Analyze the world through Goldberg logic. My entry: the fact that most people on Earth wear underwear beneath their pants indicates that Hitler, who also dressed in this manner, actually won World War II.
Progress
I have to say I am beginning to believe that these abortions, given their excruciating moral and personal choices, may be the most defensible in context of all abortions. And yet they seem to be taking life in a more viscerally distressing way. I need time to think and rethink these things. I would not have without reading these extraordinary accounts.
What I couldn’t understand yesterday was how Andrew could hear all these tragic tales and not re-evaluate his position. These are deeply personal and horribly complex medical and moral issues that should be left to the mother and father and the doctor, not to a bunch of moral scolds, religious nuts, and outright busybodies waving placards on the street and screaming “murderers” while having absolutely no personal stake in the matter. It really should be none of their damned business.
Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated
A friend from the finance world wrote in about the various comments on the death of US manufacturing:
Remarkably, US manufacturing dwarfs everyone (and this doesn’t include things like agriculture, movies, utilities, etc.., where we dwarf the world).
Non manufacturing = real estate (yes, non-manufacturing), arts and entertainment, retail trade, finance and insurance, utilities (these are in order of their size).
Basically, manufacturing we make what the next two combined make (the next two = china and japan). Check out this link, granted the data is from 2004 (it shows that the US manufacturing sector is about 60% larger than any other country’s — Japan is second).
Honestly, US manufacturing is a f-ing beast. It’s how we won WWII. Our non-manufacturing, with movies/tv/entertainment, finance, and agriculture is huge.
Also, our percentage of gdp that is manufacturing is about 14%. That’s the same as (drumroll please), India. Yes, India.
Now, could the US do more? Of course, but American mentality is not just to be “first”, but it’s to be so freakishly in first place that everyone else is in awe.
Reports of its death are greatly exaggeratedPost + Comments (85)
Good Catch
Isaac Chotiner catches a great exchange between Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg:
BECK: What a nightmare this is. Can you give me any example in history where this kind of stuff has happened, what’s happening today, and what does it lead to?
GOLDBERG: …I’m not calling Barack Obama a Hitler and I’m not calling him Nazis and all the rest. But, you know, in fascism, we saw the people’s car. We call it the Volkswagen, where the state said what we’re going to do is we’re going to take over the auto industry, government and business and unions are going to get together and we’re going to create cars to fill a political need rather than a market need and give people these cars.
Also, am I the only one who thinks of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (“Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism’s in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.”) every time I hear Jonah Goldberg sounding off on Liberal Fascism?
Mistakes Were Made
Why do these guys hate the military:
A military investigation has concluded that American personnel made significant errors in carrying out some of the airstrikes in western Afghanistan on May 4 that killed dozens of Afghan civilians, according to a senior American military official.
The official said the civilian death toll would probably have been reduced if American air crews and forces on the ground had followed strict rules devised to prevent civilian casualties. Had the rules been followed, at least some of the strikes by American warplanes against half a dozen targets over seven hours would have been aborted.
***Any American victory would be “hollow and unsustainable” if it led to popular resentment among Afghanistan’s citizens, General McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a confirmation hearing.
According to the senior military official, the report on the May 4 raids found that one plane was cleared to attack Taliban fighters, but then had to circle back and did not reconfirm the target before dropping bombs, leaving open the possibility that the militants had fled the site or that civilians had entered the target area in the intervening few minutes.
In another case, a compound of buildings where militants were massing for a possible counterattack against American and Afghan troops was struck in violation of rules that required a more imminent threat to justify putting high-density village dwellings at risk, the official said.
“In several instances where there was a legitimate threat, the choice of how to deal with that threat did not comply with the standing rules of engagement,” said the military official, who provided a broad summary of the report’s initial findings on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry was not yet complete.
It just seems so entirely uncontroversial to me that killing dozens of innocents in air strikes does not advance our goals in the region, and quite the opposite, does grave damage to our mission (whatever that may be these days). We’ll see if anything changes.
Red Province, Blue Province
Harold Myerson of the Washington Post is shrill about our new economic overlords’ skill at learning from America’s Best Capitalists(tm):
The military units that rolled into Beijing 20 years ago today came chiefly from the sticks. Isolated by geography and indoctrination from the liberalism flowing through Chinese cities and packed into Tiananmen Square, they were the perfect shock troops for Deng’s murderous reassertion of authoritarian power.
…
Two decades later, however, the troops who pulled the triggers have reason to wonder who won and who lost in the class-and-culture war in which Tiananmen was but the bloodiest battle. Today, the Communist Party has proven itself, in all but one particular, a friend to the urbanites and professionals who now prosper in China’s cities — socioeconomically, the very kinds of people it gunned down in Tiananmen Square… In the countryside, where hundreds of millions of Chinese still reside, the benefits of the nation’s economic miracle are far harder to detect. For many, the backbreaking drudgery of peasant life persists as it has for centuries. Some Sinologists believe that one reason the urban Chinese haven’t demanded more rights is their fear that in a democratic China, they’d be outvoted by a peasantry that would demand a more equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth.
Mandatory disclaimer: I understand it is objectively & patriotically ten thousand times better to be a rural American citizen than a rural Chinese citizen. (Believe me, every time I spend a couple hours failing to make much progress in my pathetic urban “garden”, I give fervent thanks to my late grandparents for getting the heck out of rural Connemara.)
On the other hand, it would be nice if America’s most popular business export was something other than MBA seminars on “How to Fvck Over Your Working Class While Ensuring They Blame It All on the Urban DFHs”.
Twenty years since Tiananmen Square. Damn, I am old.
The Genius of Zero Tolerance
Good thing this menace has been addressed:
The Penn Hills school board will decide Tuesday night whether or not a 15-year-old student should be expelled for showing up at school with an eyebrow shaver in her handbag.
A Linton Middle School teenager was expelled after a random search turned up an eyebrow shaver in her handbag on May 4.
Officials at the Penn Hills school recommended that Taylor Ray Jetter be expelled for the rest of this year and 45 days next year.
The state’s Safe School Act defines a weapon as any knife, cutting instrument, cutting tool, nun chuck, firearms, rifle and any other tool capable of inflicting bodily harm.
I also have learned from a source she tore the warning labels off of her mattress and is fond of carrying 3.5 ounces of fluid onto airplanes. This from another report had me screaming at the monitor:
The school released a statement saying it has a standard disciplinary policy that addresses all students equally.
Thank goodness for that.
Just curious, how many of you think this is going to instill a sense of respect for authority in this kid?