The Ten O'Clock Scholar

Guns Saving Lives

2013-01-10T20:34:00.003-05:00

Google map with stories.

Peruse these stories that the media doesn't promote!

Philosophical Foundations

2012-12-25T12:34:00.003-05:00

This blog post searches for the philosophical foundations of left-wing politics, asking this question:

The conservative movement rests on a series of great thinkers: Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Burke, Mill, Hayek, von Mises, etc. Where are the intellectual foundations of the Left?...There is an intellectual tradition behind the contemporary Left, stretching back to Plato’s Republic and including Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Marcuse, Alinsky, etc. But it’s a deeply totalitarian tradition. It’s the political philosophy that dares not speak its name in an election season, for it would garner few votes, and for good reason.

The real intellectual vacuum underlies not the Left as such but people who style themselves liberals, but not socialists—i.e., I’m guessing, most Democrats.

Lee Reynolds from the Tempe Tea Party adds these comments:

Liberalism is sold on the premise that by embracing its sentiments and assorted affectations, you will become an enlightened and wise individual. A kind and knowing person, a better person, and get to sit at the cool kids’ table. Those who do not embrace Liberalism are cast as selfish and uncaring, greedy and bigoted, emotionally grotesque, shortsighted, foolish, stupid, blind, and most of all uncool.

In real life those who embrace Liberalism end up parroting cliches and earnestly promoting half-baked nonsense that ranges from the frivolous to the intensely destructive. Meanwhile those who are not beholden to Liberalism tend lead happier and more productive lives.
...
The vast majority of what is called Liberalism is nothing more than the effort and desire to make human beings equal. I don’t mean equal before the law, or possessing equal rights, I mean equal period.

This is quite impossible because human beings are fundamentally unequal.

Some people are smarter than others. Some people are of better character than others. Some people possess specific traits and abilities that others lack. In general, if there is a way in which people CAN differ from one another, they DO differ from one another. We are defined as a species by the variance of our individual abilities and inclinations.

Liberalism is the heartfelt desire to wish all that away and replace it with a universe in which everyone is cut from the same cloth.

This is why Liberals tend to focus so much on the dregs of society. They wish to pretend that mental patients and convicts are the same as the rest of us, just unlucky.

This is why we hear so much from Liberals about the “less fortunate.” This term was not fashioned as a polite euphemism for idiots and losers, but represents how Liberals truly see people whose deficits of ability or character prevent them from meeting the challenges of life.
This is also why Liberals are so keen to endorse environmental or social explanations for human differences. If a difference is the result of an external influence upon a person, then this difference can be eliminated by altering or removing that influence. In contrast, a difference that is innate cannot be.

Unfortunately 80% or more of our differences are innate. Who we are is who we are, not what happens to us. Our nature is not malleable. The axe murderer didn’t chop up people because his daddy didn’t love him enough, he chopped up people because that is his nature.
But that doesn’t stop Liberals from trying. Hence the recent promotion of gender-neutral toys, especially in places like Sweden. These futile efforts will not make boys and girls the same. Furthermore, the children subjected to them will be harmed in the process.

This is also why Liberals are so keen to bestow the appurtenances of a middle class existence to those who are not capable of middle class behavior. The most famous example of this was their effort to give mortgages to people who didn’t have what it took to qualify for one. The hope and belief was that home ownership would somehow magically bestow these new homeowners with the characteristics and abilities that traditionally defined someone who owned their home. Instead we wound up with “liar loans,” the housing bubble, starving animals locked away to die in foreclosed houses sold to human trash, and all of the other ill effects and externalities for which Liberals still so strenuously seek to blame others for.

So it is no surprise that Liberalism is without any sort of intellectual foundation. Liberalism is the obsessive denial of human difference, which cannot be substantiated or justified in the real world. It isn’t so much a house of cards as it is wishful thinking masquerading as a philosophy.

Wishful thinking masquerading as a philosophy! Now it all makes sense!

Origin of Political Correctness

2012-12-02T15:06:00.002-05:00

How the Left creates and maintains the Narrative, from the Marxist Frankfurt School to the takeover of academia and the development of Critical Theory, all in a handy, engaging discussion from Bill Whittle:

Link to YouTube

Read all about the hideous Frankfurt School here. Note it became affiliated with Columbia University in 1935, and the infection of higher education in the US was complete. Here is just one example of how art, music, and all "studies" programs at universities have been corrupted or created with malice aforethought by these Marxist thinkers:

Philosophy of modern music Adorno, a trained musician, wrote The Philosophy of Modern Music (1949), in which he, in essence, polemicizes against beauty itself ― because it has become part of the ideology of advanced capitalist society and the false consciousness that contributes to social domination. It hence contributes to the present sustainability of capitalism by rendering it "aesthetically pleasing" and "agreeable". Only avant-garde art and music may preserve the truth by capturing the reality of human suffering. Hence: "[...]Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks [...] Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked." This view of modern art as producing truth only through the negation of traditional aesthetic form and traditional norms of beauty because they have become ideological is characteristic of Adorno and of the Frankfurt School generally.

The higher education bubble can't burst soon enough!

D'oh!

2012-09-26T23:12:00.002-04:00

Obama's New Blasphemy Rules

2012-09-26T23:09:00.000-04:00

Promise Kept!

2012-04-04T21:40:00.003-04:00

Spotted on a gas pump in PA:

Prime Post

2011-08-16T19:36:00.002-04:00

Today this blog turns 7 years old, which is a prime number.

And, this marks the 1,013th posting, which is also prime.

Just Bad Luck

2011-08-15T21:00:00.003-04:00

On the campaign trail in Iowa, Obama says:

"We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again," Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. "But over the last six months we've had a run of bad luck." Obama listed three events overseas -- the Arab Spring uprisings, the tsunami in Japan, and the European debt crises -- which set the economy back.

How the Arab uprisings hurt the economy isn't quite clear to me, but be that as it may, recall Heinlein wrote in 1973:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.This is known as "bad luck."

UPDATE: Great minds thinking alike? Surely independently, Instapundit posted the exact same juxtaposition exactly one hour after I did!

Posted at 10:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

Ha!

2012 Via Palantir

2011-08-14T11:16:00.003-04:00

Here is a hilarious guide to the 2010 election campaign, as seen through the lens of Middle Earth.

Orcs are public sector unions, ACORN, anyone who writes for Huffington Post, and every other evil, statist minion ever identified by Glenn Beck. Speaking of Beck, his closest equivalent is Denethor, Steward of Gondor — well-spoken and intelligent but more-than-slightly crazed.

The photographic juxtapositions alone are worth hitting the link and reading it all.

For extra credit, don't miss this "unused dvd commentary" dialogue by Zinn and Chomsky on the Fellowship of the Ring...

Judicial Engagement

2011-08-12T20:42:00.003-04:00

Perhaps some good news from the judicial branch:

In striking down Obamacare’s individual mandate today, the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals used the term “judicial engagement” to describe the proper role of courts in deciding constitutional cases. The Institute for Justice coined that term and today marks the first time a federal court has used it in this context. Instead of deferring reflexively to Congress as courts so often do, the Eleventh Circuit correctly observed that “the Constitution requires judicial engagement, not judicial abdication.” Institute for Justice president Chip Mellor praised the ruling: “We have more government at every level than the Constitution authorizes. This decision is an important step towards the direction of limited government.”

If Judicial Engagement is the opposite of judicial activism, by reining in government power to accord with the structure of the Constitution, rather than to arbitrarily expand it for the sake of expediency, I'm all for it!

Saving The Republic

2011-07-04T13:21:00.003-04:00

At the close of the Cosntitutional Convention in 1787, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin, "what have you given us, a republic or a monarchy?"

To which he responded, "A republic, Madam, if you can keep it."

And there are plenty of signs we are not keeping it, with far too much unbridled democracy leading to socialism leading inevitably to bankruptcy.

On this Independence Day, it is worthwhile to reflect upon solutions to restore the Republic.

Here is a link to a short paper from the Tennessee Law Review Symposium on proposed Constitutional reforms, entitled Divine Operating System.

Amongst the ideas are:

- adding the addendum, "And we really mean it!" to the 9th and 10th amendments;

- adding a House of Repeal, whose members are tasked only with repealing legislation, thus giving some politicians an actual incentive for smaller government

- the idea of "No representation without taxation", meaning that everyone should pay at least some income tax

- some kind of balanced budget process, or at least a line-item veto when the budget is out of whack

- a reduction of gerrymandered districts

These ideas are all good. I would add a few more.

1. Far too many people can now vote. Luckily, many choose not to exercise this right, and that genie is out of the bottle. We should at least endeavour to re-introduce a grounding in civic history in the schools, or in other words, remove the Marxists from the process

1a. As a symbolic gesture I would support raising the voting age back to 21, with an exception for members of the Armed Forces and Coast Guard.

2. The author of the above law article is not keen on term limits. I disagree. As for the cry that "we already have term limits -- just vote them out!", that's not the point, to simply turn them out. The idea is to change the incentives. Right now politicians have a strong incentive to avoid being voted out, by promising whatever is expedient in the short-term to the mob, which usually involved spending someone else's money (i.e., mine). Knowing that a career cannot be made out of false promises in perpetuity, a different class of person might be attracted to politics, and the ones there would perhaps at the margin think longer-term.

3. Repeal the 17th Amendment, which provided for direct election of Senators - Senators shouldn't be uber-representatives, who now get campaign cash from who knows where, and thus don't even represent the people of their states, let alone the states themselves as separate sovereign entities. I'm sure the process of appointing them by the states was corrupt, but so is the current process. At least we'd have one corruption in competition with another, which is the point of checks and balances.

For example, according to the Washington Post,

Harry M. Reid needed money, and lots of it....The senator began dialing old and new friends across the country, asking for their help. Many had one thing in common: They had a financial stake in legislation that Reid, as the most powerful member of the Senate, helps control....Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors campaigns, said trial lawyers and other Democratic-leaning donors probably want to help Reid stay in power -- but other new outside interests may want something else from him.

Having him beholden to a Nevada political machine at least isolates the interests that control him, and pit them against others. Right now, one single big corrupt influence can buy any number of senators.

4. Term limits for the Supreme Court. This interesting idea I read elsewhere, in which members can serve up to two 18-year terms, with one new member appointed every two years. This has the added benefit of giving every President exactly two appointments per term, which distributes this power more fairly among Presidents, instead of opening the system to the gaming of ideological justices attempting to time their resignations to the administration of a favorable party.

5. The national popular vote movement needs to be stopped in its tracks.

Nearly 100 years on, it's time to start fixing the excesses of the Progressive Movement, and revive the Republic. Too much democracy is a bad thing.

Happy 235th Birthday, America!

May there be many more!

And let us honor those of an earlier, more confident age.

Marx Is Dead

2011-04-03T17:21:00.002-04:00

A simple evisceration of Marxist economic theories:

I read somewhere, written by a more literate person - I believe an economist - that the weakest point of the Marxist theories was that Marx, as an economist, was such a bizarre failure he never understood the role of resellers.
...
This would only make sense for an academic who has lived in the city his whole life and is NOT aware of where his veggies come from. If you think your pasta grows on trees, you probably can imagine sauntering down to the local park and picking a bushel full. At worst, if you know it has to be made in a factory, you figure you should get it at factory price. Of course.

But the people who transport it have to make money too.
...
But you really, really, really cannot study Marx for any length of time without seeing other holes.
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To Marx value was raw material plus work. The means of producing that work (machinery, etc) were just sort of there. And he made no allowance for invention. (Which is why though Marxist revolutions often recruit intellectuals they're the sort of intellectuals who never had an original idea in their life.) Of course in our day and age, invention and original thought are at least as important as machinery in creating product.

Also, the raw material fallacy means all the countries who have nothing else to sell feel "exploited" because we're taking their "value" away. Imbuing raw material itself with value means that it's sort of like stealing national treasure. This has given rise to an entire colonialist-exploitation-theory of history which has held more people in misery in developing countries than the most brazen robber baron could manage. And no one, NOT ONE seems to realize that their raw materials mean absolutely nothing if not used.
...
I don't have time to go into all the crazy things that idea has caused, because the work=value thing fascinates me even more.

This is an idea SO loony only an exceedingly well educated person could believe it. We've all heard of the famous "if I take a month to polish a dog turd, can I charge by the hour of my labor?"
...
This also discounts things such as human knowledge. Humans get better at tasks they do most often. This is the idea behind training. So, let's suppose what we're making is clay cups. I will undoubtedly take longer to make a clay cup than a master craftsman. I also - hey, I know myself - will end up with a lumpy product full of thumb marks. But I took longer. Therefore it's worth more, right? (Suddenly I understand how certain artsy shops charge for things.)

Now you're laughing and telling me no one believes that. Ah, but you're wrong. First of all people believed that - absolutely believed that, until they were in the place where they set production quotas and all the shoes available for sale were size twenty six and for the left foot.
...
Good old Marx is also responsible for that most insane of ideas, the minimum wage. Dictating a minimum wage people have to be paid is the same as saying that labor has an intrinsic, minimal value. And before you scream I'm cruel or heartless, what the heck do feelings have to do with economics? Economics is the science of value. Value is what someone is willing to pay for something. NOT "but they need this to survive." THAT is an idea that work in itself has a value.

If that were true, we could hire an army of unemployed workers to polish dog turds for the international market. We'd be rich, rich I tell you!

Read it all!

Codex

2011-04-03T17:13:00.002-04:00

An unusual discovery. Whether forgery or authentic is as yet unclear, but it is potentially very interesting:

Lead Codex Found In Desert

If genuine, this could be the first-ever portrait of Jesus Christ, possibly even created in the lifetime of those who knew him.

The tiny booklet, a little smaller than a modern credit card, is sealed on all sides and has a three-dimensional representation of a human head on both the front and the back. One appears to have a beard and the other is without. Even the maker’s fingerprint can be seen in the lead impression. Beneath both figures is a line of as-yet undeciphered text in an ancient Hebrew script.

Astonishingly, one of the booklets appears to bear the words ‘Saviour of Israel’ – one of the few phrases so far translated.
...
The samples were then sent to the Swiss National Materials Laboratory at Dubendorf, Switzerland. The results show they were consistent with ancient (Roman) period lead production and that the metal was smelted from ore that originated in the Mediterranean. Dr Northover also said that corrosion on the books was unlikely to be modern.

Meanwhile, the politics surrounding the provenance of the books is intensifying. Most professional scholars are cautious pending further research and point to the ongoing forgery trial in Israel over the ancient limestone ossuary purporting to have housed the bones of James, brother of Jesus.

The Israeli archeological establishment has sought to defuse problems of provenance by casting doubt on the authenticity of the codices, but Jordan says it will ‘exert all efforts at every level’ to get the relics repatriated.

The debate over whether these booklets are genuine and, if so, whether they represent the first known artefacts of the early Christian church or the first stirrings of mystical Kabbalah will undoubtedly rage for years to come.
The director of Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, Ziad al-Saad, has few doubts. He believes they may indeed have been made by followers of Jesus in the few decades immediately following his crucifixion.

‘They will really match, and perhaps be more significant than, the Dead Sea Scrolls,’ he says. ‘The initial information is very encouraging and it seems that we are looking at a very important and significant discovery – maybe the most important discovery in the history of archaeology.’

If he is right, then we really may be gazing at the face of Jesus Christ.

The Gut Speaks

2010-10-19T21:49:00.002-04:00

Bacteria rule the world in more ways than we know:

Researchers have found several reasons to believe that bacteria affect the mental health of humans. For one thing, bacteria produce some of the same types of neurotransmitters that regulate the function of the human brain. The human intestine contains a network of neurons, and the gut network routinely communicates with the brain. Gut bacteria affect that communication. “The bugs are talking to each other, and they’re talking to their host, and their host talks back,” Young says. The phrase “gut feeling” is probably, literally true.

...

For example, it’s been known for a while that sick people get depressed and anxious. This seems so obvious as to be a no-brainer, but research suggests that some of the fear and fatigue associated with infections stems from immune responses affecting the brain.

...

“For a long time, these deep sediments were thought to be devoid of any life at all,” he says. There’s life down there, all right, but talk about slow metabolism: When Parke analyzed 4.7 million-year-old organic sediment in the Mediterranean, he estimated the average time it took for resident microbes to reproduce by cell division at 120,000 years. And he reported finding living bacteria just over a mile below the seafloor, in sediments 111 million years old and at temperatures of 140 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

These and other new findings suggest that microbes deep in submarine rock may play a heretofore unrecognized role in the regulation of not just the oceans, but the global environment.

...

But just how smart are they, really?

Giovannoni stops short of claiming that bacteria are actually thinking. But the litany of bacterial talents does nibble at conventional assumptions about thinking: Bacteria can distinguish “self” from “other,” and between their relatives and strangers; they can sense how big a space they’re in; they can move as a unit; they can produce a wide variety of signaling compounds, including at least one human neurotransmitter; they can also engage in numerous mutually beneficial relationships with their host’s cells. Even more impressive, some bacteria, such as Myxococcus xanthus, practice predation in packs, swarming as a group over prey microbes such as E. coli and dissolving their cell walls.

Glenn Reynolds CONDEMNED!

2010-09-18T13:24:00.000-04:00

They told me if I voted for John McCain...

Deep Thoughts

2010-09-12T18:41:00.002-04:00

Here's an amusing thought experiment.

If I proposed to burn an American flag, would Obama, the MSM, and the ACLU vigorously support my right to do so?

Now, what if it happened to have a Koran wrapped inside of it?

Sustainability

2010-07-28T21:11:00.002-04:00

Linking right in with this seemingly odd desire to limit our use of water, energy and resources, is this compelling claim at Pascal Fervor:

The single most debilitating thought in our world is not often spoken, but I see it underlying everything today.

S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y.

This is the arch concern of "very important" people who are acting on behalf of the fear that there are too many people on earth.

It means that a minimum number of people aim to maximize human decline with a minimum of fuss.
...
Those who find themselves in positions of power and influence tend to be pessimists. Why that is I have done a bit more than speculate on my own and other sites. But why is not nearly as important to you, the individual, as first recognizing that the pessimism is there, in horrifying amounts, and then comprehending where all that angst is leading.

I find it logical and significant that Malthusianism which preceded Marxism came into being at roughly the same time that mankind achieved unprecedented liberty and then quickly gained the ability to thrive as never before. I also find it compelling to note that both deadly ideologies -- one from the start, the other proven to be -- have been and are heavily fostered and accepted by the highly positioned and/or the well-to-do who have self-styled themselves as "Progressives."

The furtherance of these ideas has become such accepted thinking in the splendid halls of "intelligentsia," that any who dare utter an optimistic word -- such as those who believe in a God who has promised to always provide -- are shouted down, marginalized, and persecuted.

And generic hatred of mankind other than oneself -- misanthropy-- underlies it all. I've witnessed it as have nearly everyone who is reading this blog when you bumped elbows with them. It is that sense of dread and loathing oozed by some in the upper classes for the "repulsive" middle class that ever strives upward to join them.

That ties together Progressivism, the hijacking of Environmentalism to rule every aspect of our lives, and the class warfare of the ultra-rich against middle America.

Belmont Club put it thus:

Once upon a time the future was going to be fun and the assumption was that things were always going to get biggest, faster and better. But today a significant current in public thinking holds that the coming years are going to be dark — that they literally should be dark. The UN’s has promulgated indicators to indicate how much of anything we shouild be allowed to use. Today efforts are being focused on the degree to which we can reduce energy consumption, limit intensity of materials use, cut down on water consumption, limit land use and curb mobility. The dream of the future is no longer the man in the flying car but the man/womyn/transgender person living in the smallest possible cubicle, limited to the narrowest geographic circle possible and consuming his own waste.
And we are getting there.

A future in which America will have no capability to send a human being into space is already in sight. And good riddance to it, some would say.

To bring it full circle, Belmont Club's link to the report on UN indicators above is entitled, gaggingly, "Sustainable Consumption", positing that consumption is destructive and bad.

There's that word again!

Sustainability is just a word to convince you to walk into the misanthropic tyrant's cage willingly.

Insufferable Busybodies

2010-07-25T19:47:00.004-04:00

Any doubt this monster of an adminstration and its fascist progressive allies want to control and regulate every aspect of human life, need look no further than this Department of Energy decree in May:

1992 federal law says a showerhead can deliver no more than 2.5 gallons per minute at a flowing water pressure of 80 pounds per square inch.

That in itself is a problem -- that they feel they can regulate that. But it gets worse!

But in May, the DOE said a "showerhead" may incorporate "one or more sprays, nozzles or openings." Under the new interpretation, all nozzles would count as a single showerhead and be deemed noncompliant if, taken together, they exceed the 2.5 gallons-a-minute maximum.

In May, the DOE's general counsel, Scott Blake Harris, fined four showerhead makers $165,104 in civil penalties, alleging they failed to demonstrate compliance for some devices.

Manufacturers and retailers say the new rules affect not just upscale systems but also those with hand-held sprays used by the elderly and disabled. Multiple showerheads often found in shower rooms at schools or gyms could also be at risk, manufacturers say. Customers will be disgruntled because of limited product range, they add.

"Did Congress limit consumer choice? Absolutely," the DOE's Mr. Harris says. "When you waste water, you waste energy." Each multi-head shower fixture uses an extra 40 to 80 thermal units of energy per year, equivalent to 50 gallons of gasoline, or one barrel of oil, he says.

If I want to pay for that, I WILL NOT stand for any busybody to tell me just how much energy I am "allowed" to use!

The showdown is a challenge to President Barack Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, as they try to cajole—or compel—Americans to use water and energy more efficiently. Mr. Chu, a self-described "zealot" for energy efficiency, says he crawls around in his attic in his spare time installing extra insulation.

Send them back to the attic!

Compel?

I will now "waste" energy and water with glee just to spite them.

National Popular Vote Arguments

2010-07-20T19:54:00.002-04:00

A supporter of the National Popular Vote Initiative dropped by and anonymously left several lengthy comments on my previous piece. I won't be a repository for their propaganda; it can all be found verbatim on their website.

But I will address the main points raised.

And the main point to note is nowhere do the NPVI people address the fundamental (and little appreciated) structure of the Electoral College formula, that it was never meant to be a direct proxy for a citizen popular vote, but rather is a weighted average of TWO popular votes: one by the people, and one state-by-state.

Because those were the two power groups mentioned in the Constitution that ceded limited powers to form a Federal government, and thus are separately represented in Congress (House and Senate), and in choosing the President -- by the same Congressional formula.

The NPVI supporter ignores the state represention issue entirely, and thus we end up talking past each other.

On to the carefully-crafted misdirecting rhetoric:

The current system of electing the president ensures that the candidates do not reach out to all of the states and their voters.

Nor would a strategy to win 51% of the popular vote force a candidate to reach out to all states and voters. Indeed, such a strategy would foster targetting specific demographics, without regard to geographic diversity. If states only existed as subdivisions of Federal political power, this wouldn't be much of an issue -- but they aren't.

Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide. This has occurred in one of every 14 presidential elections.

Again, that is not a bug, but a feature. It's not meant as a poor proxy of a popular vote, but is a blend of TWO votes.

For example, though Gore in 2000 won the popular vote by a whisper-thin margin of 48.4% to 47.9%, Bush won the state-by-state vote in a LANDSLIDE of 59% to 41%!

Blended together by the electoral formula, Bush wins. There's nothing perverse or unfair in that outcome AT ALL.

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as "plenary" and "exclusive."

Indeed it is. The states can certainly do this. It's just foolish and wrong, as it further marginalizes states as separate political entitites with their own rights. The Founders believed the only thing strong enough to stand in the way of a government is another government.

There is no valid argument that the winner-take-all rule is entitled to any special deference based on history or the historical meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution.

That too is true. If we wanted to make the popular vote piece of the electoral formula more representative, the reform I'd support is for States to assign their Electoral votes as 1 vote per Congressional district won (for the People's representation), plus the State's 2 votes to the overal state winner (for the State-by-state "popular vote"). Two states (Maine and Nebraska) already do this.

But, they'd never do that, because it would put a big piece of California and other large "blue" states in play for Republicans, and no Democrat could ever be elected President.

In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided).

Irrelevant. They surely don't understand the real issues at stake, and have been misled to believe the Electoral College gets in the way of their popular vote for no good reason. The importance of the States is largely forgotten by most -- but not by me.

I'll take the National Popular Vote movement more seriously as a principled stand, if it also stood for abolishing the Senate as an irrelevant body getting in the way of direct representation in the House.

Instead, it will increase the risks of populism and demogoguery, and identity-group politics at the further expense of the already near-moribund States, which are supposed to stand as important bastions between us and a Federal government that naturally trends to tyranny.

Too much pure democracy is a bad thing -- as Franklin put it, two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.

Another Willful Step To State Destruction

2010-07-19T23:28:00.002-04:00

Senate Action Moves Commonwealth of Massachusetts One Step Closer to Enactment

Last night, the Massachusetts Senate passed National Popular Vote legislation by a vote of 28 to 10, moving the Commonwealth of Massachusetts one step closer to giving voters an equal vote in electing America’s President. The Massachusetts Senate vote follows the recent 52-7 New York State Senate vote in favor of the bill—a victory supported by a 22-5 Republican margin (with 3 not voting) and 30-2 Democrat margin.
...
National Popular Vote preserves the Electoral College by creating an agreement among the states. When enough states join (totaling 270 or more Electoral Votes or a majority of the Electoral College), the agreement triggers. Compacting states then award a majority of Electoral Votes to the candidate who wins the most votes in all fifty states, guaranteeing the presidency.

Terrible, misguided idea. More news and background here.

“Our proposal is consistent with the intent and wishes of our Founding Fathers and gives the American people what they want,” said Koza. “The compact addresses the serious drawbacks of the current system of state-by-state, winner-take-all rules. It ends a system that marginalizes two-thirds of America’s voters. With National Popular Vote, a vote in Massachusetts will always count as much as a vote in Florida.”

Wrong wrong wrong!!!

They make it sound so reasonable, but it is a deception. The talk of equal votes is a complete misdirection. The Electoral College system is intended to blend TWO separate votes, one a popular one and one a state-by-state one in choosing the President!

That fact is generally forgotten, as State's Rights have withered away -- but it is recognized in the Constitution that TWO groups, the States and the People, both ceded limited powers to the Federal Government, and thus that is why both are represented separately in the Senate (with all states equal) and in the House (proportionally to population, for the People) in Congress.

And so both also get to weigh in on electing the President through the Electoral formula. Thus we see the supposed "anomaly" when Gore lost to Bush though winning the popular vote really wasn't odd at all, because Bush won the state vote in a landslide -- and the blending of those two results together resulted in a Bush win.

EXACTLY AS THE FOUNDERS INTENDED!

So the first statement in the quote above, "Our proposal is consistent with the intent and wishes of our Founding Fathers" is a complete and utter LIE.

Massachusetts is poised to join Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington and Hawaii as the sixth state to enact the National Popular Vote bill. Companion bills have been introduced in all fifty U.S. States.

Idiots. how they so easily throw away their State's Rights! Those legislators are allowing their votes to be controlled by people outside of their own state. It is such outrageous foolishness that it is beyond belief.

And yet, here we are.

Who is really behind this National Popular Vote Initiative?

Class Warfare

2010-07-18T19:57:00.002-04:00

Class warfare is back, but this time it's the ultrawealthy and the "ruling class" setting out to destroy the middle class. Their perfect vision is one of perpetual power, created by dividing society into two parts: those who oversee the resources and hand out largesse for the Progressive public good, and everyone else who is dependent upon receiving those handouts.

The upwardly-striving middle class doesn't fit into that model.

This also requires resources, particularly energy, to be scarce. I've always argued energy should be cheap and used plentifully and never understood the rationers, but now it makes sense. And clearly the Green movement and the Global Warming hysteria play right into it.

But I digress. Here is the essay everyone is talking about right now, which lays it all out. It is long, and important:

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust.
...
Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity.
...
Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.
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As the 19th century ended, the educated class's religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.

Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked "can't you let anything alone?" he answered with, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill."
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Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a "machine," that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges -- civic as well as economic -- to the party's clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle's view of democracy. Hence our ruling class's standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government -- meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class's solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming.
...
Dependence Economics

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency's value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public.
...
Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support.

Government needs a cleansing.

But wait, it gets worse!

In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country's needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. ("Congress shall make no law..." says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of "responsible parties." Hence the ruling class's perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry's elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government's plans, and to craft a "living" Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to "positive rights" -- meaning charters of government power.

Anyone who believes that way is an enemy of the Constitution and of individual Liberty.

We The People

2010-07-18T19:47:00.001-04:00

It's a trend!

I Am America

2010-07-18T19:28:00.002-04:00

The title reminds me of this post.

Losing the Republic

2010-06-24T22:05:00.003-04:00

See UPDATE below!

Chilling developments in a topic I've written on before that gets too little attention (see here, here and here):

Attacks on the Electoral College Gain Momentum

You won’t hear about it in the mainstream media, but the Electoral College is on the verge of being eliminated. One important legislative vote could occur Thursday. Two others could occur in the upcoming days and weeks.

A California-based group, National Popular Vote, is lobbying hard for a dangerous piece of anti-Electoral College legislation. My NRO article on the mechanics of the legislation is here. Five states have already approved NPV, but now three additional states are dangerously close to joining them: Delaware, Massachusetts, and New York. Another trio of state legislatures approved the scheme, but their governors vetoed the plan. These latter states remain important; a reasonable argument can be made that the gubernatorial vetoes are irrelevant.

If each of these states is counted, NPV could have as many as 169 electoral votes in favor of its plan. It needs 270. NPV has come startlingly close to success even as most Americans remain completely unaware that the presidential-election process is so close to being turned on its head.

The scheme is based on states colluding to cast their electoral votes for the national popular vote winner, rather than for the winner of their own particular state!

This is complete madness -- state lawmakers are essentially declaring that they will theoretically squander their citizen's votes on a candidate that zero people in the state voted for.

This wrongly strips out the state-vote aspect of the Electoral College, which was never intended to be a proxy for the popular vote -- it is a weighted average of the popular vote with a state-by-state vote, since both the people and the states ceded power in the Constitution to form the federal government.

And that is why both are represented separately in Congress.

States already had their interests gutted when the 17th Amendment changed Senators from being appointed by State governments (as their direct representatives) to being elected by popular vote. And now Senators receive national money to run their election campaigns, and thus are beholden to special interests instead of the State interest.

These "progressive" moves towards greater and greater democracy are not a good thing -- we were set up as a Republic for a reason.

UPDATE: Case in point on the destructiveness of the 17 Amendment -- Sen. Harry M. Reid building war chest by tapping donors beyond Nevada

Harry M. Reid needed money, and lots of it....The senator began dialing old and new friends across the country, asking for their help. Many had one thing in common: They had a financial stake in legislation that Reid, as the most powerful member of the Senate, helps control....Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors campaigns, said trial lawyers and other Democratic-leaning donors probably want to help Reid stay in power -- but other new outside interests may want something else from him.

Clearly, it is a fantasy that Reid represents Nevada as a state.

Web Of Connections

2010-03-25T21:47:00.002-04:00