Tuesday, January 11. 2011
 I wonder what our readers use for high-quality computer speakers. I am using my machine more and more to listen to music while doing paperwork, even though I have a fine real sound system in my office for radio and CDs. I won't use headphones, and I do not waste time with computer games: engaging in real life offers more than enough games for me - and the result counts.
A friend told me the Bose stuff is good, but I have no clue.
Advice requested. Price, within reason, is no object.
 The Three Media Stooges, via Legal Ins
Insty: Mental Illness and mass murder
And also, a book: Madness in the Streets : How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill. The PW blurb at Amazon says:
Taking aim at advocacy groups who view the homeless as ordinary people down on their luck, the authors of this scorching critique cite findings that 30% to 40% of the homeless suffer from major mental illness, and that a high proportion are substance abusers. Isaac, a sociologist, and freelance journalist Armat, blame the abandonment of the homeless mentally ill on the anti-psychiatry movement (led by Thomas Szasz, Ronald Laing, among others), on civil libertarians and on psychiatrists who foster the "delusion that preventive community psychiatry could eliminate mental illness." Arguing that we have replaced the mental hospital with the 18th-century poorhouse which threw together the mentally ill, the retarded, criminals and the displaced, they warn that a humane system of care will be costly and might involve treatment of some mentally ill persons against their will. Their support for judicious use of electroshock therapy will also stir controversy.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Pic from last January, in CT -
Monday, January 10. 2011
Barry Rubin asks: If One Extremist Gunmen Can Do So Much Damage in America, How About Ten Million Such People In The Middle East?
So, why do so many liberals excuse and leftists ally with the Arab and Iranian radicals and haters?
When one crazed or ideologically obsessed gunman starts shooting in Arizona, people condemn him and start bemoaning their society. How about a place with ten million people like that who are treated as heroes?...
Let’s say that the proportion of lies, slanders, and incitement in the American discourse is one-tenth of one percent of all the words spoken on controversial issues. The equivalent figure for the Middle East is well over 95 percent.
In addition to that tone, there is not only a total lack of balance but an absence of the other side altogether.
And in addition to those two points, the level of factual accuracy has a huge gap separating it from reality. (Though, admittedly, that gap has been narrowing in recent years as Western standards decline).
And in addition to those three points, while extremists tend to be marginal in the United States, they are in control--either politically or at least rhetorically--throughout most of the Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority worlds….
Now, let me ask some questions:
--If America is horrified in claiming that a tiny amount of mostly marginal extremism inspires one mad man to murder six people and try to kill a politician, how much violence can be traced to hundreds of thousands of mosques, media, teachers, and mainstream politicians daily preaching hatred literally millions of times a day?
--If the discourse throughout the Arabic-speaking world, Iran, increasingly in Turkey, and generally in Muslim-majority countries is almost 100 percent incitement, how can there be partners for peace or a hope of stability? What good do concessions do when the next day the culture of incitement and hatred goes on at full speed?
--If the degree of anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Jewish, and anti-Christian incitement is 100,000 times more intense and mainstream than any “Islamophobic” discourse in the West, while mitigating discourse—i.e., empathy, positive images, etc., toward “the other”—is one thousandth of a percent less, then which of these phenomenon is a greater threat and problem?
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.
(I hope this is my most inane post of 2011)
I don't get to malls very often, I am happy to say. Basically never, but I did join the Mrs. to check out Teavana on Sunday afternoon. We had run out of good tea. They had one of the Help Wanted signs. The place was busy. Help Wanted signs all over the place.
Well, it was a bit of an adventure for me. "Bird Dog Goes To The Mall." Your editor goes to lots of places, and loves to bang around NYC, but not malls or shops unless Home Depot counts. Nice clean mall with natural light and Palm trees all over. Packed with people, but I tried to avoid taking their photos. The main thing I noticed was the small-d democratic nature of the populace there. All types, all colors, every apparent level of evident prosperity or lack thereof, all languages, all ages, strolling, laughing, window-shopping, and joking around. A day off work. In the tea place, I heard German, Japanese, Chinese, French, and something I could not identify.
An agora. People having fun, spending money, looking at stuff. Too bad they couldn't have built a similar phenomenon on the town's streets, but perhaps people like the feeling of enclosure and predictability.
More Mall Adventure pics below -
Continue reading "Help Wanted: A Mall Adventure for Bird Dog"
Heather MacDonald: Restoring the Social Order - Twenty momentous years of conservative policy success in cities. She begins:
Conservative ideas are responsible for the two great urban-policy successes of the last quarter-century: the breathtaking drops in crime and in welfare dependency since the early 1990s. You’d never know it from members of the opinion elite, however, who have rarely recognized these successes, much less their provenance. So let’s recapitulate an epic battle about the foundations of social order, a battle that had not just a clear winner but also a clear loser: the liberal policy prescriptions for cities that many opinion makers and politicians still embrace. New York has been at the center of this battle because so many of the bad ideas that wreaked havoc on cities hatched there. Fortunately, so did many of the antidotes.
Manhattan, early morning, from the Whitestone Bridge
The New River Valley Outdoorsman. It's good fun to read his posts, in the left-side column.
Via Dino:
One veteran Democratic operative, who blames overheated rhetoric for the shooting, said President Barack Obama should carefully but forcefully do what his predecessor did. “They need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” said the Democrat. “Just like the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people.”
And politicans wonder why people do not respect them.
 God, nature, and chance must be against me, because I failed to win that $300 million Powerball. Oh well, maybe next time. And when I do, I'll buy a nice ski place near Killington.
The one pictured is for sale. I think it's ugly, but it would work OK as a party house.
"Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation."
Kin Hubbard
Sunday, January 9. 2011
Had a fine New England hunt today with Gwynnie, another pal, and the new pup. We did manage to bag a few birds. This enthusiastic young Lab (only his third real hunt) puts on a good point. I think it would be a shame to train the point out of him, but some folks like a Lab to flush the bird right away.
More photos on continuation page below:
Continue reading "New England Pheasants "
A reference to Nagel's classic What is it like to be a bat?: What is it Like to be a Man? A quote from the essay:
If science offers a complete account of nature, then it must be able to offer a complete account of human conscious experience, since human conscious experience is a feature of nature. It must be able to say something about what it is like to be a man. Accordingly, for several decades, a relentless effort has been undertaken by those in the disciplines of cognitive science and philosophy of mind to conceptualize such an account – an explanation of the mental in terms of the purely physical. The results of this endeavor are unambiguous – it has been a complete disaster. One would be hard pressed to identify, in all of intellectual history, a philosophical detour more obstinately barren, more improgressive, more tangled up in empty verbiage, more devoid of genuine insight, more irrelevant to life as it is actually lived, than is to be discovered in contemporary philosophy of mind. John Searle described the futile history of this materialist project as follows:
One sees this pattern over and over. A materialist thesis is advanced. But the thesis encounters difficulties; the difficulties take different forms, but they are always manifestations of an underlying deeper difficulty, namely, the thesis in question denies obvious facts that we all know about our own minds. And this leads to ever more frenzied efforts to stick with the materialist thesis and try to defeat the arguments put forward by those who insist on preserving the facts. After some years of desperate maneuvers to account for the difficulties, some new development is put forward that allegedly solves the difficulties, but then we find that it encounters new difficulties, only the new difficulties are not so new – they are really the same old difficulties.
Well, that was easy.
The one big question after yesterday's horrific shooting was whether the mainstream media was going to blame Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Tea Party, Bible-thumpin' gun clingers everywhere, or simply Republicans in general.
Question asked, question answered.
Critics of Sarah Palin have already drawn a link between the shooting and the fact that the former Alaska governor put Giffords on a "target list" of lawmakers Palin wanted to see unseated in the midterm elections. - CBS News
“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” Ms. Giffords said last March. “But the thing is the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that.” - New York Times
Ms. Giffords was also among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time. - MSNBC
Afterward, she referred to the animosity against her by conservatives, including former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's decision to list Giffords' seat as one of the top "targets" in the November midterm elections. - USA Today
As of Saturday, Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' name appeared on a website titled "take back the 20" as part of a list originally issued by Sarah Palin of vulnerable House Democrats. A map on the site showed crosshairs over the contested Democratic districts. - CNN
Linking to a map of U.S. House districts that Sarah Palin's PAC wanted to "target" during the 2010 mid-term elections -- which sadly included crosshairs over Rep. Giffords' district (among others). DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas Tweeted, "Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin." - ABC News
What went unmentioned during this rampant outbreak of PDS was:
— According to the shooter's YouTube profile, two of his favorite books were Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. Now, maybe I'm just naive, but I doubt Sarah Palin has read either of those.
— And did you see the quote from Markos "Kos" Moulitsas up above? What also went unmentioned in the above articles is that Kos had a post up — now removed — referring to Giffords titled "My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!" Giffords, a centrist, voted against Pelosi in the recent Minority Leader race and is hated far more by the hard left for that indiscretion than by Palin & Company simply because she's not a Republican.
So, let a Lefty use the word "DEAD" — in all caps, no less — in an article about Giffords and that's perfectly okay, but let a Righty put (gasp!) crosshairs over her congressional district, and you're one step removed from being the next Beltway Sniper.
In related news:
Bristol Palin Pregnancy: Is Sarah Palin’s 5th Child Really Her Daughter's?
Who is Trig Palin's Mother?
Kathy Griffin's Next Target: Willow Palin
Bird Dog did a pic dump yesterday, before the shooting, including this gem. Have you ever seen anything more timely?
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
Egypt's Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as "human shields"
Krauthammer via Protein:
Americans are in the midst of a great national debate over the power, scope and reach of the government established by that document. The debate was sparked by the current administration’s bold push for government expansion – a massive fiscal stimulus, Obamacare, financial regulation and various attempts at controlling the energy economy. This engendered a popular reaction, identified with the Tea Party but in reality far more widespread, calling for a more restrictive vision of government more consistent with the Founders’ intent.
White flight from the Dems
US jobs report an ‘utter mess’
The Distraction Of Birthright Citizenship
Shrinkwrapped: Sex and War; Political Correctness and Perversion
Surber: Believe in global warming, collect $2.4 billion
Related, via If it were only about the science:
What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. It doesn’t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn’t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind’s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies – and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis….
"Moral Pron"? Cool phrase.
Why the Left Loves the Lies of Climate “Science” - Climate science's only product is political because its only patrons are politicians.
Brooks on health care: Buckle Up for Round 2
WaPo blames Israel for Palestinian barbarity (updated: NY Times too)
Reason: Defending the Right to Offend
Truth in America: Am Spectator
Best of Left-Wing Hate From 2010
Acts 10:34-43
10:34 Then Peter began to speak to them: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality,
10:35 but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.
10:36 You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ--he is Lord of all.
10:37 That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced:
10:38 how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.
10:39 We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree;
10:40 but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear,
10:41 not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
10:42 He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.
10:43 All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name."
Home sweet home. Even got central heat. Gas heat.
And my 27 year-old Brooks tux still fits me. Trousers were let out an inch a few years ago, though. Darn good investment: 4-5 times/year, ready whenever needed. Sharp-dressed man, is Bird Dog. When he wants to be, that is. Which is rare.
Saturday, January 8. 2011
Terry Eastland in Weekly Standard:
What might be called the unlimiting of the national government began to take place during the New Deal, when the Supreme Court understood congressional authority to be so capacious as to leave little that Washington could not regulate. Congress largely accepted the Court’s jurisprudence and extended its legislative reach, losing sight of the core purposes of government and building our big and costly welfare state.
I have been sorting through my file of images, and found some that are worth posting before discarding. I suppose some have been used in past years. I don't recall where most of them came from.
I may need to do this for a few Saturdays, to clean out the files...
Steal them at will.
More below the fold -
Continue reading "My first fun and useful image dump"
Cold up here today. Love it, love that chill, but hate that stupid green logo for a macho ski area. Anyway, this is worth posting while I take a beer break to warm my fingers and toes: House Votes to Repeal “Job-Killing” Health Care Law 236-181.
It will go nowhere, with the Senate and the O's veto gel pen. Still, a strong message.
Hey - big par-tay here tonite. Readers invited, with toga or thong or whatever. Release those inhibitions! That is your News Junkie, down in front, locked and loaded.
 I discovered something pretty neat at Office Depot a while back. .3 millimeter doesn't sound like much, maybe the width of a hair, but, in my case, it actually made a real, tangible difference when it comes to the ease of shopping trips.
First off, if you aren't hip to gel pens yet, you are just squaresville, baby. The main reason 'razor point' pens came into popularity years ago is because, unlike cheap ballpoints, the ink starts flowing immediately. Gel pens do likewise, but they don't have that scratchy feel that razor points have.
To note is that almost every pen out there, regardless of type, lays down a line .7 millimeters wide. Somebody once decided that's the standard and there she be. Then the other day I was looking over gel pens at Office Depot and way over to one side I noticed a package that said "1.0" for the line width. A star was born.
What's interesting is that the line doesn't necessarily look 'fatter' as much as 'darker'. I'm speaking of black ink in this case, and that .3 millimeter made all the difference as to whether or not I had to haul out my stoopit reading glasses every time I wanted to glance at my shopping list. That .3 millimeter crossed some delicate boundary in my eyes' field of focus.
The pen I grabbed is here. Most of the larger pen companies have a 1.0 gel stashed somewhere.
Coincidentally, the next day I was giving some info to my mom over the phone and got the old "Darn, hold on a sec — this pen doesn't work." Naturally, I immediately made a beeline for the Office Depot site and sent her a box of 12 just in time for Christmas.
I'd like to report that it was her favorite present, but that would be the elephant Chia Pet I gave her. The pens came in second. She was, however, so thrilled at having discovered (1) gel pens to begin with, and (2) 1.0 gels pens at that, that she promptly doubled the amount of the Xmas check she sent me.
A victory for .3 millimeters, everywhere.
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Moe Lane at RedState: 