Friday, November 19. 2010
Related to our morning links comments about exposing the totalitaranism of the Left, read Vanden Heuvel: Send Hither a Swarm of Bureaucrats.
Vanden Heuvel's advice is yet more dreary evidence that the left's desire to transform America into some socialist paradise takes precedent over democratic processes. Day by day, thanks to twits like Vanden Heuvel, the left reveals its decidedly undemocratic character.
All of the name-calling of Conservatives as "fascists" and "Nazis" is pure projection. Conservatives want less government control and involvement in life - not more. Conservatives do not want to be controlled - or to control.
Get your eggs frozen?
100 leaked body scans (h/t Thompson)
Exhibitionists must love this
Protein:
The idea that America might inadvertently and incrementally fall into socialism is a great deal closer to the strategies of “actual existing socialists” than textbook definitions of economies nationalized at a single revolutionary blow. The reason Americans don’t understand this is that the universe of post-sixties socialism has remained largely hidden from public view. Yet this is Obama’s world. It’s time we got to know it.
Larry Elder: Clinton, Gore, and Kerry lost the white vote too
Woah!… Soros Group Says Obama Can Use Armed Forces to Push “Progressive” Agenda
Ah, exposing the totalitarism of the Left
Sen. Rockefeller: FCC Should Take FOX News, MSNBC Off Airwaves
Ah, exposing the totalitarism of the Left
Coyote: I am thinking about renaming the Chevy Volt the Chevy Bastiat.
Meet the 'New' Donald Berwick
This guy just can't wait to run your medical care. Yeah, more totalitarianism - for your own good. Isn't it comforting to know that some people know what is best for you?
Marginal Rev: Who again is supposed to cut the rate of growth of Medicare spending?
Condoms in Elementary School
For the pedophiles?
Where are the jobs? See below -
Thursday, November 18. 2010
Robert Bernstein, former Chair and president of Random House, and founding Chair of Human Rights Watch, details the many failings of HRW. If you want it summed up in one piece, by someone both knowledgeable and devoted to human rights, this is the one to read.
I won't go into all the ways HRW has gone seriously astray. But, below, is Bernstein's appeal to college students with which he concludes:
In closing, let me make a statement to whichever students choose to listen: When I was in Israel, I talked to 18 year-olds, both boys and girls, who were not going to college but instead were going into the army for three years and then for one month a year until 45 or 50 years old. They’ve been doing this for 60 years. And most of them have faced some kind of danger during that period. They are not involved in the peace process. They are involved in the defense of their country and have to hope that their government will avoid war. I also think of the Palestinian 18 year-olds – particularly those in Gaza who can’t get jobs because their economy is not thriving. I believe it is not thriving specifically because their government is bringing in arms and Israel is trying to stop them. And their government is preaching genocide. Many of these students can’t afford college and that leaves jihad as their only opportunity. If college students can help bring the human rights movement back to trying to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights truly universal in the Middle East, they will be making a valuable contribution.
If credible human rights watch is to have a future, and a worthwhile impact, it will depend upon the next generation of leaders. The current prominent NGOs, HRW, Amnesty, and most of the lesser known ones involved in the Middle East have surrendered their mission to terrorists and thugs.
Those who are suffering from terrorists and thugs are watching, and waiting, too long.
Does Human Rights Watch care? It just took $100-million from George Soros, "which should offset nicely the income lost from core donors who've walked away in the wake of a host of scandals." Read more
P.S.: As you'll read in Bernstein's speech, Natan Sharansky was one of the inspirations for Bernstein, and many others. Here is Sharansky recently at the San Diego Jewish Federation's event Celebrating Jewish Heroes (yes, that's Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul & Mary introducing him):
Celebration of Jewish Heroes - Natan Sharansky from Brad Slavin on Vimeo.
When Sipp and I exchanged emails about the charming house on the blog this morning, he decided to find out a bit about Moodus (where that house is). Here's the Moodus Wiki. (Moodus is a village in East Haddam, with a pop c. 1200 - depending on who is in jail or court-required rehab at a given moment).
What he discovered that was interesting to me was that Moodus was the smallest town in the US to receive federal urban renewal money in the 1960s. The old town center (pic below) was demolished.
The quaint village center, dubbed "Downtown Moodus", formerly located at the intersection of routes CT 151 and CT 149, was a popular destination for guests. However most of the village was razed after the citizens of East Haddam controversially voted in 1967 to accept Urban Renewal funding to rebuild Moodus commercial district a quarter mile east along CT 149.
The citizens immediately regretted their decision, but it was too late for the Dem-controlled Feds with their bulldozers and their developer allies.
The genius central planners had something more modern in mind (ie up-to-date strip malls), to be built 1/4 mile up the road. The soul of the village was killed. It's just one example of why we at Maggie's are so distrustful of genius government planners of anything. This ex-farming village, ex-middle-class resort village, is now a frequent hangout of ex-cons and cons-in-training, young gals without cars with too many tatts walking down the road to the minmart for chips, cigs, and beer, scruffy immigrants whose language one cannot identify, people on various dubious disabilities (as in nearby Middletown, CT), and abandoned or tumbling-down once-gracious homes with rooms for rent. Nobody goes to Moodus anymore, except to fill their gas tank.
Well, those "modern" renewal government-subsidized strips malls are now emptying, shabby, and falling down. Like, as I imagine it, "Pearly Nails" - boarded up. "Uncle Tsao's Quickee Chinee Takeout" - boarded up. "PIZZA POUR VOIS" - boarded up. (I'm sure there must be something good about Moodus still, but it's just a place on a map now, and not my sort of Yankee village anymore).
Thanks a lot, Uncle Sam, for modernizing Moodus. And thanks to you expert geniuses in DC who think you know better than us. See Detroit. And shame on the Connecticut Yankees who bought into such government baloney. The Feds rarely get anything right except through their military - thankfully, their main responsibility.
This site has some good posts on the topic of Moodus' destruction, including:
Pt 1. Legacy of "Progress" Gone Sour
Pt 2. Urban Renewal Flops in Moodus
Pt 3. Could Moodus Have Been Saved?
A quote:
Once the town opted for urban renewal funds, fixing up the town was no longer a viable solution. "With the influx of federal dollars, you had to play their game," explains Jim Gibbons, an urban planner with the UConn Extension Service in Haddam. "In order to accomplish smaller goals, you had to follow federal regulations and guidelines and at the time of the Moodus project urban renewal was oriented to demolition. To many critics of the program at the time, the correct title was ‘urban disruption.’ As an outsider, I think this was part of the problem with the Moodus project: It disrupted the neighborhood."
Here's a pic I took last weekend of an abandoned and boarded up church in (once) central Moodus.
Congressman Darryl Issa each year, via his Issa Family Foundation, sponsors a Christmas Pancake Breakfast and Toy Drive at Camp Pendleton, in cooperation with the Navy League. My boys and I go, gorge, and spread the gratitude to the children of Navy and Marine service members.
For those not in the area, please send monetary donations, any size. The Issa Family Foundation will match all monetary donations, so the bigger the better. Make tax-deductible check out to: S.D. Navy League/Homefront.
The address:
Issa Family Foundation; P.O. Box 1388; Vista, CA 92085
From Mead's excellent Pretty in Pink? Obama’s Dark Night of the Soul (my bold):
In January 2009, newly inaugurated President Obama believed that the road to success as president lay in pleasing the kind of intellectuals and the high priests of the liberal religion whose esteem he had long sought and pretty much always obtained. He seems to have thought that groups like the editorial board of the New York Times actually represented some serious force in American life. He also seems to have believed that with a few tweaks here and there what passes for political orthodoxy among the intelligentsia of the civil service unions provides a coherent and practical governing philosophy for the United States and that the aspirations of the most legalistically minded of the human rights community describe a feasible path toward world peace. He believed that if we were nicer to the leaders of other countries they would be nicer to us – with one important exception. He believed that if the President of the United States shook his little finger, the Prime Minister of Israel had no choice but to tremble and obey.
Read it all. Link above. I did not vote for the guy - I voted for, and gave max money to, the other, more harmless, doofus.
Great. Another 50,000- member government union, this time literally designed to get into our pockets. That's a lot of new big gummint voters.
Story at Surber.
 There is just something so wrong about this pic (from Drudge). It seems too gay, for one thing. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Our proposal for the TSA mess is to hire studly young men to grope the women, and hot young babes to grope the men.
Complaints would disappear. People might even line up for more thorough checks in the back room. Of course, they would have to revise those dorky pseudo-cop uniforms. They aren't cops - they are toll-collectors.
Related: Government: offensive, intrusive, expensive and ineffective all at once?
 A Brief History of Republicans and Democrats
That is cruel
Driscoll: The China Syndrome, Starring Tom Friedman as Jane Fonda
Tiger:
Is there any more graphic measure of the incompetence of our federal government than that it is the second half of November and nobody has the first clue what their tax rates will be for 2011?
Harvard MBAs Are Rushing to Wall Street Again. Yikes!
Via Althouse: In Defense of Going to Law School: A Prudential Perspective
Single, Childless Women Now Earn MORE Than Men: Do We Really Need MORE Federal Legislation?
Redistricting: Low-tax states will gain seats, high-tax states will lose them
Congress Getting Rich as It Bleeds Us Into Poverty
My thought about Palin too: High floor, low ceiling.
But I do like the lady. Related: It's Sarah's happiness that drives Libs nuts.
Roger Ailes Lets Rip
California Suggests Suicide; Texas Asks: Can I Lend You a Knife?
Idiot's guide to public sector that produces no wealth (h/t, Fausta):
This place had a For Sale sign and a No Trespassing sign in a sad old farming town in rural Connecticut. It has a couple of barns, sits on around 8 acres. Probably needs a little work.
Wednesday, November 17. 2010
 Those LED crank flashlights got me thinking about regular LED lightbulbs. They're expensive, but last almost forever - and they don't burn out, just slowly fade in intensity.
Here's the scoop on them.
Seems like a good choice for sockets that are impossible to reach. Has anybody tried them?
I agree with Cutler in the WSJ about early voting. In fact, I disagree with absentee voting and mail voting in general except for overseas military. If you want to vote, show up on Election Day with ID in hand, and do it the right way. Otherwise, don't vote.
WSJ: Too many voters are making decisions when horse-race coverage dominates the news, attention to issues is limited, and key debates haven't taken place.
 Had an outage for 8 hrs this morning. All it seems to take around here is a stiff breeze.
Re power outages, I just bought a few of these for stocking stuffers. Got one for Gwynnie's car, too. Sorry I got them right before the 2 for 1 deal began.
Brian Aitken's Mistake - A New Jersey man gets seven years for being a responsible gun owner.
Wilson Sonsini and Silicon Law
Use Wiki? Send them a few bucks.
Inflation = taxation. the stealth $600 billion tax increase
McGowan on the Blindness of the Times
I would read his book, but I already know what he is saying.
Advice on giving advice.
Related to advice, Gingrich: Obama should take off most of the rest of the year
Happy 5th Birthday to Pajamas.
Can these things make $?
Obama Whines: American - Journalists 'Never Say Thank You'
Show a little masculine dignity.
Prager: Fairy tales, and people aren't all good
Religion of Peace holds religious Death To America rally
Why the hate? Why the "hate speech"?
Waiver-mania! The ever-expanding Obamacare escapee list
We want a waiver for Maggie's Farm - staff and readers
Soros: China has better functioning government than U.S.
It's called a "dictatorship," shmuck. Move there, and tell them how to do their job better. Bring Friedman with you.
Is this an antique Colonial or a reproduction? Defend your judgement with details.
Tuesday, November 16. 2010
This morning, my 5th grader Jason asked me to help him choose a handicap for him to write an essay about for “abilities” day. I suggested “idiot savant”, since it demonstrated an advanced ability despite a severe disability.
His teacher had never heard of idiot savant! (Jason had the dictionary definition with him, to enlighten her.)
After school, we went to the annual Scholastic book fair. There wasn’t a single classic of literature, even in a child version. There wasn’t a single biography of a great person. There weren’t any geography books. There were no science books.
Jason reads at a 7th grade level. He read The Count Of Monte Cristo a few months ago. He invented something last term that a patent attorney is looking at now. He is in 6th grade math, doing elementary algebra.
I asked the teacher at the cash register where the classics were. She pointed at Diary Of A Wimpy Kid!
I asked where any books were beyond the 4th or 5th grade level ones there. She pointed at a cook book, saying that is difficult.
I guess that is why she is a teacher. Pablum is easy. And, this is one of the highest rated public schools in San Diego County.
That question is posed by Bryan Caplan on the signaling value of education, here, via our reader Mike's site, here. (Thanks, Mike)
My perspective on the topic is that educational signaling, like dressing well, good manners, or possessing a good pedigree, will only take you so far in life - maybe to your first or even second job, but it alone will not lead to a happy and productive lifetime white-collar career or careers. That requires fortunate combinations of personality traits including social skills, a bit of dignitas, leadership skills, savvy judgement, a quick penetrating brain, good ability to assess others, a cheerful but forceful disposition, integrity, good intuition, etc., of which many folks lack at least one element. (I lack more than one of those, which is why I am a Partner and not an employee. Like many Maggie's Farmers, I am not fit to be an employee but I am a darn good tough but caring boss: if you don't bs me, I'll be on your side when you screw things up - which you will.)
After the first or second job, the only real value of fancy academic signaling is social. The old school tie networking is highly over-rated these days (except amongst the Dartmouth Gang and the prep school kids who help their own tribe no matter what. Yalies? Not much anymore, since Yale went psychotic).
When we interview at my shop, we partners interrogate the candidates first, and glance at their resumes afterwards. We like to size a person up. Get the cut of their jib. We do not like slick, and we do not like negativity. We have a soft spot for vets and/or people with a strong sport because those things matter to us. We see through bs like a laser. We enjoy dry humor as well as raunchy humor, and are bored by conventional thinking and ordinary "nice" personalities. We try to decide whether this is a person we'd enjoy and benefit from having around every day, somebody we can learn from - and have fun with at dinners and parties. We like to be surprised, and we enjoy quirkiness when associated with brilliance and creativity. And we are looking for the beef: "Teach me something I don't know about ____"
(Admittedly, our candidates are screened first by our junior people, and how they do that is not my concern.)
The grand White Oak of eastern North America.
For the past 40 years, as farming has declined in the Northeast, it is not unusual to see one of these gnarly monsters among a woodland filled with younger trees. Sometimes in the midst of the stands of White Pines which often quickly fill abandoned pastures. The old White Oak is the sign that you are walking through an old cow pasture. Squint your eyes in the woods to eliminate all of the younger trees, and imagine dairy cattle chewing their cud in the shade of that old oak.
This is Frederic Church's View Near Stockbridge, MA, 1847:
I was good friends with one of these giants as a boy. Its lower branches reached almost to the ground, so that you could monkey up to 15' or 20' into the tree by going up those low limbs. Getting higher was difficult going - and slippery going from all of the moss growing on those big limbs.
New England is filled with second-growth forests, not too much climax forest yet. It's difficult to realize now, but in the late 1800s there was hardly a tree standing in rural New England other than in farmers' woodlots - and sugarbush.
My pic doesn't capture it, but this one has about a 5' diameter. We were hunting for Woodcock.
All worship was to him sacred, since he believed that in its most degraded forms, among the most ignorant and foolish of worshippers, there has yet been some true seeking after the Divine, and that between these and the most glorious ritual or the highest philosophic certainty, there lies so small a space that we may believe the Saints in Paradise regard it with a smile.
Via Potemra, who says "It’s from Elizabeth Waterhouse’s Thoughts of a Tertiary, and it was used by Evelyn Underhill as one of the epigraphs to her classic book Worship"
At Maggie's, we love the charms of both town and country - when they get it right. The decline of industrial urbanization and the (government-subsidized) rise of the suburbs - with the move of industry and corporate offices to the suburbs, have left many cities as hollow cores of their former selves.
Lively people like to live in cities if they are vibrant, safe, interesting, attractive - and if there is work. For example, much of Manhattan is so appealing that few can afford to live there.
Malanga at City Journal: The Next Wave of Urban Reform - Mayors Cory Booker and Dave Bing fight to save two of America’s most distressed cities. One quote:
Since the mid-1960s, many big-city mayors and Washington policymakers had argued that the problems plaguing America’s cities—rising crime, deteriorating schools, sluggish economies, and social dysfunction—resulted from national and global economic forces that urban politicians were powerless to resist. Out of that period came an array of ambitious federal programs to aid city residents and revitalize struggling urban neighborhoods. Even though the programs—many of them carried out under the banner of the War on Poverty—did little to boost cities’ fortunes, the refrain that urban woes were Washington’s responsibility became commonplace among mayors and remained so for nearly three decades.
But just a few years after the summit, America witnessed the rise of a new group of mayors who rejected the notion that the federal government—or anyone else—should be their savior.
Read the whole thing. Malanga tells the story well. Link above.
California’s government workers are protected from paying traffic violations the rest of Californians pay.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that California privacy law allows its 1.5-million government workers and some of their families to keep their home address private. A result: They “zip along toll roads and past red-light cameras with almost no worries about being caught because collection agencies have no address to send citations.”
The San Diego Democrat in charge of the state Appropriation Committee blocked legislation to close the loophole, failing to weigh the toll and fine collections against the estimated $3-million to use government employees’ agency address to collect.
The newly elected state legislature is facing a budget deficit of over $25-billion, and growing. First on its list of measures should be closing this loophole. Right?
An academic mercenary tells his story. A quote:
You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.
I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.
In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.
From DiscoverTheNetworks, Organizations Funded Directly by George Soros and his Open Society Institute.
Related, Soros is targeting your state.
I've got to keep an eye on this guy, because his view of America and the world is so far from my own.
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