Wednesday, January 21. 2009
Most from the US, second most from Canada. From The Myth of America's Oil Addiction:
The United States consumes about 21 million barrels of oil a day. Just over a third is domestically produced, while the rest is imported from a diverse array of sources from Latin America to Canada to Africa and the Middle East. The top five sources are geographically diverse: Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela and Nigeria. If Americans want to wring their hands in fear of being held hostage to oil imports, they might worry about a Big Five conspiracy: a secret Riyadh-Ottawa-Mexico City-Caracas-Lagos cartel that turns off the tap one day. If that sounds impossible and ridiculous, it’s because it is.
Photo: The Englishman's place, this week. Love the pic. But where's all the snow?
Everybody has his or her own critique of Obama's speech. I thought it was OK. Why is this such a big deal? The guy got a promotion. I had collected a bunch of interesting comments about it, but it's really not important so I decided not to link them.
Horowitz on conservatives and the inauguration
Kenyans waiting for their free stuff. Me too.
GM: We're still dying. NYT: We're still dying. They had to go to a loan shark? Also, the banks are bankrupt. There isn't enough money in the world to rescue all these dying things.
Wonderful Thank You George Bush photos.
Who is this obnoxious a-hole? Oh, he's Obama's Chief of Staff, putting away childish things.
Stimulus = pork.
Want influence in the new Admin? Be George Soros.
Ace's honeymoon is over. Well, when I heard that white and right thing I said things outloud that I cannot post at Maggie's.
On Obama's first day, he calls for repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. First things first, right?
Obama channeling Fred Astaire?
Also not drinking the Kool Aid.
Non-political: parents of autistic kids try anything. Sadly, they are easy prey for quacks and mountebanks.
 David Ogilvy had, and still has, a near-mythic stature in the world of advertising and marketing. However, his life was far more interesting than that.
Paul Carroll's WSJ review of a new bio of Ogilvy begins:
David Ogilvy (1911-99) had a grand life. He also had a boundless personality and a lot of fresh ideas, not to mention the luck of a booming postwar economy and the genius to take advantage of it. He helped transform the world of advertising -- and generally in a good way, even for those of us who usually find advertising an annoying distraction from important things, like sports.
Read the whole review.
 Orangutans threatened by Green Movement (h/t Jungleman). Orangs are almost people, aren't they? Without clothing, haircuts, etc.? See our photo of a well-groomed female Orang lounging at the beach.
The Great College Hoax. (h/t, Dr. Helen)
How is your fastball reaction time? (h/t, Theo)
If movie posters were honest (h/t, Wall St. Fighter)
Checklists for everything. I could not live without them. Especially my travel checklists. Without them, I'd end up at the beach without my flip-flops, in the woods without camera and ammo, in Italy without walking shoes, and in Nantucket without my red shorts.
Tuesday, January 20. 2009
 Good luck to the new Pres, and all the best to George Bush with our thanks for taking on a thankless job (photo from Anchoress). These people are only human...and, for better or worse, there happen to be three equal branches of the federal government. It's a bully pulpit, though, if one knows how to use it. GW didn't know how, or didn't care to. Celebrity was not his goal.
The death or re-birth of the financial supermarket/ Or will all of the banks end up nationalized?
A proposal to make newspapers non-profits.
What Obama brings to Conservatives.
Good essay: Kristol on Our next War Pres
Reminder to the orgasmic MSM: Half the country voted for the other guy.
McCain's campaign was pitiful. Like Dole, I think he was told from the start that he had no chance, so just go out there and be a good sport.
From the unions, a deafening silence on climate. Related: Climate update at Gateway
What is affordable housing? Sowell
Hamas torturing Fatah. That is true torture.
Florida: The Fool's Golden State. Vanderleun
A guy who is clearly not optimistic about Obama.
A grim milestone indeed. Government jobs in the US pass manufacturing jobs (h/t, Insty):
Who is supposed to make the money and profits to pay for all of those salaries, benefits, and pensions?
Despite being older than Insty - old enough to remember the Civil Rights era - I'll ditto Insty on his post. I always want the best for our country, and wisdom for our leaders government employees.
I refuse to term them "leaders" because, as a cranky Yank, I rarely follow anybody unless they're going where I am going.
One of the best sites I have seen. Newspapers from 72 countries. Click on a city to read, double-click to biggify. Newseum
The daily life of a solo doctor: Dr. Bob
We have never done an "open thread" here at Maggie's. In the spirit of 'change," let's give it a semi-open try.
"Hope" and "Change" are empty vessels. What do our readers want for Hope and Change (if anything)?
 I have never enjoyed inaugurations, whether I voted for the guy or not. They have always seemed too much like coronations to me, neither fitting the role nor the country. We build 'em up to superhuman size...and then we tear 'em down. Our founders rightly feared that human nature would try to turn Presidents into kings. Yes, it is kinda cool that we elected a young black guy, but just to say that is not only racist but also rather adolescent.
Blame Bernie Madoff's parents
Two thirds of African-Americans believe King's vision has been fullfilled.
From The Day the Newspaper Died in The New Yorker:
Soon after Jefferson came to power, he, like Adams, developed doubts about the unbounded liberty of the press. Printers, Jefferson complained, just days after his election, “live by the zeal they can kindle, and the schisms they can create.” In his second Inaugural Address, Jefferson ranted against printers who had assaulted him with “the artillery of the press,” warning that he had given some thought to prosecuting them. During his beleaguered second term, Jefferson suggested that newspapers ought to be divided into four sections: Truths, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Lies. What Jefferson wanted for the nation under his governance was a “union of opinion.” But that, of course, can never be the aspiration of a democracy—a point that newspapers have been very good at making over the two centuries since.
A critical view of Bush's tenure, at Reason
Wanted: More Nazis
From Mark Levey Leave the New Deal in the history books:
By 1939 Roosevelt's own Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, had realized that the New Deal economic policies had failed. "We have tried spending money," Morgenthau wrote in his diary. "We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!"
The problem was that neither Roosevelt nor President Herbert Hoover before him grasped the essential nature of the crisis, which was not the stock-market crash, but global deflation. At the end of the roaring '20s, an overhang of intergovernmental war debt from World War I, coupled with falling commodity prices and a currency crisis, had started the decline. Weak credit structures and European banks hurt by wartime inflation worsened it. When the Austrian Creditanstalt Bank failed, it ignited a global banking crisis that slashed across the international financial system cutting down everything in its path. Deflation went into full howl.
The same perils are now confronting President-elect Barack Obama, as the risk of deflation casts a long shadow over the economy. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have been correctly focused on shoring up financial institutions to prevent a collapse of the financial system, and stave off a severe decline in the general price level. If that were to occur, the unspoken fear has been that the U.S. and global economy could go into a deflationary death spiral that would cause the collapse of the international financial system.
From Karlgaard in Forbes: A Failure of Morals not Capitalism:
Many people do blame capitalism for bringing us to this low moment in the economy. Do they have a point?
They do if capitalism, as they define it, is devoid of any underlying morality. True enough, it is hard to see any underlying morality when one surveys the present carnage caused by liar loans, shady banks, duplicitous politicians, Ponzi schemers and regulators angling for Wall Street jobs.
This weekend, I caught a BBC radio program on the meltdown in “The City”--London’s financial district. The program quoted many young Brit bankers who said morality was a barrier to personal success in The City. Better to have the sociopath gene if one wants to become a billionaire.
Whole thing here.
Monday, January 19. 2009
More snow tonight. Time to declare a federal emergency for plowing costs. Don't you folks in Florida want to unite, and give me a hand? Or some free money would be fine.
The state of chronic emergency. A quote from Steyn's brilliant Our Permanent State of Routine Emergencies:
The Cato Institute's James Bovard was struck by the plight of Vernon, Conn., a town ravaged in the winter of 1995-96 by, er, slightly more snow than they'd expected. So FEMA sent them a check for $40,023. Vernon had 30,000 people, and its town snow-removal costs that winter were $258,000. "That's just $8.60 per person," Bovard pointed out, "less than a 12-year-old charges to shovel out a driveway after a good snowfall."
So why did they need "federal emergency" aid? Because the town had only budgeted $104,516, and so claimed to be "overwhelmed" by the additional costs. They could have asked the good burghers of Vernon to chip in an extra five bucks apiece. But why bother when FEMA's so eager to give you a warm bath in the federal love nectar? The town government wised up pretty quickly. The next winter, they set the snow-removal budget at just $69,383.
So a "federal emergency" is no longer a nuclear strike on Cleveland or even a Category Three hurricane, but now a snowfall in New England and an inaugural ball at the Mayflower Hotel.
Such hysterical boo-hoo-ism is not the Can-Do America I know and love. I keep wondering how much "We can't do it" is embodied in "Yes We can."
Next case -
From VDH's Novus Ordo Seclorum:
The more he willingly takes on the Lincolnesque or Caesarian mantle, the more the media worries that we have put too many expectations on Obama. Well, surely one way to lower our expectations would be to take a night-flight on a 737 to DC from Chicago, rather than reenact train-bound Young Mr. Lincoln. (Remember, unlike Lincoln, Obama flew back to Chicago from DC to take the train back to DC again). It sort of reminds one of the lectures about the Obama family off limits / Obama family center stage for photo-ops and interviews.
and
The 2005 Bush inauguration, despite occurring in boom times, was, I remember, deemed by the media as crass and a rich man’s fest, insensitive to the general poverty around. The more than twice as expensive 2009 Obama inauguration, despite occurring in a severe recession, is a measured and proper celebration of diversity and landmark progress. Annuit coeptis indeed.
 More snow yesterday and last night. This has been a wonderful winter thus far, cold and snowy, and cozy indoors. I got myself some nasty frostbite on my hands splitting and stacking firewood this past week. Just beginning to heal with the help of the BD daughter's special hand lotion stuff. Having sons is a darn good idea, but daughters take care of you.
Photo is my snow-covered duck boat.
16 things it took me 50 years to learn. Dave Barry
Are new jobs "stimulating"?
Jules needs a new system if he is going to continue to put up with his family's resentment of his blogging. His slow loading was bugging me, too.
Jew-baiting, then and now.
Bill Moyers vs. Abraham Foxman
"The sheer arrogance is breathtaking." Samizdata. Same in the US.
Towards market-based universities. Ward Connerly.
It's always fun to kick Tom Friedman around. He is indeed a legend in his own mind.
James Hansen: Obama has just 4 years to save the world. Meanwhile, Princeton Physics Prof unloads on the AGW charlatans
A parody or not?, from Slate's whine wine critic.
George Lakoff's job is to find new metaphors with which to render statist and socialist agenda items more palatable. Wilkinson discusses Lakoff's notion of "countries as clubs." I kept misreading this as "countries as country clubs." Free golf for all? or "Free the Golf Foursome"?
More details from the proposed Dem spending that you might have missed.
Middlebrow Messiahs and The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of The Great Books
A blog the Dyl found: The Contemporary Calvinist. He posted Jonathan Edwards' 70 Resolutions. It's all good.
The Eastern Church: How much do you know about it? One quote:
Eastern priests expect not only regular confession, but regular attendance, and most Eastern priests do not consider only every Sunday regular attendance. Both the Byzantine and Orthodox priests here expect attendance at Vespers as well as Matins and Liturgy on Sundays. The Orthodox parish offers Vespers and confessions every Wednesday and Saturday evening, and the priest expects attendance on Wednesday evenings, as well as Holy Days, in order to receive the Eucharist. Both priests require regular confessions.
The Plague hits Al Qaida. How nice for them.
 I agree with this quote at Am Thinker:
It can be stated without fear of serious argument that no previous president has been treated as brutally, viciously, and unfairly as George W. Bush.
Bush 43 endured a deliberate and planned assault on everything he stood for, everything he was involved in, everything he tried to accomplish. Those who worked with him suffered nearly as much (and some even more -- at least one, Scooter Libby, was convicted on utterly specious charges in what amounts to a show trial).His detractors were willing to risk the country's safety, its economic health, and the very balance of the democratic system of government in order to get at him. They were out to bring him down at all costs, or at the very least destroy his personal and presidential reputation. At this they have been half successful, at a high price for the country and its government.
Related: Bush's Rehabilitation. Krauthammer.
Related: War on Terror most successful US military operation in history. Jefferson on the pirates has nothing on him.
Related: Bush saved ten million African lives. He is better appreciated in Africa than in the US.
Related: To trash Bush was to belong. Related: The infantile tantrums Bush endured, without any hostile reaction from him or from his admin.
This tribute to the Gray Eagles (WWII pilots) was in conjunction with an air show in Ohio called "The Final Roundup." It was the last large gathering of the remaining P-51 Mustang fighters used during WWII. There were about 120 of the fighters there, all of them in flying condition, of course. The flyover seen at the end of the video trailer is composed entirely of P-51s spelling out the number 51.
A fine airplane. Video here.
"Segregation ...not only harms one physically, it also harms one spiritually...it scars the soul...It is a system which stares the segregated in the face, saying "You are less than..." and "You are not equal to...""
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
From a US Govt. "backgrounder" on the Civil Rights Act:
The assassination of John Kennedy in November 1963 left most civil rights leaders grief-stricken. Kennedy had been the first president since Harry Truman to champion equal rights for black Americans, and they knew little about his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Although Johnson had helped engineer the Civil Rights Act of 1957, that had been a mild measure, and no one knew if the Texan would continue Kennedy's call for civil rights or move to placate his fellow southerners.
But on November 27, 1963, addressing the Congress and the nation for the first time as president, Johnson called for passage of the civil rights bill as a monument to the fallen Kennedy. "Let us continue," he declared, promising that "the ideas and the ideals which [Kennedy] so nobly represented must and will be translated into effective action." Moreover, where Kennedy had been sound on principle, Lyndon Johnson was the master of parliamentary procedure, and he used his considerable talents as well as the prestige of the presidency in support of the bill.
On February 10, 1964, the House of Representatives passed the measure by a lopsided 290-130 vote, but everyone knew that the real battle would be in the Senate, whose rules had allowed southern (Democrats) in the past to mount filibusters that had effectively killed nearly all civil rights legislation. But Johnson pulled every string he knew, and had the civil rights leaders mount a massive lobbying campaign, including inundating the Capitol with religious leaders of all faiths and colors. The strategy paid off, and in June the Senate voted to close debate; a few weeks later, it passed the most important piece of civil rights legislation in the nation's history, and on July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed it into law.
Here's a link that briefly summarizes the civil rights era in the US.
Sunday, January 18. 2009
A big thanks today to every site on our blogroll on the left. We read 'em all, and rely on them all for ideas and "content." People put time and effort into their sites, whether commercial and high volume, boutiques like us, or niche sites which are relatively unknown.
I am sure that our readers, like us, are always finding new interesting sites and writers. But there is only so much time in a day.
So a big Thank You from snowy Yankeeland to everybody who toils at all of the sites on our list.
Winter nature photography, students aged 13-21, at Pixcetera.
Wow.
30 people for dinner uses one heck of a lot of appetizer plates, gumbo bowls, dinner plates and dessert plates, serving trays, pots and pans, utensils, wine glasses, linens, etc. It's our family tradition to leave it all out overnight so everything sticks hard to them, then take on the challenge in the morning. However, every last bit is cleaned up now. In keeping with the times, we did the whole thing without any servants/helpers. I am happy to have a left-over mountain of cheese grits. I can live on that stuff.
Well, we are blessed with wonderful friends. And, by the way, I need to mention that the person who "offered to bring desserts" last night is not only a fine lady and a talented pastry chef - but also an avid hunter and shooter. I was afraid she might try to pull a Cheney on me someday in a pheasant field if I didn't add that important detail.
Seen at the bird feeder this morning: A fine male Eastern Towhee (image). One wouldn't think it, but they are technically large sparrows. Early migrant, or over-wintering? They are indeed less common in New England than they used to be, for unknown reasons. They are woodland birds, and our eastern woodlands have been expanding as New England agriculture becomes less profitable.
 Somehow, Tiger just can't get it into his head that Big Corporations are evil, and should be destroyed. A quote:
...to Democrats, virtually every jurisdiction in the world is becoming a corporate tax haven compared to the United States. The federal and state corporate income tax rate in New Jersey, not the highest in the United States, is seven percentage points (or approximately 20%) higher than France, 11 percentage points (or around 35%) higher than Australia and the United Kingdom, and 29 percentage points (or around 250%) higher than in Ireland.
Folks, we are not going to rebuild our economy by vilifying public U.S. corporations that are operating businesses in "tax havens," even tiny little islands in the Caribbean. The relatively new accounting rules around corporate tax (known as "Fin 48" to the cognoscenti) wrap corporate taxes up in the same intensive audit review as other financial reporting. Sure, there will be the occasional case of fraud, but the top U.S. corporations (and even much smaller ones) now have vast internal audit staffs that blow the whistle on any attempt -- which now cannot come from the "top" -- actually to evade taxes. No, if you want to stimulate economic activity in the United States, massively reduce the corporate tax. At least make us competitive with, say, France, which any corporation would prefer to the United States as a location for its profits.
A new progressive's guide to action, from The Nation. Good grief. These folks live in the 1930s.
It's not your great-great-great-great grandfather's Bank Medici
The Milky Way: Not snack-sized anymore
Obama's apparent energy policy. Let's hope it's not what it looks like.
Best Blog? We considered nominating him for the Maggie's Farm Most in Need of Medication Award.
In case you missed it, here's the video of 1549 going into the river.
Surber on Hillary:
Nobody is dumber than someone who thinks she knows it all.
Omama is no Lincoln. He's a Copperhead. Thus far, anyway.
JC Phillips on the taxes on soda pop:
There is no scientific research linking non diet drinks with obesity.
It's not really a nanny state thing: It's a new tax, pure and simple, disguised with virtuous intentions.
Glenn Lowry looks at the future of identity politics and tribalism, in Boston Review. Here he discusses his childhood friend Woody:
Everyone, on first meeting him, assumed as much. I did too when we had begun to play together a decade earlier, just after I had moved into the middle-class neighborhood called Park Manor where Woody’s family had been living for some time. There were a number of white families on our block when we first arrived; within a couple of years they had all been replaced by aspiring black families like our own. Yet, Woody’s parents never moved, which puzzled me. Then one day I overheard his mother declare to one of her new neighbors, “We just wouldn’t run from our own kind.” Somewhat later, while watching the film Imitation of Life on TV, my mother explained how someone could be “black,” even though they looked “white.” She told me about people like that in our own family—second cousins who lived in a fashionable suburb, and on whom one would never dare drop in unannounced because they were passing for white. This was my earliest glimpse of the truth that racial identity in America is inherently a social and cultural, not simply a biological, construct—that it necessarily involves an irreducible element of personal choice.
and
...to the extent that we blacks see ourselves primarily through a racial lens, we may end up sacrificing possibilities for the kind of personal development that would ultimately further our collective racial interests. We cannot be truly free men and women while laboring under a definition of self derived from the perceptual view of our oppressor, confined to the contingent facts of our oppression.
Read the whole thing. I certainly agree with his point that reducing the notion of identity to skin color is a darn thin reed to hold on to. Being white tells me nothing about myself.
 John 1:43-51
The day following Jesus would go forth into Galilee, and findeth Philip, and saith unto him, Follow me.
Now Philip was of Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.
Philip findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.
And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth? Philip saith unto him, Come and see.
Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!
Nathanael saith unto him, Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.
Nathanael answered and saith unto him, Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel.
Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these.
And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.
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And it's the