Post-office bribery, part 2

Not only did Hilliary Clinton get a book advance which is probably ten times what its sales will justify, she's also asking more than $2000 a person to get prime seats on her book tour.  Sorry, but I can't see this as free markets, unless one expands that definition to "delayed payment for services rendered."


How to fix it?  Apart from decreeing that a politician shall be forbidden from receiving any payment for life from anyone whose business was impacted by that politician's decisions--a legal morass by any definition of the word--you can't.  What you can do, however, is reduce the amount of government funding and power so that the pool of bidders ("johns") for politicians' services becomes smaller.

Paging Dr. Williams and Dr. Sowell

Apparently pointing out the habits that lead to prosperity and long life is now not only politically incorrect, but also racist.  As apparently, Walter Williams, Barack Obama, and Thomas Sowell are being fitted for sheets, and Booker T. Washington is spinning in his grave.

There's some great evidence

A group of psychiatrists is writing a letter to Congress alleging, more or less, serious mental illness on the part of the President.  Which is interesting, given that according to standard psychiatric practice and ethics manuals, it's a serious breach of professional ethics to diagnose someone you've never met.


#deranged, I guess.  If you're a psychiatry student being taught by one of these guys, you may want to consider changing professors.  If you're a patient being treated by one of these guys, you might want to choose a new doctor to have one who follows basic medical ethics.

There's a great decision for you

Apparently, the Obama administration approved transgender soldiers despite having a study that demonstrated that the average transgender soldier would be, due to sex change surgeries, undeployable for 238 days.  Because obviously, having soldiers absent from their units for the better part of a year does nothing to unit cohesion, and it's not like the DoD has found that introducing new soldiers to experienced units tends to get people killed.


Except, ahem, that's exactly the case.  So even beyond issues of mental health, physical strength, and the discomfort of other soldiers, there is a monster issue that the former President chose to blithely ignore.   If you care about the transgendered, you need to be in favor of President Trump's move to reverse President Obama's move.

It takes a village idiot....

...to fund Planned Parenthood Infanticide, apparently.  A Denver seller of sex toys is devoting all profits to keep Planned Parenthood afloat.  Now we can, and should, be both amused and repulsed at a lot of aspects of this, starting with the fact that apparently pro-abortion people don't find satisfaction in their spouses/lovers and need these toys, but there is a strong underlying message that insiders of the infanticide business are starting to admit publicly; abortion alone can not keep the doors of abortuaries open. 


As I've noted before, but now, I'm going to extend the argument.  I previously argued that, outside of big cities and D1 university towns, the demand for abortions was unlikely to be high enough to support abortuaries without government funding--things like contraceptive funding and allocations for referrals for mammograms and such.  I dare suggest that even most abortuaries in big cities are financially on thin ice, as the case of Kermit Gosnell makes clear.  A good number of his crimes started with cost-cutting in terms of anesthesia and sanitation, after all.


So how does this work?  Again, if you look at the statistics, you're going to find that a huge portion of abortions are done on poor women, especially poor minority women (and their children of course).  Going out on a limb here, I'm going to guess that a huge portion of urban abortions are paid for out of government programs like Medicaid. 


In other words, if you take away government funding for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, and if you start doing meaningful health and sanitation inspections on abortuaries, you can reduce abortion to the pre-Roe level without banning abortion at all. 

Time to take a close look

According to this column, which is admittedly biased, Hilliary Clinton received a $14 million advance for her book "Hard Choices", but overall sales so far are only 280,000 copies, and the original hardcover price appears to have been $35.  So I'm calculating a maximum possible revenue, including the cut of the publisher and the bookseller, of only $9.8 million.  Realistically, the publisher's net is less than half of that, and Mrs. Clinton's cut should have been a maximum of $1 million.


In similar news, the advance provided to President Obama for his memoirs is said to be about $65 million.  Given a usual royalty of $1-2/book for this kind of work, that would mean that the publisher is expecting to sell a copy to most of those who voted for him.  Similarly, Bill Clinton's memoir earned him a $15 million advance, but sold only 2.25 million copies. 


Now I don't have a complete picture of what's going on--I couldn't find information on advances for books by George W. Bush, for example--but it strikes me that at least inasmuch as prominent politicians of the left are writing, they're getting compensated far in excess of what a smart businessman would give them--say by a factor of ten or more.


I'm guessing that if a smart detective looked around--say he had friends working at the publishers--he'd find that these huge advances given to liberals are not in fact business decisions, but bribes.   The question is what is being bought, and inquiring minds might like to know.


Update: I found a source that said that George W. Bush had gotten a $7 million advance on a book of his that sold about two million copies, which is firmly in the generous range, but not yet in the ludicrous range.  Somehow it seems that, whether by error or bias or bribe, Democrats are getting richer deals than are Republicans.

Jerry Lewis, dormi, dormi, dormi

My family decided to honor the passing of Jerry Lewis by watching Rock-a-bye Baby last night, and somehow it seemed that this would be appropriate.  And yes, Gigi's voice is pretty good--in his non-Hollywood life, he was an operatic bass named Salvatore Baccaloni, and he's not faking an Italian accent, either.

Now we know

Until today, when Asian commentator Robert Lee was moved from calling a college football game in Virginia because of his name's similarity to the Confederate general, I had no idea why former Broncos Linebacker Thomas Jackson had retired from ESPN. 

Another hate group?

Jim reports that in the mind of the SPLC, being against homosexual marriage mirage is enough to get your group classified as a "hate group".  OK, if that's so, then we would assume that we would then classify most Catholic, evangelical, fundamental, and conservative Lutheran and Presbyterian churches as "hate groups"--the SPLC's list is tens of thousands of groups short of the real total, if not hundreds of thousands. 


More importantly, they missed two very significant hate groups, the 2008 Obama and Clinton campaigns for President.  Come on, SPLC, if you can't be coherent in your definition of hate groups, at least be consistent.

Now this is interesting

Powerline reports that the SPLC has created a graph correlating the creation of Confederate monuments to the year, and one interesting thing is that it does not correlate well with Klan activity.  Even the bump during the Civil Rights era isn't as big as the bump prior to WWI.  Another interesting thing is that, having spent a little bit of time in the South,  the overall numbers don't seem that big--there seems to be some Confederate monument or other in every town big enough for a post office.  So maybe there is a list of criteria the SPLC is using to determine what's big enough to count, or something interesting is going on on the Y axis.


Just food for thought. 

Say what?

A Washington Post sports columnist, apparently not having learned about great moments of black athletes, claims that the era of "the docile black athlete" has ended with Colin Kaepernick.  Apparently he's never heard about Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, or John Carlos, all of whom demonstrated long, long ago that black athletes were known to stick up for themselves.


Democracy dies in the darkness named the "Washington Post", it seems.  I give Jerry Brewer four dunce caps for his non-reading of sports history.

Truths

From Vox Day: To be a National Socialist in the West today, you have to be so mentally retarded that Hitler would have euthanized you under the Lebensunwertes Leben principle.


And so I don't escape picking on the other side of the riots--many of the groups were unabashedly pro-Communist--the Babylon Bee notes that there is a Strong Link Found Between Supporting Communism And Never Once Having Opened a History Book.


Let's be blunt about the matter; if someone you're politically affiliated with brings out a flag with either the swastika or the hammer & sickle on it (or a red star), it's time to reconsider your political affiliations to reflect people whose IQs are above room temperature. 


And yes, I'm saying that inasmuch as the counter-protesters are fans of Communism--killer of ten million by Lenin, twice that number by Stalin, over 50 million by Mao, and millions by Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and others--they are indeed morally equivalent to those who view themselves as "neo-nazis". 

Much appreciated, Mr. Bellamy

Wes Bellamy, vice mayor (hee hee) of Charlottesville, has a nice string of tweets including this gem:


I DON'T LIK WHITE PEOPLE


To be sure, he probably meant he doesn't "like" white people, but I'll simply be glad if he keeps his tongue in his mouth where it belongs.  Judging by his racist tweets, it might be good to keep his lips together as well and superglue his fingers to the bannister or something.

Say what?

Apparently, the FBI investigated complaints that former basketball coach Bobby Knight groped women at a U.S. spy agency.  My instant question; what business would he have at a spy agency?  The answer, apparently, is that he was teaching leadership.  Here is some video of agency leadership after the lecture.

I mean, yes, he was a great basketball coach, but....seriously?

New on King David's Cruise Line

Since King David has gone off to parts unknown, I'll try to help.  Apparently, a cruise ship going through the Indian Ocean (not really near Somali pirates) chose to have a ten night pirate drill with all passengers aboard, most of whom were paying up to $40,000 for the cruise.


Now precautions can be a good idea, but in light of the recent collision of a U.S. Navy ship with a freighter, going without lights really isn't exactly the best idea.  Instead, remember that your ship is a much more stable platform than a pirate boat is likely to be, and have a few crew members on board to spot prospective pirates, and if necessary, introduce them to Ma Deuce, or possibly something in 40mm if longer range is desired.  After all, five or so people to guard the ship (really a small faction of the security staff you'd want with 1900 passengers and probably 1000 staff) is a whole lot cheaper than 1900 people with their vacations ruined.


And also on the light side, who wouldn't want to take a ten day cruise to Dubai with a nighttime curfew through pirate infested waters?  I bet the reason KD didn't write about this is he was on the ship!


(sorry, KD, couldn't resist)


In other cruising news, a cruise ship in Alaska arrived in Ketchikan with a dead whale stuck on the bow.  I'm guessing that "smell of the seas" really enhanced the experience at the evening buffet.

Now that's a job well done

The editorial board of the New York Times is arguing that Sarah Palin's defamation/libel lawsuit against them ought to be dismissed because the editorial board had not read New York Times articles that clearly stated that the editorial board's positions were false. 


Given that one of the roles of newspaper editors is to, you know, edit the writings of reporters for brevity and clarity, we would have to go further; we would have to say that the editorial board of the New York Times had not even read the articles they had claimed to edit.


In a sane world, such an argument would be met by a series of quick dismissals by Arthur Sulzberger, but no such luck, sad to say.  On a more serious side, this does explain a lot of blatant factual errors by many at the Old Gray Lady.   Apparently those layers of fact-checkers were in fact down at the bar.

Nope, no problem, nosirree

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain submitting 18 false voter registration forms.  Just believe the Democrats--the party that benefited from Andrew Spieles' crimes--that there is no problem.  Ignore the fact that he obtained the information for these forms from the Democratic Party of Virginia.


Maybe, just maybe, it's time for some good audits of voter registrations to see exactly how many dead people were registered to vote, how many people are registered to vote where they can not possibly live, and how many people are registered to vote in multiple places, and how many of them actually did vote illegally.

Chicanery, or bad water?

Two Cuban diplomats have been expelled after a number of U.S. diplomatic personnel had to return to the U.S. with unspecified maladies.  Now perhaps this is true chicanery along the lines of what was consistent in Moscow during the Cold War (or is now?), but I have to wonder if what's really going on is they're going outside the embassy for food and forget warnings not to eat raw fruits and vegetables, and not to take ice with one's drink.


Hopefully our State Department is not quite that stupid, but after the recent spate of leaks, I'm not quite so sure.  At any rate, it strikes me that if State is correct in their assessment, then Cuba's not exactly the friendly nation Mr. Obama assured us it would be.


Update: the problem appears to be an "acoustic attack" with sound beyond the audible range.   Given Cuba's extremely tight control over their economy, it's hard to believe anyone but the "friendly" Cuban government and the Castros are behind this.  Once again, heckuva job, Barry.

There's some great thinking for ya

A professor at San Antonio College has started to come to class dressed in body armor to protest on-campus carry.  Because, after all, it's not like he chose to live in gun-happy Texas or anything.

Coming in 2020!

General Mills will figure out that, indeed, wood does grow on trees.  How do I know this?  On my box of Cheerios, it states that all cereal box manufacture will be sustainable by 2020.  Since cereal boxes have been made of paper, hence wood, as long as I can remember, I can only imagine that this will be the date when the sustainability team at General Mills realizes that paper is made from wood, which grows on trees, and that when you cut a tree down, you can plant a new one.


This is what you get when your "environmental experts" are drawn from a class of people who dropped majors in the hard sciences and engineering because they couldn't do math, I guess.