Students of Color Conference

This one at the University of California encountered the reality of identity politics.  It collapsed into, as one of the conference-goers called it in her op-ed for the UCLA Daily Bruin, an oppression Olympics.

From the first link:

In one of the larger workshops, one of the students raised a question about why the only issues being discussed were those involving anti-blackness, prompting an African-American student to respond that black students are the most oppressed, to which a Muslim student made a comment about her people being bombed in the Middle East[.]

And

Above all, conference participants each wanted to focus on their own particular minority issue[.]

And the whole thing apparently turned a series of microaggressions, unsafe safe spaces, and canceled workshops.  UCLS student Robert Gardner:

I am very unhappy about how this conference was ran. There needs to be accountability for the trauma some of the organizers made. And I didn’t appreciate my workshop being cancelled….

Apparently grammar isn’t a safe space for young Master Gardner, either.  But he continued:

It was really hurtful to have other marginalized identities silenced because a small fringe of organizers decided that their oppressions are more important (talk about Oppression Olympics. …)

Stop oppressing me with your superior victimhood!

Merry Christmas

First posted in 2011, I repeat it here.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.
-Ralph W. Sockman

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
-Benjamin Franklin

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
-Hamilton Wright Mabie

Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.  If we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world.
-Calvin Coolidge

Some celebrate Christmas as the birthday of a great and good philosopher and teacher.  Others of us believe in the divinity of the child born in Bethlehem, that he was and is the promised Prince of Peace.
-Ronald Reagan

 

Why do bells ring at Christmas?

Because someone pulls the rope.

Economic Advisors

President-Elect Donald Trump has them.

  • Larry Kudlow, the anti-Keynes, to run (maybe) the White House Council of Economic Advisers
  • Peter Navarro to Head the White House National Trade Council
  • Steve Mnuchin for Treasury Secretary
  • Wilbur Ross for Commerce Secretary
  • Linda McMahon for Administrator of the Small Business Administration
  • Gary Cohn to run the White House National Economic Council
  • Mick Mulvaney to head Office of Management and Budget
  • Rick Perry as Energy Secretary
  • Andrew Puzder for Labor secretary
  • Scott Pruitt for Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency
  • Elaine Chao for Transportation Secretary
  • Betsy DeVos for of Education Secretary
  • Carl Icahn as special adviser on Federal regulations, a newly created and unpaid position

There’s much of Trump’s putative trade policy with which I disagree.

However, Progressive-Democrats don’t like these folks.  It’s hard to get a more ringing endorsement for an advisory team than that.

A Warren Buffett Acolyte

Patriotic Millionaires Chair Morris Pearl doesn’t want his taxes cut as part of a reform of our tax code.

Well, those of us who are less wealthy spend their money, they don’t invest it in assets. Investing in assets is not what grows the economy. Spending money is what grows the economy.

This is where he parts company with his sensei, though: he appears not to understand how a free market, capitalist economy works.

From where does Pearl think the things on which people spend money come—the turnip tree? From where does Pearl think folks get the money to spend—the dollar tree?

It takes folks working—jobs—to produce the goods and services on which we spend our money. It takes folks working—jobs—to earn the money to spend.  It takes both spending and asset investment—jobs creation—to grow an economy.  And that takes money left in the private economy—lower tax rates for all, including the rich.

Pearl also admits he’d only pay the taxes required; he wouldn’t make donations to the Treasury of amounts equal to the reduction in his taxes.  He just demands to impose his views on all of us.  In that, he follows his sensei assiduously.

More Obama Fiat

And the failures just keep coming.

This time, it’s President Barack Obama’s (D) effort to sabotage the oil industry as thoroughly as he’s done the coal industry.  Obama’s latest bit of I Know Better And Congress Be Damned is an Executive Order that is intended to ban

federal offshore drilling and mineral leases on some 3.8 million acres from Virginia to Maine and 115 million acres off the coast of Alaska, including some of the world’s great untapped repositories of hydrocarbons.

And he’s bragging that he thinks the move is permanent.

It’s a laughable as it is delusional.