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.
Sicily is a spectacularly beautiful island between Europe and Africa. It is surrounded by sea as clear and clean as gin, but what happens on dry land there is as dark and disturbing as sewage. In Sicily, which gave the world the word “Mafia,” it is impossible to tell the difference between a mafioso and a politician. Follow the money—if you can.
I have been to Sicily many times for work and on holiday. Its stunning countryside is dotted with stately old abandoned houses in the baroque style. I love it there. It would be great to own one of those houses and they cost next to nothing, but what would be the point? How could I possibly live in Sicily? Life is tough enough here in the “red” Romagna surrounded by “ex” communists who years ago sent me a bullet in the post for my eldest daughter (now eight) because of something I wrote.
A good pal and hunting buddy retired last week from his job as a field biologist for a conservation organization. That's what I will do in my next life.
Apropos of (is it necessary to use "of" after "apropos"?) our post a while ago about scientific research, here is Dr. Ionnadis's famous essay: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.
It's a classic, and a good antidote to "the experts say..." and "studies show." Thanks for the reminder, reader.
Interesting to note that, the hotter the topic, the less reliable the findings. In the social sciences, it's far worse. Mostly garbage, I think.
I am science-trained, and it made me a skeptic about everything I read.
That's what these fall elections boil down to, this year. A stark choice in attitudes towards the relationship between the individual and the state. A Parental State vs. a Servant State. The country votes roughly 50-50 on that, which, to my mind, is pathetic in a bold nation like this. Too many people looking for a caretaker instead of embracing opportunity.
Lots of people are embedding this Scott Brown ad. The strange, shrill anger in Harvard prof Warren's voice is disturbing. She needs to be reminded who pays for the roads - and for her salary. The angry condescension towards the free commerce which makes this nation alive always bugs me, especially from those who have never engaged in it:
It’s painful, charge our critics, for the families that these schools serve to see the contrast between their dreary classrooms and ours, which we spruce up with cheery paint jobs, new carpets and extensive technology.
Actually, it’s far worse than that: 88 percent of our students read proficiently; fewer than a third do at these district schools. Our students also get two hours more instruction per day, science daily and teachers who receive far more professional development.
And they do it for less money, with no admissions process other than a lottery. No union bosses, no political pay-offs.
Give him a chance. He can be pretty smart sometimes, if not all the time. Certainly nails the psychology: Media Desperately Trying To Tie Batman Shooting To Conservatives:
Great. Other cancer patients get sent cute, upbeat jokes from their friends in order to lift their spirits during these depressing times. That's what friends are for, to be there during times of need with their calm, understanding ways, right?
So what kind of jokes do I get from my dear friends?
That is, I think it was a joke. Some jokes sound so real it's hard to tell.
In case you missed the announcement a few weeks ago, I need an operation to get rid of a tumor in my lower intestine. Thankfully, they caught it at an early stage, so I've got some time to dig up the cash for the operation. Horrific details are here.
I'm having it done down in ol'Mehico, because it's a quarter of the price as up here. Funny old world, huh? The Canadians come down here for medical treatment and we go down to Mexico.
With a little over a month to go, I'm edging nearer to my goal. After some wonderful donations from family (the advantage of having 13 cousins), the gang at my mom's rest home (thank you, Alice!), some terrific support from the Maggie's Valued Readers™ (and you know who you are) and selling off $5K in stocks, I'm about $6K short. I talked my neighbors into springing for a newspaper ad and we had a collective yard sale here last weekend where I sold pretty much everything that wasn't nailed down and garnered another $550. The one thing I refuse to put on the chopping block in the Guild 12-string guitar I bought in 1968. It's sitting here three feet from me. I'll go before it does.
The link to the Save-Our-Doc campaign is here. As I noted in the last update, if there's anything online I can do for you in exchange, like promote a web or blog site or set one up for you, just tell me in the comments to email you. Every little bit helps.
Oh, back to that 'friends' thing for a sec. Another one of my friends sent me the following pic with a note that said "Hey, maybe you can use this in your art collection!"
But we didn't build that ourselves. Other people did that - our readers did that, but I know they read us for our recipes.
Are we a Conservative website? I think of us as more Small Government-Libertarian in our political ethos. "That government is best which governs least - that government is best which governs not at all." (That's a Thoreau quote, variously also attributed to Tom Paine and Tom Jefferson.) We're freedom-from-government-power-and-control people. Like this:
The actions of James Holmes are not a reflection on us or on that imaginary village that raises all of us. It is a reflection on him. To forget that by assigning responsibility to the gun or the movie is to abdicate individual responsibility and throw up our hands to the liberal gods of government and the police state to come and save us from ourselves. And they will eagerly answer the call.
Is John trying to snag Gelernter as a contributor to his site? Who would not? We have been Gelernter fans since his first book. A quote:
...more surprising than his political super-buoyancy is the resurrection of big-government, 1930s-style economic thinking in the Democratic party long after it was taken out with the trash along with Jimmy Carter, and once more (for good measure) after Gingrich smashed Clinton in the ’94 midterms. The failure of central planning and state-managed economies is one of the big themes of the 20th century. But Obama’s handlers have yet to tell him.
His biggest asset is being black. People feel virtuous when they vote for him, or support him, or at least don’t trash him. We all like to feel virtuous...
He has a winning smile, too. And
While conservatives worry about debt and taxes and huge problems abroad, the left is busy pulling the whole country out from under them. While conservatives fiddle around on the roof, robbers are rifling the house and stealing the children. Conservatives might consider climbing down and having a look. Obama is only the first of a new breed.
What is college for, and why is it so expensive? From John Leo:
Where does all that money go? Much of it to lavish spa-like facilities and grand new construction, including $100 million or so for multicultural centers and sports stadiums. The debt taken on by colleges has risen 88 percent since 2001, to $307 billion. Jeff Selingo of the Chronicle of Higher Education writes about a “lost decade” of wild campus spending: “The almost insatiable demand for a college credential meant that schools could raise their prices and families would go to almost any end, including taking on huge amounts of debt, to pay the bill. In 2003, only two colleges charged more than $40,000 a year for tuition, fees, and room and board; by 2009, 224 were above that mark.” And now many are inching toward (or past) $50,000 a year...
I am old-fashioned. I think college should be spartan but spartan doesn't sell. It's about branding and sales.
To the slight extent that our higher education has increased social stratification, it is due to the mania for college credentials the system has helped unleash. Some people who can’t obtain the credentials that are increasingly required of job applicants—even for work that calls for nothing more than basic trainability—are shut off from good career paths. That is something of an obstacle to social mobility and if the higher education industry wanted to make amends, it could work toward alternative credentials that would be less costly and better indicators of employability. (There is already movement in that direction, but mostly from outside “edupreneurs.”)
I think the edupreneurs will own the future, especially for those who seek education mainly as an investment in their careers. Traditional colleges don't know whether they are centers for life-enrichment or job-training centers. They are confused about their mission because they do not want to see themselves as credential-salesmen. I have no problem with janitors with college degrees. Why not? I do have a problem with college for people who do not treasure the life of the mind.
The main method Obama and many politicians seek to stimulate the economy is through deficit spending.
What is lost on those who engage this method is that for deficit spending to actually work, it has to be funneled into truly useful production, projects which will yield massive value. Without getting into the problems inherent in all deficit spending, some might make a case that government related spending may yield benefits. It's a stretch to say that the TVA or the Hoover Dam was best provisioned by the government. Fact is, private industry would have managed these projects much more efficiently.
But these are examples of the sort of project which could make the government look better than it does right now by spending massive amounts of money with little to show for it. I'm not saying I support these projects, just that better options exist than Obama's current path. He made a moderately good show by using some funds to try and build a train tunnel under the Hudson which would have saved me 15 minutes on my commute each day. That tunnel, however, was going to be built with limited oversight, meaning costs would've spiraled and New Jersey would have overspent on it, thus losing all the value it would provide.
More importantly, these types of projects are difficult to begin today. Why? Regulation. It would be virtually impossible to build the Tappan Zee Bridge today, and even the current upgrade of the facility has faced massive problems which have increased the cost dramatically. A study of the region around the Hoover Dam, with today's regulatory environment, would end up killing this sort of project altogether due to environmental concerns. My perspective is simply that the Left has hung themselves on their own petard. They want the government to spark job growth, but they want to regulate all sorts of things, not realizing they hamper job growth.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has issued its annual report on the regulatory environment, outlining the economic costs of current Federal regulations. Today, these economic costs are greater than all corporate profits. In other words, one of the fastest and best ways for Obama to earn tax income to drive down the deficit would not to be raising taxes - but by reducing regulation. Of course, this would mean admitting his previous approach was incorrect and flawed.
You can try to rebuild buildings and ports, but buildings and ports are useless in what has become a feral, non-Western culture since the French abandoned it. In Haiti, guys with tire patches sit on the side of the road and throw nails onto the road to generate business. When people get a kid they don't want, they dump it off at the Catholic orphanages promising to return someday to pick the kid up if they get a bigger house. Many are oblivious to time and when they say next week they mean maybe next year. Haiti has two classes, the politicians and the rest. There are no oppressor Capitalists because there is no capital, so Socialism doesn't have a prayer.
Except that Haiti has tons of NGOs and GOs like AID with millions of dollars, and none of them make all that much difference. They seem to exist for purposes of moral vanity. The corrupt pols make deals with the NGOs. Foreign NGO administrators do stints there to earn their third-world stripes so they can earn a promotion while living in guarded NGO enclaves, then they get the heck out before they become clinically depressed or go postal from frustration. I've heard the stories from guys who have worked there for NGOs.
All you have to do is to compare the hell-hole of Haiti with the Dominican Republic on the other half of the island. The DR built itself and is now a major tourist, tobacco, and farming center. People in the DR work hard and worry like normal bourgeois people. Is that a good thing?
Culture is the ultimate infrastructure. You can quote me on that.
That's why it is so difficult to help Haiti get on a more solid footing, and why businesses are not eager to build plants there. Haiti's culture is dysfunctional from a Westerner's point of view but not necessarily from their point of view. They are fatalists ("Si Bondye testaman" is their key phrase), live day-to-day and there is lots of lying, cheating and stealing, bribery, and rape. That's why the NGOs so often fail in their efforts - except in providing the medical care which is entirely imported.
They are a happy, often amoral and hedonistic people, I am told, who don't bother with worrying the way we do. Go figure. OK, they are materially poor. They have a thriving black market in, I am told, extremely high-quality marijuana. The ports which receive donations are their cargo cults.
The Haitians will never become like New Hampshire Yankees, Germans, or Vietnamese no matter how much money people throw in there. If the West were truly multicultural, we would leave them alone to do their thing.
Just my amateur opinion. Debate, and better information, welcome.
Spain decided that liquor, games, and rudeness were acceptable because they brought in tax revenue. New Orleans needed this cash because its residents exhibited at least one all-American trait: they hated paying taxes. They did need expensive public infrastructure, though, to keep out the water and to rebuild when the water broke through. “Vice paid,” explains Powell. “Without the revenues it provided, government officials would have been hard-pressed to pay for maintaining the towns’ costly infrastructure.” Crown administrators likely would advise present-day Louisiana officials to build yet another casino or pleasure emporium to bring in jobs and cash.
On rare occasions I agree with the teachers' unions, to whom this was an election year favor. I don't think the feds have any proper role in education. I don't even think the states have a proper role in education. Important things like education and medical care need to be kept far away from politicians.
Related, from Harsanyi: Are Obama's Ideas Un-American? - If not un-American, the ideas that propel Obama's re-election campaign are certainly unprecedented.
"Does your cauliflower have a large carbon footprint?"
The shy master of the electric guitar, a guitarist's guitarist with, to my amateur ear, perfect taste without gratuitous flash. I think he was Robbie Robertson's hero, and hero of many others too: THE MESSIAH WILL COME AGAIN (LIVE 1976)
The man refuses to retire to his pads in Malibu, New Orleans, and Scotland on his Social Security, and thus sets a good example for us all. Most days now, he can only croak like a frog but on some days he can sort-of sing the songs. But that's not the point.
The rumor is that arthritis is what has him banging chords on the piano instead of using his guitar. I don't know. The olde expression is "It's good enough for rock n' roll." Sipp can maybe splain that to you.
I plan to catch Bob somewhere this fall, with the kids and some of my pals. Good fun, even if it were not with the great Knopfler.
You have to admire people who just won't quit, who keep on keepin' on. It's an American thing.
One feature of Dylan performances is the age range of the audiences these days. Are we tempted to bring the tiny one along? Yes, tempted. He did seem to enjoy Paul Simon.
My babysitter,
Apropos of (is it necessary to use "of" after "apropos"?) our post a while ago about scientific research, here is Dr. Ionnadis's famous essay: 
Great. Other cancer patients get sent cute, upbeat jokes from their friends in order to lift their spirits during these depressing times. That's what friends are for, to be there during times of need with their calm, understanding ways, right?
200 Screaming SEIU Goons 
Details of tour