Thursday, June 3. 2010
No More Identity Politics; Palin Proves Old School Feminism is Dead. A quote from Lori Ziganto's piece (h/t, Linkiest):
The reason I’m happy that Palin and the “mama grizzlies” are in the forefront isn’t because they have girl parts. It is because of what they believe. It is because of the kind of people they are. It is that they are coming forward now, as freedom fighters. It is because, like it or not, it just so happens to be the women of the GOP who have the will and the fighting spirit at this time. That is what we need: leaders with spines, regardless of having breasts or not.
You see, while “Feminists/Femisogynists” were busily pant suiting themselves and trying to become men, other women were out there annihilating the glass ceiling, by raising their families and learning through actual living and perseverance. We didn’t learn by trying to be something we are not, but rather we learned by living. Most often in our wonderful small towns, none of which, in my experience are bitter.
We don’t rely on a victim mentality; we rely on ourselves and the love of our families.
George Will on Voegli's new book, Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State. A quote:
Wilsonian progressives believe that History is a proper noun, an autonomous thing. It, rather than nature, defines government's ever-evolving and unlimited purposes. Government exists to dispense an ever-expanding menu of rights -- entitlements that serve an open-ended understanding of material and even spiritual well-being.
Yes, Lyndon Johnson himself said he wanted government to supply spiritual well-being to every American. A god in every pot?
Jeff Jarvis in the NYPost: How not to save news - Bad government ideas for journalism. He begins:
The Federal Trade Commission says it wants to save journalism. I'm not sure who asked it to.
So far, 54 theaters around the country have signed up to show "The Lottery", and more are signing up daily. Take a moment to see if "The Lottery" is playing in a theater near you and buy tickets by clicking http://www.screenvision.com/s/showing/TheLottery/.
The Lottery" will be playing for some single showings and week-long runs: In New York for one night, June 3, a free showing at the Apollo Theater followed by a reception, 253 W 125th St., in New York from June 11-18 at the Big Theater, 239 East 59th Street (near 2nd Avenue). In Los Angeles from June 18-25 at Laemmle's Music Hall 3, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Additional runs in Denver and other cities are being planned.
Recent reviews:
An already heated national debate over charter schools gets a few degrees hotter tonight with the premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival of "The Lottery," a powerful documentary about the Harlem Success Academy charters launched by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz. The film is designed to knock ambivalent people off the fence when it comes to the benefits of charter schools, and it does. In the same way that "An Inconvenient Truth" mobilized a vast constituency to take action on climate change, "The Lottery" will create and energize charter supporters by the thousands.
- New York Daily News
For this lottery, the stakes couldn't be higher. The nerve-racking bid by parents to land their 5-year-old kid a coveted seat in a high-performing Harlem charter school is detailed in a documentary set to screen tomorrow at the Tribeca Film Festival.
- New York Post
 Photo: Why there was no looting in Nashville during the flood (it's an old photo, but you get the idea) h/t Theo
We're happier in our 80s.
Royal Society to Re-evaluate Position on Global Warming. Says Sir Alan
“One of the reasons people like myself are willing to put our heads above the parapet is that our careers are not at risk from being labelled a denier or flat-Earther because we say the science is not settled. The bullying of people into silence has unfortunately been effective.”
With demographic details: Obama down to 46% in Gallup weekly poll. Sounds high to me. Also, historic low for Dems
Morris: Obama doesn’t have a clue
Geitner clone in the UK: Danny Alexander
Surprise: Dems Citizens United Disclosure Law Has Different Rules for Corporations and Unions
York: Gibbs raises the Sestak stonewall
Data Used to Justify Health Savings Can Be Shaky
Item #2: New York (Waste of) Times Cheers on Deadbeats
Obama’s National Security Doctrine: Naive — Frighteningly So
Berwick: The $1 trillion health care disaster in waiting
Tuvalu and many other South Pacific Islands are not sinking, claims they are due to global warming driven sea level rise are opportunistic
The Grand Jihad: A word from the author Andy McCarthy
Lowlife claims affair with Nikki to torpedo her candidacy. It's a lie. It's not working. If it were true, she'd be a goner.
Anti-Israel sharks sniff O's weakness. No kidding.
Danish report from Gaza: "Where's the humanitarian crisis?"
Glenn:
JENIN REDUX: As Reality Unfolds About Flotilla, World Media Continues with Fictional Narrative. This is why people chiding Israel for poor PR miss the point. It doesn’t really matter what they do, since the press will just lie about it. That seems an argument for much less restraint, rather than more. . . .
From Had Enough Therapy? (h/t, Vanderleun):
In the past few weeks, this European democratic socialist worker's paradise has been revealed to be a fraud, a sleight of hand, a pipe dream, an exercise in rank denial and living beyond your means.
And when you deny reality, by pretending that you can live beyond your means forever and a day, then reality is going to come back to bite you.
Everyone knows that the great European social democratic experiment has failed.
Help needed! Oil spill damage to Louisiana wildlife:
Here's our request to our regular and/or irregular readers:
As summer begins in the northern hemisphere, people tend to find better things to do than to read websites. That is good. However, here at Maggie's the steadily-growing readership is our only compensation for our (enjoyable and self-educating and sometimes simply therapeutic) effort and time.
We know we are not to everyone's taste, but there are tons of folks out there who might enjoy our eclectic site if they knew we existed. If you have not done so already, do us a favor and introduce us to your friends, neighbors, relatives, colleagues, enemies, etc. (It used to be called "viral marketing," but before that it was called "word of mouth.")
Thanks, from the Maggie's Team.
PS: Dr. Merc reminds me to remind you to not be shy, and send us comments when you have them.
"U.S. urged Israel to use caution and restraint with aid boats heading to Gaza" reports the Washington Post's Scott Wilson and Glenn Kessler:
"We communicated with Israel through multiple channels many times regarding the flotilla," P.J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement issued in response to a question from The Washington Post. "We emphasized caution and restraint given the anticipated presence of civilians, including American citizens."
One wonders whether the Washington Post reporters followed up for details or, if not, why not. This may be an explosive key to why the snafu at sea.
Israeli investigations of itself are notable for their comprehensiveness, self-criticism, and transparency. What exactly did the Obama administration say to Israel, and what exactly did Israel do in response?
Israelis and analysts friendly toward Israel are aghast and confounded the Israeli commandos were lowered one at a time into an armed, violent gang, on board to physically attack Israelis, and the commandos were instructed to use paintball guns to disperse attackers.
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, traveling in Israel, had this encounter:
I just met with the son of a friend who serves in an elite Israeli army unit, one very much similiar to Flotilla 13, the Naval commando unit deployed so disastrously against the anti-Israel flotilla, and he explained the shame this way: "These soldiers are the best we have. We are Israel's deterrent. People in the Middle East need to think we are the best, and we are the best, except that when we're sent into situations without any intelligence, without any direction, with paintball guns instead of sufficient weapons, with no understanding of who we're fighting.
Israelis, Americans, the world deserves an answer to whether and, if so, to what extent Obama administration admonitions created the conditions that allowed thugs afloat to damage Israel and encourage Hamas’ ruthless terror of Gazans and of Israelis.
As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said on Wednesday, "This was not a 'Love Boat', it was a hate boat." Another question to be answered: Was he influenced by the Obama administration admonitions and, if so, specifically how?
P.S.: Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine notices this in "More bad advice from the U.S. to Israel." Still waiting for politicians, major media, and blogs to ask the big questions.
P.P.S.: I emailed the Washington Post reporters Scott Wilson and Glenn Kesler, via the Washington Post email link to them (click on each's name), to ask, simply, whether they or the Washington Post were following up to find out the details. As yet, no reply. Hopefully that's because they are hot on the trail, as should all real journalists.
Welcome PowerLine readers. See "That's the thanks Israel gets for acceding to Washington" for another instance of US pressure on Israel, to please unpleasable, hostile Turkey.
Mercenaries Identified: June 4, why not before?
The IDF identified a group of about 50 men – of the 700 on board – who were well-trained and were stationed throughout the ship, mostly on the upper deck, where they laid an ambush for the IDF soldiers who rappelled onto the deck from helicopters.
The members of this violent group were not carrying identity cards or passports. Instead, each of them had an envelope in his pocket with about $10,000 in cash. The defense establishment suspects the funding for the mercenaries may have come from elements within the Turkish government.
According to sources within the defense establishment, one member of the group, who appears to have been the ringleader, traveled to the city of Bursa in northwest Turkey and allegedly recruited mercenaries for the flotilla there.
In videos from the Marmara released this week by the IDF, this group of men can be seen preparing to confront IDF commandos. The videos, taken by the ship’s security cameras, show the group of activists brandishing metal bars, slingshots, and other assorted weaponry.
The group was split up into smaller squads that were distributed throughout the deck and communicated with one another with handheld communication devices. The men wore bulletproof vests and gas masks.
One video clearly shows a member of the group throwing a stun grenade onto the IDF commando vessel that pulled up alongside the Marmara. Another video shows how groups of at least four or five men swarmed each commando that landed on the top deck, beating them with metal bars, and in one case throwing a soldier off the third deck.
Soldiers testified that in at least two instances their sidearms were taken from them, as were their helmets and vests. Two soldiers jumped off the ship into the water to save themselves from being lynched.
On Wednesday, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna’i told a Knesset hearing that all nine men killed on the Marmara were “involved in the fighting.”
“There were no innocents among the dead,” Vilna’i said.
Meanwhile, Palestinian Media Watch reported Thursday that three of the four Turks killed on ship sought a martyr’s death.
Wednesday, June 2. 2010
Stay to the end to witness the ignorance that is the fertile ground in which hate is planted.
Regular people living in the real world never bought the Leftist narrative that criminals are victims. Neither did shrinks, who know how much character matters. Criminality knows no socio-economic or ethnic boundaries.
This is right on the money: Were Liberals Wrong on Crime? It's a sad day when honest, hard-working people who are willing to work two tough jobs to pay their bills and support their families are made to feel like chumps, or worse.
Such good folks are the salt of the earth and the backbone of America, whatever the Manhattan radical chic set thinks of them.
How do Americans spend their leisure time? Paul Bloom begins:
The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex.
Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real.
Fascinating article. However, that 4 mins per day seems dubious on many counts.
Pilar Rahola is a Spanish politician, journalist and activist. She is a passionate defender of the United States and Israel and an indefatigable fighter against anti-Semitism. All these despite being ideologically from the left. Read it all.
Her conclusion:
I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not as anti Israeli as my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel. To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews.
As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles. Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as a non-Jew, journalist and lefty I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too.
The struggle of Israel, even if the world doesn’t want to accept it, is the struggle of the world.
We have a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Congress controlled by the Democrats, uncaring about its impacts on our health, finances, or national security. The Congressional Democrats are deserving of repeal in November.
Don’t bother to ask what is really within the thousands of pages of ObamaCare, and tell Americans lies. -- The Director of the Congressional Budget Office does tell, despite the assurances that ObamaCare would somehow reduce health care costs and government spending on healthcare:
In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure. In fact, CBO estimated that the health legislation will increase the federal budgetary commitment to health care (which CBO defines as the sum of net federal outlays for health programs and tax preferences for health care) by nearly $400 billion during the 2010-2019 period….
[I]t is not clear what specific policies the federal government can adopt to generate fundamental changes in the health system; that is, it is not clear what specific policies would translate the potential for significant cost savings into reality. Moreover, efforts to reduce costs substantially would increase the risk that people would not get some health care they need or would like to receive.
Don’t bother to find out how the military could adjust to openly gay enlistees or the effects on recruitment and retention, readiness, or military families (half of the military are married). Tell the members of the Joint Chiefs, responsible for military personnel, and the military that their views don’t count.
Democrats ignored those pleas and voted anyway. Their concern was that if they waited until the Gates study is complete, after the November elections, Republicans could pick up enough seats to block repeal in 2011.
Perhaps the biggest affront was the fact that the White House, Mr. Gates, Adm. Mullen and Democrats settled on a compromise without allowing the four service chiefs to see it or comment.
Don't ask how we get out of the mess if you don't tell in November, and before in letters, meetings, and contributions to and participation in campaigns.
Do DSM psychiatric diagnoses have any validity? Or are they superficial descriptors on the order of "Patient has a fever" or "Patient is dehydrated," but with pseudo-scientific-sounding specificity?
What’s in a name? Genetic overlap between major psychiatric disorders
Readers know that I view a DSM diagnosis as just a little bit more than an insurance form entry item, most of the time. As a highly experienced colleague says, "I've read the DSM, and I have never found a patient of mine in there."
I plan to bore our readers by reposting my series on Psychiatric Diagnosis during vacation this summer.
Warbler migration season has reached its end, but our readers need a tougher challenge. Here 'tis. It is cheating to go to the link (I'll thank him with a link for the photo later today).
Hint: It's a female. Another wonderfully charming female below the fold, mostly safe for work -
Continue reading "Who am I?"
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs gathered senior Israeli generals to outline the basics of Israeli defense issues and policy, "Israel's Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace."
The link has several illuminating videos as well as the reports. I won’t use up bandwidth or delay it loading on your end by presenting the videos or reports. If any are interested in the hard facts, please go to the site and see for yourself, including why much of the commentary and suggestions offered by armchair generals and ignorant politicians are dangerous illusions and hogwash, indeed further the aims of Israel and the West's enemies. Security is the object of diplomacy, not to be compromised or sacrificed for "process" or photo-ops that avoid the core issues.
Goldberg: In a welfare state, how much is 'enough'?
A quote:
Governments do not generate wealth; they can merely distribute it. The challenge for both liberals and conservatives is simply to define how much distribution is "enough." What would an acceptable safety net look like? Who should be taken care of by taxpayers and for how long? Paul Ryan offered an answer to that question, and liberals scoffed because they reject the question. There's no such thing as enough. That's what the Greeks thought.
That's what the Greeks thought until Mr. Reality in the form of the Bond Market appeared to them.
There is no such thing as "enough" as long as there is one more vote to be bought.
The real picture of the O at the Louisiana beach, above. That's a real news photo, but the widely-distributed image was just a posed propaganda shot for the sycophantic media. "Message: I care."
Tapscott: Will journalists wake up in time to save journalism from Obama's FTC? Coyote opines, in Creating the American Pravda, that this was the information missing from the FTC report:
“The New York Times and Newsweek can’t figure out a profitable business model in the Internet age. We propose the government step in with all means at its disposal to limit competition to these print media companies and create new government subsidies for their business. Once their companies’ profitability is absolutely dependent on these government mandates and subsidies, the Federal government will have a powerful source of leverage to protect itself from criticism in these outlets. Once we have this situation in place, we will have a strong inventive to quash more independent outlets and maximize the market share of media companies beholden to the government. In a large sense, our recommendations build off the success of the tobacco settlement experiment, where a few large companies agreed to pay the government large percentages of their future profits, and then the government worked diligently to quash new tobacco competitors to maximize the market share of those companies paying it settlement money.”
Chinese electric vehicles will dramatically increase emissions
Gallup's Pro-Life America
Krauthammer on Gaza:
If these people had wanted humanitarian aid, Israel offered to take the ships into Haifa, peacefully, unload all the stuff inside and to allow all the humanitarian aid immediately into Gaza, all the food and medicine. And it was refused because it was meant to be a provocation and to create an incident.
Shocker. Arrested Gaza Flotilla “Peace Activists” Are Al-Qaeda Members. Also,
Liberal Arts majors and the adults who lie to them. h/t SDA.
Tuesday, June 1. 2010
Five or six more months until duck season. A friend sent me these photos of a splendid, if surrealistically overblown, duck blind. It has to be in Arkansas.
At Insty. Certainly the costs might indicate a bubble.
Conservatives claim that government is incompetent, inefficient, and intrinsically corrupt (eg vote buying), and therefore can be trusted to do very little.
Libs and Lefties seem to believe that government is smarter and possessed of superior motives to those of the private sector.
When governments fail to demonstrate effectiveness (as in the IRS' failure to make money on a Nevada whorehouse, or the oil spill, or managing money, or border control, or Fannie and Freddie, or...), many Conservatives complain that government isn't doing its job with all our dough. Libs and Lefties complain that the failure will damage the notion of big government's omni-competence and virtue and thus their claim to our hard-earned dollars and pennies.
Readers know my view: Much of government is a legal racket, a special interest in itself devoted to its own interests of power and money and ego. Government has limited power against reality, and disproportionately more power over people's lives. Obama can no more control the oil spill than he can legislate the weather or the economy.
I am entirely in agreement with Steyn who we quoted this morning, "Almost every problem we face today arises from the vanity of Big Government."
I do not blame Obama for the oil (or the weather). I never rush to blame anybody for anything. Shit happens. However, government worshippers like Obama cannot say so because it would undermine the vision, which they market, of governmental godlike omnicompetence and virtue leading towards Progress and Worry-Free Life and General Wonderfulness. The Achilles' Heel of taking that position is that you must accept blame for almost anything that goes wrong.
Reality is relentless. Even if you control the media, reality wins in the end.
Our Capt. Tom, an ex-Schlumberger oil rig engineer, offers this explanation in reaction to our photo of a blowout preventer:
 Just in case anybody is interested, a blow out preventer of the type used on Deepwater Horizon relies on three major methods of stopping the flow - two hydraulic and one manual which, in theory, is supposed to be done with ROVs. The reason is that oil is under pressure at all times from either natural gas or pressure from the surrounding rock or salt strata (normal depth pressures). Pressure on land can reach as high as 6,000 psi, under water (at the depth of Deepwater Horizon's well head) it can reach as much as 3,800 psi. Remember the old films of "oil gushers"? That's why the oil was spraying everywhere. There are two basic types of valves - one called a ram valve and the other is called an annular valve. The ram valve is exactly that - a ram powered by hydraulics or mechanically that shuts off the flow of oil. Think of these as "pinchers". The annular valve is a rubber/steel device that is actuated in the same fashion as the ram valve, but creates a better seal. They can be set for different operating pressures. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon's well head, the preventer worked partially meaning that the ram/annular system hydrauics worked, but some as yet unknown reason, didn't close all the way. The manual systems were rendered inoperative when the rig collapsed. There is a fourth way to close a preventer which is usually required on all deep water projects - an acoustic actuator on one of the mechanical valves. When this preventer was built, the Mineral Materials Service waived the requirement for an acoustic actuator which it has for quite a while under pressure from the oil industry. The acoustic actuator is required by most other oil producing countries. In the picture of the preventer, what you are seeing with all those pipes and valves are the various types of ram/annular actuators. The problem with Deepwater Horizon is that the pipe leading to the surface collapsed when the rig collapsed. On the videos where you see the leak, that is actually at the top of the preventer - the pipe that leads to the surface.
Global Cold Wave May Be Looming — This Time, the Science Is Good
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