Saturday, November 20. 2010
Been to Chicago several times, mostly for business or meetings but once just for social. Nice little town, but it isn't ready for the big time yet.
After careful consideration, Maggie's Farm has concluded that what Chicago needs most for its future is a black woman Left-wing mayor with a history of pushing the limits. It's time to bring high integrity, union inspiration, and some caring government muscle to Chicago politics. Time for Carol.
We ardently support Carol Mosely Braun for Mayor of Chicago. She's not a namby-pamby weasel like the potty-mouth ballerina Rahm.
If you like Detroit, you'll love the Chicago of the future.
I have a pal who is in the hospital, being treated for a serious case of Babesiosis. I visited him at the hospital yesterday, and determined that he would survive because I was able to elicit a few laughs - but it can be a very nasty and life-threatening disease (or a mild and insignificant one). He was on two or three IV antibiotics, and a morphine pump for the headache.
It's a bug like Malaria, and its vector is the tiny Deer Tick, same bugger as Lyme Disease. Dog ticks are annoying, but we woodsy and doggy people get those on us all the time. No big deal. Those Deer Ticks (actually, they are mouse ticks more than deer ticks) are the real problem for people who spend time outdoors.
Not to make light of a serious topic, but I can't resist re-posting "I'd Like to Check You For Ticks." It's a guy song, but the gals seem eager for Brad to check them. It must be lots of fun to be a country star:
The furor over revealing body scans and pat down searches for those who refuse the body scan has several themes, privacy and effectiveness of alternative means. It is part of the revolt against increased government intrusiveness, as well as just another way for scribblers to fill space.
Here’s an idea: Let all those who object to scans and searches (according to a poll, about 1%) to fly on designated planes, after signing that there will be no law suit for being blown up, and that their assets can be tapped to repay the airline for its plane. – That will, also, make the other 99% safer, as bombers fly on these planes instead.
Yea, not practical.
But, either is creating a well-trained workforce of adept profilers, even without bounds. The volume of US air traffic is mega-multiples of Israel’s. Lotsa luck with that one, even if the disagreements with profiling somehow miraculously disappeared. -- And, wouldn’t we want layers of security anyway, like scans and searches?
Sure, any method has its downsides, and none can be perfect, but that beats a rapid, explosive downside for flyers.
OK, commenters, have fun ranting. Please add how often you fly commercial airlines, and whether you are willing to scatter your remains to the birds.
I guess I am a genius too. I drinks a bit, and me stays up late.
Science says it, so it must be true.
Somebody informed Insty about this book: The Blame Game: The Complete Guide to Blaming: How to Play and How to Quit
But blame is essential for self-esteem
Sol Stern tells the story of Tel Aviv
Stefani Germanotta is buying a Scottish castle
You needed to know that.
Getting Ahead In Today’s Mad Max Real Estate Market - Why the end game of this housing bust is going to be unlike any other in my lifetime. He says:
I've been through quite a few housing booms and busts. I’ve renovated houses so old they still showed visible damage from King Philip’s War, so I’ve been exposed to every housing bust since wigwams, one way or the other. The early nineties were pretty bad, as I recall. The late seventies/early eighties were Armageddon. But they all mostly had discrete causes and effects, and in fairly short order Metacomet or Jimmy Carter or whoever was mucking up the landscape got run out of town, and something like normalcy returned.
This time I'm not so sure.
Mona Charen: Why Sarah Palin Shouldn't Run
Like I say, I love her but she ain't my candidate. She is good at what she's doing - she should keep it up and enjoy life.
Strangling innovation with red tape
START: Another Phony Crisis, Another Rush To Vote
Via Betsy:
Charles Krauthammer sees the statement "Don't touch my junk," as a metaphor for how Americans are thinking about their government today.
And at Powerline:
Krauthammer explains: "The junk man's revolt marks the point at which a docile public declares that it will tolerate only so much idiocy.
Secretary of State Clinton Lashes Out at Europe; Demands That They Appease Muslims
Kotkin: How Liberalism self-destructed. A quote:
Liberalism once embraced the mission of fostering upward mobility and a stronger economy. But liberalism’s appeal has diminished, particularly among middle-class voters, as it has become increasingly control-oriented and economically cumbersome.
Today, according to most recent polling, no more than one in five voters call themselves liberal.
and
Modern-day liberalism... is often ambivalent about expanding the economy — preferring a mix of redistribution with redirection along green lines. Its base of political shock troops, public-employee unions, appears only tangentially interested in the health of the overall economy.
Sen Brown treads a fine line in push to alter health law
I think he wants to be re-elected. Guess he likes the gig.
Wisdom via SDA:
I admit I have been as reluctant to admit this as anyone. My whole career has been based on the proposition that somewhere, under all the insults and lying and general bad behaviour that makes up the bulk of political life, there was some genuine issue at stake: that if you could just strip away the politics, you would eventually get to the policy. It has taken me all these years to understand that, no, it’s just politics all the way down.
 Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth -
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth -
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall? -
If design govern in a thing so small.
I usually let poems stand on their own, but I cannot resist commenting that this little poem is itself design personified, as complex and intricate as a watch or a cobweb. I think he spent a lot of time working this poem. BTW, as the poem discusses, Heal-All, or Self-Heal (Prunella) is blue (as in photo).
Friday, November 19. 2010
If you are around NYC in the next couple of months, you might get a kick out of the Train Show at the NY Botanical Garden. I've seen it. Magical. The whole thing, other than the trains, is organic...or, should I say, "sustainable."
Gwynnie iPhoned me a pic from the preview of the show this afternoon. That is Gracie Mansion - the old farmhouse overlooking the East River which is the official residence of the Mayor of New York. (Bloomberg doesn't live in it, though. He can afford fancier digs.)
Show opens to the public tomorrow:
I am doing paperwork this afternoon, listening to Mark subbing for Rush.
Is there something wrong with me for preferring Mark to Rush? (Not that I am not amused by Rush, but Mark cracks me up with every sentence. He must have a good case of permanent mania. Or is he a speed freak genius?)
"Sustainability" is the latest greeny-Lefty fad, especially in academia. As with all Lefty fads, a tendency for threat and coercion quickly develops. At the same time, nobody is entirely sure what it means other than that some sort of conspicuous virtue with no meaningful effect seems to be involved.
From Thorne at NAS: The Sustainability Inquisition. It begins:
While using American University’s database for recording faculty publications, one professor noticed something unusual. After filling in information on authors, the title, the journal, the year, the volume, the pages, whether it was refereed, whether it was international, who publishes the journal, etc.—he came to a box asking whether this was sustainability research.
He was baffled. “What is sustainability research, anyway?” he wondered.
Read the whole thing. I think it's the replacement for the discredited Global Warming meme, or the Diversity meme, or whatever.
Whatever "sustainability" may mean to people, the only thing I know of with real sustainability is a perpetual motion machine. Or God. Everything else requires input, and the chemical destruction of something.
"Community is more important in life than food."
A friend's 84 year-old Mom
Related to our morning links comments about exposing the totalitaranism of the Left, read Vanden Heuvel: Send Hither a Swarm of Bureaucrats.
Vanden Heuvel's advice is yet more dreary evidence that the left's desire to transform America into some socialist paradise takes precedent over democratic processes. Day by day, thanks to twits like Vanden Heuvel, the left reveals its decidedly undemocratic character.
All of the name-calling of Conservatives as "fascists" and "Nazis" is pure projection. Conservatives want less government control and involvement in life - not more. Conservatives do not want to be controlled - or to control.
Get your eggs frozen?
100 leaked body scans (h/t Thompson)
Exhibitionists must love this
Protein:
The idea that America might inadvertently and incrementally fall into socialism is a great deal closer to the strategies of “actual existing socialists” than textbook definitions of economies nationalized at a single revolutionary blow. The reason Americans don’t understand this is that the universe of post-sixties socialism has remained largely hidden from public view. Yet this is Obama’s world. It’s time we got to know it.
Larry Elder: Clinton, Gore, and Kerry lost the white vote too
Woah!… Soros Group Says Obama Can Use Armed Forces to Push “Progressive” Agenda
Ah, exposing the totalitarism of the Left
Sen. Rockefeller: FCC Should Take FOX News, MSNBC Off Airwaves
Ah, exposing the totalitarism of the Left
Coyote: I am thinking about renaming the Chevy Volt the Chevy Bastiat.
Meet the 'New' Donald Berwick
This guy just can't wait to run your medical care. Yeah, more totalitarianism - for your own good. Isn't it comforting to know that some people know what is best for you?
Marginal Rev: Who again is supposed to cut the rate of growth of Medicare spending?
Condoms in Elementary School
For the pedophiles?
Where are the jobs? See below -
Thursday, November 18. 2010
Robert Bernstein, former Chair and president of Random House, and founding Chair of Human Rights Watch, details the many failings of HRW. If you want it summed up in one piece, by someone both knowledgeable and devoted to human rights, this is the one to read.
I won't go into all the ways HRW has gone seriously astray. But, below, is Bernstein's appeal to college students with which he concludes:
In closing, let me make a statement to whichever students choose to listen: When I was in Israel, I talked to 18 year-olds, both boys and girls, who were not going to college but instead were going into the army for three years and then for one month a year until 45 or 50 years old. They’ve been doing this for 60 years. And most of them have faced some kind of danger during that period. They are not involved in the peace process. They are involved in the defense of their country and have to hope that their government will avoid war. I also think of the Palestinian 18 year-olds – particularly those in Gaza who can’t get jobs because their economy is not thriving. I believe it is not thriving specifically because their government is bringing in arms and Israel is trying to stop them. And their government is preaching genocide. Many of these students can’t afford college and that leaves jihad as their only opportunity. If college students can help bring the human rights movement back to trying to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights truly universal in the Middle East, they will be making a valuable contribution.
If credible human rights watch is to have a future, and a worthwhile impact, it will depend upon the next generation of leaders. The current prominent NGOs, HRW, Amnesty, and most of the lesser known ones involved in the Middle East have surrendered their mission to terrorists and thugs.
Those who are suffering from terrorists and thugs are watching, and waiting, too long.
Does Human Rights Watch care? It just took $100-million from George Soros, "which should offset nicely the income lost from core donors who've walked away in the wake of a host of scandals." Read more
P.S.: As you'll read in Bernstein's speech, Natan Sharansky was one of the inspirations for Bernstein, and many others. Here is Sharansky recently at the San Diego Jewish Federation's event Celebrating Jewish Heroes (yes, that's Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul & Mary introducing him):
Celebration of Jewish Heroes - Natan Sharansky from Brad Slavin on Vimeo.
When Sipp and I exchanged emails about the charming house on the blog this morning, he decided to find out a bit about Moodus (where that house is). Here's the Moodus Wiki. (Moodus is a village in East Haddam, with a pop c. 1200 - depending on who is in jail or court-required rehab at a given moment).
What he discovered that was interesting to me was that Moodus was the smallest town in the US to receive federal urban renewal money in the 1960s. The old town center (pic below) was demolished.
The quaint village center, dubbed "Downtown Moodus", formerly located at the intersection of routes CT 151 and CT 149, was a popular destination for guests. However most of the village was razed after the citizens of East Haddam controversially voted in 1967 to accept Urban Renewal funding to rebuild Moodus commercial district a quarter mile east along CT 149.
The citizens immediately regretted their decision, but it was too late for the Dem-controlled Feds with their bulldozers and their developer allies.
The genius central planners had something more modern in mind (ie up-to-date strip malls), to be built 1/4 mile up the road. The soul of the village was killed. It's just one example of why we at Maggie's are so distrustful of genius government planners of anything. This ex-farming village, ex-middle-class resort village, is now a frequent hangout of ex-cons and cons-in-training, young gals without cars with too many tatts walking down the road to the minmart for chips, cigs, and beer, scruffy immigrants whose language one cannot identify, people on various dubious disabilities (as in nearby Middletown, CT), and abandoned or tumbling-down once-gracious homes with rooms for rent. Nobody goes to Moodus anymore, except to fill their gas tank.
Well, those "modern" renewal government-subsidized strips malls are now emptying, shabby, and falling down. Like, as I imagine it, "Pearly Nails" - boarded up. "Uncle Tsao's Quickee Chinee Takeout" - boarded up. "PIZZA POUR VOIS" - boarded up. (I'm sure there must be something good about Moodus still, but it's just a place on a map now, and not my sort of Yankee village anymore).
Thanks a lot, Uncle Sam, for modernizing Moodus. And thanks to you expert geniuses in DC who think you know better than us. See Detroit. And shame on the Connecticut Yankees who bought into such government baloney. The Feds rarely get anything right except through their military - thankfully, their main responsibility.
This site has some good posts on the topic of Moodus' destruction, including:
Pt 1. Legacy of "Progress" Gone Sour
Pt 2. Urban Renewal Flops in Moodus
Pt 3. Could Moodus Have Been Saved?
A quote:
Once the town opted for urban renewal funds, fixing up the town was no longer a viable solution. "With the influx of federal dollars, you had to play their game," explains Jim Gibbons, an urban planner with the UConn Extension Service in Haddam. "In order to accomplish smaller goals, you had to follow federal regulations and guidelines and at the time of the Moodus project urban renewal was oriented to demolition. To many critics of the program at the time, the correct title was ‘urban disruption.’ As an outsider, I think this was part of the problem with the Moodus project: It disrupted the neighborhood."
Here's a pic I took last weekend of an abandoned and boarded up church in (once) central Moodus.
Congressman Darryl Issa each year, via his Issa Family Foundation, sponsors a Christmas Pancake Breakfast and Toy Drive at Camp Pendleton, in cooperation with the Navy League. My boys and I go, gorge, and spread the gratitude to the children of Navy and Marine service members.
For those not in the area, please send monetary donations, any size. The Issa Family Foundation will match all monetary donations, so the bigger the better. Make tax-deductible check out to: S.D. Navy League/Homefront.
The address:
Issa Family Foundation; P.O. Box 1388; Vista, CA 92085
From Mead's excellent Pretty in Pink? Obama’s Dark Night of the Soul (my bold):
In January 2009, newly inaugurated President Obama believed that the road to success as president lay in pleasing the kind of intellectuals and the high priests of the liberal religion whose esteem he had long sought and pretty much always obtained. He seems to have thought that groups like the editorial board of the New York Times actually represented some serious force in American life. He also seems to have believed that with a few tweaks here and there what passes for political orthodoxy among the intelligentsia of the civil service unions provides a coherent and practical governing philosophy for the United States and that the aspirations of the most legalistically minded of the human rights community describe a feasible path toward world peace. He believed that if we were nicer to the leaders of other countries they would be nicer to us – with one important exception. He believed that if the President of the United States shook his little finger, the Prime Minister of Israel had no choice but to tremble and obey.
Read it all. Link above. I did not vote for the guy - I voted for, and gave max money to, the other, more harmless, doofus.
Great. Another 50,000- member government union, this time literally designed to get into our pockets. That's a lot of new big gummint voters.
Story at Surber.
 There is just something so wrong about this pic (from Drudge). It seems too gay, for one thing. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Our proposal for the TSA mess is to hire studly young men to grope the women, and hot young babes to grope the men.
Complaints would disappear. People might even line up for more thorough checks in the back room. Of course, they would have to revise those dorky pseudo-cop uniforms. They aren't cops - they are toll-collectors.
Related: Government: offensive, intrusive, expensive and ineffective all at once?
 A Brief History of Republicans and Democrats
That is cruel
Driscoll: The China Syndrome, Starring Tom Friedman as Jane Fonda
Tiger:
Is there any more graphic measure of the incompetence of our federal government than that it is the second half of November and nobody has the first clue what their tax rates will be for 2011?
Harvard MBAs Are Rushing to Wall Street Again. Yikes!
Via Althouse: In Defense of Going to Law School: A Prudential Perspective
Single, Childless Women Now Earn MORE Than Men: Do We Really Need MORE Federal Legislation?
Redistricting: Low-tax states will gain seats, high-tax states will lose them
Congress Getting Rich as It Bleeds Us Into Poverty
My thought about Palin too: High floor, low ceiling.
But I do like the lady. Related: It's Sarah's happiness that drives Libs nuts.
Roger Ailes Lets Rip
California Suggests Suicide; Texas Asks: Can I Lend You a Knife?
Idiot's guide to public sector that produces no wealth (h/t, Fausta):
This place had a For Sale sign and a No Trespassing sign in a sad old farming town in rural Connecticut. It has a couple of barns, sits on around 8 acres. Probably needs a little work.
Wednesday, November 17. 2010
 Those LED crank flashlights got me thinking about regular LED lightbulbs. They're expensive, but last almost forever - and they don't burn out, just slowly fade in intensity.
Here's the scoop on them.
Seems like a good choice for sockets that are impossible to reach. Has anybody tried them?
I agree with Cutler in the WSJ about early voting. In fact, I disagree with absentee voting and mail voting in general except for overseas military. If you want to vote, show up on Election Day with ID in hand, and do it the right way. Otherwise, don't vote.
WSJ: Too many voters are making decisions when horse-race coverage dominates the news, attention to issues is limited, and key debates haven't taken place.
 Had an outage for 8 hrs this morning. All it seems to take around here is a stiff breeze.
Re power outages, I just bought a few of these for stocking stuffers. Got one for Gwynnie's car, too. Sorry I got them right before the 2 for 1 deal began.
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