Monday, September 20. 2010
 I plan to pose a number of questions to our readers this week because I have some talks to give on Saturday and would love some fresh ideas.
I hope our brainy and learned readers will rise to the occasion.
First, why are so many American middle-class and poor people (especially women) fat or overweight, while wealthier and better-educated women tend to be svelte?
Got a theory? Is it really class-related, or is that coincidence? Or is it a matter of fashion, wherein some social groups are just more accepting of fat? Some guys do prefer fat girls.
The Globe's Jeff Jacoby gets it.
When it becomes profitable to mine landfills, they will be mined. Possibly in 1000 years.
Add: The comments on Jacoby's piece are entertaining.
First off, Wendy and I would like to offer our sincere thanks for the positive comments the original ProCon post received. You can certainly sense that people are itching for a change.
These ProCon posts will be a small series until the election. Future posts will deal with various aspects and related articles, but today I wanted to cover some of the points raised in the comments. There being 27,000 words on the site, most of the raised issues were covered there, but rather than just tossing out links to answer the commenters, I thought I'd expound on them here. Rather than quote anyone, I'll just generalize.
1. "There isn't enough time between now and November to be effective."
That's just plain ol' wrong. Anyone who believes that has no idea how truly flaky American voters are and how many of them still don't know for sure who they're voting for when they wake up on Election Day. That flyer you hand them at the grocery store that morning might make all the difference.
Yes, it's embarrassing to admit the average American voter is so fickle, often picking a candidate for the flimsiest of reasons, but that matters not. We don't care any more about 'embarrassing' than the fact that it's 'tacky' to go after people's wallets, rather than intelligently discussing the issues as we did during the last two elections. And I needn't remind you what happened using that respectful little tactic.
This is war, and convention be damned.
2. "Web sites don't do any good."
No argument there. The 'home base' we want you to set up isn't for blogging and collecting readers and, in fact, the subject is never raised. You certainly can blog on it if you want, but it's two main functions are to act as a backdrop for the inspiring, hopefully-vote-changing 'motivational' posts and as a base of operations for your own endeavors, be it organizing a neighborhood Tea Party or collecting carpool riders for a Tea Party in the big city. It also gives you a sense of involvement and is demonstrative proof that you're actually doing something — as referred to fawning over your fave blogger's latest words.
Continue reading "ProCon: The Commentariat Speaks"
 Bog hockey. Ever play it? I did.
Columbia wins again: Few Schools Have a Solid Core Curriculum
Creepy vid: Al Gore's Baleful Brood
Villainous:
We have had government declare war on poverty and a war on drugs, but this is the first time our government has declared war on free enterprise.
Given the resounding success of the first two wars, I'd say that's the best news I've heard in ages.
New addition to ye olde blogroll: the profblog. See his Sarah Palin urges WHITES to vote for change
Teachers win, students lose, in DC.
However, Unions Struggling to Get Members to Rally Behind Dems. They'll figure it out: they plan on spending $100 million on these elections. That can buy something.
Is your money the government's money?
Tea Parties. It's how people organize themselves.
People migrate towards freedom. Vigorous folks want to be left alone.
The Republican Answer to George Soros's Money - Steven Law admires how the left organized itself during its wilderness years. Now he's got $50 million to help elect candidates on the right.
The Admin is bad for business. No kidding.
More Christie vs greedy unions. NY Post
Palin as the Leftwing Anti-Christ. So was Nixon, Reagan, Bush, etc. etc. Same old, same old.
Bailing out General Motors 20 months ago may have been a political payback. Duh.
It's a wonder to me that politicians and bozos like Michelle O know what foods are "good for us," while doctors have no idea. The notion of "healthy food" is religion, not science.
Thomas Sowell: The “Achievements” of the American Intelligentsia“- Intellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood.”
Are American Universities Going the Way of General Motors?
Driscoll on 60s mythology: , “Jack Webb reached more people than Jimi Hendrix every week”
Barnes: GOP Nor’easter - Republicans storm Pennsylvania and beyond.
We have said this too. Clinton: Losing House Would Help Obama in 2012
Sunday, September 19. 2010
 The prix fixe 3 course lunches at Jean Georges, on Columbus Circle (1 Central Park West). $26/person. We ate in the "informal" section before going to the Freud-CS Lewis play down the street yesterday.
I have had lots of good food lately, but this is as good as it gets. Menu isn't all seafood, but plenty of it. I had the Tuna Tartare on avocado with radish and some kind of incredible tangy sauce, the broiled Cod with tomato-herb sauce, and the famous tiny molten chocolate cake. All perfect. Here are some reviews. Forgot my camera, but found the pic of his Bluefin Tartare on the web.
After the play, we took a little stroll through Central Park, which looks immaculate and is full of cheerful people. Despite Bloomberg's obnoxious nannyism, NYC is doing something right these days.
Don't pass it up on your next visit to NYC. Trust your Editor Bird Dog on this. If you try it and disagree, I'll pay for the lunch.
I found the whole of Peter Saunder's 2008 essay, Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul.
It's a classic. The key quote:
Capitalism offers no grand vision of the future, for in an open market system the future is shaped not by the imposition of utopian blueprints, but by billions of people pursuing their own preferences.
Yep. Under control systems, people are forced to pursue the preferences of their supposed betters. I do not believe in "betters."
 About his book, FEATHERED TALES - A Bird Hunter's Grand Slam Odyssey Joe Augustine says:
"I wrote this book to tell a story -a good, old-fashioned adventure tale about some bird dogs, hunting and the life led while living a dream to complete my version of a 'grand slam' on North America's upland birds."
He did the whole thing without guides. Get it and read it. Amazon does not seem to have it.
Via NRO:
Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.
Anything can be justified by "greater good" Utilitarianism. More from John at Powerline.
Some have asked my for my source for the Lectionary. There are many sources, but I use the Vanderbilt Divinity School's site, and I just pick my favorite of the moment. I would probably prefer using the King James, but I don't.
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
8:18 My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.
8:19 Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: "Is the LORD not in Zion? Is her King not in her?" ("Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?")
8:20 "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."
8:21 For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.
8:22 Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?
9:1 O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!
Saturday, September 18. 2010
BD's tab dump this morning addressed poverty in America. Who are the poor? What is in their lives, he wondered. Tiger provides this:
...by simple, homey measures of comfort and convenience, the lowest rung on the income ladder lives better lives today than the average middle-class Americans of the last generation.
Poverty is not materially poor in the US. Sometimes I think it is just spiritually poor. What's a "good life"? Is it having a microwave? Not to me - nothing to do with a good life. I lack one, and do not want one. Not trying to be Marcus Aurelius or Thoreau here. I was under the poverty line for seven years - "working poor" - and I had a great simple life in poverty-stricken, jobless, but scenic western MA. Now I am making money in New York, and my life sucks more in many ways. I do meet more delightful females but, for one thing, I have less time for the fall hunting season. I do love the City, however, and feel invigorated every time my feel hit the sidewalk in the morning and I see the hustle and bustle and all the beautiful, slinky HOPAs and MILFs headed to work in their cool New Yorky outfits.
Plus I love the endless demands and rigors of my job, which test and stretch my brains and character every day and often all night too. I am trying to figure out what I really want in life besides beer, money, pals, dogs, guns, and fun sex. I realize now that I do not know, but that as a Yankee I know I do not want it to be easy. I want to work at least as hard and long as my old man did and does, and I know I need more God in my life.
I will not burden our readers with my inner confusions (but it is why I have been semi-AWOL here since my August boating adventures. I explained that to our Editor a while ago, and he was kind, understanding, encouraging, and teasing as he always is).
Amid much fanfare, the Democratic National Committee unveiled its inspiring new logo the other day:
Whoops! My mistake. That was the prototype. Here's what the above was eventually reduced to by the DNC graphics department:
Naturally, a number of right-wing bloggers immediately asked the obvious question.
And the answer is...
Not long, not long at all!
Available here. A very interesting blog site, and kudos on a great design and a masterful response.
We showed our dear friends around the Outer Cape (aka Lower Cape) last weekend, and I hope they got a sense of why it is enchanting to some of us. (They had a chance to look up some dead ancestors too.) We walked quite a bit, tooks lots of snaps, consumed quite a bit of seafood, ran into some interesting and friendly folks.
Re nomenclature, Wiki correctly notes:
The terms "Upper" and "Lower" as applied to the Cape have nothing to do with north and south. Instead, they derive from maritime convention at the time when the principal means of transportation involved watercraft, and the prevailing westerly winds meant that a boat with sails traveling northeast in Cape Cod Bay would have the wind at its back and thus be going downwind, while a craft sailing southwest would be going against the wind, or upwind. Similarly, on nearby Martha's Vineyard, "Up Island" still is the western section and "Down Island" is to the east, and in Maine, "Down East" is similarly defined by the winds and currents.
Over time, the reasons for the traditional nomenclature became unfamiliar and their meaning obscure. Late in the 1900s, new arrivals began calling towns from Eastham to Provincetown the "Outer Cape", yet another geographic descriptor which is still in use, as is the "Inner Cape."
Anyway, as I was saying, we love it because it is simple, a little bit wild and woolly, small-"d" democratic, and without pretension, fashion, or name-droppability. Even the wealth up there on the Outer Cape quietly adheres to the Yankee Code (and when they do not, they catch hell).
Lots of pics with commentary below the fold -
Continue reading "The Outer (Lower) Cape: Eastham to P'town"
 My thanks to JLW III in the comments for suggesting I take another look at the Thunderbird multiple identities email program. They'd tweaked something since I'd looked at it a year before and it's now my email program of choice. If you're looking for an email program that handles individual identities, this little honey is the way to go.
It's a freebie, put out by Mozilla, the same folks who brought us Netscape and Firefox. I'm using Firefox right now to edit this page, and ten minutes ago I was using Netscape Composer, their web editor, so just call me 'Exhibit A'. I'd looked at T-Bird a few times before, of course, but it was just never in the big leagues like it is now. Thanks again, JLW.
Additional info and setup tips are below the fold.
Continue reading "Doc's Computin' Tips: Thunderbird"
10 Job Search Mistakes You're Probably Making
LA: $111 million for 55 jobs. It should be a scandal.
The Tea Party has already won
Who loves ya, small business?
The limits of science. A quote:
Physicists, in particular, have long believed themselves to be on the verge of explaining almost everything. In 1894 Albert Michelson, the first American to get a Nobel prize in science, said that all the main laws and facts of physics had already been discovered. In 1928 Max Born, another Nobel prize-winner, said that physics would be completed in about six months’ time. In 1988, in his bestselling “A Brief History of Time”, the cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote that “we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.” Now, in the newly published “The Grand Design”, Hawking paints a picture of the universe that is “different…from the picture we might have painted just a decade or two ago”. In the long run, physicists are, no doubt, getting closer and closer to the truth. But you can never be sure when the long run has arrived. And in the short run—to adapt Keynes’s proverb—we are often all wrong.
City Journal on charter school lotteries
AVI thinks about poverty. Before I even get to his considerations, I need to know who is in those stats, and how poverty is currently defined (for example, does it include the value of government benefits? I know it excludes assets, and only looks at income.). Does it include grad students with stipends and free housing? People with two cars? Women's Studies grads living at home who can't find a job? 19 year-old single moms with four kids? People who are temporarily out of work? People who work off the books? - (Who hasn't heard "I'll do it for $500, or $200 in cash"?). Maine potato or blueberry farmers with 200 acres? Chronic schizophrenics and the mentally disabled who can only work in sheltered situations? The creepy Goth gals with the tats and body-piercings who work part-time in the truck stops in St. Johnsbury and Lebanon NH and live with their boyfriends? Unemployed actors and dancers? Waiters in Colorado Springs who do not declare their tips? Drug dealers who declare no income? The elderly living on Social Security? I mean, I know there is some poverty (and tons of programs to assist them), but who are they? And how much of it is elective in some sense, like my hippie Maine Guide who wants to follow his heart and doesn't give a damn about income? Or people who won't leave Michigan when there are jobs for them in Texas and Alabama? Money is not everybody's primary motivator, but I know there are tons of ambitious Americans looking hard for work right now in this crappy Obama economy. I just want to know who is in those stats.
Powerline on the politics of the stupid and obnoxious lightbulb ban
Castle seems to have felt entitled. Here's another sore loser. Grow up, people. Take your lumps, and go get a $1 million/yr lobbying job in DC if you don't like living in your home state. Or is it about a twisted desire for power?
What does Take Back America mean to you? For years, a common yard and barn sign in nothern Vermont has been "Take Back Vermont." (I don't think they took it back yet, and soon the posters of those signs will be dead. Dead and buried, ayup.)
Nice Magazine You’ve Got There, Mr. Forbes… Be a shame if something were to happen to it…
Beloved, Let Us Once More Praise The Rain
Beloved, let us once more praise the rain.
Let us discover some new alphabet,
For this, the often praised; and be ourselves,
The rain, the chickweed, and the burdock leaf,
The green-white privet flower, the spotted stone,
And all that welcomes the rain; the sparrow too,—
Who watches with a hard eye from seclusion,
Beneath the elm-tree bough, till rain is done.
There is an oriole who, upside down,
Hangs at his nest, and flicks an orange wing,—
Under a tree as dead and still as lead;
There is a single leaf, in all this heaven
Of leaves, which rain has loosened from its twig:
The stem breaks, and it falls, but it is caught
Upon a sister leaf, and thus she hangs;
There is an acorn cup, beside a mushroom
Which catches three drops from the stooping cloud.
The timid bee goes back to the hive; the fly
Under the broad leaf of the hollyhock
Perpends stupid with cold; the raindark snail
Surveys the wet world from a watery stone...
And still the syllables of water whisper:
The wheel of cloud whirs slowly: while we wait
In the dark room; and in your heart I find
One silver raindrop,—on a hawthorn leaf,—
Orion in a cobweb, and the World.
We haven't posted anything by Aiken previously, and it's time we did. A symbolist poet like Robert Frost, more or less - but without Frost's self-marketing canniness. His gravestone in lovely Savannah is a bench. He hoped that people would sit there and have a Martini.
Friday, September 17. 2010
White House wants to change the alarm to "climate disruption."
When people keep changing the name of something, you have to wonder What's up? Like, maybe there is no global warming now. But there is still weather of all sorts to get all excited about - especially in New England where the climate is "disrupted" constantly: See this charming 1876 speech by Mr. Samuel Clemems.
As for me, I hate boring weather. I enjoy disruptive weather.
BTW, I think Holdren is insane.
Well, I've been busy. 27,000 words, 55 pages and counting.
A couple of months ago I hooked up online with a very sharp lady named Wendy Calloway. We had both mentioned in blog comments what a dismal failure the right-wing blogs turned out to be after the '06 (historic Democratic sweep) and '08 (Obama) elections, so I contacted her and asked her if she'd like to dissect the entire mess, piece by piece, and reevaluate everything; what worked, what didn't, and what to do about the latter. Therein followed about a thousand emails, a bunch of phone calls, and a big 'master file' of the future web site that we passed back and forth.
As for the '06 and '08 elections:
We immediately came to a few conclusions:
— That the pundits are correct. From Ace of Spades to James Taranto, everyone agrees that it's the independents who win or lose elections. Occasionally, as in 2008, national fervor will sweep someone into office, but for normal, average elections it's the independents, centrists and moderate Democrats who make the real difference in the voting booth.
— That the blogs on both sides of the fence weren't very effective. Just ask Ned Lamont. It was simply more 'preaching to the choir' and obviously didn't make any difference with the aforementioned independents, centrists and moderate Dems. For every few we picked off, DailyKos and MyDD got theirs.
— Most money used in campaigns is ill-spent. Bluntly put, lawn signs haven't won an election yet. There, in the privacy of the voting booth, it's almost always something deeper than that. While we heartily endorse getting our candidates' names into the public eye, we leave that to the large organizations.
So we decided to focus on that "something deeper", which usually translates to matters of the heart (patriotism), the mind (common sense), and matters of the wallet, such as "Will I be able to pay the rent next month?"
The reference to Ned Lamont is quite apt. He was the Connecticut senatorial candidate that DailyKos, MyDD, et al, got behind. His election was supposed to be their 'crowning moment' as they showed the world what blogpower was all about.
The point the above quote makes is that he got crushed in the election. Fat lot of good all that blogpower did.
Continue reading "ProCon: Back to the (grass) roots"
Blast From the Past: Could Facebook Destroy Your Marriage?
Quantum computers on the way
Prager: Why the Right Fears Transforming America -- and the Left Seeks It
Gov. Christie does it again (with the vid). He's a mensch. Not a metrosexual. Too real for politics...or maybe not.
Related: Ryan and Christie - the GOP's Dynamic Duo
Poverty rate at highest level in half-century, data show. They do not tell you how they define poverty, or whether their figures include government benefits.
NYT sees Tea Partiers as "furious" and "snarling." I'd term that pure projection.
From George Will's Trifle with the government? Just ask Jacob Maged:
The crime scene at 138 Griffith St. has changed in 76 years. Today it is a barber shop. In 1934, it was a tailoring and cleaning establishment owned and run by Jacob Maged, 49.
With his responsibilities as a father of four, Maged should have shunned a life of crime. Instead, he advertised his criminal activity with a placard in his shop window, promising to press men's suits for 35 cents. This he did, even though President Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealers, who knew an amazing number of things -- his economic aides were not called a "Brains Trust" for nothing -- knew that the proper price for pressing a man's suit was 40 cents...
OMG. Christine O'Donnell has had sex!
Bail out Studebaker!
Ace: Democrats To Run On Record of Genuine Accomplishment and Gaywad Logo But Mostly Gaywad Logo
Thursday, September 16. 2010
Came in over the transom with the video:
 The P51 was the most versatile fighter plane of WW2. It excelled at both ground level support of the troops and high altitude long range fighter cover for the heavy bombers. It was the equal of the best fighter planes in dog fights. It was also an accident of fate or timing rather than planning that it existed.
In late 1940 or early '41 Britain was desperately short of fighter planes of any sort and had sent some RAF people to the US to see what they could buy. Hoping for some P-40's they talked with Curtis Wright and found them booked up for the duration by the US govmt. They got a tip from Curtis Wright that North American Aviation had no contracts yet and was looking for business, and that Curtis Wright would licence North American to build P-40's if they worked out an agreement. When the RAF asked the North American small management crew if they would be interested their answer was Why do you wand to buy an expensive, high priced obsolete plane that would take well over a year to start any production when we have a new design worked out and can have a prototype ready for RAF test flights in 9 months if you can get us an engine for it from Allison. They were, they could and they did a deal and were very happy with the performance of the prototype, and placed a production order.
When this news worked its way through to the Army Air Force they decided to look into the possibilities and eventually ordered a production run that wound up as the A-36 low level fighter. The Allison V12 was the only non-radial combat aircraft engine built in the USA and, unlike the Rolls Royce Merlin engine and the German ME bf109, it did not have a supercharger which was essential for combat above 15,000 ft as well as top performance at lower altitudes. After the RAF had a few month's experience with the new plane, the RAF did the obvious thing and grafted a Rolls Royce Merlin engine from a Spitfire onto one of their "P-51's" (don't remember what the RAF called their version of the plane). At this time the RAF got the North American crew on board the update and they soon found out that Packard Motor Company in the US was building Rolls Royce engines for the PT Boats of the Navy. Packard was happy to add Merlin egines for NA to their production runs and the P-51 was officially launched.
One of the benefits of NA being small and nearly broke was that the design engineers had to do double duty as production engineers so they designed the plane for simple and fast as well as low cost production. At that time the conventional practice was to build the airframe and then have people crawl inside to string all the wires and cables together, and this more than doubled the assembly time and cost. NA designed the fuselage in two half shells and had the electrical, hydraulic and control cables, etc installed in each half prior to sewing the halves together. The P-51 cost about one third the cost of the P-38 and about half the cost of the P-47 or F6F Navy planes.
The video here: http://www.asb.tv/videos/view.php?v=1bf99434&br=500
Oktoberfest decolletage collage via Theo. Nice dirndls:
He has a new record, Mean Old Man. Still going strong, it seems, despite all of the ups and downs. An interview in the WSJ.
In the run-up to the 2006 elections, I posted a widely followed debate among some prominent bloggers about – in light of discouragement or disagreement with President Bush’s second term immigration, Supreme Court choice, profligate budget policies -- whether to sit out the 2006 election, or start a third-party, or – in my opinion – to bite the bullet and get active against current and coming Democrat excesses. I called the first two positions "conservative battle fatigue." At other forums, like National Review, others joined in.
I’m not from Delaware, moreso from Missouri (“show me”), so looking back over the past four years I’d say we were all correct and all wrong.
Divisiveness and dispiritness among Republicans, coupled with energy and major media hawking among Democrats, led to the 2006 Congressional majority and 2008 Presidency for Democrats. We’ve all paid the prices. The establishment Republicans for the most part continued in their path of feebleness, until the Tea Parties released the energy and eagerness for reform among rank-and-file Republicans and Independents. Then, the Republican establishment was bestirred, kicked in the butt, to jump on board.
The 2010 elections and primaries demonstrated the synthesis of the three views from 2006: Don’t sit out an election but, instead, change their course by active participation, including overthrowing the more feckless members of the Republican establishment when able.
Now, we have a new debate which essentially pits those either clinging to the Republican establishment, or at best arguing for possibly greater electability in some left-leaning states of a weaker principled Party, against those who are more determined to stem and reverse the Democrat excesses of the past four years and launch a political party rebirth.
Some among the Republican Party establishment, however, go beyond the debate to defection. Florida’s Crist is the prime example, to his rue after being given a hearty attaboy by liberals and his liberal reposturing being rejected in the polls.
Continue reading "Politics: Don’t Get Fatigued, Get Even"
At TigerHawk. One quote:
He does not, at the moment, have a great deal of public support to draw on, and the level of vituperation from the extremes has reached the level it was with George W. Bush. Where Bush was accused by the extreme left of going into Iraq to increase profits for Halliburton and the oil companies, Obama is being accused by the extreme right of trying to create a socialist state. Add to this other assorted nonsense, such as the notion that Bush engineered 9/11 or that Obama is a secret Muslim, and you get the first whiff of a failed presidency. This is not because of the prospect of midterm reversals — that has happened any number of times. It is because Obama, like Bush, was off balance from the beginning.
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