Thursday, November 8. 2007
Winslow Homer, 1892 
"Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'.
Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins,
The hour when the ship comes in.
Oh the seas will split
And the ship will hit
And the sands on the shoreline will be shaking.
Then the tide will sound
And the wind will pound
And the morning will be breaking.
Oh the fishes will laugh
As they swim out of the path
And the seagulls they'll be smiling.
And the rocks on the sand
Will proudly stand,
The hour that the ship comes in.
And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they're spoken.
For the chains of the sea
Will have busted in the night
And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean.
A song will lift
As the mainsail shifts
And the boat drifts on to the shoreline.
And the sun will respect
Every face on the deck,
The hour that the ship comes in.
Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin'.
And the ship's wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin'.
Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'.
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it's for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.
Then they'll raise their hands,
Sayin' we'll meet all your demands,
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh's tribe,
They'll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they'll be conquered." "When The Ship Comes In," from 1964's The Times They Are A-Changin'. A performance with Joan Baez, from the March on Washington in August 1963 is below. | | | |
Hey Sean - get a load of this, dude. I suppose the reply would be the usual Commie one: You have to break eggs to make an omelette. Many eggs, until the human spirit is pacified, terrorized, or dead.
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention, and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read. Samuel Johnson, The Idler, #30, 1758, via a piece on reading real books from Vanderleun
Bravo, Sarko. Sarkozy's visit, and his speech. Flopping. It is refreshingly sane.
 Richistan: A journey through the American wealth boom and the lives of the new rich. A new book by WSJ writer Robert Frank, reviewed in The American. One quote:
It’s not the existence of these well-heeled, free-spending Americans that’s remarkable, Frank writes, but their sheer abundance. In 1995, there were 230,000 U.S. households worth at least $10 million and 50,000 households worth at least $25 million (in inflation-adjusted terms). In 2004, there were 530,000 and 110,000 such households, respectively. The accumulated wealth of America’s top one percent of earners—about $1.35 trillion—equals more than the total national incomes of Canada, France, and Italy. Perhaps most striking, roughly half of all American wealth has been created in the past ten years.
What a wonderful thing it is that, if you want big money, you have the chance to make it. The reclamation of LA's Skid Row. Heather MacDonald in City Journal. A quote For 25 years, the advocates used lawsuits and antipolice propaganda to beat back every effort to restore sanity to Skid Row. They concealed the real causes of homelessness under a false narrative about a callous, profit-mad society that abused the less fortunate. The result: a level of squalor that had no counterpart in the United States. Smith’s policing initiatives—grounded in the Broken Windows theory of order maintenance—ended that experiment in engineered anarchy, saving more lives in ten months than most homeless advocates have helped over their careers. The forces of lawlessness are regrouping, however, and Smith’s successes may wind up reversed in a renewed attack on the police.
and An Urban Land Institute study warned in 1987 that the “invasion of the homeless” was threatening the older SRO population and local businesses; stronger police protection was essential, argued the institute. The recommendation failed to take into account a second new population invading Skid Row: homeless advocates. Some of the same groups that had challenged public-order laws and pushed for the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill now seized on the resulting homeless for a host of ends, including a right to housing and further restrictions on the police. A made-for-the-media “tent city” erected by sundry homeless advocates outside City Hall in December 2004, for example, sought to end workfare and job-search requirements for welfare recipients—measures that had nothing to do with why people were on the streets.
Read the whole thing.
Wednesday, November 7. 2007
I stand in awe of the people out there in the world who can design and make the real things that make the real world work, while the rest of us take it all for granted as we pursue other things. There is an entirely unjustified arrogance, I think, often found in those of us who have more purely abstract work and interests, as if there were something lesser about building things that make trains run. There is surely some insecurity hiding behind that superiority - the insecurity of knowing eternal Shakespeare perhaps, but not having a clue about magnetic detection of invisible flaws in rails - or even about how trains really work. Like me, many of us would be lost and helpless - thrown back into the stone age - if the everyday, underpaid and underappreciated practical geniuses disappeared. The Sperry Rail-flaw detector is my case in point today. You could not run a safe railroad without these funky yellow machines, which you can see around regularly, perched on sidings, if you ride rails. Nowadays, they use ultrasound probes. Photo of an older one below, and details of Dr. Elmer Sperry's remarkable career here. As you can see, his useful company - one of 8 manufacturing businesses he created - is still in business in good old Danbury, CT, once the hat-manufacturing capital of the US (and the home of Charles Ives). Thanks, C., for the inspiration. 
We have often mocked the "crisis of obesity." From the Journal of the American Medical Association via the NYT, more evidence that being overweight has no correlation with mortality.
Excellent, via Iowahawk. h/t, Driscoll.
 A quote from Don Luskin: It's the same game, whether played from the right or from the left. Scare you into herding yourself into a malleable collectivist mass.
Well, maybe from the Conservatives a bit when they weaken, but the power-greedy Left in America rarely misses an opportunity to declare "market failure", followed by a grandiose plan to expand the power of the Federal state. FDR wrote the playbook, with Lenin's help. Whether it's oil profits, climate, medical treatment, schools, risky mortgages, income differences, etc, there's always a "plan" for a grab for money and power. That is why I am always highly skeptical about manufactured and trumped-up crises. Medical insurance is a case in point. TigerHawk has a solid piece on the subject, in response to a piece by Ezra Klein which tries to convince the reader that American medical care is terrible, and the NYT piece by Mankiw that we linked yesterday. All worth a read. And one more comment, re the "fully-socialized VA system." I have worked in a VA hospital attached to a major teaching center, and it worked just fine as long as you worked within the decreed limits. That's beside the point. VA patients have the choice of where to go for medical treatment, and they use those choices because the VA only offers clinic-style medicine, much like the charity clinics most kindly hospitals provide to their communities. The Post Office works pretty well too (except for the USSR-style lines at the window), but we also have UPS, FedEx, etc as welcome alternatives to a government-controlled, lazy-bureaucrat-operated, arrogant monopoly which has no incentive - and no heart - to give a damn about you.
Excellent short new video, "Consistent Conservative," at Fred '08, here. The guy is good, but does he really want the job enough to win it? Below, his recent video on Hillarycare.
 MIT suing Frank Gehry for design flaws, flooding, leaking, and dangerous icicle formation in the Stata Center in Cambridge.
As Althouse comments, Do you want a wild and crazy building dreamed up by an artist? Stop and think whether all the less strange buildings look the way they do for a reason.
It will not help the construction company, from whose site we borrow this photo, that they bragged about their teamwork with Gehry. The design itself? Looks just like any ordinary building, after one has eaten a few shrooms. And don't blame MIT - no engineers there.
Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance. Saint Augustine
Hitchins: Jihadists aren't in Afghanistan - or Iraq - because we are there. A quote: "No end in sight" is another favorite mantra of the anti-war mentality. And how true that melancholy reflection seems to be. The latest news is of a very nasty Islamic insurgency in southern Thailand, butchering Buddhist villages (remember the Taliban assault on the Buddha statues at Bamiyan?) and making demands for the imposition of sharia law. Perhaps someone will identify for me which Thai and Buddhist—or Western imperialist—crimes have led to this sudden development. Or perhaps it will be admitted, however grudgingly and belatedly, that there is something sui generis about Islamist fanaticism: something that is looking for a confrontation with every non-Muslim society in the world and is determined to pursue it with the utmost violence and cruelty. It is also seeking a confrontation with some Muslim states and societies.
Read the whole thing. Jihad is a world-wide movement of violence and oppression in the name of their god: they say so themselves. Pretending it ain't so does no good whatsoever. This will go on for a long time, in many places.
 Climate skepticism on the rise in Europe
Fred fading? The guy is good, but does he really have his heart in this? Sarkozy in Washington: "We want to win your hearts back." Prude: How our sex-obsessed culture damages girls. A book, at Powerline Fred McDarrah died. An archive of his photos here. His photo on right - the wonderful Franz Kline in his studio, 1961. Business news you might have missed. Wizbang. Incomes rising faster than inflation. Princeton's Robert George: The Moral Purposes of Law and Government. h/t, MouseNaround Outstanding pencil sharpener. FMFT More on my "invisible knapsack" of privilege. Moonbattery Finally - Brit pubs rebel against smoking ban Sowell: Among the many mindless mantras of our time, "making a difference" and "giving back" irritate me like chalk screeching across a blackboard.
Whole thing at Town Hall
Thanks to a loyal Yankee reader for this snap of a Great Black-Backed Gull on the blustery Connecticut coast this week with what I would identify as a small cold-water-loving Winter Flounder in his beak. A tasty sushi dinner for either man or bird. Our majestic Great Black-Backed is the largest gull in the world, and has been extending his range southward along the Atlantic coast for thirty years. Who knows why? But he competes effectively with our regular, abundant Yankee Herring Gull, a very fine, handsome, large and sturdy bird too, for whom Nor'easters and hurricanes are no big deal, and just an excuse for aerial acrobatics. 
Tuesday, November 6. 2007
 "How To" books and sites are great fun to read, even if you never actually do the thing. I have been perusing Home Depot's Home Improvement 1-2-3 with great enjoyment and edification. Since I do not ever plan to retire, I don't know when I will find the time to try most of these things, but it's fun to know how they are done.
And speaking of "How-To" books, one would have to place the Kama Sutra on top, as it were. It was written by the Hindu sage Vatsyayana between the 2nd and 4th centuries, for prosperous male urbanites, not for the masses. It was meant for spiritual connoisseurs, you might say. Here's a good Kama Sutra ("Writings on Love") site. Study it carefully, boys and girls - and practice, practice, practice. Pop quiz later this week. Image: Charunarikshita - "lovely lady in control."
Why the long hike from Grand Central Station to the platform for the 42nd St. shuttle to Times Square (the S Train)? Here's the answer.
 Blair:
The British government warns:
British Environment Minister Joan Ruddock has warned citizens that by not eating leftover food, they are effectively causing climate change.
As I munch dutifully on leftover Halloween candy, I am wondering what exactly she means by "effectively." I think she means "ineffectively."
Yet another "crisis." Ho hum. In my opinion, if people have the money, and want to overeat delicious carbs and get fat, then leave them alone. Your body is your own, and not on loan from the nanny. And it's a free country. Here's a cool obesity map of the US, 1984-present.
You know, if you're going to spend all that money and go to all that trouble, you really should enjoy yourself. Bust up the furniture, maybe. And if nothing else, after you settle in for all those decades of either eyeing the kitchen knives while he watches football, or smiling and nodding while your significant other picks out just the right candle at the second CandleBarnOutletAnnex you've been in today, you'll still have some amusing wedding pictures to look at.
Lots more, all hilarious, at DivineCaroline.com
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