Sunday, May 31. 2009
Ponder.
Defenders of government workers and unions say that their pay and benefits need to be higher than those in the private sector or non-union, in order to attract better talent or create better product. Defenders of tort attorneys say that their high fees are needed to attract those who provide proficient counsel to the otherwise defenseless overwhelmed by the complexity of the laws and to offset the costs of their risk of losing cases.
Yet medicine, where doctors and scientists labor through the many years and huge costs of gaining expertise to save and better lives, is somehow to continue to attract the best when doctors’ burdens are increased to personal and professional breaking point, innovation is not encouraged by recompense, and rewards are reduced to that of an able plumber.
How costly is lack of competence? In which realm are we actually getting value?
Or, will Einstein be proven correct: “If I had my life to live over again, I’d be a plumber.”
 The Constitution in Exile.
It is truly Orwellian, and it creeps me out. All these people want is more government power over me. Why anybody would want that is utterly beyond me.
Photo: George Washington, who never sought power, who accepted it with reluctance, and who finally renounced it.
 Via Aurelia: The Roman Empire's Lost Highway. A bit more interesting than Route 66.
Photo from the article.
You cannot be too cynical to understand politics. How the Dems killed Estrada's judicial nomination. A quote:
It was precisely the fact that Estrada was Hispanic that made Democrats and their activist allies want to kill his nomination. They were determined to deny a Republican White House credit, political and otherwise, for putting a first-rate Hispanic nominee on the bench.
Durbin and his colleagues did as they were instructed. But they had nothing with which to kill the nomination -- no outrageous statement by Estrada, no ethical lapse, no nothing. What to do?
They brainstormed. Estrada had once worked in the Justice Department's Office of Solicitor General, right? (Appointed under the first President Bush, Estrada stayed to serve several years under Clinton.) That office decides which cases the government will pursue in the Supreme Court, right? And that process involves confidential legal memoranda, right? Well, why don't we suggest that there might be something damaging in those memos -- we have no idea whether there is or not -- and demand that they be made public?
Durbin and his colleagues knew the Bush Justice Department would insist the internal legal memos remain confidential, as they always had been. It wasn’t just the Bush Administration that thought releasing the documents was a terrible idea; all seven living former Solicitors General, Republican and Democrat, wrote a letter to Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy begging him to back off.
But the Democrats didn't back off. They had a new, very serious question to ask: What is Miguel Estrada hiding?
The answer was nothing, of course. But the strategy worked. Democrats stonewalled Estrada's nomination, and, after losing control of the Senate in 2002, they began an unprecedented round of filibusters to block an entire slate of Bush appeals-courts nominees, Estrada among them. The confirmation process ground to a halt. More than two years after his nomination was announced, Estrada, tired of what appeared to be an endless runaround, withdrew his name from consideration. Instead of being on the federal bench, he is now in private practice in Washington.
Moonbattery notes that the photo above makes it clear that some forms of "freedom" may be preferred over others.
A look at Cuba before the socialists destroyed it and turned it into a third-world country
The O admin attempts to stifle criticism of stimulus
Related: Betsy on the Chicago Rules
Looks like a true thriller. Yikes.
The Lituus:
Bach's motet (a choral musical composition) "O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht" was one of the last pieces of music written for the Lituus.
The unreliability of eyewitnesses. h/t, Dr X
Are the O and the Dems playing a deep game or, as our Roger said on Friday, a simple game?
Makes sense to me: 82 year-old strangles 71 year-old girlfriend for loading the dishwasher wrong.
Biggest mystery in American history. A quote:
The U.S. spends a huge amount on education; more per student than anyone else; more and more every year. Simultaneously, over the last 70 years, literacy has fallen, SAT scores have fallen, American competitiveness has fallen, and the general knowledge of ordinary citizens has fallen. Teenagers graduate from high school who can't read their diplomas; the country now has 50,000,000 functional illiterates. I recently saw on television that the wealthiest, most successful country in the world--that would be us--hovers around 18th internationally on reading, and 25th in science.
I submit that all of these facts taken together are paradoxical; one might say, impossible. It's as if I told you that an ordinary man consumed 5000 calories a day and lost weight. So this, I submit, is the greatest mystery in our history.
I am past the point of doubting that the climate change hysteria is anything more than the latest excuse to grab power.
School Choice: the new civil rights struggle
The Denny's Octomom Special
A definitive, updated history of West Germany’s depraved Baader-Meinhof terroristsOpen-source software wins the day. But there is a cloud. The Incredible Shrinking Clintons. Dick Morris. That was the plan. No oxygen use, and no emissions. A quote:
Just as Lincoln buried his rivals Seward, Chase and Stanton in the Cabinet and then on the Supreme Court, and Wilson buried Bryan at the State Department, so Obama has hidden his predecessor and his rival in plain sight at the upper reaches of the government.
Another Taize chant: Veni Sancte Spiritus. I love this one.
Anchoress reminds us that
The Gifts of the Holy Spirit are Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel (Right Judgment), Fortitude (Courage), Knowledge, Piety (Reverence) and Fear of the Lord (Awe of God).
Good gifts indeed. Who does not hunger for these?
Saturday, May 30. 2009
Strong breeze and thus a very fine sail this morning. We passed this handsome old cruiser moored outside a CT harbor:
Time to re-post this video on the Americans without any medical insurance -
I am not sure what Pravda is anymore, but Pravda opines:
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.
Via Insty:
The political class in Sacramento believes the people of California exist for the state government, not the other way around.
Via Neptunus:
“Western colonization of nearby Muslim lands lasted 130 years, from the 1830s to the 1960s. Muslim colonization of nearby European lands lasted 1300 years, from the 600s to the mid-1960s. Yet, strangely, it is the Muslims…who are the most bitter about colonialism and the humiliations to which they have been subjected; and it is the Europeans who harbor the shame and the guilt. It should be the other way around.”
The railroad cars of the old tycoons. Much more comfortable than private jets.
Keeping our kids safe from science education
Climate change already killing hundreds of thousands
McQuain:
Our problem in health care is not insurance company profit. It is the structure of the system (employer based) and the lack of competitiveness in the insurance market. As economist Arnold Kling once declared, we don’t have health insurance, we have health insulation. Compared to any other insurance product, health insurance is a definite outlier. We’d laugh if someone said car insurance should cover oil changes. That’s because we understand that car insurance is there to cover expensive and catastrophic events, not routine maintenance. We understand that to do that, we’d have to pay much more in car insurance than we now do. Yet we expect health insurance to cover that routine maintenance when it comes to our health.
A good rant at Minding the Campus. A quote:
While the mind-boggling damage done to higher education by multicultural activists, diversity-mongers, and all-around leftist jerks is a subject very much on the minds of conservatives, liberals seem truly not to care. More precisely, they actually regard it as progress. Shakespeare elbowed aside by Maya Angelou? Hey, education's got to change with the times, just like the Constitution. Mandatory sensitivity training for incoming freshmen to instill appreciation of transgendered persons? What kind of monster has a problem with sensitivity? Conservative students getting charged with hate speech for daring to take on affirmative action or women's studies zealots? Exactly - that kind of monster. Even the occasional report in the mainstream press of epidemic ideological conformity on the nation's campuses fails to elicit a reaction. So what if, as the Washington Post reports, 80 percent of faculty in America's English literature, philosophy, and political science departments describe themselves as liberal and a mere 5 percent as conservative - with ratios of eighteen to one at Brown, twenty-six to one at Cornell, and sixteen to one at UCLA - or that a study after the 2004 election showed that the Harvard faculty gave John Kerry thirty-one dollars for every dollar donated to George Bush, with the ratios rising to forty-three to one at MIT and three hundred to one at Princeton? (And you think when someone gets around to a comprehensive analysis of the 2008 campaign donations, that will be any less lopsided?) For liberals, the only important question remains what it's always been: How can I get my kid into one of those places?
Here's one way to guard your stuff: Shave your dog:
Here's one of the many cave canems from The Dogs of Pompeii:
Here's my sign, which we picked up in a hardware store in Italy:
Ephemera
"YOUR eyes that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
Because our love is waning."
And then She:
"Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!"
Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
While slowly he whose hand held hers replied:
"Passion has often worn our wandering hearts."
The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
A rabbit old and lame limped down the path;
Autumn was over him:and now they stood
On the lone border of the lake once more:
Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves
Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
In bosom and hair.
"Ah, do not mourn," he said,
"That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell."
Friday, May 29. 2009
Sippican sent us the link to the Graham Rust gallery of residential trompe l'oeil. It sure beats wallpaper. Here's one:
 I may be one of the few guys around this site who bought the Band's Big Pink the day it came out. I brought it over to a girl's house, and made her listen to it twice on her dad's record player, and then we had tea. I still have the vinyl.
Re Big Pink, said Robbie Robertson: "This is emotional and this is story telling. You can see this mythology. This is the record that I wanted to make."
I didn't think of "The Weight" as being the centerpiece of the record; I thought the record was all of a piece.
Anyway songs and poems are not puzzles. They just are what they are. Still, it's diverting if pointless to look at their references. Vanderleun tracked down a piece on The Weight. The piece seems foolish at some points but interesting at others.
I liked this Robertson quote in the piece:
If I read the lyrics to some of my favourite songs, they don’t mean shit to me. But if I hear ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’, it is so powerful and emotional. All I want out of any of these songs is the right emotion. I don’t give a shit what the lyrics are. Dylan rambled on way too much for my liking. I remember years ago saying to him: ‘listen to ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’; I like this more than any of the songs we’re playing. This is emotional to me; our songs are clever. I don’t care for clever. Let’s try and get somewhere that has an emotional thing.
Also got a kick out of this Rick Danko quote:
So Levon spoke to this chick he was dating. Her name was Kathy and she was the most beautiful girl in Toronto… 16 years old when he met her, and she was a gorgeous, gorgeous lady. She looked beautiful and no one could resist her. Anyway, Levon explained the situation to her, and she kindly gave this cop who was trying to crucify us a blow job. Then she told him she was 14 years old. He was the chief witness against us, but this was some weird shit for him, and he disappeared, we never saw him again. In the end everyone else got off, and I received a year’s suspended sentence on probation.
 Maggie's Farm is holding its first Engagement Party tomorrow.
Or I think that's what you might call it. But not really - it's actually sorta like a mini-wedding reception with a receiving line and all that, because the actual wedding will be way up in VT in the shadow of the couple's Alma Mater, good old Dartmouth College (also the Alma of the bride's Dad and late Grandpa, and of the groom's late lamented uncle) - and will be just closest family.
We have the old place sorta spruced up (finally moved the old broke fridges and generators off the front porch, for one thing, got the old duck boat off the front yard, yanked out the saplings growing out of the roof, threw out three year's worth of garbage, and cleaned most of the skeletons out of the coat closets), and I finally even warshed my overhalls, which I hated to do seein as they were just getting comfortable. Might even take a shower if the Missus insists, but I been told that dihydrogen monoxide is bad for you unless it has Cape Cod ocean mixed with it - which is the only dihydrogen monoxide solution I happily enter- and only if it is as cold as hell. (Soap and shampoo are chemical poisons too: consensus science tell us that, and everybody knows it.)
So we got the champagne and the other good booze like bourbon such as Grandpa's Overhalls and the crab cakes and scallop n' bacon thingies and barbecue sliders with dippin sauce (gotta have them) and the required basil-goat cheese tartlets and the apple-onion tartlets, hot mini-tortillas, and a bunch of other tasties on the way. Plus a couple of bartenders and a number of good wait staff, and a couple of off-duty cops to organize the parking because, despite the global warming crisis, most folks still insist on driving automobiles to get where they want to go (horses are too slow, and emit noise-polluting and criminal volumes of methane from their hindquarters).
As a last minute addition, I added a case of Chalk Hill cab to the mix because Gwynnie forced some on me last night against my will, and the fragrance of it blew me away (can be cellared for 15 years? Are you kidding me? How about for three weeks?). Hardly have to bother drinking it, it smells so good. The fragrance is a meal in itself. Why bother with the drinking part, which only makes you stupider than you already were?
The fortunate heir has all four of his grandparents coming, too, along with closest family friends and the whole darn family - including the bride-to-be's family who all flew up to Yankeeland from Birmingham, Alabama in the rain last night.
I hope it don't rain tomorry, because we planned mostly for outdoors, without any silly tent.
Do we love the gal? Yes indeedy we do. She is a peach.
 I'm not sure what to say to my Republican friends anymore.
I honestly thought all the pearl clutching paranoids pulled the lever with the D next to it, but I guess I was mistaken. You ran the least attractive candidate possible for President and lost by a little and you're ready to commit suicide in your Ayn Rand bunker after you're finished homeschooling your kids.
It's tiresome stuff. I'm going to try to explain it to you one more time. Obama, and all his accomplices in his co-prosperity sphere, are not "secret" anythings. Not secret muslims, socialists, communists, antichrists or Illuminati. He'd adore it if you spent the next eight years looking for his birth certificate, because he knows it's a colossal waste of his enemies' time, and that's a natural born fact.
It's a straight plunder economy. Why are you so confused and surprised about this? You keep talking about all sorts of ill effects that are going to appear in decades and verify your wild hypothesis about the guy. But the effects are always immediate and visible. He's not playing a deep game here.I take that back. Maybe he is. He's confused a lot of people into thinking he's confusing.
Poor Rich Moran. He's all shocked that maybe car dealership closings under the watchful eye of Democrat mandarins are going to fall along party lines, and figures it's earthshaking.
This story is about ready to explode. All the ingredients are there for a gigantic political scandal that would shake the Obama administration to its foundation and perhaps take down several high ranking officials. All that's needed is one connecting piece of evidence that would tie the White House Automotive Task Force to some political arm of the Democratic party.
Continue reading "Obama Thanks You For All The Free Advertising"
Everywhere I go I'm asked if the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. Flannery O'Connor, h/t to Novalis
Volokh asks:
Property Rights in Web Sites:
Check out Conwell v. Gray Loon Outdoor Marketing Group, Inc., decided May 19 by the Indiana Supreme Court. Is a custom-designed and designer-hosted Web site a good or a service? Who owns the site? Can the deletion of the site by the host (for nonpayment of the bills) constitute tortious conversion of the supposed owner's property? Not the sexy sort of cyberlaw, just the practically important sort.
 Did you need the lyrics for the Pancho and Lefty YouTube we posted yesterday? Here they are.
The oxytocin receptor and prosocial behavior. It would be interesting to see whether bloggers are low in these receptors.
The shot that changed Germany. It should be a big story in Germany - and in all of Europe.
Wilkinson on Sotomayor: People going crazy on cue
The Hugging Crisis in our schools.
Are we ready for Men's Studies yet?
Iron Laws of political economics, including:
There is no form of market failure, however egregious, which is not eventually made worse by the political interventions intended to fix it.
 Maybe we should get rid of all of those terrible crosses at Arlington, too. Meanwhile in Euroland, French author faces jail for offending Islam. They are trying to re-live the Dark Ages. Thus far in the US, still no laws against offending religions.
California pols refuse to explain why their state needs hysterical spending growth
How did Socialist Nazy Germany pay for their Social Security programs?
Insty:
PEOPLE TEND TO REBEL AGAINST EXCESS NANNYING, EVEN WHEN THE NANNIES ARE RIGHT: Healthy Lifestyles On Decline In United States. Then, of course, there’s the way the advice tends to change over time.
From Gaghdad Bob (h/t Dr. Sanity's Leftism Aims Low)
Liberty is not a built in -- much less universal -- value, and I think you can see how this is a major part of understanding the motivations -- or shall we say, the deep structure -- of leftism. Classical liberals wonder why leftists don't value freedom, but they shouldn't.
Rather, the question is why we do value it, because it is an obvious aberration in the human race. Most humans value security over liberty, predictability over change, conformity over individuality, and authority over self-rule. So when we see that leftists hate freedom and progress but love authority and comformity, we shouldn't be the least bit surprised, for it is true of most rank-and-foul humans. Political correctness, statism, micromanagement of our lives -- these are all the natural consequences of a dread of liberty.
To finish up with Prager's thought, he noted that it was God who wanted humans to have freedom, not humans. For the vast majority of human beings, liberty is not a particularly important value, much less the most important one. They would just as soon barter it away for security, as they have done in western Europe.
Can you spot the billionaire? From Boudreaux:
Nora ____ e-mailed me earlier today; she was terse: "How do you sleep at night justifying policys [sic] that make incomes more unequal???"
My first response is to say "grow up." As long as Mr. Smith earns his income rather than steals it, Mr. Jones ought not care. Envy is an ugly sentiment, and becomes ghastly and dangerous whenever it is manifested in government policies.
But my more measured response is here.
Thursday, May 28. 2009
Via Coyote, who links to more of them.
From Harsanyi in the Denver Post.
His personal piece caused me to ponder how those who seek social changes strategize to "normalize" those changes so that we stop thinking about them. I remain deeply conflicted about the idea of abortion.
Sheesh, Obama. We just aren't that into you.
And definitely not as into you as you are into yourself.
I can't resist noting that Mary Roach, whose TED video on orgasms we linked yesterday, is the author of both Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex - and thus she is the only author I can think of for whom the interview question "What got you interested in this topic?" would be deeply stupid.
Your math courses are one long IQ test. We use math courses to figure out who is really smart.
Prof. Mankiw
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