Friday, December 7. 2007
The book that sets the record straight: Democracy Project
Warning: Do not listen to this video with coffee or beer in your mouth -Catherine Tate is Britain's answer to Carol Burnett:
 Quackery supported by Brit NHS. Why? Because it's political, of course. Socialized medicine is all about politics, not medicine.
Eye disease and Impressionism. Neurophilosophy Before we go all hysterical like Andy Sullivan, here are the facts about those CIA tapes. A player to make people like golf who don't like golf Chavez: Our people aren't mature enough. Dr. Sanity. Not mature enough to want to be serfs to the State? What is "sloth"? Kimball When a bad kid smiles at a teacher. What gun laws do for us. The case for English as the official language. NY Sun Is this guy getting a bad deal? I have never seen a child porn site, but what if I just wanted to see what was on them? Cramer Magna Carta for sale. Dissent not allowed in Bali. h/t, Insty More on The Death of the Grown-Up: Driscoll The logical flaw in modern Darwinism. Auster. It's about the human instinct for teleology. Kangaroo farts are Green. What about Wallabees? All I have here is a whole bunch of Wallabees. G.I. Jill. Gateway Image: Thomas Nast's Santa. History of Santa here.
Quoted from O'Neill at Spiked: Imagine a country where city officials could take it upon themselves to ban art exhibitions, pieces of music and other performances that might, in their view, provoke violence. Where a pub, club or gallery could be threatened with having its licence revoked, and effectively be forced to close down, if it played music or displayed art that has been blacklisted by officialdom. Imagine a country where a young woman could be put under house arrest for, amongst other things, writing poetry judged to be ‘dangerous’. Imagine a country where the strictures on what you can and cannot say are so stifling that arts institutions censor themselves, sometimes withdrawing potentially inflammatory plays or exhibitions in order to keep sweet with the powers-that-be. Surely no one would put up with such a regime? Even in Eastern Europe in the dark days of Stalinism, individuals protested against dictators who sought to control art and curtail artistic freedom. Yet all of the things listed above are happening right now, here in Britain, and people are putting up with it.
Read the whole thing. Yes, it's more about the Fascist Left.
Photo borrowed from Lucianne: 
 I am an Internaut. The Internet is a wonderful mess. I use it for most everything, including my livelihood now. I am deathly sick of about 90% of it, but that's OK, as you'd have to live to be a thousand to look at 10% of it anyway. There is an infantile sense of humor on the tubes that I find endearing. There's a really nasty sort of discourse that is its fellow traveler, so you have to sort of pan for your comedy gold, but it's there. And it's not always for the meek. Anyway, the Internet has decided that Hitler is funny. I applaud this derision. There's a kind of psychosis that goes along with it that we could do without --that decidedly milquetoast politicians or the former CEOs of software companies or people that try to stop you from stealing movies on bittorrent sites are Hitler, who is not funny at all when you're a very emo commenter on webpages looking to get the silly comparison meter to go to eleven. Hitler is very bad when George Bush is Hitler, and very funny the rest of the time, apparently. It's not new to make fun of Hitler. During WWII, Hitler was made sport of by everybody from Charlie Chaplin to the Three Stooges. In a way, I suppose the dead bastard would prefer to be remembered like he is in Germany -- spoken in a serious whisper with a sense of dread, by law. I like it much better to watch an old Looney Tunes cartoon and see a bunch of Jews in Hollywood make a mockery of him.
Continue reading "Is Hitler Funnier Than Rick Astley?"
A quote from the review of Mead's book by Heather Wilhelm at RCP: To his credit, Mead acknowledges--unlike some acolytes of the power of liberal capitalism--that the future of the Anglo-American system will, like thousands of years of human history before it, hold perpetual turmoil. The classic human mistake throughout the ages, well illustrated in "God and Gold", is an optimistic one: This time it will be different. This time we've figured it out. Global capitalism, while a tremendous blessing for many, also has its dark sides: cultural clashes, technological surprises, stateless actors impossible to deter. Together, America and Britain have unleashed a world-changing force, brewed over the course of 400 years. Hopefully, in the years to come, it will win enough friends and beneficiaries to help smooth the bumpy ride that awaits us.
 Buchholtz at Opinion Journal:
Bill Gates has $56 billion to his name. What would you do if he called your home asking you for some money? You'd hang up on the prankster, of course. Now, what would you do if Harvard, with its $35 billion endowment, called begging for cash? My wife and I take out our checkbook. But maybe we should be hitting up Harvard instead. Princeton's endowment grew by more than $3 billion last year. Three weeks of gains in the Tiger portfolio would have paid for every undergrad's tuition and for a fresh pair of stripes on the mascot. Princeton's nothing special, at least in this case. Over 60 universities in the U.S. have endowments surpassing $1 billion, a fivefold gain in the past 10 years. This lovely fiscal boom has angered some U.S. senators who want to force Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford and many others to spend more from their coffers. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley threatens to pry open the endowments so that, like other charitable groups, they must spend at least 5% of principal each year, compared with the measly 4.2% they chose to spend in 2006, down from 5.1% in 1994 and 6.5% in 1982. What's happening here? Are rich schools like survivalists, afraid to spend and waiting for the apocalypse? If we looked in Yale's basements would we find a million rows of canned tuna and bottled Evian, guarded by angry bulldogs? The universities have all sorts of sensible rebuttals.
Read the whole thing.
Viking. Same thing in New Jersey. People aren't stupid: life offers incentives and disincentives.
Our blog friend Theo is taking a sabbatical after having run into problems with Google's Blogger. As a reliable purveyor of wit, art, and military aircraft, we will miss him and hope he comes back soon. For a sample of his famous photographic art collection, we offer this Odalisque below: 
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened. .Winston Churchill (h/t, Shape of Days)
From Greg Mankiw: A good topic for class discussion: What are the limits of government redistribution to achieve egalitarian goals?
His discussion here.
 When will the global warming arrive? It's cold as hell up here. When is warming supposed to begin? Do I have to wait 20 years? I can't wait.
Search elsewhere. 72 virgins at Wellesley? Lucky just to find 72 cute gals at Wellesley these days. Streisand supports Clinton: Obama dirty tricks blamed Intellectual conformity and the cascade on the globalistical warmening hoax. Never Yet Melted. Ho ho ho. You're fired. Religious schools do best in Britain. Best piece I've read on The New Republic fiasco. Iowahawk A boring subject, but it's no joke. The AMT. Conspiracy. More good on the AMT: Big Lizards Hey shrinks! A new diagnosis: OMS (Offended Muslim Syndrome) The Dems dislike Uribe (he's not a Commie), but he is saving Colombia. The American. Lucky Colombia, unlucky Venezueala. A Harvard guy, but clearly not brainwashed. All too easy to satire. Madeleine Bunting wants the State to control your fun. What a pill!
Thursday, December 6. 2007
Call for quote. No bag limits, and no licenses required. - Posted by Roger de H.
A plan is just a guess in a party dress. Michael Yon, in his exciting Aug, 2005 piece Gates of Fire. How things have changed in Mosul.
"How can we continue to believe that by taxing more and working fewer hours, we can ever create wealth and jobs?" Sarkozy, as quoted at No Pasaran
 World's hardest easy Geometry problem. Coyote.
Are the Dems still in a Wonderland, where international hostilities can be handled like problems in Sunday School? Opinion Journal No smoking in your own apartment? NY Sun San Francisco will Save the World! With a new tax, conveniently. New taxes are the real Convenient Truth. Iraqis protest Al Quaida. That tells me that they feel safe. Eric thinks the Global Warming hysteria is just the latest device to try to foist communitarianism on America. I agree. With poverty fixed as well as it can be, what else is there to use as a crisis? Re Canada's investigation of Steyn. It is just as we always warn, from Ace: This is shameful. All those dark fantasies conservative "crazies" concocted about the left actually becoming Nazi-like and Stalinist in purging and persecuting those it found troublesome on the right... well, they're not fantasies, and those conservatives weren't crazy. People like me who said "Oh shush with that nonsense, they'd never dare, they too have a commitment to basic liberal values, if perhaps not a very strong one" were actually the crazies.
Whiners. From a Rasmussen South Carolina poll report: Thirty-three percent (33%) of South Carolina Democratic Primary Voters say the economy is the number one voting issue. Twenty-eight percent (28%) name the War in Iraq while 14% say Health Care.
What's wrong with the economy? We have complete employment and the subprime mess doesn't effect the average person - it hurts Wall St. Iraq is going well, and everybody gets medical care if they're sick. What's the problem?
 Roger Kimball - Hillary Clinton and Friedrich Hayek.
I have no time today to discuss it, but Kimball discusses one of our previous links today on Hillary, and radical communitarian thinking. Read it! (Do any of our readers still have one of those scythes? I do, but using a big noisy gas machine is more fun, and a work-out in itself. Wendell Berry on Scythes.)
 - In which we are reminded anew of Hillary's antediluvian trade policies. RedState
- Hillary gives Wall Street a Warning, quote from the NY Sun: Senator Clinton gave a clear indication yesterday that as president she would be happy to intervene in the management of the economy if she thought the free market was failing middle-class Americans. Speaking to donors and supporters at Nasdaq's headquarters in Times Square, Mrs. Clinton threatened legislation to regulate the mortgage lending industry closely if money managers do not come up with their own scheme to defray the effects of the subprime mortgage collapse. She also served notice on wealthy Americans that they should be prepared for tax increases.
- Quoted from Hillary's Charm Offensive by Voegli at No Left Turns: Haven’t we seen this before – the boundless sense of entitlement, the fury at those who would presume to deny the self-anointed candidate her destiny? Despite all the talk about how Hillary had grown in the aftermath of the health care debacle, the stories about how she had learned to play nice with others in the Senate, the same attractive attitudes and habits that endeared her to the nation 15 years ago are once again on display. Carl Bernstein’s book, A Woman in Charge, reports that in 1993 the First Lady beguilingly told a group of Democratic senators, who expressed doubts about the political feasibility of passing ambitious health care reforms, that the Clinton administration would “demonize” those who stood in the way of her plan. It was the last straw for Sen. Bill Bradley. “You don’t tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy.” When her task force of 500 members and 34 committees sent the Democratic Congress a bill that was 1,324 pages long, it sank like an anvil. Smaller, simpler measures might have passed, but the First Lady refused to support any plan but her own. Bob Boorstin, a media relations deputy with the task force, told Bernstein that Hillary is “among the most self-righteous people I’ve ever met in my life.”
We first posted this piece by Dr. Bliss on July 14, 2005. Since that time, many have written on the same topic. Sometimes it's interesting for us to see what we were thinking a couple of years ago. We who try to be reasonable are befuddled by why the American and European Left have a reflex to defend the Jihadists, and to oppose combating them. The fact that they do so is amply demonstrated, endlessly, by the Great Horowitz, among others.
My theory is that the Left is nihilistic at heart. For whatever reasons, they have passed criticism and have come to hate their own civilization, which is admittedly imperfect but which, at the same time, cannot be matched anywhere, anytime, in history in its freedom, opportunity, safety, stability, and idealism. (Yale's famous rejection of the Bass donation was a high-water mark of this self-hating trend.)
The consequence is an anti-Western bias, but they refuse to offer an alternative, either because they do not have one, or because any offered would be rejected by voters. My belief is that our civilization is a fragile sculpture, a rare and precious thing, and that our Western Civilization is one of the most amazing things that humans have created, with, at its core, the idea that every individual human matters, as a child of God. That’s the core of it all, and it is at the core of Western medical practice and medical ethics too, since Hippocrates. We care for their injured in our hospitals, and they behead their prisoners. That is a big difference, one which relegates them to the barbarian category. “All men are created equal…”
It was not my brief on Maggie’s to get into politics, but I cannot ignore this one. What is behind the Left’s apologizing for Jihadists? Why does England welcome them? Why does the US welcome them? Why France and Germany and Sweden? Why does Canada welcome them? Why welcome your destroyers into your home?
I wrote a piece on Evil several months ago, but it had no political content. Hatred and destructiveness can derive from hundreds of sources, but most of the time social norms and rules prevent us from acting on such impulses. They are very human evils, or sins, if you will. If you live in a culture, or subculture, which endorses them, many will be pleased to follow – see Nazi Germany, the Mafia, the Weathermen, or any number of murderous, sadistic civilizations and cultures and subcultures throughout history - and relieved to be given a sanctioned outlet for such emotions. Humans are natural-born killers, after all, just like chimps, and it takes a heck of a lot of civilization to keep us on the right side of the road.
It’s clear to me from all that I have read that the Jihadists have long identified Jews and Christians as the “other” – sub-humans occupying potentially Islamic space. We do not do the same to them – on the contrary, we in the West bend over backwards to make them welcome and to accommodate their ways. Their denial of our humanity is their evil, even if it is endorsed by their culture and their religion, and their using our generosity and tolerance for their own purposes is evil as well, though they see it as justified by Mohammed. Fooling an Infidel is not a sin, and we "nice" infidels are too eager to be fooled.
So we quickly arrive at the religious core of morals and ethics, from whence they derive. The Jihadist believes that war on the West is demanded of him by God. I refuse to get morally relativistic and multicultural about that about that - leave that to the anthropologists. To me that is evil. Why does the Western Left like to ally themselves with this? One might imagine that woman-hating, fascistic, anti-human rights, primitively-capitalistic, oil and opium-dependent, hyper-religious movements would be anathema to them. But no. They are apologists. And I do not think it is as simple as the anti-Semitism of the Left, although that does exist, I believe.
My take on it all is that the Left longs for chaos, for trouble, for failure and failure of confidence, for cultural breakdown, to undermine the fabric of our culture. Thus the Left has a reflex to be contrary to all tradition, including moral, religious and patriotic traditions - and including the tradition of self-defense. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” I suspect that they imagine that with adequate turmoil, they will prevail and create our socialist heaven on earth with them, of course, in control. However, they would create a nightmare – whether their own statist vision, or the Jihadist theocracy, where their women would be the first to be stoned to death in the stadium, and the men would be next in line. Jihad does not tolerate free-thinkers.
Thus hatred of their own civilization, and contempt for its defenders, seems to have become the hallmark of the Left. I view it as a cultural death-wish. I can understand the Jihadists – their individual evil impulses are culturally- and religiously-endorsed, promoted and rewarded, from childhood, thanks to the Saudi-supported Wahabist schools. But whence the West's cultural-suicide wish from within?
There are only two possibilities: they either believe the illusion that they might prevail following social catastrophe, or they operate in a near-insane denial of the capacity for evil and destructiveness in mankind – the wishful, childish notion that everyone is “nice underneath,” which is psychological nonsense, as reality and honest introspection reveal to us daily. I suspect mostly the former, since the Left has no trouble attributing evil to the defenders of our civilization, and virtue to themselves.
- Dr. Joy Bliss
The video is here. Worth listening to.
Wednesday, December 5. 2007
I'm telling you, I don’t think that it’s the primary responsibility of the federal government to tell you what to eat. Fred Thompson
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