We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
...the German vision of a Europe transformed into virtuous northern savers who play honestly and conscientiously by the accepted rules of the game looks hopelessly unrealistic, and never so more than now as the Italians get into the game.
Herbert London: The Failure of the Century's Grand Experiments:
If there is one obvious condition associated with the last century, it is the lack of government humility. Among the century’s leadership there was the self confident belief that “good ideas” will trump tradition, customs, history, even instinct. There were scarcely limits to political ingenuity. Here was the triumph of positivism, the assumption that rationality can subdue emotion. The engineers were in history’s driver’s seat and the lights appeared to be synchronized in green. Somewhere along the way things went wrong and the lights turned crimson...
It is a relief for learn that our Dept. of Homeland Security is busy monitoring Drudge Report, New York Times, blogs, and Twitter. I always thought this DHS was a foolish idea, and that it would never go away. If violent Jihadism disappeared today, the DHS would find or invent work for itself, and continue to grow, for eternity. This is one dumb thing I really do blame Bush for.
As Ronaldus Magnus used to say, “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth."
"But, by an inference as false as it is unjust, do you know what the economists are now accused of? When we oppose subsidies, we are charged with opposing the very thing that it was proposed to subsidize and of being the enemies of all kinds of activity, because we want these activities to be voluntary and to seek their proper reward in themselves. Thus, if we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in religious matters, we are atheists. If we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in education, then we hate enlightenment. If we say that the state should not give, by taxation, an artificial value to land or to some branch of industry, then we are the enemies of property and of labor. If we think that the state should not subsidize artists, we are barbarians who judge the arts useless."
You might suppose that the anti-Vietnam press corps might have approved of this demonstration of independent thinking. But Romney was, after all, a Republican. Moreover, as White makes clear, he was a particular kind of Republican — naïve, innocently moralistic, and old-fashioned — qualities that the liberals in the press were inclined to loathe. Within days, the “brainwashing” quote was everywhere. Eugene McCarthy added a cruel but amusing quip that no brainwashing was needed as “a light rinse should have been sufficient.” Romney’s polls tanked. He was finished.
Driving into "the Hive," as Vanderleun terms it, on the West Side Highway a few days ago. Always exciting for a simple country boy like me. I love the feel of it all, and I have good old friends there and lots of cool places to go to:
We have periodically posted here about eating obsessions, whether overeating, anorexia, "organic" preoccupations, people whose approach to food verges on the medicinal, vegetarianism, food fads and food quackery, etc. We shrinks call it all "orality."
As we have often said here, anybody in the Western World would need to make a full-time effort to avoid an adequate diet. Furthermore, medical science has yet to come up with a consensus on what a "healthy diet" really is. Eskimos thrive on seal fat and sea gull meat. Despite what Mrs. Obama or anybody else tells you, it's all Old Wives Tales. We all would enjoy believing that we can control Fate in some way by one sort of magic or another. Eat fruit? Why? It's pure carbs and just makes you fat. Spend good money on vitamins? Why? It's all Magical Thinking.
During most of human history, any food was scarce and costly to obtain. We have tons of good food, cheap. If anything, too much and too tasty, and we don't have to do drudge labor in the fields all day to get some of it.
I have seen plenty of sturdy young athletes grow up on nothing but Cheerios, macaroni and cheese, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Eat what you like, and thank God we have food choices.
Where's my Big Mac? I've been waiting here two minutes already.
Modern-Day Prohibition - The eternal temptation to ban things that give people pleasure. Stier begins:
The new Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Prohibition is a five-and-a-half-hour missed opportunity to demonstrate why bans on substances are doomed from the start. Fortunately, for those who want to understand the irresistible lure of all types of prohibitions, there is Christopher Snowdon’sThe Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition Since 1800. Although Snowdon’s comprehensive history will never reach as many people as the PBS series, The Art of Suppression makes the case that Burns seems to go out of his way to avoid: that prohibition of products that people desire, whether alcohol a century ago or Ecstasy today, is bound to fail miserably.
The world is full of cranks and zealots who want to make you do whatever they think they should do. From my standpoint, I tend to want people to make up their own minds, and if they want to spend their lives half-stoned on heroin or pot, or fat from ice-cream and pastries, so be it. It's their life and their body.
The list of things of which I disapprove is long, but the list of things I would chose to apply power to prohibit is very short. Murder and theft, for starters.
“Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things. We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best."
It's usually pretty good, satisfying, and adequately-compensated, but right now it's a bit of a bummer. The biz is slow and quite stressful, and it (corporate communications, PR, investor relations, marketing, etc.) is a good measure of the condition of the US economy.
Perhaps this is my winter depression, DSM 4 "Life sucks." I have not been skiing often enough. My bonus this year is half of last year's. I need a new hot girlfriend who can appreciate my annoying quirks and bad habits. Why can't the government give me some money and some cute sweet girls just be be my wonderful self, so I can go protest something, or go back up to Sugarloaf for a few days? I blame Obama. Everybody always told me that I was very special, wonderful and talented, but maybe they lied.
If my next big deal goes through this week, we can delete this post. Plenty of difficult work is all I want. If I am not working 7 days/week at my age, I feel like I am wasting my time. Thankfully, I am no Euro-weenie, and don't have a union job like my Dad did where they prevented you from working too hard or too long.
The country’s largely suburban and increasingly Southern electorate does not see big government as its friend or wise liberal mandarins as the source of its salvation. This sets up a potential political crisis between those who know what’s good and a presumptively ignorant majority. Obama is burdened, says Joe Klein of Time, by governing a “nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive,” as the title of his story puts it, without the guidance of our president. But if the people are too deluded to cooperate, elements in the progressive tradition have a solution: European-style governance by a largely unelected bureaucratic class.
The tension between self-government and “good” government has existed since the origins of modern liberalism...
Excerpts from an interview in Private Wealth magazine:
From his perch at The Wall Street Journal, Robert Frank has become one of the nation’s leading chroniclers of the 1%. He has been the newspaper’s wealth reporter for eight years, writing about the lives, culture, economy, spending and investing of the wealthy....
Frank: To a degree, there has always been churn in the world of wealth. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called it “creative destruction,” where one sector of the economy replaces another because of business and product cycles. But the cycles of wealth are now far more rapid, extreme and frequent. The old saying used to be “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” in three generations. Now it can happen in three years.
Before the 1980s, the top 1% used to be the flat line on the income charts—rising and falling less than the rest of America during economic cycles. Suddenly, in the early 1980s—1982 to be exact—the 1% started jumping off the charts, soaring far higher than the rest of the country during good times and crashing harder during recessions. They became like the binge drinkers of the economy....
First, more fortunes are tied to the stock market. The Dow Jones rose from under 1,000 in 1981 to 11,000 and change today. That fueled the creation of the largest number of new millionaires and billionaires ever in America, with the rise of stock-based pay—and entrepreneurs who started and sold companies, either through IPOs or mergers. Those fortunes, however, are far less stable, since the stock market is up to 20 times more volatile than overall economic growth.
The second reason is debt. The debt levels of the top 1% increased more than threefold since the 1980s, and many of the rich loaded that debt pile onto speculative bubbles or paper wealth. Leverage can be deadly, no matter how much you think is “manageable.”
The third reason is spending. Some of the wealthy went overboard with homes, cars, yachts, planes, vacations, handbags, shoes and other luxury goods because they thought they could afford it. As it turned out, many looked rich but were actually living one crisis away from financial collapse. Some of the wealth of the past decade was a mirage.
The wealthy are a more diverse group than ever, and on the subject of taxes, they’re as divided as the rest of the country. By sticking to this rich-get-richer narrative, the country may be missing the real danger, which is that we’re more dependent than ever before on a group that is highly unstable.
Prince: So what’s the solution? Frank: That was the hardest question to answer in the book. To solve the problem of high-beta wealth you have to roll back all the forces that have created inequality. You’d have to roll back all the recent advances in technology, you’d have to roll back globalization and you’d have to somehow wipe out most of the financial markets around the world. Not going to happen. So the practical solution is to better prepare for these wealth and income shocks. Governments need to create bigger, more robust rainy day funds that they can fill during good times and drain down during crises. As consumers and workers, we need to save more, spend less and borrow less to survive these cycles. And for those who aspire to be wealthly, they need to take money off the table as they’re on the way up and use debt sparingly. You can’t get around risk if you want to get rich today. But you can manage those risks and price it more intelligently....
And in a high-beta world, wealth no longer ensures stability and security in your life. What really matters in this world is doing something you love, having strong connections to family and friends, and making a contribution to your community or the world at large.
Have you ever bothered to see what happens to your town's recycling? Those bins and things you put out there - where do they go? And are you charged for this extra effort of yours?
In my home town, we have to lug cardboard to the dump excuse me, recycling center. Newspapers, too. We are also supposed to separate glass from metal, and colored glass from clear glass, and plastic from glass.
For all of this self-applauding virtuously annoying pleasure, my most recent research reveals that ours all goes to a landfill in upstate New York, some is trucked to West Virginia to be dumped in a swamp or something, and some is burned by a subsidized power plant. There is no market for this "garbage" other than the marketplace for meaningless virtue. Glass, plastic, and newspaper, for starters, are far cheaper to make new than to recycle. Who is making money from this scam which makes naive soccer moms feel better about themselves?
Do me a favor and find out the facts about your local recycling - where does it all finally end up, and whether you pay extra for the privilege. Let us know. I think there's a news story in it.
Another movie comment from the weekend, this time the new Tinker Tailor. I don't advise seeing it.
Not because it is poorly-done, but because it is impossible to depict the plot and the subplots of this complex Cold War counterespionage story in 2 hours. Had I not read the book, and seen the BBC miniseries several times, I would not have understood this film at all.
The gold standard for Tinker Tailor is the 6 hour miniseries with Alec Guiness as Smiley. It's one of the best things ever produced for TV. Ever. Even so, following the plot is difficult if you haven't read Le Carre's book first.
Reagan's end of the Cold War was a great loss for fiction.
If you are fascinated with Alzheimer's or are in love with Meryl Streep's phenomenal talents playing an Alzheimer's patient, see Iron Lady. If you have any interest in Margaret Thatcher as a person or leader of Great Britain, don't expect any of that in this movie. The non-Alzheimer's flashbacks probable amount to less than 20% of this disjointed movie, and are designed to conceal any utility of her policies or actions, such as when she is portrayed as viciously attacking the poor Argentinians despite the advice of her admirals.
In short, it is clear that Mrs. T and her politics were repugnant to the writers and producers, who are using Streep's fabulous talents in one of the more effective hatchet jobs (fortunately, the hatchet was so blunt the agenda is obvious to all).
Our webmeister is on vacation on Kauai, and emailed this pic of Koloa Church yesterday. Looks like New England, and not by accident.
A quote from the guest preacher at my own home church yesterday: "Go with Jesus today, and let Him take you to places that cash and Mastercard can't take you."
"Atheism is like AIDS: it robs you of the ability to repel invading viruses, philosophical or mental, by crippling the spiritual version of your immune system."
Dining in a clam shack can be cheaper, and far better, than eating at home. I love rickety little clam shacks. This one has a more extensive menu than the usual. Place is famous for the best Lobster Rolls in the world (in their opinion).
Why Sea Scallops cost more than Bay Scallops, these day, is a puzzle to me. The little Bay Scallops are much tastier, but the big Sea Scallops make a better presentation, I guess. Lots of people just don't know their seafood. I don't know much, but I think I know my seafood.
Charles Murray on Belmont Vs. Fishtown, about social class in America and the Founding Virtues: marriage, industriousness, honesty, religiousness.
It's a major essay. One quote:
...if you live in an affluent suburb, an upscale neighborhood of a large city, or in a college town, you do not need to read (David) Brooks to know what I’m talking about. You live in that culture. But it is also possible (depending on the circumstances in which you grew up) that you are no longer familiar with what everywhere else in America is like. The problem is not the lifestyle of the members of America’s new upper class, which in many ways is attractive, but the degree to which the new upper class has become sealed off from the rest of America.
Sometimes the isolation is geographic as well as cultural. In major cities and their surrounding areas, those top-ranked zip codes in which the members of the new upper class live are surrounded by other top-ranked zip codes that form elite clusters consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, creating large bubbles within which life can go on without reference to anywhere outside the bubble. Even when the geographic isolation is not extreme, the differences in culture often are...
Study the whole thing. It rings true to me. Even in a small town where we know all sorts of people, we tend to hang out with people who play tennis and golf, own guns, read lots of books, discuss Plato, Marx, Freud, Adam Smith and Hayek, go to church, have gardens, and love opera. Otherwise, what is there to talk about except the weather? It's not defined by financial status, but rather by common interests and, sometimes but certainly not always, similar backgrounds and similar world-views (but excluding political views, generally, untiil one is clear about where one's companions are coming from).
We posted on The Art of Choosing a little while ago. It got me to thinking about one of my favorite topics, the choices of life goals.
There tends to be a political assumption that everybody is most motivated by material and financial goals, but it just is not true for many people unless they are in dire straights. Sad to say, many are these days.
However, in normal times, normal people choose their goals, and construct their plans to achieve them for all sorts of reasons: religious, following a passion, "life style" reasons, security, wanting to "make a difference," following a calling, etc. So, while most people could always use more money, that cannot be assumed to be what most people base their choices on. Just ask a toll-collector on the Mass Pike, or a Mass. State Representative why he/she picked the job.
... one reason that people differ in their incomes is that some people care more about having a high income than others. To put it in geekspeak, preferences over pecuniary goods (say, consumption) and nonpecuniary goods (say, leisure) are heterogeneous.
The heterogeneity is the point. We make compromises, don't we, between our practical goals and our emotional goals in the endless pursuit of life satisfaction? However, most people do not have a career-related passion, in which case money and material often become our culture's default choice. I am fortunate in having a spouse with two absorbing passions: doing deals and playing sports. The former frees me up to pursue my less-lucrative academic work and charitable interests, and the latter keeps him out of trouble (except for orthopedic trouble).
If your preference is to work hard and long, with rewards potentially commensurate with effort but with plenty of risk too, I suggest starting a business.
One fine fact about life is that we can change our goals as we grow.
Did your Mom ever make you kids
Photo via 
Have you ever bothered to see what happens to your town's recycling? Those bins and things you put out there - where do they go? And are you charged for this extra effort of yours?
Another movie comment from the weekend, this time the new 
