Saturday, February 6. 2010
In the (now, sadly, defunct) New York Sun:
Given the nearly total absence of fanfare, you could be excused for not knowing that this was the quincentenary of Andrea Palladio's birth. Generally it is a kind of condescension to treat the great cultural figures of the past as though, in some sense, they were, or needed to be, our contemporaries. And yet a respectable case could be made that, of all the architects who lived before the 20th century, few were as influential as Palladio (1508-80) or came closer, in the arc of their reputation, to being what we would now call a "starchitect."
Read the whole thing.
Here's Wiki on Palladio. Below is a photo of Villa Capra, aka Villa Rotunda, in Vicenza.
A quickie for dessert? Restaurant bathroom trysts.
I guess amore is sometimes just overwhelmingly urgent, like diarrhea. Been there, but never when fully sober. I remember in the 70s when the only thing going on in restaurant bathrooms was people doing lines of coke with rolled-up $100 bills.
It is performed standing up, I assume, like the coke.
Rightly or wrongly, they used to call these people "not college material." h/t Capt. Capitalism who thinks these things should have been learned in High School. I'd say Grade School. Readin, ritin, and rithmatic, right?
Who are the Tea Partiers? THEY ARE STARVING CANNIBAL MARTIANS WHO HAVE COME FOR YOUR CHILDREN AND PETS!!!!
Related: Tom Tancredo acts like a total jerk. Not funny, Tom.
The maybe coming Iranian Revolution. I hope they go for it.
Vanderleun: "Scientists said" is becoming the numero uno phrase that gripes my ass.
Krauthammer: The Electorate vs. Obama's Agenda
Why Antagonize China? The revitalization of Asian capitalism is the most important positive event in the world in the last 30 years.
Jules on Brown:
Whether Scott Brown realizes it or not, his future is not entirely in his hands. Their are people out there who have plans for him, and this has all the makings of an epic ride that doesn’t necessarily end well for him. Hang on. Remember that thing about getting a dog if you want a friend in DC.
Insty:
WAIT, I THOUGHT CALLING PEOPLE SOCIALISTS WAS A “SMEAR.” Gallup: Majority of Dems View Socialism Positively.
Related: A Stroll Down Extremism’s Memory Lane.
In response to a question asking Democratic Party delegates whether they felt George W. Bush was legitimately elected in 2000, fully 91% of respondents said he wasn’t. The poll also noted the response rate of self-identified Dems overall, 78% of whom thought Bush’s 2000 election was illegitimate (question 56).
Just for perspective.
Obama Reverses on Bankers. Like it or not...
First India throws the IPCC overboard - now the Netherlands. Oh, and now China. It's difficult to keep up. England, too:
Despite active measures by the BBC and the liberal Guardian newspaper to suppress climategate revelations, other media outlets like the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and the TimesOnline have picked up the slack and have run story after story about the fraud, the bad science, and the shameful actions of scientists in trying to suppress opposing viewpoints.
The Economist: Neither the president nor Congress shows any sign of knowing how to tackle the deficit. Related from VDH: Is Greece our future?
However much people may want global warming (the warmists want it for their narrative and for their grant $, and people like me because we think it would be good for humans), the scientists worry: Signs of Damage to Public Trust in Climate Findings
Obama picks campaigning over leading
 Story by Alexander in the WaPo. One quote:
...even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot" -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).
This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.
Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival.
Read the whole thing. For many, we think, Liberalism is a matter of social fashion; conformist, self-congratulatory, conspicuously virtuous and "open-minded" (not that I think it is virtuous or open-minded at all - how many Liberals check out Maggie's for fresh views on things?). It says that they aren't rubes, but rather "caring," sophisticated, and bien pensant. Part of the crowd, acceptable. Nice.
I don't think that we Maggie's Farmers are morons or uncaring even though we do like our guns and our Bibles and our Constitution and our ceegars...and lots of other things.
I also think that the condescension often passes over into raw hate, as Dr. Bliss discussed recently. Related, see Liberal Hate Speech at Am. Thinker.
Photo is Lionel Trilling, a neurotic Liberal who also had interesting things to say about literature.
Pastures of Plenty
It's a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed
My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road
Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled
And your deserts was hot and your mountains was cold
I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind
California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well it's North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine
Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground
From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters run down
Every state in the Union us migrants have been
We'll work in this fight and we'll fight till we win
It's always we rambled, that river and I
All along your green valley, I will work till I die
My land I'll defend with my life if it be
Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free.
You can listen to Guthrie singing the song below. Photo on top is Guthrie in 1946.
Friday, February 5. 2010
 We have found her travel books - "Exceptional Places to Stay" - to be spot on, especially if you seek local color and prefer to avoid the international hotel chains.
From Phi Beta Cons:
My point is that the common notion that a college education is essential to doing most of the work in the economy is mistaken. The ability of individuals to do work seldom depends on anything they studied in college.
True indeed. Nothing wrong with a liberal arts education, though, as life-enrichment for those too lazy to figure out how to obtain it on their own. (It's called "reading.") A rigorous high school education ought to be enough for most practical purposes, and adequate preparation for any job training or apprenticeship which doesn't require advanced math or science.
The story of Germany's SDU is relevant to everyone these days, even though it sounds strange to hear people still talking about "workers" as they still do in Europe - as if it were some permanent condition of serfhood. One quote from the piece at Boston Review:
...social democracy may have settled the issues of industrial society, but it did so just in time for industrial society to give way to a globalized economy, one with its own complicated and pernicious effects on labor and social equality: immigration, fluctuating employment levels, and offshore outsourcing, to name a few.
Like the American Dems, political organizations like the SDU are fighting the last war.
I have never been disappointed in The Teaching Company, but I have never enjoyed a series as much as Prof. Sutherland's Classics of British Literature. It is college as it should be.
As with any excellent humanities prof, you learn as much about thinking about life as you do about the topic at hand. His soft brogue is pleasant too.
Today, I am listening to his Chaucer lectures. Time flies by on ye olde elliptical machine.
The American is the Englishman left to himself.
Alexis de Tocqueville, in a piece about de Tocqueville at Chicago Boyz
Several weeks ago I posted a longer version of this. The San Diego Union-Tribune liked it, and asked for a shorter version. 711 words from 1200+. Yes we can!
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/feb/05/no-gop-ideas-try-these-10/
What a putz. Can you image if Bush...
"Pleasing your enemies does not turn them into friends."
Who knows who first stated this ancient truism, but I snipped it from Kate.
Where not to die in 2010.
Also from Tax Prof: Law School Only Makes Economic Sense If You Go to a Top 70 School. Top 70? I'd say Top 25.
Fun in Hartford: NORTHEAST FISHING & HUNTING EXPO COMING FEB. 26-28
A bamboo bike?
How come no family members help this poor lady?
The wealthy don't pay the estate tax. Small businessmen, farmers,, and regular people are the ones who get stuck with it.
Rent control in NYC: Taxpayers, Meet Your New Tenants
Unpleasant Grannies rage against Tim Tebow's existence. Wonder whether they have grandkids...
Steyn: Credibility is what�s really melting
Tim Blair: Their faith upset by recent events, warmenists are lashing out.
Related: We have been swindled:
We've been set up as marks by a gang of opportunistic hucksters who have exploited the na�vely altruistic intentions of the environmental movement in an effort to control international energy consumption while redistributing global wealth and (in many cases) greedily lining their own pockets in the process.
Perhaps now, more people will finally understand what many have known for years: Man-made climate change was never really a problem -- but rather, a solution.
For just as the science of the IPCC has been exposed as fraudulent, so have its apparent motives. The true ones became strikingly evident when the negotiating text for the "last chance to save the planet" International Climate Accord [PDF], put forth in Copenhagen in December, was found to contain as many paragraphs outlining the payment of "climate debt" reparations by Western nations under the watchful eye of a U.N.-controlled global government as it did emission reduction schemes.
Then again, neither stratagem should come as any real surprise to those who've paid attention.
The EU is a tyrant. It is time for the Euroweenies to man up and rebel.
"I found it fascinating that the people who were editorializing against it were The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company," Thomas said, according to a report in The New York Times. "These are corporations."
Thursday, February 4. 2010
Droll Yankees produces many good, squirrel-defeating bird feeders. They have the Whipper, the Dipper, the Flipper and the Tipper. I am trying the Tipper because it doesn't need batteries.
Yes, I always throw a few handfulls of seed on the ground each morning for the squirrels and the ground-feeders.
Obama’s Chicago enforcer Rahm Emanuel got lots of heat for calling my-way-or-the-highway liberals “f**king retards.” All the criticism was for him using the disparaging word “retards” and none for his frequent use of the adjective. Hmm? Via Instapundit, an Emanuel theme song. That’s the Chicago way, and mine from Brooklyn, and probably yours too.
The peaceable kingdom? Or already filled up with antelope meat? Daily Mail
 The O admin seems determined to quietly undo Clinton's welfare reforms. We have learned over the years that the Dems and the Lefties want all the people on the government plantation that they can collect. That's what "health care" is was all about, but the people saw through it.
It's what most Dem programs are about: everybody a slave to the Massas in Washington, and relying on their "generosity" (see Medicare).
Heather MacDonald now reports in Championing Dependency that New York is experiencing attacks on Clinton's welfare reform. Good essay. One quote:
This double-sided attack on New York’s welfare reform lacks all empirical basis. Since 1995, the city’s welfare rolls have dropped nearly 70 percent, from 1.1 million to 350,000. Rather than increasing, as opponents of welfare reform warned, the child poverty rate in New York City dropped 34 percent during the same period, compared with a 5 percent drop nationwide. In 2008, New York City had the lowest child poverty rate—26.5 percent—and the lowest total poverty rate—18.2 percent—of the country’s eight largest cities.
Work, even at minimum wage, remains the best route out of poverty. When tax credits and medical and housing benefits are included, an average single mother of two with an $8.25-an-hour job in New York City receives a $63,000 annual income. On welfare alone, that same mother would pull in $43,000 a year—a whopping amount for non-work, to be sure, but still less than work provides.
Re Ted Kennedy, via Never Yet Melted:
...Kennedy waxed sentimental about Washington in the early 1960s: “It used to be civilized. The media was on our side. We’d get our work done by one o’clock and by two we were at the White House chasing women. We got the job done, and the reporters focused on the issues. . . . It was civilized."
I visited Venice for a few days many years ago, and do not feel driven to return - it's a giant tourist trap with a pickpocket team on every block - except that I wouldn't mind catching the Venice Regatta in August:
On further thought, I wouldn't mind getting a little more experience with Venetian cooking. All I know about it is Risi e Bisi, which doesn't look like much but which is killer delicious when Mrs. BD makes it.
Here's When I Paint My Masterpiece live with The Band in 1971:
A new documentary, coming out in May. It's about applying to charter schools. Looks good.
The website of the producers has The Education Constitution.
Email from a friend:
One of our institutional equity market strategists reacted to Pres O's proposal to tax banks to recover TARP money. Everyone knows the the gov't is net ahead on its bank investments, but here are the actual returns (costs or benefits to taxpayers) as calculated by my colleague:
Bank bailouts: + 16.9 billion profit to date
AIG bailout: - $30.4 billion projected loss
Automaker bailout: - $30.5 billion projected loss
Homeowner bailouts: - $50 billion projected subsidy
Looks to me that the logic leads us to tax homeowners. Ooooooooops! I just realized that he is proposing that, too.
Who says there's nothing amusing in the newspapers anymore?
(From yesterday's MarketWatch)
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