UPDATE II: Celebrity And The #Selfie

Aesthetics, Celebrity, Feminism, Film, Hollywood, Pop-Culture

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Less repulsive than Kim Kardashian’s preoccupation with selfie taking is the fact that she goes unchallenged when depicting her obscene, whorish narcissism as an attempt to come to terms with her body. “Be a little easier on myself,” as she puts it. Kardashian is as heroic as the females mocked in last week’s “Heroism Or Hedonism?”

A voice in the wilderness is the “iconic French actress Catherine Deneuve,” who reminds us that real feminine allure and mystic are not to be found in the “new generation of celebrities addicted to social media.”

“A star is someone who must show themselves only a little and remain discreet. With the introduction of the digital age there is an intrusion of everything, everywhere, all the time,” she said.

“We see a tremendous amount of people who are very famous, with millions of followers, and who have done absolutely nothing.”

“Heroism Or Hedonism?” made similar points with respect to true heroism: it is private and discreet.

Deneuve is on my short list of the few good things produced by France. So is Brigitte Bardot, Rene Guinot and the Musée du Louvre.

UPDATE I (5/11): More for the list: Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Ravel, Debussy, Degas, Monet, Chagall (not born in France), César Franck (also not born there), and many more. But you get the picture, and the use of humor (I hope) to make a point about a generally insufferable lot.

UPDATE II: Albert Camus, too, WAS WONDERFUL. He was born in Algeria but was French. The French dislike him and prefer that retarded, piece of rotting flesh, Sartre, who recommended ignoring Stalin’s gulag, so as to keep the morale of the workers’ of the world high. Yep. The French …

‘Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly’ In The Ivy League

Economy, Labor

“Economic malpractice” in the Ivy League is nothing new. In promoting minimum wage laws, hundreds of so-called top economists have defied the “law known as the first fundamental law of demand.”

The law states that the higher the price of something the less people will take of it and vice versa.

Alas, members of “the brie, tofu, and champagne circuit” regularly pretend that this natural law, “to which there are no known real-world exceptions,” is unaffected by minimum wage legislation.

Now comes news that a California city is to raise its minimum wage to $16.00. This unemployment-causing folly is a good opportunity to revisit WALTER E. WILLIAMS’ magnificent, ongoing efforts to “embarrass the economists” who lie about the costs of raising the price of unskilled labor:

… Some people suggest that if the price of something is raised, buyers will take more or the same amount. That’s silly because there’d be no limit to the price that sellers would charge. For example, if a grocer knew he would sell more — or the same amount of — milk at $8 a gallon than at $4 a gallon, why in the world would he sell it at $4? Then the question becomes: Why would he sell it at $8 if people would buy the same amount at a higher price?

There are economists, most notably Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who suggest that the law of demand applies to everything except labor prices (wages) of low-skilled workers.

Krugman says that paying fast-food workers $15 an hour wouldn’t cause big companies such as McDonald’s to cut jobs. In other words, Krugman argues that raising the minimum wage doesn’t change employer behavior.

Before we address Krugman’s fallacious argument, think about this: One of Galileo’s laws says the influence of gravity on a falling body in a vacuum is to cause it to accelerate at a rate of 32 feet per second per second. That applies to a falling rock, steel ball or feather. What would you think of the reasoning capacity of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who’d argue that because human beings are not rocks, steel balls or feathers, Galileo’s law of falling bodies doesn’t apply to them? …

MORE.

A #British Libertarian’s #Voting Strategy

Britain, Elections, libertarianism

As a private individual, and not in his capacity as director of the UK Libertarian Alliance, Sean Gabb, to whose Libertarian Alliance Blog I contribute, summed up his voting strategy thus: He voted for the people he hates to keep out the people he fears.

The big differences are the survival of England and of political accountability. If the Conservatives remain in government after today, they will allow another reasonably free election in 2020. If Labour forms a government, it will fix the voting system to keep itself in power till street protests are needed to remove it. This fixing will be dressed up as “electoral reform.” Moreover, if Labour must rely on Scottish support, the price will involve some Balkanising of England. In or out of the United Kingdom, Scotland cannot be an important entity in the British Isles so long as there is an England. Therefore, any reasonable Scottish nationalist will need to press for the dissolution of England into a group of devolved and squabbling territories. Only the Conservatives stand in the way of this.

My vote is unlikely to determine who wins the election in my constituency. But it may add to a Conservative victory in England in terms of votes if not of seats. This will give Mr Cameron the right to insist that he is the real winner today, and that he should be allowed to stay in government.

Judged by libertarian standards, the Conservatives in government have been half useless and half malevolent. I despise them and I hate them. But I fear Labour. For this reason, I see it as my duty to vote for the lesser of evils. Voting is more of a public duty than a private right, and I see it as my duty to vote for the people I hate to keep out the people I fear.

In closing, I will repeat that this should in no sense be regarded as a recommendation from the Libertarian Alliance. I am speaking not ex cathedra as Director of the Libertarian Alliance, but as a private individual. I also accept that I may be wrong. …

… Read “The Evil Party or the Stupid Party? A Topic for Debate, not a Recommendation.”

Pamela Geller Offends Shariah Media

Constitution, Europe, Free Speech, Islam, Jihad, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Political Correctness, Propaganda

There’s a “FRENCH CONNECTION” and a “RED CONNECTION”—both bad—in “Pamela Geller Goes Against Sharia Media,” the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Sandhya SomethingOrAnother is a “social change” reporter for The Washington Post. (Yes, the WaPo has such a beat.) Ms. Somashekhar (her surname copied and pasted) implied that WND columnist Pamela Geller ought to repent for staging a Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas, an event that was briefly attended by two, uninvited ISIS-Americans. Sandhya must have been angry because she called Geller, in error, “a housewife from Long Island.” Progressives don’t much like housewives.

Like most Geller haters, Somashekhar (her name copied and pasted) cited the Southern Poverty Law Center as her “scholarly” source for Geller’s hatefulness. The SPLC is a “leftist vigilante group,” explained Paul Gottfried, a real scholar. It is “unmistakably totalitarian in the drive to suppress and destroy deviationists from the party line on race, gender, and ‘discrimination.’” The “$PLC” is as dodgy in its financial dealings as it is in its strong-arming tactics. (Read “Is The Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) The Next Financial Bubble?”)

“Stupid,” ruled a less obscure enforcer of political correctness, Bill O’Reilly, on Geller’s event. Also at Fox News, host Martha MacCallum suggested Geller ought to have explored kinder, gentler ways of protesting Islam-imposed restrictions on expression.

Pantomime, perhaps?

The left-liberal Jon Stewart took the safe route. The idiotic urge to kill over any annoyance was the object of the satirist’s spoof. Stewart’s Thou Shall Not Kill skit was hardly cutting-edge comedy. So he livened up the tired shtick with a curtsy in the direction of the Prophet’s avengers. Geller’s group, The American Freedom Defense Initiative, was about hate speech, warned Stewart.

The biggest clown in the media circus, however, was TV anchor Chris Cuomo. While Geller staged her vital challenge in private; Cuomo, a lawyer, flaunted his “smarts” in public. He tweeted that “hate speech” was unprotected by the Constitution. Not everyone was speechless. Another of CNN’s cretins, Alisyn Camerota, stood squarely in the corner of the victims: those poor ISIS-Americans whose descent into hell was hastened by a guard at Geller’s Garland cartoon contest.

It was difficult to tell what it was about Pamela Geller’s position on impolite and impolitic speech—echoed in the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights—that so puzzled Camerota …

… Read the complete column, “Pamela Geller Goes Against Sharia Media,” on WND.