Tuesday, August 5. 2008
From a stunning post at HuffPo: Dreams from My Father is a staggeringly beautiful book, lyrical, powerful and poetic. It is also the story of a man who has been many men, all named Barack Obama. In his own eyes, he is one race, but also another. He is an American, but also a Kenyan. He is from Hawaii and also the Kansas heartland. He is Harvard elite, then the Chicago streets. At times he decries the very clay from which he was made, only to remake himself again. At each place and stage, as Barack Obama chronicles the chapters of his life, he tells us how he has re-invented himself, becoming the role he inhabits, though not falsely or in-authentically, like Bill Clinton. He actually seems to transform himself, becoming what must be next. He has been called distant, aloof and somewhat unapproachable, perhaps because we cannot approach what he does not have, a solid core. His soul seems to be molten and made up of dreams, which is at once breathtakingly inspiring and forbiddingly indeterminate. When this young man with the flowing, passionate core, when this candidate without the solid-center changes positions and transforms himself as we watch, it leaves Americans much more in doubt about who he is and how he would lead us. It also reveals an Obama of unapproachable arrogance and inestimable self-regard: He appears confident voters will appreciate his superiority regardless of where he journeys or what he becomes to meet his political ambitions. John McCain is a complete and well-formed man. Barack Obama is completing himself. As he moves to fit what he perceives to be a right-of-center country, he distances himself from the simple and authentic passion of a young candidate who once pledged "Change We Can Believe In." This is the trap Barack Obama has made for himself, the one he cannot escape, the one Hillary Clinton foresaw, the one that may doom him. The Obama campaign knows it too. In fear the dream is being lost drop-by-drop, they are going negative on John McCain. Maybe the aliens should ask to meet McCain, as well.
Read the whole thing. The point is that Obama is not a man - he's a boy. He's an Icarus who bought his own hype. Thus his polling is weakening as the realities become clearer. Even the greedy sanctimonious Lefties are upset, even though they think they know he is really one of them. He is exploiting their innocent, childish mentalities. As Environmental Repub says, ...Sen. Barack Obama has proven to be an empty suit in spite of news coverage that would make the Pope blush. The Dem base is suffering from buyers remorse it seems.
Rick Moran considers these ideas at some length. And, as Moderate Voice sadly notes, John McCain has just begun to campaign, and he has some real pros working with him now.
 Stanley Fish in The NYT. (h/t, Right Wing Prof). One quote:
Last week, I confessed to being a bad traveler. This week, I confess to something much worse. I resist and resent the demands made on me by environmental imperatives. I don’t want to save the planet. I just want to inhabit it as comfortably as possible for as long as I have. Things reached something of a crisis point a few days ago when my wife asked me to read a communique from Greenpeace. (She thought, she told me, that if I read it rather than hearing about it from her, my unhappiness would be directed at the organization.) It said that Kimberly-Clark, the maker of the paper towels, facial tissue and toilet paper we buy, does not use recycled fiber and instead “gets its virgin wood fiber clear-cut from . . . the North American Boreal . . . one of the world’s most important forests.” And that meant, she told me, that we would have to give those items up and go in search of green alternatives. But we had already done that once before when it turned out that the manufacturer of the paper products we used to buy — Procter and Gamble — engaged in research on animals. That’s when we found Kimberly-Clark. So it seems that the pure were not so pure after all, and who’s to say that the next corporation won’t have an ecological skeleton in its closet, too?
At The Corner. Ditto, Jonah.
That's a Theo gal, but looky here for the coolest machine ever, with photo. Within ten years, everybody might have their own home energy source. Martian soil is polluted. Obama wants "economic justice." My idea of economic justice is for me to keep my money and the money I inherit. Not that I ever will inherit any, though. On the other hand, perhaps economic justice might permit me to travel like this. Related: Sissy calls Obamamania what it is - another Children's Crusade. Related: Scarecrows and Bogeymen. Related: Is Obama's oil flip-flop too late? Related, a quote from the NYT: "We have to take health care out of the hands of insurance companies, BigPharma and overpaid doctors. We need to set a goal of building a social welfare system similar to the more civilized countries in Europe, like France and Germany."
Is that self-satire, or for real? Related, Hollywood takes on the Left. Related, a plea to closeted California Repubs to come out. Lots of gorillas out there in the jungle. The Royal Navy is sinking junk science. Related: Somebody wants to regulate blog speech about the AGW debate. Unbelievable. On the internets, it's still the Depression. Jihad takes on China. Bad idea. China has no ACLU. Dumped lesbian charges bigamy. Life in the monoculture. Driscoll. Outside the urban monoculture, however, old folks and bikers vote too. Also, old bikers. The messages in Merrill's misfortunes. A reader likes the sound of this new Nikon D90.
The Opinion Journal's piece on Solzhenitsyn begins like this: "The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering." Thus did Alexander Solzhenitsyn begin "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," his reveille for the world about totalitarianism. Published in 1962, in the brief post-Stalinist thaw under Khrushchev, the novel about a prisoner in a Soviet prison camp made Solzhenitsyn at first a Russian sensation and later the country's most famous dissident after the Kremlin reverted to brutal form.
And as quoted by Vanderleun, "When all of the rest of the civilized world, as well as the Marxist world, was tossing God into the dustbin of history, Solzhenitsyn realized that only God really matters. He chided the West for embracing materialism and forgetting God, a lesson that is just as true today as thirty years ago." -
Back from my annual trip to family-friendly, glitz-free�Wellfleet on Cape Cod, whence no opportunities for fresh posting. You talk about Obama stickers - good grief. Never saw so many of 'em. Just a solitary NOBAMA bumper sticker, and�one Ron Paul sticker on a plumber's old F-150: the self-employed are an independent lot.
Only regret: no time to stop by and visit with our friend�Sipp on the way. With the vacation traffic, the drive took us 7 migraine-inducing stop-and-go traffic�hours.
Despite the drive, the Cape is where I need to go to clean my brain with (all-organic)�cold salt water and to refresh my innards with fresh Wellfleet oysters.�Here's where we stay:
�Here's the view of the harbor and our�home beach�from our deck, with its tiny boardwalk across the little�salt marsh:
More photos of the place on continuation page below -
Continue reading "Pines, hot sand, and chilly salt water"
Monday, August 4. 2008
 "Why Do So Many Westerners Refuse to “Get” That We Are At War?" That's the title of a piece by Phyllis Chesler. One quote:
Westerners are in denial. And, the deniers are even more afraid of Jihad and terrorism than those of us who are crying out against it. Thus, like battered women, they seek to appease the violent offender; they also engage in self-blame in the misguided belief that if they do not “offend” their batterer that he will not batter them.
The raw cheese protest. Reason I'm conservative, but don't tell anybody. Am. Thinker Babies don't do better in countries with socialized medicine. Pajamas John Voight: We were used and manipulated during Vietnam The Utopia of Relativism. Dr. Bob Bill Clinton says he isn't a racist. Inside Obama's OODA Loop, via Insty, at Classical, a quote: McCain, the fighter pilot, has gotten inside Obama's OODA loop. Something the Navy teaches fighter pilots to do. The OODA Loop, often called Boyd's Cycle, is a creation of Col. John Boyd, USAF (Ret.). Col. Boyd was a student of tactical operations and observed a similarity in many battles and campaigns. He noted that in many of the engagements, one side presented the other with a series of unexpected and threatening situations with which they had not been able to keep pace. The slower side was eventually defeated. What Col. Boyd observed was the fact that conflicts are time competitive. Elections are nothing if they are not time competitive. Evidently the "freezing of the opponent" that Alinsky recommends has not worked on McCain. He was not frozen. Once that happened McCain was operating inside Obama's decision loop. Evidently Boyd is beating Alinsky. Or to put it another way. The fighter pilot is beating the community organizer. As a Navy man myself, I'm not surprised.
Related: Obama is a jet crash Image: I guess we were down for quite a while yesterday, and nobody let our Blogmeister know. And I can assume that he was sailing, and had no clue.
by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu, 1725. It begins: The difference between great nations and savage peoples is that the former have applied themselves to the arts and sciences, while the latter have totally neglected them. Perhaps most nations owe their existence to the knowledge that the arts and sciences provide. If we had the mores of the American savages, two or three European nations would soon devour all the others; and then perhaps some people conquering our world would boast, like the Iroquois, of having devoured seventy nations. But leaving aside savage peoples, if a Descartes had come to Mexico or Peru one hundred years before Cortez and Pizarro, and if he had taught these peoples that men, composed as they are, are not able to be immortal; that the springs of their machine, as those of all machines, wear out; that the effects of nature are only a consequence of the laws and communications of movement, then Cortez, with a handful of men, would never have destroyed the empire of Mexico, nor Pizarro that of Peru.
His whole piece at New Atlantis.
What did it do? A quote from Pakistan Picaresque in The Wilson Quarterly: The year was 1992, and Lucymemsahib and I were helping the government of Pakistan prepare a grant proposal for the country’s Social Action Program (SAP)—a comprehensive effort to renovate Pakistan’s health, education, and water sanitation systems that the World Bank and a consortium of other multinational development organizations had pledged to support. Specifically, we were looking into ways to attract more women to provide midlevel health services in rural areas. As head of the Pakistan Nursing Council, Mrs. S. presided over the governmental organization responsible for the recruitment, training, and certification of nurses at Pakistan’s 60 civilian nursing schools and a handful of specialized military institutions. The SAP we helped prepare, which ran from 1993 through 1998, turned out to be a dismal failure, as was the one that followed in 1999–2003. Subsequent programs, especially since 9/11, show every indication of being as unsuccessful. The critical indicators of maternal and child health tell it all. Estimates of Pakistan’s maternal mortality ratio since 1990 range from 300 to 800 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births; even the low end of this range is unacceptable. By contrast, Sri Lanka, another South Asian country, with an income per capita that was roughly comparable to Pakistan’s at the beginning of the 1990s, saw its maternal mortality ratio fall from 92 per 100,000 in 1990 to below 50 today. The infant mortality rate in Pakistan in 2003 was 76 per 1,000 live births, as compared with 11 in Sri Lanka. In the developed countries, the infant mortality rate is only about five per 1,000 live births. Beyond the health care sector, the story is much the same.
It's a good case study of what really happens in the real world, despite the best of intentions.
Ronald Bailey at Reason calculates the cost of "re-powering America." Cost is one thing, but I don't see the purpose anyway. We have centuries of good fossil fuel here, and VA, oddly enough, is full of uranium.
The Voyage of Life, Childhood, 1842. National Gallery of Art, Washington. 
Sunday, August 3. 2008
By Herb London at TCS. It begins: In order to fulfill the requirements for a major in history at Northwestern University, my daughter took a course called "The Cold War At Home." As one might imagine in the hothouse of the college system, left wing views predominate. The students read Ellen Shrecker, not Ronald Radosh. Joseph McCarthy has been transmogrified into Adolf Hitler. And victimology stands as the overarching theme of the course. Communists in the United States are merely benign civil rights advocates and union supporters. The word espionage never once crossed the lips of the instructor. An extraordinary amount of time and energy has been devoted to the "lavender persecution" - harm imposed on gay Americans. Presumably, this group was more adversely affected by McCarthy's allegations than others. Despite the recent scholarship on the period such as Alan Weinstein's well researched book on Alger Hiss or Stanton Evans' biography of Senator McCarthy, views that do not fit the prevailing orthodoxy aren't entertained. Pounded into students is the view that America engaged in "totalitarian practices" not unlike the Soviet enemy we decried.
What is marriage? Some provocative thoughts at Chronicle, concluding: In the meantime, Dolan and the marriage scholars she ably represents and cites — such thinkers and inspired researchers as Nancy F. Cott, David Cressy, Alison D. Wall, and Stone — offer a further message to conservative opponents of same-sex marriage. If they truly understood the institution's history, they might fall to their knees and thank God that gay people want anything to do with such a conceptual mess.
Is it really a mess? It's been a sacrament for a long time.
Vegetarian sausages? How subjective is taste? Very. Look at Berlin. It's a mess. African infantryman of the year. Mr. Free Market. Good grief. If Obama loses, it proves America is racist.
From Mary Eberstadt, at First Things. It begins: That Humanae Vitae and related Catholic teachings about sexual morality are laughingstocks in all the best places is not exactly news. Even in the benighted precincts of believers, where information from the outside world is known to travel exceedingly slowly, everybody grasps that this is one doctrine the world loves to hate. During Benedict XVI’s April visit to the United States, hardly a story in the secular press failed to mention the teachings of Humanae Vitae, usually alongside adjectives like “divisive” and “controversial” and “outdated.” In fact, if there’s anything on earth that unites the Church’s adversaries—all of them except for the Muslims, anyway—the teaching against contraception is probably it. To many people, both today and when the encyclical was promulgated on July 25, 1968, the notion simply defies understanding. Consenting adults, told not to use birth control? Preposterous. Third World parents deprived access to contraception and abortion? Positively criminal. A ban on condoms when there’s a risk of contracting AIDS? Beneath contempt.
Modern contraceptive practices had a huge impact, and yet sex was not invented in the 1960s, and the ancient Egyptians and Greeks used contraceptives. Does sexuality have anything to do with Judeo-Christian morality? Read the whole thing.
 Bird Dog gave me some seedlings to try in the garden, warning me that they don't grow like squash, but like gourds. (They are an edible gourd, same as pumpkin.)
Vigorous doesn't describe it. These things are like Jack's beanstalk, and bugs leave them alone. You're supposed to pick them before they get much over a foot long. Americans may consider them to be an Italian heirloom vegetable, but they are grown all over Asia. You peel them and cook like summer squash. Sometimes people fry them, too. Photo: A cucuzzi, with an overgrown cucumber for comparison.
Friday, August 1. 2008
Our friend Jonah Goldberg on Prosperity and It's Discontents. Poverty and trouble is, indeed, man's default condition. One quote: The interesting question isn’t “Why is there poverty?” It’s “Why is there wealth?” Or: “Why is there prosperity here but not there?”
At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.
For generations, many thought prosperity was material stuff: factories and forests, gold mines and gross tons of concrete poured. But we now know that these things are merely the fringe benefits of wealth. Stalin built his factories, Mao paved over the peasants. But all that truly prospered was misery and alienation.
A recent World Bank study found that a nation’s wealth resides in its “intangible capital” — its laws, institutions, skills, smarts and cultural assumptions. “Natural capital” (minerals, croplands, etc.) and “produced capital” (factories, roads, and so on) account for less than a quarter of the planet’s wealth. In America, intangible capital — the stuff in our heads, our hearts, and our books — accounts for 82 percent of our wealth.
Any number of countries in Africa are vastly richer in baubles and soil than Switzerland. But they are poor because they are impoverished in what they value.
He nails it. Read the whole fine thing.
Nope. It's a bathtub. Good grief. More here. 
I was taught that glass is technically a liquid. However, now it seems that there is no consensus on what it is.
 They went to Russia to build socialism.
Dems say they're OK with $10 gas. Hey, John! You can be a celeb too. Moderate Voice Why the growing Gulf dead zone? What if Iraq works out? VDH Monitoring the enemy's broadcasts. No Pasaran Some real numbers on PC in education. h/t, David Thompson
Politics is so complex, isn't it? No joke - apparently Obama promises his kids a puppy if he's elected. It's all about hope, kids. The News Junkie believes that Obama will give him a pony and a new, hopeful outlook on the communal paradise to come.
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