Wednesday, May 23. 2012
The federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandates that all hospitals, including Jewish or Moslem, must serve pork instead of beef. Pork is lower in fat and calories, thus better for health, and less expensive than beef, thus better for healthcare spending. HHS opines that only synagogues and mosques may continue to ban pork from their menus.
Can you hear the uproar? Jews and Muslims are required to break their basic dietary laws, rooted in many centuries, to obey a federal mandate. Every civil libertarian and all faiths would protest.
Yet, except for the support of Orthodox Jews, who actually have less stringent prohibitions than Catholics, and the Southern Baptist Convention, most groups which otherwise defend individual and group liberties are silent in backing Catholics in challenging the ObamaCare mandate to provide contraception and abortion by their non-church charities.
Jonathan Tobin lays it out:
One needn’t oppose the president’s re-election or endorse the Vatican’s stance on contraception in order to understand that a ruling against the church would grant the government nearly unlimited power to restrict religious freedom. In the weeks and months ahead as this issue continues to be debated, it is vital that more faith groups rally around the church and make it clear to the administration and the courts that when it comes to protecting First Amendment rights, the church does not stand alone.
You might speak with your pastor or rabbi and ask them not to be silent when Catholics' constitutional right is abridged. Silence is not moral.
(Note Added: There is no such HHS mandate to serve pork, at least yet. It is plausible because of the extent and nature of other ObamaCare intrusions into personal choice and beliefs.)
 After I read this guest post at Zero Hedge, More Than 30 Blocks Of Grey & Decay (h/t American Digest), I thought a little more about my post yesterday, An interesting response to Charles Murray. Here's a quote from the Zero piece:
There is now a grey pallor that seems to engulf this once thriving corridor. The houses that were built in the 1950s and 1960s and kept up by middle class families that took pride in their neighborhoods have been deteriorating for years. The homes are in disrepair. The bricks have grown dingy from years of pollution buildup and lack of power washing. Porches and awnings are sagging. The woodwork hasn’t seen a paint brush since the 1970s. Trash is strewn in the streets. Gardens are no longer tended to. Lawns are overgrown with weeds. The inhabitants of these neighborhoods either don’t care or don’t have the financial wherewithal to maintain their homes. On the current trajectory, these once proud neighborhoods will eventually resemble the 30 Blocks of Squalor.
It's not lack of wherewithal. If you can afford a car, an iPhone, and a big flat screen TV, you can afford a few gallons of paint, a scraper, and a paintbrush from Home Depot. It's just about old-fashioned degeneracy, ignorance, or sloth, which will always be with us in some proportion of the population. We have to accept that reality. For heaven's sake, we have prostitutes in Hartford getting Disability checks for anxiety disorders. It's their loss more than it is mine. If you wish to live a life without dignity, have at it; I won't let you starve, but don't expect any respect from me. A young gal with Down Syndrome works every day at my market. She is not on Disability.
I don't know whether Mr. Welton is right or wrong about government benefits enabling parastic or feral subcultures, but I do think he is correct that the middle class feels that all they can do about it via government is to give them some money and hope they will live, and stay, drunk or stoned or just unmotivated, far away from them. "NIMBY, s'il vous plait. I want a pleasant, peaceful life, and work hard to have one."
Funny, the middle class feels the same way about feral government, most of the time. Except when they are getting freebies. Never dare take freebies from the middle class.
It's because of "jumping genes." These genes may be residues of viral genes which, over millions of years of cellular evolution, inserted themselves into the DNA of cellular forms of life.
Jumping genes are conjectured to play a role in at least some autism mutations.
Ed Morrisey ably sums up the intimidation campaign by a convicted murderer, Brett Kimberlin, against several bloggers. As Michelle Malkin writes: “This is a convoluted, ongoing nightmare that combines abuse of the court system, workplace intimidation, serial invasions of privacy, perjury, and harassment of family members.” Read it all.
A highly notable issue, aside from that the legacy media has failed to take up the matter, is that the funding for this campaign comes from some of the most-darling of liberal-left foundations (see this list, and some more background on Kimberlin's trail of BS), using the Tides Foundation as their beard. The Tides Foundation acts as a secret conduit to leftist causes for donors, that include George Soros and Teresa Hines-Kerry as well as numerous other liberal foundations but also benefits from grants from the US government. See here.
Morrisey and Malkin and many other bloggers call for a free speech blogburst, of which this post is part. There is more at stake than the first amendment right to factually expose a campaign of intimidation against bloggers who have exposed Brett Kimberlin and his backers. There is the need to further expose the network of leftist donors and by example require greater transparency and accountability to their whole range of activities.
 How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love
College Grads Earn Less Than A Decade Ago
Supply and demand at work
Transgender Five-Year-Old?
MoDo doesn't understand Catholicism
HHS doesn’t speak for me, or many women
Mary Ann Glendon: Why the Bishops Are Suing the U.S. Government - The main goal of the contraception mandate is not to protect women's health. It is a move to conscript religious organizations into a political agenda.
Washington Post Asks The Important Question: In a Way, Isn't Romney Sort of Responsible for a Massacre By Mormons 160 Years Ago?
Obama's Bain mutiny
Swinging at Bain, Obama Ignores What Private Equity Is
Democrats and Bain Capital: Hypocrisy exposed
As I understand it, venture capital and private equity are the EMS of the business world
Furious Chris Matthews Explodes: Cory Booker 'Betrayed' and 'Sabotaged' Obama
Obama’s dangerous words about profits and free enterprise
Dr. Orwell Will See You Now - Don’t be fooled by their health care Newspeak.
Michele: A 2012 campaign must-read: The conservative survival guide to Mitt Romney
Lazear: 2013 Tax Increases Are to be Feared, Not Spending Cuts
Watching the Democratic Party Collapse in Dixie
Obama challenged in Arkansas primary
GAFFNEY: Bad timing for LOST - Another foreign policy battle in the presidential election
The Danger of Article 82 and Obama’s Latest Treaty
White House officials shaped pending bin Laden movie
North American Energy Inventory
ZUBRIN: China’s population-control holocaust - The bloody history of ‘Limits to Growth’
Smithsonian's Vietnamese exhibit recalls plight of 'boat people'
Re Europe:
"Today, firms with more than 15 workers cannot get rid of employees even in a downturn without risking legal proceedings that can last years," reports The Economist magazine, referring to Italy's overregulated economy. "If a judge then decides the company has acted unfairly, it can be forced to rehire the worker and pay him his lost earnings
Tuesday, May 22. 2012
Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club, as usual, sees more clearly, deeply:
We often think that politicians know when they are misleading the public and when they are not. But there’s one other possibility. They don’t know themselves what the truth is any more. They are like a bunch of pirates who, after making the master mariner walk the plank realize they can’t read the “books of navvigashun” for the life of them. They are irretrievably lost and the only thing the pirate chieftains can do is pretend to pore over them.
The situation may be reaching the point where it has become counterproductive to listen to “the leaders” who have neither the knowledge nor skill to think or do anything definite. Perhaps recovery — when it comes — will be the result of people just doing stuff. Creating new businesses, innovating or just adapting to changed circumstances without much reference to the Big Leaders who will continue to pretend to know everything when they know nothing. Maybe the end of Peak Government has already started. The “leaders” will pronounce more and more, and they will matter less and less.
From a friend:
Sir John Gielgud, unforgettable in so many roles – and only he, playing a butler, could so verrry stiffly and silkily respond to Arthur’s bland set-up, “I’m going to take a bath” with such genteel contempt, “I’ll alert the media,” and then keep the rhythm building a series of quiet little comic explosions:
Arthur: Do you want to run my bath for me?
Hobson: It’s what I live for.
Arthur: I just broke up with Linda.
Hobson: I can’t imagine why; a little tart like that could save you a fortune in prostitutes.
and so on.
 From this good collection of Kramer passages:
Central to its doctrine of embattled and threatened virtue is the notion of what Lionel Trilling has called the avant-garde’s “adversary” relation to the larger (bourgeois) culture in which it functions. If the institutions that now serve as conduits of avant-garde claims are no longer shy about acknowledging this adversary role, it is because the role itself has acquired an unquestioned historical prestige.
We have all been brought up on the legend of avant-garde martyrdom, with its celebrated episodes of tardy vindication. Nothing is more familiar to us than the literature of cautionary tales recounting middle-class resistance to and stupidity about “advanced” artistic innovation. The history of modern art abounds in such tales, which are often chronicles of genuine suffering when they are not mere comedies of cultural manners. As a result, the tendency of modern critical thought, whether sympathetic to avant-garde objectives or openly hostile to them, has been to accept without question an essential, perhaps even a metaphysical, antagonism separating high culture from the middle class—an antagonism readily confirmed in our guilty feelings over the crowded roster of abused and misunderstood genius.
Kramer was wonderful. There is nothing new under the sun. Vanity of vanities: all is vanity. Call me bourgeois - I don't care -Trilling, Kramer, and Gombrich are my kind of bourgeois guys. Sticks and stones...
 Once a common bird in New England and the Eastern seaboard but now gone the way of the Passenger Pigeon.
From Wiki:
Heath Hens were extremely common in their habitat during Colonial times, but being a gallinaceous bird, they were hunted by settlers extensively for food. In fact, many have speculated that the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving dinner featured Heath Hens and not wild turkey. By the late 18th century, the heath hen had a reputation as poor man's food for being so cheap and plentiful; Thomas Winthrop related that they could be found on the Boston Common and that servants would sometimes bargain with a new employer for not being given Heath Hen for food more often than 2 or 3 days a week.
From a thoughtful reaction to - not against - Murray's Fishtown and Belmont analysis by Clark Whelton: SugarHouse Rules - On certain aspects of Charles Murray’s new book:
...if feckless men in Fishtown are not unmanly, what are they? Murray invites us to choose our own words; I suggest “remittance men.” In nineteenth-century Britain, sons, brothers, and uncles whose disreputable conduct made them an embarrassment to their families sometimes received an offer they couldn’t refuse: “Move to Capetown, Jamaica, or Tasmania, and—provided you never come back to England—we will send you a monthly remittance. It won’t be a lot, but you’ll be able to live without working.”
Do the residents of Belmont (median household income $95,000) and countless other communities like it have a similar understanding of Fishtown’s feckless men? The Belmonts of America help fund the various government payments that keep neighborhoods like Fishtown afloat. In return for remitting to the tax man, Belmont, Massachusetts (83.5 percent white, 11.1 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, and 1.8 percent black) gets a measure of isolation from the troubles and failures of urban neighborhoods.
Cool blog we found: Brain Pickings. Sample: Joan Didion on Self-Respect
Mutations in autism
A new study in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science finds that organic food eaters are . . . jerks.
Is it rape, or pushiness?
Mead: NY Met: The End of The Season
We love the Grand Tier too. An annual treat for us.
A new cut of steak
Selling kidneys
If you exercise enough, can you live forever?
How to prevent the poor of the world from getting Vit A
Humans, per groups like the WWF, are undesirable parasites. In effect, the WWF would prefer the scourge of humanity to be wiped clean from the planet.
We're white, we're male, and we suck
The Worst Union in America - How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and crippled the state
How would Tom Barrett have erased the $3.6 billion budget deficit in Wisconsin?
New York Times' Tom Friedman Bombs on ‘Jeopardy!’
The president had dinner with nine presidential historians...
Meet Desmond Hatchett — the fulfillment of the Welfare State
Douthat: A Little Bit Indian
Europe is driving full-tilt, foot on the pedal, into a brick wall
Racism must be a problem because government must have power.
The Left’s Threat to Delegitimate the Supreme Court if it Invalidates the ACA:
Once health insurance can be mandated, Congress will inevitably find that other products or services are equally essential to national well-being. Future Courts will either have to find all such purchase mandates to be legal, in which case there is no limiting principle, or they will have to pick and choose, which means an endless exercise in policy-making.
Democrats Turn on Obama's Bain Attack Ad
‘Relief Rolls As Modern Reservations’
Is mentioning Rev. Wright racist?
As best I can tell, Rev. Wright is a racist
Obama allows your children to go swimming for one more summer
VDH: Winning Battles, Losing Wars
Ten Thousand Commandments 2012 - An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State
Does Jeremiah Wright have a place in this campaign?
Caseless ammo could cut 25 lbs. from gear
Cronkite and the Roots of Media Bias:
A key element to this fairy tale is the idea that the journalistic icons of the time, like CBS’s Walter Cronkite, were Olympian figures who would never stoop to play favorites or inject ideology into the news.
But this view is totally false.
MSM: Obama’s Faith Is Off The Table, Romney’s Isn’t
The Treblinka Gold Rush - After World War II, Polish peasants hunted for jewels and gold amid the human remains at former Nazi death camps
Like totally cool. A country cabin on the roof of a six-storey building, corner of 13th and 3rd just a few blocks from Union Square. They even have a Wisteria arbor up there. Rus in urba indeed.
We went to the CSC's production of Midsummer's Night Dream this weekend. It got some terrible reviews - and some very positive ones too. It was wonderful, and sexy.
Maggie's is a big supporter of CSC: "Reimagining the classics." They manage to get stars who want to do classic stage. Bebe Neuwirth was Tatiana.
"But what is the story line?", I asked the wise Mrs. BD.
"What fools these mortals be" she replied.
I am fortunate in spouse and friends who dislodge me from my work, my gardens, and the internet. There was a wonderful street fair on Third Avenue. As a country boy, I sure do love visiting New York. I'd like to do a week of urban hiking there, with camera and beer stops and a nice hotel suite. Invite all of our readers to hike along too.
Some fresh photos below the fold.
Continue reading "NYC"
Monday, May 21. 2012
One of my kids attended a very demanding high school, a boarding school, actually. During senior or possibly junior year, this youth showed me his AP European History thesis. The master had written on top, in the usual red ink, "Best AP European History thesis I have read in ten years. Almost publishable. B+"
I believe he understood the compliment. The master believed that, however fine and well-researched the work was, he could have taken it even further.
From The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn - The greatest tragedy of progressive education is not the students' lack of skills, but of teachable character.
“An A,” she said jubilantly, but with a strong undertone of derision. “And I didn’t even read the book!” As the paper thudded into the trash basket, her friends joined in the disdainful laughter.
That quote is about college, not the local high school. Another quote from the essay:
The person who is never challenged is also never refined, never learns to cope with the setbacks that come on the way to high endeavor. And it is not only in the academic realm, of course, that they may be hampered: a full life outside of university also requires the ability to confront one’s weaknesses and recover from defeat. Despite the admittedly important emphasis on character formation in our schools — on tolerance, anti-racism, refusal of bullying, and so on — it seems that we have failed to show students what real achievement looks like and what it will require of them.
Colleges have become high schools. As far as I have heard, only the elite boarding schools still maintain the highest expectations and standards, far higher than even the most elite colleges.
We are inundated with pseudo-science. I have a few relevant links:
Via Fast Science:
... the pace of scientific discovery is slow. This does not mean that we need to hide every step of it from view until we get the results that we deem worthy of sharing. On the contrary, I agree with those who think that sharing at the more interim steps can only improve what we do. Yet the innumeracy, fame and fortune are forces that put such free sharing in peril by misrepresenting it as the final answer to everything. And when the answer is changed, which is not only expected, but indeed desired in scientific pursuits, the public opinion punishes science.
From Science vs. PR:
That’s the whole substance of the paper. Straight-ahead chemistry, exploring a possible explanation for an observed phenomenon and drawing out one tentative prediction. “Showing that it could have happened this way is not the same as showing that it did,” the author most properly concedes. He should have quit while he was ahead. What imp of the perverse induced him to add two more sentences?
Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them.
Maybe the PR guy talked him into it.
From The New Phrenology - How liberal psychopundits understand the conservative brain:
That the “rich and powerful” are identical to conservatives and Republicans—Edsall’s assumption—is a hoary idea dear to many Democrats and essential to their self-image as the opponents of privilege. It persists even though many of the plushest and most powerful institutions of American life are in the hands of liberal Democrats: public and private universities, government bureaucra-cies, nonprofit foundations, movie studios, television networks, museums, newspapers and magazines, Silicon Valley . . . Among the fabled “1 percent,” according to Gallup, the number of self-identified Republicans is only slightly greater than the number of Democrats. As Christopher Caldwell has pointed out in these pages, political donations from 19 of the 20 richest ZIP codes in the United States go overwhelmingly to Democrats, by a ratio of four to one or more. Democrats are the party of what Democrats used to call the superrich. Only Democrats seem not to realize this.
From Pathologizing Normalcy and Overdiagnosing Pathology:
In the U.S, the DSM boils down to three critical issues: reimbursement, reimbursement and reimbursement. It should be renamed the American Diagnostic and Reimbursement Manual, so that those who use it outside the U.S. better understand the influences behind it.
Paul Mirengoff’s lawyerly skills rebut Karl Rove’s campaign skills on whether Rev. Wright should be raised as an issue in the 2012 presidential campaign. The difference is between inside-Beltway and what turns on (or off) the jurors, voters.
Karl Rove considers President Obama’s twenty-year attachment to his radical minister as old hat, largely because failed presidential contender John McCain declined to raise it in 2008, and because the Obama administration’s record is so bad in itself that it should be enough to defeat him in 2012.
Paul Mirengoff, however, says that “presidential elections aren’t just about issues; they are about the person in whom we are entrusting our highest office.” Mirengoff then goes into how campaigns actually occur:
The second argument for shying away from Wright is that raising the issue will backfire, as pro-Obama forces accuse Romney of personal attacks and racism. But Romney need not, and should not, make the attacks; nor should the major PACs that back him. If the issue is raised –- after testing it with focus groups — it should be raised by lesser groups, as was the case with ads attacking John Kerry over his military service….It’s not racist to be disturbed by the fact that Obama chose a rabidly anti-American, who happens to be Black, as his spirtual [sic] leader. And, of course, Obama’s associations with white radicals can be invoked as part of the same line of attack.
In 2004, defenders of Kerry insinuated that Karl Rove was involved in the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth campaign to show that Kerry’s narrative of Vietnam heroism was false. Their only “proof” was that some of the same people supported President Bush and the Swiftees or that anti-Kerry Swiftees lacked enough documented evidence in Navy records.
That would be a problem for a Wright-Obama campaign in 2012, except that Kerry’s critics were the witnesses to his overblown attempted image whereas Obama’s own words and actions are the witness to his radical past. Further, Obama’s radical past is directly in line with his radical presidential policies and actions.
Were it only Rev. Wright that might be downplayed as but one indiscretion, albeit a twenty-year one. But, throughout Obama’s life his self-proclaimed formative mentors were cut of the same radical cloth, and in his administration he has appointed others of this ilk.
During the 2004 campaign I was interviewed by a star New York Times reporter, pro-Kerry, about the Swiftee campaign. I was fairly quoted, and continued an email correspondence with the reporter. After Bush narrowly won, this was our last email exchange:
Note to Todd Purdum, New York Times: If not for the anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans, shifting many thousands of votes, the election may well have been lost by Bush.
Reply from Purdum: Hard to argue with your analysis.
Mirengoff wins the dispute.
Nonetheless, I and others opposed to President Obama’s re-election must be responsibly concerned that some others opposed to his re-election may exceed the facts of his radical nature, and – of course – will be the ones given most prominence by the pro-Obama legacy media. That is unavoidable. But, regardless, the core truth will resonate with many who otherwise would be unaware of the facts of Obama's proudly radical past and how it shows in his present. It will be another strike against Obama that, again, may determine the margin in 2012.
From the article:
- The graduates of our social sciences and humanities programs are increasingly found wanting in the workplace. Unless they can find employment in a leftist dominated milieu (e.g., government, academia, public sector union, media conglomerate), the American business world finds them ill-equipped to function successfully in what remains of the US entrepreneurial society.
- The costs of a university indoctrination--er, that is, education--have skyrocketed. In light of the previous bullet, consumers-- i.e., the students' parents--find it increasingly hard to justify the expense.
- Intense criticism of the faculty is on the rise: they can't teach; or what they teach is garbage or propaganda; they're too busy with their "research"; and they are overpaid.
- Administrative policies make no sense--multiculturalism trumps achievement, political correctness outweighs impartiality.
- Most damaging, our universities, after a prolonged period of indoctrination, return students to their parents in a form that parents cannot recognize--their opinions, values and behavior have been altered beyond repair. (To be fair, it is encouraging that a not insignificant percentage of college grads manage to resist the brainwashing on campus).
Sunday, May 20. 2012
From a pal:
Pops and I went up to Oswego, NY this week to fish Lake Ontario for King Salmon and Brown Trout. Had an excellent trip. Fished with T-K Charters and stayed at K&G Lodge http://www.kandglodge.com/. I highly recommend both.
As the pictures will attest, we caught our limit of Kings (3/person), ranging in size from 9-13 pounds, couple of Brown Trout, a couple of Lake Trout and a Steelhead. Left the dock in Oswego a bit before 5am, ran 2 miles right off the Town and had our limit by 9am (would have been earlier buy Pops lost a couple. I, of course, landed every fish on my line . .), and back to the dock by 1030a.
Probably one of the easier fishing trips - Dunkin Donuts is open 24 hours, so we had hot coffee and donuts on the boat. Guy at the dock filleted the fish for $4/fish and included ice for the cooler and we were back home by 5pm.
That fishery is pretty consistent from year to year, not only with state stockings but a decent (not great) level of naturally reproducing fish. Fish are close to shore as the water warms earlier in the shallows (that is relative as we were fishing in 90 feet of water, temps in the low 50's). Trolled spoons and anyone who says a 12 pound salmon on 10 pound test is not a fight, knows not of what he speaks. Oh - and about 35 pounds of salmon fillets for the freezer.
Guy on the right in the pics is the mate. He works doing maintenance at nuke plants for 8 months of the year, and fishes the other 4. His father was the Captain and both know what they are great fisherman
BTW - Pops is 78 (79 this October) and cannot wait to go next year.
I think he likes me. I copied it below the fold.
Now back to my honey-do list. Sheesh.
Continue reading "Got a friendly email from President Obama today"
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If you have a minute, catch up on the stuff we posted over the weekend. We do it for you!