Sunday, May 24. 2009
 Journalism: From profession (?) to commodity
CSI and friends with benefits. Bad news.
WalMart Auntie of the Year
Waxman: I know nothing. I rely on the scientists. Maggie's readers understand the issues better than he does.
California voters may be forcing their pols to act like adults. Wow. In 8 hours I could reduce their budget 25% with a Sharpie pen and have no meaningful impact on life in that gigantic and pleasant state. Related: The press was totally on board with the failed scare campaign.
Brit banks rebel against Obama tax plans. Why should foreign tax collection be their job?
What nations are the worst polluters? More on PT Obarnum at Dino
Kevin Jackson:
I received an email from a black man who was attempting to convince me that, though I am completely black, I have no experience growing up black in America. The bulk of his theory on my ‘blackness' was based on the fact that I constantly lampoon Obama in my blog. He counseled me to embrace Obama, as Obama could help me to "rediscover the black experience." He warned that "whites would never see me, as I see me."
Touting Obama as the poster child for blackness is a ridiculous notion. Further, the idea that Obama can teach me "blackness" is equally ridiculous.
Steele says MSM didn't vet Obama because of race. I disagree. They didn't want to vet a Lefty. They do colonoscopies on black conservatives.
Parents objecting to having gay propaganda shoved down their kids' throats at age 5
I knew nothing about Gypsy culture and Marime. h/t, AVI
Youtube: A very brief History of Weed. h/t, Thompson. Pot is America's #1 cash crop. Sheesh. I never figgered out what was so great about it, compared to beer.
Ths brief ad by CatholicVote gave Kim goosebumps
Powerline: Obama's incoherence on detainees:
Perhaps the solution is to release the dangerous detainees and then follow and kill them.
Great idea. Could make for good fun at the local rifle range, but that would be mean, and Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Dr. Sanity is not impressed by the O:
Understand that I listen to people for a living. I hear various degrees of honesty, sincerity, and real emotional pain being expressed on a regular basis. I also hear some of the most self-serving, dishonest and completely irresponsible utterings that it is possible to imagine. Yet, in my professional career, I have to freely admit that I have heard nothing like the deceitful and self-aggrandizing utterings of Barack Obama, which seem to get more and more pathological with every speech he gives. His most recent scam, in the National Archives in front of a fake copy of the U.S. Constitution just about takes the cake. This is not irony, so much as it is the grandiosity of tyranny.
Besides his smarmy condescension, what bugs me most about listening to the O is how self-referential he is. He never just talks about a thing: he always talks about himself and the thing. Perhaps he believes his hype.
Related: A forensic lit expert asks Who wrote Dreams of my Father? Forensic lit sounds cool, sort of like handwriting analysis on a larger scale.
Reader LS took these photos in FL last week. Can you name them?
Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow wrote McGyver scripts. He discusses chance, risk, history and hindsight in an interview. One quote:
Some people take solace in an understanding of their environment, others don’t. For me, an understanding of the role played by chance has taught me that one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at-bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized. As someone who has taken risks in life I find it a comfort to know that even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success. Or, as I.B.M. pioneer Thomas Watson said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”
Pentecost, marking the end of the Easter season, is next Sunday.
There isn't much Taize music on YouTube, but here is a bit of the Taize chant Bless The Lord, My Soul:
Saturday, May 23. 2009
 Nantucket summer rental prices are getting reasonable this year. Recession pricing. Places that were $55,000/week now $45,000/week.
Polpis cottage in upper photo now available for only $20,000/week in August.
Lower cottage only $2700/week and available now in August. Seems a lot more reasonable to me, and less pretentious. But outdoor shower "not enclosed"? What? OK, watch me shower in the sun if you want to.
Once you have showered outdoors, you never want to shower indoors again.
Via RCP, a superb essay by Carl Schramm Up From Poverty. How economic growth occurs remains a mystery to economists - or at least a subject of endless debate.
An enduring truth often forgotten (or ignored) by proponents of state-led development: economic growth owes more to the forbearance of the state than to its intervention. Governments do not, indeed cannot, make wealth-only their citizens can. And when government protects their freedom, the world's growing population of entrepreneurs, in the bargain, expands human dignity and establishes the foundation of ongoing growth on which civil society ultimately depends.
One quote from the essay:
In the touchstone year of 1820, 84% of the world's population lived in what would today be judged "extreme poverty." Today, only 16% do. That is such an astounding achievement that it is difficult even to comprehend. According to the World Bank, in the last 30 years alone-a time of rapid globalization-the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by 25%, or 500 million people. The outbreak of entrepreneurial capitalism within the Communist political system of the People's Republic of China accounts for most of this achievement, but almost every region of the world has seen a decline in the share of its population living in extreme poverty. Bright spots such as Israel and Mauritius, moreover, have proven that growth can occur in regions previously thought allergic to it.
Apparently. Who'd a thunk it? h/t, Neptunus. The world has gone mad.
A reader took this photo in the West Village yesterday afternoon:
 Surely all agree that Hunt for Red October is the best movie of the past 20 years.
The poll is "Who is your favorite character in this movie?" (in which the casting is astonishingly good - Brit quality, and in which the detail and subtlety of the acting is endlessly interesting. Just the way the head of the Russian Navy drops his teacup, echoing the spilled tea when Ramius kills the KGB guy)
We aren't going to bother with that voting software. Just let us know whether you are able to decide.
Mrs. BD votes for Bart Mancuso, after agonizing over the cynically amusing pol Jeffrey Pelt, the Russian Ambassador, and, of course, Captain Ramius. I vote for Jonesie, but Alec Baldwin, one must admit, was fantastic as Jack Ryan. As was Fred Thompson as the Admiral, and James Earl Jones, and ... everybody else in this wonderfully engaging movie which holds up well after many, many viewings.
 How to get your spouse to quit overspending. h/t, Marginal Rev
How to survive a job you hate. Many links.
If China, India and Russia don't care about CO2, what good can we do?
Dying malls and ghost town malls. Good riddance.
Roast baby Neanderthal? Why not?
You might not like ObamaCare
"The Germans could not kill Walter Gibson. But Britain’s National Health Service was up to the task."
Does Colin Powell belong in the Repub Party? Of course. All welcome, in my view. I am a Big Tenter. I think of us Conservative/Libertarians as just a part of that Party. Party factions come and go, rise and fall, over time. That's why it works.
America's Christless Christianity.
Krugman: Bush destroyed our food. Is he insane? I mean, of course Bush tried to destroy our food. That's what evil, sadistic Repubs do for fun, right?
What's with Jihad in the Bronx?
President Above-It-All. Rich Lowry. Yes, a figurehead. Riehl sees him as a weak man with a big image. Well, he has never done anything difficult yet, but he has his chances now.
Joe Biden: "I'm out of the loop." It's a life-long affliction. I feel sorry for the guy.
Jules was pretty amusing about the Great Debate.
Voters sick of bailouts.
Has America really turned Left? Neoneo
Let's legalize counterfeiting. Brilliant!
Friday, May 22. 2009
Stolen from Samiz:
"I think in the U.S. and in most of the world the public understanding of economics is abysmal. But it’s one thing not to understand something. I don’t understand brain surgery. It’s another to want to form policies on things on which you are ignorant. I hear the wonderful phrase “I want to make a difference” when it comes to policy. I would be horrified if I wanted to make a difference in brain surgery. The only difference is more people would die on the operating table. The only encouraging thing about public reaction to the crisis is that going by polls citizens seem to have more misgivings about some of these policies than politicians or the media. Still, though there have been studies that indicate the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by years, what is also clear is it was enormously popular. FDR was elected four straight times, and more than once without ever having brought unemployment down to single digits. An economic disaster does not necessarily mean a political disaster. If we could raise the average level of understanding of economics to what Alfred Marshall had in 1890, the vast majority of politicians would be voted out of office."
Thomas Sowell
 We have had some mischievous, or possibly malevolent, hobgoblins in our servers for the past couple of days. Our apologies.
In my view, we need to call Ghostbusters. However, we are too cheap to call them.
We will do our best to keep stuff coming, despite the goblins and despite the holiday weekend, with its holiday which is the most sacred secular holiday of the year.
Remember, you never know what you will find at Maggie's - even if it's nothing more than "Cannot connect to server."
 Race and IQ. There's a provocative topic for ya.
Speaking of IQ, a Suckers and Morons Tax for MA
The Prof takes on "Lost." It's a mystery to me.
Recruiting kids to spy on adults in the UK. Unrelated: Brit cops claim sex change operations. Still some humor over there.
The dueling speeches yesterday. Related: The ten punches Cheney landed on the O's jaw.
Related: Legal Aid for Jihadists and thoughts on the dueling speechs at Hugh Hewitt. Related: O forced to play defence. This will happen more and more now.
Where's the only employment growth in Michigan? You guessed right, didn't ya?
Women less happy than they used to be.
Megan takes a deeper look into that victim of the greedy bankers. Live beneath your means, friends.
The Jihad virus in American jails
Despite ten years of global cooling, Congress acts.
The Jacksonian says:
The primary duty of the President is Commander of the Armies and the Navy, which is also the seat of the Admiralty power and this the President Commander in Chief of our armed forces. He is not given the spot to remedy economic ills, or other woes of the financial sector - in no place is this given as a Presidential duty. Indeed, that primary responsibility calls for the thing the Left bemoaned over the last few years: sacrifice. Yet this President has decided to fight on the cheap by removing funding for weapons systems that have either been demonstrated as effective (such as Ballistic Missile Defense) or which went into final testing after acceptance (like the Non-Line of Sight Cannon). Such systems are meant to protect the Nation and our soldiers in the battlefield and make them more effective. By cutting back on systems, support and equipment, President Obama is the first President in quite some time to actually cut back on military systems during two Congressionally Authorized wars.
I have special and sentimental feelings about this fine state, including time in the elegant Bluegrass and at Keeneland (even saw Secretariat grazing in retirement) - and time working up in the wild hollers of eastern KY where everybody is a cousin of eachother and either works in coal, moonshining, or is on welfare.
I have seen many fine Kentucky mornings, with the mist rising from the fields and crouched in the valleys. I guess I was also only passin' through, but I had a true love there, and I still have her.
Shrinks debate putting Bipolar Disorder into the Psychosis category.
It's all a tempest in a teapot for me. All of our diagnoses in Psychiatry are of dubious validity. They have two purposes: 1) Something to write on an insurance form and 2) a starting point for research to find out if they make any sense.
I do not even think that Schizophrenia is a "disease" per se. It's a handle for a lot of different strange things that we understand poorly.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.
Tom Paine
In Australia. With excellent video. The end of the video is the best part.
The psychotherapist Robin of Berkeley, author of the essay Letter of Amends to Conservatives, is back with more on her journey. She begins:
So what do you do when you realize that everything you've ever thought and believed no longer worked for you? Where do you go when the bubble of progressive politics bursts in your face and you're left in the leftiest place on earth? It seems that the choices are as follows: either you cling to your beliefs even more zealously and attack anyone who dares to disagree. Or, if you're like me, you embark on a journey of discovery and recovery.
Thursday, May 21. 2009
I will be boating to celebrate summer's global warming, and out of intertube range for a few days. Will burn many gallons of gas to help prevent global cooling. Life is short, but I want to do what I can to help.
Leaving these links for you landlubbers:
 Re the California tax vote (h/t, Surber)
According to the Tax Foundation, officials in Sacramento have been on a wild spending spree since 2000, the last time California’s budget was balanced without borrowing or resorting to one-time accounting gimmicks. Between 2003 (when Schwarzenegger took office) and 2007, state spending ballooned 31 percent – far beyond inflation (12 percent) and population growth (5 percent). Californians have seen this train wreck coming for many months.
Why should I pay California's bills? I have my own problems and, frankly, I don't give a damn. Related, at Betsy.
Time to clip up those credit cards and go to cash.
BA is still cool, and everybody speaks English.
Knife death good; gun death bad. I prefer my killing when I use a baseball bat. The skull crunch is so satisfying.
Unions are fraudulent children. They want money and goodies without responsibility. UAW doesn't want Chrysler stock. How could they complain? Who would they negotiate with? How would they sell their unwanted products? Thus the lameness of modern unionization is exposed for what it is.
A spy reacts to Pelosi's attack on the CIA
A serious book critiquing multiculturalism. (h/t, Gay Patriot)
Even the Germans refuse those Gitmo scum. Where's the terrible Swine Flu when you need it?
Guaranteed: you will be deeply disappointed in Obamacare...if it ever happens.
Max Borders: How can Conservatives compete with Free Stuff? TCS
Related, from Villainous:
Read my lips: I'm not asking for national health coverage. I don't want it. So don't tax my "risky lifestyle choices" to pay for something that's going to break the federal piggy bank as a back door means of giving the Nanny State carte blanche to tell me how to run my life.
I stopped smoking when I was 14. Idiocy like this just makes me want to start up again.
I suggest Merit Menthol Lights. They won't kill ya, but they are pleasant enough. But, of course, there is nothing sexier than a gal smoking a ceegar.
Pubs figger out how to get around the UK pub smoking bans. Haha.
Jesse Jackson Jr. - a chip off the old block. Chicago loves their con men.
Netanyahu: Not impressed by Obama.
The New New Deal, at RCP:
If you believe President Barack Obama, he's working overtime to save American capitalism.
"I strongly believe in a free-market system," he told reporters in London, "and...in America, at least, people don't resent the rich; they want to be rich. And that's good." The market, he declared, "is the most effective mechanism for creating wealth...that history has ever known."
GOP identification increasing - but you wouldn't know it.
The O admin and the NYT not on the same page - for once. Must have gotten their wires crossed.
Released Gitmo jihadists and their recidivism: Report suppressed
Good piece on newspapers at Driscoll, who quotes:
Which would you say was more responsible for the death of American newspapering? The “descent into tabloidization”? Or the dreary monarchical deference of American liberalism’s insipid J-school courtiers? The king rode in the park. He was riding his videographer in the shrubbery, but you don’t need to know that.
I do not want Susan Gill protecting my home and family. The blogger notes:
Let us for a moment look past her sincere ignorance and the fact that there have been precisely two murders documented with legally-owned machine guns since 1934, that children are already barred from purchasing all manner of firearms, that "harmonious living" never stopped a hardened criminal, and that criminals should not circumscribe your freedoms. We'll look past all that to focus on what all too many outside of her moonbeams-and-unicorns world view also misunderstand about what our nation is, and the role firearms were intended to play.
The climate-industrial complex. What it is. Related: Sociologists ask "Where's my global warming $?"
Defining defamation down: The UN is insane.
Also insane:
SHOCKING NEWS: This Just In: U.S. Obesity “Epidemic” Due Solely to Overeating! “So the implied solution seems to be that food industry must be forced to make their products tasteless and unattractive.”
A good dose of poverty ought to solve that crisis easily, especially if everybody quits their credit cards.
Light rail: pretty idea, but not practical. We never should have gotten rid of the trolley cars, which every town in the USA had until the 1950s - when the gummint began subsidizing buses and put the trolleys out of business.
I am tired of reading about Narcissism at Dr. Sanity and Shrinkwrapped, but I must admit that the topic is relevant to our decadent, spoiled, entitled "Gimme" society. As Shrinkwrapped says:
The Utopianism inherent in Socialism appeals to those who feel that life is unfair and that it should be more fair. What child hasn't, at one time or another, uttered that immortal phrase that so many parents have so much troubling resisting, "Its not fair!" By the time the youngster begins to support him or herself, in modern Western cultures usually by the age of 30 or 40 (pardon the mild hyperbole, though there are efforts afoot to increase that age to never) they begin to recognize that the world is, in fact, not fair. The Universe does not care if you are a good person or a bad person (leaving religion out of the mix) but only whether or not you can support yourself and those who depend upon you. Modern liberal capitalist states have become so incredibly wealthy over the last century that we can now afford to support a growing dependency cohort which naturally evokes the infantile wish among the dependent to be treated more fairly, ie, that to each according to his needs should be the rule. The upshot is that there is an inherent tension in our society between those who pay and those who are dependent. This can and does create cognitive dissonance among those who have incorporated the ethos of Socialist compassion without spending time and energy understanding the far greater moral imperative of personal responsibility and freedom (tow inextricable values.)
The last century's grand experiments in Communism and Socialism led to the impoverishment of millions, authoritarian and totalitarian rule and the deaths of millions. History has rendered its verdict and Communism and Socialism have failed. This has led to a crisis for the Left.
Yeah. The crisis is what do you do after you crush all of the producers? Where does the money and wealth come from? The sky?
The perennially optimistic Larry says:
The communists were put to rout in the Indian elections. This suggests that India will take new steps to liberalize its economy, including foreign investment, free trade, privatization, and tax cuts. This is a big plus for global economic recovery. And the Indian elections may well have triggered the stock rally right from the opening bell this morning.
Plus: Morgan Stanley will probably de-TARP, along with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and perhaps others. No one knows for sure, but I think of de-TARPing as a kind of falling of the Berlin Wall. Let economic freedom ring. Let banks get out from under the yoke of government controls.
Yes, there will be shareholder dilution as the banks raise new equity capital. But the thought of banks freeing themselves from Team Obama way offsets any near-term dilution issues.
And out on the Left Coast, California voters look set to deny big state-government taxing-and-spending initiatives in tomorrow’s election. It’s a Prop 13-like vote. And it suggests that the Tea Party movement is in fact indicative of a tax-and-spend revolt going on around the country.
We linked Stanley Fish's God Talk, Part 2, earlier this week. Thanks, reader, for pointing out the discussion of Fish and Eagelton at Augean Stables.
It's a rich and impressive discussion. One quote:
One of the things that always struck me about “post-modernism” was the combination of ignorance and hubris embedded in the name. We don’t know what we are, but we do know that we’ve superseded modernity, that we’re well beyond that period. I always thought of modernity – that is, the liberal project of trying to establish a society run according to the basic rule of equality before the law for all citizens — as a long and difficult process. Indeed, it sometimes takes decades, even centuries to confront some of the difficulties that arise in such an endeavor – letting women and other races vote, de-imperializing, creating a safety net for citizens, figuring out how to treat other nations decently.
|
