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.
In California, most cars are from Japan. But, after that, Fords are the most popular. I've driven a 2000 Taurus for the past 12-years. Good, comfortable, reliable sedan. The other day, my neighbor traded in for a Ford, saying she wanted to buy American. There's also another reason that Fords are popular the past few years:
My friend Mark Safranski, at his blog Zenpundit and contributions elsewhere (like Small Wars Journal), provides some of the best digestions of complex matters of national security policies and debates that a layperson can find.
Safranski has turned his attention to R2P, Right To Protect, as its advocates term it. It is the liberal internationalists’ concept of how US foreign policy ought to be. R2P reflects limitations of the US abilities to militarily intervene elsewhere as perceived by our liberal elites but raises our humanitarian impulses selectively by them to justify certain interventions, again, as they perceive which to be worthwhile. Further, R2P raises hazy international law or consensus of international liberal elites to supremacy over national law or consensus.
One of R2P’s main propounders, Anne Marie Slaughter, even advocates each US agency and members of our judiciary to act independently of Executive or Congressional oversight or law to conform to the consensus of foreign liberal elites. Slaughter is not just someone blathering. Slaughter was Dean of Princeton's influential Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002–2009 then from 2009-2011 she served as Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State, now back at Princeton. Slaughter’s thinking is telling in the pieties mouthed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama as they ignore US laws, ignore Syria’s worse repression and threat as they intervene in Libya, and extol a hostile majority in the UN to undeserved credence. Slaughter isn’t alone. Obama administration insiders Samantha Powers and Susan Rice are R2P foxes in the henhouse.
As Safranski sums up:
Slaughter is a revolutionary who aspires to a world that would functionally resemble the Holy Roman Empire, writ large, with a diffusion of power away from legal process ofstate institutions to the networking informalities of the larger social class from whom a majority of state and IGO officials are drawn, as a global community.
At first glance, disaggregating the state and granting at least a measure of sovereignty to its component parts might appear to weaken the state. In fact, it will bolster the power of the state as the primary actor in the international system…Giving each government institution a measure of legitimate authority under international law, with accompanying duties, marks government officials as distinctive in larger policy networks and allows the state to extend its reach.
Actually, it extends the uncontrolled reach of liberal elites within our government to act regardless of our laws or popular will.
Safranski comments:
R2P will require the imposition of policy mechanisms that will change the political community of the United States, moving it away from democratic accountability to the electorate toward “legal”, administrative, accountability under international law; a process of harmonizing US policies to an amorphous, transnational, elite consensus, manifested in supranational and international bodies. Or decided privately and quietly, ratifying decisions later as a mere formality in a rubber-stamping process that is opaque to everyone outside of the ruling group.
Who is to say that there is not, somewhere in the intellectual ether, an R2P for the environment, to protect the life of the unborn, to mandate strict control of small arms, or safeguard the political rights of minorities by strictly regulating speech? Or whatever might be invented to suit the needs of the moment?
Well, there is such in the “intellectual ether”, as in this example from William Magnuson, lecturer on international law at Harvard, and a graduate of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs:
While it is undoubtedly true that the loss of life is a greater harm than the loss of free speech rights, the major arguments (moral, legal, and consequential) in favor of the responsibility to protect doctrine apply equally to free speech as to crimes against humanity. Freedom of speech is a fundamental right. The widespread suppression of speech may cause us to doubt that state sovereignty is worthy of respect under Rawls’s and Walzer’s discussion of well-ordered societies. An obligation to intervene to protect free speech may persuade states to refrain from muzzling the media or jailing dissidents.
Transnational self-elected elites making “the world safe of democracy” or for their own supremacy? How many have children serving in the military, I wonder. Just look at how few in our State Department were willing to serve in civilian reconstruction in Iraq or Afghanistan. Yeah, “leading from behind”, as in Groucho Marx saying, “follow me, you go first,” making a tragic joke of core national interests in security that are actually recognized by average Americans, substituting instead rationalizations for scattered interventions although nice not essential and frittering away our lives and resources.
Added: Mark Safranski posts on this post, adding the key conclusion:
This is not an argument over whether genocide is bad and should be prevented or the positive good of Western liberal societal values but rather over how power will be exercised in our name, for what reasons and by whom. Any good ends sought under a putative R2P doctrine can be done today if the political will for intervention is present. That will is crystalized when the ends, ways and means are scrutinized in open, free, debate under our constitutional norms, not by a self-appointed vanguard.
Also, read Saints Go Marching In in The National Interest: (H/T: American Power blog's Donald Douglas)
. The conclusion:
As Libya shows, war and utopia should not be mixed up. War is too serious, utopia too unserious, for that.
Perhaps the SAT does roughly correspond to IQ, but the reason to use IQ is to take into account unrealized potential in those who have had the misfortune of not being exposed to adequate education or of stimulating environments.
Admittedly, most people with intellectual ambition and special ability find a way to pursue it in youth, but there are surely plenty of diamonds in the rough out there with undiscovered glitter. If I were a college admissions officer, I'd want a kid with a 160 IQ and mediocre SATs over an over-achiever with decent SATs and a mediocre IQ.
Mind you, this is all about academic potential, not life potential. That's an entirely different topic. Only God can measure a life.
The other day I went into my favorite Mexican restaurant, favorite because it doesn't serve the usual Americanized border food of just tacos and burritos but real(er) Mexican food. I had the goat meat soup, lifting with my hands the flesh covered bones to chew on. Mexican chicken soup is particularly tasty, so I suggested to the owner adding chicken feet to nibble on. He replied that it was also a favorite of his, we both remembering a restaurant in Ensenada that served it and was always packed with locals and foreigners (like my father and me, who like other poor people in our youth made good use of every part of the chicken), but has been displaced by tourist food for the nearby cruise ship port.
There's a post that is circulating that humorously and realistically describes the staples of immigrant Jewish foods. I grew up on them all, and delight when I make some of them or rarely find a restaurant that gets one right. My boys dig in and ask why they haven't had more of this. I joke that McDonalds is not named McDonaldwitz. Many complain that such foods are cardiac arresters. I just finished a series of extensive heart tests, the cardiologist surprised that my heart is much younger than I am.
Lean cuts of beef, like top round and flank steak (London Broil), are not worth grilling, and should not be grilled, without marinating them overnight first. Cooks say 10 hours at bare minimum. Otherwise, these dense, wood-like cuts are like chewing gum when grilled rare, and like leather when overcooked.
In other words, something you could easily choke on, requiring an annoying Heimlich Maneuver.
They have to be marinated in enough acid - vinegar or citrus -to loosen up the meat. Some alcohol - wine or beer - helps in addition to the vinegar. Many people seem to like to simply marinate these cuts overnight in pre-mixed Italian dressing. (I use plastic garbage bags for marinating things in.)
Even with a good 20 hours of marinating, London Broil needs to be sliced thin after grilling.
At dinner last night, with my lad, we observed the bartender administer the Heimlich Maneuver, successfully, to a person choking on a bite of steak. Seemed like quite a coincidence with our Heimlich post yesterday.
Turned out that the bartender, Manuel, is a part-time EMS guy and had performed this a number of times. Perhaps everybody thinks they know how to do it, but it doesn't hurt to review it all. Of course, the trick is to determine whether choking is a person's emergency, or whether it is something else.
They call choking a "Cafe Coronary" for good reason. Can look like a bad heart attack. Choking can kill you quicker than a heart attack.
Here's a quick reminder of how to do it. Need to use plenty of upward force with one hand as a fist. Don't worry about hurting them.
Does a restaurant have a duty to choking patrons? No.
What if a chunk of something is so stubbornly stuck that Heimlich doesn't work, and help is not quickly forthcoming? You can perform an emergency tracheotomy. A ball-point pen comes in handy.
President Obama tonight seemed simultaneously angry and nervous as he rushed through a speech that was transparently not worthy of a joint session of Congress. His great idea: Cobble together a mish-mash of old ideas (infrastructure spending, a payroll tax cut) and pay for it later, by asking the debt commission to come up with additional deficit reductions later, preferably by hiking taxes on the rich. The second half of the speech was a heated campaign rally aimed at a cartoon version of his future opponent.
Is there a meaningful difference between an 800 and a 770 on the Math section of the SAT?
My proposal for the SAT exams (which, for our overseas readers, is used to measure something called "college readiness" - although in the US today college readiness can mean ability to pay or to obtain loans and grants to pay. American colleges are full of kids who cannot even do basic trigonometry) is to make three sections, each with a fairly steep slope of demands from basic to subtle and advanced:
- Scientific and quantitative
- Literary, reading comprehension, and writing
- General academic information (ie history, the arts, religion, geography, etc)
Then to score each section with the usual academic letter grades, A+ to F (with A+ reserved for a perfect score because that means you know it all and can execute it without sloppiness).
If I had my druthers, I would add a regular IQ test also, but in the current atmosphere I don't think that would be accepted despite the fact that plenty of grad schools do require it. (I had to take an IQ twice, once for the army and once for grad school. I think maybe we had to take one in grade school too in order to assess our academic potential.)
...the sentimental idea that the intellectual differences between children are not real - or that they are real, but too upsetting to acknowledge - has taken hold of the popular imagination, whereas once such nonsense could only have been believed by a sociologist.
My son went to one of the comprehensives that replaced academically selective grammar schools. He is now studying law at university. Since he was likely to be correct about which of his peers would have passed and failed the eleven-plus had it still existed, I asked him if any of the likely failures had gone on to do surprisingly well under the comprehensive system.
Not one. I then asked if any of those whom he would have expected to pass the eleven-plus had gone on to do less well than he would have expected.
Several.
And then of course there is the question of the content of the education, even for those who “do well”. My son would be quick to acknowledge that he is an academic success but that he knows virtually nothing of British or European literature prior to the twentieth century. Indeed, he knows little of British or European history, even including the twentieth century. He knows nothing of the Bible, or the Christian tradition. Luckily, he is genuinely intelligent, and has a magpie-like gift for intellectual theft, seeing much of an idea from even the tiniest stolen morsel.
Read the whole thing. It's about "enforced compassion" and egalitarian ideology.
“[T]herapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning capacity for self-help . . . between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence.”
Good questions, in the comments at Watts from Andrew Harding:
The warmists forgot one thing when they tried to persuade the world that AGW is happening and that is common sense. They were unable to provide answers to the following questions: 1) Why should I be paying a fortune for my gas,electricity,petrol and flights and have my countryside disfigured by windmills when industrial giants like China and India do nothing and have booming economies? 2) What % of CO2 in the atmosphere is regarded as “safe”? 3) 3% of CO2 in the atmosphere is man made, how do we deal with the other 97%? 4) Why have we had three cold winters in a row (with a fourth predicted) when we were told that AGW would mean that snow in the UK would be a thing of the past? 5) Likewise with the cool and wet summers? 6) Why are we building more wind turbines when we need power stations running in the background to provide power when the wind doesn’t blow? 7) Why are people who question AGW derided, insulted and described as “mentally ill” by AGW supporters? 8) If the science is “settled” why do we need more money pumped into research? 9) Is AGW as likely to end the world as HIV, bird flu, swine flu, tobacco, alcohol, mad cow disease, the millennium bug, 2012 and whatever date this year that some idiot told us would end mankind? 10) Climategate, hockey sticks, lawyers paid vast sums to prevent data paid for by the public, being seen by the public? 11) The global economic meltdown will be nothing in comparison to what will happen to the worldwide
Returned home at 3:45 P.M. yesterday from pitching for Little League batting practice. Garage door opener did not work. No electricity. Only carry car key, so got house key from secret hiding place. Told all not to open refrigerator for any reason. Got out my 1950's AM transistor radio and tuned to local news station. No one had a clue; just lots of jabber. Got out my 9 flashlights and camping lantern, plus battery powered Jack-o-Lanterns. Gavin (6) is ecstatic that it's Halloween and wants to go trick-or-treating. Supper is room-temp cans of Spaghettios. Yummy. Radio says that school is cancelled for Friday. The boys are even happier. They're deprived of snow days and hurricane days here in San Diego. Kids on my block all playing in the street. No parents mention any regret at missing President Obama's re-run of sameo-sameo speech. Radio says that a worker in Arizona power company tripped something or other during routine maintenance that cascaded throughout western Arizona, Imperial and San Diego counties, southern Orange County, and northern Baja Mexico. Spokesperson for power company at news conference says that the lack of building power plants and power lines (while not mentioning the envirocrazies) makes the power grid more vulnerable. Electricity returned to my area at 3-minutes to 10 P.M. Wife immediately looks for the TV listings so she doesn't miss the ten-thousandths rerun of Law And Order. I finish a spy novel and go to sleep.
If you want to know the one word missing from President Obama's speech, guess, than click here for the answer.
TWEET from skateboarding superhero Tony Hawk: "Is a blackout in North County a way to force the pseudo-hippies to see what it's like to truly 'go green?' Panic on the streets of Leucadia."
We've all seen this sort of urban death spiral happen in many places. Unionization, government costs, and living costs drive business away, taxes rise to support government, the middle class leaves the city behind to drugs, welfare, and dysfunction with a disappearing tax base and a nasty reputation. It is entirely predictable. Hartford, CT is a classic case, voted most pleasant medium-sized city to live in, in the USA, around 1955.
Next, forks? When I took my cc handgun licensing course, I met a guy who had used a baseball bat to fracture the skull of a burglar in his house. (Note to our Brit readers: Cops winked at him and said "Good job.")
This speech sounds pretty much exactly like all his other failed speeches. Pretty much every job he talks about, just like in 2009, 2010, and 2011 are government jobs or jobs dependent on government.
What do most administrators actually do? The answer, Ginsberg assures us, is what many senior faculty suspect: almost nothing of any intellectual value. His well-documented catalogue of make-work projects includes endless meetings to fashion long-term “strategic” plans filled with boilerplate and homilies (commonly called “vision statements”) that are quickly forgotten, expensive conferences that are dripping in psychobabble and activities like canoeing to sharpen “decision-making skills,’ and supervising committees to concoct meaningless benchmarks, targets and lists of “best practices.” All the while, the administrators voice the latest managerial buzzwords (e.g., SWOT, ECM, and MBO) to impress gullible outsiders. Further, add expensive image polishing campaigns and energetic fund-raising whose purpose is often to hire yet more administrators.
Lean cuts of beef, like top round and flank steak (London Broil), are not worth grilling, and should not be grilled, without marinating them overnight first. Cooks say 10 hours at bare minimum. Otherwise, these dense, wood-like cuts are like chewing gum when grilled rare, and like leather when overcooked. 
