Wednesday, April 16. 2008
To Villainous, from her husband, in A suspension of Contempt: "Babe. I know we were planning on retiring. But I cannot, in good conscience with everything that is going on in the world, get out now. I think important things are going to happen and the Marine Corps will need all the leaders it can get. I still think I have something to contribute, and believe it is important to stay in and do my part. I trust you will understand."
 Staying in the dating game.
Parents often disagree with kids' choices of spouse (oh, really?) Do people really like having kids? The breakdown of marriage costs the taxpayers $112 billion/year. Jules. Makes the cost of Iraq seem insignificant. Well, I guess there's always gay marriage as an alternative, but Michael Coren says it's a big mistake. Plus many find it distasteful, as a concept. OK, now for the good news: me. Contentedly married with one wife, four kids, four horses, and three dogs - love 'em all, most of the time.
We rarely miss an excuse to discuss this law of nature. From a piece by Rob Norton at the Library of Economics and Liberty, which begins: The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or "unintended." Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular opinion have largely ignored it. The concept of unintended consequences is one of the building blocks of economics. Adam Smith's "invisible hand," the most famous metaphor in social science, is an example of a positive unintended consequence. Smith maintained that each individual, seeking only his own gain, "is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention," that end being the public interest. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, or the baker, that we expect our dinner," Smith wrote, "but from regard to their own self interest." Most often, however, the law of unintended consequences illuminates the perverse unanticipated effects of legislation and regulation. In 1692 John Locke, the English philosopher and a forerunner of modern economists, urged the defeat of a parliamentary bill designed to cut the maximum permissible rate of interest from 6 percent to 4 percent. Locke argued that instead of benefiting borrowers, as intended, it would hurt them. People would find ways to circumvent the law, with the costs of circumvention borne by borrowers. To the extent the law was obeyed, Locke concluded, the chief results would be less available credit and a redistribution of income away from "widows, orphans and all those who have their estates in money."
Read the whole thing.
Bardot in court once again for insulting Moslems. h/t, Theo. Ya can't make this stuff up.
 Yes, the guy paints and draws. I don't know how he finds the time.
This from a show of his stuff in Germany last year.
 Norwich VT (properly pronounced "norrich,") population 3000, is directly across the Connecticut River from Hanover, NH. The two towns in different states share a school district, which I believe is unique.
What caught my eye was this handsome place:  Built in 1998, but looks right for the land. I like the attached barn, but the place only has 19 acres. Asking price $3,450,000. Things are not cheap in New England these days. You can read about this house here.
Limited Government: Are the Good Times Really Over? A talk by Charles Kesler at Hillsdale College. Excellent, but I cannot quote from it.
McCain constantly makes himself available: he is the opposite of a managed candidate. Good on him. Interesting interview (transcript).
Smart guy, that King of Pith Insty, who asks: How come "human rights" are suddenly trumping Constitutional rights?
"All human institutions since the dawn of prehistory or earlier had always been designed to prevent change - all of them: family, government, church, army. Change has always been a catastrophic threat to human security." Peter Drucker (h/t, Vanderleun)
I confused some folks by posting our Tips to Commenters on the blog yesterday instead of at the top of our Categories over on the left, where it belongs. My bad. However, due to popular demand, we can now tell you how to put linkable links in our comments. You have to type in the command, thus: [url]www.domain.com[/url] Give it a try, if and when you feel like it. I did it without the bolds, and it didn't work.
 The use and abuse of tax havens.
I thought this was satire, but it isn't. Hurricane Alert! It's not global warming Markets in kidneys. Make sense? Wouldn't you agree that I have led a sensational life? Ed Koch Decision-making is surprisingly unconscious McCain-omics needs a theme VA school bans tag. Too aggressive? Good grief. Minimal consequences for violent crime in the UK. Dalrymple Don't rescue me. Sipp
Tuesday, April 15. 2008
Our pub-crawling friend Kondratiev, seeking a high-paying job at Maggie's Farm, offers this submission: As Mark Twain said with attribution to Benjamin Disraeli, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Let’s look at U.S. foreclosure filings, which increased by 0.067 percentage points in March from a year earlier as adjustable mortgages increased and more owners gave up their homes to lenders. More than 0.186% of the 125,892,000 U.S. households (234,000 properties) were in some stage of foreclosure. Properties in foreclosure in March 2007 were 0.118% of U.S. households (149,045 properties). About 1.99% of US homes (or 2.5 million foreclosed properties) may be on the market this year and in 2009. This doesn’t sound too scary, moving from twelve hundredths of one percent to nineteen hundredths of one percent, with a maximum two-year potential of less than two percent of US homes. However, a liberal press agenda is to maximize the fear factor in the months preceding the election, so let’s see how the press maximizes the potential fear factor editor’s comments in [brackets]: U.S. Foreclosures Jump 57% as Homeowners Walk Away (Update2) By Dan Levy April 15 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. foreclosure filings jumped 57 percent and bank repossessions more than doubled in March from a year earlier as adjustable mortgages increased and more owners gave up their homes to lenders. [that’s the ratio between 0.118% and 0.186%] More than 234,000 properties were in some stage of foreclosure, or one in every 538 U.S. households[doesn’t one in 538 sound like a larger number than 0.186%?], Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc., a seller of default data, said today in a statement. Nevada, California and Florida had the highest foreclosure rates. Filings rose 5 percent from February. “We're not near the bottom of this at all,'' said Kenneth Rosen, chairman of Rosen Real Estate Securities LLC, a hedge fund in Berkeley, California and chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate at the University of California at Berkeley. “The foreclosure process will accelerate throughout the year.'' Rising foreclosures will add more inventory to an already glutted market, keep home prices down through at least next year and thwart efforts by Congress and President George W. Bush to help homeowners avoid default, Rosen said in an interview. ‘Drag' on Prices About 2.5 million foreclosed properties will be on the market this year and in 2009, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. analysts led by Michelle Meyer said in an April 10 report. U.S. home price declines will probably double to a national average of 20 percent by next year, with lower values most likely in metropolitan areas in California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada, mortgage insurer PMI Group Inc. said last week in a report.
What PMI actually said was: “Given the drop in prices already the broad S&P/Case-Shiller house price index could decline by roughly 15-25 percent [from the 2006 peak]. The narrower OFHEO index could decline by a lesser 5-10 percent, because it excludes jumbo loans and the large portion of subprime and Alt-A loans that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac don’t participate in. “The odds of the ultimate price decline being toward the lower end of these ranges (5 percent for OFHEO and 15 percent for S&P/Case-Shiller) has increased recently because of policy changes that have taken place in the past few weeks. . . . “We still expect the housing market to stabilize sometime in the second half of this year in response to expansionary monetary and fiscal policy, while builders continue to reduce the number of single-family housing starts into 2009. If this occurs, then the inventory of unsold homes should peak later this year and fall throughout next year. As a result, the downward pressure on national house prices should begin to abate in the second half of 2008. It is likely, however, that prices will continue declining well into 2009, as inventories will still be large (even if falling).”
Note that this directly contradicts the statements by the Berserkley guy Ken Rosen, but the writer chose to ignore that. Frightening the consumer is paramount in accomplishing regime change in the United States, and if we do indeed have a recession, it will be the first to have been entirely caused by the media – the underlying economics in the country are excellent!
Here's a 2008 review of this 43 year-old dancing pheenom. Here's a brief excerpt from a solo piece.
 If there is an epidemic of drooling pedophile lechers hanging around the beaches, it's news to me, but maybe Maine is different:
York Police Chief Doug Bracy said the statute would represent a fairly minor change that would help keep the public safer, especially children. He noted that York police respond fairly regularly to reports of public peepers on the town's beaches.
Our editor wants a comment about this insanity in which, as Van Helsing puts it, "the government wishes to regulate your eyeball movements." People are sexual beings. We are many other things too, but that's one thing that we are. We have been given a strong dose of it, and it isn't seasonal like most animals. Is human sexuality "appropriate"? No, often it is not. Nor is human aggressiveness, nor is human fantasy in general. That's why we learn to keep fantasy in fantasyland, and to keep our behavior in the real world, where the real consequences happen. One thing that bothers me about the neo-puritanism of the radical feminists is the disingenuous blurring of sexuality with aggression (the wording of the Maine law is a perfect example of the perverse blurring). At the risk of sounding perhaps too non-traditional for Maggie's, unconscious and sometimes conscious erotic fantasies know no bounds of gender, age, morality, law, or social appropriateness. Everybody knows this and everybody has experienced this, on some level. Socio-cultural taboos, conscience, mental mechanisms like repression, laws, consequences, judgement, the balance of normal impulses, and conventions prevent most of us from behaving like monkeys. Not to mention the fact that we have other interesting or necessary things to do. However, people who sexually prey on kids are not so much sick as they are simple criminals. Unlike the ancient Greeks, and for better or worse, we have laws about these things. Break a law, become a crim. It's your choice. But this Maine law, designed to make it easier to prosecute "peepers" as felons satirizes itself. Obviously, the potential for abuse by paranoid Moms is part of the issue here. How does anyone discriminate a peeper from a looker? Everybody likes to look at cute kids, and that is what the neo-puritans can't tolerate. Is "looking" an action? Not in my book. If it were, I'd be on death row for all of the visual daggers I have thrown. Editor: More from Dr. Helen, and Moonbattery: Government to regulate eyeball movements. Related: The pub ogling crisis in the UK Photo: Would the feminists permit this famous and utterly innocent ad today?
Finally got around to finding this depressing piece on the Pacific Ocean's garbage dump.
 From Frank Furedi's The Truth about Music, at Spiked:
There is no ‘truer truth’ than that which comes through music, said Robert Browning. Which makes today’s transformation of music into a tool of social policy all the more tragic.
and The idea that classical music is elitist has become an article faith in the area of art and educational policy. It is premised on the belief that ordinary folk lack the aesthetic or intellectual resources to appreciate any experience that soars above ‘common culture’. Consequently, music apparently must be recycled in a form that can be mass-consumed. These kind of patronising assumptions underpin the way that music is taught in schools today. In many schools, children are provided with what’s called ‘music-making opportunities’. Instead of providing an opportunity for pupils to study and learn about music, ‘music-making opportunities’ are often about involving kids in playing around with digital media and pretending to be djs. Some educators justify this dumbed-down initiative as a pragmatic response to the shortage of music teachers. But frequently the ‘music-making’ approach is praised because it allegedly removes the ‘barriers’ that prevent children from ‘making music’.
Read the whole thing.
The reintroduction of Moose to Scotland. Very cool. But why do they have to be fenced? Battles over wolves in the American West.
As the Pope arrives in NYC, Anchoress looks at The Reality of Pope Benedict at Pajamas The Left goes down, in Italy Is the Ivy League a meritocracy now? Princeton's Flim Flam Man, in the NY Sun Why women should not rule the world. Big Lizard Turning around America's worst schools. The American The price of appeasement. Chesler
It's Skunk Cabbage time in New England. They are the earliest of marsh plants, producing their fleshy flower (in photo) before they produce their abundant cabbagy and funky-smelling leaves. Remarkable fact about these plants: They are thermogenic. That's how they can punch through snow and ice so early in Springtime. 
Monday, April 14. 2008
 Map of the world, as seen from America. Tiger
Brit Navy: Be nice to pirates. Maybe it was Be Nice To A Pirate Day. The normally calm Right Wing Prof blows a gasket over Obama. Related: A Category ll Kinsley Gaffe. Related: Allentown, at RWNH. Good piece, Rick First photograph ever taken. Jules takes a look at Marx Lite. From Blackjack to Wall Street: Gross and Thorpe "Natural" food doesn't mean safe. McCain's heart, at Villainous. Mo Udall was a good guy. I had this idea too. Complaint filed at the Canadian Human Rights Commission against a Montreal imam Mexico cracks down on illegal imigration - into Mexico Poor starving because of our "green" fuel. Related, at Boston Globe: Can't Eat Ethanol (h/t, Viking) Is Obama Cassius Clay? asks Scott at Powerline. He certainly acts like he can take the hits.
Photo: A cigar-lover at Mr. Free Market
 You just click on a date and see all the jazz in NYC. Cool resource.
Photo is The Blue Note.
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