1. Another NYT hit piece on North Dakota’s oil boom. This time they ignore that the boom creates jobs that pay oil field workers and workers in supporting industries higher wages than they may ever see again in their lives and focuses on how there are more injuries and increased health expenditures because of the boom.
2. At AmCon, Robert Murphy on the economics of discrimination. He writes on the case out of Iowa where a dentist fired his assistant because she was too attractive and too tempting for him.
4. Government ministers in the UK are considering portraying the country in a negative light in order to limit immigration. Bulgaria and Romania seem to be the targets, but I can think of a few other countries that ministers might want to consider.
5. Prisons should provide inmates with yoga classes? This reminds me of those Locked Up shows on MSNBC on the weekends where well-behaved prisoners are allowed to keep cats in their cells. It sounds good in theory, but I don’t think it’s scalable across a large group of typically violent men. I can picture a prison gang calling themselves The Downward Facing Doggies.
6. An interview with neocon Michael Ledeen who spoke on Tocqueville and ‘millions of tiny regulations that erode freedom’. I like anything about Tocqueville, but Michel Houellebecq’s discussion was most interesting. Hit the ‘CC’ button for English captions.
Houellebecq properly grasped and broadcasted the decline of his country before the priest of culture figured it out. He’s pretty red pill for a big name writer. His comments on the state and its treatment of individuals remind me of a phrase a friend once used for the type of freedom that the left prefers, “freedom of children”.
I noticed the NY Times ND hit piece and cant figure out if its part of a defensive play because people are warm to the drill baby drill idea or if its groundwork for the coming environmental lawsuits and battle in the public sphere. If enviros can slow that down and oil hits $150, the cathedral will need reasons why its good that drilling stopped… or it could be alberta envy as noted above.
I wonder if the Romania/Bulgaria thing is about Gypsies. To those who don’t know, forget Slavic or Scandinavian women — the most beautiful women in he world are ethnic (ie, non-Gypsy) Romanian girls. Actually, nah – apex Scandinavian women are still the touchstone of female beauty. But nobody does big-eyed pixie like Romanians.
Speaking of Gypsies, I visited Poland in the 1990s, shortly after Communism ended, and I was shocked with the sight of masses of Gypsies everywhere in Warsaw. Entire mini-cities of Gypsy squatters at train stations, in the city city centre, etc. Sleeping, shitting, out in the open… I heard later that this was true also of medium-sized and smaller cities as well. Well, I visited again 2-3 years later, and they were all gone — all went to England, I heard. Good olde England, with its welfare… Except for the Gypsy girls, who dyed their thick curly hair blonde and worked for prostitution mafia on country roadsides. They known as “tirówki,” after the trans-Eurasian TIR truckers they were known to service. But now, those Gypsy girls are all gone too.
I don’t think it’s anything more than new yorkers’ (ahem, jews’) seething hatred for flyover whites and a visceral reaction to seeing them actually get paid a decent wage
#4: Doesn’t work. Mexican media portrays America as a terrifying, racist crucible but mestizo Mexicans know that we are about 100x better at acknowledging their humanity (quite apart from the $ issue) than their Conquistador ruling class will ever be. Bulgarians probably realize the same truth about the British.
I don’t think it’s anything more than new yorkers’ (ahem, jews’) seething hatred for flyover whites and a visceral reaction to seeing them actually get paid a decent wage.
Agreed, but interestingly the guy writing the oil boom hit piece articles is a young hipster black dude.
If you like Tocqueville Gucci, you really should read Hugh Brogan’s very fine biography of the man (actually, I’m reading it now). It’s quite good, I think.
“Government ministers in the UK are considering portraying the country in a negative light in order to limit immigration.” — this is a weak-ass substitute for fulfilling their obligation and responsibility to control the goddamn border.
They will never be able to portray the UK as being worse than Eastern Europe or Pakistan — until they have admitted enough Eastern Europeans and Pakis that Britain IS as bad as these places.
I work in the healthcare industry on the finance side. My two cents on that NYT piece is that if workers were getting injured in large numbers on the job, which to some degree probably does happen, they would be covered by their employers’ workers comp/liability insurance, which are generally profitable patients for hospitals to treat. The idea that the evil, greedy oil industry is bankrupting local hospitals by putting workers with no health insurance coverage in dangerous situations/jobs and sticking the poor local hospital with the bills when these guys get hurt is completely bunk.
If local hospitals are seeing a surge of uninsured patients, its likely just from the rapid population growth the last few years, which, for most places is a nice problem to have. I’m guessing the real story is a lot more ho hum. Try this headline: “Population growth burdens municipal services; additional infrastructure needed.” In other words, dog bites man.
Michel Houellebecq: I’ve read two of his novels from the 1990s recently and he was truly prescient. Briefly, he considers the two bastions of society which stand against the “marketplace” as the family and the church, with the 60s sexual revolution – which is portrayed in almost pornographic terms — representing the equivalent of unfettered laissez faire capitalism but in the romantic/sexual marketplace. He attracted a good deal of criticism for making very candid comments about immigrants and Africans, which to me are a tangential line of thought for him. That’s a capsule summary of Houellebecq’s sophisticated and wide-reanging thinking – there’s more there.
Houellebecq looks and sounds like a bum, but the Tocqueville quotes were seriously prescient.
As to the oil boom thing…here in Canada we have a phrase for it…
“Alberta Envy”
Toronto is famous for it.
Houellebecq properly grasped and broadcasted the decline of his country before the priest of culture figured it out. He’s pretty red pill for a big name writer. His comments on the state and its treatment of individuals remind me of a phrase a friend once used for the type of freedom that the left prefers, “freedom of children”.
I noticed the NY Times ND hit piece and cant figure out if its part of a defensive play because people are warm to the drill baby drill idea or if its groundwork for the coming environmental lawsuits and battle in the public sphere. If enviros can slow that down and oil hits $150, the cathedral will need reasons why its good that drilling stopped… or it could be alberta envy as noted above.
I wonder if the Romania/Bulgaria thing is about Gypsies. To those who don’t know, forget Slavic or Scandinavian women — the most beautiful women in he world are ethnic (ie, non-Gypsy) Romanian girls. Actually, nah – apex Scandinavian women are still the touchstone of female beauty. But nobody does big-eyed pixie like Romanians.
Speaking of Gypsies, I visited Poland in the 1990s, shortly after Communism ended, and I was shocked with the sight of masses of Gypsies everywhere in Warsaw. Entire mini-cities of Gypsy squatters at train stations, in the city city centre, etc. Sleeping, shitting, out in the open… I heard later that this was true also of medium-sized and smaller cities as well. Well, I visited again 2-3 years later, and they were all gone — all went to England, I heard. Good olde England, with its welfare… Except for the Gypsy girls, who dyed their thick curly hair blonde and worked for prostitution mafia on country roadsides. They known as “tirówki,” after the trans-Eurasian TIR truckers they were known to service. But now, those Gypsy girls are all gone too.
I don’t think it’s anything more than new yorkers’ (ahem, jews’) seething hatred for flyover whites and a visceral reaction to seeing them actually get paid a decent wage
Prisons should provide inmates with yoga classes?
Could reduce the number of rapes, if the offenders learn how to self-fellate.
#4: Doesn’t work. Mexican media portrays America as a terrifying, racist crucible but mestizo Mexicans know that we are about 100x better at acknowledging their humanity (quite apart from the $ issue) than their Conquistador ruling class will ever be. Bulgarians probably realize the same truth about the British.
“Government ministers in the UK are considering portraying the country in a negative light to curtail immigration.”
I have no idea why this should require a government program: portraying Britain in a positive light would probably be a much more challenging task.
I don’t think it’s anything more than new yorkers’ (ahem, jews’) seething hatred for flyover whites and a visceral reaction to seeing them actually get paid a decent wage.
Agreed, but interestingly the guy writing the oil boom hit piece articles is a young hipster black dude.
https://twitter.com/jeligon
If you like Tocqueville Gucci, you really should read Hugh Brogan’s very fine biography of the man (actually, I’m reading it now). It’s quite good, I think.
“Government ministers in the UK are considering portraying the country in a negative light in order to limit immigration.” — this is a weak-ass substitute for fulfilling their obligation and responsibility to control the goddamn border.
They will never be able to portray the UK as being worse than Eastern Europe or Pakistan — until they have admitted enough Eastern Europeans and Pakis that Britain IS as bad as these places.
I work in the healthcare industry on the finance side. My two cents on that NYT piece is that if workers were getting injured in large numbers on the job, which to some degree probably does happen, they would be covered by their employers’ workers comp/liability insurance, which are generally profitable patients for hospitals to treat. The idea that the evil, greedy oil industry is bankrupting local hospitals by putting workers with no health insurance coverage in dangerous situations/jobs and sticking the poor local hospital with the bills when these guys get hurt is completely bunk.
If local hospitals are seeing a surge of uninsured patients, its likely just from the rapid population growth the last few years, which, for most places is a nice problem to have. I’m guessing the real story is a lot more ho hum. Try this headline: “Population growth burdens municipal services; additional infrastructure needed.” In other words, dog bites man.
Michel Houellebecq: I’ve read two of his novels from the 1990s recently and he was truly prescient. Briefly, he considers the two bastions of society which stand against the “marketplace” as the family and the church, with the 60s sexual revolution – which is portrayed in almost pornographic terms — representing the equivalent of unfettered laissez faire capitalism but in the romantic/sexual marketplace. He attracted a good deal of criticism for making very candid comments about immigrants and Africans, which to me are a tangential line of thought for him. That’s a capsule summary of Houellebecq’s sophisticated and wide-reanging thinking – there’s more there.