The Outstater
It is required in my so-called profession to have a stack of papers on your desk of items you found interesting at one time but never justified 600 words. Here’s mine to date. — tcl
✔️ The tweet of the week: “Corn Pop tried to warn us all.”
✔️ From the Mises Institute: “What causes poverty? Nothing, it’s the original state, the default. The question is what causes prosperity.”
✔️ The Associated Press gleefully reports that the leadership at the Federal Reserve has become its most diverse ever: “There are more female, Black and gay officials contributing to the central bank’s interest-rate decisions than at any time in its 109-year history.” Hmmm.
✔️ So, the universities and the federal government conspire to sell useless degrees at ever inflated prices and it is the hapless borrowers who are at fault? And couldn’t the bankruptcy courts have sorted this out? Don’t the schools have endowments that could be tapped?
✔️ It has started. Certain cheddar cheese puffs list “cricket flour” in the ingredients.
✔️ The Indianapolis Star’s “public engagement editor” tweeted what she described as the “heartbreaking” story of her friend’s granddaughter, a volleyball player at Duke. Members of at least one opposing team whispered a racial slur whenever she was about to serve. OK, that’s life in Division I sports. The question (asking for a friend) is can one get one’s own granddaughter into Duke on a full scholarship, regardless of test scores, if she is alright with being called names during athletic competitions?
✔️ With university admissions declining, diversity eating its own, and student loans becoming problematic, has anyone noticed that Mitch Daniels always bails at just the right time.
✔️ Could it be that mortgage “red-lining” tracks crime boundaries?
✔️ Mark Helprin of the Claremont Institute, mocking professed Catholic Nancy Pelosi and others: “I’m personally against discrimination against homosexuals, but I think it’s a decision that should be left up to a woman and the Islamic State.”
✔️ A GOP candidate for Indiana governor would establish a $100 million fund to subsidize adoptions. Won’t that add to the adoption bureaucracy, which, as anyone who has gone through the process knows, is abominable? And economists tell us that such funds tend to be underfunded, meaning that government agents are left in charge of awarding a scarce commodity, in this case adoptable children. If Christianity wasn’t such a nonstarter, the churches could handle this and we wouldn’t have to elect another posturing fraud.
✔️ For the monarchists in the membership: “A republic has no affection for its subjects. A king may be ill-advised and act wrong, but a republic never acts right, for a knot of villains support each other, and together they do what no single person dare attempt.” — Lord Horatio Nelson
✔️ The state of the union is just this: Your house can be searched and you can be handcuffed for holding classified documents that you have the authority to classify while your jailers need not show what the documents document because, of course, the documents are classified. An expert in such matters, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, put it this way: “Show me the man and I’ll show the crime.” Or more broadly, George Orwell in “1984”: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”
✔️ And the disparagement, “fascist,” gets thrown around loosely these days. Here is how its inventor, Benito Mussolini, defined it: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Do the reading.
✔️ The Roman Emperor Constantius II had to ban Jews from buying more Christian slaves.
✔️ Submitted for the “2022 insipidity Award” is the announcement earlier this summer by a local mayoral hopeful: “I need all 260,000 people in Fort Wayne involved. Itʼs not about me. Iʼm not running because I want to be mayor. Iʼm running because I want to make a difference. You know? I want to include everyone.” Do we need to say that he is a well established Republican?
✔️ Waiting for the results of a Washington investigation? Following the Challenger disaster, the presidential Rogers Commission took four months to find the culprit among four suspected contractors. Only 13 minutes after the disaster, however, Morton-Thiokol’s price on the stock market sank while the other three stabilized.
✔️ Here’s a tip for the Indianapolis Star’s newly formed Pulitzer Prize-minded gun-safety investigative team: From March of 1998 to May of this year, 96 percent of mass shootings occurred in “gun-free” zones. Will they make the connection?
✔️ And does this suggest a crime-fighting strategy? Two percent of all U.S. counties account for half of the nation’s homicides and, depending on location, as many as 95 percent of the victims are black or Hispanic.
✔️ Remember the random Afghans that Gov. Eric Holcomb so warmly welcomed to Indiana last year? Surprise! The Department of Defense reports that it has not been able to keep track of those that might be risks to national security.
✔️ Relatedly, the successful candidate for Indiana governor this next cycle will be the one with the yard signs reading, “I Am Not a Soft-Headed GOP Retainer.”
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