Maggie's Farm

Bruce Kesler of Democracy Project was kind enough to send some readings a while ago explaining how poverty has been dealt with by the US government. I forgot to post them at the time, probably intending to write more about it:

1. The Safety Net Delivers. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

2. The Effects of Government Taxes and Transfers on Income and Poverty. US Census Bureau

3. Federal Transfer Payments to Low-income Households Tops $17,000. The Tax Foundation

Jackie Robinson was VP of the Chock Full o' Nuts coffee company, whose chain of luncheonettes in NYC were as well-known from the 20s through the 60s as MacDonalds is today. Note the prices. And note the piece of Scotch tape holding up the Dodger's banner - for those few who might not recognize the great man.

Quoted from Prof. Deneen's Let the Good Times Mold:

Observing the people seeking accelerated intoxication and wandering in herds looking this way and that hoping to see actual outbreaks of ecstasy, I couldn't help but be struck by the forlornness of the appearance of revelry, the desperation that underlie the efforts to appear joyous, the unexceptionalness of the now-unremarkable female ululations and the wholly predictable male whoops. The celebration seemed more a set of expected and dutiful going through motions, all actual meaning of the original purpose of the celebration lost to the unbroken hedonism of our culture and, more importantly, the overarching disbelief in any actual "structure" that could sustain genuine outbreaks of "anti-structure." A mockery instead of a celebration, a self-consciously mimiced charade rather than an outbreak of overturned or reversed roles, in a concentrated form my encounter with Bourbon Street over the weekend helped me to understand better my dissatisfaction for much of what passes for apparent celebration in our culture.

Bad loans discussed vigorously by Michelle.

Who is to blame if you take out a fraudulent loan, or a loan you doubt you can pay off? Sovereign funds from the Middle East might help rescue Citibank's liquidity, but they will extract a heavy price for that investment. If you gamble, you're on your own. When you win, you win. When you lose, don't come crying to me.

And please don't claim that you are a victim because you didn't read the terms of the loan. Basic literacy is assumed in financial transactions, as is the assumption of risk. As we can see, your lender also assumes his share of risk.

But don't listen to me. I think the stock market is a gambling enterprise unless you have a 20-year time horizon. Blue Chip US stocks have not moved an inch in 8 years - other than downwards recently.

They're not illegal guns, they're "undocumented firearms."

h/t, Ace

“It’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his papers for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. HE is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, they don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

C.S. Lewis (h/t, New England Repub)

From Politico, Nancy Pelosi has changed the menu:

The processed cheese has been replaced with brie. The Jell-O has made way for raspberry kiwi tarts and mini-lemon blueberry trifles. Meatloaf has moved over for mahi mahi and buns have been shunted aside in favor of baguettes. 

A revolution is afoot at the deli counters, grills and salad bars of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Read the whole thing. Sounds to me like they changed from boy food to girl food.

We have been avoiding adding any verbiage to the racial dimensions of these primaries. In general, we hate the subject of race. However, a piece by Sykes at Am. Thinker - Barack Obama's Race Problem: White Liberals - nails the condescension of the liberal elites and of the lefty bien pensants. (thanks, Reader). A quote:

In the wake of Clinton's New Hampshire victory much of the punditocracy seems to be surprised by the sudden resurgence of race as a central factor in the presidential race. They shouldn't be.

Democrats, after all, are a party shaped and obsessed with identity and grievance politics, so the clash between sensitivities of race and gender will inevitably be magnified. Who is more offended? Women or Blacks? In New Hampshire it was women, who protectively rallied around an emotional Hillary Clinton who has been unfairly beaten up by the boys.

Now the focus is turning to the sensitivities of African Americans, who are offended by the subtle racial digs of the Clinton campaign. The political backlash of "denigrating women," is being replaced by a backlash against "denigrating African American."

Deep down, guilty white liberals feel guilty about other people's attitudes and behavior, not their own. To the contrary they are smugly certain of their own racial virtue; in fact, (they will tell themselves) they care so deeply about black people that they feel an obligation to protect them from an unenlightened electorate. Don't be surprised if many white liberals end up voting against Obama, while telling themselves they are doing it because they are so supportive of minority aspirations.

That's Obama's racial problem.

All the rhetorical devices that have been a staple of identity politics are now being exploited by the Clinton and Obama campaigns against each other. They are competing to play the victim. They are both accusing each other of insensitivity. They are both deliberately misinterpreting each other’s comments in order to somehow imply that the other is morally retrograde.

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

Mr. Robin Page. From The Telegraph:

Mr Page, 64, a farmer, conservationist, columnist for The Daily Telegraph, and the chairman of the Countryside Restoration Trust, became the focus of police attention after his comments at a country fair in September 2002.

He claims that in order to gain the attention of listeners at the gathering in Frampton-upon-Severn, Glos, he started in a "light-hearted fashion".

His opening remark was: "If you are a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you."

Mr. Page was later arrested for a hate crime, but eventually vindicated - and compensated. The story was linked by a disgusted Mr. Free Market in a piece on "white flight" from the cities, in England.

Bach's Double Concerto, 2nd movement. It's more from Heifetz' Master Class, with Heifetz inviting "student" Eric Friedman to play first violin. Life does not get any better than this (if you have half-decent speakers). I think Heifetz wants it sped up a bit, but it's fine with me as is.

Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior. Even when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence or as a matter of sin and virtue. Rozin notes, for example, that smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.”

At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called “bums” and “tramps”; today they are “homeless.” Drug addiction is a “disease”; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a “sexually transmitted disease” and more recently a “sexually transmitted infection.”

This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority. In fact there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it. Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.

Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.

Read the whole thing.

Image: That is Jiminy Cricket, for you youths. Everybody's source of conscience and good, sober judgement.

On Friday (h/t, Right Wing Prof)

In CT, last night (thanks, reader)

A true teacher pushes you to your limits, and teaches you humility with perhaps a slight touch of kindness - when earned. "Which one do you have in your fingers?" "None of them." "Can you play 17?" "Not now." "OK, play #17."

Ezra Levant's comments at a Canadian Human Rights Commission "interrogation", re his publishing of the Mohammed cartoons. These videos via LGF. Excellent comments from Steyn. Also comments from Samizdata.

Bravo to Ezra.

Froggy Mountain Breakdown. Yes, I like to call it "froggy" instead of "foggy."

That's some dang band Earl has with him (thanks, reader). As somebody commented, how did my old Auntie Bertha get in that band? What fun they have. The piano isn't bluegrass, but it does add something to the mix.

Some good folks have gotten together to produce a daily, blog-based, non-partisan and non-ideological online newspaper, called The Issue.

They are notable for their "Issue of the Day," analogous to a front-page story in a newsmagazine, which takes a look at the sides of a controversial issue. Today: Smoker's rights.

Give them a look. I am sure that they would welcome Dr. Merc's critique of their site.

Grow a Brain is planning to quit that site, and perhaps begin another of a different sort. He is kind enough, though, to leave us with the screenplay for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Intentionally or not, Thompson's book, with its black, chemically-addled humor, depicted the dead end of the peace, love, hedonism and drug youth "culture" of the time.