Now for something completely different. A blogger has claimed it was outrageous of me to belittle Glenn Beck’s brain power without the attendant detailed textual exegesis and footnotes—just about. I had mistakenly surmised that among those with a modicum of intelligence certain things are manifestly true. Alas, the culture has deteriorated to such an extent that no a priori agreement exists about intelligence and its manifestations.
Since Beck, mercifully, doesn’t write (he will, he will; the dreaded book will appear in the fullness of time), there are vaults of TV-time evidence to prove he is not too bright. For anyone who possesses a smidgen of intelligence, who lives in America, has watched a lot of TV, and listens to the radio; let us establish a couple of a priori truths:
Beck is a bit of a simpleton. Rush Limbaugh isn’t the brightest. Hannity is not too smart. Nor was poor Anna Nicole Smith, RIP. If civilization means anything, some things in this world must simply be accepted as axiomatic. But standards mean squat, I know, I know!
And while we’re at it, the economic laws of supply and demand do not need empirical proof for their validation; they are a priori true. Or, as Gene Callahan puts it in this excellent essay, “they are logically prior to any empirical study of economic phenomena.”
Category Archives: Media
Updated: ‘Inflation 101 for Women Pundits & Other Tyrants’
“Libertarians have a keen appreciation of how governments monkey with the money supply. This is but one of the reasons principled libertarians abhor the optional war pursued in Iraq. By and large, the war accounts for the $9 trillion in national debt. It’s a debt that has been increasing ‘average of $1.47 billion per day since September 29, 2006.’ At the time of writing, every one of us owes $28,921.”
“Yet, never once have the war harpies and their hombres in the ideological trenches indicated they comprehend how and WHO is paying for all this. I know they believe we’re not being taxed in lieu of the debt, a faith they base on Bush’s promise not to raise taxes…”
Here’s hoping that “Inflation 101 for Women Pundits & Other Tyrants” —a primer about inflation at home and hyperinflation in Zimbabwe—will persuade ‘the distaff side of the commentariat,’ especially, to stop whooping it up for war.
Update: Related reading: “Lethal Weapons: Neocon Groupies“
Updated: 'Inflation 101 for Women Pundits & Other Tyrants'
“Libertarians have a keen appreciation of how governments monkey with the money supply. This is but one of the reasons principled libertarians abhor the optional war pursued in Iraq. By and large, the war accounts for the $9 trillion in national debt. It’s a debt that has been increasing ‘average of $1.47 billion per day since September 29, 2006.’ At the time of writing, every one of us owes $28,921.”
“Yet, never once have the war harpies and their hombres in the ideological trenches indicated they comprehend how and WHO is paying for all this. I know they believe we’re not being taxed in lieu of the debt, a faith they base on Bush’s promise not to raise taxes…”
Here’s hoping that “Inflation 101 for Women Pundits & Other Tyrants” —a primer about inflation at home and hyperinflation in Zimbabwe—will persuade ‘the distaff side of the commentariat,’ especially, to stop whooping it up for war.
Update: Related reading: “Lethal Weapons: Neocon Groupies“
Updated ‘Reza Aslan’s Pogrom Amnesia’
About Reza Aslan, the darling of the media on all things Muslim, Myles Kantor observes the following:
“Last night I watched Sam Harris and Reza Aslan’s January 25 debate on religion at the Los Angeles Public Library. Toward the end, Harris noted the anti-Semitic character of the Middle East before the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Aslan responded in reference to pre-state Israel, ‘Before 1948, of course, there were tens of thousands of Jews living alongside their Arab neighbors without any problem at all.’
Without any problem at all? How about the Jerusalem pogrom in 1920 and the Jaffa pogrom in 1921? Or Arab massacres of Jews in Hebron and Safad in 1929? Or the Tiberias pogrom in 1938? (There was a reason the Sephardic Jewish sage Maimonides wrote in 1172 regarding Arabs, ‘Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.’)
If Aslan is ignorant of this recurrent savagery, then the Harvard graduate’s study of pre-state Israel has been amazingly selective. If not, his misrepresentation of Arab-Jewish life before 1948 is revisionism in the same gutter as Holocaust denial.”
Or down at curb level with the New Historians’ output.
Update: the post was mentioned favorably at Jihad Watch.