Wednesday, January 5. 2011
 Reader Buddy prompted me to refresh my memory of the Children's Crusades.
While of no historical importance, there is a cautionary tale in the story.
The story begins:
One day in May 1212 there appeared at Saint-Denis, where King Philip of France was holding his court, a shepherd-boy of about twelve years old called Stephen, from the small town of Cloyes in the Orléannais. He brought with him a letter for the King, which, he said, had been given to him by Christ in person, who had appeared to him as he was tending his sheep and who had bidden him go and preach the Crusade. King Philip was not impressed by the child and told him to go home. But Stephen, whose enthusiasm had been fired by his mysterious visitor, saw himself now as an inspired leader who would succeed where his elders had failed. For the past fifteen years preachers had been going round the country-side urging a Crusade against the Moslems of the East or of Spain or against the heretics of Languedoc. It was easy for an hysterical boy to be infected with the idea that he too could be a preacher and could emulate Peter the Hermit, whose prowess had during the past century reached a legendary grandeur. Undismayed by the King's indifference, he began to preach at the very entrance to the abbey of Saint-Denis and to announce that he would lead a band of children to the rescue of Christendom. The seas would dry up before them, and they would pass, like Moses through the Red Sea, safe to the Holy Land.
 *for a whole two hours!
I think I'll be a sociologist in my next lifetime. I've always been intrigued by cultural conditioning and changing perspectives. Even more so when I'm the subject of the aforementioned changing perspectives.
Following are two posts on the subject. The first was made a few years ago, when I bought my 40' liveaboard boat. And, as if that wasn't enough of a perspective change, what happened the other day actually put me in the greenie class.
The topic is wind power. Like you, I've mocked, scorned and belittled it for years. What a fraud! Without fat government subsidies, it'd be as dead as geothermal energy and ocean wave power. Just another greenie notion without a lick of sense.
Until.
Continue reading "Doc goes green*"
At The American, Living in the Political Wake of the Bubble. A quote:
One of the biggest causes of the bubble and financial crisis was the government itself. How will this highly political body be able to criticize the government? Let us recall the excellent question posed to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke by Senator Jim Bunning: “How can you regulate systemic risk when you are the systemic risk?”
My girlfriend always laughs during sex - no matter what she's reading.
Steve Jobs
Was going through photos, and liked this one from the lad's Woodstock, VT wedding in Aug. 09.
This is the Simon Pearce factory (and restaurant) in Quechee, where we had the jolly rehearsal dinner. That's the party on the porches. If you wanted to walk around, you could go downstairs and watch the glass-blowing.
Tuesday, January 4. 2011
I see Oil price ‘threat to recovery’.
Crude oil pricing is fascinating to me, but I know little about it. I do know that OPEC controls the big spigot, and thus controls global supply and global pricing. (Pricing is global, not local, and I do know that it is determined, in the final details, by global commodities exchanges.) But, in an interesting and rather cool feedback loop, if oil is too high, it can begin to strangle economies, reducing demand and thus reducing the prices the oil producers can get.
I also know that the American oil companies are, sadly, rather small players on the world scene, nowadays:
We probably have readers who can explain the vicissitudes of crude oil pricing, from the producers to the pump. If you can, please do. In 100 words or less (or is it "fewer"?).
At Smithsonian. Always wondered how they filled that space with water for the mock sea battles.
This January, the BD family is devoting itself to enjoyable DVD series from Santa. That Ken Burns Jazz series is one (the old photos, film footage, and the music are well-worth it).
And, as part of our planned summer trip, we are alternating the Jazz with Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor and the History of Ancient Egypt.
The Teaching Company has some good sales on right now. You can really pick any random course and find it interesting and life-expanding. Plus, unlike college, you get the best teachers, collected from all over the world. Home schoolers should use these courses. Lots of libraries have them now. Each one comes with a study guide.
We love these courses. Some are fine on audio, but some require the DVDs.
The trip (cruise, that is) for which we are preparing is below (we are only doing the Rome to Athens leg of the voyage, due to time and $ constraints). I have been eager to get back to Turkey.
Do I need a better camera?
Via Mankiw, from Tierney: Economic Optimism? Yes, I’ll Take That Bet. A quote:
You can always make news with doomsday predictions, but you can usually make money betting against them.
A reader sent in this pic of dying, discarded Christmas trees. Mine is still standing proud, outdoors, in its stand in the snow. I hate to let them go.
How Obama Gets to 270 in 2012. "It's all in the math — and the numbers aren't looking good for the GOP."
 Image from Don't Touch My (Area of government intervention Here) Junk
As frustration grows, airports consider ditching TSA
Earthquakes and climate change: Stupidity of the day
Intelligence is for stupid people
Insty noted this Harry Stein Book: I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous [Paperback]
Synthstuff reports from the small biz arena
The Alexandria Church Bombing: The Plot Thickens
Iconoclast: Don't blame the West - The 'root causes' of Islamist terrorism do not lie in poverty or western imperialism
In The Arena:
D-Day is coming for Republicans. They can't keep this charade of being the party of fiscal discipline much longer without showing America their plan for cutting the deficit. The won an election without doing it but they can't govern without doing it. They have been big talkers up to this point but no specifics. America awaits how they plan on cutting spending and taxes at the same time and making a dent in the deficit. Maybe it is not their D-Day but their Waterloo.
Reason on Obamacare: The law will penalize doctors to pay patients and penalize patients to pay doctors. A quote:
... the administration is defining Medicare fraud down to include “unnecessary” and “ineffective” care. And to root this out, it plans to make expanded use of private mercenaries—officially called Recovery Audit Contracts—who will be authorized to go to doctors’ offices and rummage through patients’ records, matching them with billing claims to uncover illicit charges. What’s more, Obamacare increases the fine for billing errors from $11,000 per item to $50,000 without the government even having to prove intent to defraud.
This is utter insanity. And it has been caused by the transformation of health care into a government-controlled industry where the natural, self-regulating forces of the market have been badly subverted.
George Will: Sarah Palin Cannot Be Elected President
If she tries to run, she will damage her brand. She's a fine spokesperson, for now. She should run for some other office if she wants to be a pol. I think she's better as a voice in the wilderness.
Salcedo: The Spaghetti Strategy: Advice to Republicans - A strategy to advance freedom by keeping President Obama and his radical appointees on the defensive
Gateway: Russia to Lay Off 200,000 Federal Employees, Cuba to Lay Off 1,000,000 Federal Employees, Obama Hires 25,000 More Federal Employees
Europe starts confiscating private pension funds
Monday, January 3. 2011
At Reason, Ronald Reagan, Ron Paul, & the Fed: Q&A with David Stockman. I can remember when Stockman related how Reagan was never really serious about shrinking government.
Stockman caught hell from the true believers for that blasphemy.
How Videogames Are Changing the Economy - From Silicon Valley to China to media, they are leading the next productivity revolution. So hug a geek today.
I have never played a video game, and have no idea how anybody finds the time in life to do so. I am either blessed or cursed with more things I like to do, and more people I like to spend time with, than I have time for. However, the article says that there is much of real use emerging from the technology.
At Powerline, Europe's Doomed Generation.
Educated, over-credentialed, and entitled. Sounds familiar, and it is not a good thing. I wish I had a solution to propose, but I don't. Perhaps many people will need to be inventive and create their own work.
He sounds like our own Bruce Kesler when he says:
That is what happens when government inserts itself into every employment decision and when labor unions are given quasi-official powers and status. The result is economic disaster, a disaster first suffered by the young. What has happened in Europe, especially Southern Europe, is a flashing red alert, warning the United States not to follow the same path of government interventionism and union empowerment. Yet that is exactly the direction in which the Obama administration is trying to take us. It is deeply ironic that Obama came to office in part because of support from young voters who are too ill-informed to see the effects that his policies, if implemented, would have on them.
 Had a chance this weekend to watch the first CD in this nice Christmas gift. It's an absorbing Ken Burns series (2001), although it can be criticized on several levels.
I like it. I learned that Jazz was first called "Jass music," maybe after the Jasmine perfume the whores wore in the whorehouses in with this music was typically played.
It's about time we re-posted this flooded-woods multi-story duck blind:
 It's Back To Work Monday. Back To Grim Reality, and Back To The Gym At 5:30 AM. If you are just back to Maggie's, and have a moment, please scroll down and catch up on our posts from the past week.
We saw The King's Speech last night. Good stuff. Logue basically functioned as the King's psychotherapist. A fine friendship. It's a shame that the King died so young. His docs advised him to smoke, "for his nerves." Lung cancer.
Mobile phone radiation linked to people jumping to conclusions
NYT: Public Workers Facing Outrage as Budget Crises Grow
FrontPage’s Person of the Year: The Tea Party
She was the single mother who claimed her town was poisoned by its water supply... but was Erin Brockovich wrong?
David Warren: Is history bunk?
VDH: I, I, Me, Me, My, My — for Pacifism!
The Olive Tree Initiative: A Fig Leaf for Anti-Semitism?
Disposing of a new light bulb in Maine — this is not a joke
Spot the political haters
Just Another Radical Obama Appointee
Cathy Davidson, nominated for the National Council on the Humanities, is another in a long line of highly questionable Obama appointees.
Barone: Personal Well-Being Overshadows Income Inequality
...there's little evidence that most Americans begrudge the exceedingly high earnings of the likes of Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg or J.K. Rowling. We believe they have earned their success and don't see how taking money away from them will make the rest of us better off.
Free markets are great for the creative, ambitious, and energetic. Who would want to de-incentivize those folks? We regular people are in their debt for what they add to life.
Sunday, January 2. 2011
 FYI, at Thompson. Still, not cheap.
Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times sums up the best that liberals can come up with for reducing income inequality: better education for the poor, to reduce The Upward Mobility Gap. He correctly points out that this goal is one of the few that Democrats and Republicans can agree upon. And, then he stops.
The goal is fine but how to get there is the question.
McManus says, “Opportunity in America isn't what it used to be.” Liberal nostrums fail to mention the biggest barrier to reducing income inequality – if considered needing reduction -- is government, whether one advocates more or less government programs.
To now, more government programs actually create more government workers, their pay and benefits unaffordable while diminishing basic public services. Less government programs tend toward wholesale cuts in unaffordable welfare and government worker benefits, while failing to refocus funding on productive education and related infrastructure.
As well, McManus passes over the “moral” or lifestyle elements that are necessary to taking advantage of educational and employment opportunities as being difficult to measure. Yet, these are crucial.
Three of the ways that the poor found rungs on the ladder of upward mobility, manufacturing jobs and small businesses, are under continuing pressure, while illegal immigrants reduce even sustenance jobs for citizens. US manufacturing employment has shrunk for repetitive tasks while requirements for technical education and skills has increased, overall production holding its own. Lesser costly environmental and workplace regulations, along with lower wages, has drawn much lower skilled manufacturing abroad. More government regulations and greater competition due to reduced transport costs and increased imports of staples has made small business less able to survive or thrive. Illegal immigrants – mostly uneducated -- mostly impact manual labor opportunities for the poorest American citizens, while consuming much government funding that could otherwise, maybe, hopefully, be redirected toward support and education foundations for poor American citizens.
Government programs that focus on useful job skills are un- or underfunded, in favor of expensive contemporary elite culture curriculums, especially victimology humanities. Legal immigrants – thankfully -- fill our sciences. Government programs that sustain or increase welfare dependency, and regulations that discourage risk taking, perpetuate a permanent lower income class. The virtues of stark choices may be overrated, but elimination of such choices is less virtuous. Corruption and self-dealing, either financial or ethical, is unacceptable. Fish stink from the head. The same standards must apply to chieftains of government as to of business. Lack of performance must not be tolerated in government any more than it is in private enterprise.
Two examples of the difference culture makes, my father and my son. The common thread, across the generations, is work habits, learned young, family emphasis on useful education, and behavioral skills and focus.
My father, born 1920 in Detroit, from a large poor immigrant family, dropped out of high school, did manual labor and worked for local retailers, then went to trade school to become a tool & die maker (others in the family had similar life-stories), thereafter earning a decent worker’s income. His choices were stark, the path up clear.
My son, born 2000 in California, from a middle-class family, is an A student. The caliber of primary education in his school district is high, the primary differences among schools and their scores being the lesser parental involvement at the schools in the poorer areas. My wife and I are pretty demanding and involved. There are almost no manufacturing jobs locally, the few being highly technical. There are few local stores, and laws forbid he being hired for anything. Anyway, what retail jobs there are go to otherwise unemployed humanities college graduates! New Years eve he watched MTV’s Jersey Shore revelry, before getting bored and going to sleep. Last night, he watched Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees. After the movie, he said to me that people used to act nicer. On one side of my house are the two, contemporary culture, lazy 20s boys taking four years to complete two-year AA degrees, their courses being weak humanities type. Their father had gotten them manual labor construction jobs and, though they are big and strong, the illegal immigrants outworked them. On the other side is a former Eagle Scout, majoring in a technical field at a top college.
Today’s choices are no less stark than they once were. The only real difference is between those who recognize that and those who avoid the choices or enrich themselves by sheltering those who would otherwise benefit from starker choices.
Malanga at City Journal: Pessimism-Proof
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