. And there’s that global pain that the rest of the globe feels: we’re supposed to be as indifferent to that as the terrorists are to their own?

[A] major bombing campaign would run a near-certain risk of intensified Iranian retaliation, in the region and beyond, further depleting US missile defense interceptor inventories while running the risk of much higher fuel prices and higher casualties, perhaps even on the home front.

This emphasizes an essential contradiction in O’Hanlon’s argument, which he exposed earlier in his article, apparently obliviously.

[M]ore than 30,000 additional US combat sorties, including strike missions attacking some 13,000 aim points, have been less effective against other targets. Perhaps one-third to two-thirds of Iran’s missile force was put out of action, yet some has likely been rebuilt. Drone production continues apace, even as US regional allies remain vulnerable to Iranian attack.

 

Despite our Navy is largely successful efforts in escorting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s terrorists continue to attack that shipping, with enough success to keep maritime insurance costs at several times their levels a year ago and so still sharply elevates the price of oil, even though “limited” to those higher prices. Moreover, Iran still lobs missiles across the Arabian Gulf at Arab nations’ energy production and transportation infrastructures while continuing to arm the Houthis and its Iraqi militias so they can join in the infrastructure attacks.

Steady certainly could be useful, especially if it’s steady total conflict—kinetic, cyber, economic. Slow, though, is maliciously foolish and punishes, only and severely, the Iranian people, who are not the bad guys here. The bad guys—the terrorists—are the IRGC and its civilian political arm who are in charge of the government that’s reigning over the Iranian people.

Slow has, and will have, no effect on those terrorists: they’re too married to their ideology and too indifferent of the effects of their ideology on the people over whom they rule. More broadly than that, those terrorists’ value set, concept of morality, means of getting others to live by their imperatives, and view of the costs of these to others are so radically different from our own, from those of western civilization, as to be orthogonal to them.

The only way to defeat Iran consists of two steps. First is to distinguish between the Iranian government and the Iranian people. That distinction is largely in place. Second is to mount that total war and keep it going at maximum pace until the terrorists are dead. Part of their value set: if they’re still alive, they’re winning, no matter how many others suffer catastrophically or are killed. It’s that latter cost, those others’, that is maximized by fits and starts conflict and by “slow,” regardless of how steady.

No, It Isn’t

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New York City, as the WSJ pointed out, has a serious homeless problem, and it’s failing across to deal with it. The article centered on the city’s socialist Progressive-Democrat mayor, Zohran Mamdani’s current failure, but in truth, the problem is rampant across all of our nation’s cities.

Dave Giffen, Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director thinks he has the answer.

The simplest solution is to build more affordable housing.

No, it isn’t. It is, though, the only idea the economically bankrupt Left can conceive.

It’s always either throw more money into failed programs, or build ever more government housing projects, or both. In truth, though, Leftists and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians don’t care a penny about programs or policies that actually work; they just want the spending and building (the latter especially for their union benefactors’ jobs), and then to call it good. Sadly, as the rest of us understand, “more affordable housing” just perpetuates the homeless’ isolation from society by facilitating their dependency on government and trapping them in increasingly dilapidated government housing.

Contra Know Betters like Giffen and his ilk, the simplest solution isn’t as pie-in-the-sky simple as those virtue-signaling money wasters so favored of the Left, but it is eminently straightforward. This entails getting government regulations out of the way of private enterprise, so more jobs, including those for the unskilled, become much more available; encouraging private enterprises and charitable organizations wholly unaffiliated with government to run job training programs; and thereby providing the homeless with both the incentive and the means to get jobs and earn their own income and get into their own homes. (The general housing shortage is a separate problem.)

In parallel with that, encourage private enterprises and charitable organizations wholly unaffiliated with government to set up drug rehabilitation programs for those addict homeless who want off their drug dependency the treatment they need to achieve that. In parallel with this particular phase, it’s critical for government at all jurisdictional levels to get truly draconian and move the drug pushers off the streets and their suppliers out of their facilities and into jail. This is one of the very few aspects of homelessness in which government has a legitimate role.

There will remain a few homeless who are truly hopeless; these would be wards, first, of local church and charity, and only last of government, beginning first with local government.

Hold Politicians Accountable?

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Dave Brody, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, opened his Friday op-ed in the WSJ with this:

Michigan voters appear poised to approve a ballot initiative opposing “dark money” in politics on November 3. What Michiganders don’t seem to realize is that this proposal could keep them in the dark by making it harder for journalists to hold politicians accountable.

Even if we could take is strenuous self-congratulatory second paragraph or his crocodile tears later in his piece seriously, he would be an isolated outlier in the field of what passes for American journalism.

American journalism studiously spiked all reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop while the elder Biden was President.

American journalism determinedly downplayed then-Senator Joe Biden’s (D, DE) casual mishandling of classified documents.

American journalism enthusiastically hyped—and still does—President Donald Trump’s (R) every move and statement of which those worthies personally disapprove.

American journalism avidly yoks it up over one of their own bantering and joking with Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN) over the question of her alleged marriage to her brother.

American journalism hides its bias—and thereby exposes it—behind repeated cites and quotes of “officials familiar” and “people who were present” while just as determinedly refuses to answer any question of what standard of journalistic integrity they use after having long since walked away from an editorial requirement for at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate any number of anonymous sources in an article.

Journalists holding politicians accountable. It is to laugh. If Michigan voters vote up the dark money ballot initiative, they’ll lose nothing regarding journalism.