Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Much Sorry with Delays
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Thursday, January 12. 2012

A few Thursday morning links


Did your Mom ever make you kids coffee jello for dessert? Mine did. It's good.


Bird Man: A portfolio of John Isaac's close encounters of the avian kind


Travel advice from my Pupette: When you go to third world countries, bring some Cipro with you


Every hear of "childism"?


That nutty lady never had a child


Men and Women Have Major Personality Differences: New Report Suggests Previous Measurements Have Underestimated Variation Between the Sexes


Well, I'll be darned


University Guildsmen and Anticapitalism


Here's the scare info on fracking.


Ever read the package insert on your medicines? It's sort of like that.


Haiti: Where did the money go?


A great place for NGOs


“Italy will astound the world,” he replied, “with its ingratitude.” Mead:



...the German vision of a Europe transformed into virtuous northern savers who play honestly and conscientiously by the accepted rules of the game looks hopelessly unrealistic, and never so more than now as the Italians get into the game.



Herbert London: The Failure of the Century's Grand Experiments:




If there is one obvious condition associated with the last century, it is the lack of government humility. Among the century’s leadership there was the self confident belief that “good ideas” will trump tradition, customs, history, even instinct. There were scarcely limits to political ingenuity. Here was the triumph of positivism, the assumption that rationality can subdue emotion. The engineers were in history’s driver’s seat and the lights appeared to be synchronized in green. Somewhere along the way things went wrong and the lights turned crimson...

Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 05:42 | Comments (18) | Trackbacks (0)

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It's perverse consequences, is all. "If everybody stands on their toes, everybody can see better" doesn't work out in spite of its obvious planning success.

Problems that respond to direct action as expected have already been solved.

What's left is problems that respond to direct action with perverse consequences. It's Darwinian survival for the fittest problems.

Those are the problems that the left is always solving, and that the right is always right about.
#1 rhhardin (Link) on 2012-01-12 07:36 (Reply)
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/135210/

...just up, aligns well with the guilds & anticapitalism essay. Reynolds thumbnails "...it’s basically intra-elite New Class struggle" and Morgan the von Mises contributor says --well, heck, i need to paste an excerpt:

[open quote]

Within the guild system, a master guildsman was expected to refrain from purchasing his factors of production from middlemen and journeymen (those who engaged in free trade without completing an apprenticeship), and thus were set against the progress of the market. Journeymen undersold the guilds, and the guilds turned to the government in order to regulate the progress of the journeymen who ruined the regulatory guilds. The entrepreneurial journeyman was always a threat to those who had worked seven years with little or no pay under a master.

The precapitalistic guild mentality is, as far as history has provided examples, the anticapitalistic mentality par excellence. The world has rarely seen another, and there is likely no other anticapitalistic mentality imaginable.

The entire setup of the university presupposes that its partisans would also oppose the market. If the university is a guild, then why should we expect university intellectuals to ever espouse a free-market philosophy? The progress of pro-market theories will nearly always be against the ideological current of university intellectuals, even though they may find a small niche within the university.

The university proper vacillates between a "guild" mentality, which is innately mercantilist, and a socialist mentality. "The guild view," one chronicler of university ideologies writes, "is elitist toward the external environment, conservative toward internal change, conformist in relation to the opinion of colleagues. The socialist view is democratic toward society, radical toward change, and nonconformist."[7]

In other words, the left-right dichotomy mimics the socialist-fascist dichotomy at play in most Western democracies.

[close quote]
#2 buddy larsen on 2012-01-12 10:41 (Reply)
PS, and it all makes a sensible picture of nonsense, that everyone from real journos like Stossel to nutzenbolt entrepreneurs like the Home Depot founders vociferously blame sophisticated academia for our cultural lapse into juvenalia in the ideology of the making of a living.

That picture includes the academy's ideal pre-Renaissance vestments, titles, architecture, et cetera, announcing that frozen in time is the place to be, providing that that time is the past or the future (the dichotomy elsewhere expressed as that of socialist vs fascist), but never the great middling middle of the current present presently current, where abide the masses laboring with limited time to capitalize everywhere BUT the great abstract fields of unlimited revision known as the Past and the Future.
#3 buddy larsen on 2012-01-12 11:13 (Reply)
PS, maybe what makes the academy's futurism so reactionary is that, unlike everything else from say framing a house to selling a widget to digging a ditch to writing a novel, a school alone cannot say, after a failure, "...well, I sure went to school on THAT!"
#3.1 buddy larsen on 2012-01-12 11:36 (Reply)
With regard to Buffet's challenge: How easy it is to become a generous liberal once you have made your billions in capitalist community!

With regard to these comments about the Italians--could that be called Racist?

When we once again have the courage to go after the true enemies of the state (the mobs/mafia) we will not be having such a focused discussion about ideology. We need to consider the damage done to enterprise and small businesses by the likes of the Chicago Mafia, the New Jersey Mafia, the New York mafia. Add to that we now have large groups of Russian mafia, and Mexican mafia working within our borders. Perhaps the question is not which castrato to put in the west wing, but when will we clean up our house?
#4 another one on 2012-01-12 12:03 (Reply)
I gave a quick look to some of the other articles on the supposedly "Science" site. Looks like a PR extension of the extreme left. You remember that group of folks who believe that there is nothing wrong with twisting scientific findings to support political left ideologies!
#5 faculty Wife on 2012-01-12 12:10 (Reply)
Cipro, yes, it's foolish to travel to any country with less than top-ranked hygiene and medical rankings without precautionary medications. Vaccines, too. I thought that was covered in World Traveling 101.
#6 Ed on 2012-01-12 12:26 (Reply)
The underlying cause is that the world is now run by university graduates who spent about 20 years with head firmly wedged in book, rather than of accumulating real-world experience of causality.
Their lives of fluff and candy (paid for by others) convinces them that anything is possible, if only it were tried.
The only cure: a period of abject poverty and bloody war involving these uplifters.
#7 PacRim Jim (Link) on 2012-01-12 13:41 (Reply)
Travel advice from my Pupette: When you go to third world countries, bring some Cipro with you

Instead of a high-level medicine, I have approached the issue of Third World water supplies by the "ounce of prevention.." approach. In numerous trips to Mexico and Central America, I have used Polar Pure, which dissolves iodine crystals into water to purify bad water. I have never had a problem with the runs since using it. I have used Polar Pure on water from rivers, mountain streams, and municipal water supplies. BTW, in some locales, the municipal water supply gets chlorinated only several times per week, so follow the locals on when it is safe to drink. Granted, iodine-treated water doesn't taste that good, but consider the alternative.

I found out that Polar Pure is not currently available, as the Great State of California in conjunction with the Feds has withheld the permit necessary to purchase iodine crystals. The reason? Meth dealers are allegedly purchasing Polar Pure for nefarious reasons. From the above link:

QUOTE:
Eighty-eight-year-old retired metallurgist Bob Wallace is a self-described tinkerer, but he hardly thinks of himself as the Thomas Edison of the illegal drug world.
He has nothing to hide. His product is packaged by hand in a cluttered Saratoga garage. It's stored in a garden shed in the backyard. The whole operation is guarded by an aged, congenial dog named Buddy.
But federal and state drug enforcement agents are coming down hard on Wallace's humble homemade solution, which he concocted to help backpackers purify water.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and state regulators say druggies can use the single ingredient in his "Polar Pure" water purifier -- iodine -- to make crystal meth.
Wallace says federal and state agents have effectively put him out of business, because authorities won't clear the way for him to buy or sell the iodine he needs for his purification bottles. He has been rejected for a state permit by the Department of Justice and is scheduled to appeal his case before an administrative judge in Sacramento next month.
Meanwhile, the exasperated Stanford University-educated engineer and his 85-year-old girlfriend said the government -- in its zeal to clamp down on meth labs -- has instead stopped hikers, flood victims and others from protecting themselves against a bad case of the runs.
"This old couple, barely surviving old farts, and we're supposed
to be meth dealers? This is just plain stupid," Wallace said, as he sat in the nerve center of his not-so-clandestine compound surrounded by contoured hiking maps, periodic tables and the prototypes of metal snowshoes he invented a few years ago. "These are the same knotheads that make you take your shoes off in the airport."
. More at the above link.

My brother's father-in-law got very sick from the water on a trip to SE Asia- the Mekong River, as I recall. That didn't stop him and his wife from globe-trotting, though.
#8 Gringo on 2012-01-12 13:59 (Reply)
'bring some Cipro With you'

'All you need is something for constipation, and something for diarrhea'
#9 Chuckles on 2012-01-12 14:05 (Reply)
Coffee Jello - yes, I do remember it.
And that until fairly recently, coffee ice cream was only known in New England and Florida.
The sister who lives in Wisconsin buys a case of coffee syrup whenever she visits. And people have mostly stopped reacting with "You gave coffee [milk] to your kids!?!" horror.
#10 John A on 2012-01-12 14:08 (Reply)
Big Coffee Ice Cream people around here.
#10.1 Bird Dog on 2012-01-12 15:41 (Reply)
I've heard people from New England make the assertion before that few outside of their region were familiar with coffee ice cream, and it always seemed bizarre to me.

I was born in the mid-late 1960s and grew up in the DC area and remember enjoying coffee ice cream as a child in the 1970s. Maybe by "fairly recently" you mean the 1970s, but I suspect you mean in the last ten or twenty years. I assure you, though, we did have coffee ice cream long before then. My parents (neither of whom was from New England) were familiar with it and liked it and introduced us to it.
#10.2 Kurt on 2012-01-12 23:49 (Reply)
I started drinking coffee at age eleven. God knows how tall I'd be today if I hadn't.
#11 rhhardin (Link) on 2012-01-12 15:37 (Reply)
Been drinking it since before kindergarten. My neighbor used to give it to me every morning, with saccharine.
#11.1 Texan99 (Link) on 2012-01-13 13:54 (Reply)
bring some Cipro with you

Be careful with Cipro. It weakens tendons, as I found out the hard way after a bout with a UTI. Came home from the ER and went back to work on a kitchen remodel. A week later, while lifting a piece of drywall into place, a weight well within my upper body strength to handle, I ripped a tendon just below my elbow, causing it to bend backwards and making me think I dislocated it.

So if you're off to the Third World with Cipro, stay away from mountain climbing, running, weight-lifting, et cetera, else you may be coming home with crutches.
#12 fiftyville on 2012-01-12 20:11 (Reply)
Bird Dog ... I'm not convinced about the harmlessness and efficacy of Cipro as a generalized antibiotic protector when traveling in less civilized more heavily populated countries. Back in the 1980s, I accompanied my husband on a month-long trip to the Far East at the behest of his employer, a major oil company [it was Exxon, in case you're interested] Before we left, the company gave us some great cultural tips, [don't point the sole of your shoe at any citizens because it is a mortal insult to quite a wide variety of locals] and a medical kit. The kit contained tetracycline tablets, to help us if we got infected by foreign bugs. I was lucky we had it, because I got a doozy of a throat infection, and it turns out I'm allergic to Cipro. Tetracycline has been around a long time, and it does have some of the drawbacks of many early antibiotics and some disadvantages. but. like aspirin, it's effective for a wide variety of illnesses and it is widely available around the world for very low cost. The last time I took it for an infection, the full prescription cost was $4.00.
At any rate, our month-long trip to the Far East was a great success, I quickly got over my infection and we ended up in Singapore, Thailand and Japan.

By and large, we were well treated, but , oh my, I missed the USA. When we boarded our flight from California to Houston, after a nineteen hour flight from Narita, we sat silent until the plane took off, and then I started to sing America, the Beautiful with tears in my eyes. The passengers around us joined in, and it was one of life's Magic Moments.

Marianne
#13 Marianne Matthews on 2012-01-12 22:57 (Reply)
...a magic moment created by 'I started to sing' pixie dust, Tinker Bell.
#13.1 buddy larsen on 2012-01-12 23:20 (Reply)

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