Tuesday, October 6. 2009
 The big lies of the UN Climate Report. Am Thinker. Related, I still think the notion of CO2 as a "pollutant" is patently insane.
Related: Dr. Holdren used to be a Coming Ice Age catastrophizer. Maybe he is a catastrophizer by nature.
Equally insane: schools banning bake sales. Next they will replace pancake breakfasts with raw broccoli and tofu - and nobody will show up.
Camel's nose in the tent: FTC to begin to regulate blogs
I blame last year's economic mess ultimately on the government. Now they want to do it again. Of course, a good down-payment is a good idea - but what if the government gives you that too?
It's a great time to be a consumer - if you have any $ left
The 125th birthday of Ludwig Van Mises. Why he is important.
Medical-related
Jindal: The Conservative case for reform. I like it.
Democrats Mired in Chaos, Confusion Over Healthcare Bill
The infant mortality canard
Country With Worst Health Care In The World Wins Nobel Prize
I don't know where the WH rounded up those docs yesterday, but docs are overwhelmingly opposed to further government involvement and control.
Monday, October 5. 2009
Another point of view re Polansky, from NYM:
I tend to view the Polanski affair, not as an authentic case of rape, but as a payment dispute in which one side is able to whistle up the assistance of the criminal law.
 For the past four days, we have been visited by the noisest Eastern Screech Owl I have ever heard. For an hour or three at dawn and dusk he doesn't shut up, and drives the pup nuts. Maybe it's the full moon that is doing it?
I have always been fond of these little owls, but they are rarely seen, just heard. I hope this guy sticks around.
Here's a sample of their calls, but their calls are more varied than that.
James Capretta makes the case that the real national economic crisis is the growth of middle class entitlements in his excellent essay, The New Middle Class Contract.
The danger as he sees it (and as I see it) is to risk suffocating the goose that lays the golden eggs which have (not really) paid for our existing middle-class entitlements.
One quote from his essay:
Some liberal politicians, including the president, have sought to use this moment of instability — when all past certainties seem suddenly in question — to advance their longstanding agenda and expand the role of the state in health care, energy, education, and other sectors, taking on new spending commitments and in effect exacerbating the dangers of the old middle-class contract. As Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said in November 2008: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
But the shock of the economic crisis may also make Americans more open to serious entitlement reforms that Emanuel, President Obama, and many other Democrats have long resisted. The logic of the case for reform is much like that of the case for the recent emergency interventions: the need for a bold response to an enormous problem, aimed at regaining some equilibrium and allowing again for sustainable economic growth and prosperity. This is the time to explain to the public just how grave the prospects for our entitlement system — and therefore for our larger economy — really are, and to argue for a serious and sensible change of course.
The impulse to insulate the middle class from the cost consequences of their choices — an impulse that has defined our longstanding middle-class contract — has done great harm and stands to do far more. The remedy must be to redesign our entitlements so that the choices the middle class makes in terms of work, family, and health care will promote more productivity, efficiency, and wealth, rather than the shrinking of the labor force and the growth of government.
Done right, a new arrangement would both strengthen our fiscal outlook and improve the economic standing of American families.
Yes, he is an idealist. His whole essay at National Affairs.
At First Principles. I still read books. Plenty of 'em. So does Lisa Schiffren: Are books archaic?
Mark Twain hated Jane Austin, but I am happy to see that Norm likes Wallace Stegner. So do I.
And here's a book every Canadian needs to read.
"Please understand. God's goal is not to make you happy. His goal is to make you His."
I do not know who said that.
I have been pondering a post on the topic of sex and male and female sex drives for a while -and what people do with those drives, but what I want to say has not crystallized for me yet.
In the meantime, our friend Villainous has a thoughtful piece on the subject: Should women withhold sex?
Mayor at Drudge: Bloomberg: 'We can't just say everybody can go everyplace and do anything they want'... (fixed link)
A guy who wrote verse for Hallmark Cards (h/t, No Left Turns)
A new way to think about crime deterrance
Nice photos of the Adirondacks from Tiger. Nice place he has there.
How government is keeping unions alive
Did we elect a Beta male?
Horowitz banned from speaking on campus
The NEA is all about power
Do you want this Copenhagen Treaty? I don't.
California wake-up call
Althouse on the insulting, condescening, adolescent speeches to the Olympic Committee
Prelutsky:
The idea that any sane person would be in favor of the government’s running the health industry simply doesn’t compute. Leaving such important matters in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats is beyond mind-boggling; it’s lunacy.
Can the middle class afford Obamacare?
Baucus' plan is the same old thing. From Weekly Standard:
Along with new taxes, the bill seeks to offset its enormous increases in government spending by squeezing Medicare, and particularly the Medicare Advantage program that millions of seniors use to get extra coverage through private insurers. But rather than use cuts in Medicare to shore up that program's ailing finances and help make it sustainable, the Baucus bill (like other Democratic plans this year) would use the money to create yet another unsustainable entitlement.
The bill would therefore exacerbate the chief causes of the rising costs at the core of our health care woes: inefficient entitlement spending and the absence of real market pressures in health insurance. Instead of addressing these, Baucus is offering tax increases, a new entitlement sure to grow more costly every year, fewer options for doctors and patients, a far greater government role in health care, and the prospect of health care service shortages, disruptions, and rationing.
Why do the Dems want to undermine Medicare Advantage?
This old hillside pasture is worn-out, but it does produce a good crop of Goldenrod. Unfortunately, there is no market for it.
Sunday, October 4. 2009
5th in series on ethnic firsts in US sports
Who better to be the best US athlete of the 20th Century than a sportsman of melting-pot heritage, child of part Native American, Irish and French parents. In 1950, the Associated Press poll of sports writers named Jim Thorpe as the best American athlete of the first half of the 20th Century. For the second half, the AP named him third, behind Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan.
With all respects, neither Ruth nor Jordan won the Olympic gold in pentathlon and decathlon, and starred in football, baseball and basketball. Nor did Ruth, Jordan or any other such supremely gifted athlete suffer worse abandonment by the sports at which he excelled and the notables who’d lauded him.
Educated in assimilationist Indian Agency schools, Jim Thorpe’s native name was most appropriate: Wa-Tho-Huk or Bright Path. Unfortunately, the trail's end wasn’t.
“Pop” Warner tried to dissuade Thorpe from injuring himself playing football, because Thorpe was already the track-and-field star of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, but the football players were unable to catch up to him. Thorpe even excelled at ballroom dancing, winning the 1912 inter-collegiate ballroom dancing championship. One of the football teams Thorpe almost single-handedly beat was Army’s in 1912. An opposing player, future President Dwight Eisenhower, in 1961 recalled, “Here and there, there are some people who are supremely endowed. My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe. He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.”
At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Thorpe won the gold at the pentathlon and decathlon. A silver medalist observed, “He was the greatest athlete who ever lived….What he had was natural ability. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. All he had to see is someone doin’ something and he tried it…and he’d do it better.” Czar Nicholas II presented Thorpe with a special award for the pentathlon, and King Gustav V of Sweden a special award for the decathlon, telling Thorpe, “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world. I would consider it an honor to shake your hand.”
Thorpe returned to the US for a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in NYC. Thorpe said, “I couldn't realize how one fellow could have so many friends."
King Gustav and the International Olympic Committee turned out to be the “Indian-givers.” Ignoring its own rules for when a challenge to an Olympic medal may be considered, and ignoring that other college athletes did the same but under aliases, the IOC revoked Thorpe’s medals and took back the Gustav trophy for Thorpe having participated in a few baseball games for pocket-money while in college, voiding his amateur status.
Jim Thorpe then played professional football and baseball, drawing huge crowds. He retired at 41 from pro sports, but continued touring with exhibition teams in football, baseball and basketball.
After his sports career ended, Thorpe found it difficult to find and hold jobs during the Depression. He worked as a laborer, security guard, bouncer, and even as a movie extra as an Indian chief.
By 1950, when diagnosed with cancer, Thorpe was broke. On March 28, 1953, Jim Thorpe -- living in a trailer park -- died from his third heart attack.
Only after his death was the racism and unfairness publicly recognized with which Jim Thorpe was treated. Sports Illustrated’s 2004 retrospective, “Jim Thorpe cruelly treated by authorities", for example, concluded:
Racial prejudice was undoubtedly a factor. Snobbery was another. Brundage [president of the US Olympic Committee, who rebuffed restoring Thorpe’s medals] rigidly adhered to an amateur ethic designed to keep workers in their place which was long out of date by the time of his death in 1975.
Revenge may have been a third. Brundage finished sixth in the pentathlon and 15th in the decathlon behind Thorpe at the 1912 Games.
A teammate of Thorpe’s on the New York Giants recounted Thorpe, in tears, visiting his room, telling him about the taking away of his Olympic medals. “It broke his heart and he never really recovered.”
Hollywood made a movie about him, starring Burt Lancaster, and paid him nothing for being a consultant. A town in Pennsylvania he’d never been in renamed itself after him, to gain tourism dollars. His statue is in the football hall of fame. His Olympic medals were stolen from a museum. In my opinion, the only true honor to Jim Thorpe is the large park in central Flagstaff, Arizona where my kids played every day while we were touring and generations of other kids play for the joy of sports that too many adults forget is what they’re about.
From Wikipedia, Native Wiki, Sports Illustrated
Via Mr. Free Market, we learn that the furthest point from a McDonalds in the USA is 145 miles by car.
I have no doubt that this is the case.
Tons of free architectural walking tours in NYC next weekend, via Open House New York. Scroll down.
I have read some negative reviews of the new season of "House" lately. Apparently he went to rehab for his Vicodan addiction, and is no longer as difficult of an attending physician as he used to be. Well, let's hope he relapses.
I also learned that Laurie's character was inspired by Sherlock Holmes (Holmes-House). How did I miss that? Holmes, you recall, was an addict too.
What has been fun about ex-Marine Special Agent Gibbs in NCIS and Dr. House is that they are both cranky, tough, non-PC SOBs who are always alert to interesting females, and that they get away with it because they are so good at what they do. Gibbs, of course, has a military sense of honor, decorum, and dignity which Dr. House seems to lack.
At First Principles. Just one quote:
The British, seeking to adapt to the aspirations of a modern, democratizing age, weaned themselves from Magna Carta. The Americans, “born equal, instead of becoming so,” in Tocqueville’s phrase, found in Magna Carta a symbol of political liberty, silently ignoring its feudal excrescences and adopting the common law insofar as it was, in the later words of Joseph Story, “applicable to the situation of the colony, and . . . not . . . altered, repealed, or modified by any of our subsequent legislation.” The Americans eventually established many of the Charter’s provisions in written constitutions of their own.
 "Boost the United States"? I thought we were a terrible, evil country. How can you say both?
The US gives up control of the internet. Good or bad or neither?
USAF pilots who cannot fly?
The Incest Lobby jumps on the Polanski story. Good grief. The non-incestuous are termed "outbreeders". I hear the theme from Deliverance. (h/t, No Pasaran)
Pence: We are on the verge of a great Conservative Awakening. I hope so. It requires radical Leftists to get them to pay attention - since they have demanding jobs and lives, etc.
Related: If I had told you, would you have believed it?
Finance Committee Democrat Won’t Read Text of Health Bill, Says Anyone Who Claims They’ll Understand It ‘Is Trying to Pull the Wool Over Our Eyes’. Just trust them. They care about you.
No climate change bill this year. Thank goodness. It's been too darn cold. I wish our Masters in government would turn the temp up a tad.
From WSJ Online re Olympics:
"This idea that other nations will do something that's not in their best interests because they like you is just silly."
It adds doubts. No kidding.
SDA:
Michelle Obama talked about her late dad who suffered from multiple sclerosis.
Alas, someone in Brazil's delegation once lived in Rio, and had a great-uncle with angina.
Jules:
That Olympic village is going to need to be an armed camp. The big question is whether those Olympic-themed thongs were occupied or not. You’d think the Windy City’s pluggers would have had the good sense to put something traditional in their gift bags that really says “Chicago.” Like cash. And pork. Maybe a nightstick and some brass knuckles just to remind the IOC members to seriously consider their interests. But if they had, they might have won.
The always-amusing Ace: Chicago dodged a bullet
As they say:
Few presidents have suffered this much loss of support in so short a period of time — and things will probably get worse before they get better. Friday didn’t help. Mr. Obama has sustained a political wound at a vulnerable moment for him.
Related, from Powerline:
What Obama doesn't want to accept is that the Democrats' scheme for government takeover of health care is deeply controversial. In fact, most Americans oppose it, many bitterly--as, in my view, they should.
Obama also doesn't seem to understand that he is a not-very-popular President with a poor track record of accomplishment who is not in a position to demand anything from Congress. At the end of the day, the Democrats may or may not have the votes to pass a radical "reform" bill. But whether they do or do not have the votes will not be determined by empty threats from President Obama.
Saturday, October 3. 2009
Jeffrey Lichtman on WABC radio today (filling in for Kudlow):
"Why do Liberals want more jail time for not buying medical insurance than they want for child rape?"
Why are we still reading Dickens?
Better question: Why wouldn't we be? He's the best story-teller in all of the world's literature (except maybe for Homer - but Homer cheated: he used a lute or an electric guitar, or something).
There is a new translation out of Rilke's poetry, but this isn't from it:
 The Song of the Widow
In the beginning life was good to me;
it held me warm and gave me courage.
That this is granted all while in their youth,
how could I then have known of this.
I never knew what living was---.
But suddenly it was just year on year,
no more good, no more new, no more wonderful.
Life had been torn in two right down the middle.
That was not his fault nor mine
since both of us had nothing but patience;
but death has none.
I saw him coming (how rotten he looked),
and I watched him as he took and took:
and nothing was mine.
What, then, belonged to me; was mine, my own?
Was not even this utter wretchedness
on loan to me by fate?
Fate does not only claim your happiness,
it also wants your pain back and your tears
and buys the ruin as something useless, old.
Fate was present and acquired for a nothing
every expression my face is capable of,
even to the way I walk.
The daily diminishing of me went on
and after I was emptied fate gave me up
and left me standing there, abandoned.
Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming
 All the talk about Letterman reminds us of our prescient post from June, Hey Jenny Slater, Hey Jenny Slater, which was a reaction to Letterman's unfunny jokes about Sarah Palin's baby. One quote from the post:
Letterman's congenital problem manifested itself in spades. He is a Beta male in an industry filled with Beta males. Even the industry's a Beta. He's not even an entertainer -- his job is to talk to and about entertainers. They say politics is show-business for ugly people, and the similarities are manifest. Politics is often home to Beta males that try to cut in front of the big men on life's campus by the side door. Same deal. That's why they get along famously.
That's why men like Letterman always end up groping the help. All the Beta males do this. Look at John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Bob Packwood, Newt Gingrich... this will grow monotonous. They're lame, and know it, and so they try to get themselves in a position of power over the men they used to resent, and the women they never had a shot at. But the men are all dorks of one sort or another, and the women they never had a shot at are still out of their range. They can lord it over whatever women are handy, but eventually find that they are in the thrall of someone as defective as they are.
Re-read that good post if you want. Link above.
Toon from I Own The World via Am Digest
Friday, October 2. 2009
 From Dalrymple's The Cult of Insincerity:
I am like one of Pavlov’s dogs, who salivated at the sound of a bell. I have only to hold a newspaper in my hand to feel a pleasant frisson of outrage coming on.
Lawrence Silberman discusses stare decisis vs Originalism (video)
Banning dissent in science. Coyote. It's disheartening to say the least.
Who killed California? National Affairs
Related: Can New Jersey be saved?
Pethokoukis: The not-so-secret plan to raise our taxes:
Does President Obama have a secret plan to raise taxes on middle-class Americans — and,well, pretty much everybody else — with a European-style, value-added tax? Actually, it’s not such a big secret.
Related, from Tiger:
Two Americas: This year, 47% of households will pay no federal income tax. No wonder increasing taxes on those who already pay them has become so popular.
Powerline: Is Conservatism brain-dead? Or is Beck the new Brain?
Related: fascinating comment from Wretchard on the death of Liberalism (h/t, Vanderleun)
The top 40 political blogs (nb: We are not a political site. We are an elite boutique site for the Illuminati)
Ireland to determine Euro serfdom today.
The KrautMan on Obama's French Lesson
Office of the President attacks media. Driscoll
Why they hate Palin. Video. The intensity of the hatred is disturbing to me. What has she done that is so terrible? Except lead a vigorous, adventurous American life, and not go to an Ivy?
The media doesn't cover unemployment like they usta do. Funny about that.
That oughta do it: 25 minutes on Aghanistan, a day on the Olympics. What am I missing? It's a major blow when you put yourself and your family on the line like that. Who is doing the thinking in the WH? Well, like I care...
Is Tom Friedman the dumbest guy in the world?
Climate change! Record cold temps hit US (from Drudge):
Michigan: Record low temps -- breaks 1935 cold...
Record low tied at Daytona Beach...
Cold snap fills up homeless shelters in Idaho...
Ain't it terrible when facts don't fit your narrative? But it can be easily solved: get more hysterical. The reality that the earth may be cooling should be far more worrisome for humans - and there is nothing we can do about it but to adjust. Winter is coming here, but Maggie's Farm will help you cope with invigorating weather. Dig out your long-johns: we will re-post our Winter in New England series this year.
You can read the whole legal memo to ACORN posted via Big Government. Devastating. But ACORN seems to have ignored the advice they paid for. h/t, Big Govt
They assumed that none of the laws or rules applied to them. "By all means necessary" is the Gramsci-ite term.
Taxpayers at all income levels could be hit with over $1.5 trillion in new taxes, fees, and other costs over the next 10 years, despite President Obama's repeated promises that he would not raise taxes "one dime" on those earning less than $250,000 a year.
Whole story at Newsmax.
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