Saturday, May 5. 2007
 I will not use this blog to confess every possibly wrong, evil, or criminal thing I have done. That would be vulgar showing off.
Instead, I want to use this post to claim my victimhood! Maybe I can get some special treatment or power or money for it! (Please wire funds to my Cayman account.) It's an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. In my case, that shift was an intellectual awakening, but I have been mugged and robbed. Here's my tale of woe: NYC: 1970s, Saturday, a few days before Christmas, around 8 pm, with snow: On way to an Upper West Side Christmas party, walking happily along Morningside Drive in the lovely NY snowy evening, when a scruffy guy of no racial idenity jumps out of the park and sticks a handgun in my stomach, and requests money. Having worked all day driving the horse and buggies in Central Park (my cool college job), I had about $1300 in a wad in my back pocket, but half it it (not including tips) belonged to the stable on W. 48th St. Emptied my front pockets (change, subway tokens, a few crumpled one-dollar bills) and handed it to him. I did not appear wealthy, for sure. Guy takes it, and runs back into the snowy Morningside Park. My body shakes for an hour, until I have had a few drinks and tell the story at the party. In those times, a waste of time to call the cops. NYC: 1970s, May, Saturday, 11 am. Packing girlfriend's powder-blue Volkswagen convertible for a picnic out at Jones' Beach. Run inside to get blankets for our picnic. Run back out - car gone. Call cops. They say "Fuggedaboutit. Unless you really want to file a complaint. If you really want to bother, you can come down to the precinct and fill out the forms. We will need the VID and the registration, but you're better off just calling your insurance." During the Koch and Dinkins years, there was anarchy. All credit goes to Rudy for the NYC of today. Boston, 1980s: Sunday night, 11 pm. Three young guys of no racial identity begin following me to my car. I walk faster; they walk faster. I run; they hustle. They are overweight, and one waves what looks like a handgun. I have my keys out, jump into my car, lock the doors and turn on the engine and start off. They kick the bumper as I depart, leaving them in the dust. NYC: 1980s, Saturday, 5 pm. Return to Upper West Side apartment with friend after buying mountain-climbing equipment. Mainly crampons and ice axes. Find door open. Hear water running, and open bathroom door. Find young person of no racial identity dressed in my roomates' clothes in bathroom. Then find suitcases full of our stuff in the living room. Threatened guy with ice axes, told him to remove clothes and get the f- out before we killed him. Guy says "Don't be gettin no attitude" but makes hasty retreat with only his dirty jeans - no shoes or shirt. Yells from bottom of stairwell "I'll be back, M-f-." He never did come back. I think we seemed crazier than he was. Eventually, moved back to New England. All that has happened to me since has been one late-night emptying of the garage - all bikes and fishing gear gone in the morning. Fear-free, but dismaying. But never try to tell me that thieving and white-collar crime are equivalent to ugly crime. They are not equivalent in the degree of personal violation. Image: 1883, Murder in a railroad car
Friday, May 4. 2007
 Post Modern vs. More God. Bruce Kesler. We wanted to write a comment on this piece, but haven't found time. Good read.
YouTube gets a competitor who won't take down conservative voices. More funky architecture. Second Empire? Some people call it, erroneously, Victorian. Bush will veto new hate crime legislation. That is the right thing. Crime is crime, and all of us criminals should be treated equally. Another talk show guy - Boortz this time - targeted by the Left. But look at what he said! Same thing we say all the time. I am happy to see that Imus, although I am not a big fan - is sueing CBS in a big way. Heck - they hired him for his poor taste, so they shouldn't fire him for it. How Satan created the Brit NHS. Samizdata. Segolene gets desperate. What she forgets to mention, in her threats, is that the last bunch of riots happened with Chirac. Re our post on Prostitution, Anyone? this week, a happy hooker gets fired by her DC law firm. Well, at least she still has some marketable skills. A reminder from a piece at Powerline: ...al Qaeda itself has repeatedly said that Iraq is the biggest battlefield in their war against civilization. Here is Zawahiri, for example, writing to Zarqawi in July 2005: I want to be the first to congratulate you for what God has blessed you with in terms of fighting battle in the heart of the Islamic world, which was formerly the field for major battles in Islam’s history, and what is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era…
If you read our link to Ken Mehlman on Hispanic Repubs, maybe you missed our Dylanologist's frankly curmudgeonly if not acerbic comment: Hispanics are not really a bloc. White hispanics tend to go for Republicans (e.g. Cubans in FL), while Mestizo Hispanics (Mexicans, Salvadorans, etc) break 65-35 in favor of the Democrats. Unfortunately for the Republicans, it is the Mestizo Hispanics that are the rapidly growing part.
It's not like Mehlman is a guy to take seriously with stuff like this anyways. Remember his big effort with all the high-profile black Republicans running last fall - Steele, Blackwell and Swann? After he tried to get cozy with the NAACP? All lost big-time. So I guess, now, it's back to Hispanics as the "crucial vote" for Republicans. How a bit a little pandering to white folks for a change, Ken? Take them for granted and they just might choose to stay home - let me refer you to November 2006 as a case in point.
 Quoted from Towards a Totalitarian Europe, in Brussels Journal:
Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovksy has warned that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. When people who have worked on higher levels in the EU system note similarities as well, it is time people start taking this idea seriously.
I think people are learning that the best way to destroy liberty is incrementally, from within, working in and around democratic processes, rather than by force of revolutionary arms or invading armies. It's always "for your own good" or "for the greater good," and they always take your guns away first, in case people get cranky about being turned into sheep. This isn't paranoid: I don't think these folks are usually malevolent in intent, but malevolent in effect. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there is a thin line between the Nanny State and authoritarianism, as Tony Blair has amply demonstrated. Similarly, would-be invaders of nations have learned that it is more effective to do so via immigration than with arms. After all, if a million people try to cross a border with weapons they'll get shot, but if a million cross a border unarmed they will lay out a red carpet for you.
In Boston, they ask, how much does he know? In New York, what is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents? Mark Twain
Thursday, May 3. 2007
 If you are a true warming believer, it is time to start buying these bargains. A brilliant investment idea from Dust My Broom.
Get in before the hedge funds discover it! Our experts recommend putting all our your life savings into this unique real estate opportunity! Go for it! Then just bide your time. It might take ten years, or 50 years, or 100,000 years, but, someday, it may be the Yukon Riviera!...or maybe not. Image: A Palm Tree which recently appeared in a Winnipeg suburb.
 Gladiator graveyard discovered at Ephesus. Pathologists tell us how they died. (h/t, Wasson)
Banning the words "mom" and "dad" in California. True Moonbattery of the finest sort. John Edwards promises what Johnson "gave" us over 30 years ago. Surber. Guy seems out to lunch and out of touch. Guns in Switzerland. Everybody owns them. Alphecca. The Feinstein Scandal would be three weeks of front page news if she were a Repub. Do you doubt that for one minute? Indeed, it makes Cunningham look like an amateur. Bored with the presidential campaign? Absolutely. Betsy too. Way too early to think about, unless life bores you. Is a repeal of incest laws coming to Europe? Cramer. Hey - that sounds very progressive. Do your own thing, dude. Taboos are so middle class. Your tax dollars at work. The EEOC takes on The Salvation Army. The Truthers and the California Freeway. Ace. (Hint: it was an inside job...all the hallmarks of Halliburton?)
From Roger Kimball in New Criterion. Quotes: Of course, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. But it is remarkable what a large accumulation of eggshells we have piled up over the last century. (And then there is always Orwell’s embarrassing question: “Where’s the omelet?”) I forget the sage who described hope as the last evil in Pandora’s box. Unfair to hope, perhaps, but not inapplicable to that adamantine “faith in a better world” that has always been at the heart of the socialist enterprise. Talk about a hardy perennial! The socialist experiment has never worked out as advertised. But it continually blooms afresh in the human heart—those portions of it, anyway, colonized by intellectuals, that palpitating tribe Julien Benda memorably denominated “clercs,” as in “trahison de.” But why? What is it about intellectuals that makes them so profligately susceptible to the catnip of socialism? In his last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), Friedrich Hayek drily underscored the oddity: The intellectuals’ vain search for a truly socialist community, which results in the idealisation of, and then disillusionment with, a seemingly endless string of “utopias”—the Soviet Union, then Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Nicaragua—should suggest that there might be something about socialism that does not conform to certain facts. It should, but it hasn’t. And the reason, Hayek suggests, lies in the peculiar rationalism to which a certain species of intellectual is addicted. The “fatal conceit” lay in believing that, by exercising his reason, mankind could recast society in a way that was at once equitable and prosperous, orderly and conducive to political liberty.
A key quote concerns a subject about which our Dr. Bliss is often concerned (she often discusses the regressive effects of the nanny state) - the psychological influences of different forms of government on its citizens: Echoing and extending Tocqueville, Hayek argued that one of the most important effects of extensive government control was psychological, “an alteration of the character of the people.” We are the creatures as well as the creators of the institutions we inhabit. “The important point,” he concluded, “is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives.”
A fine, meaty essay. Read the whole thing.
"Well, I had to go down and see a guy named Mr. Goldsmith
A nasty, dirty, double-crossin', back-stabbin' phony I didn't wanna have to be dealin' with
But I did it for you and all you gave me was a smile
Well, I cried for you - now it's your turn to cry awhile
I don't carry dead weight - I'm no flash in the pan
All right, I'll set you straight, can't you see I'm a union man?
I'm lettin' the cat out of the cage, I'm keeping a low profile
Well, I cried for you - now it's your turn, you can cry awhile
Feel like a fighting rooster - feel better than I ever felt
But the Pennsylvania line's in an awful mess and the Denver road is about to melt
I went to the church house, every day I go an extra mile
Well, I cried for you - now it's your turn, you can cry awhile
Well, there's preachers in the pulpits and babies in the cribs
I'm longin' for that sweet fat that sticks to your ribs
I'm gonna buy me a barrel of whiskey - I'll die before I turn senile
Well, I cried for you - now it's your turn, you can cry awhile
You bet on a horse and it ran on the wrong way
I always said you'd be sorry and today could be the day
I might need a good lawyer, could be your funeral, my trial
Well, I cried for you, now it's your turn, you can cry awhile" "Cry a While," from 2001's Love and Theft. Watch Dylan's performance of this song at the 2002 Grammy's here.
Our House Wrens flew in last night. We have about three pairs around the place, and they let you know when they arrive with their loud chatter. This means warblers are arriving too, but I haven't had a chance to look around yet.
 Quoted in NRO (h/t, Classical Values), regarding the new documentary Indoctrinate U:
...I was struck by the scientist who said that her students were able to figure out her politics simply by noting what she did not say. Just by teaching her subject, without adding extraneous leftist political harangues, she had revealed herself to be a closet Republican. You won’t believe what happened when the faculty found out about her politics. But the full horror story is almost less disturbing than the reality of that single observation about silence. Particularly in some of the non-science disciplines, it really has gotten to the point where mere silence on matters political is enough to reveal you as the enemy.
Whole short piece at NRO here. Register your interest in seeing the documentary here. See the trailer here. What does it take to be an academic pariah? Be conservative. Powerline. It's not funny. Deeply disturbing and distressing. Maoist. Another plug for the Indoctrinate U documentary. If the main job of education is to transmit foundational knowledge, values, and the culture, it cannot be done without a required core. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) have one. Fun to read. Columbia and Chicago have the best ones I know of, but every college has a potential core curriculum - it's just not required. Only Mom and Dad can require it - and they should. Ask us what we have required, if you're interested. Or maybe I will post it. ACTA is not pleased with the Vanishing Shakespeare. Their report here. Freshman Algebra in 1961. Right Wing Nation. I especially like the quiz questions like "How would you approach this problem?" and "Why can't this problem be solved?" My opinion on high school? No reason for it to be four years. Three is enough to do the job. Trivia question: when and why was American High School increased from three to four years? And, of course, for grown-ups who feel inadequately educated (that should mean everyone), don't take a course. Use The Teaching Company. I have never been disappointed in them. Photo: Columbia's Hamilton Hall, across College Walk. Interesting that Columbia College is now the most competitive liberal arts college in the country, and has the largest required core curriculum and the largest number of required courses. That says something. You can thank Rudy and Bloomberg too, who have cleaned up the city.
Wednesday, May 2. 2007
 1. Rolling Stones --- I Can't Get No Cir-cu-lation
2. The Bee Gees--- How Can You Mend a Broken Hip?
3. Bobby Darin--- Splish, Splash, I Was Havin' a Flash.
4. Ringo Starr--- I Get By With a Little Help From Depends.
5. Roberta Flack--- The First Time Ever I Forgot Your Face.
6. Johnny Nash--- I Can't See Clearly Now.
7. Paul Simon--- Fifty Ways to Lose Your Liver
8. The Commodores-- - Once, Twice, Three Times to the Bathroom.
9. Marvin Gaye--- Heard It Through the Grape Nuts.
10. Procol Harem--- A Whiter Shade of Hair.
11. Leo Sayer--- You Make Me Feel Like Napping
12. The Temptations--- Papa's Got a Kidney Stone.
13. Abba--- Denture Queen.
14. Tony Orlando--- Knock 3 Times On The Ceiling If You Hear Me Fall.
15. Helen Reddy--- I Am Woman, Hear Me Snore.
16. Willie Nelson--- On the Commode Again.
17. Leslie Gore--- It's My Procedure and I'll Cry If I Want To.
18. Rolling Stones --- Hey! You! Get Off Of My Lawn.
19. Herman's Hermits--- Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Walker
and, 20, Herman again --- Baby, Baby, Can You Feel my Heart Beat?
"Do I have to kiss her?" I liked this, at Captain Capitalism.
How do the Repubs get, and keep, Hispanic voters on board? I hate to think in terms of voting blocs, but I guess they do exist, at least statistically. Ken Mehlman, via RCP
 Dems snub President Uribe. Why? Because he's not a socialist dictator? Colombia is becoming a shining island of sanity in a sea of garbage. Everyone in the US should be cheerleading Colombia onwards.
So how did the NYT do on their real estate deal? Not too well. Not much is working well for the NYT these days. The ten prayers God always answers with a "Yes." Anchoress. Bill Clinton's civil rights record. Jim Miller. But who cares? Maybe the Repub politicians stink, but at least they don't come up with insanity like this.
For May Day, Dr. Sanity took on the amusing issues which emerge when different victim groups have conflicts. The Socialist Food Chain.
When reading about the DC Madam who has essentially outed thousands of clients by turning her records over to ABC News, I wonder whether prostitution should be illegal. (I used to think that the pill and the "sexual revolution" - if there was any such thing - would render prostitution obsolete, but I guess not.) I am not asserting that it should be legal (I tend to think not, but it is legal in Nevada, isn't it?) - just wondering. What do y'all think?
"My Daddy always told me if you hang around with smart people, some smart will rub off on you, and if you hang around with dumb people, some dumb will rub off on you, but if you hang around with rich people, you will go broke picking up dinner tabs." Tommy Earl Bruner, in Dan Jenkin's classic Baja Oklahoma
Tuesday, May 1. 2007
Tony Blair's legacy. Quoted from a piece in the Daily Mail (h/t, Samizdata): Tony Blair has shown himself the most accomplished political actor ever to occupy the premiership. He is an orator of near-genius, a performer who has for years dominated party conference platforms, TV studios, Parliament, White House press conferences, even the U.S. Congress. Put him before an audience in his heyday, whether of three people or 3,000, and he could weave a spell worthy of Gandalf. But now let us step over the camera and lighting cables, walk past the brilliantly painted frontage of whichever modern temple of glitz he is patronising - the Millennium Dome would be appropriate - and venture backstage. Examine the real Britain after ten years of Blair.
Read the whole thing.
 A Man of Two Havanas. Trailer from the film at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Overfishing bothers me a great deal. We are eating odder and odder fish, too, and the stocks of the old standards are depleted. Did you even wonder what "Chilean Sea Bass" was? It's a Patagonian Toothfish. And "Orange Roughy" is a Slimehead. Can't imagine why they changed their names for the menus. Another warmenist recants, and this one puts his money where his mouth is. Blair. Meanwhile Prince Chuckles wants a war against the climate. DC editors don't want to post the madame's list of names. Why not? In NYC, the names of johns are printed in the paper. Well, somebody will, sooner or later. Somalis in Nashville? Yes, and they are ripping us off. Dust my Broom goes multiculturally sensitive: permits "New Canadian" with different views to beat up wife. I take it as a good sign that the insurgents are killing each other. A "controlled civil war" could work to the Iraqis' advantage. A Brando festival at The Shelf An appendectomy via the mouth. Laparoscopic surgery was amazing, but this new NOTES is something else again. Jeff Jacoby, via Austin Bay: Senator John McCain, adamantly supporting the current “surge” in Iraq, says he would rather lose a presidential campaign than a war. Democrats, all smiles, prefer to lose the war and win the campaign. They’re not alone. In Iraq, Al Qaeda is smiling, too.
This is a re-post from May 17, 2006, following Bush's speech on immigration: Robert Samuelson's op-ed in today's Washington Post, almost alone among the commentary I have seen in recent days, takes a sober, rhetoric-free look at the long-term economic and social consequences of our nation's unwillingness to control how many and what sort of foreigners we choose to allow into the United States. President Bush's immigration speech mostly missed the true nature of the problem. We face two interconnected population issues. One is aging; the other is immigration. We aren't dealing sensibly with either, and as a result we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict. On the one side will be older baby boomers demanding all their federal retirement benefits. On the other will be an expanding population of younger and poorer Hispanics -- immigrants, their children and grandchildren -- increasingly resentful of their rising taxes that subsidize often-wealthier and unrelated baby boomers. Does this look like a harmonious future?
Such big-picture analysis of the demographic future of our country - which, unlike the price of oil, the value of the dollar, or the cost of buying a home, can be predicted with a reasonable degree of certainty - is virtually unknown among policymakers or journalists. Continuing, Samuelson argues that in focusing exclusively on illegal immigration, we have missed the forest for the trees: The central problem is not illegal immigration. It is undesirably high levels of poor and low-skilled immigrants, whether legal or illegal, most of whom are Hispanic. Immigrants are not all the same. An engineer making $75,000 annually contributes more to the American economy and society than a $20,000 laborer. On average, the engineer will assimilate more easily.
This ought to be common sense, but such things are rarely if ever discussed honestly or forthrightly. The obsessive desire on the part of Bush and the Senate to flood this country with poor, uneducated, non-English speaking workers will have incalculable consequences down the road for virtually every area of American society, and Samuelson deserves credit for sounding the alarm.
Music frozen in time, and in symbols. Best thing I've seen today, and a true Da Vinci-type code, via Blue Crab.
“To promote vulnerability as a moral virtue is not merely foolish. ...it signals to everyone that you’re not in the real world.” Mark Steyn (h/t, Kim du Toit)
 Today is Illegal Alien Rally Day - a day which mocks American sovereignty and which celebrates the exploitation of American soft-heartedness and soft-headedness.
Boortz has some hard-headed ideas about how to deal with it. One of two Mexican families have relatives in the US, Drudge reports. Does that mean that if illegals are given citizenship, half the population of Mexico could move to the US? Remittances to families in Mexico is Mexico's second largest source of foreign currency, after oil, and far ahead of tourism. Linknzona looks at the crime mess in the Southwest, created by illegals. Of course, they are all criminals by definition anyway. We have 623,000 released alien fugitives in the US. Michelle. From a year ago, Mark Helprin on The Unvarnished Immigration Debate in the WaPo. A quote: Businesses large and small, careerists with Latin nannies, and those who want wages low, the unions suppressed and their gardens well tended have made common cause with their political opposites. The latter, who have embraced multiculturalism and bilingualism, and who, though they may be little blast furnaces of ostentatious compassion, are in their disdain for America as ruthless as commissars, would be delighted to see it changed any which way as long as it becomes unrecognizable. If you worry about the potential for California and the Southwest to calve like melting glaciers and cleave to Mexico, or vice versa, the left will mock your distress as it once mocked and reviled anticommunism. And in the same vein the equanimity of the business right is similar to the self-satisfaction of those who would have sold Lenin the rope with which he planned to hang them. This is the lobby, strange as it may seem, for illegal immigration.
Working in Mexico: The following is a re-post from about a year ago. A comment from a director with Southwest Bell in Mexico City. I spent five years working in Mexico. I worked under a tourist visa for three months and could legally renew it for three more months. After that you were working illegally. I was technically illegal for three weeks waiting on the FM3 approval. During that six months our Mexican and US Attorneys were working to secure a permanent work visa called a FM3. It was in addition to my US passport that I had to show each time I entered and left the country. Barbara's was the same except hers did not permit her to work. To apply for the FM3 I needed to submit the following notarized originals (not copies) of my: 1. Birth certificates for Barbara and me. 2. Marriage certificate. 3. High school transcripts and proof of graduation. 4. College transcripts for every college I attended and proof of graduation. 5. Two letters of recommendation from supervisors I had worked for at least one year. 6. A letter from The St. Louis Chief of Police indicating I had no arrest record in the US and no outstanding warrants and was "a citizen in good standing." 7. Finally; I had to write a letter about myself that clearly stated why there was no Mexican citizen with my skills and why my skills were important to Mexico. We called it our "I am the greatest person on earth" letter. It was fun to write. All of the above were in English that had to be translated into Spanish and be certified as legal translations and our signatures notarized. It produced a folder about 1.5 inches thick with English on the left side and Spanish on the right. (The remainder of his note on continuation page below)
Continue reading "Illegal Immigration: Mayday Mayday Mayday"
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It's not like Mehlman is a guy to take seriously with stuff like this anyways. Remember his big effort with all the high-profile black Republicans running last fall - Steele, Blackwell and Swann? After he tried to get cozy with the NAACP? All lost big-time. So I guess, now, it's back to Hispanics as the "crucial vote" for Republicans. How a bit a little pandering to white folks for a change, Ken? Take them for granted and they just might choose to stay home - let me refer you to November 2006 as a case in point.