Thomas Sowell: Hollywood Economics

 Thomas Sowell discusses “Hollywood Economics:”

It is not really news that Hollywood is still producing anti-business movies, but there is a certain irony in it nevertheless.

Although these movies tap a certain envy and resentment of corporate wealth, that large corporate wealth comes from far more modest individual amounts of money from about half the population of the United States, which owns stocks and bonds — either directly or because money paid into pension funds or other financial intermediaries are used to buy stocks and bonds.

It does seem the liberals are obsessed with giving away other peoples’ money.   Liberals don’t employ anybody who works at Walmart.  Yet liberals somehow feel that Walmart is not paying her employees enough.

TEHERAN, Iran- (The Jerusalem Post)- Iran’s parliament wants the next presidential elections to be held more than one year early, the Fars news agency reported Sunday.

Parliament approved a draft bill upon which the parliamentary and presidential elections would be held simultaneously in the first quarter of 2008.

As the next parliamentary elections are scheduled for February 2008, but the next presidential elections for June 2009, the new bill would reduce the four-year presidential term of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by almost one and a half years.

The members of parliament in favor of the bill, more than 80 percent, say that the simultaneous formation of the executive and legislative powers would enable better cooperation between the two powers and strengthen parliament’s supervision role.

Hmmm. Something smells, here.
Alex Knapp over at OTB notes the same story and says:

To the best of my knowledge, Ahmadinejad is still rather popular in Iran, so I don’t know that this precedes his ouster, as the editors of the Post appear to. Still, if the article is correct and the Iranian parliament wants to strengthen its “supervision” of the President does provide some hope that, at least among the governing class of Iran, Ahmadinejad isn’t as popular or as politically strong as he appears in the U.S. media. I can’t help but think that that’s a good thing.

I think you’ve missed something crucial, here, Alex.

The Iranian Parliament is run, if I recall rightly, by the religious extremists It is these which brought him to power.  As extremist as he’s been, I cannot imagine that their disagreement now has to do with his not being moderate enough… such is the nature of their own extremism.  Thus, removing him would only serve to make Iran more extreme than they have been….  an even more extremist brand of Iranian government would emerge.  I can’t see as many people would call that a good thing…

Update: AHA!!!!

Robert Tait in The Guardian:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who flaunts his ideological fervour, has been accused of undermining Iran’s Islamic revolution after television footage appeared to show him watching a female song and dance show.
The famously austere Mr Ahmadinejad has been criticised by his own allies after attending the lavish opening ceremony of the Asian games in Qatar, a sporting competition involving 13,000 athletes from 39 countries. The ceremony featured Indian and Egyptian dancers and female vocalists. Many were not wearing veils.

SITYS, I had an idea it was he wasn’t Islamic enough to suit them.
Nice to see my insticts haven’t soured.

An emotional time around Casa De Bit tonight.

Longtime readers of these pages will remember that a couple of years ago my mother in law passed on.  Among the other consequences of that happening was that we inherited number of pets… among them a canary. The bird was aged in the extreme for it’s kind, even then… When we were forced into the decision of placing Mom into a home, we took the bird into our home. For nearly two months Harrigan… for so Mom named him… made hardly a peep.  He ate well enough, bathed, etc. and looked healthy enough, and occasionally ventured out of its little hiding spot to examine the small world around him.  But that was all.  We figured he’d been missing Mom, and that he wasn’t long for the world.

Then came the awful day that we learned Mom was gone.  We went to the hospital to deal with that painful scene, making the trip for the final time, that we had made so many nights previously in the last four months or so.  Needless to say, we were shaken by the event.  When we came home from the Hospital… a weakness in our hearts that only those who have lost a loved one can know, and wondering how we face the world the following day, the little bird decided to note our arrival with the loudest and most beautiful song I’ve heard any bird of its size utter. And it was the first time we’d heard him sing in, well, months. We were astonished.

Donna at the time said, that she could see in her mind’s eye her Mom smiling as the bird sang. I said nothing, but took it as a reminder that for all the pain in the world, that joy still exists. Indeed, there was no better description of his singing, then a joyful noise.  And a part of both of us, I’ll confess, considered the idea more than once… that he was singing for Mom.

For the next several weeks and months, one thing that could be depended on in our house was that Harrigan would be singing his heart out.  It saw us through some very rough times putting smiles on our faces where they otherwise had no reason to be. 

This evening, some two years after Mom, Harrigan passed on, at the age of ten… as I say, aged for his kind. So, as I say, it’s an emotional time around here tonight. 

He was just a small thing, providing us with what could only be called an intangible.  Yet, I say without irony, but with a sense of wonder… that it is often the smallest and most intangible things that make the largest difference in our lives. 

Bye, Harry…. and thanks.

Well not quite.  U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan remains the U.N. version of JImmy Carter, simply a man without a moral clue.

This  is Annan view:

“I think they are right in the sense of the average Iraqi’s life,” Annan said. “If I were an average Iraqi obviously I would make the same comparison, that they had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying, ‘Am I going to see my child again?’

This is how PBS described what Hussien did to his own population:

Saddam’s Republican Guard fought the resistance in Karbala. Civilians and rebels fled the city. On the roads leading out, Iraqi army helicopter crews poured kerosene on the refugees, then set them on fire.

Being burned to death by your own government is a small price to pay for good bus service.

WASHINGTON —FOX- U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton has abandoned his quest to remain at the world body next year, sending formal notice to the White House that he will leave when his temporary appointment expires in the coming weeks.

The White House, which had been holding out hope for Bolton despite the writing on the wall, has been tight-lipped about any other possible candidates for the U.N. post. Deputy Amb. Alejandro Wolff is expected to fill in as acting ambassador until a nominee can be confirmed in the Senate. That won’t be until January at the earliest

Not a shock at all. As Allah notes:

Bad things happen when you lose your majority.

And yes, I regard this as bad for the US. We need a strong person who represents US interests there… who’s not going to put up with the nonsense that is part and parcel of the UN. Alas, the Democrats, fools that they be, don’t want that.

The King(Fidel Castro) is dead:

HAVANA, Dec 2 (Reuters) – Cubans were astonished by ailing Fidel Castro’s absence from his birthday parade on Saturday, but many believe the only leader they have known for 47 years will survive his health crisis and return to public life.

 

Whether they like his communist government or not, Cubans find it hard to get used to the idea the bearded revolutionary might no longer be around. Few thought he would fail to turn up on Saturday in his trademark green uniform

Long live the KIng (Hugo Chavez):

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stormed to a re-election victory in Sunday’s vote, handing him an ample mandate to broaden his promised socialist revolution and challenge Washington’s influence in Latin America.

CARACAS, Venezuela —AP– Emboldened by a resounding re-election, President Hugo Chavez pledged to shake up Venezuela with a more radical version of socialism and forge a wider front against the United States in Latin America.

Opposition contender Manuel Rosales accepted defeat Sunday night, but promised to continue countering a leader whom he accuses of becoming increasingly authoritarian.

Well, we’ve already discussed the accuracy of… or more correctly, the inaccuracy of AP reports recently.  Blue Crab Bvd notes problems, however:

Massive amounts of conflicting information coming out of Venezuela right now about the election. (T)Hugo’s reliable major media is dutifully reporting the official government line that Chavez is winning. Other sources say not so fast. Publius Pundit has pictures. Fausta has some technical problems with a podcast, but has valuable links. Telemundo was suddenly shut down by Chavez thugs and prohibited from broadcasting about the elections (If that isn’t a sign that Chavez is in trouble, I don’t know what is). Last link via Instapundit.

Update: Blue Crab now reports Rosales has conceded but notes:

Chavez says he would convene a commission upon re-election to propose constitutional reforms, likely including an end to presidential term limits. Current law prevents him from running again in 2012.

Boortz, the other night:

Moving on now to Warwick, New York.  The local government elementary school wanted to raise a little money, so they set up an event called “Breakfast with Santa.”  Well, sure enough, some parent complained.  Some woman (you could have guessed that, right?) wrote the school board to complain that Santa was a religious figure and that the school was promoting a religion by having the breakfast.  It took no time at all for the school officials to cave, and what we now have is a “Winter Wonderland Breakfast” and Frosty the Snowman is going to join the event.

If Neal was really sharp about this, he’d have had a contest.  The object of the contest was figuring out who was the bigger fool; the woman place in the complaint, or the school board president caving to it.  Not so very long ago I would have asked a question that is doubtless on the tounge of nearly all who read this: Has it really come to this?

But, if you look closely you may notice I’m not asking.  The reason is, for afraid I already know the answer. 

Snow and Cold

We’re supposedly getting 1 to 3 inches of snow tomorrow, around here.

Now, that wouldn’t be unusual, in most years, for the first week in December, by any means. Matter of fact, this year we actually got a couple of feet just west of us here, in the middle of October.  By this time we’re usually up to our pipiks in snow,and claiming we love the stuff.

But, in reality, for all but a few diehard winter types who like strapping expensive boards to their feet and sliding down hills with the expressed purpose of breaking their legs, arms and other body parts, we really hate the stuff, if we notice it at all….  Except at Christmas, when we tolerate it, because it covers all that brown and gray with a white that’s a lot prettier to look at…. until the neighborhood dogs get ahold of it, at which point is becomes the makings of a Frank Zappa recording.

So, don’t let anyone from the northeast kid you about this snow stuff. Trust me, we simply put up with it. I mean, think; Why on earth would people who have lived here all their lives suddenly uproot themselves once the kids are out of the house, and move to Florida (hurricanes, bugs the size of Buicks, gators with attitude, and a requirement to speak Yiddish or at least Spanish) or Arizona.. (125 degrees, but it’s a DRY heat…)? Simple, they’re trying to escape from all of this ‘winter wonderland’ crap. It’s not at all unusual to see cars with older people driving them with Florida plates or Arizona plates or maybe California, with license plate frames from dealers here in western New York… particularly during this Christmas season.  And don’t get me started about how they forgot how to drive this kind of weather.  I wrote an entire column on that once; maybe I’ll run it again sometime this winter.

I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I’d considered moving out of the neighborhood.  For us, our oldest just turned sixteen.  We have one more behind him.  It’s going to be awhile before we consider whether we’re be among those making the skate from this winter paradise to somewhere we don’t have to burn several hundred dollars in fuel just to keep our blood from freezing.  So, here we sit.  Doing ‘inside’ activity.

MP3’s

What am I doing, inside? I’m currently re-scanning my MP3 collection.  I think I’m going to have to do this more often, given that the size of it is becoming somewhat unwieldy.  I have somewhere on the order of a half a terabyte worth of MP3’s, Most of which were transferred from their original LP’S.  For all that it is a bit of a maintenance headache, I find that I’m listening to a great deal more music, then I have in a long time.  Mostly because the computer does all the work in terms of setting them up, mixing them, and putting them away.

The end result is, that I have three or four very high quality professional great turntables for playing LP’s on, that I haven’t touched in about a year.  I have sitting within arm’s reach of me here at my desk a very high grade professional quality CD player, which is still early neglected.  Rather sad really… I only got about five years worth the use of it before making the transition.

I do have a larger collection to consider then I think most people do.  I started big.  Being in the radio business means never having to say “I don’t have anything new to bring home to listen to tonight”.  That resulted in a large collection all by itself, which I added to from the stores.  Time was that is a frequent visitor to the used record shops, often bringing home 30 and 40 LPS a session.  By the time Donna and I got married back in ’89, I had something like 25,000 albums and I don’t know how many singles on file.  Along with a grand total of ten CDs.  Since then I’ve added perhaps 150 to 200 CDs over the years.  All of the CDs and most of the opiates are now residing as data only, on my big server.

One of the things I found, with this new style of listening to music, is that I’ve lost a physical relationship with it.  Back in the day, there was a physical relationship with the music in that you had this piece of plastic 12in. in diameter, black, generally…  With colors and textures and smells unlike any other. I’m a very visual/conceptual person.  Back when I was playing the buyers someone would ask me if I had a particular song.  Instead of looking at last I would think through the list of records that I owned in my head. Once I had a picture of it in my head, I could tell you where it was whether not I was carrying it that particular evening and what other songs on it there were.  It had physicality, substance.  The covers and often the labels had unique pictures on them and the writing on the cover could be basic or intense.  We lost a lot of that, when we want to compact discs.  Granted, we lost nearly the same amount when we went to Cassette tapes. But with MP3’s, now, that connection is completely broken.  There is no more physicality to the recorded music experience.

I haven’t decided whether not I think that lack is a good thing.  Certainly, it is the kind of convenience level and certainly the kind of quality level that was only a dream say, 50 years ago.  And yes, I said quality level; I grant that with MP3’s one can hear the encoding at work.  I certainly can, anyway. I can hear, particularly in recordings of less than 128 kilobits/sec, reproductive errors in the encoding scheme, that reveal themselves as phrasing errors, particularly in the higher ranges.  And yet, for all that, for all that the MP3 encoding scheme does to the recorded material, it still ends up being a cleaner audio chain than most other analog delivery systems at the consumer level, including my beloved LP collection.  And the ability to play the things wherever… including while jogging through the snow… does have it’s selling points. Tried that with an LP lately?

Whereas when I was DJ’ing at parties, I used to go to parties carrying perhaps 250 to 300 albums in big heavy black cases, along with two turntables and and the table to set them on, people in that business nowadays show up with a couple of laptops, and a mix board…  Or perhaps, they eliminate the computers, and carry a couple of MP3 players instead, such as an IPOD or two.  Somehow I suspect their backs will probably last a little longer in the field than did mine.

In an unprofessional environment, the listening experience ends up being more like listening to the radio than anything else, what with the player mixing from track to track and doing some fairly decent song selection, from one song to the other, given I have a plug in to Winamp that does that for me.

As a matter of fact, these days, the only thing I shut the music off for one am here in my office, is when I open up my voice dictation unit.  Music tends to confuse it.

I enjoy dealing with MP3’s as such, but I must tell you that I miss the joy of opening a new record album for its first play. It amazes me that there are now people who are 20 and 25 years old who’ve never seen a new album, nor seen or heard one played.

The Grill

Dinner tonight, with the weather being what it is… 33 degrees…  was an exercise in “To hell with it, I’m doing this.” We used that little gas grill I bought the other night to grill a Turkey Roll, and some Shitake Mushrooms.  The neighbors probably think I’m crazy, but I think that I convinced them of that some years ago anyway, so who cares?  This likely will not be the last time I mention this, but I miss having the trailer.. and food grilled outside, is just a reminder of that, as I sit and watch the snow moving in… huddled over my little gas grill.

A final thought:

There is, perhaps, something of the sound of gears meshing between these nightly ramblings of mine, and the comments from Fran as I mentioned last evening.  The upshot of that was that he wasn’t going to concentrate quite so much on politics because it was driving him crazy.

I, meantime, have decided that if all we were to write about for the next however many weeks it is between now and the next election, we’d not have a heck of a lot to write about for most of that time. And anyway, if as I told Fran last night, politics isn’t the end all and be all but rather a REFLECTION of one’s deeply held beliefs, then perhaps a nightly focus on life itself isn’t such a bad thing, since it puts that life in the foreground, for a few paragraphs.

This nightly, non-specific rambling is a fairly new thing for me. I didn’t start writing these explorations of daily happenings because of a conscious effort on my part… rather, I simply sat down a few nights ago, and started writing… as I often do… and decided it all fit, somehow.

I guess all I can do is hope someone finds it mildly interesting. I can guarantee you that there’s going to be nothing earth shaking in anything I right in the nightly rambles .  For those, look at the topic specific stuff that myself DavidL and Fersboo post daily. but since I’m paying for the web space, I guess I can indulge myself for awhile, and see what kind of a response I get out of it.  Come to think of it, it’s worked for other people… Though emulating them was not my purpose.  (Shrug) As Billy says… Onward.

Back in the year 1954, the Supreme Court decided in Brown v Board of Education local school boards could not send school chlldren in the same neighborhood to different schools  based on arbitary distinctions, in this case race.   What the Supreme Court mandated was de-segregation.

Now mind you, the Constitution gives the Supreme Court utterly no authority over local school boards.   Yet for reason, or reasons, unknown the Supreme Court saw fit to meddle. 

Now in the sixty plus years since Brown local schools boards have turned Brown on its head.   Now school  boards are using Brown as a rational to send school children in the same neighborhood to different schools, the very practice that Brown was intended to stop.   Whereas in 1954 we sent children in the same neighborhood to different schools in the name of segregation, today we send children in the same neighborhood to seperate schools in the name of diversity.

Since when did diversity became a constitutional value?  Nancy Benac reports:

WASHINGTON -(AP)- The Supreme Court is diving into a debate over school diversity that is as old as Reconstruction-era efforts to integrate blacks into the mainstream and as new as the 5:35 a.m. start time on some buses carrying students across town in Louisville, Ky.

At a time of rising de facto segregation in public schools, the high court is to hear arguments Monday on lawsuits by parents in Louisville and Seattle who are challenging policies that use race to help decide where children go to school.

It is the contitutional role of the Supreme Court to interpert matters of law.  Yet note how the Supreme is being asked, and expected, to decide social policy:

Educators, civil rights advocates, politicians and parents — not to mention students — are watching for a potential watershed ruling on what value the nation should place on diversity in the classroom, and at what price.

It not the proper role of the Supreme Court to decide social values.   For that we have elections and legislators.  It is the elected representatives of the People whos proper job is to decide social policy.   It is long past time for the Supreme Court to butt out of the People’s affairs.

Jules Crittenden at The Boston Herald this morning:

When a company defrauds its customers, or delivers shoddy goods, the customers sooner or later are going to take their business elsewhere. But if that company has a virtual monopoly, and offers something its customers must have, they may have no choice but to keep taking it.

That’s when the customers, en masse, need to raise a stink. That’s when someone else with the resources needs to seriously consider whether the time is ripe to compete.

The Associated Press is embroiled in a scandal. Conservative bloggers, the new media watchdogs, lifted a rock at the AP.

Curt at Floppingaces, led the charge. He thought there was something strange about an AP report, and took a second look at it, then a third look. He and others blew the lid off it. The AP is making up war crimes. But the resulting stink in the blogosphere has barely wrinkled a nose in the mainstream press. The ethics-obsessed Poynter Institute seems to be oblivious to it.

It has to do with the AP’s Iraqi stringers and an oft-quoted Iraqi police captain named Jamil Hussein. Problem is, the Iraqi police say Capt. Hussein does not exist. The Iraqi police and U.S. military say an incident described in an AP report – Iraqi soldiers standing by as people were burned alive in a mosque – didn’t happen. Another AP-reported incident, U.S. soldiers shooting 11 civilians, also never happened, the military says.

When the AP was forced to acknowledge this situation, it did so in a story about a new Interior Ministry policy regarding false reports. The AP buried the fact that its own false report prompted this new policy.

The fact is that AP, like ALL mainstream press orgs, have been using their position to make political points for the Democrats instead of simply reporting news. In the case of AP, it’s as Crittenden suggests:

The AP, of course, has been delivering unbalanced reports about U.S. national politics for some time, as when President Bush, whom AP reporters despise, is barely allowed to state his case on an issue before his critics are given twice as much space to pummel him. The AP, once a just-the-facts news delivery service, has lost its rudder. It has become a partisan, anti-American news agency that seeks to undercut a wartime president and American soldiers in the field. It is providing fraudulent, shoddy goods. It doesn’t even recognize it has a problem.

Nor do the rest of them.  And that, simply, because they don’t consider such liberal bias to be a problem, rather they consider it their mandate. 

But in a larger sense, it is time for us to understand the kind of damage that has been done in Iraq and elsewhere because of this biased “reporting”.  One of the major reasons behind the image of Iraq as a failure, and in turn, the most recent election results, is the bias of the press; the American people are not getting the real story.

I call that a corrupted press.

Tags: International affairs, Old line socialists