Friday, January 14. 2011
From Chicago Boyz last summer: Is “Liberal Guilt” a Myth?
Freedom House says it is.
Political freedom has always been a rarity, and a great inconvenience for governments.
"The other line always moves faster."
Everybody
Thursday, January 13. 2011
Re Grand Central Station: "It's bloody gorgeous." As I was walking around late this afternoon, making my rounds, a Brit couple, rightly perceiving me to be a friendly, approachable, and respectable bloke, asked where where they might find a cab. We were near Grand Central, so I suggested they try the main exit from the station. Usually some cabs there. "Seen the inside of the station?" I asked. Well, this nice, refined older couple followed me in through the side door and down the escalator to check it out. I hope they found a cab or, as Brits are wont to do, found a cozy nook for a drinky. I did recommend the Campbell Apartment for a good cocktail, which many people do not know about.
As a country boy who lived in the city for around 6 years in younger days, I still get a rush of energy and inspiration just by visiting for a day or two. And that is despite the fact that, most places I go, you cannot smoke a ceegar indoors thanks to the sanctimonious jerk Nanny Bloomberg.
More pics from today, below the fold -
Continue reading "Pics: Hanging out around midtown"
HDV video for sports. Mount it on your helmet, your hat, or whatever. The GoPro.
Watch the sample ski helmet-mounted vid on their site. Great stuff.
Another one of those depressing marriage quizzes: The Sustainable-Marriage Quiz.
Is it the job of a marriage to sponsor "personal growth?" That sounds very 1960s. I think it is adolescent to think of marriage as an answer to life's questions, challenges, and dilemmas. A loyal and committed companion and partner is what it is.
When a man makes up his mind without evidence, no evidence disproving his opinion will change his mind.
Robert A. Heinlein, 1978 (h/t, Vanderleun)
Re Cultural Literacy: She asked for it..., the comments were good fun. Thanks, y'all. She enjoyed noting them very much. She watched Seven Beauties last night, That movie was too much for me delicate sensibilities, regardless of Giannini's performance.
Are you familiar with the McSweeny's site? Apparently lots of folks are, but it's new to me.
Verbing? I don't approve of it.
Why Paul Theroux cannot write an autobiography
How many people can the earth support?
The Idea of "Affordable Housing": Memphis
The Vegas IRA: Gambling on Wall Street v. Gambling in Las Vegas (h/t Betsy)
Dr. Sanity: FASCIST PIGS, FANATICAL IDEOLOGUES, AND DELUSIONAL ILLNESS
Insty: HAVE YOU NO DECENCY, SIR?
For EPA, climate tough in Senate
Corn asserts When It Comes to the Rhetoric of Rage, the Right Has the Edge
Twittering Why didn't they kill Palin instead
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED… Death Threats Against Sarah Palin at Unprecendented Level
My Name is Betsy. I'm a Killer
From Coyote:
We libertarians cringe when presented with a “national tragedy” like the shooting of Gabriella Giffords. Not because we are somehow more or less sensitive to vilence and loss of life, but because we begin bracing for the immediate, badly thought-out expansion of state power that nearly always follows any such tragedy, whether it be 9/11 or Columbine or Oklahoma City or even Pearl Harbor. Those looking to expand the power of the state, and of state officials, make their greatest progress in the emotional aftermath of a such a tragedy. These tragedies are the political equivilent of the power play in ice hockey, when defenders of liberty find themselves temporarily shorthanded, and those wishing to expand state power rush to take advantage.
Protein: We know who you are and we know what you’re trying to do. Morons.
Reason: Beware Bipartisan School Reform - If everybody on the Hill is happy, Americans probably shouldn't be.
Surber: Require youths to listen to Rush
Wednesday, January 12. 2011
From Assisted Suicide at Tablet:
The Arabic word taqqiya is frequently used to denote the kind of dissimulation practiced by Muslims in the Middle East. Westerners tend to abuse the term, as if any Muslim who lies, for instance, about a car robbery, was practicing taqqiya, when he’s just trying to avoid arrest as any other suspect would. Taqqiya is a doctrine particular to the Shia, a Muslim minority who, because they have had much to fear over the last millennium from their more numerous Sunni neighbors, are permitted to lie under duress about their real religious sentiments. The concept, however, is a useful reminder that this is a part of the world where saying the wrong thing to the wrong person can be costly.
Nonetheless, Westerners are very sensitive to the idea that some cultures do not value truth-telling in the same way that we do. For reporters it can be embarrassing if your beat is to cover, say, the Palestinian Authority, since the bulk of your work is taking dictation from frequently malevolent fabulists and having to pass it off as though you were interviewing someone actually worth speaking to. But the convention of our press corps is to treat the utterances of Muamar Qaddafi with the same respect due the prime minister of Canada. To fact-check an entire political culture is beyond the pale of Western journalism, so instead we pretend that Arab societies respect the truth as much as we do, for to say otherwise is to sit in judgment over another culture.
Unfortunately, there is no getting around the fact that societies where the truth is just one among many possible narratives are going to fare worse than societies where truth is valued.
Aways use your enemy's hand to catch a snake.
Persian Proverb
Major snow dump overnight - lost power for a while, lost my links. I'll post this, instead:
Giffords Shot: Now, A Word from Our Gun Control Sponsors…
Rhode Island Governor Bans State Officials from Talk Radio
Dem Congressman: If Violent Rhetoric Didn't Cause This Shooting -- It Will Cause Next One!
Dr. Torrey: A Predictable Tragedy in Arizona - We emptied state mental hospitals starting in the 1960s without providing adequate treatment alternatives.
And "Dr." Matthews
Video: Slain girl’s father says attack the price of “a free society”
OK, that's enough of today's items on the shooting. The original news story should have been "paranoid pothead goes on shooting rampage."
But within hours of the news report, people began to exploit the sad story for their own purposes. Twisting the facts, inventing false narratives, "letting no crisis go to waste" (not that this represents a crisis). It's like Tawana Brawley all over again, the flat-out lie which Al Sharpton rode to seemingly perpetual fame and fortune. Propaganda designed to create a consensus view, or at least a thinkable view regardless of the facts. A snow job:
snow job
n
Slang chiefly US and Canadian an instance of deceiving or overwhelming someone with elaborate often insincere talk
Even the worthy Dr. Torrey did it, above. This kid would not have been hospitalizable, much less long-term hospitalizable, against his will, anywhere in the US. Well, I might be wrong about that: apparently he had been making death threats.
The only sane comment I saw this morning was the slain girl's father. He gets it. Well, this guy gets it too, at Am Thinker via Lucianne, The Media Has Declared War:
Newsrooms and hospitals have one major thing in common: the "hush" is the loudest thing anyone ever hears. The "hush" is the moment when normal activity stops cold for an announcement of major events that will entirely reshape any usual activity. While both newsrooms and hospitals stop on that kind of news -- and then, following it, race into a whirlwind of overdrive -- the similarities end there.
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Comments:
In the crosshairs of the trigger-happy MSM: Sarah Palin
In the crosshairs of the trigger-happy MSM: the 1st Amendment
In the crosshairs of the trigger-happy MSM: anyone who defies the imposition of socialism in America
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Otherwise, the blizzard of exploitation is disheartening, if not sickening.
It's a winter wonderland out there; a perfect day to be 6 or 7 years old.
Tuesday, January 11. 2011
 A Bird Dog pup (pupette, actually) has asked me to help her fill out her college education by listing some things she ought to know and read, but cannot fit into her college schedule as she has mapped it out.
Music to a Dad's ears, of course. Father knows best.
Well, I will just focus on one piece of her request here and now (because it went well beyond entertainment - this is just the fun part). She is a theater rat and reads plays daily for fun. She knows most of Shakespeare pretty well, and loves Pinter too (!). But she says her knowledge of films prior to her era is very limited. "What films should I know?," she asks. (I call them movies because I am a knuckle-dragging clinger.)
Ain't it great when the youths acknowledge their ignorance?
I told her I had once, for fun, made a list of my 100 essential movies (and I am not much of a movie fan), but it went away when my ancient Mac died ten years ago. Naturally, my list had some John Wayne, Gone With The Wind, Bridge Over The River Kwai, Swept Away, Streetcar, Waterfront, Mr. Blandings, Wonderful Life, the hideously painful Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, some James Bond and some WC Fields, Citizen Kane, Days of Wine and Roses, some Jack Lemmon like 7 Year Itch, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Harvey, Billy Budd, the Alistair Sim Christmas Carol ( which she has seen countless times), and, as one item, all of Charlie Chaplin. I don't want to try to make my list again, and, for a person who is more of a reader than a movie person, I got well over 100 with my list of basic flicks.
If you google "100 essential movies of all time," you can get all sorts of obscure lists by critics. She did take the time from her Christmas-break reading and ski trips to New Hampshire and constant NYC trips to watch Amarcord today, which definitely is on my list.
Man, that movie is rich in memorable imagery, and as Italian as anchovies in olive oil.
So help me out. What's on your essential movies-to-see-to-be-culturally-literate list? (please do not feel that you need to list 100!).
Why spend 2 million for the simple cottage we posted yesterday, when you can spend just 8X more for a special ski house with plenty of space for all of your friends?
OK, so it isn't most peoples' idea of quaint little Stowe. I suppose you could buy it just to dynamite this wedding cake.
Monday, January 10. 2011
(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.
"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 "
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Moe Lane at RedState: