Month: December 2017

When I was six years old and my brother was eight, each of us was given a quarter to spend in a candy store before seeing a movie.  I thought my quarter was a fortune, but not so my brother.  The third-grader was unhappy with the quantity of popcorn he could get for his coin and complained to the shopkeeper.  The impatient shopkeeper asked my brother, “What do you want for 25 cents, the Brooklyn Bridge?”  My brother said, “Yeah, ya got any in stock?”

This exchange happened in the late 1950s on Staten Island.  The TV show Impractical Jokers is also a creation of Staten Islanders: four guys who stage embarrassing hidden camera pranks around New York City.  It is no coincidence that this show features New Yorkers pulling weird, sometimes humiliating and disgusting pranks on other New Yorkers.  It’s the only place they could get away with it.  Humor, sarcasm, laughing at yourself and others, acerbic name-calling, and “ranking out” are essential coping mechanisms for life in New York – especially so for the mensches, the real people in the streets, stores, and neighborhoods.

New Yorkers have what psychologists call a large capacity for benign violation.  In other words, they can take it, and they can dish it out, too.  When the New Insensitive Male in the White House calls the identity-hoaxer Senator Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” – punctuated by adding that the only apology he makes is to the real Pocahontas for comparing her to goofy Liz – Trump is being an archetypal guy from Queens. He is deploying humorous mockery, a powerful coping mechanism in conflict situations, which, like my brother, he learned to use as a child.

President Trump is liberating Americans from the mental prison of political correctness and allowing them to laugh again.  But the sourpuss left wing doesn’t get the joke.  On the contrary, left-wing media are all panty-wadded about Trump’s Pocahontas jibe, and of course, they are wailing about racism.  Senator Warren herself wrote that Trump showed “the very worst of gutter politics.”  The senator thinks nothing in politics could be worse than her being called a sarcastic name?  She must consider herself a supremely important person.

Psychologists have advanced many theories to understand the dynamics of humor and what makes people laugh.  Benign violation theory is a recent addition to this literature by Caleb Warren and A. Peter McGraw.  It is particularly robust in explaining why many people find Trump’s Pocahontas moniker amusing while others are greatly offended.  Benign violation theory posits that humor is experienced when a circumstance is simultaneously perceived as a violation but also as being benign.  Most violations do not amuse, but a violation that is perceived as OK, acceptable, or safe produces amusement and laughter.  The theory explains that major forms of humor such as puns, sarcasm, punch lines, practical jokes, slapstick, and horseplay make people laugh because they involve violations of linguistic, physical, or cultural conventions (“Take my wife – no, please, take her.”) yet at the same time are benign and therefore acceptable to the recipient of the humorous attempt.

Because sarcasm involves saying one thing but meaning the opposite, it violates conversational norms of meaning.  When it is perceived as safe, such as the proverbial sale of the Brooklyn bridge, it can be funny.  Trump gives Senator Warren the name of a Powhatan Indian princess who died in 1617 because he believes that the senator is not an American Indian as she has claimed to be.  The senator and others of the far left not only don’t find the sarcasm amusing, but splutter that it is a racist outrage.  BVT theory neatly accounts for this: “Sarcasm isn’t funny to people who don’t detect the speaker’s true intention.  Nor is it funny to people who don’t approve of the speaker’s true intention.”

The left wing strongly disapproves of the president’s intention to call out Senator Warren’s hoax.  This is because classical liberalism is gone, replaced by dogma focused on oppressions of the distant past and sustained by bitter delusions that seek the worst in the human heart – politics founded upon the purported original and eternal sin of American white racism.  The priestcraft of the cult that replaced liberalism is driven by an obsessive search for innovative examples of white racism to confirm itself, enlarging upon loony white privilege theory and sniffing around every sombrero for signs of “cultural appropriation.”  This season’s fashion-forward term on the bigotry runways is “white supremacy.”  Regarding the knee-jerk outrage at the president’s jokes, blind dogmatists are not known for their sense of humor.

Trump’s humor will prevail against the left’s addiction to racism-spotting because his sarcasm is benign to people who love America as she is.  Calling Warren Pocahontas resonates with the wish of Americans for the restoration of a meritocracy and equal opportunity in academia.  In her (unsuccessful) outrage, Senator Warren is hoping that people who really are of American Indian ancestry will continue to burn in the long banked fires of historic victimization.  But she is also stoking a non-benign attitude toward America.  Leftists can’t laugh at themselves or anything else anymore, and everybody needs a good laugh sometimes.

The cold civil war we are fighting is not just going well.  Contrary to what was once expected, this war right now is in a stage of overwhelming success.  Not that we have won anything permanent, but one has to be amazed at how positively things are going.

Consumer confidence is close to an all-time high.

Our economic growth is over 3%.  After nearly a decade, our economy is clearly coming out of the doldrums, and the U.S. population is becoming optimistic about its future.

Trump is remaking the judiciary, an extraordinary achievement.

Illegal immigration is down, eventually to be controlled.  A real border for a real country.

The military is strong, confident, and doing its job.  ISIS and radical Islam are genuinely being defeated.

Our alliances overseas are strengthening, and our leadership is successfully realigning friends from the Obama-Clinton years of destruction.  Other countries respect and fear us once again.

America is becoming great again.

Domestically, embittered adversaries on the left are melting down, in multiple ways.  Their elites are being shown as irrational, immoral, hypocritical, rudderless, and foolish in an overwhelming wave of self-induced negativity.  Their illusion of cultural greatness is falling apart, from Hollywood to the media to the educrats to the Democratic Party itself.  They are failing miserably.

The Clinton crime family is going under for the third time, dragging others with it.

Yes, it’s wonderful to watch the left disintegrate, but don’t forget: they still own the education system and have won too many hearts and minds to their own party.  It ain’t over ’til it’s over.  We may be winning, but we haven’t won yet.

So let’s talk about really winning this thing.  In order to really win, there are a few things we need to remember.  And never forget: the things we must remember are those qualities that made us a great nation.  Those unique strengths that define humanity at its best, corporately and individually.  They include the freedoms to excel and improve.

We are between the great holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and as the song says, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.  It’s a time to recall and reflect on what are the best things this life has to offer.

Reagan said this in 1986:

Perhaps no custom reveals our character as a nation so clearly as our celebration of Thanksgiving Day. Rooted deeply in our Judeo-Christian heritage, the practice of offering thanksgiving underscores our unshakable belief in God as the foundation of our nation and our firm reliance upon Him from Whom all blessings flow.

Succinct.  And this quote was taken in the middle of the Cold War, when the winner was in doubt.  Reagan was reminding us of how to be thankful in the midst of a time of great strife and difficulty.  He wanted us to know that “winning” was not enough.  We needed to know that winning was tied up with high character and purpose, for our nation and for each of us as individuals.

Giving thanks for what we have and have been given.  To God.  With our families and friends.  Hoping, by faith, to achieve higher character.

Yes, we are in a cold civil war.  We cannot truly win that war if we devolve.  We cannot win that war if we become like those we have been fighting.  Stooping to their level will not fly.  We cannot become like the Jacobins of the left.  That is a construct we have to follow.  We cannot allow hate or bitterness to succeed in gaining a foothold in us.

We can hate what they’ve done without hating them personally.  We can be confident when we come against hate, but we must not let ourselves take on the character of those we have fought so hard against.

George Washington said the following about division:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

As much as we need to despise what the left has done and ofttimes has stood for, we cannot let ourselves become despots.  We can’t exact revenge on individuals or groups that have wished us ill or even have done wrong things to us.  Instead, we need to remember the importance of forgiveness.  And please, I am not confusing forgiveness with approval, consent, or seeking justice for criminality.  We need to look forward to convincing as many as possible on the left to move toward a reconciliation and a reunification.  Gloating, dominating, excluding, and belittling those who would move toward betterment should not be done.

Yep, that may be a pipe dream with many we know and see on the left, but it has been done before.  And yes, it will take a long time.

The Civil War was not yet over when Lincoln said it this way:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Once again, the calling onward of a citizenry to high character and not revenge.

Without this we cannot become great again.  Make America Great Again.  What an amazing slogan.  It’s simple and powerful, and it calls us upward to better things.  Those things are not simply material, meaning rising economic fortune; they’re the deep improvement of virtue that brings on and fulfills a strong economic well-being.  This would be virtue in the classic sense, in its finest and fullest sense.

No, perfection isn’t possible, so get that out of mind.  Betterment, however, is.  We cannot confuse virtue with church lady-like pronouncements, nor take a sourpuss attitude of clucking at things we deem unclean.  Humor, building families, building businesses, building friendships and communities.  So much to do, so little time.

“Character is destiny” is a saying attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.  This is a truth that should be remembered, a truth once upon a time embedded in our culture, a truth we must renew.  With malice toward none, with charity for all.

How do we develop character?  To what do we aspire?  I’ll leave it to the real expert, who was asked what the most important things are.  He replied that virtually everything else hung on us following these two instructions freely:

“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the first and great commandment. 

 And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The faith to build character for now and for future generations.

The way to truly make America great again.

It’s a point that’s been made to death: U.S. politics have never been polarized as much as it is polarized today.  Rhetoric has become more heated in what seems like an arms race to stoke – and capitalize on – the most outrage.

Christmas came early for regulation demagogues on September 7, when Equifax, a credit-reporting agency, announced that it had suffered a catastrophic data breach.  People panicked – up to 145 million Americans had their identity data compromised.  Nobody can blame Americans for reacting this way to being exposed to identity theft.  But not so blameless are Senators Elizabeth Warrior (D-Mass.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who introduced the FREE Act.  It’s regulation of an increasingly common kind: thoughtless, opportunistic legislation with bad solutions.

The FREE Act and other bills inspired by it would mandate that companies provide credit freezes to consumers for free.  The rhetoric behind it follows the same rubric as all demagoguery: approach complex issues with

1.outrage-mongering and

Lot of people are outraged about the @Equifax data breach. I am too. Here’s what I’ve been doing about it this week.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) September 15, 2017

2.simplistic solutions.

The idea behind our bill is simple: @Equifax doesn’t pay you when they sell your data. You shouldn’t have to pay them to stop selling it.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) September 15, 2017

It goes without saying that the government can’t just mandate prices of services to become zero without any negatives.  The result will be less efficiency in the credit industry, and average Americans will be the ones hurt the most due to the constraint in the availability of credit.  Credit ratings exist as a metric to rationally evaluate credit risk, and preventing resources from being used in this evaluation will just make credit harder to come by.  And shrinking the credit availability of an entire sector of the economy has serious consequences.

Regulating credit freezes would also serve to empower the notoriously lawless Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Senator Warren before she took office.  The rhetoric supporting her pet agency should be familiar in its hyperbolic slant: Warren characterizes any criticism of the CFPB as a conspiracy between banks and “their Republican friends in Congress.”

That’s ridiculous and should immediately raise a red flag.  Serious people seeking the common good do not characterize their critics as Saturday-morning cartoon villains.

And perhaps more worrying is the intersection of this overblown rhetoric with its stated goals.  Warren thinks the whole credit-reporting industry “should be completely transformed.”  That’s a big goal, and far-reaching legislation can’t be motivated by hyperbolic black-and-white thinking.  That’s how the worst kind of policy finds its legs.

Senator Warren should prove that she is committed to a sober pursuit of rational policy.  Here’s how she can do it:

1. Offer an evidence-based, non-emotional explanation for why the FREE Act won’t lead to new costs for consumers and businesses.  Economic theory indicates that credit freezes and unfreezes are a service that requires resources, and mandating that such a service be provided for free will lead to market disruptions.  Argue convincingly that this will not happen.

2. Offer evidence that Equifax’s blunders indicate that the credit industry in general is broken and in need of transformational reforms.

3. Honestly engage with the discussions of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s lack of accountability.  Arguments that Republicans are wicked henchmen of a conspiracy to hurt consumers are not an honest engagement of these ideas.

4. Paint what is, in your mind, the most realistic picture of how the credit industry works.  Then compare this to the models that are the consensus of non-partisan economists. 

5. Demonstrate how better oversight and enforcement with on-the-books regulations would not suffice.

6. Demonstrate that you understand the actual arguments of the critics of the FREE Act and not your own emotionally laden caricature of those arguments.  This can be done through what’s known as an ideological Turing test.

Point number five is perhaps the most important.  Senator Warren expects hyperventilating words and absurd misrepresentations of her opponents to do the work for her.  But that isn’t how good policy is crafted.  Good policy comes from sober and evenhanded analyses of the facts.  Until proponents of the FREE Act can demonstrate their commitment to such analyses, they can’t be taken seriously as crusaders for the common good.

The two sides of this argument couldn’t be more different.  One sees apocalypse and conspiracy in every instance of opposition to the latest regulatory power-grab.  The other calls for scrutiny and moderation.

It’s not going to be the end of the world if the FREE Act passes.  That’s an absurd thing to believe.  Elizabeth Warren isn’t evil.  That’s also absurd.  The FREE Act is a well intentioned but badly reasoned piece of legislation – the precise type that tends to further bloat the morass of the federal bureaucracy.

We hear that the NFL will contribute $100 million to the players’ social concerns, or something like that.    

This is from Jim Hanson:   

NFL owners seem poised to donate nearly $100 million (including some contributions from players) over seven years to support the favorite social justice causes of the players. 

But in a perfect show of how incompetent they are, the owners will get nothing from the players in return. No promise to stop disrespecting the national anthem or any other meaningful concessions.

Who taught these clowns to negotiate, Neville Chamberlain? Obviously, they are used to trying to buy their way out of problems. 

Can you even imagine the sum total spent bailing their pampered players out of legal beefs, domestic violence and sexual misconduct issues? 

It would likely dwarf even Congress and Hollywood. But do they really think this will solve their problem?

Maybe the commissioner got his negotiation lessons from the Obama Iran nuclear deal or the Cuba detente?

As an NFL fan, I find this deal rather weak.   

First, these “social concerns” do not need money. What we need is for players to get involved in their communities, from working with the police chief to telling young people about the importance of fatherhood.   

Second, I am angry with the NFL because the players are not respecting the national anthem. I understand that there are grievances and would be happy to hear them. Please don’t tell me about them when you being disrespectful to your flag or anthem.

It is still incredible to me how the NFL has allowed the actions of a small group of “employees” to hurt the brand of the employer. This is not a civil rights issue but rather players who’ve chosen to “demonstrate” when they are on the clock.

It’s incredible that Commissioner Roger Goodell has allowed all  this happen!

So the NFL moves on and more fans like me will move on too. I will watch the Cowboys but I’m done with the other games. Remember that spring training and play ball is about 90 days away!

P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.