90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, April 27, 2015

The Stupid Express..

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The Men Who Started the Hugo Awards Controversy

A prominent editor of speculative fiction (a term that encompasses both science fiction and fantasy) declared in 2013 that the genre had “moved away from the white male Anglo Saxon Mayberry of its youth and towards a more mature, diverse, and inclusive future.” His words were an encapsulation of trendy opinion among certain sorts of spec-fic fans. They were also flat-out wrong. If early science fiction and fantasy had an ideology (a doubtful proposition at best) it was techno-cultural utopianism—the opposite of the conservatism of The Andy Griffith Show. The giants of the field wrote in explicit support of civil rights, sexual liberation, and women’s equality. But ideologues must exaggerate past evils to justify their present excesses, and so down the memory hole go Heinlein’s 1961 A Stranger in Strange Land and LeGuin’s 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness.

2013 was also the year a conservative-leaning author, Larry Correia, (later joined by Brad Torgersen) decided to take a stand against this kind of demographic obsessiveness. Beginning that year, they began to promote a slate of candidates each year for speculative fiction’s most prestigious awards—the Hugos—and urged readers on their personal blogs to nominate the candidates en masse. This year it worked. Their slate dominates this year’s nominations. A predictable wave of outrage followed, culminating in an over-the-top hit piece in Entertainment Weekly. Correia and Torgersen have become boogiemen to liberals and folk heroes to conservatives.

In all this fuss, the quality of their work has been largely overlooked. Both writers recall an earlier time in speculative fiction’s development, before the New Wave of the sixties and seventies brought in experimental literary techniques. Correia is the better-known of the two. His hugely popular...

By Michael Maharrey - A bill that would heavily diminish the effect of federal programs that militarize local police was signed into law on Thursday.

Introduced by Rep. Nicholas Schwaderer (R-Superior), House Bill 330 (HB330) bans state or local law enforcement from receiving significant classes of military equipment from the Pentagon’s “1033 Program.” It passed by a 46-1 vote in the state Senate and by a 79-20 vote in the state House. On Thursday, Gov. Steve Bullock signed it into law.

The new law will prohibit state or local law enforcement agencies from receiving drones that are armored, weaponized, or both; aircraft that are combat configured or combat coded; grenades or similar explosives and grenade launchers; silencers; and “militarized armored vehicles” from federal military surplus programs.

But, as The Guardian reported last fall, handouts of such equipment from the Pentagon are far from the only way that the federal government has been militarizing local police. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants used to purchase such equipment amount to three times the value of the equipment given away by the Pentagon.

HB330 closes this loophole by banning...

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently appeared on one of the late night talk shows, beating the class warfare drum and arguing for billions of dollars in new social programs paid for with higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires. In recent years, though, blue states such as California, Illinois, Delaware, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland and Minnesota adopted this very strategy, and they raised taxes on their wealthy residents. How did it work out? Almost all of these states lag behind the national average in growth of jobs and incomes.

So, if income redistribution policies are the solution to shrinking the gap between rich and poor, why do they fail so miserably in the states?

Day after day, the middle class keeps leaving California. The wealthy areas such as San Francisco and the Silicon Valley boom. Yet the state has nearly the highest poverty rate in the nation.

The blue states that try to lift up the poor with high taxes, high welfare benefits, high minimum wages and other Robin Hood policies tend to be the places where the rich end up the richest and the poor the poorest.

California is the prototypical example. It has the highest tax rates of any state. It has very generous welfare benefits. Many of its cities have a high minimum wage. But day after day, the middle class keeps leaving. The wealthy areas such as San Francisco and the Silicon Valley boom. Yet the state has nearly the highest poverty rate in the nation. The Golden State, alas, has become the inequality state.

In a new report called “Rich States, Poor States” that I write each year for the American Legislative Exchange Council with Arthur Laffer and Jonathan Williams, we find that five of the highest-tax blue states in the nation—California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Illinois—lost some 4 million more U.S. residents than entered these states over the last decade. Meanwhile...