Saturday, May 7. 2005
Bloggers: Who are they? Norm at normblog in the UK has interviewed over 50 of them. Debate: Brewton and Prof. Gavin Kennedy debate role of Judeo-Christian values in capitalism. This is high-quality blogging.
1961 Farmall, Model 560 Not a thing of beauty, but it has a simple honesty to it, and at least that front axle adds some stability, unlike those old tippy Farmalls. Tractor accidents are the #1 cause of work-related mortality for farmers.
Magical Mystery Tour He's back! Iowahawk, that is. From rehab? From jail? From the sanitarium? Or was he just another runaway bride? And with a report of his "tour" of the old USA.
Ye flowery banks o' bonie Doon,
How can ye blume sae fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae fu' o' care? Thou'll break my heart, thou bonie bird,
That sings upon the bough,
Thou minds me o' the happy days,
When my fause love was true. Thou'll break my heart, thou bonie bird,
That sings beside thy mate,
For sae I sat, and sae I sang,
And wist na o' my fate.
from Ye Flowery Banks (Bonie Doon) by Robert Burns. Read entire: Click here: RPO -- Robert Burns : Ye Flowery Banks (Bonie Doon)
Friday, May 6. 2005
Social Security vs. Savings "Liberals want you to be entirely dependent on the Federal government. Otherwise, you might not have to vote for them." That deserves to be a QQQQ. Excellent summary of the issue by Brewton.
Art Highrollers Feeling No Pain Wednesday at Sotheby's:
Picasso, Rodin, and Max Beckmann all fetch premiums at Sotheby's last night. Hopefully the plastic in your wallet has no limit as some of these masterpieces reach prices approaching 20 million a pop. That's the high end even in downtown Greenwich. Thursday at Sotheby's, from the NYT:
"Christie's sale totaled $142.8 million, far above its low estimate of $111.2 million but not quite reaching its high estimate, $149.6 million. Of the 59 lots offered, only 7 failed to sell. Sotheby's sale totaled $91.2 million, after a low estimate of $127.3 million, with 20 of the 65 lots unsold. "It was day and night," said Franck Giraud, a former director of Christie's Impressionist and modern art department, who is now a private dealer. "It restored confidence overnight." The art market has bounced back according to the insiders. Everyone can get a goodnight's sleep now. The euro continues to rise and the Americans are cutting their losses but the "Big Boys" like Lauder, Newhouse and cohorts continue to spend money like it does grow on trees. Good news for the artists--oh wait a minute-they are dead. Posthumously enjoying themselves to be sure. "The undisputed star of the evening, and the most expensive work, was "Bird in Space," from Brancusi's well-known series of sculptures. This one, a delicately carved piece of gray-blue marble with its original box and limestone base, was made in 1922-23. Scholars did not know of its existence until an expert at Christie's discovered it in an attic in France. Last night about six serious bidders wanted the sculpture, and by the time the price had risen to $23 million, two unidentified telephone bidders were determined not to lose. The hammer fell at $24.5 million, and with Christie's commission the price shot up to $27.4 million, a record for a sculpture at auction and more than twice the $12 million high estimate. They audience burst into applause." Art Market Bounces Back in 2nd Night of Spring Sales - New York Times
 Sinatra's Arrogance Explained
He was in the mob. See Captain's Quarters. Robert Sheer Exposed By Horowitz, of course. Freakonomics You heard it here second. The new book by Steven Levitt. From Dean Barnett's review: "Levitt graduated Harvard in 1989 summa cum laude and received a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1994. After becoming a chaired professor at Chicago at the tender age of 35, Levitt recently won the John Bates Clark medal, which is awarded every two years to America's best economist under the age of 40. (The Clark medal is widely viewed as a precursor for an eventual Nobel Prize.)THE ENTIRE PURPOSE OF FREAKONOMICS is to reveal counterintuitive and often unsettling truths. Levitt aims to show the world how it is, not how we wish it were or how the "conventional wisdom" deems it. Levitt knew that exposing such truths would cause no small amount of offense in numerous quarters. In one chapter sure to make enemies, Levitt asks, "What do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?" The answer: Both groups are willing to cheat. I don't want to ruin all the fun and describe how Levitt reaches his almost undebatable conclusion, but one must admire the audacity of a man so willing to stand up to both the teachers' unions and sumo wrestlers." Read entire review. Venezuela Follies Chavez sends troops to protect his oil industry. I can hear the words to his mother: "Mom, when I grow up I want to be just like Fidel." Religion and Politics I believe there is no issue, except pure partisan warfare. New England Patriot has a good piece: "The new liberal talking point is that Republicans, led by conservatives, seek to blur the lines between separation of church and state. Liberal Democrats like Howard Dean and Al Gore have given us a primer on what is ahead in the next election cycle - those who oppose abortion, gay marriage or euthanasia are religious zealots." Read entire. And More on the Subject from Taranto Non-believer Taranto supports the religious right: "One can disagree with religious conservatives on abortion, gay rights, school prayer, creationism and any number of other issues, and still recognize that they have good reason to feel disfranchised. This isn't the same as the oft-heard complaint of "anti-Christian bigotry," which is at best imprecise, since American Christians are all over the map politically. But those who hold traditionalist views have been shut out of the democratic process by a series of court decisions that, based on constitutional reasoning ranging from plausible to ludicrous, declared the preferred policies of the secular left the law of the land." Read entire interesting piece. - and the companion anti- piece by Hitchins.
Trompe l'oeil NYC's expert street artists create 3-D illusions with chalk. (If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, eh Frankie?)
 One more:
"I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me." Winston Churchill
Thursday, May 5. 2005
Free Toby...I mean Save Toby This is dumb. But Toby will die, unless... Cinco de Mayo Daily Demarche tells us what this celebration commemorates.
 Peregrines, Ospreys and Eagles
Seen their videocams lately? The chicks are growing. NYC Peregrine. Maryland Osprey. Maryland Eagles. What's that corncob doing in the nest on the video? Looks like they had a clambake up there. Also, the story of the removal of one of the eaglets to Vermont. Photo courtesy of P. LaTourette - his link to the left.
Dartmouth Insurgents: The ongoing excitement. What Next for Britain's Tories?: Wheatcroft in WSJ. Piling on Jane Christensen: The holocaust-denying History Prof who teaches that 9-11 was done by Zionists. Hey - tenure doesn't protect you from criticism or mockery. New Pope "too Catholic," says Media: Just found this. A Sad Day for Texas: State bans sexy cheerleading. Lighten up, people. Iraq: I don't post much on Iraq. War's over, good guys won. They have the first elected government in their history. But Instapundit is on Al Quaida's current woes. Seems like their only remaining boosters are in the American Left, all 14 of them. Bob Herbert: Powerline is on the job, exploring Bob Herbert's hearsay-based smear of the US military in Iraq. Look out, Bob. If you rathered the story, ie screwed up your due diligence because of a desire to believe, John will call you on it, big time. More on the Great Horowitz: David H. is doing a great service for all of us. He is a man on a mission, and his Academic Bill of Rights has been effective in smoking out the covert fascists and the latent fascism among the academic Left. Here. Pelosi Hypocrisy: Captain's Quarters also on the job, as usual. Guess what, Delay isn't the only sleaze in DC - big surprise. More Frank-Bashing: We enjoy making sport of Thomas Frank, and so does Mac Johnson - who does a better job of it than we do. But then again, he is such an easy target, it almost feels cruel.
Island Trees, etc. "In a 1982 case called Island Trees v. Pico, the Supreme Court ruled that school boards can't remove books from a school library just because they don't agree with their content. But in many communities around the country, school administrators and librarians are under heavy pressure from religious and other groups to censor what we read and study. If you believe that your school is censoring books because of their viewpoints, you, your teachers and the school librarian can challenge book censorship at your school or in court. The freedom to read is the freedom to think – and that's totally worth fighting for!" American Civil Liberties Union : Your Right to Free Expression Sure. Fine. But why is it the ACLU must always refer to "religious" groups when pointing out censorship? If this isn't bias, then what is? It is time for the "card carrying" ACLU members to stop the religious paranoia. Censorship is censorship no matter what group is enforcing it.
 Chris' Excellent Adventure
We posted a nice photo of a boat shipper earlier this week. Our friend Chris was nice enough to bring his digital camera to document his picking up his boat this week from one of those mobile boat-delivery dry-docks, in Newport harbor. After which he sailed it down to CT. Flip through the photo series to get a feel for the process. The ship sinks until the boats can be floated off and unloaded. Who knew? Photo posted: Anti-Bush sign in Rhode Island - a Blue State for sure. Nice house, though.
 The Fawlty Towers of Academe: Analyzing Faculty Unhappiness
Every bright, curious young person has at least once considered a teaching career. Even I did, as an undergraduate. How could one not, spending all of those years surrounded by teachers? It is one of the few careers with which a kid has close experience. Plus it is truly a noble profession, with no heavy lifting, especially at the college level. So why are faculty always griping? Joseph Epstein tries to get to the bottom of this question via his review of Showaler's new book, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and its Discontents. My sense is that his essay, which uses the academic novel as a jumping-off point, pertains mainly to faculty in the Humanities if not in Departments of English in particular - a group which, from the point of view of "consumers," seems to have lost its way, forgotten its mission, and sacrificed its prestige. Eptein notes the dream of the academic life: "Universities attract people who are good at school. Being good at school takes a real enough but very small talent. As the philosopher Robert Nozick once pointed out, all those A's earned through their young lives encourage such people to persist in school: to stick around, get more A's and more degrees, sign on for teaching jobs. When young, the life ahead seems glorious. They imagine themselves inspiring the young, writing important books, living out their days in cultivated leisure." But such an idealized vision can never be realized, of course, and then a little envy drops in: "But something, inevitably, goes awry, something disagreeable turns up in the punch bowl. Usually by the time they turn 40, they discover the students aren't sufficiently appreciative; the books don't get written; the teaching begins to feel repetitive; the collegiality is seldom anywhere near what one hoped for it; there isn't any good use for the leisure. Meanwhile, people who got lots of B's in school seem to be driving around in Mercedes, buying million-dollar apartments, enjoying freedom and prosperity in a manner that strikes the former good students, now professors, as not only unseemly but of a kind a just society surely would never permit." And, the final blow - the realization of the triviality of one's "research": "Now that politics has trumped literature in English departments the situation is even worse. Beset by political correctness, self-imposed diversity, without leadership from above, university teachers, at least on the humanities and social-science sides, knowing the work they produce couldn't be of the least possible interest to anyone but the hacks of the MLA and similar academic organizations, have more reason than ever to be unhappy." Epstein cheerfully concludes: "And so let us leave them, overpaid and underworked, surly with alienation and unable to find any way out of the sweet racket into which they once so ardently longed to get." Read entire.
Crash on the levee, mama,
Water's gonna overflow.
Swamp's gonna rise,
No boat's gonna row.
Now you can train on down
To Williams Point,
You can bust your feet,
You can rock this joint.
But oh, mama, ain't you gonna miss your best friend now?
You're gonna have to find yourself
Another best friend somehow.
Dylan, from Down in the Flood
Wednesday, May 4. 2005
The Big Red Button Seen this? Try it. Males, youth, elderly, and females not allowed. Via Michelle via Instapundit
Reposted from 2005 - not that anyone needs a reminder of that sad tale. From Ryan Sager at The NY Post: "March 17, 2005 -- CAMPAIGN-FINANCE reform has been an immense scam perpetrated on the American people by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a "mass movement." But don't take my word for it. One of the chief scammers, Sean Treglia, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, confesses it all in an astonishing videotape I obtained earlier this week." I have contended that Campaign Finance is anti-free speech, unconstitutional, and typically insidious goo goo stuff. Watch that FCC. Read entire: Click here: New York Post Online Edition: postopinion
Pat Robertson is a Skunk Stinking up the Tent So says A Moderate Voice. Pat does tend to be one of those folks who make Conservatives look silly, if not creepy. Fortunately, the Liberals have their own barnyard full of loonies. The Barrister "Do you think the Repubs still think they're in a debate, when what they are really in is a shooting war with real bullets?" Damn good point. Read yesterday's post by him - scroll down. Vietnamese Capitalism Chrenkoff, with a Vietnam Mastercard ad: Ejecting American imperialists out of the country: 2 million dead
Building communist utopia: 1 million refugees, hundreds of thousands of "reeducated" political prisoners, basic human rights suppressed, economy ruined while the rest of Asia is thriving
Admitting after three decades that your stupid communist policies have failed and the experiment is just about over: priceless. David Limbaugh Saying What we Know "Just as when John Kerry masqueraded as a hawk on national defense and the Michael Moore/Howard Dean wing of the party stayed right on board with him, Hillary has virtual immunity for any such apostasies. Why? Because they know she'll always be a card-carrying, hardcore liberal no matter how much she pretends otherwise." read entire. Oh Man. Not another finger? Here. Yuk. But let's see. On average, 10 fingers per person, and 296,000,000 Americans - so call it 3,000,000,000 fingers in the US. No wonder some of them go missing once in a while. VDH, "On Being Disliked" "Last year the hysteria about the hostility toward the United States reached a fevered pitch. Everyone from Jimmy Carter to our Hollywood elite lamented that America had lost its old popularity. It was a constant promise of the Kerry campaign to restore our good name and "to work with our allies." The more sensitive were going to undo the supposed damage of the last four years. Whole books have been devoted to this peculiar new anti-Americanism, but few have asked whether or not such suspicion of the United States is, in fact, a barometer of what we are doing right — and while not necessarily welcome, at least proof that we are on the correct track."
My comment: What "allies"? Germany - two wars against them. France - two rescues. Allies? Read entire.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." Pablo Picasso (Bird Dog comment: I get Mr. P's point, but that was in the pre-blog era.)
Tuesday, May 3. 2005
Medecins Sans Frontieres Doctors without Borders. I admire this organization, I support it with money, and God bless the physicians who give their time. It is a high expression of the medical profession. In fact, I offered myself to them a few years ago, but could not be away for their minimum length of time committment, but I forget what it was. Several months. I could have given 1-2 months with a locum tenens, but that's all. The message is that these docs give a lot. Interesting fact on their site: the media-sexy Marburg virus killed 200 - Malaria kills millions every year, but makes no headlines. Another interesting fact: MSF has treated 1000 in Haiti for gunshot wounds since December, mostly political disputes. Nice country.
World's Smallest Political Quiz WaPo says it's accurate. It's called the miracle of sampling. Try it.
The Penis Monologues Apropos my recent post about humorless, bitter feminists: Let those penises speak! Even though we women already know what they're going to say, and it is neither intelligent nor inspiring due to the absence of cortical matter in those cute little happy heads. But have no fear - we normal ladies do enjoy them quite a bit, anyway, despite their low IQs. Especially when they are attached to an interestingly complex, intelligent, quirky, or entertaining human being, preferably tall, dark and handsome. Read Christina Hoff Summer's amusing piece. Free Testaclese! Thanks, View from 1776.
Propaganda vs. Debate Paul Mirengoff of mighty Powerline studies the figures of speech used as substitutes for reasoned argument by the Left. As many of us at Maggie's point out regularly, as the Left loses power and relevance, their voices become shriller, more hysterical, and meaner. The past election escalated this slide into a paranoid detachment from reality. Next will be the rubber room. Sure, there are plenty of valid and compelling criticisms to be made against the Conservatives in action - especially hypocrisy - but equating the US with the Khmer Rouge ain't one of them. The US stinks at debate. For forty years, there was minimal debate with a Liberal press and a liberal government and a liberal "establishment". Then, thanks in part to the removal of the Fairness Doctrine and in part to cable and in part to blogs, we conservatives - most of us ex-liberals ourselves - are all prepared to debate ideas, but the Left will not engage in that way. All we get are tantrums and name-calling and manipulative propaganda. Well, forget the Left. The Left is dead. But even normal good Democrats - c'mon guys and gals - let's debate the ideas honestly. It would be good for the country. But hmmmm, let me think a minute...shucks, gee whiz, do ya think maybe that's not what politics is all about? Is it possible that the Repubs still think they're in a debate, when they're really in a shooting war with real bullets?
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