We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
What we are witnessing is the full and seamless fusion of media power with government power.
The media used to hide it a bit, in their actions; they would temper their scorn of conservatism, throw them a bone now and again just to prove they were capable of such a thing.
No longer. The media no longer hides it in their actions. They are fully fused with the Obama Administration and DNC. The only way in which they do hide it is by simply lying when confronted about it: They'll issue a snide denial, then go about doing precisely what it is they were accused of doing.
Related to the post we linked this morning from (the Liberal Dem) Mead on one of the assumptions of modern Liberalism (ie the notion that most of the masses will never do much or reach full self-sufficiency in a modern economy), here's A nation of takers.
Naturally, we wonder to what extent that could be a self-fulfilling notion.
The concept of an elite guiding national development for the benefit of those it governs remains operative today among blue partisans, but what’s changed is that the blue elite no longer sees a bright future for the masses. It turns out that there are two ways to think about the trajectory of liberal society. The traditional view is that over time the differences between elites and non-elites can and should shrink, and it is the proper goal of liberal policy to ensure that they do.
The other view is to believe that differences of talent and ambition ensure that the world will always be divided between a creative minority and an inert majority, and that the goal of social policy isn’t to eliminate that ineradicable difference, but to ensure that the process of recruitment into the elite is genuinely fair. Once the privileges of race, gender and fortune have been neutralized so that the elite is a purely meritocratic body, the members of the elite are obliged to concern themselves for the welfare of the majority, but there is nothing more to be done about equalizing their condition with that of the elite. Authority must rest in the hands of the qualified; those who score poorly on aptitude tests, don’t do well in classes and/or lack extraordinary beauty, artistic talent or ambition must resign themselves to taking direction from the natural aristocracy that a well ordered society has brought so smoothly to the fore.
I doubt that even Rudy Giuliani, to whom a generation of New Yorkers owe gratitude, could have won NYC in a national election. As Glaeser notes,
The Republicans’ abandonment of the city is good neither for their party nor for urban America. The GOP clearly needs a heftier percentage of the urban vote, but winning it by means of fiscal pandering or redistribution isn’t the way to go—partly because such a strategy would cost rural and suburban votes and partly because it would be wrong. A better approach is to offer the good ideas that cities desperately need. Republicans have plenty.
Why is that, when Republicans have demonstrated effective answers to urban issues in the cities in which they have had influence while most deep blue cities are either dying or drowning in red ink?
Whenever I do a movie review, I always include a clip highlighting the main actor doing his or her thing.
What a disgrace.
It seems as though I'm bedazzled by star power, completely ignoring all the lesser actors; those who really make the movie click.
But not this time.
No, this time I'm determined to focus on the supporting cast, those who really make the movie work; those who provide the surrounding aura so that Keanu Reeves may shine.
By 1880, New England had been almost completely deforested. Moose, Wolf, Black Bear, and Wild Turkey were gone or limited to tiny habitat islands. Deer were rare. Then profitable farming moved west to the rich plains of Ohio and Indiana. Good-bye to rocky New England.
With reforestation, Moose and Wild Turkey have rebounded, and Beaver, Bear, and White-Tailed Deer have become pests in some areas. So have the highly-adaptable coyotes, who moved into wolf territory (coyotes were never native to the Northeast) and are now considered pests in New England with generous hunting and trapping seasons for eastern coyotes, coydogs, and coy-wolves if any.
Those critters are all Wolf food, including coyotes. Maybe not the bears.
The new coyotes of the Northeast are larger than those of Western US and Canada, may have a few wolf genes, and a large male is easily mistaken for Wolf or German Shepherd.
There is only one species of Wolf in the world - Canis lupus. The species has - or had - a global reach, with all of its various subspecies (subspecies means races - of which the domesticated Dog is one. The Grey Wolf and the Eastern Wolf are probably the same subspecies, but there is much controversy about wolf subspecies genetics).
All domestic dogs in the world were genetically engineered from the Eurasian Grey Wolf subspecies, including African domestic dogs, beginning around 14,000 years ago. Wolves - dogs - were domesticated before any other animal but your average wild wolf cannot be civilized, even if raised from birth by man. Humans must have found the rare wolf individuals with civilizable genetic flaws as in photo below:
North America's Grey Wolf was an immigrant across the Bering Strait from Siberia and, along with the Cougar, were the dominant predators across the entire US and subarctic Canada.
Dominant predators require large ranges of undeveloped land, preferably without roads and cars. The Cougars will have a tough time repopulating the Northeast, but the Wolves can come down from Quebec. In dribs and drabs, they have been doing so. Probably lone wolves. Visual reports are not reliable, but DNA testing is so the animal has to be shot or trapped to be tested to distinguish the animal from a coydog, a coy-wolf, etc. I don't know why coyotes and wolves can interbreed if they are separate species.
There are no records of confirmed Wolf breeding or pack-forming yet in New England, but these occurences would not be surprising, and would be welcome to many. Wolves remain common enough in Canada to have popular hunting seasons for them. Wolves leave people alone, unlike foolish Cougars who sometimes confuse a jogger with a deer and eat them up.
Heather on women in combat: "I am not aware of any comparable crusade to create gender-integrated football teams. At least America knows what’s really important."
However, we know that Leviathan's hunger for money and control is never sated. If you imagine that there is ever "enough," just ask a Leftist where the endpoint should be, the point at which government's task is complete.
There will always be a list, the job will never be done, and, still, utopia will never arrive because dystopia always arrives first.
Related: Gerard found that One Cosmos has reviewed Our Logophobic President, with his sarcasm button turned on. One sample:
"A great nation must protect its people from life's worst hazards and misfortune."
Hmm. Does that include protection from the most devastating hazard and misfortune of them all, the tyrannical and intrusive state?
Because if the 20th century taught us one lesson, it is that there is nothing more destructive than the all-wise and all-powerful state predicated on the fantasy that it will protect its citizens from all of life's unavoidable exigencies. I mean, just protect me from domestic and foreign enemies, okay? And stop violating with the Constitution. Then we'll talk.
What are life's worst hazards, anyway? Probably the same they've always been: war. Famine. Disease. Poverty. So, why don't we cure hunger by imitating the Soviet Union and putting the state in charge of food production and distribution? While we're at it, why doesn't the federal government create millions of pretend jobs and lavish its worthless employees with absurdly generous wages and benefits?
Oh, right. I guess Obama noticed how effectively that model is working here in California
Prof. of Philosophy and Law (NYU) Thomas Nagel's classic short essay What Is It Like To Be a Bat? (1974) is a fairly deep reflection on mind and consciousness. Take an extra Adderal before studying it. One key quote:
At the present time the status of physicalism is similar to that which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it might be true. In order to understand the hypothesis that a mental event is a physical event, we require more than an understanding of the word 'is'. The idea of how a mental and a physical term might refer to the same thing is lacking, and the usual analogies with theoretical identification in other fields fail to supply it. They fail because if we construe the reference of mental terms to physical events on the usual model, we either get a reappearance of separate subjective events as the effects through which mental reference to physical events is secured, or else we get a false account of how mental terms refer (for example, a causal behaviorist one).
He is certainly one of the most provocative and interesting philosophers around today.
In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel continues his attacks on reductionism. Though the book is brief its claims are big. Nagel insists that the mind-body problem “is not just a local problem” but “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” If what he calls “materialist naturalism” or just “materialism” can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life. And if it can’t explain life, then it can’t fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. Subjective experience is not, to Nagel, some detail that materialist science can hand-wave away. It’s a deal breaker. Nagel believes that any future science that grapples seriously with the mind-body problem will be one that is radically reconceived.
Epistomology becomes a whirl, or a whirlpool. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." I'll put Nagel's new book on my 2013 reading list, which continously expands. Too many books, too little time.
"after the Sandy Hook murders I felt compelled to do something, even if it was only symbolic. So, last month, I joined the NRA, the nation’s most effective civil rights organization, for the first time."
"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious."
As I have mentioned here before, I don't know how it is possible to run a complex household effectively without two or more adults in it. We know that marriage has seen a marked decline in the lower socioeconomic strata, thus contributing to a vicious circle of poverty, malfunction and dependency. From what I have read, marriage is still going strong in the middle and upper-middle strata. I suspect that is because middle class people desire a coherent, orderly, busy life which is enriching to everybody in the family - and one reason why divorce is so traumatic: it's not just about money, it's about structure.
“The scale of marital breakdown in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent and seems unique,” the distinguished historian Lawrence Stone said a few years ago. “At no time in history, with the possible exception of Imperial Rome, has the institution of marriage been more problematic than it is today.”
Hitler's Germany has conquered all of Europe; all except for one resolute island nation. And, with his eye on Russia, Hitler has no interest in fighting Great Britain, he simply wants to relegate it to the inconsequential. This means stopping the supply convoys from America. A relatively simple task, given the right equipment.
Which he had.
The terrifying armada of U-boats had already caused the American supply ships to huddle in close-knit convoys; perfect targets for the long guns of a battleship. And even if the convoy was accompanied by a cruiser, or even a battleship, that's not much of a challenge when your own battleship is so big and new that you can outgun the enemy by five miles.
It was a fairly simple plan, really, and it should have worked.
And if it had?
Britain would have sat on the edge of starvation for the year or so it would have taken Hitler to conquer Russia, since now he wouldn't have to divide his forces, then would have easily fallen once he turned his eye upon it.
And that means, without a stepping stone or 'bridgehead' to gather our forces on, America never could have effectively invaded Europe.
And that means Hitler's Germany would have developed the atomic bomb long before we did. They were already working on it by the time we invaded, and it was only our intervention (like bombing the 'heavy water' facilities) that curtailed its development. Without that, Germany would have had the atomic bomb within a few years. At the time, they were considered the finest machinists in the world.
And then, after taking out Boston and Detroit, the same way we took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki — as a small warning of what's to come — what would our government have done? The same thing the Japanese government did when faced with certain annihilation.
That's how important this moment in history was.
So, why did this great plan fail? It was, after all, the maiden voyage of the largest battleship ever built, the Bismarck, and with four other battleships in the fold, there was simply no way Germany could have failed to wreak havoc on the convoys, isolating Britain and effectively curtailing any further involvement from America.
How did it fail? By a few great strokes of luck and an incredible number of blunders on Germany's part. And that's despite three major screw-ups by the Brits.
But the one major error on Germany's part, the one that signaled the end, was the one that created a situation that was perhaps the most surreal moment in the history of modern warfare.
When you picture the sinking of Bismarck, you're imagining the pounding of the large British naval guns and the brave aviators in their fast Hellcats launching deadly torpedoes at the massive warship, right?
This feisty little prodigy is Sugar Chile Robinson, aka Frank Robinson. Quite a youthful career, but he quit music, went to college, and became a Psychologist and had a radio show.
Harvard is looking for a woman to bear a Neanderthal child. She might need broad hips. They would probably gain plenty of applicants if the kid were guaranteed admission on a multicultural basis. Might be a threat as a linebacker on the Crimson team too or, given the brain size, a threat on the Chess Team.
I was disappointed that the post the other day about human migration excluded our Neanderthal brethren. They were made in God's image too, were they not?
Global cooling is a real threat for mankind's global future, obviously. One advantage of bringing back our Neanderthal brothers and sisters is that they know how to hunt the coming influx of Wooly Mammoths, as Steyn reminded us today on the radio. At some point, in the Northeast, the dang Mammoths will become pests, rooting around in our Rhododendrons in the snow along with the Polar Bears and those annoying and smelly Musk Oxen.
It's a very sad story, and it is due, in part but not entirely, to the Obama economy in my opinion because nobody is hiring anybody right now, and neither are we:
The belief that education is both good in and of itself, and also, is practically a guarantee of a good job, was never entirely true. But now it's clearly false in many fields, and insiders who blind themselves to this reality are doing naive kids a great wrong. Increasingly, getting the extra degree may actually decrease peoples' chances of finding jobs, partners, and satisfying lives, because of the debt and time that are poured into them.
What we really need around here are more good plumbers and electricians who do not abuse drugs. We have plenty of skilled, reliable masons, all clean-cut Mexican immigrants. In today's economic mess, it's time for people to get creative and to start their own businesses. Necessity is the mother of invention. Just make sure you don't hire more than 49 employees (same as they do in France). After 49, you get in deep government issues which nobody can comprehend but you just know you will make some error somewhere.
He has also recently written a short legal essay on a topic dear to my heart entitled HAM SANDWICH NATION: DUE PROCESS WHEN EVERYTHING IS A CRIME. Nobody knows what the criminal laws are anymore, especially the regulatory ones. It's like Alice's Restaurant. The Feds truly can indict anybody for anything if they want to.
Hilarious climate science fail by the warmists at GRIST (and now CNN)
By 1880, New England had been almost completely deforested. Moose, Wolf, Black Bear, and Wild Turkey were gone or limited to tiny habitat islands. Deer were rare. Then profitable farming moved west to the rich plains of Ohio and Indiana. Good-bye to rocky New England.
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Prof. of Philosophy and Law (NYU) Thomas Nagel's classic short essay 
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Harvard is looking for