A free market solution to the Campus PC scourge

Some people look at a problem like the rise of totalitarian Political Correctness on college campuses and beg for a Government solution... I, on the other hand, see free market opportunity.

It's only a matter of time before some enterprising University begins to market itself as an alternative to the big Northeastern Campuses and their stifling attacks on anything that doesn't conform to the current in vogue narrative.

As an a example of what that might look like, take a College like Hillsdale... By marketing itself as a center-Right alternative to the standard Liberal campus, and by reaching out to prominent Conservative radio hosts like Hugh Hewitt and Michael Medved, in a very short time, Hillsdale has transformed itself from a College I had never heard of, to a place I would consider putting on my kids' college wish lists.

There aren't many industries that are more competitive than colleges competing with one another for students willing to shell out 100K for what they're selling, and generally, the Free Market works better than my brain, so chances are that this opportunity is already a topic of conversation in the back rooms of many American Universities... I would look for the revolution to begin in the South, but begin it will and as kids who feel stifled by campus PC begin to make different choices, the market will begin to correct even the worst of the worst... 

Yale I'm looking in your direction.

UPDATE: I think you're going to start seeing a lot more of this. In fact, if I were the President of a University looking to re-brand in this way, I would actively encourage Professors to publicly speak out against PC attacks hoping that some percentage of those rants will go viral.

Terrorism and your personal risk assessment

There are 24 hours in a news day, and the cable news networks have to fill every second of it. So we can expect a steady diet of warnings about ISIS plots to attack and destroy all manner of American soft targets this Holiday Season...

So should we worry?

Maybe.

Americans as a rule are pretty bad at risk assessment. We worry too much about the wrong things. But are we justified in worrying about threats from ISIS? I've got two thoughts on this...

1) Is there a real personal threat to you from ISIS attacks?  Probably not. There are 350 million Americans spread out across 3.1 million square miles. The chances that ISIS will attack and that you will have the bad luck to be standing close enough to be shot or blown up when they do is infinitesimally small. So yeah, be aware, don't walk around staring at your phone, have good situational awareness, but don't let fear of dying in a terrorist attack change the way you live your life at all. To paraphrase one of the dopiest meme we've ever come up with as Americans, that's how the Terrorists win.

2) Is there a real threat that a terrorist attack on America will change the country in ways that will negatively affect you and your family? Absolutely yes. 9/11 gave us The Department of Homeland Security... that Jaba The Hutt of Government Agencies, and its Salacious Crumb the TSA. From that flowed the Patriot Act, the NSA Warrantless Surveillance programs and, presumably, that giant NSA monstrosity in the Utah Dessert that runs so big and so hot that it routinely melts its own servers.

Is ISIS a threat to our way of life? Sure... but you know what the true existential threat to America really is? Massive growth in the size of Government and the explosions of debt and loss of Liberty that inevitably comes with it.... that is the true existential threat to our Nation, and if ISIS does pull of a successful attack on our Homeland, the real damage will occur when we beg our Government to overreact to the threat and they happily oblige.

Compassion is not a suicide pact

Hey guys, did you hear? We have a ROBUST system for vetting Syrian Refugees to make sure none of them pose a terrorism threat to the United States... yep, we sure do, our Attorney General just said so. Apparently it consists of interviews and, well... interviews I guess.

Refugee Vetter: Are you a terrorist?
Refugee: ... no?...
Refugee Vetter: Are you sure?
Refugee: ... yes?...
Refugee Vetter: Right, off you go then!

I'd like for someone to please tell me which Government Agency has detailed dossiers on all military-aged males from every random backwater village in Turkey and Syria?  Is it the same agency that "fully vetted" the Tsarnaev Brothers!?  Is it the same agency that sent a fully approved Visa to the Post Office Box of Mohammed Atta six months AFTER he led the 9/11 attacks!?

Seriously, when Achmed shows up claiming to be a peaceful family man and Rotary Club Member from Asscrack, Syria, how can we know if he's telling the truth? Who do you call to verify literally ANYTHING he tells you? The level of trust in Government I see on my social media feeds with regard to this Administration's ability to perform this incredibly dangerous task successfully is completely misplaced, given that the consequences of failure are so enormous.

Let me ask you this, you don't want the US to get involved in another Middle Eastern War, right? Iraq was a mistake, you say? Getting out of Afghanistan was the right decision? Fine... what do you think we're going to do when five teams of Syrian Terrorists shoot up five different Malls across America on Black Friday?

I'll tell you what we're going to do... we're going to get involved in a really big goddamned war in the Middle East, that's what.

Compassion is important, I don't want to overshadow that. It's what makes us different from ISIS. Even knowing the dangers, a large number of us still want to help these poor Refugees in whatever way we can. That speaks well of us as a people. I know that the vast majority of these people are trying to save themselves and their families from the same kind of brutal violence that terrifies us. I am completely sympathetic to that, and I'd be doing the same thing if I were them.

But wanting taking a brief pause to make sure we're not importing the same kind of horror that France and Germany have already imported to their countries does not make me an awful person, despite what Vox and Salon may think.

Compassion is not a suicide pact.

UPDATE: As I said

College campuses are exactly like ISIS...

...because of Rape Culture you guys...

If somebody came up to me and said "apples are exactly like oranges", I would assume that they know next to nothing about apples or oranges. And since the SJWs comparing college campuses to ISIS live on actual college campuses, I have to assume that in this case what they know nothing about is ISIS... Which is terrifying.

I don't know where all this crazy is going to take us, but I'm worried in a way that I'm not sure I have ever been before.

Happy Veteran's Day

"When I go home people'll ask me, "Hey Hoot, why do you do it man? What, you some kinda war junkie?" You know what I'll say? I won't say a goddamn word. Why? They won't understand. They won't understand why we do it. They won't understand that it's about the men next to you, and that's it. That's all it is."

Trump changing his tune?

Trump must be listening to his consultants because his tax proposal answer in last night's debate was very... Un-Trump. He didn't attack anyone, in fact he complimented his fellow candidates by saying they all have good proposals and while he thinks his proposal is the best one, any of them would be better than Hillary Clinton's.

That is a vastly different Trump than we are used to seeing. Not only did he say obliquely nice things about his fellow candidates, but he actually (gasp!) went after Hillary Clinton.

I wonder if that will help soften that hard ceiling he seems to be stuck under....

End the TSA...

In the wake of a report that an ISIS bomb brought down a Russian Airliner and with a recent expose showing the TSA still fails to spot the majority (95%!!!) of weapons smuggled through airports even after being warned and subsequently re-tested, the White House says it's reviewing options to see if there's a way to "enhance security at airports."

Well...

I have one simple idea, but it will never be considered by the Federal Government because it requires collecting less tax revenue, spending less tax revenue, and giving up some measure of control over its citizens... Three things Government would rather gargle raw sewage than ever even consider.

We should immediately eliminate the TSA and use the money to pay a private company to run airport security. Because here's the truth, it's not hard to predict the Government's response the next time a terrorist attack kills people at an airport or on an airplane... They will say people are dead because we didn't spend enough tax money on security measures. That's what they always say... no matter how much we spend, it's never enough to actually get the job done. What a freakin' racket. And because we're all terrified of being killed by terrorists on an airplane, like suckers, we will all dutifully nod and reach for our checkbooks... again.

No one will get fired. No one will have their budget cut. Nothing will change, except that a river of cash will get dumped onto the problem without actually, y'know, solving a goddamned thing. And we won't hold anyone accountable because on some level we know Government is incompetent and a certain expectation of failure is already baked into our assumptions about everything they do... and too many of us are brainwashed into thinking there's no other viable solution to these kinds of large-scale problems other than a top down Government solution.

But there is. A private sector company would live in absolute terror of losing a billion dollar plus contact and would bend over backwards to make sure not so much as a sharp word gets past their security measures. And if they should fail, they would expect to be fired and forced to make room for the next security firm with the next great idea on how to keep us safe. I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money that in the first year after privatization, the percentage of weapons test-smuggled through Airport Security would drop from 95% to a statistical near zero. It would HAVE to, because any private sector company would know that its consumers (you and me) would have zero tolerance for failure even in Year One.

That's the difference between government and the free market. And the longer we continue to embrace government solutions over market solutions, the more we are going to find our lives unnecessarily placed at risk by Bureaucrats who don't care because they fear no consequence in the wake of failure.

Los Angeles receives a lesson, neglects to actually learn anything

For decades Los Angeles has been dealing with a problem called "runaway production", which means that Hollywood has been fleeing the high tax, high regulatory, high union environment of Los Angeles for more business friendly states, like Louisiana, and countries like Bulgaria... Yes that's right, it's so expensive to shoot movies and TV in L.A. that it's actually cost effective to ship an entire production to... lovely Bulgaria.

The solution is obvious, lower taxes and reduce regulations to lure production back to the city. But in the Liberal ideological bubble that is Los Angeles, the obvious solution is like garlic to a vampire. 

But there's good news...the rich Hollywood folks who really run this town (the politicians are nothing but their own personal paid employees) are, apparently, crazy but not stupid. Last year L.A. Government was successfully lobbied to change the tax environment to make it more attractive to its Hollywood patrons, and the results were entirely predictable. Production came roaring back to Los Angeles. According to Variety, production days in the city are up 54% over the same period last year. That's amazing. Imagine the same thing happening to, say, the auto industry in Detroit. A city is apt to be utterly transformed by an increase in business like that.

But sadly, this is not a lesson Los Angeles will learn. This city is simply not interested in reducing taxes or regulations because they aren't interested in giving up any measure of control over the lives of their citizens... improvements to their economic well being be damned.

If creating a friendly tax environment can fix the movie business, it can fix any business. Sadly, no other industry has lobbyists as powerful as Studio Heads, Network Chiefs and JJ Abrams. And so, the broader California economy will continue to tank, and those who can leave will continue to do so until Los Angeles is populated only by the ultra rich and the desperately poor.

Our city Poiticians know the answers. They know how to fix this. But they simply aren't willing to give up the power that high taxes and burdensome regulations grant them over our lives. And so we will continue to suffer.

The message to Los Angeles' dwindling middle class is "suck it."

Good luck with that.

CNBC Debate was a huge win for the GOP

Ignore your social media feeds... it's full of establishment pundits and your Liberal friends. They don't understand the truth, that what happened last week on CNBC was a huge win for all of the GOP candidates...

HE FIGHTS!!!

Most of the support for Trump can be summed up this way... "HE FIGHTS!", the Trumpkins on Twitter will say. Sometimes they change it up to "HE HAS BALLS!" but that's really just another way of saying the same thing.  Well last week it was like the GOP Candidates got jumped in a biker bar, but instead of folding and getting shipped to the hospital in a long line of somber ambulances, they turned back to back and dove into the fray. They fought like gladiators... wrestled the moderators to the ground, and choked them out. It was a huge win for the candidates, especially those like Cruz who are hoping to overtake Trump. There's a reason why Cruz was widely credited as the winner of the night... because he led an incredibly effective counter-attack against an obvious Left-Wing Media hit squad.  And if Obama wants to crack jokes in front of his sycophantic supporters about the GOP not being able to handle moderators, let him. He's not the target audience for an off-year October GOP debate, and neither are those supporters.

BUT... BUT... THE DONORS!!!!

I saw several insider/pundits, Rick Wilson chief among them, reporting during the debate that big money donors were telling them the debate was a disaster for the GOP. I happen to like Rick a lot, and he's forgotten more about politics than I'll ever know, but who cares? Isn't it clear that this election is as anti-donor class as any election in our lifetimes? Let them whine... what are they going to do, stay home with their checkbooks closed? At the end of the day they will fall in line. They stand to make more money off a GOP President than any of us. And again, the donor class was not the target audience for this debate... at least not as it turned out.

MEDIA BIAS ON DISPLAY

Look, the truly committed Leftists will never admit it. But everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders saw media bias on display last week in all its glory and many, to their credit, were even willing to say so. A Liberal friend of mine once tried to get me to watch a dopey Fox News documentary in which, he said, the money quote was Shepherd Smith caught on camera saying "this is why people hate Fox" when some right wing bias slipped out on camera. Well that door swings both ways. I think an awful lot of moderate to center-left voters started to wonder just how deep the rabbit hole of media bias goes last week, and that's a huge win going forward. Next time Candy Crowley steps in with a timely assist for a struggling Democrat during a debate, perhaps it won't pass so unnoticed by everyone not already pre-disposed to vote GOP.

Folks... that's three big wins for the GOP... you can embrace it and hope the next debate will be better in terms of substance and issues... or you can wallow in donor-class hysteria until you're miserable. It's your choice.