Friday, November 30. 2007
Today, new big flat monitor, new potent Dell box/server, new everything -perfect for a blog editor and busy human being (but one who is a bred-in-the-bone Yankee and hates to spend money). Thanks to the Mrs. Bird Dog and to Larry The Local Tech Genius for the delightful surprise. I did not know what "fast" meant until this afternoon. Backed up automatically too, on the accessory hard drive, which has been a major headache in the past for some of my projects. Happy Bird Dog.
From a series of clips of Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher interviewing Friedman in 2005. More of the clips here. h/t, MouseNaround
We do not believe that the best liberal arts educations are necessarily at the most competitive colleges, but we do tend to believe that the smartest kids will be your competitors and colleagues at the most competitive colleges. WSJ ranks high schools by college admissions.
 The New Yorker wonders, in a book review, whether it's cool to be a carnivore now.
Who cares whether it's cool? Only The New Yorker, and they should be above such superficial nonsense. But, I agree with one thing - who can remember all of the cuts of a cow, and where they come from? I can remember the cuts of a White-Tailed Deer, however, having butchered my share. Excellent cartoon from the article.
Please, do not overreact. Erin Burnett, who undoubtedly is so smart that she would still be reading the news on MSNBC even if she looked like Madeline Albright, has referred to the POTUS as a "monkey." Twice. A lot of grim, humorless, authoritarian conservatives will get their panties in a bunch over this, and feebly ask for some sort of retraction. Pshaw, I say! Can't people who read the [scare quotes] news [end scare quotes] have opinions? Can't Erin have the hots for that Gallic midget instead of the Plano one? Can't we all just get along?
I say yes. In the spirit of the exchange, I'd like to remind everybody who finds this offensive to lighten up, and also do my part to support Ms. Burnett by jocularly suggesting that she get in the kitchen and make some noise with those pots and pans. My sammich ain't gonna make itself.
By the way, Erin, in honor of President Bush accompanying the hunky leader of the country that until fairly recently ruled Algeria, perhaps next time you should refer to Bush as a macaca. I doubt anyone will mind.
 More thoughts on the Dems as the party of the rich. Dr. Sanity
Venezuelans flee to NYC. NY Sun Rodney King. Still an icon of dysfunctionalism. How to go to college for free. How to date at the office. Dr. Helen Keep your laws off my body. Except... Coyote The Dems want a bilingual America. Pure pandering, IMO. I can speak French and German (and a little English, aka Modern Friesian), and the only thing that might motivate me to learn Spanish is to read Cervantes. The only language I covet is Sienese Italian. The latest on cybercrime and spambots. We have had our tussles with spambots here. Prepare ye for the end! Rick Moran thinks Pat Buchanan's new book is over the top. CNN: We're not embarassed by our lack of journalistic integrity Dr. Bob on Medicare: The history of Medicare is a history of regulatory tyranny which invariably results in “unintended and perverse consequences.” When your local hospital closes, after this proposal is implemented, be sure to write your Congressmen and local Medicare officials to express your deepest appreciation for their efforts to improve health care quality.
Thursday, November 29. 2007
"To be alone with you
Just you and me
Now won't you tell me true
Ain't that the way it oughta be?
To hold each other tight
The whole night through
Everything is always right
When I'm alone with you.
To be alone with you
At the close of the day
With only you in view
While evening slips away
It only goes to show
That while life's pleasures be few
The only one I know
Is when I'm alone with you.
They say that nighttime is the right time
To be with the one you love
Too many thoughts get in the way in the day
But you're always what I'm thinkin' of
I wish the night were here
Bringin' me all of your charms
When only you are near
To hold me in your arms.
I'll always thank the Lord
When my working day's through
I get my sweet reward
To be alone with you." "To Be Alone With You," from Nashville Skyline. Bob growls out a version from a 2002 show - the second to last before he started playing the keyboards - in the Youtube below.
A re-post from 2005. The Red-Tail migration is in full force right now, and I am seeing them everywhere. I had one perched above my porch a week ago, eyes fixed on my bird feeder waiting for a squirrel.  The Red Tailed Hawk is the most commonly-seen hawk in the US and Canada, especially in winter when he likes to hang out along highways and in suburbs, on the look-out for rodents. His white chest is usually more noticeable than his rusty-red tail which is only seen from the back, or when he turns in flight and the sun catches it.
He is a "buteo" - the large, plump, soaring family of hawks with rounded wings (called buzzards in Europe). The Red Tail is a versatile creature, able to make a home even in NYC's Central Park, where "Pale Male" has been raising families for several years on rats and pigeons. This hawk's call is a distinctive "Keeeeeeer" which sends a chill down the spine of all little warm fuzzy critters. He'll take a pheasant from a shooting field, but his hamburgers are rodents - rats, rabbits, squirrels and mice. He will grab a foolish pigeon if he can. He is migratory, with population shifts south during winter, such that our New England winter birds are likely Canada breeders. Learn more about the mighty Red Tail: Click here: All About Birds
What's under the surface of the sea, or outside in the dark, or beyond the light of the campfire, or in the deep woods beyond the lawn and the woodpile? The human imagination populates the unseen with its inner visions - unless it knows from experience what is really there. A few nights under the stars, for example, will rid one of all fears of what's beyond the woodpile at night - unless you live in Grizzly country. Sippican takes a look at city folk in the country: Not Even a Concierge Can Save You Now.
I have been considering the work of young Cuban artist Ernesto Estevez, and like this painting of his:  Our editor Bird Dog asked whether that was hyperrealism or plain realism. I think he likes to put art in categories. Here's what Wikipedia said: Wikipedia: Early 21st century Hyperrealism was founded upon the aesthetic principles of Photorealism. However, it is starkly contrasted with the literal approach found in traditional photorealist paintings of the late 20th century. Despite any apparent similarities, the two styles are distinctly apart from one another. Hyperrealist painters and sculptors use photographic images as a reference source from which to create a more definitive and detailed rendering, one that unlike Photorealism, often is narrative and emotive in its depictions. Photorealist painters tended to imitate photographic images, often omitting or abstracting certain finite detail in order to maintain a consistent overall pictorial design. They often consciously omitted human emotion, political value and narrative elements.
I would call the painting below by Denis Peterson photorealism, but I am not sure. Artists just paint what they want: Claudio Bravo. This is Cristo en el Sepulcro (charcoal on paper):
The government as Santa the Thief (who and what is "Santa the Thief"? We will tell you later.)  The Trouble with Limited Government, by Voegli at Claremont. One quote:
Reagan was elected president 25 years after the first issue of National Review declared its intention to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." This was an amazing ascent for a political movement that started out, in the words of NR's first editorial, "superfluous" and "out of place." In the 25 years since Reagan's election, however, conservatives determined to scale back the welfare state might as well have been standing a respectful distance behind history, whispering "please slow down." If conservatism has a future, those who want to fashion it need to acknowledge and understand this stunning defeat. In National Review last year Ramesh Ponnuru said the "real crisis" is that, while a conservatism whose "central mission" does not emphasize the fight against Big Government is inconceivable, a "political coalition in America capable of sustaining a majority" for that mission is unimaginable. Conservatism, in other words, can have a purpose or it can have a prospect. It cannot, apparently, have both. This political problem will only become more acute as the challenges of governance become more severe. One yardstick may help conservatives feel a little better about themselves. In 1981 federal spending was 22.2% of GDP; last year it was 20.3%. This measure hovered in a very narrow band for the whole era, never exceeding 23.5% or falling below 18.4%. Adding expenditures by states and localities confirms the picture of a rugby match between liberals and conservatives that is one interminable scrum in the middle of the field. Spending by all levels of government in America amounted to 31.6% of GDP in 1981, and 31.8% in 2006. Conservatives, though, can't take much solace from fighting Big Government to a draw.
Read the whole thing. Readers know my view: the only vision which can compete with the vision of childlike dependency on an omnipotent State is the old Yankee vision of the individual freedom and dignity of sturdy, honest, self-reliant family people who proudly forge their way through life, take their lumps, ask for nothin' from nobody, and want a government which only protects freedom and which "governs least." That noble vision was an easy sell in 1789, but not so easy today. From the board-room to agri-business to greedy geezers, everybody now seems to want a government Santa, and to feed at the trough of the income tax and the federal debt - and even invents ways to morally justify it. Heck, if I live to Medicare, I will probably take it too - but I will hate myself for doing so. There is a soul-degrading vicious cycle at work: the more you tax people, the less money they have to take care of their families - so the more they will want, or even need, "freebies." Am I old-fashioned to distrust and fear government power and control? Are we really just government-intoxicated decadent Europeans, on a different continent with different accents or a different language, instead of the stalwart, rugged, independent Americans of history? Was it just a dream?
I cannot fulfill my usual editorial duties today because I will be busy getting ready for our annual conservation charity event tonight for Ducks Unlimited. Eleven million acres under protection for wildlife habitat, with no government money - that's a darn good cause. We will pre-post some useful new stuff today, and stuff from the archives. No dead air! Image: David Maas "Wood Ducks", over a DU Reclamation Project sign
Wednesday, November 28. 2007
For many more old, not very PC ads, including "Is it always illegal to kill a woman?", here at Daily Mail
 Ormbsy in The NY Sun begins:
One fine late 18th-century morning, an affluent collector named Thomas Butts came to call on his friend William Blake and found the poet and his wife sitting stark naked in the summer house of their modest lodgings in Lambeth. The happy couple, "freed from those troublesome disguises which have prevailed since the Fall," as his early biographer Alexander Gilchrist put it, were reciting Milton's "Paradise Lost," with William taking the part of Adam and his wife Catherine the role of Eve. Butts was embarrassed, but Blake called out, "Come in! It's only Adam and Eve, you know!" If you or I did this, Gilchrist remarks, "it would be time for our friends to call in a doctor," but in Blake's case, he writes, a recitation of Milton in the nude served to demonstrate the "full simplicity and naïveté" of the poet's character. And yet, Blake was neither simple nor naïve. For him, the everyday world was only the thinnest band of a vast spectrum which extended from the smallest grain of sand to all eternity. To become Adam in the Garden — or, for that matter, Moses or Socrates — he needed only to open wide the eyes of his imagination.
Read the whole thing.
The MSM finally calls Bill out on his big lies. Story at Surber.
 The hottest Christmas item I have heard about this year is this Nespresso single-serve espresso/cappuchino machine sold at Bloomingdales.
I do not want one.
 I was invited by our editor to comment on a piece, Talking Back to Prozac, in the paleo-Commie and reliably long-winded NY Review of Books.
The essay/book review by Frederick Crews is semi-hysterically worried about antidepressants, but the real theme motivating the essay seems to be the astonishing and scandalous fact that Big Pharma makes money from developing and selling medicine. Well, slap me with a mackeral and call me Mildred. That's terrible news. Maybe non-profits, or the government, or the UN should be developing the new treatments, and giving them away for free. OK, one of the books, the one by Christopher Lane - How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, sounds like it makes some good points. Everything is pathologized today (and granted a fancy diagnosis to get insurance coverage) - and every child is supposed to be perfect. The assumption is that we/they could be, if only the government or somebody really smart ran the world, like the people at the New York Review of Books. I don't have time to comment further, except to say that antidepressants - the older ones, and the SSRIs and the hybrids, have, overall, been a great boon to mankind. The point is correct that depression and anxiety disorders are not really a "chemical imbalance" - except in the case of true Bipolar Disorder (and not the faux bipolar disorder that everybody and their kid and cousin is diagnosed with these days). That would be equivalent to claiming that a headache is a Tylenol deficiency. Anxiety and depression are usually symptoms of complicated mental states - time-consuming, expensive, and often frustrating if not impossible to get a grip on. Some people chose to try to get to the bottom of it, some choose the band-aid alone, and some people refuse medicine. It's a free country. I have always valued Joyce McDougall's A Plea for a Measure of Abnormality: I am not a psycho-utopian, or any other kind of utopian, but I think we all should be grateful for what the drug companies do. Eliminating pain is God's work. And no, shyness is not a disease.
 I always wondered about this too: PC says kids cannot hold hands, but they should get condoms in school. Protein
Gingrich predicts Obama in Iowa. Why does Free Speech matter? Stumbling All about the Sten Gun. FMFT Excllent update on the endlessly-annoying and tedious subject of the Palestinians, at Jules Update on Hillary Clinton's radical past: via Powerline Is $97,000 family income rich? Polipundit discusses. No, it certainly is not rich in the Northeast, after 45% state and federal taxes and a mortgage payment. More on The Sound of Settled Science. Small Dead Lemmings. Jewish students flee Moslem mob in Canada Control freakery in the EU: Tangled. And speaking of creeping tyranny via nanny state regulation of everything, see "Reasonable Regulations" at Alphecca. The history of ideological hatred. It's about ideology replacing religion. From a piece by Dunn at Am. Thinker: It will grow more rabid in time, as it always does. When Rudolph Giuliani is elected, they will turn on him the same way they did Bush. They already have in New York City. (In all discussions of Giuliani's "failings" I have yet to see anyone point out that Giuliani is the sole Republican candidate who has put the boot to the liberals successfully and repeatedly.) For that matter, Mitt Romney would be in for the same treatment if he were elected. Even Ron Paul, borderline radical that he is. Any Republican elected to high office will be treated the same for the foreseeable future. So the media may as well knock off all the marveling on how hated Republican office holders are. At this point, it's simply part of the job description. Liberalism has become the party of hate -- the first major party to fit that description since the heyday of the Know-Nothings. You can check the record and see how long they lasted.
 "Liberal Fascism"? Quoted from a Leftist French magazine in a piece at American Future:
Why so much hatred (for Chavez)? Because at the same time social-democracy is undergoing an identity crisis in Europe, historic circumstances seem to have confided the responsibility of taking the lead at an international level in the reinvention of the Left to Mr. Chávez. While on the Old Continent, European reconstruction has had the effect of making any alternative to neo-liberalism practically impossible, in Brazil, in Argentina, in Bolivia and in Ecuador, inspired by the Venezuelan example, experiments that keep the hope of realizing the emancipation of the humblest alive continue to succeed one another. In this respect, Mr. Chávez’s record is spectacular. We can understand how he has become the required benchmark in dozens of poor countries. In his scrupulous respect for democracy and all its freedoms [!], has he not re-founded the Venezuelan nation on a brand new basis, legitimated by a new Constitution [!] that guarantees popular involvement in social change? Has he not rendered their dignity as citizens to some five million marginalized people (including the indigenous people) deprived of identity papers? Has he not taken back in hand the public company Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA)? Has he not de-privatized the country’s principal telecommunications company as well as the Caracas electricity company and returned them to serving the public? Has he not nationalized the Orinoco oil fields? Finally, has he not devoted a share of oil rents to acquiring effective autonomy vis-à-vis international financial institutions as well as autonomy for the financing of social programs?
Ah, government trying to run businesses! How quaintly 19th Century! How idealistic! How caring! It's "for the people"! Kinda like Hillary Clinton on the US oil companies: "I am going to take those profits..." Indeed, there is no greed in the business world that can compare with government greed for money and power. Chavez' "progress, " however, includes no food on the supermarket shelves. While I do not have the same trust in Venezuela's voting as Jimmy Carter does, it remains a fact that dictatorship by popular vote, and tyranny by popular vote, has a long history. However, this "liberation of the masses," as Gateway noted yesterday, is requiring lethal force and, remarkably, students and professors are in opposition (as they likely would not be in the US): Demonstrations also occurred in other cities: Maracay, Valencia, Yaracuy and Puerto La Cruz and there is information that many professors joined their students. For this Sunday, all the student leaders will join their forces and will march in a huge demonstration to reject Chavez's plans to turn Venezuela into an oppressive and tyrannical country.
More at Fausta - Countdown to Tyranny Where are Sean Penn and the rest of the Chavez-lovers today? Have no fear: they will re-emerge when this "vote" is over because, with Fidel on the permanent sick list, the ignorant thug Chavez is now the world's leading proponent of the beautiful utopia of totalitarian, police state socialism (unless you include the equally-charming Kim Jong-Il, who unaccountably receives few accolades and little moral support from the Western Left).
Tuesday, November 27. 2007
 Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, seems like a book that somebody needed to write.
Sounds like the right book at the right time. Many readers of this site are well-aware of the totalitarian impulse of the Left, but I am not sure how much the general public thinks about it. However, I am not sure how much of the general public reads anything.
Race, IQ, and Education, a quote: One year ago, I wrote about the attempt to send more children to college, instead of dealing with students as individuals. I will not repeat that rant here. But this is another example of how the education establishment wants more money in reward for its failures. Overall, I think that to do education properly, we need to take into account individual differences of ability. I do not think we should pay attention to race. Too much of our education policy seems to be driven by the opposite--we focus on outcomes in terms of race and leave the individual children behind.
And from his 2006 piece he links, Education and Entrepreneurship in which he refers to Wizard of Oz diplomas, a quote: I fear that many of the students who pass will go on to earn Wizard-of-Oz diplomas, which signify nothing. Students will claim to be educated, but employers will know otherwise. The phenomenon of the Wizard-of-Oz diploma has discredited the college degree. My oldest daughter discovered that her degree qualified her for secretarial positions. She soon decided to try law school instead. As her experience illustrates, although the average salary differential between college graduates and non-graduates remains high, the marginal college graduate is earning little or no premium.
"Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea," but "reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so to make it finite.... The poet asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." G.K. Chesterton, as quoted at One Cosmos in Lunacy and Salvation in the Cosmic Funhouse
 As ye sow... Intellectual, peace-loving Presbyterian youth with guns in France battle cops.
More on Vin Gupta and the Clintons, via Lucianne Eric at Classical Values on guns, urban and rural. Gun rights are one of the third rails of politics in the US. Gives you whiplash. During the first Bush campaign, Gore was the muscular neo-con and Bush the quasi-isolationist. Then 9-11. When Iraq got challenging, the Dems changed horses in mid-stream and became limp defeatists. But now what? And is it all just partisan wrestling, really? My opinion? Yes. That's our system. As The Barrister always says, "You cannot be too cynical to understand politics." Jules on Iraq=Korea. A quote: This sets up a logical strategic arrangement, addressing vital U.S. and Iraqi interests, that illustrates how ridiculous withdrawal proposals have been, as they concentrated on abandonment without regard for any internal or external consequences. Particularly the Murthite “over the horizon” proposals. I’d suggest 50,000 U.S. troops in bases would have to have significant combat capability if they were to be prepared to carry out any of the roles outlined above. Sounds almost … Korea-like. Maybe more like our 62-year arrangements with Germany and Japan. Watch and learn, as Iraq and the United States forge an opportunity not to repeat the wretched experience of Southeast Asia. Who wants that? Oh yeah, right.
Photo: Why the odalisque from Theo? Because I think she could add a bit to the discussion of epistemology in the previous post.
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