Maggie's Farm

Liberals and atheists are "more evolved." Everybody knew that already, didn't they? We ignorant uneddicated knuckle-dragging throwbacks nonetheless persist in clinging to Jesus and our firearms. Why they let we Neanderthals vote and have websites is beyond me.

Just like Crichton's novel: Warming goes on trial. It could be another Scopes trial: The warming religion vs. skeptical science

I suspect that it is a genetic defect specific to married women which causes them to object to the heavenly fragrance of the finest legal and illegal cigars.

Before you marry the gal, she will have no problem with the habit. After you marry them, all you hear about is how the smoke gets in the draperies and upholstery and the insanely-expensive "window treatments."

I have a friend who installed an old 12" brass ship ventilator next to his desk in his library containing a powerful fan, exiting out the wall. A custom design with a baffle to keep snopw from blowing in, and very cool.

In order to preserve an otherwise acceptable marriage, many hedonistic fellows have thought long and hard about how to smoke indoors, and to avoid the humiliating and less-than-relaxing experience of having your smoke out in the rain and blow and snow like a naughty child who has been banned from home and hearth. As a commenter on a relevant site says:

I smoke cigars and can only indulge once in a blue moon and that is basically because I have to go outside to smoke them, I can only smoke during seasons when it's not too hot or too cold, there's nothing to do while smoking, etc. I'd like to have a room where I can smoke a cigar while sitting in a leather chair and watching some TV or a movie or listening to some music. Also I'd like a place where I can play poker with my friends and not have to force them out of the house to smoke cigarettes.

Well, OK. I guess every married guy is pussy-whipped to some extent (and often enough for good reason - many males seem not to domesticate well).

The cheapest solution is to create a negative pressure in your home smoking areas with a cheap window fan like this.

A more expensive solution is a powerful ceiling vent, like a kitchen fan.

The so-called "air purifiers" are a joke, in my view - and especially if you are the sort who likes to have some windows open in your house.  Unlike Al Gore, you cannot purify the planet.

If you have a basement man cave, something like this makes sense.

If readers have any useful ideas short of evicting the spouse or of provoking one's own eviction, please share them.

From Env Econ:

The sound of meditation for some people is full of deep breaths or gentle humming. For Marc Umile, it's "3.14159265358979..."

The guy knows 15,135 of the numbers - and he's only #10 in the world.

WSJ: Climategate Was an Academic Disaster Waiting to Happen - "The notion of objective truth has been abandoned and the peer review process gives scholars ample opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies." (Sorry - whole thing is behind their new pay wall)

Indeed. Corrupt Big Academia.

A real, regular American. Not slick, no preaching, no condescension, straight talk, common sense:

Number and Percent of Nonpayers At Record High; More Tax Filers Now See IRS as a Source of Income.

Remember when being called a "taxpayer" was equivalent to being called a "solid citizen"? This trend is not good for America. Every voting citizen should pay their dues to the club of America.  

The issue of salt seemed to link with our post on Woodrow Wilson and all of our routine posts about Brit Nanny-Fascism.

Just skim this Tierney piece on the salt "controvery" in the NYT. "Advocates" are promoting their dire data, and the other side is promoting their own - or debunking that of the advocates. (Reminiscent of global warming - and salt, like CO2, is essential to life on earth.)

My point, though, is that the assumption seems to be that if excess salt intake is bad for some small minority, then the government should regulate it. That's the technocratic, government-by-expert thing we have been seeing lately.

Is there anything the scientific technocrat busybodies don't want to control in my life?

Where is individual choice, individual responsibility, and freedom in the equation? Whence a government's power to determine the salt in my food?

Salt wars? What next?

Maybe broccoli. I read that it is carcinogenic - especially if it is "organic". Everything causes cancer.

"There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime."  

Sign over Squadron Ops Desk at Davis-Montham AFB, AZ. Lots more here.

America's great export: Rocket science finance, layers of abstractions and computer modeling, and shadow banking. One quote:

What is shadow banking? It is one of a handful of terms — structured finance is a more technical one, ghostly economics a more evocative one — used to describe the infrastructure of debt finance that provided the conduits for capital from around the world to flow into the American housing sector. It is best understood as a technological innovation amalgamating computing power and probabilistic modeling to vastly expand the various world markets in debt securities. The late journalist Mark Pittman, in an authoritative 2008 report for Bloomberg, called it “the biggest U.S. export business of the twenty-first century”...

Related, how our government does rocket science finance - minus the rocket science.

Vladimir Lenin: “Socialized Medicine is the Keystone to the Arch of the Socialist State.”

Of course it is. With it, they control your very life. For your own good. I mean, for the "Greater Good," or for "Society." Whoever they are. Never met them. 

Joseph Schumpeter ominously speculated that as capitalism succeeded, democracies in time would come to expect its end (wealth) but reject its means (free-market competition). He worried that because of the inequality and creative destruction it brings, capitalism would provoke a kind of adverse reaction. A popular call would arise for government to plan market outcomes according to some utopian view of society's good, and this democratically guided central planning would inevitably slow economic growth. Schumpeter predicted, in turn, that if economic expansion faltered, individual liberty would be directly imperiled or quietly ceded by citizens resigned to having their diminished economic position protected by the state.

We hear more voices these days yearning for a benevolent autocracy, including the creepy Thomas Friedman. The whole terrific essay, Can Democracy Survive Capitalism?, at Claremont Review.

Photo: Kim Jong-il, beloved, benevolent, altruistic autocrat who understands everything and who only cares about what is best for his people

The Dems and the O are always about talking and negotiating endlessly with other countries, and never drawing a line. But with their fellow Americans,  'The time for talk is over.' 

Thus an accommodating attitude towards enemies, and a warlike attitude towards Americans.

It suppose that is change.

Two posts about Marxism on Maggie's in two days! That's a record. And now for a third:

The Left in the Western World, such as it is, remains Marxist at core. I have read and studied Marx, as has Mead. They have some worthwhile and interesting insights into psychology, sociology, and human nature.

The problem is their reductionism. The rare people in the modern world with fresh new insights - eg Freud, Marx and Engels, Adam Smith, Burke, etc. often find their notions reduced to simplistic, reductionistic equations which they might not have anticipated.

Re Marx and Engels, every human is, in part, Homo economicus. But only in part. Humans are also Homo spirito, Homo ludens, Homo conflictus, Homo everything. That's why freedom is so important, if we accept our Western idea of the uniqueness and, almost, sanctity (not almost, if one has religion) of the individual.

At Chicago Boyz, Seizing the Opportunity to Destroy Western Civilization. A quote:

Narrative reduces personal experience to a linear progression where cause and effect seem to have a purposeful order. These narratives can then be shared with others, leading to the best definition of history ever: history is a fable agreed upon. Most personal narratives will never be the equivalent of the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Gibbon; or even the fables of Aesop, La Fontaine, or Orwell. Most are simply humble habitual ways of thinking. As habits of thought, such narratives largely control how you react to unfolding events, whether it’s pricking your finger or waging a world war. 

Photo: Killer Whales killing Sea Lions just for the fun of it.

Euphemisms are about creating an illusion of a nursery school pretty pony and rainbow view of the world in which evil does not exist, in which we can all get along if only we wanted to, and in which we can all be anything we want, if only we would label things properly.

Rabid Jihadists and criminals become "the oppressed," kids who cannot read well become "learning disabled," klutzes become "hand-eye coordination impaired," the socially-awkward become "Asperger's," global warming becomes "climate change," housing developments in swamps become "Riverview Estates" - and Killer Whales become cuddly "Orcas" (so as not to offend their delicate sensibilities, no doubt).

Euphemisms are a form of propaganda (see The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook: Updated! New Entries!) designed to kill reality.

"Imagine," indeed.

Please post your favorite euphemistic reality-killers in the comments.

If you are like me, you are getting sick and tired of the endless push for government control of medical care.

These folks aren't listening to America, but they are wearing us down and the Libs are doing a full-court press now.

One more chance to send your Senators and your Rep a brief note with your opinion. A FAX is more useful than an email, but anything is better than nothing. I advise doing so regardless of their position on the topic.

I faxed my folks in DC. I told them I would support the Republican proposals for health care reform, but that the 2000 page Dem mess is an obnoxious and unwanted piece of garbage.

FAX and emails of Congress here.

Tar and Chip is a good way to do, or re-do, a driveway. It's more attractive than asphalt, cheaper, and affords better traction.

It can also be applied on top of an asphalt driveway to improve the appearance. It's basically stone chips or small gravel, of whatever color you chose, rolled into hot tar. Over time, careless snow-plowing will wear away the gravel. Not quickly, though. It lasts for years.

This guy loves his tar and chip.

Do we have any readers who are tar and chip fans?

Prof. Lindzen, in his talk at Fermilab which we posted yesterday, refers to the Prosecutor's Fallacy (aka Defender's Fallacy), which refers to a strategy of counting on a jury's inability to understand statistics, and specifically conditional probability.

Conditional probability is about the amount of linkage in events.

The simpest case: Given a red, green and blue marble in a bag, what are the odds of drawing a blue one after drawing a red one?

See the sad case of Sally Clark, who fell victim to the fallacy.

From Steyn's Our Own Greek Tragedy:

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still just about functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn't pay. You'll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of "the rich" to fund the entitlement state, because in the end, it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they've run out Greeks, so they'll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

At American Thinker, a brief word on the topic. 

America don't need no steenkin' noblesse. But, re the elites, Liberals are smarter. I knew that! They are smart and I am dumb. But not too dumb to be able to support my family and my wife's dumb animals in some degree of comfort and pleasure. 

Thank goodness for the equality of one dummie, one vote. I have two Ivy degrees but always doubted my brains. Guess I was right about something.

Re medical care, from Andy McCarthy's post at NRO:

I'm glad Republicans have held firm, but let's not be under any illusions about what that means. In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you've calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.

Man, do I agree with Ramesh in Time. One quote from his piece of the above title:

We could probably increase the number of high school seniors who are ready to go to college — and likely to make it to graduation — if we made the K-12 system more academically rigorous. But let's face it: college isn't for everyone, especially if it takes the form of four years of going to classes on a campus.

To talk about college this way may sound élitist. It may even sound philistine, since the purpose of a liberal-arts education is to produce well-rounded citizens rather than productive workers. But perhaps it is more foolishly élitist to think that going to school until age 22 is necessary to being well-rounded, or to tell millions of kids that their future depends on performing a task that only a minority of them can actually accomplish.

The good news is that there have never been more alternatives to the traditional college.

I do not know the history of how government unions came to be, but I deplore them. Who are they defending those employees from? Their evil neighbors who pay their salaries and their benefits?

The days of fat-cat evil Capitalists oppressing workers are long gone. Private sector unionization is in the dusk of its history, but government unionization is growing by leaps and bounds. Can anyone imagine a unionized military?

In my view, public employee unionization should be illegal because their opponent, in effect, is the public. But there is the basic right to free assembly. At the very least, public employee unions should be prohibited from politics and political contributions: that seems corrupt by definition but, again, there are logical consistency and freedom issues here.

People have been thinking about the topic lately:

From Declining unions, increasing stranglehold:

As the latest BLS statistics reveal, more union members – 7.9 million – now work for the government than the 7.4 million union members working for companies in the private economy, which has five times more workers. This imbalance has profound consequences for all workers, and for democracy itself.

From Rick Moran's WHAT DO WE OWE PUBLIC EMPLOYEES?

We have allowed public employees to ascend to a privileged place - a pedestal that they were never intended to occupy by the Founders - to the point where their influence over politicians, especially at the state and local level, have made them a force unto themselves in growing the size of government. More public employees means more union members, which means more dues money, which translates into more political contributions to friendly politicians who will gladly repeat the cycle.

This vicious circle must be ended. The biggest reason is that it is bankrupting us.

At Reason, Class War: How public servants became our masters:

People who are supposed to serve the public have become a privileged elite that exploits political power for financial gain and special perks. Because of its political power, this interest group has rigged the game so there are few meaningful checks on its demands. Government employees now receive far higher pay, benefits, and pensions than the vast majority of Americans working in the private sector. Even when they are incompetent or abusive, they can be fired only after a long process and only for the most grievous offenses.

It’s a two-tier system in which the rulers are making steady gains at the expense of the ruled. The predictable results: Higher taxes, eroded public services, unsustainable levels of debt, and massive roadblocks to reforming even the poorest performing agencies and school systems. If this system is left to grow unchecked, we will end up with a pale imitation of the free society envisioned by the Founders. 

Nearly 25% of all mortgages are underwater. What's the big deal? Is a home an investment, or a home? What is truly remarkable in life is to buy something - and to have it appreciate in value. That rarely happens.

100% of auto loans are underwater, and so is the vacation you took last year and put on the credit card. That new leather sofa too, the TV and the boat. And probably your life savings, compared to a few years ago.

For those headed for trouble because of job or income loss, however, I have nothing but sympathy... while I blame Washington: We need tax cuts instead of ever-higher taxes.

We linked Mead's Sunday Jeremiad: Petty Prophets of the Blue Beast earlier today, but I feel it needs highlighting. He begins:

There’s nothing like Lent for reflecting on the sins of other people; I thought I’d start at the top — with the bishops of my own church.  As the Episcopal church along with the other mainline Protestant denominations diminishes, we don’t have to look far to see bishops and leaders who are largely failing in their core assignments: to tend to the health and promote the growth of the congregations in their area.  Yet even as we have fewer and fewer effective and successful leaders, we have no shortage of political, ‘prophetic’ bishops.  When they can, they meet with world leaders and jet off to exotic locales to bring peace and fight for justice.  When they can’t do that, they sign statements of concern, issue reports and otherwise tug on the skirts of an indifferent public seeking attention for their political views.

In the mainline churches, which is what I know best, the political views leaders express are generally those of what could be called the ‘foundation left’ — emotionally grounded in concern for the poor and development, historically linked to the ‘new left’ mix of economic and social concerns as developed in the 1960’s, shaped by an atmosphere of privilege and entitlement that reflects the upper middle class background of the educated professionals who run these institutions.  The social sins they deplore are those of the right: excessive focus on capitalism, too robust and unheeding a promotion of the American national and security interest abroad, insufficient care for the environment, failure to help the poor through government welfare programs, failure to support affirmative action, failure to celebrate and protect the unrestricted right of women to abort.  I am of course speaking very generally here and there are lots of individual exceptions, but many of these folks are generally tolerant of theological differences and rigidly intolerant when it comes to political differences: they care nothing at all about doctrines like predestination but get very angry with people who disagree with them about issues like global warming or immigration reform.  Theological heresy is a matter for courtesy and silence, but political heretics fill them with bile.

Read the whole thing.

Counterfeit Cubans, from JR. Nicaraguan. Mine just arrived today, and I just smoked one. Cheap, legal in the US, and plenty tasty as a medium-strength everyday smoke with a hearty earthy tanginess. I am told that those Sumatran wrappers were grown from Connecticut seed. I can't say they are as good as a good Habanos, but quite enjoyable for the price. Perfect for this Obama economy.

Why does the O smoke cigarettes instead of cigars, anyway? Who does he think he is? FDR?

Via View from 1776:

I will grant you that liberals always have the best of intentions.  They are always trying to make things better.  In doing so, they victimize many.  When I was growing up in rural Louisiana in the 1940s, both blacks and whites had strong, church-going families, low divorce rates, low rates of out-of-wedlock births and the crime rate was low.  Abortion was virtually unknown, and was certainly not a means of birth control.  All of that changed with LBJ’s Great Society programs.  In an effort to “help”, liberals gave people (both black and white) incentives to have children out of wedlock.  The result was several generations of welfare mothers, disintegration of the family, indigence, government dependency, soaring crime rates, etc.  All of this was predictable, but it was only ended in 1996 when, after two Presidential vetoes, a Republican Congress finally shamed Bill Clinton into living up to his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it”.  Yes, the Great Society had noble intentions, but it harmed poor whites and poor blacks indiscriminately, almost destroying the black family. Liberals always have the best of intentions, but the results are often disastrous.

Redstate:

The country is not in danger of ObamaCare passing via reconciliation.

The country is, however, in danger from politically desperate and irrational leaders who are intent on the political equivalent of self-immolation.

From Krauthammer's Excuses for Obama:

In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president's own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

I, for one, am just as happy that leadership skills are lacking in the White House right now. Many are unhappy about it, such as this guy - a Rabbi no less - who is disappointed in his Messiah. Good grief.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Oscar Wilde

Dining manners and styles, Euro and American:

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

Oscar Wilde

From today's WSJ: Another failure of liberal governance:

For the fourth time since the 1960s, American voters in 2008 gave Democrats overwhelming control of both Congress and the White House. Republicans haven't had such large majorities since the 1920s. Yet once again, Democratic leaders have tried to govern the country from the left, only to find that their policies have hit a wall of practical and popular resistance.

Democrats failed in the latter half of the 1960s, as the twin burdens of the Great Society and Vietnam ended the Kennedy boom and split their party. They failed again after Watergate, as Congress dragged Jimmy Carter to the left and liberals had no answer for stagflation. They failed a third time in the first two Bill Clinton years, as tax increases and HillaryCare led to the Gingrich Congress before Mr. Clinton salvaged his Presidency by tacking to the center.

A fourth crackup is already well underway and is even more remarkable considering how Democrats were set up for success.

and

The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck's entitlement state for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments.

You can see this in bankrupt Greece, where government spends 52% of GDP; or in California and New York, where the government-employee unions have pushed tax rates to punishing levels and the states still can't pay their bills. Americans can see that this is where Mr. Obama's agenda is also taking Washington, and this is why they are rejecting it.

Few Americans, outside the universities, wish to end up like Europe.

Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the Democratic party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country — that’s not going to work too well.

Sen. Evan Bayh

A bit of a rant, Get Rid of the Holy Crap, From Mead. One quote:

...let me post a provocative thesis on the wall:  If virtually the entire regional and national staff of every mainline denomination were to be called home to heaven overnight in a mainline version of the Rapture, leaving only the equivalent of Bishop Baker and his secretary in their place, I am sure that someone somewhere would notice a difference, but the effect on either the spiritual state of American Christians or the health and well being of local congregations throughout the United States would be hard to detect with the naked eye.

Just the sort of thing our friend Sippican loves: Spray-on glass.

Is glass really technically a liquid? No, it's best classified as an amorphous solid, but Nature doesn't always follow our human categories very well. Why would it?

The Fable of Market Meritocracy 

"Markets don't reward smart people. They reward value." Yes, that is what markets are for. Markets are ultimately about human psychology; the only way to determine value and price, given human nature, fiat currency, and the annoying limitations of reality.

From Glucksman at City Journal's The Velvet Philosophical Revolution -Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the battle for political freedom goes on.

During four decades of ideological confrontation, theoreticians and journalists had argued about how a society should move from capitalism to socialism. There was no research on the opposite question—that is, on the transition from socialism to capitalism—apart from a few inconclusive studies, most notably in Poland, concerning the possibility of introducing some elements of the free market into a Communist society. As the philosopher Josep Ramoneda has observed, the whole world—Communists, anti-Communists, and those in between—took it as given that the Soviet Union and its satellites could not “return” to capitalism. So when, during the Velvet Revolution, demonstrators posed exactly this question—How can we go from socialism to capitalism?—there was no ready answer.

As Western intellectuals watched Berlin in November 1989, they reconsidered their long belief that the world was fated to be Communist—but retained their belief in fate.

Where is the MSM with this story?

We never doubted it for a minute: Moonbattery. Manchurian Candidate, thanks to the MSM's homo- or hetero- or Lefto- or whatever-eroticism.

I wouldn't mind if he had changed his view of the world since then, but I haven't heard that road-to-Damascus story yet.