Trevor Noah and Brown v. Board

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I have the guilty pleasure of scanning the traditional media and entertainment. It’s not that any of the various personalities I come across have any intelligent thoughts of their own, witness the ramblings of Margaret Brennan, but their utterances provide a glimpse into the larger sociology of the Left.

So it was of interest that I came across former “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah’s “What Now?” podcast where he interviews Princeton University professor Ruha Benjamin. Noah states:

“And that’s a really powerful thing I’ve learned in communicating with other people. When I’m in a room with anyone where we start to tie together multiple things. So, if I’m in a room with Black people, already there’s like an implicit trust because we know what certain actions, words, and vibes mean.”

I find Noah to be a poseur, and of course he has to have a podcast. But he provides us a great service by providing a gathering place, much like a watering hole on the Serengeti, where he and his ideological ilk can gather in a place of perceived safety and can be observed. So Noah extends his remarks and a little later asks Benjamin:

“Do you think that integration was the right move?”

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In At the Beginning

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Reading here and there about what can only be viewed as corruption of various charitable agencies by an apparent flood of government dollars, I am certain now that I was inadvertently present at the very start of that corruption – a warping of charitable concern towards refugees, as well as non-refugee migrants, the homeless, the addicted and the otherwise socially maladjusted. I was a college student in my junior year at a no-name public university, at the time of the fall of the South Vietnamese in 1975. My adolescent years had been haunted by the ongoing war in Vietnam, a war painted in the most horrific colors by the then-extent national media. I grew up in a place, a time and in a class of Americans where men were much more likely to be drafted and sentenced to serve for a year in what was painted by the national establishment media as a pointless, endless, thankless war.

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Brennan, JD Vance, and the Spirit of 1776

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I’m sure most of you by now have heard of Margaret Brennan’s comment during her exchange with Secretary of State Rubio on “Face the Nation.”

“Well he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide…”

Brennan got raked over the coals by the Right for that comment, since she seemed to imply that the Nazis 1) were in favor of free speech and 2) were using free speech to conduct the Holocaust in the same way they used gas chambers and bullets. Her point, that words are violent (I thought it was silence that was violence), was reinforced by the fact that Vance’s speech brought the chairman of the Munich Security Conference to tears.

Mr. Heusgen is obviously a man who doesn’t think about the Roman Empire every day.

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Trade, Tariffs, and Prices, continued

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Palmer Luckey, founder & CEO of Anduril, on the importance of US manufacturing.

Warren Buffett had an interesting suggestion for an approach to tariffs: Import Certificates. The idea is that when you export products, you receive import certificates, according to the dollar value of the products exported.  In order to import products, you need to provide Import Certificates of equivalent value.  And the certificates trade. So the system would be self-balancing.

Buffett suggested this approach in a Fortune article more than 20 years ago, I have no idea if that’s still his view, but I think it’s an interesting approach. The original Fortune article is still online but paywalled, the content can be read without subscription here.

See also my post Trade, Tariffs, and Prices from last November, in which I cited an earlier post:

In a world with global and highly-efficient transportation and communications…and billions of people who are accustomed to low wages…is it possible for a country such as the United States to maintain its accustomed high standards of living for the large majority of its people?…and, if so, what are the key policy elements required to do this?

This question should be fundamental to discussions of trade policy, along with national defense and resilience considerations.  See also the discussion about tariffs and consumer price markups–it’s far from true that it’s always just a simple pass-though.

The Return of International Villainy

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Less than four weeks into the Second Coming of Trump and the New International Order.

There’s the throw down with Denmark over Arctic security and the status of Greenland.

There was the smack down in Munich by the Ohio Hillbilly (aka JD Vance) of those freedom-crushing European welfare queens.

Then there was the USA-Canada hockey game last night, where they had three fights in the first nine seconds of the game. In addition the hits were epic, especially the ones by Charlie McAvoy on Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid.

By the way, we won.

This was the America we voted for.

Leave aside any of the current trade and other bad blood issues between Canada and the US (and oh, boy), the USA-Canada hockey rivalry runs hot and is great not just for hockey but for sports in general.

International hockey is so much better than those flopping pansies in the soccer World Cup. The fact that the game happened in one of the great hockey cities of the world (Montreal) and the fights were coordinated by two brothers (Matthew and Brady Tkachuk) just made it more epic.

Whether it’s international relations or international sports, the world needs more villains.

The game was part of the “Four Nations Tournament” and somehow I don’t think you are going to get the same passion from the NBA All-Star Game tonight.

More, please.