Thursday, June 9. 2005
The latest on Mugabe, from Normblog. Another fine essay on Hayek, from Ocean State Blogger. Targeting Byrd in WV., from Front Page Dean: the latest Tape. You could laugh, but it isn't really funny. The Feral Hog Story, in FLA. Beginning of the end of Europe's Nightmare: Acton Inst.Click here: Commentary: Europe’s Statist Nightmare — Beginning of the End? Pedicures for wife-beaters: From your State Dept, on Town Hall Steyn on Africa: (from Country Store) The issue in Africa in every one of its crises - from economic liberty to Aids - is government. Until the do-gooders get serious about that, their efforts will remain a silly distraction.
Stop the ACLU: thank you, reader, for forwarding this Yahoo discussion group Grizzly Eats Girl: in Daily Pundit - Click here: Daily Pundit Individual Archive New Aircraft Carrier: In Jane's - Click here: US Navy to press ahead with new aircraft carrier Hillary's Polls Stink, says RWN China requires website registration, with 30,000 internet thought police. Gee, all so they dont read Maggie's. In Science Daily - Click here: China forces Web site registrations
In the lonely night
In the blinking stardust of a pale blue light
You're comin through to me in black and white
Where we were made of dreams You're blowin down the shakey street
You're hearin my heart beat
In the record breakin heat
Where we were born in time Not one more night, not one more kiss
Not this time babe, no more of this
Takes too much skill, takes too much will
It's too revealin. Dylan, from Born in Time
CD here.
Wednesday, June 8. 2005
Federal Program to Help Tell White Christians Apart at Polls: Dean asked for this one from Scrapple-Man. - when he said yesterday that the white Christians just keep voting repeatedly because poll workers can't tell them apart. Seriously said that. Learning to Walk - Literally. At Cognitive Daily. Immigration Alert, from The American Thinker: In fact, the total immigrant population of the United States now stands at 33 million, or 11% of the entire population, which, according to The Center for Immigration Studies, is significantly higher than at any time in history.At this rate, immigration will swell the population of the United States to 400 million in 50 years. (This includes all immigrants, legal and illegal.) Consider that we have 10.3 million illegals here now, with at least 800,000 more entering every year. In twenty years we will have 26.3 million illegals, plus any children they may have. The population of the United States when it was founded was only 3 million. This is over 8 times that number, and these people have all entered this country illegally. In fact, there are over 3 million children born in the United States to families headed by illegals. The Population Reference Bureau, furthermore, shows that the overwhelming number of illegals are men between 18 and 39 (43%) followed by Women between 18 and 39 (29%) with 17% being children. The age breakdown is important; it means that the bulk of the population is at prime childbearing age, or will be in a number of years. We are about to have a baby boom of children of illegal immigrants. I'm Sick of these money problems Excepted from The Onion: Hola, amigos. What's goin' on? I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but it's like life keeps raining shit down on me and I don't have a shit shovel big enough to clear it all away. My ride is giving me grief. The muffler is coming loose, so it's making a lot of noise. The car might sound badass if it were, like, a Thunderbird or something. But it's a Festiva, so it sounds like a souped-up lawn mower. I took a tin can and some muffler tape and patched the pipe up, but my repair job isn't going to last for long.
Last Day of Sale From our Department of Free Advertising for the Worthy: Today is the final Sale Day at Wayside Nurseries.
 Harvard's PC
We Yalies always enjoy winning in football, but now the crimson has pooped in its pants in public, and you almost have to feel sorry for them. Our team here has done the "Larry is a weenie" bit endlessly over recent weeks, but Powerline has taken the story a bit beyond name-calling (not that it isn't entirely justified). Scott has also quoted our favorite and most essential essay of all time - Politics and the English Language. Watch a once-grand institution try to commit slow suicide on the altar of PC: Here.
 Brewton does Dartmouth
Tom Brewton at View from 1776 did a piece on the lack of basic knowledge among Dartmouth kids a week or so ago, and it garnered some attention and argumentation. The lack of a core curriculum doesn't just apply to the great Dartmouth College, it applies almost everywhere nowadays except at Columbia College, and at the University of Chicago, which I believe wisely borrowed Columbia's required series of two years of their required "Humanities" series and two years of "Contemporary Civilization" (which means Classical Greece to 1900, approx.). And because it all flows and inter-relates, with the Humanities series roughly covering stuff that is contemporary with the stuff in CC, you inter-link - and remember it forever. For example, you could be reading the Aeneid in Hum, studying Roman governance in CC, and looking at the effect of Greek art and architecture on Roman civilization ideally at the same time. You can know that these kids will know Augustine from Aquinas, Sophocles from Socrates, Luther from Lucretius, and Burke from Locke, whether they are Math majors or Art History majors. (And they will know, in detail, how the steps and the columns of the Parthenon were carefully mathematically distorted in shape to create an illusion of flat steps and straight columns.) I always felt there could have been a concurrent History of Math, Science and Techology too, as part of the core, but I guess you have to draw a line somewhere. What's the point? The point is that colleges with core curricula have the confidence to make a statement about what they believe is foundationally important for a citizen, with a college education, to know. Columbia's Core Curriculum here. Brewton's piece here. (I know I will get annoyed emails about other excellent colleges with similar curricula - and I'd like to know, but please, be respectful.)
Abortion, Iraq, Morality, and a Strange New Political Grouping Is there any way to make sense of the emerging political alignments? It isn't Conservative exactly, in the usual sense. Bottum in First Things: The goal in either case is to restore confidence in—well, what, exactly? Not our own infallible rightness, surely. But neither can we live any longer with the notion of our own infallible wrongness. We need to restore belief in the possibility of being right. There’s a reason the leftist Christian magazine Sojourners started life in the 1970s as something called the Post-American. Many religious activists in those days seemed to have reached a point where they couldn’t tell an admirable patriotism from the murderous ideologies of nationalism—and, besides, if you squinted hard enough, social defeatism looked like a secular version of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. The result was hardly what they hoped for: a cynical policy of Realpolitik abroad and a culture of death at home. In the new fusionism of the pro-life social conservatives and the foreign-policy neoconservatives, a number of traditional issues seem, if not to have disappeared, then at least to have gotten muted along the way. Where exactly is tax reform and social security and the balanced budget in all this? Where is much concern for economics, which once defined the root of American conservatism? Perhaps they are missing because, however important, they do not bear hard on the immediate question of social defeatism—on the deep changes that might reawaken and remoralize the nation. The one thing both the social conservatives and the neoconservatives know is that this project comes first. The angry isolationist paleoconservatives are probably right—this isn’t conservatism, in several older senses of the word. But so what? Call it the new moralism, if you like. Call it a masked liberalism or a kind of radicalism that has bizarrely seized the American scene. Mutter darkly, if you want, about the shotgun marriage of ex-socialists and modern puritans, the cynical political joining of imperial adventurers with reactionary Catholics and backwoods Evangelicals. These facts still remain: The sense of national purpose regained by forceful response to the attacks of September 11 could help summon the will to halt the slaughter of a million unborn children a year. And the energy of the pro-life fight—the fundamental moral cause of our time—may revitalize belief in the great American experiment. Read entire.
 A nationwide, usually flocking songbird with a subtle, creamy color. Not uncommon, especially where fruits and berries are abundant. Read more about this attractive bird.
Photo courtesy of Bill Horn - his link to the left.
Sewage in our Rivers, from DC to us. The Fed EPA wants to lower sewage standards. While such things are state and local issues, the EPA sets the minimum. Bad idea. Science Daily. Lefties in Charge of 9-11 Memorial. You won't believe this. In Dons Attic - thanks LGF. The beginning of the end of the Euro. Prins: This remarkable week has put onto the agenda a development that was previously unthinkable but which may materialise rather quicker than the elites expect: the unpicking of the euro. Read entire excellent analysis of the European runaway brides. Hodgson: Conservative Blogs Poison Political Atmosphere. Yup, blame it all on Maggie's Farm. Free speech is a big problem, isn't it? The Klein Book: The pre-emptive strike against the book has begun. The book will have no impact on anything, sorry to say. Hope I am wrong about that. Rip Currents: A timely piece, and excellent, in the NYT. I always believed that you just let it carry you, and that seems to be the case.
You can change someone else 5% of the time, but you can change yourself 50% of the time. Anon.
Tuesday, June 7. 2005
Moms at War Auster is right to point out to what extent our PC machine in America is able to "normalize" the grossly abnormal and nonsensical (while simultaneously trying to "abnormalize" the normal). His case in point concerns "coping groups" for military Moms in Iraq who miss their kids. There is a craziness to letting Moms go to war which mocks common sense, emotional sense, family sense, cultural sense, and psychological sense, and would only make sense if our shores were invaded by barbarian hordes. How did we get to this, unless we are psychotically imagining that Moms are Dads, and men are women, and black is white? Auster here.
Kerry Flunks GPA Comparison After endless late-night jokes during the campaign mocking George W. Bush's supposed lack of brainpower, it turns out that Dubya actually maintained a slightly higher average during his time at Yale than John Kerry, and earned only one "D" as compared to Kerry's four (though neither man's academic record is especially praiseworthy). Kerry had declined to release his college transcript until just last month, and it seems we now know the reason for the delay. Comment from Editor: Now how long must we wait for his military records...but at this point, who really cares? (except the Mass. voters)...I just want to see Hillary's military records.
CT Forces More Folks to move to FLA Fairfield Co., CT: The only problem with living in New England is their Democratic legislatures. As a native Texan with central CT (Manchester) family roots, the weather up here is wonderfully variable; the folks are either interesting like the Yankee Farmer, or well-educated like The Barrister or genius writers like Bird Dog; the land is the old land of our fore-fathers; and the earth is our rock-studded, plow-breaking, back-breaking Yankee soil, and here in southwestern CT, in Fairfield County, we have the big boys, the ambitious smart guys, who work in NY but pay the bills for the State. But with every such tax increase, we have more people spending 179 days of the year out of state, in Florida and a bit in NY pied a terres or hotels for work, not to mention business travel (and vacations in the Seychelles for bonefishing and Patagonia for trout and London for the kids or grand-kids, etc.), to protect their inheritances and to help their families. Thus leaving more burden on the poor citizens with dry-cleaning shops and tire stores who loyally stay and must fish hatchery trout at home I suppose, or God knows what they do for fishing (not bluefish hopefully), or do not have the spare cash for a Jupiter Island home. Which I Thankfully do. Or, who knows, maybe they are so hard up that they do Redneck Golf and do not fish at all, which is a pathetic soul-destroying waste of time, in my opinion. But anyway - Hey, Hartford - you ain't getting a penny of this from me. We count those days, carefully, and our estate planners are way smarter than you, which is why they have real jobs in the real world, and you do not, or barely. Did you ever hear of "laptops?" So sorry, Hartford. And if you think CT is bad, read about RI, on Anchor Rising, here.
 Hillary Squawks
"There has never been an administration, I don't believe in our history, more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda," said Mrs. Clinton, whose own administration collected FBI files on opponents and had accusers audited by the IRS." No, not since she has been in there. Story here. It is called "projection." Regardless, I wish she were right about what she said. Would it be OK if the Repubs just forgot about their agenda, forgot about the election, and became re-born liberals? Would that be OK? Would you play nice, then? Pretty please, with sugar on top?
 Lynx in Minnesota: This is good news. A wonderful critter.
Five Things that really tick me off about the Repubs now 1. Immigration policy, which seems to be to ignore the issue, no doubt to pander to Hispanic voters. 2. Conservation. The Repubs should recapture the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt. I think they are missing a big pile of swing voters on this issue, especially in the Northeast and Northwest. But it's important anyway, regardless of vote calculations. Even if you write them off in national elections, they still have State parties that matter. 3. Balanced budget: There should have been a temporary war tax. Freedom isn't free. 4. Poor articulation of conservative principles - they have bully pulpits galore, which they could be using to convert the entire nation to reason, as FDR did with the Welfare State. There are lots of good folks, and younger folks, with their biases stuck in the mud of 1930s rhetoric, who might be curious about the Reagan vision of America - and the serious thinking behind it. 5. General political fearfulness; timidity in the face of liberal spin despite the wishes of the voters
More from Thompson An interview with Thompson, from Thompson at Large: "The left/right divide is not what it used to be — that's my point. Let me add that there many liberal Democrats are excellent on human rights issues. Back to your question: Have I moved right? What today is called liberalism is almost unrecognizable from the liberalism of the late 1960s. This is not to be nostalgic about the past — it's a question of being accurate. In his 1966 Cape Town speech, Bobby Kennedy declared himself unwaveringly opposed to communism because it exalts the state over the individual and over the family. He said the best way to oppose communism is to enlarge individual human freedom. Ronald Reagan understood this, but he added another element: increased defense spending as a means of bankrupting the Soviets. Powerful combination, and it worked.
Now what's interesting is that Bobby's speech about freedom is not one his brother is likely to make today. Not because Ted Kennedy is pro-Communist, but because it's a matter of record that he strongly favors increasing government control in and management of the economy and society as a whole.
The worldview that captured the imagination of left-liberals around the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century, the New Deal, has essentially exhausted itself. The New Deal was a sharp departure from the principles of limited constitutional government. We created a bureaucratic welfare state, and the results were terrific — assuming we were trying to foster generations of dependent citizens, broken families, and oppressive government regulations."
Read entire.
I cannnot believe some of the emails we receive. Honestly, getting bored with being called a moron. Let's get a little more creative out there, critics: Editor Bird Dog, You stupid ---- ---- Republican jerks why dont you look at yourselfs and see how stupid you are, the whole country is dieing from pollution and no food and needs help and all you do is look at birds and get jobs while people are starving and not getting education because of Bush or disability which I need and cannot get and what do you care. You are hopeless morons and I do not read your blog and you are right there is no cure for stupidity - and I mean yours. Anonymous  Dear Loyal Reader,
Thank you for the genteel and constructive criticism. We must earnestly try to be less stupid, but it is hard to do with the limited brain content we have. We can't all be as wise and perceptive as you obviously are. I would suggest that you run for office, instead of writing to blog editors. You have a future in politics, along with John Dean and all the others, and you wouldn't have to worry about that disability problem. I think you meet the IQ hurdle, but take it easy on the Old Milwaukee or you might slip below the bar, which is 75. But hey - we aren't Republicans so much as we try to be Rationalists who vote for whoever makes the least bad sense and is the least corrupt. There are many dogs we'd be glad to vote for but they are way too smart to run for office. Running for squirrels or ducks is a wiser game. But keep reading Maggie's - we need the numbers. Sincerely, Bird Dog (yup, that's my photo)
Prayers for Iowahawk: The most droll, the most wise, the most adolescent, the most...well, you know - we love the Hawk. He needs your prayers. We have been worried about him. Steyn: Hillary is Dems only hope. Repubs know it, too. How did it get to this point? Who is she and what has she done? Krauthammer on US grovelmania Ferderalist 45 and Pot: I agree with Right Thinking. What are these folks thinking on the SC? "Why would the Times publish this article?" Turner nails it but good on Tech Central. Saving Hemingway's House in Havana., in CSM. Faith of the Framers: And yet more on this recently-reawakened story. Border Patrol Catch and Release: What am I missing here? Oh, I get it - both parties are closing their eyes. From RWN. Columbia Drug Wars - A good summary in Reason A Note to Repubs in DC from the News Junkie: Earth to Repubs - you won. Act like it.
Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. Albert Einstein
Monday, June 6. 2005
Zimbabwe and the African Crisis Yet another story which has received very little coverage in the US media about Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's efforts to punish the urban poor for supporting the opposition candidate in the most recent election. In fact, the whole sad tale of the once-prosperous nation and its self-inflicted economic collapse has gone all but unreported in American news outlets, nor has the US government done anything other than issue its tepid disapproval of Mugabe's actions. We ignore Zimbabwe and the continent at our own risk. Sadly, Zimbabwe's story is not unique among the nations of sub-Saharan Africa. As many of the former so-called "third world nations" advanced out of poverty in the years 1970-2000 - much of southeast Asia for example, and many countries in Latin America - African nations actually saw their per capita incomes decline during this period, as explosive population growth overwhelmed small gains in productivity. Five years into the new millenium, the trend has only continued to accelerate, as the old, post-WWII categories of first world (the West and Japan), second (the old Communist bloc) and third (all the rest) give way to a new order in which sub-Saharan Africa increasingly occupies a category of its own. For example, of the 30 lowest-ranked nations in the world in terms of per capita income, sub-Saharan Africa alone accounts for 20 (with many of the remaining ten being small, isolated island nations with tiny populations or Palestinian territories). Of those nations with the highest birth rates, often a good indicator of education, urbanization and women's rights, African nations are almost uniformly far above every other country in the world with the exception of Afghanistan and Yemen. The population dynamics in particular are rarely considered in a geopolitical sense, yet what we are witnessing today is the greatest change in the distribution of human beings in history. From a population of roughly 100 million in 1900, Africa will grow to a projected 1.3 billion by 2020, while during the same time Europe's population will have less than doubled (from 400 million to under 700 million and shrinking). The future here is more or less set: already Nigeria has nearly as many 0-14 year olds as the entire European Union. The implications of such a massive population shift combined with increasing economic inequality is a recipe for unrest on a giant scale. The rapid spread of AIDS and the fact that Islam is gaining ground in southern Africa add additional explosive elements into the mix. The tension is already evident in the huge number of African emigrants desperate to enter Europe, yet what has happened thus far only represents the very beginning. The only question now is how Europe and the West will respond.
Too Funny - Clinton gives advice to Chirac - on Drudge. Just cannot keep themselves out of the news, can they? Lens Lice, those Clintons. How do you pry their suction-cupped fingers off the cameras? What are they, when they are alone? Empty shells hoping to be filled? The Analyst might know, but she wouldn't say. There is a sickness there, I suspect.
Bad Bad Books Human Events online has compiled a list of the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries, with The Communist Manifesto easily grabbing first place. The runner-up list provides comprehensiveness, but I'm sure there are a few more works which readers could add (or some which they feel don't belong on the list). Any ideas?
Why is Condi Still Single? A wise group of deep thinkers by poolside Sunday afternoon concluded that it is her STUPID HAIRCUT, maybe by the same guy who cuts John Edward's hair. Because she is otherwise perfect.
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