Tuesday, January 5. 2010
Cool graphic, showing how it grew and spread across the US.
The wonderful states of Nebraska and Kansas seem immune. That's the Heartland.
Via Thompson. One of them:
 Getting on the Scott Brown bandwagon: Michelle, Riehl, Sissy, Fowler at NRO. It's a long shot in wacky MA. Photo is Brown. He has three weeks to make his case against the Dem machine candidate who is avoiding the press, off on vacation, and assumed to be a shoe-in as a Dem. Easy gig, big staff, dinner out every night, do as you are told.
Barone: GOP Should Push Education and Pro-Family Tax Reform. Douthat also has advice for Repubs.
Yes, they are saying that this frigid winter is due to global warming. As Legal Insurrection rightly asks, What would they say if it were a warm winter? Heads I win, tails you lose.
At Samiz on the C of E:
I have zero tolerance for a state privileged organization who claims to speak from a position of moral superiority advocating force backed restrictions on secular life. The sooner the Church of England is disestablished the better.
Call it what it is: Iran's revolution
MacDonald:
The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice.
Brooks:
The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.
The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.
The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.
A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.
VDH:
...over one-third of all the efforts to repeat 9/11 have occurred in 2009—just as the United States has made unprecedented efforts to renounce the prior war on terror, to demonize a prior President, to use euphemism, to bow and apologize abroad, to turn war into jurisprudence, and to reach out to the Muslim world.
Via Driscoll:
...Tim Blair writes, “New York City banned smoking in bars and nightclubs four years ago, and imposes the highest cigarette taxes in the US. But if you’re a junkie, the city will spend $32,000 teaching you how to shoot up.”
Via Wizbang:
When George W. Bush returned, bloodied and bruised, to his Texas home after eight years in the White House, 43 percent of Americans surveyed by Scott Rasmussen "strongly disapproved" of the job he had done. Today, after less than a year in office, 46 percent express the same intense level of opposition to Obama.
Dems will do health care in secret meetings. Image below from Moonbattery -
Monday, January 4. 2010
 You will recall that the despicable race-monger and hate-monger Al Sharpton made his name with the Tawana Brawley case. It was, of course, a hoax, the victims of which were the then-15 year old Tawana herself - and police officer Steven Pagones.
Our link this morning to Powerline's The radical feminist empire strikes back at Duke got me to thinking about one of our perennial themes here at Maggie's (namely the bullsh-t people and the MSM feed us) which we specifically touched upon three years ago in a random post on Truthiness, from which I borrow these quotes:
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Aldous Huxley
A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.
Mark Twain
All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.
Bob Dylan
One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.
Dr. Karl Menninger
What is Truth?
Pontius Pilate
There is no doubt in my mind that many careerists, opportunists, cranks with an axe to grind, neurotic cause-seekers, victim addicts, grievance-seekers, and folks with passionate political agendas use Tawana Brawley Case methods to advance their causes. These people need problems to justify their work, their income, or their very raison d'etre. If they have a sociopathic streak, they are not above inventing or exaggerating those problems:
Those Duke profs want more rape.
The warmists want more warming.
The race-mongers want more racism.
The transfat haters want more heart attacks.
The capitalism-phobics want more poverty.
Educators want more ignorance.
The race-mongers want more black kids to fail in school.
The Moslems want to be insulted.
And so on. Yes, I always want more legal cases too.
Photo is Al Sharpton with Tawana Brawley, 1988.
 I am back from my skiing and family vacation, and trying to catch up with the past week or so of Maggie's. I'd suggest that you do so too, if you have been away. Good stuff, as always.
Like our link that reminded me that our sexagesimal system (base 60, used for angles and time) derives from the Sumerians.
By the way, if you haven't given up hoping for global warming yet, you would have if you had spent the last couple of weeks in New England.
I believe in open government, but this is nuts: Obama Imperils Intel Briefings
Volokh: Why is it More Wrong to Attack a Person’s Religion than their Secular Moral or Political Views?
Copenhagen success (brr) continues. Related: Once in a generation cold snap forecast for NC. Related: Britain facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years.
Related: Peru's mountain folk face extinction due to cold. We're all gonna die by freezing! We need more free Government Oil!
Not enough rapes to keep the academic Feminazis happy: The radical feminist empire strikes back at Duke. They were obviously heartbroken that the lacrosse players never raped anybody.
Cocky Dem Coakley Goes On Vacation 20 Days Before Senate Election in Massachusetts
This Henninger piece is worth re-linking: A Rodney Dangerfield America? America isn't dead. It's just dead in the water.
Also, more on science is too white. Racists used to say science was too Jewish. Now I think they mean that it is too Asian.
New Year's Eve. Thanks for the pic, BL.
Sunday, January 3. 2010
 At the wonderful Hall of the Fishes at New York's American Museum of Natural History there is a preserved female Anglerfish. Attached to her is a bump with a tiny tail on it, which looks like a parasite.
It isn't. It's the shrunken remnant of a male Anglerfish. The males attach themselves to a female, and their bodies shrink away into nothing but male gonads permanently attached to the females. (You can read about Anglerfish here.)
I was reminded of Anglerfish by Kay Hymowitz's piece at City Journal, "The Incredible Shrinking Father," which takes a look at voluntary single motherhood in America and the role of artificial insemination. It is remarkable that, in one generation, something that had been considered a family tragedy is now considered, by some anyway, a "lifestyle choice."
A quote from her essay:
You’d think that we had enough problems keeping fathers around in this country, what with out-of-wedlock births (over a third of all children are born to unmarried women, and, in most cases, the fathers will fade from the picture) and divorce (the average divorced dad sees his kids less often than he takes his car in for an oil change). But these days, American fatherhood has yet another hostile force to contend with: artificial insemination. This may sound a tad overheated. After all, AI has been around, by some accounts, for over a century. And the number of kids born through the procedure each year, though steadily growing, remains quite small relative to the millions of babies conceived, as we can now say completely without irony, the old-fashioned way.
But aided by a lucrative sperm-bank service industry, an increasingly unmarried consumer base, a legal profession and judiciary geared toward seeing relationships through a contractual lens, and a growing cultural preference for individual choice without limits, AI is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family. There are multiple ironies in this unfolding revolution, not least that the technology that allows women to have a family without men promotes the very male carelessness that leads a lot of women to become single mothers in the first place. And fatherless families are a delicate proposition, as AI families are discovering, since all the scientists’ technology and all the lawyerly contracts can’t take human nature out of human reproduction.
Leaving aside the fact that single motherhood accounts for a large percentage of America's poverty stats (that's another article in itself), I consider voluntary single motherhood to be the height of selfishness, immoral, irresponsible, and no favor to a kid. I do not believe that "it takes a village" to raise a family, but I do think that, for a number of practical and psychological reasons which I will not go into now, it takes two parents to do it - one of each type. A couple of sets of grandparents, and some aunts and uncles, are good too, if you can get 'em. Paid help is no substitute because blood is thicker than money.
Fortunately, we live in a free country, and freedom implies the freedom to make stupid and irresponsible choices. That is why freedom requires maturity, education, intelligence, and restraint for things to work. Being a free citizen in a free republic demands a lot from a person, and all of us have to dig deep to find the strength.
You can read Hymowitz's entire piece here.
Image: A lovely female Anglerfish
Our old English long-case clock rang 12 times on New Year's Eve, as it has for my wife's family here in New England for between 240 and 300 years. There’s a note pinned inside by her great-great grandfather that reads “This clock was buried in the basement of one of our ancestors during the Battle of Bunker Hill” (which you will recall took place on June 17, 1775). History records that the London clockmaker, Devereaux Bowly, opened his shop in 1710 and died in 1773, so the clock had to have been made between those dates. My wife’s patronymic ancestor, a sea captain, was in Boston by 1736, so he could have brought it to Massachusetts any time during that period.
Of all the furniture that the past bequeathed to the current day, most of us have a particular soft spot for the long-case, or grandfather clock (so-named after the popular 1876 song, My Grandfather’s Clock). It is still and no doubt will be for many years to come the most popular form of household timepiece. Clocks give life to a room, but the tall clocks of the peculiar form that is now 300 years old have a special dignity. To the early American colonist, owning a clock was a status symbol. Most people of that time could not afford a clock of their own and had to rely on the church clock on the town common for the time of day. Privately owned clocks were only found in the finest of homes and were certain to be displayed in a prominent place for all to view.
Long-case pendulum clocks were still a new invention in 1736. In 1580 the Astronomer Galileo observed a swinging lamp suspended by a long chain from a cathedral ceiling. He studied its swing and discovered that each swing was equal and had a natural rate of motion. He later found this rate of motion depended upon the length of the chain or pendulum. In 1640 he designed a clock mechanism incorporating the swing of a pendulum, but he died before building his clock design.
It wasn’t until 1656 that Galileo’s pendulum principle was put to use by Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, who was the first to develop a pendulum based clock. Huygens’s invention however allowed clocks to run accurately to the point of three minutes loss or gain per day. Some years later in 1670 the English clockmaker William Clement noticed that a longer pendulum kept better time, so he lengthened the pendulum to over three feet. This of course required a longer case for the clockworks, and so the long-case clock was born. From then on the clocks were variously called long-case clocks, floor clocks, and even coffin clocks because they resembled the shape and size of the simple wooden coffins of that time.
Grandfather clocks were first made for royal families and nobles, but in time their production cost were cut down to where they were affordable for merchant families and became a symbol of socio-economic status and wealth.
Around 1685, long-case clocks were imported into American colonies for the first time and roughly 10 years later their construction in the New World began. New York, New England, Pennsylvania and Virginia became long-case clock making centers, but, until the 19th century American introduction of inexpensive brass movements, English clockmakers reined supreme.
Ed. note: I'm sure most of our readers are familiar with My Grandfather's Clock:
There are lady soldiers, lady cops, lady firepersons, lady mailpersons, lady everything - for better or worse.
Why are there no lady garbagepersons?
(By the way, I appreciate this past week's Dr. Bliss Festival of Reruns. When I read them, I honestly cannot remember having written them. I would write each post differently if I were to write them today - or maybe not write them at all.)
I hope our News Junkie will be able to get back from the north country tomorrow, because we are tiring of covering the links for him. Will stagger on just one more day.
Vanderleun:  What I learned from Avatar
Getting old and sick? 2010 is the right year to die in. Mankiw thinks we should keep it this way. So do I: Every prosperous family means one less poor family.
Solar Farm Held Up for Two Dozen Tortoises. I'm with the Desert Tortoises. Solar is a subsidized joke. Give me my nuke plants, and leave the ancient reptiles alone.
For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk. Their unemployment rate is at least half what ours has been this fall.
A new carry revolver: The Rhino
A Democrat right wing racist? Nobody can take a joke these days.
What every young man needs to know about fighting and violence. The ladies count on us guys to protect them and to apply force when needed.
What did Palin do as gov of Alaska? Lots of things.
There's no cure for stupid. Mortgages and the people who cannot pay them.
Coyote: Congress and Obama Enticing States Further into Bankruptcy
Is Environmentalism a Religion? h/t, Driscoll
Or is Obama a religion? Joan Walsh of Salon Finds Criticism of Obama "Traitorous"
Fineman: Obama’s Health-Care Gamble, And why he may come to regret it.
Re Napolitano: her potential is almost unlimited. Really?
Reason: Upholding the Right Not To Be Offended - The First Amendment protects even the ugliest forms of speech.
At Yale, they are having to turn students away from the Great Books course. Smart kids still want to know the good hard stuff.
Goldberg: Capitalism Fingered as Fiend of the Past Decade - Reducing “capitalism” to its alleged sins. One quote:
Every good thing capitalism helps produce — from singing careers to cures for diseases to staggering charity — is credited to some other sphere of our lives. Every problem with capitalism, meanwhile, is laid at her feet. Except the problems with capitalism — greed, theft, etc. — aren’t capitalism’s fault, they’re humanity’s. Socialist countries have greedy thieves, too.
Free markets are in disrepute these days, particularly by the people running Washington. For them, government is the solution and capitalism is the problem. If they have their way over the next decade, they won’t cure what allegedly ails capitalism — people will still steal and lie — but they will impede everything that makes capitalism great. And that will be bad for everyone, even NPR.
Doormat image is from this site. You may be needing one.
Saturday, January 2. 2010
This morning. If you are deprived by not being familiar, that's the eastern edge of Central Park on the right, around 92nd St - a darn pleasant neighborhood.
Is there such a thing as failure in science? From Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up (h/t, Neptunus):
How to Learn From Failure
Too often, we assume that a failed experiment is a wasted effort. But not all anomalies are useless. Here’s how to make the most of them. —J.L.
1 Check Your Assumptions
Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.
2 Seek Out the Ignorant
Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.
3 Encourage Diversity
If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.
4 Beware of Failure-Blindness
It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.
From a piece by Lazarowitz at Am Thinker:
With our inalienable rights to life and liberty, one might assume that among our unenumerated rights would also rest the rights of voluntary association and contract (such as the relationship between a doctor and patient) and the right to not buy insurance if one doesn't want it, as well as the right to opt out of a government health scheme. One might also assume that individuals have an inalienable, natural right to not report their medical status to the government.
The Founders were clear that such unenumerated rights would be recognized by natural law -- that is why they wrote and unanimously approved the Declaration of Independence -- but our natural rights may not be protected by constitutional law. Barnett has also wondered whether "mandatory insurance" is unconstitutional. However, given that our natural rights are inalienable, meaning that government may not take them away for any reason, it really should not matter if any of the health care proposals in Congress are unconstitutional.
Skunk Hour (1959)
(For Elizabeth Bishop)
Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchie privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.
A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
You can read a bit about the poem here. |
A melancholy chore to take ye olde tree down. However, it will have an extended life outdoors for a couple of months as the needles slowly drop, providing some cheery outdoor light and a place for the sparrows to hang out in and in which to hide from the Sharpies that haunt our area.
Friday, January 1. 2010
 Why don't colleges just collect all of the grievance study groups and put them in one department. Fat Studies, Anorexia Studies, Queer Studies, Women's Studies, Hispanic Studies, Black Studies, Indian Studies, Transexual Studies, Lesbian Studies, Klutz Studies, Oppressed Studies, Ugly Studies, Not-Too-Smart Studies, Too-Short Studies, etc.
You could call it Boo Hoo Studies, and in it you could sequester everyone who expects college to cater to their narcissism instead of teaching them about bigger, better, and more important things than themselves. Baby bottles in the coke machine, over in that department.
Eventually, they will need to include one more increasingly marginalized and disenfranchised minority in Boo Hoo Studies - Regular People Living Without Grievance. RPLWG just can't get a break these days, can they?
Editor's note: Or, to borrow the phrase from The Anchoress, could it be called the "It's All About Me" Studies Department?
 Sig Sauer P239 CCP: High Quality Carry Gun.
I never leave home without my carry gun, my keys, my wallet with some cash in it, and my cell. Who would?
Update: In response to queries, I now carry a Colt Cobra with which I very much enjoy trying to shoot beer bottles and cans down on the lower 40. Do not mess with me if you see me in downtown Hartford.
I have never needed to aim a gun at a person while in civilian clothing, although I have performed a Dick Cheney once or twice in thick woods with birdshot. Most bird hunters have. It's something to be avoided, because it pisses off your pals and makes them reluctant to invite you again.
 His wonderful 1936 essay, Shooting an Elephant. One quote:
I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly.
A good one for the beginning of a year. Bob picks it a bit in his Bob way on this version of Watching the River Flow in Sweden this past summer:
If there was no Internets, I'd have to stand on the overpass and yell at cars.
Sippican, who recommends The Colorist to us. Wonderful pictures.
 I have been taking a little time to think about how participating in a website like Maggie's, if you don't watch out, can have the effect of making you run faster and faster to keep up with the latest idea/opinion/reaction etc.
(Here's a clip from Dylan's 1978 No Time to Think from his Street Legal album. Lyrics here)
I can react, but I cannot really think, while looking at a screen - or while reading at all. I can reflect on something when I put down the book or close the page. I can reflect, and perhaps generate a thought, only by getting away for a bit from external input so I can hear some "internal input."
Am I unusual? Almost everybody I know thinks they have some degree of ADD.
I know everybody's mind works differently under different circumstances. My brain tends to think impressionistically, not sequentially and in linear fashion (except when it is demanded of me or, less often, when I demand it of myself - then it kicks into gear), and works best when I am under some sensory deprivation, like in the shower, in the car with the radio off, or with closed eyes. That's when ideas and connections come to me from my pre-conscious.
Giving myself a writing assignment is one way to force myself to think sequentially. Most of the time, no interesting thoughts appear and I end up trashing the piece. Opie likes to say "Those who can, think. Those who can't, link." We link a lot here at Maggie's, but I'd like to try to steer Maggie's away from trying to cover news. Had we the time and the brains, I'd like to post more pieces like neoneo's Give Me Liberty or Give Me Social Justice along with our usual eclectic mix of fun and/or informative non-political stuff.
Having thoughts and ideas is a discipline, like prayer. But disciplines can become good habits over time.
This year, I resolve to think more.
Related, College asks students to power down, contemplate
And here's a Google Tech Talk on the topic from Computer Science Prof. David Levy -
The charming New Year's Babe is via Theo, of course.
 Good fun: A summary of mathematical astronomy
A man and his plan: You have probably never heard of Francis Everett Townsend, but his enormous and controversial legacy is with us today.
Barone: It's a wonderful life working for the government
Mayo Clinic begins dropping Medicare patients
Henninger: America isn't dead. It's just dead in the water.
Just as the warmists want warming to be true to justify their existence, their view of the world, and their political agenda, I always think these Sharpton sorts want to find racism and oppression for the same reason. What ever happened to the "Duke 88"?
Liberal conspicuous agonizing. Thompson:
“Watch me agonise over meat. Look at how concerned I am. See how I fret.”
Allahu Akbar: It's The New "Cry For Help". Poor babies. No wonder they want to be mass murderers: they're lonely ronery.
What's up with this? No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years
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