Friday, May 11. 2007
KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov speaks (h/t, No Pasaran). Topics: Useful Idiots, the Demoralization of the West, and Exploitation of the American Mass Media. I don't know when these videos were recorded.
A home without firearms is like a farmhouse kitchen without a fireplace. The Barrister
 There is a new magazine out there, Garden and Gun. It sounds like an ideal sort of Maggie's Farm magazine (h/t, Dr. Helen).
With a photo of Pat Conroy on the cover, how bad could it be? I'll give it a try, if only to find out whether it's more interesting than our Maggie's Farm blog. I am certain that it is better-written. Re gun mags, I used to subscribe to Shooting Sportsman, but it has become too snooty for my taste. Informative, though, if you own $60,000 shotguns instead of Mossbergs and Brownings like regular folks.
The photo on the left is a compelling argument for why Persian women should never be veiled. Indeed, covering such loveliness should be illegal. From a piece on rebellion against the burkha laws in Iran, at Gateway (photo borrowed stolen from the piece at Gateway). A propos of The Barrister's post on Market Failure, Dan Boudreaux discusses how "altruistic" lawmakers, and those with market agendas, conspire. The Bootleggers and Baptists theory. Since when were the '06 elections about Iraq? Just One Minute. Dems stalled out in Congress. Obama is for bans on semi-auto weapons. Hello? Does he know what semi-auto means? I have two semi-auto shotguns. Perhaps he means full auto, or does he not know what he is talking about? Why is income inequality a good thing? Because it indicates a good return on investment in human capital. It rewards it. Mankiw. If you tax away higher incomes to create an artificial income equality by erasing the free market for labor, you reduce the return on human investment, eg education, talent-improvement, self-discipline, delayed gratification, and skills acquisition - and thus discourage people from those desirable and life-enhancing things. Plus you obviously discourage people from working hard at difficult tasks. A divorce rate reversal in the US. AOL News Makers of Oxycontin get screwed. People get addicted to the meds, and the maker is blamed. Oxycontin is apparently a great drug: my oncologist friend says it has been a gift from God for patients with cancer pain and other chronic pain. There is no "high" at the correct doses. "Sending a chill." The NYT is worried. (But aren't they always worried about one thing or another, like a bunch of old women? They need a strong dose of optimism - or Oxycontin.) A darn good point from Dino. Read the Bonus Question about Imus. There is a movement to try to keep Paris Hilton out of jail, but did you know that there is a more worthwhile movement to keep her in jail - forever? Right Wing Nation. Truth is, I sort-of feel sorry for her: she is just a cute kid with a cute name, but without substance or brains, who has made herself an empty celeb. The attention must be gratifying, but what can it possibly lead to?
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free. P.J. O'Rourke
Thursday, May 10. 2007
 I don't want to hear another word from a Marxist masquerading as a scientist. I'm fresh out of patience for two-trust-fund Savanarolas trying to impress some lumpen girl with a cryptkeeper complexion and a shock of underarm hair by joining ELF and burning down condos and keying elaborate station wagons. I don't want another exposition on why the world will end yesterday by a hayseed Frankenstein's monster droning through an apocalyptic PowerPoint presentation with the graphs upside down and backwards.
And I especially don't want to hear another word about hydrogen. Why? Because it's stupid, that's why. The Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass says that she could believe “six impossible things before breakfast.” Such an attitude is necessary to discuss the hydrogen economy, since no part of it is possible. Putting aside the intractable issues of fundamental physics, hydrogen production costs, and distribution show stoppers, let us proceed to discuss the problems associated with the hydrogen cars themselves. In order for hydrogen to be used as fuel in a car, it has to be stored in the car. As at the station, this could be done either in the form of cryogenic liquid hydrogen or as highly compressed gas. In either case, we come up against serious problems caused by the low density of hydrogen. For example, if liquid hydrogen is the form employed, then storing 20 kilograms onboard (equivalent in energy content to 20 gallons of gasoline) would require an insulated cryogenic fuel tank with a volume of some 280 liters (70 gallons). This cryogenic hydrogen would always be boiling away, which would create concerns for those who have to leave their cars parked for any length of time, and which would also turn the atmospheres in underground or otherwise enclosed parking garages into explosive fuel-air mixtures. Public parking garages containing such cars could be expected to explode regularly, since hydrogen is flammable over concentrations in air ranging from 4 to 75 percent, and the minimum energy required for its ignition is about one-twentieth that required for gasoline or natural gas.
Robert Zubrin at the New Atlantis calmly eviscerates hydrogen weinies, and stomps on their bits. There will be some mathematics, and unlike the 'Reality Based' community, his numbers add up. You want a hydrogen economy? Go to the sun, and get me some.
 One of the puppies is graduating from college in two weeks, and will be moving to New York. She is a Math major with a Fine Arts minor, with plenty of street smarts - plus a Division 1 Varsity sport.
She sealed a deal with the job she wanted in back in November. Nice little "signing bonus," too. Yesterday she emailed me the website for the building in NYC into which she will be moving. Dang nice. This building has a doorman, a gym, and rooftop gardens. Plus she will have 6 pals from college and high school in the same building. Look out, New York, for the approaching tornado. When I lived in NYC, I lived in hovels and basement apartments with slovenly roomates and cockroaches, had few friends - and no money to paint the town even if I had wanted to. In those days, there were no buildings with gyms, indoor pools, and rooftop gardens anyway. Check out the details of the apartment building. I am jealous, but a professional curmudgeon like me should say "The kids today are so spoiled. They should be suffering and struggling, or in the Army, instead of romping around." She says she expects to work from 6:30 AM to 11 pm, so I guess it won't be all fun and games, and the pressure to be outstanding will be enormous...but that's Life in the Big City. (Sometime I will have to get her to record all of her job interview questions. One guy gave her five seconds to answer "What's 19X17?" Fortunately, she had memorized her multiplication tables through 20 rather than the ordinary 10. They also wanted instant decimal conversions, and tested the depth of her knowledge of statistics, Shakespeare, Latin, Mozart's operas, Thomas Aquinas, and Duccio. I take that as an effort to weed out the bullshit artists. A total of about eight hours of pressure interviews, spread over a few weeks, for each of the jobs she wanted. Most interviews included lunch or dinner at least once, which she rightly believes was an effort to check out her collegiality, sociability, manners, and poise under pressure.)
From a piece at Econlog: A reasonable theory of modern politics is that it is all melodrama. People take government less and less seriously, which makes politicians shout louder and louder to get our attention. Whenever a story breaks in the media, whether it be Terry Schiavo or the Virginia Tech killings, politicians rush to get in front of the camera to take advantage of it. That, I would suggest, is a sign of their desperation.
At Opinion Journal. The man owns the Dem party.
 The term "Market failure" has become a fashionable phrase for things that somebody claims "require government intervention" in the economy.
In my opinion, there is no such thing as market failure, given time, fair competition, and honest free markets. Markets always eventually reflect people's economic interests, and their personal desires. "Market failure" is used, it appears to me, whenever a political agenda, for better or worse, desires to overpower market forces to achieve some postulated "public good." Thus using the loaded term "market failure," as I have seen it used lately, is often a misnomer because it's not the "job" of markets to directly supply "public goods." Indeed, the term MF can be abused to apply to anything these days: legal help, medical care, the price of gas, environmental protection, eminent domain, Microsoft, wages - you name it. These days, the Left sees market failure everywhere they look for it because they do not like free markets (which means, to me, that they do not approve of the free choices people make). When politics intervene in markets, with all of the fearsome power of the State behind them, they enter perilous waters, but it is often politically necessary in democracies, and sometimes practically necessary. My political hero Teddy Roosevelt was a great market-intervener with his trust-busting, and I would not care to live in a village without zoning, a country without an army, or to invest my money without the SEC cops to keep markets reasonably honest. But once the door has been opened to market intervention, there is potentially no end to it. It can be a slippery slope to obnoxious authoritarian (see Mayor Bloomberg telling people what kinds of fat they can eat) and/or socialist solutions. That is the creepy part for a nation which was founded on an ideal of individual freedom (and the property rights which enforce individual freedom against the power of the State), but it has been one of the prime drivers of politics (and political funding) since FDR - who, to my mind - was a noblesse-oblige socialist: "Socialism for thee but not for me." Sort-of like the Clintons, but they lack the noblesse piece. Howard Dean sees a "market failure" in the small number of listeners to left-wing talk radio. That's a good example of how a well-functioning market can end up being politically labelled as a "failure:" people don't want what he wants to sell them. See Howard Dean: "We need to re-regulate the media." Photo: The Grand Bazaar in amazing Istanbul. A wonderful maze of a free market. I advise everyone to save their pennies and visit Turkey - and not just Istanbul. It is a fine and fascinating place to which I am eager to return. And I need a new rug, about 20X30'.
A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have. Thomas Jefferson
Elegant birds. The large Royal Tern is the size of a small gull. They live on our East Coast ocean beaches, and nest on dry sand bars. Like all of our terns, they are highly migratory, and make their living diving for small fish. You can read about Royal Tern here. Amateurs like me can easily confuse them with the Caspian Tern in the field (that is, on the beach). 
Wednesday, May 9. 2007
 Allons enfants de la Patrie... See why they use the word "enfants" in La Marseillaise? Students protest French election by going on strike, presumably against their own free education. No Pasaran
Al Gore proclaims "spiritual crisis" to cheering audience. This is getting too wierd for even me. . Judge decides Carriles might be tortured if he is sent to Venezuela? This man is a CIA trained terrorist who blew up a Cuban airliner and killed 76 people most of whom were members of the Cuban National Fencing team. A terrorist is a terrorist and this guy should be in jail or extradited. WaPo. This story made Opie very angry. . "I hate nanny." David Warren is frustrated with Harper . Sarko is wary of hedge funds and venture capitalists. Samizdata. Nobody's perfect. From a piece at Protein Wisdom: “Hate crimes have no place in America,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi boldly declared last week, “no place in a nation where we pledge every morning ‘with liberty and justice for all.’” Pelosi was urging her colleagues to approve a bill aimed at violence motivated by hostility toward members of certain designated groups.
I guess she didn't want to say what she should say, which is "Crime has no place in America." I am considering designating myself a crime-free zone because I am not in a government-protected class. Instead, I am in an S&W protected class. Cut the BS, Mr. Maliki. Who better to deliver that message than Dick Cheney? Lonesome George may get a girlfriend. But will he know what to say? What to do? Sound familiar? EU Referendum, on the UK politics of Iraq: ...this is not what Cameron has in mind. The strategy is to present the government sinking into an ever-deepening mess in the hope that it gets such a bad name (not that it actually needs much help) that even the previously unattractive Conservatives look electable. Power is the name of the game. If that means abandoning the people of Iraq, the good name of our Armed Forces and the national interest, so be it.
Good for Prof. Bainbridge for writing The Complete Guide to Sarbanes-Oxley. I hope his book is obsolete soon, though, because Sarbox is a crazy thing which has hamstrung American finance. Oxley himself agrees.
 It's not a classical logical fallacy, but the Zero-Sum fallacy, when applied to money and wealth, is one of the most common fallacies around. We mention it often at Maggie's Farm.
It is a delusion commonly held by the economically ignorant - a delusion which Lefty politicians are never in a hurry to disabuse them of. We are fortunate that it is fallacious, because it means everyone can potentially have whatever degree of wealth they want without detracting from anyone else's. Coyote re-posts his annual Wealth Creation and the Zero-Sum Fallacy.
Via YouTube. And here's one with an Airbus A380. How do they keep the airplane angled like that as they approach the runway? Or do they make an approach into the wind, crosswise to the runway, and then a quick turn when the wheels touch down?
Many have read Barone's piece on changing American demographics and the Interior Boomtowns. If not, a quote: The nation's center of gravity is shifting: Dallas is now larger than San Francisco, Houston is now larger than Detroit, Atlanta is now larger than Boston, Charlotte is now larger than Milwaukee. State capitals that were just medium-sized cities dominated by government employees in the 1950s--Sacramento, Austin, Raleigh, Nashville, Richmond--are now booming centers of high-tech and other growing private-sector businesses. San Antonio has more domestic than immigrant inflow even though the border is only three hours' drive away. The Interior Boomtowns generated 38% of the nation's population growth in 2000-06.
Read the whole thing.
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I like this, at Real Meal. (My blog friend Pastor Brian at Real Meal Ministries loves turtles, so you know he is A-OK.)
Both links via RCP: Edmund Burke on Sarko's election. This is a revolution he likes. By the way, I read his new book this winter. Essential reading. I think I read it in college, but forgot all of it. E.J. Dionne: The Left is Reeling. Dionne is a real person, but he always makes for a perfect straw man anyway. And also, Chirac's Legacy, at Ace
 What high heels do to a lady's body. Ah, the sacrifices women make for beauty. Just like Spring flowers, splurging their resources to make sure they get well-pollinated by healthy, clean and articulate, eager, sharp-dressed bumble-bees like me.
Cancer genetics tests for life insurance buyers? Why not, if they already want your cholesterol numbers, which are also largely genetically-determined? Another prominent scientist - Josef Reicholf - makes jokes about global warming. Moonbattery. More on tainted Chinese foodstuffs, this time it's fish food. Never, never eat anything from China, whether you be a dog, cat, fish, or human. Panda fun. It seems to require candle-lit dinners. More on why Hummers are more green than Priuses. Am. Princess Clinton quickly distances herself from her heroine, Segolene. Does this mean they won't be baking madeleines together? Beyond the usual pork. Reparations for Guam? Hmmm, do I recall that Guam is in Pelosi's district? Flopping. Ask the Japanese for money. I did nothing to harm Guam. (I have noticed, interestingly, that we have a regular reader in Guam.) Why Blinder is wrong about off-shoring jobs. Drezner A new Political Dictionary to educate the incorrect: ACRU. (h/t, and a couple of more definitions at Powerline) Speaking of polical correctness, look what is happening to this poor prof: Inside Higher Ed. His crime? He linked to the website of a former White House speechwriter and former presidential candidate. What is anthropology these days? At Harvard, they aren't sure. John Hawk's Weblog. I like that blog - will add it to our Science category. Car-burning party time in France. Why do they like to burn cars? Maybe it's fun to do? Or is it evidence of their famous "sophistication" and "intellectual nuance"? No - I am sure it is just ordinary destructive adolescent fun, with a hip political cover for it. I'd try it too, if I could do it legally, just for the fun of it. Plus it must be good for auto sales. Political demographics. People are moving from blue states to red, in search of lower taxes, better jobs. and a better life. But they carry their blueness with them. Betsy What should the Left propose, now that it has become morally and politically bankrupt? It has been 70 years since the Left had interesting new ideas and, in those 70 years, all of the problems they sought to cure have solved themselves in the US. So now what do they do? Book review in Dissent. If this makes sense to you, let me know. The Fort Dix jihad story. No interest in it. Lock these moron Moslemists up for life - no, don't do that. Jailing somebody costs over $40,000 per year, paid by taxpayers. Better idea, Sharia-style: Execution, or just cut off their right hands and send them back to Albania.
In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one part of the citizens to give to the other. Voltaire
Tuesday, May 8. 2007
 Canada's Menu Foods Income Fund (TSE: MEW.UN) is a major North American contract manufacturer of "wet" pet foods which are sold under a variety of brand names including Iams.
Their recalls have been in the news, as have the the animal death and illness resulting from contaminants in the rice or wheat gluten imported from China. The only importer whose name I have heard mentioned is the Denver-based Wilbur-Ellis, a large agricultural and chemical company which sold the Chinese product to Menu Foods. My guess is that someone in China added material to the gluten to give it the appearance of containing a higher amount of protein than it did. Many lawyers will make money on suits between the involved companies, and in class action suits like this one. One shrewd investor has told me that Menu Foods is an excellent business, and could be a buy around its current depressed price.
Silky Pony said this: Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said Tuesday that he worked for a hedge fund to learn more about financial markets and their relationship to poverty in the United States.
Ya can't make this stuff up.
 No Bush-hating liberal bias in the news. Anchoress. You see, Bush is too crude to greet a Queen, unlike Clinton. The NYT doesn't like Sarkozy either, because of his strained marital siutuation, unlike Clinton of course.
Social cohesion. Stumbling and Mumbling. Of course people prefer to hang out with people who are on the same page. It's called tribalism, and it is normal and healthy - and adaptive. I am careful to never underestimate the communication, understanding, trust, and assumption gaps when dealing with those from other cultures or even subcultures. I have been burned too often by erroneous assumptions. Do not eat any food made in China. SDA. Seriously. In the UK, politicians rank lower than car dealers in trust. (h/t, Worstall)
 From a piece at The Moderate Voice (h/t, reader):
Well, it’s very simple: they can all point the finger to themselves. They are all to blame, as is their socialist ideology. Socialism has had its day; socialism has brought moral decline, high unemployment rates, weak, unstable economies, huge governments, regulation in just about every area of one’s life; it has caused something called personal responsibility to disappear; it has brought moral relativism; it has learned us that we cannot be proud of our respective country; it has made large groups of people unnecessarily dependent on the government; it has forced us to accept the failed concept of multiculturalism; it has taught us (I mean Europeans in general with that) that whatever you do, you have to be politically correct; it has created an environment in which one is not allowed to name problems, let alone deal with them; it has taught us that criminals are not to blame for their crimes, society as a whole is and that they, therefore, should be coddled instead of punished… oef, the list goes on and on. Socialism has weakened France, and Europe as a whole; it is time to get rid of it.
Yup. It's hard to know which is worse - the economic damage or the psycho-cultural damage.
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