Maggie's Farm

h/t, Moonbattery. It's just one part of the story. I like my guns because I like to play with them, and like to protect my family and property.

Al Gore finally admits that ethanol never made any sense. He says:

“One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president.”

Everybody has known for years that it's just a boondoggle for Iowa corn farmers.

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 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.

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.

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.

That question is posed by Bryan Caplan on the signaling value of education, here, via our reader Mike's site, here. (Thanks, Mike)

My perspective on the topic is that educational signaling, like dressing well, good manners, or possessing a good pedigree, will only take you so far in life - maybe to your first or even second job, but it alone will not lead to a happy and productive lifetime white-collar career or careers. That requires fortunate combinations of personality traits including social skills, a bit of dignitas, leadership skills, savvy judgement, a quick penetrating brain, good ability to assess others, a cheerful but forceful disposition, integrity, good intuition, etc., of which many folks lack at least one element. (I lack more than one of those, which is why I am a Partner and not an employee. Like many Maggie's Farmers, I am not fit to be an employee but I am a darn good tough but caring boss: if you don't bs me, I'll be on your side when you screw things up - which you will.)

After the first or second job, the only real value of fancy academic signaling is social. The old school tie networking is highly over-rated these days (except amongst the Dartmouth Gang and the prep school kids who help their own tribe no matter what. Yalies? Not much anymore, since Yale went psychotic).

When we interview at my shop, we partners interrogate the candidates first, and glance at their resumes afterwards. We like to size a person up. Get the cut of their jib. We do not like slick, and we do not like negativity. We have a soft spot for vets and/or people with a strong sport because those things matter to us. We see through bs like a laser. We enjoy dry humor as well as raunchy humor, and are bored by conventional thinking and ordinary "nice" personalities. We try to decide whether this is a person we'd enjoy and benefit from having around every day, somebody we can learn from - and have fun with at dinners and parties. We like to be surprised, and we enjoy quirkiness when associated with brilliance and creativity. And we are looking for the beef: "Teach me something I don't know about ____"

(Admittedly, our candidates are screened first by our junior people, and how they do that is not my concern.)

An academic mercenary tells his story. A quote:

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.

Stick with it, and get past the Polar Bear example to the Einstein: A Hipbone Approach IV: Polar bears and polar opposites. He quotes CS Lewis:

What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something but reality is about which truth is) and therefore every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths…

I could write, and run in circles, on this topic for days. So I won't. Plus I promised She Who Must Be Obeyed that I would clean up the kitchen. Fact.

Our post this week about Grizzlies reminded me of Kephart's 1906 classic, Camping and Woodcraft: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for Travelers in the Wilderness.

It's very much in the Teddy Roosevelt vein, and I have no doubt that he read it.

The above is the title of Boortz' post this week. It is indeed plunder. He quotes Bastiat:

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."

Frederic Bastiat

People are finally waking up to this issue. Lasky at American Thinker: The GOP's First Target Should Be Government Worker Salary and Benefits:

There has been a long-running vicious cycle playing out over the years. Politicians (mostly, but not exclusively, Democrats) have been signing generous agreements with government workers and their unions. In return, the government workers provide a solid voting block, and the public employee unions can use their enlarged dues to funnel money to Democratic campaigns. There was a reason -- beyond their leftist ideological beliefs and animus towards businesses -- that both Barack and Michelle Obama counseled people to go to work for the government. Those government workers become a special interest group in the pockets of Pelosi and company.

If not, Powerline linked a good essay by James Ceaser. A quote:

For many Republicans, and especially for the allies in the Tea Party movement, the issues of economic policy were also linked to a deeper concern. The size of government and the extent of the federal debt represented not only a burden on future generation and a threat to American power, but also a violation of the spirit and letter of the Constitution. The Tea Party in particular, with its belief in Jeffersonian ideas, has been responsible for re-introducing the Constitution into the public debate, a place that it has not held in the same way for over a century. This theme is what connects the Tea Party to the American tradition and makes their concerns matters of fundamental patriotism

I had a tough time deciding what to link on this glorious autumn afternoon, but decided on Mona Charen's Is Obama Trapped? The president has lost the means for Clinton-style triangulation. One quote:

My cheerful, voluble friend at our local Cumbie/24-hr gas station has been working the night shift for 8 months. He's about 25, a recent single Jamaican (legal) immigrant who lives with his Mom. He is not a Rastaman. His Mom is a hospital aide who also moonlights as a home helper. She sings in the church choir.

This morning at 6 AM he announced to me "Hey, Boss, good news. They finally agreed to up my hours. Now I'll be able to work a minimum of 55 hrs/wk instead of 45."

"Do they pay you time and a half for OT?" I ask.

"Of course they do, man. Every hour over 40. The good thing is, now I can begin to put some money aside. You watch me man, I'm gonna need an investment advisor soon."

I asked "How about 60 hours minimum? I did that when I was young."

"That's my goal." he replied. "If I keep doing a good job at 55 hours and don't make mistakes, they will let me have 60. I already worked 60 last week with my extra OT."

"Beats selling beads to tourists at the beach?"

"Oh man, I thank God every day that my Mom made me come to America with her. She forced me, man. I had no choice. She is fat and mean. I was a ganja beach bum. Next week, I'll be an investor. I'm thinking of buying some some Apple Computer."

"What's your goal?"

"I'm gonna have my own Cumbie franchise. Be my own boss. Work 100 hours if I want. Hey, do you think I should buy gold or Apple Computer?"

"I think you should buy your own computer first."

"Hey, I already have that. I am online, man. I taught myself. I read everything there. I read Bloomberg news. These old guys come in early, they say 'Are the papers in yet?' Behind the times, man."

A spirited young lad with Jamaican high school and no college, enthusiastically inventing and building a life in America from scratch, with unlimited opportunity in front of him. Ya gotta love it. I want this kid here.

Had a routine mini-check up with my Doc this morning. My BP is now normal, with medicine. He invited me to have a flu shot before I left. I asked him if they really worked, as I had recently read that they do not.

He said "They probably work a little for the people who don't need them, and don't work for the people who do need them. They're free from the government, so have one if you want."

Free from the government?  I got one.

CT is running counter to national trends. Not a single Repub Congressman or Senator, and a State House controlled by Dems with the first Dem governor in 24 years. No brakes.

Watch your taxes, middle class suburbs and quiet farming villages, because they are coming after your money. The unions want a state property tax and a state income tax increase, and Malloy is now owned by the unions.

Even my Dem friends are talking about setting up Florida residence. Vote and run.

Good source for my state's news: Connecticut News Junkie.

This good old independent Yankee state is now entirely in the pocket of the unions - especially the government unions - and the three corrupt urban train wrecks which, instead of being the dynamic centers of job and wealth creation that they once were, have become insatiable sponges for dollars: Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport. Their declines have been dramatic: In the late 1950s, Hartford was voted the most pleasant medium-sized city in America to live in - higher than Boston - and I was told about the lines of limousines parked in downtown Bridgeport.

I cannot explain how that happened, but I do know that people migrated north just before the jobs moved south (to avoid the unions, the high wages, and the taxes). Business has feet: it can move easily to Texas or to India.

CT still has the highest per-capita income in the country, but that is mostly because of New York City's prosperous suburb, Fairfield County (where the O likes to go frequently to mine for gold - Greenwich for the real gold, Bridgeport for the votes). If they over-tax those folks, they will move away. They ain't stupid. You can run a hedge fund from anywhere.

I see that CT is already ranked the fourth-worst state in which to do business. With the new team, I'm sure we could get higher on that ladder without too much effort. It's a damn shame.

The only consolation is that we still have open carry and, of course, readily-obtainable carry.

From an excellent essay at NAS, College Application Essays: Going Beyond "How Would You Contribute to Diversity?":

Would the Yale admissions office look favorably on the student who answered, “I have found ‘diversity’ to be a cudgel by which self-appointed elites attempt to enforce their preferences over others.  Diversity to me has been the experience of having my individuality denied, suppressed, and demeaned.  It is a word that summarizes a smarmy form of oppression that congratulates itself on its high-mindedness even as it enforces narrow-minded conformity."

No, any student really seeking admission to Yale wouldn’t say such a thing.  But chances are very good that a great many students harbor insights very much like that.  They know their ethnic or racial categorization, their socio-economic status, and other such characteristics matter far more to admissions offices than their actual thoughts about who they are.  

Applicants, of course, are savvy enough to feed the admissions office whatever sort of PC BS they want to hear.

Well, here's my answer to the application diversity question:

"As a middle-class, hard workin', gun-totin', Scripture-readin', horse-ridin', golf hackin', military-respectin', cigar-smokin', freedom-lovin', Scotch-drinkin', heterosexual-and-married-for-life, cranky, preppy, WASP American country club Conservative who likes to make money, I think I would add remarkable diversity to any academic program or workplace. Indeed, I think people would be quite interested in, and would benefit from, my peculiar old-timey Yankee views and my exotic life style. I believe I am an 'underrepresented minority,' and thus deserving of your most serious and special consideration despite my unfortunately-pasty skin tone."

The Lib Zuckerman doesn't have my politics, but he's always interesting. America's Love Affair With Obama Is Over:

He came across as a young man in a grown-up's game—impressive but not presidential. A politician but not a leader, managing American policy at home and American power abroad with disturbing amateurishness. Indeed, there was a growing perception of the inability to run the machinery of government and to find the right people to manage it. A man who was once seen as a talented and even charismatic rhetorician is now seen as lacking real experience or even the ability to stop America's decline. "Yes we can," he once said, but now America asks, "Can he?"

And

The open purchasing of votes through the provision of special exemptions for five states and for unions, and concessions to many of the special interests in the Democratic Party, especially trial lawyers, symbolized the corruption of our politics. The 2009 omnibus spending bill alone contained 8,570 special earmarks like those that had so enraged the American public in the past. When lawmakers had no time to even read the bills, it gave the impression that what was important was passing anything, no matter how ineffectual. Obama had promised he would change "politics as usual." He changed it all right, but for the worse. The list of his additional programs only provoked the public's distaste for big government, big spending, and big deficits.

Yeah, read the whole thing.

h/t, Neptunus:

"When we win, it's a mandate. When they win, it's some sort of complicated message about bipartisanship and the tricky optics of modern governance."

Prof B

Big lies, small lies, creative and manipulative "narratives," etc. are what much of politics is all about. We know that politics is a more humane substitute for war.

(We also know that, as virtuous souls, Conservatives always hold the high moral ground. Always.)

That aside, I am still puzzled by the shorthand of "Left" and "Right." It makes no real sense, as Wiki explains well.

If today people use those words nowadays to signify collectivism vs. individualism and freedom, why don't we use those words instead?

Jonah Goldberg notably dealt with these issues in his Liberal Fascism.

OK, but what about Adolf Hitler? Left or Right? This via Doug Ross:

"I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and penpushers have timidly begun...I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order." -- Hitler to Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction, pg. 186

I found another one, too:

"It is thus necessary that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. .... This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture .... we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man." Adolph Hitler, 1933.

Yes, he was just another messianic Leftist dictator with a zealous faith in governmental benevolence and altruism - at gunpoint. Just one amongst the number of Socialist mass-murderers of the 20th Century. I think Hitler would have argued against being part of any "Right."

Statist, collectivist people should be called that - or just called Socialist. People like me can be termed Constitutional-Conservatives-with-a-broad-Libertarian-streak. I guess it's no wonder people look for a shorthand for that, but "Right" doesn't fit.

So claims Ruffini. It makes sense to me. We're a center-right country, overall (except in my corner of it). A quote:

The act of yelling "realignment" after an election is getting tired and farcical after an unprecedented third wave in a row, so I'll resist doing it here. In the House, there was a tactical realignment, as seats Democrats held for personal reasons now give way to natural conservative Republican-held strongholds we'll hold for a long time. Attitudinally, the pendulum simply swung from the far left to the center. The President will be a Democrat, the Senate will be narrowly Democratic, and the House Republican, and the overall result will be all sides canceling each other out, e.g. centrism.

While not conservative per se, it is in one important sense: very little will get done. And that's a good thing.

Yep. The less they do to us, the better.

My two cents are to echo Marco Rubio:

"We make a great mistake if we believe that tonight these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party," said incoming Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. A rising GOP star, Rubio seized his new role as a party leader and potential presidential candidate, casting the results as "a second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be not so long ago."

Similar from Jay Cost:

This is not an endorsement of the Republican party, but much more of a rejection of the Democratic party, specifically the claims the Democrats have made since 1996 to be broad in its appeal and moderate in its policies.

Democrats built a congressional majority in 2006 and 2008 by persuading Bush voters to cross the aisle to support them, with an implicit promise of bipartisanship and moderation.  The party under Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi did not deliver on that promise -- and thus they lost the support of these Republican-leaning districts.

Related, how does somebody please all the independent voters?

... for all the decisiveness of the independents' shift, this election hasn't resolved the most fundamental question facing the country: What should the role of government be in the 21st century?

Instead it has simply set up what figures to be a two-year debate over that question in Washington, and ensures that it will be a focal point of the 2012 election.

Thanks to independents�along with other crucial swing blocs, such as suburban women, blue-collar workers and retirees, all of whom also shifted toward the Republicans�the GOP now has the strength to stop pieces of the Obama agenda and, perhaps in some instances, roll it back.

Having some friends over late tonight for a couple of hours to watch the election returns.

We'll have a jolly time, regardless of the results. Richard Baehr advises me not expect too much.

All I want is a "restraining order," for now.