Saturday, January 16. 2010
It takes a minimum of three legs to build a stool, and a minimum of three logs to build a good fire.
A BD daughter recently learned this basic Boy Scout fact after failing to start holiday fires. It requires a tent of wood to hold in enough heat to produce and ignite the heated gasses which create the rapid oxidation we call a flame. The flame is the burning gasses. The complex and mysterious chemistry of ignition is the key to flame.
The gasses, of course, are hydrocarbons. Wood is nothing but unripened oil or pre-coal. I explained to her (she does not seem to have a chemistry brain yet) that slow oxidation is called "rotting," slightly quicker oxygenation is called "smoldering," quick oxidation is called "fire," and extremely quick oxidation is called "explosion."
Medium controlled oxidation is called "life," and why we exhale CO2 (hydrocarbons + oxygen = mostly CO2 + H20 + heat/energy), and why we are above room temperature most of the time. It's an exothermic chemical reaction. We animals are masterfully designed to control and harness these chemistries in our bodies.
Friday, January 15. 2010
The people of Haiti are difficult to help now, but they have always been difficult to help.
If you want to do something now, we recommend World Vision.
Part of an extraordinary long quote from A Woman in Berlin in a piece at Never Yet Melted:
...I long ago lost my childhood piety, so that God and the Beyond have become mere symbols and abstractions. Should I believe in progress? Yes, to biggger and better bombs. The happiness of the greater number? Yes, for Petka and his ilk. An idyll in a quiet corner? Sure, for people who comb the fringes of their rugs. Possessions, contentment?
I have to keep from laughing, homeless urban nomad that I am. Love? Lies trampled on the ground. And were it ever to rise again I would always be anxious, could never find true refuge, would never again dare hope for permanence.
Perhaps art, toiling away in the service of form? Yes, for those who have the calling, but I don’t. I’m just an ordinary laborer, I have to be satisfied with that. All I can do is touch my small circle and be a good friend. What’s left is just to wait for the end. Still the dark and amazing adventure of life is beckoning. I’ll stick around, out of curiosity and because I enjoy breathing and stretching my healthy limbs.
Many conservative commentators have been applauding Google’s newfound resistance to China’s internet controls, and hoping that the Obama administration takes heed. Although Google’s speaking out is to be welcomed, at least for again highlighting the issue, Google and its US hi-tech compatriots, like CISCO and Yahoo, have been hip-deep in furthering domestic repression in despotic countries across the globe, including China.
In this case, the Obama administration actually has cause to blame Bush. I wrote many columns in 2005-6 about this freedom repression complicity by US hi-tech leaders (see below the fold, at Read More, for a link list I just compiled for another researcher) with the looking-away by the Bush administration which was more interested in foreign trade than foreign freedoms.
But, there’s still more to the story. China’s house internet provider, Baidu, has eaten Google’s lunch in China and is expanding globally. Baidu’s stock has widely outperformed Google’s. Google’s new verbal resistance is more a competitive move to highlight to other governments Baidu’s role in repressing free searches on its search engine, and to increase Google’s prospects in China by getting permission from China to offer more freedom of searches than Baidu. There may be some loosening, but that skeptically remains to be seen, as China has more than one way to skin Internet freedom and will.
Google and other US companies are duplicitous in their dealings with despotic regimes, hiding their furtherance of repression behind free trade and freedom rhetoric that is hollow.
Updates: The Wall Street Journal has a useful overview of Google in China. Congressman Chris Smith, a liberal Republican from New Jersey, has long led the fight for human rights and internet freedom, including his Global Online Freedom Act. As reported in the links below, Google like other US hi-tech companies opposed it. Now, Google is in favor. Also, see China's cyberspace policy.
Continue reading "Google’s Duplicitous China Policy (Updates)"
 Maggie's Farm has the reputation of being a dog-friendly - if not dog-written - website.
How about dog-friendly hotels? There are tons of them, and I am not sure that everyone knows how easy they are to find.
I decided just to check those on the I-95 corridor.
There is a Pet Friendly Hotels site.
Photo is my favorite breed. Friendly? They will knock down strangers just to kiss and lick their faces.
If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around.
Anon, via Theo
Toon above via Theo
Anchoress: “Haiti is the broken bloody body of Christ”
Related, from Why is Haiti So Poor? (h/t, Marginal Rev):
Haiti, once called The Jewel of the Antilles, was the richest colony in the entire world. Economists estimate that in the 1750s Haiti provided as much as 50% of the Gross National Product of France. The French imported sugar, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, cotton, the dye indigo and other exotic products. In France they were refined, packaged and sold all over Europe. Incredible fortunes were made from this tiny colony on the island of Hispaniola.
How could Haiti have once been the source of such wealth and today be the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere? How could this land that was once so productive today be semi-barren? How did "The Jewel of the Antilles" become the Caribbean's hell-hole?
A Massachusetts Miracle looks possible. Not likely, but plenty possible. Related: Coakley does not have a good record as prosecutor.
Related: Dems Sucker Punch Mass Union Members
Fear Factor - The ideologues in Washington are scaring Americans.
Every group effort or organization has its obvious jerk. But maybe it's not so simple.
Climategate: How they hid the effect of the sun. Hid the sun? Related from Driscoll: It Was Only A Matter Of Time
Hey, Mr. Taliban: We aren't looking for a fair fight.
Thursday, January 14. 2010
Park Avenue, Midtown, tonight. Plenty of lights on in those bankers' offices.
 The history of cranes and tower cranes here.
h/t, Samizdata
I haven’t been enthusiastic about prior conservative free-market approaches as a solution to healthcare spending's pressure on the economy or individuals. Conservative proposals are, rather, a mitigator of overuse leading to overspending. Through “more skin in the game,” conservative proposals cause users to think twice about how much is really necessary.
The liberal approaches, by contrast, after the application of their best minds, are now proven to go in the opposite direction from cost reduction or improved healthcare. They lead to higher costs and just benefit a fraction of the uninsured, while vastly increasing the power of the government to impose its rationing generalizations upon individual needs – which vary -- while further insulating users from sensible involvement.
With HT to Instapundit, “The High Cost of No Price” from the American Enterprise Institute.
Economists have shown that if a good’s price is zero or decreasing, then the demand for this good will likely increase. In 2008, consumers were only directly responsible for 11.9 percent of total national healthcare expenditures, down from 43 percent in 1965, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This means that someone other than consumers pays roughly 88 percent of all healthcare costs, giving consumers little incentive to mind costs and much incentive to over-consume.
From the NIMH:
The search over the past decade for genes behind mental illness has led to the realization that mental disorders are not discrete conditions with specific causes. Rather, they are the result of interactions between risk factors that affect development; psychiatric symptoms can arise from many causes and are more interrelated than current disease models allow. By 2020, this insight, which has been slow to take hold, will have transformed how doctors understand and treat psychiatric conditions.
Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
Anon, from Theo's old farmer quotes. Ain't that the truth.
Like that word. Re the Met, at Classical:
I suppose if Christians want parity in respect, we should be recruiting our own brigades of ax-swingers and splodeydopes, but I did a little reading and apparently our founder's view on disrespecting our creed was some p***y-a** nonsense about "turning the other cheek" (like that's going to strike fear into the hearts of infidels). And as far as I can tell, none of our sects have any proviso for a bevy of pliant virgins on higher planes in the event of pious detonation. So Jihad For Jesus is going to be an uphill climb, to say the least. Meanwhile, I guess we'll have to settle for the smug moral superiority of suffering figurative slings and arrows in both cheeks.
Our friend Roger gets it. Related: Red has already won in Massachusettes Massachsittes MA. Related: Seating Mass. Senate winner could be delayed. Of course.
You want some Moslem cartoons? Here's one.
Full Body Scans to Double as Annual Checkups
Pethokoukis: 9 reasons why the Dec. jobs report is bad news for Dems. Their policies are job-killers.
Google is getting fed up with China. China does not trust its people.
Who predicted this? Obama Wants $33 Billion More for War. Guy is a cowboy warmonger.
Game-Changer: Why Did Reporters Keep Silent About Edwards? And Bill Clinton too. They're in the tank. Duh.
Thompson's Remants of an Army. Story of the 1842 Afghanistan battle here.
Wednesday, January 13. 2010
Identify the perpetrators of atrocities upon children as sociopaths or whatever (see Dr. Joy Bliss' post below), and the words don't come near the horrors they commit, which are monstrous, whether during the Holocaust or today in many countries.
Here's a photo from a group of 41 children, ages 3-13, plus ten adult staff the Nazis tore from their refuge near Lyon, France on April 6, 1944. The children were sent to Auschwitz and murdered, as were the staff.
Up to 1.5-million children were murdered in the death camps, about 1.2-million of them Jews, the others Roma or handicapped.
Holocaust by Barbara Sonek
We played, we laughed
we were loved.
We were ripped from the arms of our parents
and thrown into the fire.
We were nothing more than children.
We had a future.
We were going to be lawyers, rabbis, wives, teachers, mothers.
We had dreams, then we had no hope.
We were taken away in the dead of night
like cattle in cars, no air to breathe
smothering, crying, starving, dying.
Separated from the world
to be no more.
From the ashes, hear our plea
This atrocity to mankind can not happen again.
Remember us, for we were the children
whose dreams and lives were stolen away.
Here's a photo of a few of the very few children who survived to liberation.
We see similar photos today of children elsewhere in the world who suffer. Remember and do more than repeat the mantra "Never Again."
More info about the once happy children in the first photo at this site.
HT: My good friend "Charlite", a righteous Gentile.
Old Haiti has needed our prayers for many years, but they sure need them now. Their doctors are praying too, and sometimes that's all one can do. Or the most one can do.
I have been thinking quite a bit about Sociopathy (aka Antisocial Personality, aka Psychopathy, aka in the young "Conduct Disorder") lately. People without a conscience who view others as objects of gratification or as tools to be used. I have missed the diagnosis several times over the past few years, to my regret. Many experts are known to miss it until something happens to wave the red flag in front of your face.
It's not just an important diagnosis for us shrinks to make: it's important for everybody out in the world. 2-3% of humans probably have enough sociopathic traits to be of concern in life. It's a strange partially genetic adaptation. Some end up as leaders and moguls, many end up addicts, dead, or in jail. Sociopathy knows no economic, cultural, or ethnic boundaries.
What is this "condition"?
It's a tricky thing, sociopathy. It has been well-described from many points of view. We analysts often think of it as being based in an absence of empathy - an inability to experience others as other than as objects to be exploited, used, predated upon, etc. An inner coldness and calculatingness towards others, but not to be confused with obsessional personalities who simply protect their emotions, and not be confused with those with immoral or amoral impulses - everybody has those.
However, successful sociopaths learn to create a warm, caring, engaged, and often charming presentation of themselves to the world. Very successful and smart sociopaths learn how to live honest lives and to channel their talents, guile and wiles into honest paths.
Full-blown sociopathy is generally considered an untreatable and incurable condition. I am not convinced that that is true - but I think it requires special methods which are outisde of regular Psychiatry. Sociopathic traits are far more common than the supposed 2% of the population that are said to be full sociopaths. I am not going to write an essay on this complicated topic, but will just offer some links for those who are interested:
Wiki has a simple introduction to the topic
A classic book by Cleckley: The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So Called Psychopathic Personality
An interesting paper: THE SOCIOBIOLOGY OF SOCIOPATHY: AN INTEGRATED EVOLUTIONARY MODEL
I have more links on the topic, but no more time right now.
A quote from Yuval Levin's Capitalism at NRO:
Part of the problem I have with some versions of the libertarian case is that they take capitalism (if not classical liberalism more generally) to be an argument against the need for restraints on our appetites and passions, rather than an argument for the possibility of such restraints — to be an argument for libertinism rather than liberty. I’m with Edmund Burke, who said that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.”
Is the MSM beginning to get it? From Jack Cafferty via Watts:
As the debate continues about global warming, the month of December was the 14th coldest in 115 years in the United States… and some scientists insist the earth is entering a cooling trend.
- Wind chills brought temperatures in the Dakotas to 50 degrees below zero, while record cold in parts of Florida is damaging some of the orange crops, and South Carolina called an early end to shrimping season.
- Parts of Canada have seen actual temperatures of 30 below zero… And freezing temperatures and record snowfalls are pounding parts of Asia and Europe too.
- Britain has experienced the worst snowfalls in half a century.
- In India – it’s estimated at least 100 people have died due to the cold temperatures… with dozens more killed in Bangladesh.
- In China and South Korea, heavy snow and unusually cold weather have brought chaos to travelers – blocking roads and trains, canceling flights. After one recent blizzard in Beijing – officials had more than 300-thousand people clearing the streets.
Meanwhile some of the world’s top climate scientists suggest this winter is only the start of a worldwide trend toward cooler weather, which could last for 20 to 30 years. They base their predictions on changes in water temperatures in the oceans
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.
Anon., from Theo's Old Farmer quotes
How often have we heard complaints about the inappropriate cheesecake on Maggie's Farm? Countless times.
So here's some beefcake instead - Scott Brown, MA Senate candidate, as a law student (via a piece at Powerline). The photo should help with the gal vote, don't you think?
Betsy has a very good update on the MA race. Also today: Union plans major ad buy for Coakley. We also note the conspicuous absence of a major national politician to support the Dem in this campaign. The O not invited, apparently.
We support Scott Brown, even if we enviously resent his good looks:
|
