Wednesday, June 2. 2010
How do Americans spend their leisure time? Paul Bloom begins:
The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex.
Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real.
Fascinating article. However, that 4 mins per day seems dubious on many counts.
Pilar Rahola is a Spanish politician, journalist and activist. She is a passionate defender of the United States and Israel and an indefatigable fighter against anti-Semitism. All these despite being ideologically from the left. Read it all.
Her conclusion:
I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not as anti Israeli as my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel. To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews.
As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles. Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as a non-Jew, journalist and lefty I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too.
The struggle of Israel, even if the world doesn’t want to accept it, is the struggle of the world.
We have a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Congress controlled by the Democrats, uncaring about its impacts on our health, finances, or national security. The Congressional Democrats are deserving of repeal in November.
Don’t bother to ask what is really within the thousands of pages of ObamaCare, and tell Americans lies. -- The Director of the Congressional Budget Office does tell, despite the assurances that ObamaCare would somehow reduce health care costs and government spending on healthcare:
In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure. In fact, CBO estimated that the health legislation will increase the federal budgetary commitment to health care (which CBO defines as the sum of net federal outlays for health programs and tax preferences for health care) by nearly $400 billion during the 2010-2019 period….
[I]t is not clear what specific policies the federal government can adopt to generate fundamental changes in the health system; that is, it is not clear what specific policies would translate the potential for significant cost savings into reality. Moreover, efforts to reduce costs substantially would increase the risk that people would not get some health care they need or would like to receive.
Don’t bother to find out how the military could adjust to openly gay enlistees or the effects on recruitment and retention, readiness, or military families (half of the military are married). Tell the members of the Joint Chiefs, responsible for military personnel, and the military that their views don’t count.
Democrats ignored those pleas and voted anyway. Their concern was that if they waited until the Gates study is complete, after the November elections, Republicans could pick up enough seats to block repeal in 2011.
Perhaps the biggest affront was the fact that the White House, Mr. Gates, Adm. Mullen and Democrats settled on a compromise without allowing the four service chiefs to see it or comment.
Don't ask how we get out of the mess if you don't tell in November, and before in letters, meetings, and contributions to and participation in campaigns.
Do DSM psychiatric diagnoses have any validity? Or are they superficial descriptors on the order of "Patient has a fever" or "Patient is dehydrated," but with pseudo-scientific-sounding specificity?
What’s in a name? Genetic overlap between major psychiatric disorders
Readers know that I view a DSM diagnosis as just a little bit more than an insurance form entry item, most of the time. As a highly experienced colleague says, "I've read the DSM, and I have never found a patient of mine in there."
I plan to bore our readers by reposting my series on Psychiatric Diagnosis during vacation this summer.
Warbler migration season has reached its end, but our readers need a tougher challenge. Here 'tis. It is cheating to go to the link (I'll thank him with a link for the photo later today).
Hint: It's a female. Another wonderfully charming female below the fold, mostly safe for work -
Continue reading "Who am I?"
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs gathered senior Israeli generals to outline the basics of Israeli defense issues and policy, "Israel's Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace."
The link has several illuminating videos as well as the reports. I won’t use up bandwidth or delay it loading on your end by presenting the videos or reports. If any are interested in the hard facts, please go to the site and see for yourself, including why much of the commentary and suggestions offered by armchair generals and ignorant politicians are dangerous illusions and hogwash, indeed further the aims of Israel and the West's enemies. Security is the object of diplomacy, not to be compromised or sacrificed for "process" or photo-ops that avoid the core issues.
Goldberg: In a welfare state, how much is 'enough'?
A quote:
Governments do not generate wealth; they can merely distribute it. The challenge for both liberals and conservatives is simply to define how much distribution is "enough." What would an acceptable safety net look like? Who should be taken care of by taxpayers and for how long? Paul Ryan offered an answer to that question, and liberals scoffed because they reject the question. There's no such thing as enough. That's what the Greeks thought.
That's what the Greeks thought until Mr. Reality in the form of the Bond Market appeared to them.
There is no such thing as "enough" as long as there is one more vote to be bought.
The real picture of the O at the Louisiana beach, above. That's a real news photo, but the widely-distributed image was just a posed propaganda shot for the sycophantic media. "Message: I care."
Tapscott: Will journalists wake up in time to save journalism from Obama's FTC? Coyote opines, in Creating the American Pravda, that this was the information missing from the FTC report:
“The New York Times and Newsweek can’t figure out a profitable business model in the Internet age. We propose the government step in with all means at its disposal to limit competition to these print media companies and create new government subsidies for their business. Once their companies’ profitability is absolutely dependent on these government mandates and subsidies, the Federal government will have a powerful source of leverage to protect itself from criticism in these outlets. Once we have this situation in place, we will have a strong inventive to quash more independent outlets and maximize the market share of media companies beholden to the government. In a large sense, our recommendations build off the success of the tobacco settlement experiment, where a few large companies agreed to pay the government large percentages of their future profits, and then the government worked diligently to quash new tobacco competitors to maximize the market share of those companies paying it settlement money.”
Chinese electric vehicles will dramatically increase emissions
Gallup's Pro-Life America
Krauthammer on Gaza:
If these people had wanted humanitarian aid, Israel offered to take the ships into Haifa, peacefully, unload all the stuff inside and to allow all the humanitarian aid immediately into Gaza, all the food and medicine. And it was refused because it was meant to be a provocation and to create an incident.
Shocker. Arrested Gaza Flotilla “Peace Activists” Are Al-Qaeda Members. Also,
Liberal Arts majors and the adults who lie to them. h/t SDA.
Tuesday, June 1. 2010
Five or six more months until duck season. A friend sent me these photos of a splendid, if surrealistically overblown, duck blind. It has to be in Arkansas.
At Insty. Certainly the costs might indicate a bubble.
Conservatives claim that government is incompetent, inefficient, and intrinsically corrupt (eg vote buying), and therefore can be trusted to do very little.
Libs and Lefties seem to believe that government is smarter and possessed of superior motives to those of the private sector.
When governments fail to demonstrate effectiveness (as in the IRS' failure to make money on a Nevada whorehouse, or the oil spill, or managing money, or border control, or Fannie and Freddie, or...), many Conservatives complain that government isn't doing its job with all our dough. Libs and Lefties complain that the failure will damage the notion of big government's omni-competence and virtue and thus their claim to our hard-earned dollars and pennies.
Readers know my view: Much of government is a legal racket, a special interest in itself devoted to its own interests of power and money and ego. Government has limited power against reality, and disproportionately more power over people's lives. Obama can no more control the oil spill than he can legislate the weather or the economy.
I am entirely in agreement with Steyn who we quoted this morning, "Almost every problem we face today arises from the vanity of Big Government."
I do not blame Obama for the oil (or the weather). I never rush to blame anybody for anything. Shit happens. However, government worshippers like Obama cannot say so because it would undermine the vision, which they market, of governmental godlike omnicompetence and virtue leading towards Progress and Worry-Free Life and General Wonderfulness. The Achilles' Heel of taking that position is that you must accept blame for almost anything that goes wrong.
Reality is relentless. Even if you control the media, reality wins in the end.
Our Capt. Tom, an ex-Schlumberger oil rig engineer, offers this explanation in reaction to our photo of a blowout preventer:
 Just in case anybody is interested, a blow out preventer of the type used on Deepwater Horizon relies on three major methods of stopping the flow - two hydraulic and one manual which, in theory, is supposed to be done with ROVs. The reason is that oil is under pressure at all times from either natural gas or pressure from the surrounding rock or salt strata (normal depth pressures). Pressure on land can reach as high as 6,000 psi, under water (at the depth of Deepwater Horizon's well head) it can reach as much as 3,800 psi. Remember the old films of "oil gushers"? That's why the oil was spraying everywhere. There are two basic types of valves - one called a ram valve and the other is called an annular valve. The ram valve is exactly that - a ram powered by hydraulics or mechanically that shuts off the flow of oil. Think of these as "pinchers". The annular valve is a rubber/steel device that is actuated in the same fashion as the ram valve, but creates a better seal. They can be set for different operating pressures. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon's well head, the preventer worked partially meaning that the ram/annular system hydrauics worked, but some as yet unknown reason, didn't close all the way. The manual systems were rendered inoperative when the rig collapsed. There is a fourth way to close a preventer which is usually required on all deep water projects - an acoustic actuator on one of the mechanical valves. When this preventer was built, the Mineral Materials Service waived the requirement for an acoustic actuator which it has for quite a while under pressure from the oil industry. The acoustic actuator is required by most other oil producing countries. In the picture of the preventer, what you are seeing with all those pipes and valves are the various types of ram/annular actuators. The problem with Deepwater Horizon is that the pipe leading to the surface collapsed when the rig collapsed. On the videos where you see the leak, that is actually at the top of the preventer - the pipe that leads to the surface.
Global Cold Wave May Be Looming — This Time, the Science Is Good
 Photo: Thought you might want to see what a blowout preventer looks like. These are around 5 stories high, resemble space aliens, and cost around $10 million.
What is Feminism about nowadays? Not equality
Samuelson: US poverty rates are meaningless
Glum prospects for Law grads
Kagan's Odd Harvard Reform
A student loan crisis. Crisis?
Why Faculty Unions Could Destroy Our Universities
Why Kristof is a jerk. Powerline
Stossel: What if going green is a bunch of BS? - link fixed
Why a mosque next to the WTC? Gates
Via Volokh:
“Israel appears to have stepped directly into a trap of a carefully planned suicide mission dressed up in the clothing of a humanitarian effort.”
Good summary from Dr. C. of America at the Crossroads. Them are the core issues.
Prager: The World Is a Cruel Place -- and If America Weakens, It Will Get Crueler
What America wants re illegal immigration
Driscoll's quote of the day the other day:
“Wow, three people who spend their lives opining about things and who have never run anything in their career fell for a guy who spent his life opining about things and who has never run anything in his career. Who’d a thunk it?”
The flow of oil may soon end, but the political and environmental fallout is just getting started. Newsweek
Steyn:
Almost every problem we face today arises from the vanity of Big Government.
Greece urged to give up euro. It would not surprise me if they do.
Spanking Thad McCotter
Mead:
Virtually everywhere in the world outside the EU and Islamic countries which forbid Christian proselytization, Christianity is on the biggest roll in its 2000 year history. Both in absolute numbers of adherents and in terms of its global ‘market share’ (the percentage of the world’s population that professes the Christian faith), Christianity is at an all time high. In the last fifty years it has surpassed Islam both as the most popular religion in sub-Saharan Africa and as the leading Abrahamic religion in China. The Roman Catholic Church alone claims almost as many members as the total number of Sunni Muslims in the world; all told, Christianity claims almost twice as many adherents as Islam worldwide.
Photo below from The Other McCain's "indigenous Mexicans"
Also, I advise scrolling down a bit to see what goodies you might have missed over the holiday weekend - I did.
Monday, May 31. 2010
Janet Greene, 1966 (h/t Tim Blair). As Sipp occasionally reminds us, da youts should not believe all they hear about the 60s.
A good read from David Warren (h/t, Vanderleun). One quote:
To the mainstream media -- to that liberal elite generally -- the question has not been whether we should have vast intrusive bureaucracies, but rather, what their policies should be, and how to pay for them. That is their playing field, on which they locate some "middle ground" or scrimmage line -- itself shifting constantly to the left, toward some vague, Utopian endzone. It comes as an inconceivable shock to them to discover millions of people who are not merely pushing back against this "progress" -- which they could understand -- but want no part of the game.
Their lives are centred on family and church and productive labour, not on politics. They are often poorly informed about things they care little about; poorly researched on current rights and entitlements; real boobs when they stray into debates about such things; and thus, hicks to the politically sophisticated. The latter, in turn, know little enough about family and church and productive labour.
Let’s cut out the crap from the international sob-sisters and abetters of Gazan Hamas thugs. Let the UN Security Council show this video upon its big screen, and then choke on the hasty lies swallowed by puerile politicians of pusillanimity pontificating from far away, and the media that vomited the lies upon its viewers and readers. Those who say anything Israel did was disproportionate parrot the word on cue, without any sense of what it means, in definition or actuality.
There are only two things disproportionate: 1. Israelis were armed with paintball guns and did not use more force to quickly quell and control those violently prepared upon the Mavi Marmara. Instead, Israel, as usual restrained itself, while no such self-control was planned by or exerted upon those on the ship. 2. The usual crowd of sympathizers to terror and antagonists to self-defense knee-jerk echoing of clearly wrong, inane and antagonistic charges against Israel, even despite the clear evidence to the contrary.
The blockade of Gaza is to prevent war material from entering. It preserves the peace. The convoy was offered but refused to have its cargo inspected and if humanitarian transferred to Gaza.
The convoy was not humanitarian in intent or action. It was a blatant political propaganda ploy, intentionally belligerent in leadership, word and deed, to provoke in order to pressure Israel to commit suicide, opening Gaza’s borders to the type of infusion of deadly weapons and missiles for Hamas to attack Israel that flows unimpeded into Lebanon.
Any who defend the convoy or its passengers are actually furthering avoidable death and war.
P.S.: I'm just too angry to write more right now. My friend Bookie has a good roundup. She points us to this that if President Obama plays his usual games of currying favors, which are not returned by any to whom he has, he will speed and impel Israel to take its survival in its own hands. PowerLine also has proportionate sense to offer: don't "bring a toy gun to a knife fight." AllahPundit wonders about the immediate convening of the UN Security Council to condemn Israel, compared to it not meeting when North Korea torpedoed and sunk a South Korean ship. See Useful Idiots At Sea and other posts at Contentions.
That Roman maxim explained, with Carthage as an example: Never Give Up Your Weapons
Also known as Catmint (it is related to Catnip). It's a long-blooming front-of-the-border plant, and will re-bloom later if the exhausted blooms are cut off. It comes in a few cultivars of varying heights.
This was yesterday. Note the happy Digitalis on the left. Little Lamb's Ear Hydrangea in front.
Sunday, May 30. 2010
The analysis of Elena Kagan "The Soliciter General Lays An Egg" begins:
Before the fuss over Arizona’s immigration law, there was a different fuss over a different Arizona immigration law.
Now the first fuss is coming back to haunt the Obama Administration, the professionals in the office of the Solicitor General, and maybe even Elena Kagan.
The analysis concludes:
It’s still a crappy, crippled wisp of a brief...
Read between the lines, read it all, about the Kagan knuckleheaded knot-kneading knosense of Obama administration immigration enforcement policy.
 Photo from Anchoress' God is not sophisticated enough
Shut up and dance: Margot Fonteyn’s merry dance through the farce of a failed coup d’état
Read this: FTC proposes federalizing newspapers, killing blogs
Watts: About those melting ice sheets
Hennessey: Why do so many Americans pay no income tax?
The EU: Blame the Jews
Stem cells instead of implants? Sign me up
Hewitt: The collapsing Obama Presidency
Teachers Need A Teachable Moment About Their Unions
Sea mammals as guards. Cool. h/t, Linkiest
Thompson's idea of hell
Maher: Obama Not Acting Like A "Real Black" President
The elections:
It used to be said — the president before an election had to go to Ireland, Israel and Italy. Well, now it’s Jews, Hispanics, and gays if you are going into a midterm election...
The death of Democratic Socialism: Am Thinker
Refugees From Communism React With Horror to Moonbats
Pethokoukis: 5 reasons why “Son of Stimulus” is a bad seed
Am Thinker: Are Climate Alarmists losing the Mainstream Media?
Top counterterror guy just doesn't get it:
It should be further noted that this tendency to project one’s own cultural norms of right and wrong onto others is the height of arrogance and ethnocentrism — precisely what liberals always warn against. Yet the irony is that “open-minded” proponents of cultural relativism and respect for “the other” are also the ones most prone to westernizing Islam. When Brennan insists that jihadists are really not motivated by religion but rather are products of “political, economic and social forces,” is his position — that jihadists are just like us, they just don’t know it yet — not the height of cultural arrogance?
Saturday, May 29. 2010
David Brooks wrote a much-linked piece on the two enlightenments last week. Far better and more amusing is this ripping apart of Brooks' essay. It's tough to get away with BS in the internet era.
That is quite correct that there was no "British Enlightenment." Here's our post, with a good link, on the Scottish Enlightenment.
And another good one: How The Scots Invented The Modern World
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