Friday, November 23. 2007
Prof. Bainbridge reports that spanking has been criminalized in New Zealand. This is unfortunate, because sometimes we all require an administration of tough love. I know I did, and it probably kept me out of jail. Our Dr. Bliss wrote a defence of corporal punishment here, a while ago. I agree that a good spanking is more to the point, more direct, and less painful than mental punishments - although I agree with a proper administration of shame when appropriate. Still, spare the rod... Many - not all - kids require a stern Dad and a disapproving Mom from time to time, if not more often. If a person doesn't internalize the guidelines of decent citizenship in the family, the cops will be stuck with the results. And that annoys the cops and makes them act rough because they'd much prefer to be eating jelly donuts in peace in their patrol cars. The subject makes me wonder about how some in Western culture seems to want to define harshness downwards, to the point of considering waterboarding of terrorists who might plan to kill you and your brethren as "going too far," or the death penalty by injection "cruel and unusual." Are we becoming so namby-pamby that any exertion of force is viewed as barbaric? It's an epidemic of "niceness" and a terror of anything which might have anything in common with "violence." If so, it's a dangerously decadent road. I blame Rousseau. 
Comment by the Editor: How come the first to yelp about spanking and waterboarding tend to be the first people to excuse terrorists and inner city violence? And often the first to propose greater government coercive power over the individual? Authoritarian families produce free, self-regulating citizens who don't need or desire authoritarian or nanny governments. It's all a mystery to me.
 Every five or six years our roses next to the house, warmed by the proximity and protected from the wind, manage to stay in bloom until Thanksgiving. With Thanksgiving so early this year, it's less surprising but still a delight to see them even though they are a bit ratty.
For other holiday news, I was amused to see a Sharp-Shinned Hawk hit our bird feeder yesterday, aiming for a White Throated Sparrow. He pursued the sparrow through the shrubs but finally emerged empty-handed. So much easier just to go to the Stop & Shop for one's Thanksgiving bird.
Thursday, November 22. 2007
Would you call this an easy shot, an average shot, a long shot, or out of range? (although it's moot, in fact, because you do not want to drop a bird in those tules because you'll never find it. Shoot them when they are over open water.) A flock of Mallards as seen from my duck boat, a couple of weeks ago:
Wednesday, November 21. 2007
Tennis Channel has the exclusive U.S. telecast rights to the 3-match exhibition series taking place in Asia from November 20-24 between Pete Sampras and Roger Federer. The competitions will air live or same-day delay on Tennis.
The Real Man Quiz. (Hint: the correct answer is C)
I am heading off to Familyland to help give thanks for being a free American, and to pray that I and we will continue to be. Will dig ya when I get back.  Tiger: The civil rights the NYT does not like.
Iraq: What went right? NY Post All you need to know about the Care Bear Stare. Lord, help me keep my mouth shut about politics this holiday. A hate-filled Europe. Lib. Leanings J School propaganda. Minding the Campus. Worse than teaching colleges. Affirmative action, hyphenated Americans, and other conumdrums. Kimball Feminization of the churches. Maxed Out Mama. One quote: I really have no great desire to be in touch with my feelings. To be a man is to know that if you really expressed your feelings, you’d be locked up for some of the more salacious criminal articles.
I have no desire to lectured to by someone who knows less than I do. I stopped going to a particular church because the rector persisted in discussing economics. Her theory of economics might have best been described as Seussian-Marxist ("I have none and you have two/ Let’s share everything, skippy-do” and “Tell you what, just for a laugh/ Let’s break everything in half").It’s bad enough when the ignorant discuss theology, but I’ve been lectured on law, history, business and politics by total idiots from the pulpit. The conservative clergy generally restrict themselves to Scripture, about which they generally know something.
Read it all. Good stuff. True, too. When they get off the subject of God and Jesus, they are just as foolish as you or me.
From a NYT piece on the NEA report on reading that we linked yesterday: ...Mr. Iyengar noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books.
and Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle school students and slightly declining among high school seniors. These trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading among young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a drop that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.
I guess this is new news: kids who have parents who like to learn also like to learn, but it's a crisis now. I blame global warming. As a solution to the Reading Crisis, I suggest a $1 billion Federal education program called "Books Are Fun!," a fun-filled, interactive, fast-moving multi-media curriculum-enhancement module ("MMCEM"), to be designed by leading expert reading consultants from teaching colleges and then introduced into every Middle School "curriculum" by Federal law. Approximately 40,000 new union-certified "Books are Fun!" specialists will be hired to guide schools through the application of this exciting new kid-friendly program through every course of study. Crisis solved! 
Video: How to melt your machine gun barrel. The manual recomments 5-10 round bursts, not 5-10 meter belts.
 Photo on right: Baghdad by night, from a piece at Attack Machine
Ingratitude at Thanksgiving. James Lewis at Am. Thinker. More on the Supremes and the DC gun ban. LaShawn Redefining "swift-boating," and re-writing history. The age-old dilemma: in a party primary, do you vote for your favorite, or for the most electable? Powerline Busted: NYC cheats on school performance exams. Jefferson would have preferred blogs to newspapers. Pajamas
It re-loads every 400 seconds, and you can click on each incident for details. H/t, Bruce Kesler's The Most Amazing Website I've Ever Seen.
 That's Yankee, our friend's Large Munsterlander pup, retrieving a large, heavy Canada Goose:
Tuesday, November 20. 2007
Dear Walter:
I hope you can help me. The other day I set off for work leaving my husband in the house watching the TV as usual. I hadn't gone more than a mile down the road when my engine conked out and the car shuddered to a halt. I walked back home to get my husband's help.
When I got home I couldn't believe my eyes. He was in the bedroom with a neighbour lady making mad passionate love to her. I am 32, my husband is 34 and we have been married for twelve years. When I confronted him, he tried to make out that he went into the back yard and heard a lady scream, had come to her rescue but found her unconscious. He'd carried the woman back to our house, laid her in bed, and began CPR. When she awoke she immediately began thanking him and kissing him and he was attempting to break free when I came back. But when I asked him why neither of them had any clothes on, he broke down and admitted that he'd been having an affair for the past six months. I told him to stop or I would leave him.
He was let go from his job six months ago and he says he has been feeling increasingly depressed and worthless. I love him very much, but ever since I gave him the ultimatum he has become increasingly distant. Can you please help?
Sincerely,
Mrs. Sheila Usk
Dear Sheila: A car stalling after being driven a short distance can be caused by a variety of faults with the engine. Start by checking that there is no debris in the fuel line. If it is clear, check the jubilee clips holding the vacuum pipes onto the inlet manifold. If none of these approaches solves the problem, it could be that the fuel pump itself is faulty, causing low delivery pressure to the carburetor float chamber.
I hope this helps.
Walter
The NYT reports the good news on Iraq.
While checking out the link to the Mediocracy site, I found a piece which echoes much of the sort of thing we write about here, about the attempts to re-define Liberty in the UK. Dr. Tassano notes: The transformation from old-liberty (= right not to be interfered with) to new liberty (= right to be interfered with) takes place, as Dr Brown showed us, in 13 easy steps.
Read the whole thing. We'll add him to our regular reads.
 It's good to see that VDH was awarded one of these.
A classic Vermonter asks a classic Vermont question: "Have I created a monster which I'm begging to help me preserve or am I just a nuisance to people?" Webster said. "It's a big question." I say that it's too bad more people don't ask themselves the same question. Ya gotta love this codger. Women sexually abused as kids make more money. Al Gore gets seriously serious green. TigerHawk. Sounds like a filthy Capitalist to me. Thomas Sowell on "making a difference," quoted in a No Pasaran piece on how the UN defines poverty: I would be scared to death to "make a difference" in the way pilots fly airliners or brain surgeons operate. Any difference I might make could be fatal to many people.
Making a difference makes sense only if you are convinced that you have mastered the subject at hand to the point where any difference you might make would be for the better.
Very few people have mastered anything that well beyond their own limited circle of knowledge. Even fewer seem to think far enough ahead to consider that question. Yet hardly a day goes by without news of some uninformed busybodies on one crusade or another.
Darfur for Dummies. Cinnamon Cultural deterioration in a mediocracy, a quote: If cultural deterioration is acknowledged in a mediocracy, it is blamed on marketisation. The implication is that cultural products are somehow traded more than they used to be, which is specious. Culture has always been bought and sold, and would not get produced at all without someone to pay for it. What is different about a mediocratic market for culture is that purchasing power is in the hands of the mass consumer and the state, rather than those of a small elite. The characteristics of the prevailing culture will therefore reflect the tastes of the mass, and the ideological preferences of the political class, rather than the tastes of the bourgeoisie.
Whole thing here. h/t, David Thompson. Speech recognition comes of age. Photo: Infidel, from Theo
A re-post from 2005 Tom Brewton nails down the main point, which I feel is one of the most important statements that can be made about modern politics. Gandhi said it too - "If you would change the world, first change yourself.": "Hayek thought he had observed an important change in the character of the British people, as a result both of their collectivist aspirations and of such collectivist measures as had already been legislated. He noted, for example, a shift in the locus of people’s moral concern."
Read entire.
Eco-religion (or ego-justice, or politico-paganism) from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago: Web of Creation A course on religion at the University of Findlay in Ohio: Psychology of Religion. Read the summary and topics.
 I think we linked this piece once, but I can't remember. It's from Munchkin Wrangler (h/t, Right Wing Prof), and begins thus:
Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
Read the whole thing. Here's a nice piece on handgun selection for self-defence.
 Neo-neo recalls her first visit to the Main Branch of the NY Public Library on 5th Avenue. Photo of the main reading room on right, from her piece.
NEA study says people aren't reading as much as they used to. A tour of NYC's holiday window displays in the NY Sun: Window Wonderland Novack: Clinton is Nixonian Racist or Culturist? A quiz Have you ever been served an assault rifle with your coffee? They think this is us Lawrence Weiner's "mind-stretching retrospective" at the Whitney Texas challenges "Everyday Math". NY Sun. When clergy make pronouncements about things they don't understand.
Massachusetts Hemlock woods a month ago. We have posted on Hemlocks here. 
Monday, November 19. 2007
From our friend at Sippican Cottage, with a piece at Pajamas of the above title, a quote: The least efficient entity I’ve ever encountered is the government, at all levels, in all instances. Even when it’s being ruthless, it takes its sweet time about everything. Death Row would be a drive-up window with a menu, open all night, if McDonalds ran it. (Would you like “fried” with that?) And me, Mr. Vertically Integrated himself, knows all about inefficiency. I can’t answer the phone if I can’t hear it over the table saw I’ve got running while I should be coding my website anyway. Hillary Clinton’s big idea is to think the government can run a vertically integrated version of Medicine. I have my doubts. Bad managers like vertical integration because they are immune to outside pressure to perform. There are no upstream producers giving you things before you’re ready to process them, and no downstream vendors selling things before you’re ready to supply them. And vertically integrated monopolies run by the government don’t even have to worry about the customers. No one can go to another vendor. And the opposition party cannot offer an alternative other than the destruction of what been cobbled together, which is like asking if you’d like your ration card torn up during a famine once the thing gets going. The beast will never die once Igor pulls the switch, until it collapses under the weight of its own bureaucracy. Hillary’s already told me to drop dead, figuratively. She’s looking for the power to enable her to tell me to drop dead, literally, now. Wanna give it to her?
Read the whole thing.
Re-posted from Feb, 2007  If you believe in a man-made global warming crisis, you:
1. Will not fly on airplanes
2. Will live close enough to work to walk or bike
3. Will turn off your electric power - and no oil lamps. No computers - they are energy sponges.
4. Will cease to mow your lawn
5. Will heat your home with solar power, or, better yet, not at all. It takes a lot of energy to create those solar panels
7. Will give up eating beef
8. Will junk your cars, tractors, lawn-mowers, boats, chain saws, etc.
9. Will wear no synthetics, or clothing requiring electric power to produce
10. Will grow all of your own food so it doesn't have to be trucked to your supermarket If you do not do those things, then I won't believe that you are genuinely concerned, and will not take you seriously. Show me what to do - don't tell me what to do. Government and the UN first, please. Greenies second. Just don't tell me that you are going to continue to enjoy these luxuries until the government forces you not to. Show leadership and individual responsibility. No pseudo-virtuous tokenism, please. Carbon credits? Gimme a break. (Personally, I agree with Stephen Harper that the climate hysteria is no more than a socialist/luddite scheme.) Update. An Al Gore True Believer said this to me yesterday: "I'm not the problem. Society is the problem." This person sells real estate and drives a big Mercedes all day long in his job in our Connecticut exurbia. "Society"? Who dat bad man? And what is his phone number? Image: Non-hypocritical global warming fans in Vermont wear no factory clothing, inhabit caves, and hunt for food in the woods, which they eat raw so as not to create CO2 and other pollution with campfires. Vermont environmentalists complain that they are depleting the forests of roots and tubers, scaring the deer, and eating all of the skunks and raccoons. And crapping all over the place.
 A wave of the long, fat, Freudian cigar to Dr. X, who found that Jason Jones at Bookslut is re-reading his Standard Edition (24 books), at the pace of one book per month.
What is most worthwhile about reading Freud, preferably with a guide of some sort, is watching a powerful mind at work, searching for patterns and understanding, having ideas, then rejecting them, revising them, and often just getting stuck. Looking for a path through the wilderness of the soul. Book 1 includes A Project for a Scientific Psychology, a remarkable effort in which he admittedly reached a dead end, and asked for the manuscript to be burned. Jones' reflections on Book 1 here, and Book 2 here. We will try to keep up with these as they come out. Comment from Dr. Bliss: It is a sad fact that Freud's thinking, over time, has become deeply misunderstood, trivialized, misinterpreted, abused, and misused - and his errors magnified. His goal, most simply put, was to create a framework for understanding the irrational in mankind, with the hope that this might help individuals gain mastery over their lives and their destinies.
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