Denzel

Positive change begins in the home.

A statement so obvious, it will surely offend.

Very Interesting

The real reason for the rise of the 1% from the NY Times. They're political.

This year, the Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves wrote a book about how people in the upper middle class have shaped both legal and cultural norms to their advantage. From different perspectives, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich and Luigi Zingales have also written extensively about how the political power of elites has undermined markets. 

Problems cited by these analysts include subsidies for the financial sector’s risk-taking; overprotection of software and pharmaceutical patents; the escalation of land-use controls that drive up rents in desirable metropolitan areas; favoritism toward market incumbents via state occupational licensing regulations (for example, associations representing lawyers, doctors and dentists that block efforts allowing paraprofessionals to provide routine services at a lower price without their supervision). These are just some of the causes contributing to the 1 percent’s high and rising income share. Reforming relevant laws can make markets more efficient and egalitarian, and in contrast with trade, immigration and technology, the political causes of the 1 percent’s rise are directly under the control of citizens.

Gosh, if you'd just take it one step further, you might start thinking about voting for Trump and draining the swamp of all this corruption.

Good

Justice League is crashing and burning and threatens to bring down the studio.

Studios are way overinvested in comic book movies and intellectual property and way under invested in originality. It will take a major event to disrupt this trend. Here's hoping this is it.

You Don't Say

Brain scans reveal male and female brains are wired differently.

Does Easy Divorce Leads to Assortative Mating?

Interesting.

These are my words, not hers, but I think of this as yet another way that elites selfishly have pushed for looser social and sexual and romantic norms, without much worrying about the resulting broader impact on inequality and lower earners and the less educated.

Best way to prevent various forms of child abuse is having the biological father in the home, especially amongst the poor and most vulnerable.

Ummm...Okay

"To hell with the witch-hunt debate."

No surprise the Atlantic writer thinks everything about this sexual harassment moment is A-OK. Time will tell. Meanwhile, in other news, man admits it would be a difficult choice between his wife and his sex robot. 

I expect we'll be seeing a lot more of this.

Big Brother Is Here

And this is what he sounds like. 

The Canadian Universities (at least the one here represented) have allowed these folks to put in policies designed to punish undesirable thought and speech. The entire thing is super creepy.

Kaepernick Will Fight Harsh Sentencing Practices

I hope he's better at it than reading NFL defenses.

John Lassister and Charlie Rose

I called it a witchhunt from the beginning. Just fyi, all the feminists and outraged SJW who think they making the world a better place are going to be remembered like their predecessors: the hysterics of the Salem Witch Trials, the Russian Anarchists, and the Maoists in China.

Remember, these are the people who watch the Handmaids Tale as an allegory for the present times -- but they are the ones we ought to fear grabbing power.

Plastic Bag Bans 

95% of all world plastic bag pollution comes from five countries: China, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka.

When I was in China, I noticed a lot of garbage on the ground. Everywhere.

Sounds Right

Democrats call for convincing amount of condemnation for Al Franken.

Al Franken and Sly Stallone

This is sexual hysteria. For all those excited about this 5th wave feminism, and point to the truthiness of the allegations, remember that Joe McCarthy was in some sense RIGHT about Communists having infiltrated the government and Hollywood, but it didn't make the witchhunt less awful.

Plus, this isn't about justice. It's about exposure and toppling people, which is easy. Recall the old Soviet police chief who said, "Show me the man, I'll show you the crime."

We are not going to like the world we are making.

True

America moves from frenzy to frenzy.

Thought Experiment

For all the NFL fans who think Kaepernick "should" be a on team, the very framing of the question is wrong. A fan ought to take the position: I think my team should sign Kaepernick. Otherwise, all the rest is bullshit. Either you believe your time should sign him, or you should shut up. It's like saying - someone else should invest in Tesla.

Hostiles

This looks really good to me, but I doubt it will be.

Apple Cart

It's fun to topple the apple cart, but as the saying goes, then where do you go to get the apples?

Mortgage Interest Deduction

It doesn't benefit me to eliminate the deduction as I recently bought a house -- and had this deduction in mind when paying for it. It saves me money.

Nevertheless, it's a terrible idea and I hope they'll trim it, and eventually get rid of it.

Logging

Musical: Hamilton

Overrated as a hip hop musical, but underrated as a pop representation of the Revolutionary period and Hamilton in general. What better way to get folks interested in the politics and dynamics of the founders? And what a terrific reminder of American exceptionalism. I thought the show captured the characters of the time period quite well and I imagine inspires many people to refresh their knowledge of the Federalist papers, dynamics of Jefferson vs. Hamilton, Washington, and perhaps a few more lesser known characters of the period: Schuyler sisters, Lafayette, etc.

I enjoyed the non-hip hop numbers (which there were many) to the hip hop, which reminded me of listening to Arrested Development in the early 1990s.

Film: Blade Runner 2049

Terrific ideas, but the pacing was too slow. Villeneuve makes too many movies if you ask me. I'd like to see a higher batting average from such a talent -- more like a Tarantino or Michael Mann career. Skip The Arrival and just do Blade Runner. For whatever my opinion is worth.

TV:

The Duece - The most Wire-esque of David Simon's post-Wire career. I enjoyed the show a lot, was taken aback by the finale, which I didn't even realize was a finale until he used the same musical montage ending that he did with each Wire seasons.

American Vandal - mock documentary. Is anything more in deserving of ridicule than Making a Murderer and those type of shows? Deals with the case of a high school idiot expelled for spray painting dicks on a bunch of cars. Rather enjoyable.

Mindhunter - my favorite Fincher work in a long while. Started terrific, got progressively less. Main character serviceable, but perhaps the least interesting in the show. More serial killer interviews -- they were the best part.

Books (reading):

World at Night - let's try again with this one. Starts off well. I'm searching for spy novels to enjoy beyond LeCarre. Alan Furst comes recommended.

The Last Kind Words Saloon - Larry McMurtry is the best. Even - maybe especially - his smaller works.

The Second World Wars - Military history is starting to fascinate me. Still cannot wrap my head around the scale of WW2.

The Complacent Class - impressive indictment of Americans today. We're way too complacent and fearful of risk. I think he's right, but it's an incredibly difficult cycle to break. Or maybe not so. We just do it.

Liberalism is Exhausted

Great article.

White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt.  

White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret. It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.

Yep

Democrats are failing the resistance. Sullivan does them no favors, however, by characterizing it as a resistance. By defining oneself in opposition to Trump, one is giving him all the power.

Democrats need ideas and principles. Here are a few:

1) Cut out this politically correct nonsense from the knees. Call out BLM as an organization fueling lies about policing. Table anything to do with the transgender agenda. Forget Colin Kaepernick and by all means, stop being mealy mouthed about the campus protests against Free Speech.

2) Restore Patriotism as a core idea to the party. Do not let the Republicans outmaneuver the Dems on this issue. Drape yourselves in the flag.

3) Come up with tangible policies designed for economic growth and jobs in the least well off areas of the country. Examples: payroll tax cuts for all lower wage jobs. Raising the minimum wage is a STUPID idea. It simply encourages automation and fewer jobs. We want people are the lower end of the income scale WORKING. Even if it's not enough initially to make a good living, get them working and learning skills and they can improve. Encourage dynamism, not stagnation. Minimum wage increases are stagnation - imagining people who work minimum wage jobs are going to be there forever. They are not.

4) Do SOMETHING about college tuition cost. One idea: schools are partially on the hook for unpaid loans. Another idea: scale back all Federal Student loans. Another idea: make them dischargeable in bankruptcy.

5) In areas with housing shortages, encourage more local housing development.

6) Make infrastructure investments: build more roads.

7) Simplify the tax code.

8) Criminal justice reform. As an olive branch to BLM, etc, focus an agenda on get non-violent black men less into the criminal justice system and more into the workforce. I don't have precise ideas here, but this could become a priority and would actually really help communities of color. It'd also be the right thing to do.

9) Return to a pragmatic foreign policy more focused on American interests and empowering allies than democracy promotion. It's not working.

Good Luck With All That

Left wing fantatics protest viewing a 39 year old SNL video in class.

They are throwing away any chance of being able to function in the world, along with trashing what was once a great American institution: college. They should be fought every step of the way.

Torn ACL

DeShaun Watson tore his ACL and is done for the season. Too bad, his story was an exciting one. Although, in the one game I watched him, all the fantasy stats were accumulated during garbage time and I wasn't terribly impressed. Still...he's just a rookie. But in this story, Dabo Sweeney says Watson played with an ACL tear in Clemson.

That's insane. I've torn an ACL and you have no lateral movement. To play any sports which requires balance, to my mind, is insane. To play football? The most violent of all contact sports. I don't have words to describe...

...I love sports, I love football, I hope it doesn't go anywhere, and I like toughness, but this culture of putting oneself in danger is senseless.