Friday, January 11. 2008
The dread P word is cropping up on Wall St. In the short term, markets are nuts. Only rational in the long run.
The WSJ greatly expands it's free opinion site, as of yesterday. Smart move, Rupert. Take a look: it's got books, "Taste", Arts and Leisure, Taranto's Best of the Web plus the "Opinion Journal Federation" of websites. At this point, the WSJ main site is handling the internet as well as, or better than, any other of the MSM, (although the NY Sun is doing a great job too) and will force the (still marginal, I believe, in the larger scheme of things but not without some influence) blogworld to reconsider what we/they can do best. Meanwhile, the clever MSM like the WSJ is absorbing and integrating the best of the blogworld. Since my crystal ball broke when I dropped it a few years ago, I do not know what the best role of the blogworld might be, but it's probably in opinion and entertainment, and info which is either not mass-market or is neglected by the MSM. Stay tuned! It will be interesting.
 Matt Stuart's street photography (h/t, Wall St. Fighter). Sample on right:
The Blonde Map of Europe. Assistant Village Idiot makes sense out of it. How the biofuel market is destroying the jungles rainforests The Dems face a moral choice. Am Thinker "I've never worked a day in my life." A Mark Twain 1905 interview (h/t, Classical Values) How do the unchurched view the churched? (h/t, News for Christians) Women of the world should thank Hillary to making it now possible for women to cry. Is she out of her mind? Betsy on the subject. Repent! The End is Near! MA to permit CVS walk-in clinics. Thank you America. Michael Yon Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton upset about Obama's run. It's quite clear why: he's not playing the game. Is there a problem? Blame global warming, says the NYT
I have always gotten a kick out of this portrait of the ineffectual and depressive Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf ll (1552-1612) as Vertumnus - Roman God of the Seasons, by Milan-born Guiseppe Arcimboldo. 
Thursday, January 10. 2008
"He was just a blue-eyed Boston boy,
His voice was low with pain.
'I'll do your bidding, comrade mine,
If I ride back again.
But if you ride back and I am left,
You'll do as much for me,
Mother, you know, must hear the news,
So write to her tenderly.
"She's waiting at home like a patient saint,
Her fond face pale with woe.
Her heart will be broken when I am gone,
I'll see her soon, I know.'
Just then the order came to charge,
For an instant hand touched hand.
They said, "Aye," and away they rode,
That brave and devoted band.
Straight was the track to the top of the hill,
The rebels they shot and shelled,
Plowed furrows of death through the toiling ranks,
And guarded them as they fell.
There soon came a horrible dying yell
From heights that they could not gain,
And those whom doom and death had spared
Rode slowly back again.
But among the dead that were left on the hill
Was the boy with the curly hair.
The tall dark man who rode by his side
Lay dead beside him there.
There's no one to write to the blue-eyed girl
The words that her lover had said.
Momma, you know, awaits the news,
And she'll only know he's dead." "Two Soldiers," a Civil War-era song - author unknown - covered by Dylan on World Gone Wrong in 1993. Somone has kindly posted the album version on Youtube, see below.
How many dead - and who killed them? Jules. And speaking of dead guys, looks like you can add a few more bad guys to the list the past two days.
Insty: THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE RE-ELECTED, religious intimidation would lead to self-censorship by artists. And they were right!
 Where is the world's largest Beaver dam?
We have heard the stories that the largest is somewhere in Three Forks, MT, but the best data I can find is that the largest is in Wood Buffalo Park in northern Alberta. It is 2790 feet, or about a half mile in length. It makes sense that the longest dams would need to be built on gently-sloping, slow-moving wetlands in order to impound a good volume of water, while most Beaver-sized streams can be effectively dammed with shorter lengths, or a series of shorter lengths, as in the photo below (from this excellent Beaver photo site): 
As noted in this Shrinkwrapped piece we recently linked the young, the immature and the foolish may harbor fantasies that a politician can have any positive effect on their lives. They will learn...maybe - if they are able to learn and grow from experience. Truth is that only I can shape - or redeem - my gift of life. Interesting piece by Goldsmith (former Mayor of Indianapolis and now Harvard Prof) in The American: What's Left for Government To Do? He asks what the core functions are of governments in the free world. It's a damn good question. One quote: Functions such as law enforcement and public safety are typically considered inherently governmental. But as the mayor of Indianapolis for two terms (1992–1999), I outsourced the operation not only of a jail but also of an airport and a utility—with good results. It was hard not to be amused, as the GAO panel debated the definition of an inherently governmental function, by the fact that the federal building we were meeting in was under the protection of a private security firm. Even if we could agree on core government functions that had to be walled off from contractors, we would be left with a thorny question: what happens when government turns out not to be very good at inherently governmental work?
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it." H. L. Mencken (h/t, Englishman's Castle, in a piece on how wrong the climate predictors have been)
 Hillary publicly accused of alligator tears. I have no doubt.
What is a hand worth? Dem Project Steyn: All Repubs lost The smokescreen of environmental concern. Sisu. Well said. View from the Left: Pro sports need to be politicized Glenn Beck had a terrible time in the hospital in CT. He is right to complain, but I have never heard of an experience like that before, in the US. Natural killers. This piece (via a reader) is fascinating but we ran out of time trying to figger out whether it's real. MacArthur is misspelled, which makes me skeptical even though the essay is persuasive. Update: A reader informs us that it is a fake. It's still interesting. Speaking of natural killers, I am having fun with this book. A serious telephoto lens. Goldman predicts recession in 2008 Headlines in 2029 Image of well-known Fall River, MA diner from Diner City, which has photos of diners across the USA
Wednesday, January 9. 2008
(Readers know that we do not focus on Iraq, mainly because so many others do it better and because our military sophistication is minimal. We have also mentioned that, while skeptical about going into Iraq, we have also seen great geopolitical opportunities there for the US, the Iraqi people, the ME, and for the benefit of the world in general, if the progress continues. Failure is not an option.) The ring on your finger: Totten. A quote: According to the conventional narrative, Al Qaeda was rejected by Iraqis because they murdered Iraqis. They were far more vicious and hateful than the Americans they vowed to expel. The narrative is correct, as far as it goes, but Al Qaeda is detested for more than mere thuggery. Other armed groups have been able to maintain at least some popularity even though they also murder Iraqis. None of the others, though, violent though they may be, are so thoroughly totalitarian, so alien to the traditions of Iraqi culture, and so hostile to its centuries-old social fabric. Al Qaeda in Iraq tears at Iraq’s traditional culture as viciously as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia. If you want to understand Al Qaeda in Iraq – its methods, its rise, and its fall – you’ll find their story has more in common with the Shining Path’s guerrilla and terrorist war in Peru than with the Islamic religion as practiced in the mosques of Fallujah.
From Michael Yon, a quote: We now have a large number of American and British officers who can pick up a phone from Washington or London and call an Iraqi officer that he knows well—an Iraqi he has fought along side of—and talk. Same with untold numbers of Sheiks and government officials, most of whom do not deserve the caricatural disdain they get most often from pundits who have never set foot in Iraq. British and American forces have a personal relationship with Iraqi leaders of many stripes. The long-term intangible implications of the betrayal of that trust through the precipitous withdrawal of our troops could be enormous, because they would be the certain first casualties of renewed violence, and selling out the Iraqis who are making an honest-go would make the Bay of Pigs sell-out seem inconsequential. The United States and Great Britain would hang their heads in shame for a century.
From Done with Mirrors: The insurgents would be finished when an Iraqi soldier in uniform boarded a bus, got off at his local market, and walked home.It seemed a million miles away then. Well, based on this picture taken Sunday, it's come -
64,000 Iraqis return home from Syria. Gateway
 A fine man, but maybe a sucker for every passing political fad and fashion?
Please convince me that he isn't.
 Scientificalistical proof here. (h/t, Viking).
Hence my recent photo on right. (Everybody insisted that I remove the cigar from my mouth for the photo.) Compare with recent photo of our teetotaler editor Bird Dog, of a similar vintage, below. 
This piece from Obama's website indicates that he and others like Barbara Boxer support the notion of government benefits for military employees discharged due to Personality Disorders. (the link came to me via Opie via our Editor)
Being politicians, this is probably pure pandering rather than ignorance. Fact is that Personality Disorders cannot be acquired. They generally become evident in adolescence, if not earlier - but they cannot be created by military service or by anything else.
Since the most common seriouspersonality disorder in males is the untreatable Antisocial Personality (known to laymen as sociopaths, or people with no conscience, who lie easily, believe themselves to be above the rules of civil society, treat others as useful objects, and have minimal capacity for guilt - those without souls, as they used to say), one must wonder how many of these discharges are of people who did not belong in the service in the first place, would not follow the rules, and created problems for everybody else.
In the sane, good old days, they were known as "trouble-makers." Now they have a diagnosis. And, God knows, if we get Hillarycare, somebody equally sociopathic will probably try to make money pretending to "treat" these folks - on my nickel.
Wacky as it may sound to some, the only "cure" for this problem I have ever seen is for them to find God and to be deeply changed. And, even then, sometimes they just convincingly fake it to get out of trouble.
My old Dad always said: “Never drink on an empty stomach: always have a beer or two first”, and he was probably right. Kim du Toit, in a piece a week ago on holiday drinking
Mitt Romney is a damned good, capable man but, for whatever reasons, he did not catch fire. I'd say he's out in this kindergarten game of musical chairs. I'd like to see him somewhere in the government - but far away from the subject of medical insurance. And I'd say John McCain, who I like as a person but many of whose views I strongly disagree with, is back in the game. I yearn for the old days of the smoke-filled rooms. But at least I can still ignite a Cuban stogie up here in my own little library, while hoping for the death of Fidel.
From an alert reader: Whatsa matter, don't you read your own webpage? From Maggie's Farm recently:
Come on. You don't really think that woman is not going to win the democratic primaries, do you? If you were immortal and omniscient you wouldn't have enough power or time to ferret out all the cul-de-sacs of influence, fellow travelers, yes-men installed like ticks in government and NGO sinecures, and just plain access to money her and her husband have all over this planet. The emo kids, afraid that George Bush was listening to Al Qaeda phonecalls because he secretly wanted to find their stash of doobies, don't understand that rules are for Republicans. Hillary just goes down the hall and opens the file cabinets and plops a pile of FBI files on some toad's desk. They're not kidding around, and never have been. And they've been at it thirty years. There'll be a live boy or a dead girl or a horse's head in everybody's bed the minute they pull even with her in the polls, and they'll never even know where it's coming from. Not exactly.
The press, currently infatuated with the most liberal version of a democrat and the most unelectable version of a Republican, will get over unrequited Obama love right quick and fall behind Hillary,right after she's through having people mention that her Democratic opponents are crackhead madrassah psychos and have love children behind their noble cancer-ridden wife's back. And that's where Ron Paul! comes in.
Her husband never really won an election, you know. You can go on any Internet opinion playpen and hear all about how popular Bill is --and was -- but he never even cracked 50% of the vote on his re-election. Hillary's in the same boat. It's likely she'd have a hard time getting half the vote, even though 45% of the electorate is in the bag for a Democrat. Hello, Ross Perot! It's hard being right all the time, but we must try to bear up under the strain of it.
 It is amusing for me to see all of the punditry humbled by NH. It is a strange primary, though, in which Independents can vote. What sense does that make? Isn't it the job of a party to select its own candidates?
The history of the banana. More guns and less crime in Michigan. The death of high-fidelity sound. Rolling Stone. One quote there from Bob: Last year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums "have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static."
And speaking of real rock by older gents, try this. Illegals in Boston are deporting themselves. Daniel Pipes reviews Liberal Fascism in Frontpage LaShawn loved the movie Day Zero The warming catastophe all theoretically comes from feedback. What's the feedback? Prof Deneen considers the nanny state and Libertarianism. One quote: Living long lives becomes the sine qua non of modern liberal polities. "Morals" legislation becomes impermissible in favor of legislation that prevents actions that would shorten our lives. While initially a ban on harm committed by some against the physical well being of others, the logic of self-preservation and the avoidance of physical harm ultimately extends to preventing the ignorant from harming themselves. Paternalistic laws forcing people to be healthy are a logical outcome of a certain life-obsessed libertarianism.
 Those NH polls sure had me fooled. From Rick Moran:
I have been following politics for 35 years and cannot recall such a universal, all encompassing and ultimately, totally overblown media frenzy about a candidate that turned out to be so extraordinarily wrong. There’s a lesson there for us somewhere but frankly, I am too stunned to see it at the moment. Political pros were even swept up in Obamania and fell victim to being in love with the sound of their own voices pouring superlatives and encomiums on the senator from Illinois.
and In addition to women, Hillary captured the over 55 vote and those who make less than $50,000 a year. The significance of her victory in those groups cannot be lost on Obama. Oldsters vote in greater numbers than any other age group. And those who make under 50 grand a year vote Democratic in large numbers.
Does this mean we don't have to keep hearing about "change"? Here's Jules on "change": CNN notes key issues of “hope” and “change.” I hope things don’t change too much, because while there is always a lot of tinkering around the edges that might improve this situation or that, this remains one of the wealthiest nations in the world, providing all its citizens and a lot of non-citizens opportunities to advance themselves unmatched anywhere else in the world; the nation most seriously committed to the social welfare of all by means other than burdensome, motivation-killing socialism; the nation most seriously committed, having bled and paid heavily on this score, to equality and protection for all in matters of race and religion; and whether the rest of the free world likes to admit it or not, it relies on us to ensure its security. The “hope” and “change” mantras in such a privileged country frankly sound like adolescent whining.
Image: Thanks, Buddy
Tuesday, January 8. 2008
Quoted from Dr. Bob: But in the end you decide to trust this crazy guy who has already footed the bill for your get-out-of-jail-free card. Of course, he already knows what a pathetic sonofabitch you are, and having spent the big bucks to get you off the hook, is fully prepared to do the heavy lifting necessary to transform you into the useful and happy partner — dare I say friend? — which he’s always envisioned you to be. But first you need a major cleanup, starting from the inside out, since a whitewash is never gonna cut it. Extreme makeover needed — on the inside. The outside will take care of itself, in time. This, my friends, is what we call sanctification. An extreme makeover, from the inside out. Sounds painful.
Painful? Kinda-sorta. Read the whole thing.
For cat-lovers, a handy-dandy new contraption at Mr. Free Market.
|
