Tuesday, March 14. 2006
Ahmadinejad seems like a nut, but the conflicts he provokes with the West strengthen his standing with his constituency. But wiser heads are slowly leaving his side. We have to remember that Iran has a history of western ties, and westernization. It's not an Iraq. Philosophy in a New Key: The classic is on Norm's list, with an essay. How could anyone be this stupid and insensitive ? Someone should riot and burn an embassy or two. Raising Boys that Feminists will Hate. Giles. We are not "running out of oil." Government cannot give you love. Rev. Sirico in Detroit News Mugabe: All you need to know about this friend of Fidel. Front Page Teacher: Blame the Student. Everything Dan says in this thoughtful piece seems right to me. Is swimming in syrup slower or faster than swimming in water? Is the White House staff burned out? Oriana Fallaci, Swiss speech codes, and European dhimmitude: Atlas The US moves against Iran. CA Yank Stuck in Lodi Again? Zawahiri has been in the US Clooney's lies about McCarthy, etc. the Prof. Can we say that McCarthy was wrong, but right? Truthiness? Driven to a life of crime. What a nutjob. Moonbattery. What do you call a movement of one?
Roe v. Wade provided a "right" to kill an unborn baby for any reason. The morality and politics of that decision remain alive and unresolved. The decision failed to abort - or should I say "kill" - the issue. In fact, it raised more moral and political issues. One effect has been to take a lot of the fun out of, and to add a lot of financial risk to, the practice of Obstetrics. The concept of "wrongful birth" captures it. From an important piece in the NYT: At present, courts in about half the states recognize wrongful birth as a subset of medical negligence or allow lawsuits under the more general malpractice umbrella if a doctor's poor care leads to the delivery of a child the parents claim they would have chosen to terminate in utero had they known in time of its impaired health. In some of these states, like New York, where the Brancas' case was tried, emotional damages — compensation for the distress incurred by having an impaired child — cannot be recovered. No matter the legal context, terminating a wanted pregnancy is no one's first choice, but for the time being at least, when faced with a fetus that will become a severely handicapped child, all the choices are bad. At this moment, we are fairly adept at finding chromosomal flaws and horribly inept at fixing them. There is no chemical or surgical remedy if you find out your child-to-be has cystic fibrosis, fragile X, Down syndrome, Tay-Sachs, anencephaly — the list goes on and on. As Leon Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, has noted, in prenatal cases, often the only way to cure the illness is to prevent the patient. The first significant wrongful-birth lawsuit involving a disabled child, Gleitman v. Cosgrove, reached the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1966. One plaintiff was the child's mother, who had contracted rubella early in her pregnancy in 1959. Worried, she consulted her doctor and was assured that her unborn baby would be fine, despite the common understanding that rubella early in pregnancy can lead to birth defects. The baby in question was born with "substantial defects. . .in sight, hearing and speech." Interestingly, the court recognized the physicians' failure as well as the parents' anguish and attendant financial burdens although it still decided in favor of the defendants, in part, it seems, because it did not want to enter the ethical thicket inherent in finding for the parents. "A court cannot say what defects should prevent an embryo from being allowed life.. . ." the opinion reads. "Examples of famous persons who have had great achievement despite physical defects come readily to mind, and many of us can think of examples close to home.. . .The sanctity of the single human life is the decisive factor in this suit in tort. Eugenic considerations are not controlling. We are not talking here about the breeding of prize cattle." By 1978, however, when the next significant wrongful-birth case was decided by a higher court, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had established a woman's right to choose — that is, to terminate a pregnancy. The new case, Becker v. Schwartz, involved a geriatric mother (a medical term for a pregnant woman over 35) who was not advised by her doctor that her advanced age put her unborn child at greater risk for birth defects. Her child was born with Down syndrome, and shortly thereafter the mother sued. This time, the New York State Court of Appeals found in favor of the family, declaring it had the right to seek financial damages for the added cost of raising a child with a disability. The court, however, refused to allow the claim of emotional damages. It did recognize the family's suffering, but reasoned it "may experience a love [for their child] that even an abnormality cannot fully dampen."
Greenwich, CT is not a Yankee town with dominant Yankee values. It's a NYC suburb which nowadays partakes more of NYC bling than Connecticut country modesty. But even Greenwich has limits. Mr. Jacobs is getting into problems with his 38,000 sq. foot house. Image from the NYT article: 
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him no good. Samuel Johnson
Monday, March 13. 2006
Sopranos: Wonderful television, although the trip through the sewer always leaves a bad taste. When Tony started singing in the kitchen, we knew trouble was coming. Bravo, Harper. Harper visits his troops in Afghanistan. Two from Cap'n Ed: A good reason to fire an employee, and France's latest kindergarten student rebellion: This reaction shows exactly why France will not reform its socialist economy -- too many people have invested themselves into the notion that government force should dictate terms of employment. Under these conditions, foreign investment will be more difficult to procure, as corporations will not want to subject themselves to funding a nanny state where workers cannot be terminated regardless of their work habits. The students who protest against high unemployment have kneecapped themselves and all but guaranteed that their problems will only worsen. De Villepin had the right idea, or at least the right start to the right idea. His modest proposal would have allowed French firms to take chances on younger workers, usually less reliable than those with more responsibilities. With so many looking for work, these employers do not want to waste a position on someone lacking a track record of reliability, especially since they can't get rid of an employee once hired. Why should employers take risks like that with students and new graduates, especially with their attitude of entitlement as expressed in the protests at the Sorbonne?
 Our News Junkie posted the link, this morning, to Big Lizard's piece "It takes a village meathead." Rob Reiner has apparently used taxpayer dollars to purchase PR and advertising to promote one of his personal political agenda items: the necessity to expand government child care.
The consultant, also hired with taxpayer dollars, advised thusly (highlights from Big Lizard): "We must create demand by creating awareness of the problems caused by insufficient attention to the early years. Currently, not enough people see the need for the state to do more, because they don't see a problem. If we offer people the solution to a problem they are not aware exists, they will reject it. We must educate people that there is a problem, thereby leading to demand for improvement.... We must continue our efforts at parental education. It is crucial that we continue to build upon the work we've already done in educating parents and caregivers about the difference they can make in the way their children develop, not just because it is important in and of itself, but also because it will also help to create more demand for improved programs from the state. The more we communicate about the relationship between the early years and future outcomes -- especially in K-12 -- the more we will create demand for a greater level of service from the state...."
That advice on how to extract more money from California taxpayers cost California taxpayers $110,000. It seems so simple. Create an atmosphere of crisis, and create a "need" - or, if they can get away with it, a "prescriptive right." Then the State can ride in on its white horse to save the day. Thus government expands incrementally, and freedom and autonomy and self-reliance diminish proportionately, with the ultimate goal being, I suppose, a nation of emotional pre-schoolers as in Europe supervised by a supposedly benevolent tyranny of nannies, bullies, know-it-alls, and sanctimonious busy-bodies. Interestingly, there is no evidence that so-called "early childhood education," such as Head Start, does any good whatsover. Other than to give mothers a break from their kids. Young kids are probably better off just banging around and following their natural noses in unstructured ways. AKA "playing." We can see this same pattern of operation on the subject of medical care, climate, gun control - you can name the others. The MSM is typically a willing useful idiot for these efforts, and the cherry-picking of statistics is fairly obvious to those who know anything about statistics. It is easy nowadays to identify when this crisis du jour process is happening. It is usually fairly-well coordinated, with all sorts of advocacy groups, hungry for grant dollars, on board in advance - and it always requires more government power and control. There is never a freedom solution - never.
Steyn: How Liberal Britain let Hate Flourish. The same Steyn who is no longer writing for any Brit newspaper... Meathead provides a perfect case study of how the worst of liberal politics works. More on the Roe v. Wade For Men. Need a good travel company for this summer? Club ABC wins Maggie's Seal of Approval.
Tu quoque. "You, too." It's the old "So's your old lady" from the schoolyards of yore. It is a primitive and immature, but often effective, fallacy. Like most fallacies, Tu Quoque subsumes aspects of other fallacies: Ad Hominem, Red Herring, etc. Tu Quoque appears to brings doubt upon a claim by pointing out a real or imaginary problem with the claimant rather than responding to the claim. It is a perfect type of fallacious argumentation for relativists: "You Americans think you are virtuous, but you had slaves 150 years ago - so don't preach to us about virtue." "You complain about civil liberties in China, but meanwhile you torture and abuse prisoners in Gitmo." "How dare you criticize my American Express bill when in 1989 you went out and bought yourself a Corvette." "Don't talk to me like you are so perfect." Tu Quoque. Shut them up and put them on the defensive, while ignoring their point. Excellent for ignorant juries, and also perfect for marital disputes - keeps them going on merrily for years.
A bad peace is even worse than war. Tacitus
Sunday, March 12. 2006
Remember the bumper sticker "The one who dies with the most toys wins"? That one was popular at the same time as the one that read "When all else fails, lower your standards." Lower that bar, and all shall have prizes. Diane Ravitch on the deterioration of college admission standards: The board's first tests were offered in June 1901 to 978 applicants to Columbia, Barnard College, and New York University. Each year more colleges joined the program as they recognized its value. The examinations — in chemistry, English, French, German, Greek, history, Latin, mathematics, and physics — contained no multiple-choice questions. Students were expected to demonstrate their knowledge by writing extended essays or displaying their solutions to problems. In English, 10 classics were assigned in advance for students, including The Merchant of Venice, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Last of the Mohicans, Silas Marner, and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Students were told that they would be judged more for their powers of clear expression than for their minute knowledge of those works, but they were expected to have closely studied them and to be ready to answer questions in detail. Every two or three years, the standards and reading lists were revised, and high-school teachers knew well in advance which works would be covered.
 Most well-organized families already have their summer family trips planned, but all we have is our options nailed down.
But it is already time to plan for hunting season. We have our reservations in at the Miramichi Inn in New Brunswick for October grouse and woodcock season. If you have never hunted these birds, the photo gives a good sense of what the brush is like that you have to bust your way through in hopes of getting a shot off at a distant brown blur. The Inn is also a good place for salmon.
Mardi Gras in Iraq. Nice. Tom Friedman lives in a world of his own. Tom Fox was tortured before he was shot. Was he a Christ-like man, or a foolish tool? Something tells me that this sort of behavior makes no positive impression on Jihadists. Doesn't that organization know that the Jihad hates Christians as much as Jews. And on a similiar note, the pious and feckless Jimmy Carter is subjected to some harsh criticism here. Everyone is talking about Dr. Sultan, the LA psychiatrist who gave the Jihadists a tongue-lashing on Al Jazeera, and is now the recipient of death threats. The mess in Darfur, summarized in the CSM. How does anyone help people so determined to create mayhem, and so lacking in what we rightly term "civilization"?
Mark 9:2-102Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. 4And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 6He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 8Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. 9As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. 10So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean.
Saturday, March 11. 2006
Is Google chosing evil over good? Clockwork Google. LGF noted that The Telegraph removed this article on Moslems in Britain from their website. In praise of The Sopranos. The final season. Whatever happened to the people of Easter Island? New theory. Good debate on the economics of medical care. TCS. It seems that the wealthier a nation is, the more they spend on education and medical treatment - if given the choice to do so. Maybe we should trust folks to make their own decisions? Those are rational adult choices. (And, by the way, when people talk about the "uninsured" they never tell you how many of those are temporarily uninsured, or illegals, do they? Government power grabs always create a "crisis" to justify it.) Tom Wolfe praises America. Hey, intellectuals aren't supposed to do that. Billary in bed with evil evil Wall-Mart.
 A solid and enjoyable summary of the music of The Beatles, from Terry Teachout. One quote:
Such an appraisal must begin by taking into account the fact that the Beatles were the first rock-and-roll musicians to be written about as musicians. Elvis Presley, for instance, had attracted vast amounts of attention from the press, but for the most part he was treated as a mass-culture phenomenon rather than as an artist, and so were the other rock musicians of the 50’s and early 60’s (and the swing-era band-leaders and vocalists who came before them). Not so the Beatles. Almost from the time they began making records in 1962, their music was taken seriously—and praised enthusiastically—by such noted classical composers as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Ned Rorem and such distinguished critics and commentators as William Mann, Hans Keller, and Wilfrid Mellers.
 The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware. Hardy wrote 15 novels, 47 stories, and later in life turned to poetry. A fine photographic tour of Hardy's Dorset here. A comprehensive Hardy site from Marist College here.
Friday, March 10. 2006
One of our favorites. Would like to be that horse. Thanks for the photo, Tammy. 
 The story of Mike Grey is one more example of Life Imitating Satire.
This dude publically admitted speaking English - on his pick-up truck. If this guy loses his job, he'll be the busiest landscaper in Denver. Hey, Denver. We speak English too! (Not too good, though.) The Political Correctness Police have already made a joke of themselves (See Paxety link this morning - "Baa baa rainbow sheep"). "Rainbow"? There's no black in a rainbow. No brown, either. Purple, orange, red, yellow? Huh? And what is wrong with a black sheep? Or a blackbird? Should we kill them all? And the English-speaking persons as well? Black, brown, mutant-white - all are excellent skin colors, and we have no choice about them. What's wrong with acknowledging them? What matters is what is under the skin: what is in the brain and heart and soul. On Maggie's Farm we call that "the difficult stuff" - morals, self-discipline, and character. Good grief! By the way, do you remember the basic high school physics of the rainbow? P.S.: Where can I find an English-speaking landscaper around here? It would work much better... Image: a nice Husquvarna machine
The $20 million bedbugs. Woops. A little problem with their case. Remember the bumper-sticker: "Please hit me. I need the money."? I heard this con-gal on the radio. "I was sooooooo upset. Bug bites all over me, blood..." etc etc. "Booo-hoooo." Throw these grifters out of court, and ban them from the Nevele. If women don't have to bear a child they don't want, why should men have to support a child they don't want? Fun is for fun, and Fair is fair. We'd need to invent her for humor, except she provides it herself. The ongoing Cindy Sheehan comic strip. All of the sheep issues, combined. Paxety. The press and the Left has wanted Iraq to = Vietnam. That silliness should be over now. I hope our pal Dinocrat doesn't mind if we quote at length from his excellent piece on Muslim bias in the MSM: When the story was just about Iraq, the MSM could set the following template: the Bush administration is responsible for the deaths of many innocent Iraqi citizens because of its incompetent planning and execution of the war. Moreover, US soldiers are known to have been involved in abuse and torture, and in any event, the terrorists were not in Iraq until the lying Bush and his WMD talk bungled America into the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s all Bush’s fault. Hmmmm, the MSM perhaps sound like the leading figures of one of our two great political parties, do they not? Those themes ran through 2003, the MSM and Democrat campaign of 2004, and right up to Jack Murtha in 2005. Almost every newscast, a new bombing, a new body count, and the subtext that it was all Bush’s fault. Then something changed. The MSM lost control of the template. The template fell apart in stages. First there was the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, a man who made clear his intentions to wipe Israel off the map and to make Jihad a global goal, well beyond anything having to do with Iraq. Next came the election of Hamas in Palestine, a crystalline moment when political power shifted to the leading group manufacturing suicide bombers, and whose charter and raison d’etre was the destruction of the Jewish state — again, nothing to do with Iraq. The final straw came with the cartoon riots. The cartoon riots not only destroyed the old media template (”Iraq is Vietnam”), but it created a new one (”Muslims are totally out of control”). Previously, the MSM had no problem whatsoever showing car bombings and suicide attacks in Iraq — such violence was the mainstay of Iraqi coverage. Despite the MSM’s senstivitiy to Islamic issues in their precious refusal to show the cartoons, they could hardly refuse to show the riots in Damascus and Beirut and in Pakistan and Indonesia and elsewhere, and the torching of embassies — these things were not only news, they were well within the scope of previous reporting. Only now the context was entirely different.
Well, of course they do, and steal lollipops too. But the No Child Left Behind nonsense has made it worse. That Bush bill was a typical Federal response to a local issue, and a complete waste of taxpayer $ for non-existent political gain. The kind of education kids get should be totally up to every town and village in America. The Feds have nothing of value to offer, other than free money - and the Feds should not be offering that either. It isn't their money, is it? ABC News shows how the States play games with their tests, so the voters don't get pissed off. H/T, basil.
I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether it accepts me. Bob Dylan
Thursday, March 9. 2006
 Who pays attention to the Poles? Capn Ed does. They are tired of the EU.
UN=US? Who wants to invade Darfur? Nobody wants to. What a mess. Austin Bay The Ivy League faculty Hates You. And they are better than you, too: Yale's behavior illustrates how bankrupt academic liberalism has become. Other than deeply-rooted anti-Americanism, I can think of no coherent theory that would justify admitting a former Taliban official as a Yale student while not permitting the U.S. military to talk to Yale students on campus.
A day in the life of a Chinese internet officer. Do not mess with Voltaire in France. Moslems trying to, but they are making themselves highly unwelcome, all across the globe. France seems to believe in two things: Easy life, and the Prophet Voltaire. Time for the Moslems to begin learning to understand other cultures. The MSM continues to campaign for the Dems. Why isn't it required that such MSM reporting be a campaing contribution? Distortion of facts is politics, not reporting. Warren Buffet says you're paying too much for financial advice. No diversity of opinion at Duke. Students plan to shut down Horowitz. Why so fearful of ideas?
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