Thursday, March 19. 2009
That's what Jim Hansen is calling for. Glad we didn't give them a dictatorship when they wanted us to fight global cooling 15 years ago...or every other time in history when the experts have been wrong.
Hansen, like Gore, has obviously not been taking his medicine.
 I've been to a lot of colleges. I've seen geeks, dorks, nerds. Committed frat-icide by keg. Met gobs of the artsy fartsy stripe, too. Seen plenty of pencil pushers in their dorm room chrysalis. But in all my travels, I've never been to a grimmer hive of humorlessness than Wellesley College. I'd rather have two teeth out than go to a party at Wellesley College. But they've finally come across with one good laugh. Check out the chart. That's the self-reported rate of virginity among the denizens of Swellesley, according to their own Counterpoint magazine.
When I picture the pile of mendacity this chart represents, and then season it with the images of the LUGS gettin' it on under the watchful eyes of their Sauron, Obama, and Che posters, the desolate furtive groping interspersed with the endless acts of contrition and permission necessary to disrobe a feminist toward the center of the chart, and the beautiful frosting of a vision of the bell curve ends getting together by accident during an all night trance party, I forgive Wellesley everything. You finally came across. You're checkbox comedians after all.
I've read that a Wellesley student once reported that she switched her iPod to Bach while waiting at crosswalks, because she didn't want anyone to know she was listening to the Spice Girls if she got hit by a bus when the light changed. I bet that girl's off the charts, baby.
Shep gets it (h/t, Anchoress). It's good to hear the truth from the MSM instead of pure flacking and brown-nosing. Makes me think more highly of Shep Smith:
 Shining Path Maoists embrace Capitalism. And shame on Amherst College: I guess they are the new Maoists. How come Lefties refuse to discuss ideas? All you get from them are insults, ad hominems, and censorship.
40% of US births are out of wedlock. Aren't we progressive? The gays want marriage, and the heteros don't.
Pretty funny about our Irish President being so teleprompter-bound that he thanked himself for hosting the party. Is he smart, or just slick and handsome?
Village for sale in England. Does it come with serfs?
Health information technology does no good. But it sounds good. How can you be against something called health information?
The War against Farmers' Markets. Next it will be a War against Tag Sales. Related: What if the kiddies decide to chew on their bicycles? Toys dangerous until proven safe
Prof B argues against bringing back the uptick
We hope you disagree with some of our political views, because, if you agree, you might be a Terrorist. In Missouri, anyway.
Here's where the tax increase is supposed to come from. It doesn't note that those "low-income tax cuts" are government checks to those folks. Related: Obama's climate plan could cost us $2 trillion. It is insane.
The Fed throws another trillion at the economy. Economists: Spending spinning out out of control.
The Journo-list thing is beginning to bother me. When the press is in cahoots with the government, we're in trouble.
From Dino's A TV Show for Morons:
Of course this is all a sham, today’s TV show for the rubes and morons to keep them riled up and to distract attention from The Great Train Robbery that really deserves universal opprobrium (and perhaps also to distract attention from genuine executive incompetence). AIG’s bonuses were only about 5% of what was paid by Merrill Lynch, for example. But AIG is Villain of the Day and so today we watch while AIG is thrown to the lions. Who gets eaten by the lions on tomorrow’s TV show?
Obama is an interesting character. His professorial approach and failings as an executive are paired with an apparently effective political strategy, at least as of this moment. Always have a clear enemy, always attack, and have a clear political aim. We wonder just how long the American people will let themselves be distracted by this endless cavalcade of villains being paraded before them to serve the purposes of the administration and congress.
Experiment with Lesbianism. Why not? I can relate: women are appealing.
Keeping Christians out of the UK. Right thing to do. You never know when those Christian wackos might decide to blow people up in buildings and subways.
The reviewer of a new definitive bio of Chagall at NY Review of Books says, snarkily, "I don't think his art deserves a biography this good."
This is Marketplace at Vitebsk, 1917:
Wednesday, March 18. 2009
From a review of three new books about the experience of madness, at New Atlantis:
Elyn R. Saks, in The Center Cannot Hold, brings to light her first intimation of schizophrenic “disorganization,” as she calls it, which occurred when her father reprimanded her for interrupting him while he was working. “Consciousness gradually loses its coherence. One’s center gives way. The center cannot hold. The ?me’ becomes a haze, and the solid center from which one experiences reality breaks up like a bad radio signal. There is no longer a sturdy vantage point from which to look out, take things in, assess what’s happening. No core holds things together, providing the lens through which to see the world, to make judgments and comprehend risk. Random moments of time follow one another. Sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings don’t go together.” This frightening slippage from normal consciousness first occurred when she was eight, and she knew she could not tell anyone about it.
and
Saks continued to function in the normal world even while she was delusional and hallucinating. “For example, I was getting my schoolwork done, and I vaguely understood the rule that in a social setting, even with the people I most trusted, I could not ramble on about my psychotic thoughts. To talk about killing children, or burning whole worlds, or being able to destroy cities with my mind was not part of polite conversation.” Sometimes she felt so crazy that she would simply lock herself in her room and turn off the lights. The only person in whom she could confide her true state of mind was her psychoanalyst, Elizabeth Jones.
Just reading the review offers a little glimpse in to what the experience of going crazy is like, along with the agonies of feeling defective, alienated from others, and shamefully stigmatized.
You can die of hypothermia when the temperature is well above freezing, and you will die of hypothermia after a while in 77 degree water. Many interesting facts at Freezing Persons Recollect (h/t, Cons Grapevine). All outdoorsmen should know this stuff. One example:
...many hypothermia victims die each year in the process of being rescued. In "rewarming shock," the constricted capillaries reopen almost all at once, causing a sudden drop in blood pressure. The slightest movement can send a victim's heart muscle into wild spasms of ventricular fibrillation. In 1980, 16 shipwrecked Danish fishermen were hauled to safety after an hour and a half in the frigid North Sea. They then walked across the deck of the rescue ship, stepped below for a hot drink, and dropped dead, all 16 of them.
Photo: 1st Class stateroom, Queen Mary.
I remember, as a lad, passing the Queen Mary in mid-Atlantic on a clear day. Built in 1934, she was an old lady by that time. Yes, she did blow her 1-ton whistles. She sits in Long Beach, CA today.
They don't make em like they usta.
The website Lost Liners has it all. (h/t, Theo)
 Or maybe the angle of the sun. It surely isn't the temperature here (below freezing at 5 am) which made every local bird wake up this morning and begin singing or twittering his territorial song for the first time this year.
I heard Robin, Tufted Titmouse, Chickadee, Carolina Wren, Cardinal, and Song Sparrow singing. Most migratory breeders won't be here until the buds pop open, and the tree buds aren't even swollen yet.
Today was really just a warm-up for the welcome Springtime morning chorus to come. It will last the next 6 weeks or so. Once their eggs are laid, they tend to go quiet so as not to attract attention.
Photo is a Tufted Titmouse, a fairly common songbird in New England.
 Too fat to work? They look like half the people at Disney World.
Soros' Media Matters is leaning hard on CNBC.
Reaching the beginning of the end of the recession? More at Financial Times
What is the extent of the urban heat island bias in land temperature measurement?
Tax my products, please, at WSJ. A quote:
The U.S. government mandates fuel-economy standards that force Detroit to make cars Americans don't want to drive. When Detroit loses money on those cars, Washington throws taxpayer dollars at its mistake, and the car makers demand a tax increase that would prod Americans to buy the unpopular cars that Washington mandates. As for what the American consumer or taxpayer wants -- or can afford in today's economy -- who cares? Welcome to government-run energy policy.
Obama's $100,000 bonus from AIG
More new evidence that intelligence is inherited (h/t, Gene Expression)
Cap and trade would be the largest tax ever
Afghanistan: "far from a catastrophe." Max Boot et al
Cosmetic surgery down in sagging economy
ACORN to participate in Census. That is unreal. Somewhat related: Do you know what OFA is? A quote from Am Thinker:
...we have a Movement -- this is their term, not mine -- organized by, and loyal to, a sitting President. Pledge canvassers, armed with your name, will ask you to pledge loyalty to the President too. A president whose term has already become a permanent campaign, is signing up ground forces in a mass organization pledged to personal loyalty to their Leader.
Does anyone know of any historical precedents for this in the United States?
On Social Security, he said "changes will be necessary" to the nation's retirement program. He emphasized, however, that the single most important thing the U.S. could do to put itself on a firm financial footing is to reform health care.
Pure baloney. There is no linkage there, unless they just repeat it often enough somebody might buy it.
More on the bonuses from the Financial Post. “To use a current cliche, frequently deployed to humiliate bankers and CEOs: He doesn’t get it. Barack Obama, that is. He just doesn’t get it, and nor do millions of others who are following the U. S. President on his long destructive march against bankers and corporate executives for their alleged ‘recklessness and greed.’ . . . The leading government-created disaster behind the financial crisis is U. S. housing policy and the multi-trillion dollar securitized mortgage market created by the U. S.-government backed mortgage agencies known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In comments in 2007, Mr. Bernanke reported that the two agencies, with $5.2-trillion in mortgage obligations, posed a systemic risk."
 In a 2006 interview, then- prospective candidate Barack Obama praised our troops in Iraq but when asked whether “Did [Congressman John] Murtha say that in the right way?” his charge that Haditha Marines committed “cold-blooded murder," Obama deferred to Murtha:
“You know, I don't have the exact quotes in front of me. What I know is here is a guy who served our country. I would never second guess John Murtha... I think he's somebody who knows of which he speaks.”
One after another, the Haditha Marines have been found not guilty. I’ve written many, many blog posts on the details of each case. I’ve yet to read anywhere, including the leftist blogs, any substantive criticism of the proceedings’ consideration of the facts.
Two cases remain open: Platoon leader SSgt Frank Wuterich and Battalion Commander LtCol Jeffrey Chessani. As in the other cases, the politically-propelled zealous prosecution has been handed a series of setbacks to their legal position. The latest is the appeals court upholding of the dismissal of charges against Chessani because of undue command influence. The entire judgment is here. A portion gets down to tacks:
“[W]e are convinced the Government failed to meet its burden of demonstrating, beyond a reasonable doubt, that these proceedings were untainted by the appearance of UCI. [Undue Command Influence] We are similarly convinced that an objective, disinterested observer, fully informed of all the facts and circumstances, would harbor significant doubt about the fairness of this proceeding.”
The prosecution can appeal further, up to the US Supreme Court. Otherwise, the prosecution can choose to restart the case from scratch, under new leadership. The same cause of dismissal, for SSgt Wuterich, is expected.
These Marines have suffered from a runaway frenzy in prosecution. It’s time it ended.
The father of one of the boys in my son’s Little League team is a similarly distinguished LtCol of many years service in the Marine Corps, preparing to assume a vital and very challenging command. Is the message we want to give him and his family that they may face similar ruinous consequences of simply doing their duty?
Unlike Obama, I won’t defer to Murtha but to the known honor and courage of my fellow Marines.
Tuesday, March 17. 2009
 The blackbirds are now up from the South and back at the feeder: voracious Purple Grackles, Cowbirds, and Red-wings. Also visiting today: Song Sparrow, Fox Sparrow, White thoated Sparrow, Mourning Doves in droves, Tree Sparrow, Carolina Wren, Tufted Titmouse, BC Chickadee, Goldfinch, Cardinal, Blue Jay, a few remaining SC Juncoes. Nothing exciting, but all comers are welcome.
With all of the snow and cold, it's been expensive keeping these critters on welfare this year. It's getting about time to cut out their free lunch anyway, although it was 29 degrees F. this morning.
Plus the dang fat squirrels eat half of the bird seed, thus resulting in healthier, more fertile squirrels producing more babies to eat even more of the bird seed next winter.
Photo: A male Cardinal. We have plenty of them here. They nest in the evergreens and brambles.
Roger's post here today captures some of the inanity swirling around the AIG situation over the past few days. In my view, the AIG focus is populist, boob-bait scapegoating - along with a (doubtless welcome) chance to trash Wall St. Everybody loves to trash it until they need a loan, want to make an investment, or want to start a business. It's a distraction from the real issues in the economy which pose hard and complicated questions. Tough finance and tough politics.
The previous owners of AIG (the shareholders and bond holders - me included, I am sorry to say) have already been thoroughly punished. Like it or not, though, AIG is still one stone in the arch that holds up the superstructure of the global economy, same as Citigroup (same as Lehman was, and we saw how that worked out). Unlike Citi, We The People now own AIG, so it behooves us to run it well in a businesslike fashion unless or until it is broken into parts and sold. Thus of course those folks should get their contractual bonuses. That's how these folks get paid: it's not "extra" for doing a good job. Their salaries are token, and generally quite modest. Not getting your bonus is a finance company's gentle way of saying "Start looking for another job. We don't need you here anymore because you are not adding enough value to our enterprise." If they don't get paid they will leave, and our national "investment" in AIG will go down the toilet. We are getting these guys cheap, too.
Sorkin at the NYT agrees.
Our friend Tigerhawk has written one of the clearest and most succinct pieces on the background of the financial mess. Too much easy money from governments too politically timid to sit through economic contractions, too many greedy borrowers, and overly-lax lending. We are headed back in that same direction again.
Related: Bank punished by Fed for not making bad loans
We like to put it out there into cyberspace, especially stuff that the MSM neglects, but also whatever seems interesting or diverting to us. We do not aim to cover everything, though. We all have day jobs, so whatever we do is all we can do.
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Photo: Our fact-checker, on the job serving breakfast at Maggie's Farm HQ this St. Paddy's Day morning. But Corona on St. Patrick's Day?
 There's a monotonous feel to the interaction between the stock market and government these days. A government hack says something dumb, and the market tumbles. The only adult left in the room, Ben Bernanke, will appear in some forum and talk a little sense. First the market stabilizes, and then jumps. Lather, rinse, repeat. Then every once in a while, the big kahuna of them all, Studs Urkel Obama, opens his yap and everyone with even a sock full of pennies heads for the exits. It's like clockwork.
Yesterday was only one in a raft of examples of this dynamic. Bernanke appears on Sixty Minutes, the market's riding on multiple consecutive days of big gains, likely fueled solely on shellshocked investor optimism that there's enough stability to preclude their money being subject to a kind of three-card-monte oopsie the next day. The DJIA is up 200+ by midday and it looked like maybe people might start to think it's dangerous not to be in the market. Then at noon a picture of Little Timmy and President Urkel running their mouths about AIG appears on Drudge and the market gives up three percent in two hours. Little Timmy Geithner has fallen into the Treasury well, and Lassie is dead. President Urkel can't even be in over his head, because he's never even been to the pool. He literally knows nothing about being an executive. Here's some advice for the dynamic duo: AIG deals in counterparty risk. The counterparties listen to you too.
It's the executive branch, you know. He's the chief executive. And it's his first executive position. It shows. President Urkel went live yesterday, and he complained. Whined, actually. He made an impotent gesture, talking about how someone should do something about those bonuses they dole out at AIG. Or he was going to do something, except he can't. Well, he said something, I'm not quite sure what, and neither was he. The US government owns 80% of AIG, and the chief executive of the US whined like a recently promoted secretary still asked to make coffee. He could do anything he wanted. But he did what all bad executives do: He tried to leave his castle with a pitchfork and join the mob and yell at the spot he used to be standing in. It doesn't work that way.
If President Urkel knew the first thing about being an executive, he'd know that you only whine up the ladder. You never whine to your underlings. They whine to you, you whine to your boss, and so forth. There is no "up" where you are, Mr. President. You're the Decider, now, remember? You asked for the job. That's why Nixon roamed the halls and talked to the pictures of dead people. They're your only colleagues now.
Be quiet, or do something. My advice is the former, because you seem to have no clue about the latter.
The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. MSM reporters on board, of course, to do the heavy lifting.
 I saw a Right Whale with calf from a schooner in the Gulf of Maine about 20 years ago. I had no idea there were so few of them, or that the european Right Whale population had been long hunted to extinction.
Along our American coast, with a few conservation efforts, their numbers are slowly recovering. Still, 350-400 is about as close to extinction as a species can get. Whales are as easy to kill as cows.
Magnificent critters.
Photo from the NYT article.
 "I am Patrick, yes a sinner and indeed untaught; yet I am established here in Ireland where I profess myself bishop. I am certain in my heart that "all that I am," I have received from God. So I live among barbarous tribes, a stranger and exile for the love of God."
"I am Patrick, a sinner, most uncultivated and least of all the faithful and despised in the eyes of many."
"Christ beside me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me."
Also, a reader sent in a hymn - a new one to me - St. Patrick's Breastplate - which is a translation from Gaelic. Good tune, and it uses those words in the third quote.
 "I am just going out and I may be some time."
The conference that went unreported in Europe. Why?
Imagine the luck!
Rewriting the history of Poland
I'm surprised that Clinton didn't think of this: White House Council on Women and Girls
Dick Morris: Can the Pres do the job?
Why we have to take good care of AIG. We own it.
What exactly did Obama inherit? Good or bad?
Report from a seething climate-crazed cranium
UW study says climate shifts are natural. h/t, Surber
Berkeley physics prof: Gore "exaggerates"
Shelby Steele on Why the GOP can't win with minorities. One quote:
...American minorities of color -- especially blacks -- are often born into grievance-focused identities. The idea of grievance will seem to define them in some eternal way, and it will link them atavistically to a community of loved ones. To separate from grievance -- to say simply that one is no longer racially aggrieved -- will surely feel like an act of betrayal that threatens to cut one off from community, family and history. So, paradoxically, a certain chauvinism develops around one's sense of grievance. Today the feeling of being aggrieved by American bigotry is far more a matter of identity than of actual aggrievement.
Photo: Since he asked so nicely, and since we love old rugs, we'll add the informative Rug Rag to our Eclectic blogroll. That's a Soumac. Our favorites are antique Caucasians, but they are expensive, even now. We are also adding the newly-crowned Ross Douthat's site to our blogroll (even though we do not know how to pronounce his name).
Monday, March 16. 2009
Charles Murray at The American. One quote:
...do we want the United States to be like Europe?
I argue for the answer “no,” but not for economic reasons. The European model has indeed created sclerotic economies and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem.
My argument is drawn from Federalist Paper No. 62, probably written by James Madison: “A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.” Note the word: happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.
and another
What’s happening? Call it the Europe syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the twenty-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase “a life well-lived” did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.
Perhaps we already linked Voegli's essay of the above title, but, if we did, it bears repeating. Here's one quote:
Our age has seen political disdain become seamlessly integrated into cultural disdain. The prominent novelist E.L. Doctorow showed the way in 1980 when he wrote that Ronald Reagan had grown up in "just the sorts of places [small towns in Illinois] responsible for one of the raging themes of American literature, the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces.... The best and brightest fled all our Galesburgs and Dixons, if they could, but the candidate was not among them." Reagan did attend college, but not the kind that would have given him some exposure to the world outside the soul-murdering towns where he grew up, and to moral ideas calling into question his parents' religion. Instead, wrote Doctorow, a "third-rate student at a fifth-rate college could learn from the stage, the debating platform, the gridiron and the fraternity party the styles of manliness and verbal sincerity that would stand him in good stead when the time came to make his mark in the world." Achieving success in his first job out of college, as a radio announcer in Des Moines, Reagan made a number of local speaking engagements, "giving talks to fraternal lodges, boys' clubs and the like, telling sports stories and deriving from them Y.M.C.A. sorts of morals."
We see here all the basic elements, employed for the past 28 years, of liberal condescension. Every issue of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, or Rolling Stone makes clear that the policy positions of George W. Bush, Republicans, and conservatives in general are wicked and stupid. The real problem, however, is that everything about these people—where they reside, what they believe, how they live, work, recreate, talk, and think—is in irredeemably bad taste. To embark on a conversation with one of them, based on straight-faced openness to the possibility of learning something interesting or important, would be like choosing to vacation in Wichita instead of Tuscany.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Robert Heinlein, as quoted in a counterattack piece at Synthstuff
 More snow tonight here. Where's that warming they keep promising?
Sex in church in Alabama. Makes sense to me.
Famous war criminal to visit Canada
Dramatic advances sweep Iraq. (h/t, Insty)
Victimology 101 at Yale
Management 101 at Sippican
AIG defends their bonus compensation. Bonuses are how these folks get paid. Not their salaries. Same way with me. My salary is pin money. My bonus is what I get paid for working hard. No bonus means it's your time to leave because you aren't adding enough value to the enterprise. A job is not an entitlement.
Need financial aid for college? Related: Do we really need more college grads?
Also related: The College of Social Change
How is Roubini investing?
How a college defines hate. Idiots.
Paging Dr. Obama: Looking forward to government-run health care. If anbody imagines that the gummint will offer more, better, cheaper, they are dreaming. Gummint will offer controls and rationing of medicines and procedures, way beyond what any "evil insurance company" would do. You can count on it, because they are already saying so.
Related, a quote from Dr. Bob:
Here’s the question I’ve been pondering: is it an absolute good to be continually striving for a longer life span? Such a question may seem a bit odd coming from a physician, whose mission it is to restore and maintain health and prolong life. But the article which Glenn linked to, describing the striking changes in health and longevity of our present age, seemingly presents this achievement as an absolute good, and thereby left me a tad uneasy — perhaps because I find myself increasingly ambivalent about this unceasing pursuit of longer life.
Of course, long life and good health have always been considered blessings, as indeed they are. But long life in particular seems to have become a goal unto itself — and from where I stand is most decidedly a mixed blessing.
The joke is on our kids. (I have no kids, yet. No wife, either, yet: she will need to be lovely, sweet, serene, sexy, competent, smart, outdoorsy, vigorous, and devoted to me despite my flaws - and interested in everything.)
Related: Administration not Socialist enough, at Jules
Related: The Obama team decides to take control of the Capitol. Don't I recall that "one-party rule" was a bad thing? Never mind.
Who is my neighbor?, posted here at Maggie's.
If it's just a symbol, the heck with it. Anchoress
Facebook? Pointless. Twitter? Pointless. No doubt.
Kaus: Is this Admin too preoccupied with morals? Doesn't strike me that way. At all.
Bumpersticker below from Theo:
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