Wednesday, May 26. 2010
Google "oxytocin" and you will find many articles, but not many for the lay person. Here's a mediocre piece on this hormone. I would link and comment more, but no time right now.
The always-useful Walter Russell Mead on The Top Ten Lessons of the Global Economic Meltdown. One quote:
“Vote yourself a home!” has been our national motto for the last fifty years and today Americans are as addicted to the home mortgage deduction (and the even less justifiable deductions for second mortgages and home equity loans) as Greeks are to early retirement and government employment. Political popularity makes the policies harder to change — but no less damaging and destructive.
Hot day today. I checked the Weather.com temp for my zip code: 84 F. Then I checked Accuweather: 87 F. Then I checked the local airport's weather station: 81 F. How's that for hard scientific data?
How do they get that the earth has warmed 0.6 degrees in the past 100 years from data like this?
Maybe the EU wants to self-destruct, but I am going to continue to borrow my friend's red Dodge truck.
 I am not a big fan of pasta dishes anymore (used to be, but have pretty much tired of them - especially with red sauce). Still, a favorite snack for me is pasta with garlic and oil - Pasta Aglio et Olio. Simplest thing in the world.
Tips: For this or any other spaghetti recipe, use thin spaghetti - never the full size. For this recipe, the amount of chopped garlic you use, and the extent to which you brown the garlic, is to your taste. I like tons of garlic and I like it brown. I do it with coarsely chopped Italian parsley, and plenty of it. Plenty of fresh ground pepper too. Lastly, make spaghetti the Italian way, by throwing the spaghetti into the hot saucepan and tossing with the sauce. That's the right way to coat the noodles and heat up the pasta at the same time.
A pal told me at a guys' night out barbecue dinner last night that his favorite pasta is Pasta alla Norma, the hamburger of Sicily. I've never had it.
It's not artificial life, it's a laboratory-transformed life. WSJ
 Sipp is writing again: Das Is Culch
Brill: The Teachers' Union's last stand
Douthat thinks conservatvies should compromise their principles before they have to make political compromises
Neo: The welfare state’s dirty little secret is out
The commerce clause and Obamacare
Coyote: Germany’s Ban on Short-Selling
Climate alarmism in Britain: “…the poll figures are going through the floor.”
Related, Oxford Union debates warming vs economics, warming loses
The impending battle for Kandehar
Megan: Public Pensions Headed for Disaster
Axelrod implies that Sestak is lying. This is a potential serious mess.
We have no data, but the government should do something anyway
Simon on the culture wars:
Liberalism, as we have known it for decades, is on the defensive. With the welfare state unsustainable, it has nowhere to turn and its adherents are turning tail in every direction. They are mad and they are, in many cases, unmoored. Lifetime ideologies are beginning to crumble. Personality constructs are at risk.
Tuesday, May 25. 2010
Every murderous totalitarian government of the 20th century began with some insulated group of faux-intellectuals congratulating each other on how smart they are, and fantasizing about how, if they could just install a dictatorship-for-a-day, they could right all the wrongs in the world.
Ed Driscoll, in The New York Times: Forever Trapped in 1917
Ed: Woops. Quote is from Anchoress, via Driscoll. Sorry, Anchoress.
Broken Heart Syndrome. It's a real thing, believed to be caused by a massive adrenaline surge.
A few basic books on psychotherapy and analytic psychiatry at Dr. X. He can keep the Kohut, because I cannot understand him, or any of the "Self Psychology" stuff.
A view of the farm this weekend -
Had too much work to do to spend much time birding this weekend, but I tend to have outdoor situational awareness:
Yellow Warbler, Yellow Throat Warbler, Chestnut-sided Warbler, Blue-grey Gnatcatcher, Mallard, Wood Duck, Canada Goose, GB Heron, B Oriole, Turkey Vulture, Wild Turkey, Wood Duck, Red-Tailed Hawk, RT Hummingbird, Blue Jay, Chickadee, Mourning Dove, Catbird, Cedar Waxwing, Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, Tree Swallow, Barn Swallow, Bluebird, Robin, Kingbird, Phoebe, Wood Pewee, Wood Thrush, Veery, Hermit Thrush, Song Sparrow, Ovenbird, Crow, Raven, Downy WP, Brown Thrasher, Pileated Woodpecker, House Finch, House Wren, RE Vireo, Black and White Warbler, and numerous unidentified warblers.
Did not see any Meadowlark, Killdeer, or Bobolink. Probably passed through already, but I wish they would make summer homes here. I do not know why they don't.
 AVI reflects on Me 'n Limbaugh.
My only meaningful disagreement might be that I do not see Rush's bragging as genuine, but as radio shtick. Nobody who says "I speak with half my brain tied behind my back, just to keep it fair" is a serious braggart.
I think what drives Lefties nuts about Rush (besides his opinions) are his cheerfulness, infectious optimism, fair-handedness and kindness with callers, and his regular-American (as opposed to elite American) points of view.
The lack of angst and anger is simply not fashionable and is, indeed, repugnant to the elite Liberal mind.
Surber:
Almost half the planet, or up to 3 billion people, depend on fish as the main source for protein in their diet.
There are not enough wild fish to feed all those people.
Google wants to protect cougars from themselves
Demographics and the wefare state: Europe forced to re-examine the concept of “reality”
Denmark: Clear-Cutting Forests to Save the Planet
Peterson at Am Thinker can't believe the O stood for this. I believe it. I think he thinks the enemy is us.
Germany now runs the EU - or owns the EU
Chavez moves against the food producers. Brilliant. Let them eat cake.
Catch up with Washington Reb. One quote: "even peace & love finds that violence is a final measure of intellectual, ethical and philosophical conviction."
The new culture war:
This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise—limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose.
Mead:
We are, I fear, living on inherited social capital. We have cultural patterns and folkways in our society that were created in a time when conscious moral struggle and individual moral responsibility were the subject of more serious introspection and education than they often are today. These patterns are eroding and the folkways are losing their power and, unfortunately, so far we seem to be falling short in our efforts to find new ways of building spiritual commitment and a striving for moral excellence in the rising generation.
This almost never ends well; fortunately a surprisingly large number of young people today are worried about the moral and spiritual vacuum around them.
Monday, May 24. 2010
Tom Friedman makes me puke. Talk about Liberal Fascism. The arrogant, condescending SOB needs a dose of humility, real quick.
But if life hasn't delivered it to him yet, maybe it never will...
Charter School vs. Teachers Union School.
Imagine what might happen if we just had vouchers to go anywhere for primary education, as they have in Sweden.
At Pajamas,
Tracy is believed to have smuggled 270 Somalis into the U.S. through Mexico. Let me say it again: An associate of al-Shabaab has snuck in nearly 300 Somalis from where they operate into the country. They remain here and we don’t know what they are up to.
As Dr X recently observed,
Rules, limits and boundaries are critically important aspects of psychological life, necessary to a sense of safety and security. Even if we don't always appreciate this fact consciously, boundary violations are perceived unconsciously as wrongful, serious threats to our safety. Without an appreciation for the profound psychological significance of boundaries, we cannot begin to appreciate why it is inevitable that immigrants unlawfully streaming across the border into Arizona are perceived as a menace to safety by many Arizonans.
But not just "perceived," Dr. X. People are getting fed up with flagrant violation of the law. It is not the best way to begin a new life in a new place as an outlaw, and this sort of thing does not help the illegal cause.
Till Bruckner worked for NGOs in Georgia and Afghanistan before managing Transparency International's Georgia’s aid monitoring programme in 2008-2009. He writes in Aid Watch: Just Asking That Aid Benefit The Poor about Secret NGO Budgets.
Are you ashamed of your organization’s budgets? Do you think your supporters would be shocked if they could see exactly how you are spending their money? Do you feel the need to keep your finances hidden from your local partners and clients? If you answered all three questions with “yes,” you might be working for an international NGO.
Bruckner also writes at NGO Watch, "How Corrupt Is The World Food Program?"
Private donors in wealthy countries simply lack the information needed to hold aid and development NGOs to account for how their donations are used thousands of miles away. The only information available is that which is voluntarily provided by the NGOs, which are extremely reluctant to open their operations to scrutiny....
Institutional donors like USAID usually do have a presence on the ground in developing countries, but they rarely directly monitor NGO activities in the field. Instead, they usually, though not always, rely on information provided by their grantees. Interviews with dozens of donor and NGO representatives in Georgia, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan suggest that neither NGOs nor donor country offices have an incentive to document instances in which aid money is stolen, wasted, or unwisely spent. Projects are almost invariably portrayed as successful, irrespective of realities on the ground....
Aid organizations have responded to concerns about their lack of accountability through a variety of initiatives and mechanisms intended to create transparency within the aid community. Senior staff members at NGOs’ global headquarters readily sign up to noble-sounding initiatives and commit their organizations to meeting certain standards. But these measures lack teeth and often require organizations to act as a whistleblower against a partner agency. As a result, they are almost universally ignored in practice.
A respondent to Bruckner's top piece says he's afraid to alarm the natives:
Although open accounting can seem like a good practice, it is very tricky in poor countries. I have been running international projects for twenty years. The rent on my house is higher than the salary of many of my staff. My salary is nearly triple the highest local salary. Additionally, my top staff is paid well–many times more than what our beneficiaries receive. I think that telling our beneficiaries how much we earn would reinforce the gap between them and us. It would also complicate relations with our government partners (who earn less). I am always happy to share general information about costs (our program in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands is around $650,000/year), but see little upside to sharing details.
I bet he votes Democrat.
Today is the birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge, opened in 1883, ranked as one of the technological wonders of the world for its great span and innovative construction methods. Next to the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge was iconic of the United States’ reach for freedom and for advancement.
Gabriel Cohen tells the history of the con game named after the bridge.
Since the bridge was completed in 1883, the idea of illegally selling it has become the ultimate example of the power of persuasion. A good salesman could sell it, a great swindler would sell it, and the perfect sucker would fall for the scam.
Today’s political con artists don’t have a bridge to stand on. They peddle the illusion that spending money one doesn’t have is the path to freedom and advancement instead of to digging holes in the water that will drown us and our children in debts that will enslave and regress us to the control of those who direct our labor and choices to feed their power.
What I read this weekend (and recommend): Gyorgy Buzsaki's Rhythms of the Brain.
It is about the self-generating powers and activities of the brain. While presented as a popular science book for the layman, some familiarity with modern neuroscience would help.
Photo in the MA Berkshire woods yesterday morning. An easy one:
Had almost the entire crew working on the farm this weekend clearing out the overgrown meadow. The crew included my 5 year-old nephew who my Greenie sister was teaching to cut saplings in the meadow with clippers.
Says I, encouragingly, to the young lad "Remember, every time you kill a baby tree, God smiles."
Do you think that was the right thing to say?
Governor Cuomo ll
Socrates visits modern Greece
New Jersey goes Greek
Crittenden: Duty, Honor, Blah Blah Blah, Etc.
Arizona laws vs. New York practices
Krauthammer: This Admin is lawless
Insane on the Canadian border
K Street cashes in on bill
Why the Republicans Could Still Lose in November
Steyn asks Why is (DC taxpayer) Jonah Goldberg buying condoms for 30-year old men he doesn't know?
Town in RI heads into receivership
Powerline: In Sweden and Switzerland, 7 of 10 people work past 50. In France, only half do.
Gratzer in the B Herald: Central planning’s bad medicine begins:
President Barack Obama has nominated Dr. Donald Berwick to a position largely unstaffed during the Bush administration: head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the two Great Society programs.
Berwick has decades of experience in health policy and, on paper, would seem a perfect candidate for the job. But he has fallen into the trap of many intellectual elites, which we might call the Harvard Disease: assuming that a government committee can guide one-sixth of the national economy into efficiency
Texas:
The State Board of Education's offense is great -- namely, restoring to notice in Texas textbooks, to a certain eminence even, quaint ideas about federalism and the religious viewpoint of the American founders.
Sunday, May 23. 2010
Name this machine. This one did a lot of rough work for us this weekend, but not without a few annoying mechanical glitches:
Harvard professor Ruth Wisse, author of Jews and Power, argues that the defensive self-blame and even self-abasement that Jews adopted in the millennia since the fall of the Temple is counterproductive to survival.
This argument is at the heart of today’s critiques of Obama’s feckless and failing foreign policy.
On May 20, Wisse addressed the thirteen Jewish cadets graduating West Point.the Naval Academy. The Weekly Standard has the text.
Wisse uses the humor about schlemiels to make her point. There are many definitions of the Yiddish term, mostly varying in emphasis, but basically a schlemiel is naïve, gullible, even a simpleton.
Wisse starts with some Old World jokes about schlemiels in combat who don’t recognize they are in a mortal situation. Then Wisse comments:
Hilarious in Yiddish, this joke hardly works in English, which has trouble imagining someone so unworldly that he cannot grasp that a man may be shot just for stepping on the wrong side of a border. The joke may likewise fall flat because we now know what happened to the people who created those jokes. They were slaughtered in the millions. What we call the Holocaust targeted precisely the population that created schlemiel comedy. We learned from that episode that sweetness was no laughing matter and that joking—which momentarily releases tension—offered no defense against real belligerents. The schlemiel who initially made us laugh also taught us to raise our guard.When I wrote about the schlemiel in the 1960s, I had in mind the culture of Jews, but nowadays, we Americans similarly confront enemies who intend to destroy our way of life. Like the Jews of Europe, we are tempted to ignore them. We enjoy getting along with the rest of the world. We have no passion for war, favoring peace and prosperity. Like the schlemiel, some among us think that warfare is a ridiculous pursuit….
A schlemiel doesn’t know how to find the notch in a saw. Sound like Obama? Oy vey!
But, it's even worse than that among many leading Jews, as Jennifer Rubin points out about the Rabbis selected as safe for Obama to meet with:
This is what passes for “leadership” in American Jewry. A kabuki dance is orchestrated by an Obama fan to gather other Obama fans to air the mildest criticism and to avoid challenging the factual representations of an administration that is the most hostile to the Jewish state in history. As one Israeli hand who definitely isn’t going to be invited to any meetings with this president put it: “They may be fine rabbis, but they are out of their league here.” And by not directly and strongly taking on the president, they are, in fact, enabling the president’s anti-Israel stance. It is, come to think of it, more than an embarrassment; it is an egregious misuse of their status and it is every bit as dangerous as the quietude of American Jews in the 1930s.
Same goes for the Americans of the 1930s.
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