Wednesday, January 10. 2007
Several men are in the locker room of a golf club. A cell phone on a bench rings and a man engages the hands-free speaker function and begins to talk. Everyone else in the room stops to listen.
MAN: "Hello"
WOMAN: "Honey, it's me. Are you at the club?"
MAN: "Yes"
WOMAN: "I am at the mall now and found this beautiful leather coat. It's only $2,500. Is it OK if I buy it?"
MAN: "Sure, go ahead if you like it that much."
WOMAN: "I also stopped by the Mercedes dealership and saw the new 2007 models. I saw one I really liked."
MAN: "How much?"
WOMAN: "$92,000"
MAN: "OK, but for that price try to get it with all the options."
WOMAN: "Great! Oh, and one more thing...the house I wanted last year is back on the market. They're asking $3,500,000"
MAN: "Well, then go ahead and give them an offer of $3,000,000., in cash. They will probably take it. If not, we can go a few extra 100 thousands if it's really a pretty good price."
WOMAN: "OK. I'll see you later! I love you so much!"
MAN: "Bye! I love you, too."
The man hangs up. The other men in the locker room are staring at him in astonishment, mouths agape.
MAN (turns and asks): "Anyone know who this phone belongs to?"
 We got tagged in the latest dumb blog game by our buddy Sensible Mom, and our shy editor Bird Dog got me out of my sickbed to request that I respond, to represent Maggie's Farm. OK - five personal things about me that you probably don't know and don't care to know:
1. I have bad luck with girls but I keep trying.
2. I have already blown half of my New Year's resolutions.
3. My favorite foods are clams and oysters on the half-shell, with beer. Also, stuffed clams. I hate shrimp.
4. I do not own a suit.
5. My favorite gun is my Belgian Browning 12 ga. O/U. Now I have to tag some folks. But who? Man, is this stupid.
 The Religio-Fascists are coming! The Religio-Fascists are coming!
Dunn at American Thinker considers ex-NYT reporter Hedge's new book. Last Sunday, The New York Times featured a review of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, in which author Chris Hedges makes the argument that millions of Americans are about to fall on their fellow citizens and punish them in the name of a righteous Lord. This is the latest of a series of such volumes - also mentioned is Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. We could add as well the recent "militant atheist" volumes by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, which are intended to serve the same readership for the same purpose. While reviewer Rick Perlstein doesn't particularly approve of the book in question, he does buy into the thesis. "Of course there are Christian fascists in America", he insists, followed by several anecdotes that demonstrate no such thing. "...they want dominion - for the Lord to make an America where other values are impossible to hold", he concludes.
And that, in a nutshell, is the latest left-wing horror story. The fascists are coming. They're waving crucifixes this time.
The book sounds either paranoid, or purely manipulative and political. Almost sounds like a "Scare the Jews" book. The Am Thinker piece here. Classical Values takes a look at the same subject. What these fear-mongers do not choose to understand is that Christians want dominion over nothing and nobody. Of course they prefer to live in a culture where Christian morality and Christian worship is valued - they would be foolish not to want that. But the dominion the Lord offers is a dominion of the Spirit, not a worldly one. It's called "The Kingdom of God." Maybe they just don't get it?
Bruce Kesler is the blog world's expert on medical insurance. He takes a look at the California plan, likes some of it, but not all of it.
Two ways of being a public intellectual: Robert Kagan and Noam Chomsky, in Comparative American Studies. (link only good for a day or two). I cannot cut and paste from it.
Boyd in The American Scholar has a fine critique of what they call "Theory" in the humanities. Somehow in the 60s, the humanities got terribly excited about having a world-debunking Theory - or a theory at all, without realizing that in all other disciplines theories are a dime a dozen. I think it made them feel rigorous and scientific to have a theory, but I don't think most of them ever took Physical Chemistry or Statistics, so they don't know much about the rigor and the self-criticism which are essential to serious theory-play. A quote: The position you represent has neither the intellectual nor the moral high ground you are so sure it occupies. Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.
It's not exactly light reading, but it's good. Here. A reader sent us a piece by Victor Hanson, a long-time prof himself, From the Classroom to the War. A quote: Why when academia is so critical of other American institutions, from the Republican party and corporations to churches and the military, does it ignore its own colossal failures? The level of knowledge of today’s graduate is the stuff of jokes, exactly what one would expect once a common shared instruction in science, history, literature, languages, and mathematics largely disappeared, replaced by a General Education potpourri of specialized classes in gender, race, class, and politics masquerading as knowledge-based?
Whole thing here.
From Stumbling and Mumbling: Given a choice between £44,000 for sure and a 50-50 chance of either £3,000 or £250,000, which would you choose?
Risk and risk aversion can be "logically illogical." Read the piece. This is the reason Captain Kirk was the Captain, not Mr. Spock, even though Mr. Spock had a higher IQ.
Video here. Bear with it.
 After this post, I am going to lie low today in my cabin with my DayQuil and a few bottles of ginger ale, plus a green tea every four hours. With this cold, I am irritable, sweating, achy, and marginally functional. If I die, give my Mac to my Mom.
What's this new iPhone? Is it a winner for Apple, or just another gizmo? The 15 nations of the UK, described. Handy list. Asst. Village Idiot. Why "multiculturalism" is baloney. The Nazanin story at Powerline. Frequently answered questions. Tee hee. Am. Digest Demonizing WalMart is a losing proposition. Betsy A nice rant by LaShawn, in praise of Oprah. There is no problem in the world that a little fascism cannot fix. Venezuela voted for totalitarian socialism. Venez. News and Views
We haven't shown a nice gun in a while. This is the ArmaLite AR-10 in .308 caliber - a good caliber. Mr. Free Market wants two - one for him and one for his lad. And I know Buddy would like one for popping the bunnies in his garden. Useful also for creating peace in the Middle East. 
Tuesday, January 9. 2007
Front Page takes a look at some the union-perpetuated myths. Quote: Few people are aware that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50 years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002. Since the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled. So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That didn't happen. For twelfth-grade students, who represent the end product of the education system, NAEP scores in math, science, and reading have all remained flat over the past 30 years. And the high school graduation rate hasn't budged. Increased spending did not yield more learning.
Whole thing here.
The enemy stands and fights. It's about time. Confed. Yank. Send in the Warthogs and maybe nail Al Sadr's pelt to the barn wall. I suggested to Confed. Yank that possibly the bad guys have their Beanie Baby collection hidden in that neighborhood.
 Brussels - The European Commission on Tuesday criticised the reported United States airstrike against a suspected al-Qaeda cell in southern Somalia, calling it counterproductive to peace efforts for the war-torn African country.
Is that predictable? I call it highly constructive to peace. Ya gotta love that nasty airplane - my second favorite after the A-10. It sounds like the bad guys were driven into a trap. (h/t, Polipundit) Update: I see our Special Ops came back to the same area today to bounce the rubble. Jolly good show.
Nurse makes a mistake, patient dies. Nurse is charged with a felony. (h/t, Moderate Voice)
Middlebrow has a good piece on the subject. I too have noticed how unsophisticated the thinking is about religion for those who haven't been adequately exposed/educated. I never see the sneering in my personal life, but maybe folks are being polite. I hate to be presumed stupid: at least give me a chance to prove it. A quote: Lately, secularists have taken to sneering rather than arguing. They simply assume all thoughtful people agree . . . and move on. When is a “silly” belief disqualifying? Very great men have believed very odd things . . . I would love to be tutored by Socrates (!) whatever his views on government. But the new secularism has no time for nuance or self-doubt. If a man is religious, then secularists know him to be a fool, an idiot, or a cad. If a secular writer is bright enough, then he might get away with calling a believer all three! To such folk there are good religious, folk like Cornel West, whose religious views are secularism with God-talk added.
and Secularists who are fools, idiots, or cads (the dear leader of North Korea, the Hollywood secularist of the moment, and Stalin in no particular order) are merely misguided . . . or not true secularists to the modern writer of such rot. Christianity may have helped invent modern science, the University, and produced much of the world’s great cultural treasures, but living Christianity is only to be despised, though to be fair any other religious group is hated just as heartily by these thoughtless secularists.
 Best summary I've seen on the challenges China faces and will face as wealth and economic freedom confront the totalitarian Communist Party. One quote from Huttonon in The Observer:
All societies are linked to their past by umbilical cords - some apparent, some hidden. China is no different. Imperial Confucian China and communist China alike depended - and depend - upon the notion of a vastly powerful, infallible centre: either because it was interpreting the will of heaven or, now, of the proletariat. In neither system have human rights, constitutional checks and balances or even forms of democracy figured very much. As a result, China has poor foundations on which to build the subtle network of institutions of accountability necessary to manage the complexities of a modern economy and society. Sooner or later, it is a failing that will have to be addressed.
Sign of Global Warming? Snapshot on right sent in from a reader in Camden, Maine, taken at the beach on Sunday morning. Adios to Freedom, Venezuela. You will soon be Cuba South. Blue Crab Yes, this is surreal. SDA. Pedophilia support in Canada. I guess it's a "life-style choice" like necrophilia and all those other philias. The quiet civil war in Spain. Am Thinker. Why not just give the Basques their freedom? What would that hurt? Minimum wage. Easy to demagogue, but a dumb idea. Cramer explains. But the real point, as we have said before, is that many union contracts are pegged to the MW. Britain's Channel 4 lifts up the rock, and doesn't like what they find underneath. Moonbattery The story of the Pig Races, here. (h/t, Gates of V) This story reminds me of the time my apt. got robbed in NYC, westside of Manhattan, but when we found the guy in the bathroom, he had my Brooks Brothers suit on, but I had a brand-new ice axe in my hands, and an annoyed attitude. Will tell the story sometime. Red-blooded American defiance from Classical Values: In a great post last week, M. Simon recognized how the Drug War helped facilitate the corruption so obviously apparent in the Duke University "rape" case. A common thread is popular hysteria, in which feelings are more important than freedom or facts. It's more important to win the drug war or stop cultural racism than to be concerned with trifles, and if the rules (or the Constitution) have to be bent or disregarded, so be it. Aren't we forgetting that under our system, certain principles are more important than facts? That if the police lied to get a warrant, it does not matter whether drugs were found? That even if a certain student displays evidence of racism (or a dislike of homosexuals), that does not make him guilty of rape? I'd rather keep my freedom, even if it's 70 degrees outside. There. I just said it. I'm prepared to face a Nuremberg tribunal for Holocaust advocacy.
Monday, January 8. 2007
In the UK, at The Sun (h/t, Am Princess)
A friend emailed me a site that has Filson gear at 30% discount: Goldthorpe.
 1. Loyal Reader: Thanks for the tip on the Big Damn Book of Sheer Manliness. Somebody should have given me that one when I was 15, but I see it didn't come out until '98. I done gess I jes gotta get me one for my own dam sef.
2. Another extraordinary "manspace" I have seen is an aquaintance who put a two-story cathedral-ceilinged addition on his house for his gun collection. No windows (for security), and a steel door to the rest of the house. Huge fieldstone fireplace with a Cape Buffalo headmount over the mantle, leather couches, antique oriental rugs, and balcony all around the second level with built-in mahogany gun racks for his collection of one example of every Winchester ever made. Plus enough other guns to fully stock a high-end gun shop. Room loaded with game heads - Africa and N. America - and mounted birds. A heavy glass door to the stairway to the stone-lined underground wine cellar. Wow. 3. Re the whole question of moderate Moslems towelheads, click continuation page for the really good kind of towelhead (almost, but not quite, work-safe):
Continue reading "Guy Stuff"
Seen this one? .
The Democrats now promise "A New Direction For America" . The stock market is at a new all-time high and America 's 401K's are back. A new direction from there means, what? Unemployment is at 25 year lows. A new direction from there means, what? Oil prices are plummeting. A new direction from there means, what? Taxes are at 20 year lows. A new direction from there means, what? Federal tax revenues are at all-time highs. A new direction from there means, what? The Federal deficit is down almost 50%, just as predicted over last year. A new direction from there means, what? Home valuations are up 200% over the past 3.5 years. A new direction from there means, what? Inflation is in check, hovering at 20 year lows. A new direction from there means, what? Not a single terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11/01. A new direction from there means, what? Osama bin Laden is living under a rock in a dark cave, having not surfaced in years, if he's alive at all, while 95% of Al Queda's top dogs are either dead or in custody, cooperating with US Intel. A new direction from there means, what? Several major terrorist attacks already thwarted by US and British Intel, including the recent planned attack involving 10 Jumbo Jets being exploded in mid-air over major US cities in order to celebrate the anniversary of the 9/11/01 attacks. A new direction from there means, what? Just as President Bush foretold us on a number of occasions, Iraq was to be made "ground zero" for the war on terrorism -- and just as President Bush said they would, terrorist cells from all over the region are arriving from the shadows of their hiding places and flooding into Iraq in order to get their faces blown off by US Marines rather than boarding planes and heading to the United States to wage war on us here. A new direction from there means, what? Now let me see, do I have this right? I can expect: The economy to go South Illegals to go North Taxes to go Up Employment to go Down Terrorism to come In Tax breaks to go Out Social Security to go away Health Care to go the same way gas prices have gone
 Do most men need a place to go to be alone, or to be with the guys, where they can feel undomesticated among their own stuff? I think so.
The barn, the garage, the workshop, the tack room, the gun room, and, in big houses, maybe the library or the study. A "family room" does not fit the bill - it defeats the purpose. Villainous Company takes a look at a new book, Manspace. Also, Dust my Broom shows you his. Gwynnie and I have a friend who has the best "manspace" I have ever seen. It's his boathouse, with a deck over the water. Inside, cabinets for his boating and fishing stuff, racks for fishing poles, racks suspended from the ceiling for masts, a pool table, a refrigerator filled with beer, a well-stocked humidor, a cooktop, a bar, TV, music and good speakers, etc etc. Decorated with hunting and fishing art. There's a big old wood stove, but he had the place heated and insulated.
 Phallus 101? I once dated a girl who must have taken that course, because she knew all about...never mind. The 12 Most Bizarre College Courses. Parents: Wise up. Your hard-earned money could be paying for some of this idiocy.
Finally, science comes up with something useful. Self-cleaning underwear. Hillary's flaws exposed. via RCP. I think her flaws are these: She is unlikeable, unpleasant, unfeminine, and appears calculating. That's leaving out her (for me) unacceptable politics. The more people try to live multiculturally, they more they lost trust (via A&L). Yeah, utopia is an elusive thing, ain't it? It's a no-brainer: the more you realize that someone is living by a different rule book, the warier you become. And it makes sense. Barak Obama is an apostate. Auster Does legal education need reform? I have no idea, but no Carnegie Foundation Report on anything would fail to include a call for reform. Reform and progress - like, groovy, Dude. Bush tells it like it is. Scrappleface. Medical humor You tube. Get yer fresh, warm, high-IQ Texas white embryos here. WaPo. What's the fuss? If you can pick your eggs at the supermarket by size and color, etc - why not your embryos? I must admit, though, that I always thought that the brown and white egg thing at the supermarket was a bit racist. On moral grounds, I always buy the brown. Creative destruction. Painful but necessary, like surgery. Dem Project looks at destruction in the newspaper biz. Two evil, nativist, immigrant-hating proposals, that came in over the transom: New Gas Plan....Bush wants us to cut the amount of gas we use. The best way to stop using so much gas is to deport 11 million illegal immigrants! That would be 11 million less people using our gas. The price of gas would have to come down as a result.
New Immigration Plan... Bring our troops home from Iraq to guard the border. When they catch an illegal immigrant crossing the border, hand him a canteen, rifle and some ammo and ship him to Iraq. Tell him if he wants to come to America, then he must serve a tour in the military. Give him a soldier's pay while he's there and tax him on it. After his tour, he will be allowed to become a citizen since he defended this country. He will also be registered to be taxed and be a legal patriot. This option will probably deter illegal immigration and provide a solution for the troops in Iraq, and the aliens trying to make a better life for themselves. If they refuse to serve, ship them to Iraq anyway, without the canteen, rifle or ammo. Problem solved.
Sunday, January 7. 2007
He had a bad year, but justice will be sweet. Newsweek (h/t, Betsy). Now he wants to be a defence lawyer. I should think so.
 Today is Christmas in some of the various denominations of the Eastern church.
Image is the Hagia Sophia, built in 537 - one of the architectural wonders of the world, but not a Christian basilica since 1453, when Moslem invaders conquered Constantinople and slaughtered the Christians - men, women and children. Speaking of which, here's a great time-line of what sorts of things prompted the Crusades. The Crusades were a reaction to Moslem imperialism, and Moslem imperialism never quit. It's part of their religion. As in Europe today, they will conquer without guns - when they can get away with it...but there is always a threat in the background. And yes, the image of Hagia Sophia has been photoshopped to reveal its original grandeur. Across the inlet lie some of the fancy Istanbul neighborhoods overlooking the Bosporus - some of the most expensive real estate in the world.
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