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.
Abraham Lincoln was not normally a very self-revealing sort, especially on the subject of religion. But now, in what remains the most socially revolutionary document written by any American president, Lincoln threw aside his self-imposed restraint and proceeded to justify his proclamation and the freedom it bestowed on 3.9 million black slaves in terms of a private covenant he had made with God.
Mark Safranski is elaborating at his defense issues blog Zenpundit on the problems raised by R2P, Right To Protect, or what I termed “Transnational Elites Uber Alles,” for intervention on humanitarian grounds against those nation’s rulers who our liberal elites dislike.
…it extends the uncontrolled reach of liberal elites within our government to act regardless of our laws or popular will….Transnational self-elected elites making “the world safe for democracy” or for their own supremacy?
Regimes who are not in disfavor with our liberal elites, however oppressive, get off more lightly.
In the first part of a five-part series, R2P is the New COIN, Safranski says:
…like the rise of pop-centric COIN, it will be an electrifying idea that has the potential fire the imagination of foreign policy intellectuals, make careers for its bureaucratic enthusiasts and act as a substitute for the absence of a coherent American grand strategy.
Neither COIN nor R2P are strategies. Unlike COIN, however, which is a set of tactics that may be applicable in some circumstances in pursuit of strategic goals (even if those goals may be arguable), R2P doesn’t have any operational tactics. R2P is more a clarion call to action, including actions that are contrary to US laws or popular will, in pursuit of internationalist goals for global governing as defined by transnational elites.
Further, R2P is cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric that allows liberal elites to preen, displaying their caring feathers, regardless of their ignorance of the military, regardless of the cost-benefit to US national security, and regardless that it isn’t their children being sent into harm’s way.
Lastly, R2P is reactive, not prescriptive of avoiding future threats to US security as a strategy must be. Much the same coterie who want to raise R2P to dominance over US foreign and military policies are largely dismissive of severely hobbling US allies or hollowing our military.
The second part of Safranski’s series is R2P is the New COIN: Slaughter’s Premises, Anne-Marie Slaughter being a prominent intellectual proponent of R2P. Slaughter defines a state as legitimate, effectively governed, only if it provides social goods to its populace, regardless of other sources of cohesion or democratic means of choosing leaders. Illegitimate states are targets for R2P, US core security interests aside.
Safranski writes me that Part 3 will focus on Authority and International Law, R2P resting upon amorphous, internationalist rule proposed to override US laws, Part 4 on Sovereignty, discussing the radicalness of R2P proponents’ program to replace nation states’ independence, and Part 5 on Legitimacy, Networks and Power, discussing the undemocratic, oligarchic views of the R2P proponents.
I suggest you read all five parts if you want to be up on the intellectual fad trotted forward to undermine US sovereignty and core security interests.
A post from our friend Rick, who will be a regular author here at Maggie's once we negotiate the compensation details (he won't take paper money):
"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws" — Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild
Many of us want to get rich. Some of us, anyway. What’s the fastest way to do it? Print your own money.
If it were only that easy. But what if it were? Ignoring counterfeiters, there have been several cases where privately printed money has fueled growth and provided value. Up to a point, that is, because as we all know, if it were that easy, everybody would do it. Yet the government does it because the government wants everyone to be rich, or the government wants to support declining prices, or the government wants to pay back money it borrowed. So the government creates money and backs it up with full faith and confidence and this should be enough for everyone to be rich and happy.
Why hasn't this goal ever been achieved? Let's take a look at one example where this theory was put to work.
In August 1717, somebody had a bright idea. The idea was based on the concept that the New World offered so much resource wealth and opportunity that anyone with a monopoly could sell portions of that untapped wealth to others, reduce his risk, and make himself and investors rich via joint stock ownership. Stock ownership was not a new idea, but this offer carried tremendous upside, particularly because the company offering the stock was owned and backed by a bank, and the company had been granted a government monopoly on all trade in the region.
John Law was the proprietor of the Banque Générale Privée (General Private Bank), which he funded by investing heavily in the debt of the French government. He literally invented paper money because he viewed money only as a medium of exchange, not a store of value or unit of account. It represented a claim on some value already in existence, and therefore could not have an impact on prices or overall valuations. He was brilliant and everyone, including himself, knew it. Law was so smart he was able to win card games by mentally calculating the odds. He also developed economic theories which are still the basis of some modern economic theory. One of his most persistent creations was the establishment of a central bank, which would oversee and manage the issuance of credit and paper money. Based on his theories, paper money had no relationship to the price of goods and services.
Yesterday's American architecture quiz was was too hard. I honestly had no idea how to categorize it. It was a highly pleasing pastiche, and thus an unfair question. Our expert tells us this:
That one was a bit of a mishmash, I imagine. Been changed a lot over the years. If I was a betting man, I'd say it was Italianate. Squarish, with a clerestory most call a cupola. The second story porch is officially called a "gallery," and I don't think it's original. I think the bottom floor bracketed porch is the original, and they maybe built the other one on top of its roof and added a door. That sort of arrangement is popular in places like Louisiana but not the Northeast much. I imagine the eaves of the main house had modillions or brackets like you see on the bottom floor's porch and they were removed. It may be the whole thing was much older and the Italianate style was overlaid on it. That was popular in the mid 1800s. I think the Adam style fanlight front door and flanking windows are more recent additions, too.
I like to take architectural pics when I go places. As Sipp says, people who make things are demigods, changing the world. Swords, guns, tables, plows, iPhones, or homes. This elegant and not ostentatious manse in Newport was built, no doubt, by a genius evil Capitalist as a summer cottage for his family and friends while he worked in NYC, and is more straightforward than the last one. (All substantial summer homes in Newport - and the seaside in New England in general - are called "summer cottages," as opposed to town houses.)
What Comes After 'Europe'? The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued.
...there’s one last thing that nice people don’t know. It is that hucksters aren’t confined by the same boundaries they assume everyone else is contained by. They are capable not only of sucker-punching you, but of exceeding limits you never thought could be transgressed. Grifters are in some sense not part of the same civilization that Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan inhabit. Maybe they don’t believe this yet. But they will. They will.
Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
Annual family income: $21,700 Money the family spent: $38,200 New debt on the credit card: $16,500 Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710 Budget cuts: $385
At the request of the Ohio Department of Insurance, benefit consultants Milliman, Inc. prepared an estimate of the impact on coverage and rates of ObamaCare when major provisions take effect in 2014.
660,000 are forecast to lose their group coverage from employers. A 735,000 increase in individual coverage is forecast. The percentage of all covered with some type of government coverage is forecast to increase to 31% from 20% in 2010.
Although the percentage of residents with coverage could rise by about 7.9%, the price of individual health insurance coverage might rise about 55% to 85%, excluding the impact of medical inflation, the Milliman consultants predict.
“This is primarily driven by the estimated health status of the new individual health insurance market and the expansion of covered benefits,” the consultants say.
The new tax credits are supposed to help individuals earning less than 400% of the federal poverty level pay for coverage, but U.S. residents with incomes over 400% of the federal poverty level who are in the individual market would have to pay for the coverage out of their own pockets.
Then add in the additional taxes within and caused by ObamaCare. High price to pay, huh. Hope there's any Change left in pockets.
H/T: Hot Air: "the Senate Budget GOP today releases this video to unmask a budget gimmick popularly employed by Democrats as they call for more spending on investment in “education, innovation, clean energy and infrastructure.”
KC Johnson, history professor at my alma mater, describes the lack of intelligent consideration by the faculty there:
...groupthink has the effect of producing more extreme versions of the common assumption. It stands to reason, therefore, that campuses with unusually one-sided faculties will feature more frequent episodes of extremist assertions. Such certainly seems to be the case at my own institution, Brooklyn College...
Read it all. If there's a terrorist incident on campus, call a faculty member, not the NYPD.
That is excellent advice from someone over 30. Social isolation breeds all sorts of strange and unreasonable habits of mind, while social interaction helps us define ourselves, learn about ourselves, and, especially, to learn what our limits are. Isolation nurtures delusions of grandeur or delusions of inferiority, and prevents acceptance of reality.
I attended a faculty cocktail party last night, and, for some reason, the advice I had received many years ago came into my head as a shy person during boarding school: "When you enter a gathering, make sure you say hello to, or introduce yourself to, a dozen people. Then you can leave if you want to. Never act like a shmoozing politician, but it's your job to let people know that you exist. They might want to know you, or they might not. Either way, it's learning. Learning sometimes hurts."
At my age, with genteel breeding and with my life experience, it's a little silly for me to still need that reminder. People tend to enjoy and seek my company.
James Pethokoukis explains it. Wealth-creation is not in their lexicon. They view government as the font of The Good. I definitely do not. If government does not protect my liberties and my property, I oppose it.
Government protects itself, grows itself. It is subject to all of the flaws of human nature, but has unique and potentially dangerous powers. It has become a big monopolistic, parasitic industry, but one with guns and cops and jails. Anybody who thinks that big government is altruistic is sorely misguided, delusional, naive, or stoned. Drunk on power and perqs, our public servants dread having to return to real life.
The SAT was designed to produce a more egalitarian, less elitist American college student, yet few are ever really happy with it. I tend to view it roughly as an IQ test, but one which conflates the upper end to eliminate the upper outliers (it's not fair to the others to be too good).
...once the Ivy Leagues started trying to find the most promising non-upper class kids from the rest of the country, they needed something more objective about individuals than just grades. Another issue is that high school grades have certain inherent shortcomings. The future Nobelist in physics might not care about his social studies class and thus wind up with a lower overall GPA than the well-adjusted grind. Plus, grades have a ceiling. Even an A+ in physics doesn't really tell you that much. Moreover, lots of future successes are alienated in high school. Some people who get all As in high school might not have the upside to continue to do so in college. Incentives toward grade inflation at the high school are built in. And so forth ...
Jimmy Stewart tries telling the whole story of the shooting of Liberty Valance to a young reporter, and revealing that his whole career has been built on another man’s deed, and the newspaper’s editor declines to print it. “When the legend becomes fact,” the editor says, “print the legend.”
There is no expiation in confession for Stewart. His life has been built upon a lie, and he supplanted a better man in his wife’s affections, and he knows it.
MoDo misunderstands most things, but humility and self-scrutiny are rare commodities at the NYT. Movie tells a great story with one heck of a cast.
Here's the tune (1963). Gene Pitney. Never forget Gene Pitney - or John Wayne.
Morrissey: Has Obama quit already? Judging by his plans for job creation and deficit reduction, the president has given up on policy accomplishments in favor of playing politics
Very wealthy people such a Mr. Buffett tend to earn their money in one of three ways: as investors, as entrepreneurs, or as executives in large enterprises. In each case, salary is a relatively small part of total compensation: Rather than getting a regular paycheck, investors, entrepreneurs, and top executives most often are rewarded with an ownership stake in their firms. As they work to increase the value of the business, they enrich themselves as well. This is a desirable arrangement to the extent that it aligns the financial interests of a company’s management with those of its shareholders.
Mikhail Bulgakov's 20th century classic, The Master and Margarita, was not his only book. Among other works, he wrote the little-known A Country Doctor's Notebook before he left medicine to become a full-time writer.
The former is a masterpiece, with Pontius Pilate playing a major role. The latter is plain wonderful.
Tyson’s behavior sullied boxing’s always precarious reputation, making the sport synonymous with freakishness. He would be the last in a long line of heavyweights to bear a symbolic connection to American social trends. For just as the blustery John L. Sullivan represented a growing nation coming into its strength, and the magnetic Dempsey the birth of mass-media celebrity and commercial culture, and the stoic Louis the hard years of depression and war, and the mercurial Ali the age of rebellion and change, so Tyson embodied the postmodern hoodlum—the gangsta from an urban landscape pulverized by fatherlessness and anomie. Remarkably, a middle-aged Tyson is now trying to remake his life, a feat that, given the obstacles, would outstrip anything that his illustrious predecessors achieved, in the ring or out.
... thanks to an eccentric New York lawyer in the 1930s, this college in a corner of the Catskills inherited a thousand-year trust that would not mature until the year 2936: a gift whose accumulated compound interest, the New York Times reported in 1961, “could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure.” The mossy stone walls and ivy-covered brickwork of Hartwick College were a ticking time-bomb of compounding interest—a very, very slowly ticking time bomb.
President Obama's path to reducing deficits is being laughed off as playing politics with demagoguery while deficits widen. But, according to Obama, "this is not class warfare; it's math."
This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes and payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.
Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.
Lower-income households will pay less. For example, households making between $40,000 and $50,000 will pay an average of 12.5 percent of their income in federal taxes. Households making between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7 percent.
That doesn't include the higher charges paid by middle-class and wealthier retirees for Part B Medicare, nor the lesser amounts received by them from Social Security relative to prior incomes or contributions.
One of the areas targeted by the tax-more crowd is capital gains. There's no recognition of the extra risks involved in investing, that much of the gains represent inflation, or that much or all of the amounts invested were already taxed.
Then, there's the false assertion that the middle class suffered most during the better pre-recession period.
No. In the seven years from 2001-2007 (inclusive), not only did the middle class get at least its fair share of overall income growth, the income gap between the rich and the middle class actually got smaller. In an apparent paradox, the same Census Bureau database that told us that median household income was essentially unchanged in 2007 versus 2000 also tells us that the middle class enjoyed a higher income growth rate than did either the overall economy or the rich—and therefore that their income gap versus the rich had actually decreased.
President Obama may be appealing to his base, largely made up of those who pay little or no taxes already, but is cementing the attitude of those who are productive who see him as further undermining and stalling economic recovery.
The International Monetary Fund just downgraded the economic outlook for the US (and Europe). Yeah, higher taxes should fix that, huh?
That's Italian! 
Mikhail Bulgakov's 20th century classic, 
Paul Beston's 