Wednesday, January 12. 2011
Aways use your enemy's hand to catch a snake.
Persian Proverb
Harsanyi: This 'Conversation' is Just a Setup:
Jeez, if I've never written anything that could be construed as violent or hateful, even metaphorically (though I'm sure belligerent and offensive vocabulary crept into columns as needed), what could I possibly have to reflect on? My only contribution to the crumbling discourse, it seems, is believing in the tenets of classical liberalism. That, in and of itself, is a sin.
This leaves the person with two choices: Revise your viewpoint, or shut up. Which, of course, is the point.
Related: Hijacking A Massacre
Major snow dump overnight - lost power for a while, lost my links. I'll post this, instead:
Giffords Shot: Now, A Word from Our Gun Control Sponsors…
Rhode Island Governor Bans State Officials from Talk Radio
Dem Congressman: If Violent Rhetoric Didn't Cause This Shooting -- It Will Cause Next One!
Dr. Torrey: A Predictable Tragedy in Arizona - We emptied state mental hospitals starting in the 1960s without providing adequate treatment alternatives.
And "Dr." Matthews
Video: Slain girl’s father says attack the price of “a free society”
OK, that's enough of today's items on the shooting. The original news story should have been "paranoid pothead goes on shooting rampage."
But within hours of the news report, people began to exploit the sad story for their own purposes. Twisting the facts, inventing false narratives, "letting no crisis go to waste" (not that this represents a crisis). It's like Tawana Brawley all over again, the flat-out lie which Al Sharpton rode to seemingly perpetual fame and fortune. Propaganda designed to create a consensus view, or at least a thinkable view regardless of the facts. A snow job:
snow job
n
Slang chiefly US and Canadian an instance of deceiving or overwhelming someone with elaborate often insincere talk
Even the worthy Dr. Torrey did it, above. This kid would not have been hospitalizable, much less long-term hospitalizable, against his will, anywhere in the US. Well, I might be wrong about that: apparently he had been making death threats.
The only sane comment I saw this morning was the slain girl's father. He gets it. Well, this guy gets it too, at Am Thinker via Lucianne, The Media Has Declared War:
Newsrooms and hospitals have one major thing in common: the "hush" is the loudest thing anyone ever hears. The "hush" is the moment when normal activity stops cold for an announcement of major events that will entirely reshape any usual activity. While both newsrooms and hospitals stop on that kind of news -- and then, following it, race into a whirlwind of overdrive -- the similarities end there.
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Comments:
In the crosshairs of the trigger-happy MSM: Sarah Palin
In the crosshairs of the trigger-happy MSM: the 1st Amendment
In the crosshairs of the trigger-happy MSM: anyone who defies the imposition of socialism in America
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Otherwise, the blizzard of exploitation is disheartening, if not sickening.
It's a winter wonderland out there; a perfect day to be 6 or 7 years old.
Tuesday, January 11. 2011
 A Bird Dog pup (pupette, actually) has asked me to help her fill out her college education by listing some things she ought to know and read, but cannot fit into her college schedule as she has mapped it out.
Music to a Dad's ears, of course. Father knows best.
Well, I will just focus on one piece of her request here and now (because it went well beyond entertainment - this is just the fun part). She is a theater rat and reads plays daily for fun. She knows most of Shakespeare pretty well, and loves Pinter too (!). But she says her knowledge of films prior to her era is very limited. "What films should I know?," she asks. (I call them movies because I am a knuckle-dragging clinger.)
Ain't it great when the youths acknowledge their ignorance?
I told her I had once, for fun, made a list of my 100 essential movies (and I am not much of a movie fan), but it went away when my ancient Mac died ten years ago. Naturally, my list had some John Wayne, Gone With The Wind, Bridge Over The River Kwai, Swept Away, Streetcar, Waterfront, Mr. Blandings, Wonderful Life, the hideously painful Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, some James Bond and some WC Fields, Citizen Kane, Days of Wine and Roses, some Jack Lemmon like 7 Year Itch, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Harvey, Billy Budd, the Alistair Sim Christmas Carol ( which she has seen countless times), and, as one item, all of Charlie Chaplin. I don't want to try to make my list again, and, for a person who is more of a reader than a movie person, I got well over 100 with my list of basic flicks.
If you google "100 essential movies of all time," you can get all sorts of obscure lists by critics. She did take the time from her Christmas-break reading and ski trips to New Hampshire and constant NYC trips to watch Amarcord today, which definitely is on my list.
Man, that movie is rich in memorable imagery, and as Italian as anchovies in olive oil.
So help me out. What's on your essential movies-to-see-to-be-culturally-literate list? (please do not feel that you need to list 100!).
The propaganda issued by the Obama administration to obtain support for ObamaCare is blatant and wrong. An example is touting that ObamaCare has helped small businesses to obtain medical insurance. The federal Department of Health and Human Services cites a Democrat-front organization. The real facts say otherwise.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services website HealthCare.gov offers this “fact”: “According to a new survey from the Small Business Majority, one third of employers that don’t offer health insurance said they are more likely to do so because of the small business tax credits included in the Affordable Care Act, which help small employers afford coverage for their employees.”
But, as an expose in the New York Times says, “As far as the Agenda knows, the Small Business Majority research is the only research that has found that small businesses buy in to pay-or-play. All of the other small-business advocates claim the opposite, and by greater margins.”
What is the Small Business Majority? According to the New York Times expose:
The group has been around since 2004, founded by a tech entrepreneur named John Arensmeyer….Small Business Majority has no membership — if it did, Mr. Arensmeyer says, it could no longer objectively represent all of small business, since memberships are by definition self-selecting. Nor is it funded by small businesses; instead the organization depends almost entirely on foundation grants…. Small Business Majority is nonpartisan only in the most technical sense, in that it is not formally allied with any party. Informally, however, it is allied with the Democratic Party. Mr. Arensmeyer serves as a board member of the Bay Area Democrats, which describes itself as “a network of private citizens active in national Democratic Politics.” Since 2002, Mr. Arensmeyer has given generously, and exclusively, to Democratic candidates, according to F.E.C. records. (“I’ve voted for Republicans,” he offers.)… But when Mr. Arensmeyer insists that his organization is not ideological, he appears to mean that it is not “conservative.” The whole project, frankly, seems fundamentally ideological, and clearly liberal. It’s received a leg up from Demos, the advocacy group that counts among its objectives “a more equitable economy with widely shared prosperity and opportunity” — no initiatives to foster Ayn Rand-style self-reliance here. (Demos serves as a fiscal agent, which allows the group to raise money as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.)
In Business Week, Prof. Scott Shane, of Case Western Reserve University, lays out the reality:
Sellers of small group policies report little change in demand for employee health insurance policies among small business owners. The sellers explain that compensation limits for employees make few small businesses eligible for the credit and that the low value of the credit does little to get business owners to provide employee health insurance.
The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the uptick in the share of firms offering employee health insurance is an artifact of high failure rates of the most vulnerable small businesses (which tend not to offer employee health insurance) during the economic downturn. With more of the companies not providing insurance out of the sample, the share of those providing insurance has increased for purely mathematical reasons….
Another claim is that the new law is bringing down health insurance premiums. Even if the law might, possibly, maybe, at some time in the future, bring down premiums, it hasn't done that yet. Trade publication Employee Benefit News explains that private companies' spending on health insurance is expected to have increased by 4.3 percent in 2010, a rise from the 2.5 percent expected the month before the PPACA was passed because of changes in COBRA policies….
So why am I challenging the claims of the law's cheerleaders? Because its effect so far has been a net negative. That's because many business owners have formed negative expectations of the future effects of the law. For instance, a survey of 459 businesses conducted by Fidelity Investments in June revealed that 49 percent of small employers expect the new law to increase their costs. Many small business owners are responding to these expectations by passing on health insurance costs to employees, by changing the type of insurance they offer, and by planning to drop employee health insurance coverage in the future.
As to the reduced workforce, this USA Today study points out that employment recovery from this recession is slower and less than from prior ones: “This year's hiring should lower the 9.8% jobless rate to 8.9% or so by the end of the year, Moody's Analytics says. That would still leave about 13 million Americans jobless by year's end and many economists say it will take at least five years for unemployment to return to its normal 5% to 6% rate.”
Why are firms either not hiring or limiting hiring?
The President of the US Chamber of Commerce knows the primary reason, excess regulations and taxes sapping the ability and willingness by entrepreneurs to start or stay in business, or by businesses to expand employment or to retain benefits programs. ObamaCare, for example, “creates 159 new agencies, commissions, panels, and other bodies. It grants extraordinary powers to the Department of Health and Human Services to redefine health care as we know it.” It is time to go back to the drawing board, first by wiping as much of it clean as can be gotten through this Congress and forced upon President Obama. As Obama gears up for his re-election campaign, it should be on his mind that most Americans are not buying the many exposed lies of his false claims for ObamaCare.
Why spend 2 million for the simple cottage we posted yesterday, when you can spend just 8X more for a special ski house with plenty of space for all of your friends?
OK, so it isn't most peoples' idea of quaint little Stowe. I suppose you could buy it just to dynamite this wedding cake.
From The Science of Self Help in the New Atlantis:
It is easy to dismiss the self-help literature as a money-making machine for writer tycoons; so much of it obviously is. But studying self-help seriously not only illuminates the American character but may actually turn up some needed wisdom. So I have explored, gingerly, as one does a cracked tooth, three facets of the self-help genre: first, the self-conscious wisdom literature exemplified by the work of Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, the Sage of Maui, self-described student of American philosophic genius, who has composed a 390-page commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, and who presents a two-hour disquisition with ten bullet points on your PBS station every time there is a pledge drive; second, the positive psychology movement, which disdains the self-help label and claims to be unfolding “a science of happiness,” and whose vanguard spokesman is Tal Ben-Shahar, an Israeli-born international consultant, lecturer, and writer who was until recently a professor at Harvard, his course informally known as Happiness 101 the most popular at the university; and the achievement masters, who are a sterner lot in general than most self-help boys and girls, and whose eyes burn bright with the latest discoveries in the forging of excellence from quite commonplace human material.
Interesting essay.
Mark Hemingway: Trial lawyer at the center of fake autism study.
A scummy doc, also. Is there any self-policing, or any integrity, in the trial bar? Or is the operating moral paradigm to throw sh-t against the wall to see if any of it sticks with the dumbest jury that can be assembled?
 I wonder what our readers use for high-quality computer speakers. I am using my machine more and more to listen to music while doing paperwork, even though I have a fine real sound system in my office for radio and CDs. I won't use headphones, and I do not waste time with computer games: engaging in real life offers more than enough games for me - and the result counts.
A friend told me the Bose stuff is good, but I have no clue.
Advice requested. Price, within reason, is no object.
 The Three Media Stooges, via Legal Ins
Insty: Mental Illness and mass murder
And also, a book: Madness in the Streets : How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill. The PW blurb at Amazon says:
Taking aim at advocacy groups who view the homeless as ordinary people down on their luck, the authors of this scorching critique cite findings that 30% to 40% of the homeless suffer from major mental illness, and that a high proportion are substance abusers. Isaac, a sociologist, and freelance journalist Armat, blame the abandonment of the homeless mentally ill on the anti-psychiatry movement (led by Thomas Szasz, Ronald Laing, among others), on civil libertarians and on psychiatrists who foster the "delusion that preventive community psychiatry could eliminate mental illness." Arguing that we have replaced the mental hospital with the 18th-century poorhouse which threw together the mentally ill, the retarded, criminals and the displaced, they warn that a humane system of care will be costly and might involve treatment of some mentally ill persons against their will. Their support for judicious use of electroshock therapy will also stir controversy.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Pic from last January, in CT -
Monday, January 10. 2011
Barry Rubin asks: If One Extremist Gunmen Can Do So Much Damage in America, How About Ten Million Such People In The Middle East?
So, why do so many liberals excuse and leftists ally with the Arab and Iranian radicals and haters?
When one crazed or ideologically obsessed gunman starts shooting in Arizona, people condemn him and start bemoaning their society. How about a place with ten million people like that who are treated as heroes?...
Let’s say that the proportion of lies, slanders, and incitement in the American discourse is one-tenth of one percent of all the words spoken on controversial issues. The equivalent figure for the Middle East is well over 95 percent.
In addition to that tone, there is not only a total lack of balance but an absence of the other side altogether.
And in addition to those two points, the level of factual accuracy has a huge gap separating it from reality. (Though, admittedly, that gap has been narrowing in recent years as Western standards decline).
And in addition to those three points, while extremists tend to be marginal in the United States, they are in control--either politically or at least rhetorically--throughout most of the Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority worlds….
Now, let me ask some questions:
--If America is horrified in claiming that a tiny amount of mostly marginal extremism inspires one mad man to murder six people and try to kill a politician, how much violence can be traced to hundreds of thousands of mosques, media, teachers, and mainstream politicians daily preaching hatred literally millions of times a day?
--If the discourse throughout the Arabic-speaking world, Iran, increasingly in Turkey, and generally in Muslim-majority countries is almost 100 percent incitement, how can there be partners for peace or a hope of stability? What good do concessions do when the next day the culture of incitement and hatred goes on at full speed?
--If the degree of anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Jewish, and anti-Christian incitement is 100,000 times more intense and mainstream than any “Islamophobic” discourse in the West, while mitigating discourse—i.e., empathy, positive images, etc., toward “the other”—is one thousandth of a percent less, then which of these phenomenon is a greater threat and problem?
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.
(I hope this is my most inane post of 2011)
I don't get to malls very often, I am happy to say. Basically never, but I did join the Mrs. to check out Teavana on Sunday afternoon. We had run out of good tea. They had one of the Help Wanted signs. The place was busy. Help Wanted signs all over the place.
Well, it was a bit of an adventure for me. "Bird Dog Goes To The Mall." Your editor goes to lots of places, and loves to bang around NYC, but not malls or shops unless Home Depot counts. Nice clean mall with natural light and Palm trees all over. Packed with people, but I tried to avoid taking their photos. The main thing I noticed was the small-d democratic nature of the populace there. All types, all colors, every apparent level of evident prosperity or lack thereof, all languages, all ages, strolling, laughing, window-shopping, and joking around. A day off work. In the tea place, I heard German, Japanese, Chinese, French, and something I could not identify.
An agora. People having fun, spending money, looking at stuff. Too bad they couldn't have built a similar phenomenon on the town's streets, but perhaps people like the feeling of enclosure and predictability.
More Mall Adventure pics below -
Continue reading "Help Wanted: A Mall Adventure for Bird Dog"
Heather MacDonald: Restoring the Social Order - Twenty momentous years of conservative policy success in cities. She begins:
Conservative ideas are responsible for the two great urban-policy successes of the last quarter-century: the breathtaking drops in crime and in welfare dependency since the early 1990s. You’d never know it from members of the opinion elite, however, who have rarely recognized these successes, much less their provenance. So let’s recapitulate an epic battle about the foundations of social order, a battle that had not just a clear winner but also a clear loser: the liberal policy prescriptions for cities that many opinion makers and politicians still embrace. New York has been at the center of this battle because so many of the bad ideas that wreaked havoc on cities hatched there. Fortunately, so did many of the antidotes.
Manhattan, early morning, from the Whitestone Bridge
The New River Valley Outdoorsman. It's good fun to read his posts, in the left-side column.
Via Dino:
One veteran Democratic operative, who blames overheated rhetoric for the shooting, said President Barack Obama should carefully but forcefully do what his predecessor did. “They need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” said the Democrat. “Just like the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people.”
And politicans wonder why people do not respect them.
 God, nature, and chance must be against me, because I failed to win that $300 million Powerball. Oh well, maybe next time. And when I do, I'll buy a nice ski place near Killington.
The one pictured is for sale. I think it's ugly, but it would work OK as a party house.
"Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation."
Kin Hubbard
Sunday, January 9. 2011
Had a fine New England hunt today with Gwynnie, another pal, and the new pup. We did manage to bag a few birds. This enthusiastic young Lab (only his third real hunt) puts on a good point. I think it would be a shame to train the point out of him, but some folks like a Lab to flush the bird right away.
More photos on continuation page below:
Continue reading "New England Pheasants "
A reference to Nagel's classic What is it like to be a bat?: What is it Like to be a Man? A quote from the essay:
If science offers a complete account of nature, then it must be able to offer a complete account of human conscious experience, since human conscious experience is a feature of nature. It must be able to say something about what it is like to be a man. Accordingly, for several decades, a relentless effort has been undertaken by those in the disciplines of cognitive science and philosophy of mind to conceptualize such an account – an explanation of the mental in terms of the purely physical. The results of this endeavor are unambiguous – it has been a complete disaster. One would be hard pressed to identify, in all of intellectual history, a philosophical detour more obstinately barren, more improgressive, more tangled up in empty verbiage, more devoid of genuine insight, more irrelevant to life as it is actually lived, than is to be discovered in contemporary philosophy of mind. John Searle described the futile history of this materialist project as follows:
One sees this pattern over and over. A materialist thesis is advanced. But the thesis encounters difficulties; the difficulties take different forms, but they are always manifestations of an underlying deeper difficulty, namely, the thesis in question denies obvious facts that we all know about our own minds. And this leads to ever more frenzied efforts to stick with the materialist thesis and try to defeat the arguments put forward by those who insist on preserving the facts. After some years of desperate maneuvers to account for the difficulties, some new development is put forward that allegedly solves the difficulties, but then we find that it encounters new difficulties, only the new difficulties are not so new – they are really the same old difficulties.
Well, that was easy.
The one big question after yesterday's horrific shooting was whether the mainstream media was going to blame Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Tea Party, Bible-thumpin' gun clingers everywhere, or simply Republicans in general.
Question asked, question answered.
Critics of Sarah Palin have already drawn a link between the shooting and the fact that the former Alaska governor put Giffords on a "target list" of lawmakers Palin wanted to see unseated in the midterm elections. - CBS News
“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” Ms. Giffords said last March. “But the thing is the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that.” - New York Times
Ms. Giffords was also among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time. - MSNBC
Afterward, she referred to the animosity against her by conservatives, including former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's decision to list Giffords' seat as one of the top "targets" in the November midterm elections. - USA Today
As of Saturday, Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' name appeared on a website titled "take back the 20" as part of a list originally issued by Sarah Palin of vulnerable House Democrats. A map on the site showed crosshairs over the contested Democratic districts. - CNN
Linking to a map of U.S. House districts that Sarah Palin's PAC wanted to "target" during the 2010 mid-term elections -- which sadly included crosshairs over Rep. Giffords' district (among others). DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas Tweeted, "Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin." - ABC News
What went unmentioned during this rampant outbreak of PDS was:
— According to the shooter's YouTube profile, two of his favorite books were Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. Now, maybe I'm just naive, but I doubt Sarah Palin has read either of those.
— And did you see the quote from Markos "Kos" Moulitsas up above? What also went unmentioned in the above articles is that Kos had a post up — now removed — referring to Giffords titled "My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!" Giffords, a centrist, voted against Pelosi in the recent Minority Leader race and is hated far more by the hard left for that indiscretion than by Palin & Company simply because she's not a Republican.
So, let a Lefty use the word "DEAD" — in all caps, no less — in an article about Giffords and that's perfectly okay, but let a Righty put (gasp!) crosshairs over her congressional district, and you're one step removed from being the next Beltway Sniper.
In related news:
Bristol Palin Pregnancy: Is Sarah Palin’s 5th Child Really Her Daughter's?
Who is Trig Palin's Mother?
Kathy Griffin's Next Target: Willow Palin
Bird Dog did a pic dump yesterday, before the shooting, including this gem. Have you ever seen anything more timely?
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Moe Lane at RedState: