Thursday, March 12. 2009
 Adirondack fly fishing legend Fran Betters is ill, and asks for help in selling his shop and asks that, if you want one his hand-built rods, to buy one now. Been to his place a number of times over the years. Always in that chair, tying flies or building rods, with his wife in attendance. A crusty codger with a good heart.
Read his poignant letter at his site.
If you fish, buy something from the old fellow to help put his mind at ease. Even a few flies. Fran invented the famous Ausable Wulff. A good wet fly.
We should have been following this conference in NYC closely, but we can't do everything. Here's a dispatch from Reason, with this quote from Klaus' speech:
Klaus (also) warned that powerful rent-seeking groups were riding the global warming alarmism bandwagon all the way to the bank. Rent-seeking occurs when individuals, firms, or organizations attempt to make money by manipulating the regulatory environment rather than by trade and production. Klaus cited firms and non-governmental groups that plan to profit from carbon rationing in the form of emissions permits trading and by deploying highly subsidized solar and wind energy projects.
Watts Up has been following the conference. He also offers this toon:
Video of a studio rehearsal, with Mark Knopfler and his band. Again, no date or place. 70s for sure. It's a lovely tune:
A Mr. Free Marketesque wave of a fine cigar to all of the sites that linked with Bruce Kesler's excellent and well-researched post on ObamaCare here. Light one up for the cause of freedom and choice in medical treatment, with our thanks.
We do want to get those facts out there because in a DC health care debate we will be the recipients of many self-serving and emotionally-manipulative lies and scare tactics.
 Our Editor and I have had an email discussion about Kesler's post. Sad to say, we agree that the facts often play a minor role in politics because Lefty politics is all about accumulating State power. Their term is "by all means necessary." Of course, that means removing notions of freedom, free choice, and self-reliance from all of their political equations. It isn't even discussed.
Except for abortion (which is arguably a political issue of self-determination but not, of course, for the tiny new life that is snuffed out), have you ever heard a single Dem or Lefty argument for more freedom, more independence, and less State power over the individual person? Or his/her hard-earned money?
Here at Maggie's, we tend to believe in the virtues of freedom and self-reliance for most, and the human tragedy of dependency only for those unfortunates who require it. That's the only way to build people with strong spirits. The only "universal" things we want from the Feds are protection from foreign enemies and law-enforcement.
(We should note that our blog friend Shrinkwrapped posted a simultaneous and fine piece on the same subject: Preparing for the "Healthcare Reform in the United States" Debate: Beware of GIGO)
 John Sununu speaks on the Politics of Global Warming.
Not satire: EU considers Fart Tax
Advanced paternal age and neural abnormalities
States ranked by freedom. Barone
Via Insty:
GOOD THING WE’RE NOT FACING A FINANCIAL CRISIS: “More than one out of every five dollars of the $126 million Massachusetts is receiving in earmarks from a $410 billion federal spending package is going to help preserve the legacy of the Kennedys.”
What "legacy" is that, exactly? Will it include a stone memorial for Mary Jo on Chappaquiddick?
Stimulus for illegals, but no jobs allowed for foreign-born US biz school grads.
Horowitz' book: The One-Party Classroom
NYT: In favor of filibustering GOP nominees, but not for Dem nominees
Warren Buffett's comments. I like them.
Pelosi's air rage. Sheesh. She is shameless. Who does she think she is? The new mandarins.
Sec. of Education Duncan says:
D.C. has had more money than God for a long time, but the outcomes are still disastrous.’
Judd Gregg says:
All the presidents -- including George Bush -- since the beginning of our republic, will not have run up as much debt as this budget will run up in the first period of its term.
And there is no factoring in, really, of what is coming at us in a significant way, which is the retirement of the baby boom generation, the cost of entitlements on top of all of that.
So, you essentially have set up a scenario here under this budget, where we will pass on to our children in the very near future, at about the end of four years from now, a debt-to-GDP ratio which is unsustainable and a deficit ratio which is unsustainable. And that means our kids are going to have a hard time digging themselves out of this hole.
Gitmo guys go back to their same previous job. Moral of the story: Take no prisoners.
Europe warns re US spending
Rush's stats: Not everybody enjoys him. Interestingly, Camille Paglia does. So do I.
Don't kill Armey's Army
The Goracle refuses to debate. Or even to discuss. I think he has a problem of some sort.
Jammy notes Move-On war against medical insurors (and thanks for the link to us, JWF)
Wednesday, March 11. 2009
Related to our first link of this morning, Focus on Outcome, we see this from Dr. Clouthier: We need to redefine merit...because standardized testing is racist.
How come I always thought that merit was supposed to be the solution to genetic and ethnic bias? I guess not. Racism and ethnicism are the new anti-racism and anti-ethnicism. Silly me to have trouble with that, after all this time.
With this obsession with the genetics of skin tone, why don't we simply revert to the old way, where our genetic blood-line determines what we get to do? No, I have no African blood (well, way back we all do), or royal blood either. English serfs mostly - essentially slaves (does that give me a leg up?), I believe, back in the 1400s. Hard workers who survived long enough to reproduce. A random knight or two, I believe, for whatever that's worth, and a few clergymen.
Thank God, no Irish blood.
Sippican does art.
Compromise, hell! That's what has happened to us all down the line -- and that's the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?
Jesse Helms in 1959, as quoted at The Foundry
"If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy."
Aldous Huxley, as quoted at Overcoming Bias
Theo asks whether the advertising image above is demeaning to Italian women. I say NO! (that's Italian for "No"). I say it's art. Let's analyze the picture:
It's a compelling image, with the late Renaissance landscape in the background (the Garden of Eden, with Eve covering her private parts with pasta in her new-found shame? Or is the background the bleak, sterile desert of Western Capitalism?). The gal's hair and the dinner plate are obvious echoes of Botticelli's Venus. But why the cup of cappucino? Coffee with pasta? What exactly is the artist trying to say about gender, transexualism, race, power, veganism, consumerism, carbon trioxide or whatever, capitalism, spaghetti, and coffee? Or does she have some Barbera in the coffee cup? Wine or coffee - bloodthirsty Christian wine or peaceful, spiritual Moslem coffee? West vs. East? But assuming it's wine in the coffee cup, what's up with that? Is she a victim of Capitalism, too oppressed and impoverished by The System to afford clothing or a proper wine glass? Or is her nakedness a warning about the Crisis of Anthropolitical Capitalist Global Warming? Is there Christian meaning in that cup: "Take this cup. This is my blood..."? For sure, she is saying "Eat me (and drink this)", but in what way, exactly? And does the lady represent a blasphemous pomo version of the Holy Virgin - or a faithful representation of the whores sex workers to whom Christ ministered? Madonna or sex worker? Or maybe a female Christ? Is she saying "Drink of me" (a request for an oral, not a phallic interaction - as a critique of our phallus-dominated, warmongering culture)? Is the snake-like pasta a reference to Satan, or an echo of Laocoon and his Sons? Or both, a deft blending of pagan with Christian imagery? And how do the tensions of all of these dualities help us to interrogate the dangerous and discredited assumptions of Western Civilization?
(I can do this sort of BS all day long, without once mentioning that she's a hot and delicious Italiano babe. Our college readers are welcome to expand on this post for their Art History term papers. An "A" guaranteed from your crackpot pomo prof.)
 Obama wants less college drop-outs. Focus on Outcome. Is "outcome" a piece of paper? That is easily done: High Schools hand them out every June to anybody with the brains and foresight to show up.
Why don't people live within their means, and save for a rainy day? A teed-off Sowell.
Man finds images of D-Day rehearsals
The 11 Most Expensive Catastrophes in History
Remind me again - what's wrong with bottled water? And what's wrong with using water too? Unless there's a local drought. Anybody hear about the water cycle? It all returns. Our drinking water is old dinosaur pee (which is why I stick with beer instead).
Not to worry about the environment. Sweden will save us all!
The results of 10 years of socialism in Britain
The Leftyism of academia is probably underestimated
Why aren't environmentalists celebrating the drop in consumption?
Dems getting worried about Obama. Jack Welch:
[Obama] is locked in another world. And he's throwing all these initiatives into this game in the middle of a crisis. Focus on the crisis! Focus on the economy!
 Related: The Obama Disaster: 50 Days that Changed the World! Related: Why Obama's case for doing so many things at once is pure baloney. (Image from SDA)
Related: Is Obama in trouble? DC Examiner. Is he a charming lightweight with what somebody referred to as a "dorm room philosophy"?
Not a bottom. Short covering. I think so too.
Jacoby at The Boston globe discusses the religion of AGW
2009 college grads face 22% drop in hiring
The new Left Wing conspiracy. Politico
Obama seeks to turn America to the Left of Europe - and the rest of the world. Related from Kimball: An idiot's guide to destroying the economy. Only amateurs can be as arrogant as these folks are.
Quote from Telegraph columnist Janet Daley at Powerline, re the economy:
... I grew up with the Left and what this looks like to me is a power grab: a seizing of the moment by the forces which always believed in state domination. The Left sees an opening here, first for telling a critical lie about the historical origins of this crisis, which was propelled as much by the Left-liberal determination to spread prosperity through easy credit to the poor, as by the greed of bankers. And then, out of the wreckage, to restructure the economy along the lines that it always wanted, complete with central controls over the pay levels in private financial institutions.
Tuesday, March 10. 2009
 Experts are 90% certain that this is a life portrait of Shakespeare.
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things.
William Faulkner - The Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, December 10, 1950, quoted in Vanderleun's piece which we linked yesterday.
George Bernard Shaw warned “Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” The major overhaul of American health care pursued by President Obama and his supporters is based on many false premises and is excessive and likely to do more harm than good. Tuning up and improvements already always dynamically occurs. Instead, ObamaCare is aimed at dramatically changing one-sixth of the US economy in ways that are untested or tested and found wanting, primarily involving huge increases in government direction of health care.
The details of ObamaCare are largely being left to Congress, the same body that stuffs the federal budget with earmarks, waste, and other programs that are not requested. ObamaCare is premised on claims for drastic changes in health care and major increases in government programs being necessary. Those claims are largely specious.
Below the fold, the top ten specious premises for ObamaCare are discussed:
 1. Comparing US Health Care To Other Developed Countries
2. US Health Care Spending Is More Than We Can Afford
3. Reform Overhaul Will Yield Major Savings
4. Increased Evidence-Based Medicine And Health Information Technology Will Significantly Improve Care and Reduce Costs
5. Present Administrative Costs And Insurer Profits Are Too High
6. US Consumer Dissatisfaction Requires Drastic Health Care Changes
7. Health Care Costs Are So High They Are A Major Cause Of Personal Bankruptcy
8. The Number Of Uninsured Is So Large That Drastic Health Care Changes Are Necessary
9. More Preventive Care Will Better Serve Consumers And Save Costs
10. Health Care Consumers Are Being Served By Drastic Health Care Changes
(More could be added, such as that government restraints on prescription drug prices will not impede incentives for innovations, but they are so transparently false that the list below dwells on other ObamaCare premises more misleading.)
Continue reading "Top Ten Reasons For ObamaCare Are Based On False Information"
 This weekend, I plan to use this pot roast recipe with a venison rump I have in the freezer. I wonder how it would work for shoulder too. I have one of those in the freezer. No, two shoulders.
There's always a navarin like this for the shoulder meat.
 North Korea puts Obama to the test.
Last week's purge in Cuba. So progressive!
A shining milestone for social justice. Related: Did Obama intentionally nuke the economy?
Related: Has the O Admin declared a War on Business? Why? It's the private sector which creates the jobs, supports all our charities and non-profits, and pays the gummint's bills. Without strong business, we ain't got nothin...as we are seeing right now. Sometimes I speculate about how many jobs, professions, and industries are ultimately parasitic to Business-produced wealth: law, medicine, advertising, academia, the entire investment and finance industry, every "service" industry, all of government...the list goes on and on. That's why any rational government would be thankful to business enterprise, and would try to get out of the way of those who want to produce and create. We have built a gigantic economically-interdependent superstructure on the backs of our wealth-creators. But this is all obvious, isn't it?
The ten biggest rookie mistakes of the O Admin. Related: Robert Samuelson labels O The Great Pretender
The war on Barbie dolls
Another women-in-science study
The US has 2 million job openings right now
Cap and trade is a tax on everybody. (h/t, Viking) Related: Why "doubling" alternative energy means nothing
Roger Kimball: On the road to serfdom. One quote:
...not only are the President’s naive and utopian fiscal policies exacerbating an already parlous economic situation: his starry-eyed understanding of foreign relations is set to compromise America’s defense capabilities at the very moment when other parts of the world–Iran, Russia, China–are struggling madly to upgrade their military forces.
A simple alternative to socialized medicine. NRO
A Supreme decision which will harm patients
This Pelosi move sounds like something Chavez would do. Only two months, and we have seen the Feds plan government power grabs in the banking biz, the auto biz, the medical biz, the pharmaceutical biz, the oil and energy biz, and the radio biz. And yet no screams about "dictatorship"!
Supremes narrow minority district protections. I find the whole idea disgusting.
Jim Cramer asks "Why am I a target of the Obama Clan?" Cramer is a Dem, I believe, and a free-market Liberal.
Who listens to Rush Limbaugh? Part of what limits and shapes his audience, I think, is work. Most folks cannot listen to the radio at work.
With the job losses, why do we need illegal labor? Opie reminded us about Operation Wetback. Also: Stimulus gives 300,000 jobs to illegals
David Axelrod having a surreal experience
Monday, March 9. 2009
I asked my excellent carpenter-handyman how business is going these days. He was replacing a couple of windows and fixing a few doors for us. A 2-day job. He stays entirely on one job until it is done, and he is meticulous.
He said he is making more money from 3-day jobs now than he was making from 3-10 week jobs last year. He confided that he generally makes $100-150,000/year, and that he is happier working solo instead of with the employees that he had for many years. Less aggravation, and happier customers. He is booked up for the next four months.
The guy is a serious history buff so he is fun to have around. He starts work a 7 AM, and refuses to work after 4 pm to protect his personal and family time.
College students’ reading habits ain’t what they used to be, laments Ron Charles, a senior editor at The Washington Post’s Book World.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s monthly list of best-selling titles on college campuses, Mr. Charles notes, has lately been dominated by the vampire tales of Stephenie Meyer and the inspirational stories of Barack Obama. Forty years earlier — amid the passion of civil rights, Vietnam, and the women’s movement — student tastes ran more along the lines of Howl, Soul on Ice, and the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Today “we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents,” he writes. “The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.”
Not everyone shares his alarm, reports Mr. Charles. Mike Connery, who writes for the Web site Future Majority, says that the top titles are simply what people are reading to escape. They absorb their politics through blogs and social networks, he says.
Mr. Charles isn’t buying that argument. “For the Twitter generation, the new slogan seems to be ‘Don’t trust anyone over 140 characters,’ he writes. “What you see at the next revolution is far more likely to be a well-designed Web site than a radical novel or a poem. Not to be a drag, but that’s so uncool.” —Don Troop
Ed. note: One more of those "the kids these days" pieces. But if Soul on Ice and Sylvia Plath are anybody's idea of soulful, I must live in the wrong universe.
The case that the Western World has gone mad, that our elite leaders are fools, and that we live in a lunatic asylum. From Part 9 of From Meccania to Atlantis in The Brussels Journal:
The asylum’s restraining device, a chain and ball, is made of paper. The United States Federal Tax Code takes up 67,024 pages. The Federal Register, i.e. government rules and regulations, takes up 78,000 pages. These 145,000 pages, weighing about 730 kg, are just the nucleus of the crushing grid within which the American citizen has to try to go about his daily life. In addition, there are tens of thousands pages more of tax codes and sundry regulations in each of the 50 states. In addition, each spending bill with which U.S. Congress further destroys the country and debauches its money, is over 1,000 pages long and rarely read by the people who vote on it.
In Europe, there were 80,000 pages of EU laws and regulations in 2005, 90,000 in 2006, and probably at least 100,000 now. Combined with the legal and tax code of each country, the EU citizen conducts his life with well over a ton of paper hanging from his neck.
To quantify the measure of the insanity further, it suffices to grasp that the outstanding nominal value of global swaps and derivatives at the end of 2008 was $531.2 trillion. Estimated Gross World Product in 2008 was $70.65 trillion.
We have therefore in our asylum inmates on the upper financial floor, hanging beyond the parapet with all of us in tow, unspooling toilet paper that they swear is worth 7.5 times the total value of all the goods and services produced on Planet Earth. And all of the West’s governments were blind as this was building up over many years, busying themselves instead with breaking their White subjects’ resistance to being governed by green pacifist lesbians or being invaded by over-100 million Muslims, Aztecs, and other assorted redeemers of the Euro peoples’ inexcusably Euro civilization.
It just may be that in the course of human events, it’s the lot of this generation to stand up and walk out of the theater of madness.
O Magnum Mysterium. Listen to the music.
My cousin Oscar offers this comment -
I don't want to sound like a spoilsport, but does anyone in the Mainstream Media or in the Obama Administration understand that the latest unemployment rate of 8.1% as of February, bad as it now feels, is actually close to the normal unemployment rate in France and most of the European Union (EU) without a recession?
Yes, that is the same EU which Obama and his friends want us to emulate in terms of much bigger Government, higher taxes on producers, weaker Free Markets, and much stronger Labor Unions.
In fact, there is no country in the EU which came close to the United States' former unemployment rate of about 4.5%, save Ireland, which adopted our Free Market approach and so was loathed by the other welfare states.
So, if you're an Obama enthusiast, stop whining. This is the norm for governments whose spending absorbs 30+% of their Gross National Product.
Get used to it...this is what you wanted.
Or, is it?
-Oscar
 To Hell with Niceness. I am all for that. I appreciate good manners, but not niceness.
Cockroach rights in Britain. How about some freedom for humans?
Cruel but funny.
Chris Dodd update: The Hartford Courant finally gives him some attention. (h/t, NRO)
In which Robert Reich calls people like us "crypto-fascist demagogues." Sheesh. May I engage in this mature, elevating and highly-informative discussion of the issues by calling Reich a "pinko dwarf"?
If CO2 is classified as a pollutant
Let them fail. Even God doesn't have enough money to support all these things.
Investing: Timing is nothing. Timing is everything.
Spinning it so it looks like Obama did it.
Repubs are The Stupid Party. They ignore tactics. They don't do tactics. Too honorable or too dumb? I don't know.
Nobody's home in Washington. Maybe that's for the best.
The Admin: Britain is just one more country. Not to me. Methinks The Teleprompter dislikes the Brits. Has he ever been there? No.
The Teleprompter signs on to the Cheney view of surveillance. Crickets chirp.
If the entire EU bureaucracy disappeared, would it harm anything?
Brit Hume says it's Obama's Bear Market. Via Gateway:
It's kind of a bear market within a bear market. The market was already down tremendously over the previous year, and I think most people entered this period of the new Obama administration thinking that it probably was bottoming out and that he would give by his very presence and by what he would offer real hope and that it would at least change the psychology a bit. It has changed the psychology, it seems, for the worse and I think he does bear responsibility for that, and the impression that he has managed to leave is that he's too busy with massive new spending and a scatter shot stimulus bill which was reckless and breathless new initiatives. On top of that you have this budget with all these breathtaking new initiatives to reorder our lives in a multitude of ways.
In the meantime, first order of business, the unfinished business of the previous administration. First order of business for the new administration, the financial crisis, the credit crisis. And, so far, no plan of any discernible shape of dealing with that. A couple of pieces in place as Governor Kaine pointed out. But that's what the market is looking for. It hasn't come. It's very hard. But, that's the big problem.
Sunday, March 8. 2009
It's about the pathologizing of opinions you don't agree with. Mind you, I have no problem with ending an exasperating disputation with "You're nuts. I can't discuss this with you."
But that's not a diagnosis. While I am fully aware of group and mass psychological themes, I only confer a diagnosis on those who pay me to do so. Even then, I often cannot give them a label because every person is unique.
I have more science under my belt than 95% of the folks I encounter who dispute my skepticism about AGW. But, in the world of science, the only proper attitude towards anything is skepticism. That's how it works. "Proof" is usually very elusive. We have many theories, few truths, and no Truths.
Brendan O'Neill at Spiked reports on the disease of Anthropogenic Global Warming Denial. One quote:
This weekend, the University of West England is hosting a major conference on climate change denial. Strikingly, it’s being organised by the university’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be a gathering of those from the top of society – ‘psychotherapists, social researchers, climate change activists, eco-psychologists’ – who will analyse those at the bottom of society, as if we were so many flitting, irrational amoeba under an eco-microscope. The organisers say the conference will explore how ‘denial’ is a product of both ‘addiction and consumption’ and is the ‘consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency and irresponsibility’ (1). It is a testament to the dumbed-down, debate-phobic nature of the modern academy that a conference is being held not to explore ideas – to interrogate, analyse and fight over them – but to tag them as perverse.
"Eco-psychologists"? May I conjecture that these people are nuts?
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