Maggie's Farm

Jack Fuller has an interesting essay on the future of journalism and the news, and it is worth reading if only to see how older dead-tree newspeople view the world.

I disagree with much of it, and with his premises too. Plus his brain thing is just silly. Anyway, I have no time to share my thoughts about it this morning.

From Gateway:

Over the past 30 years:

Democrats have blocked the development of new sources of petroleum.
Democrats have blocked drilling in ANWR.
Democrats have blocked drilling off the coast of Florida.
Democrats have blocked drilling off of the east coast.
Democrats have blocked drilling off of the west coast.
Democrats have blocked drilling off the Alaskan coast.
Democrats have blocked building oil refineries.
Democrats have blocked clean nuclear energy production.
Democrats have blocked clean coal production.

But, they’re funding projects in Brazil.

We have the Chinese drilling off our southern coast, and Brazil is drilling everywhere they can. I think the Dems have an aversion to American oil.

More on Voegli's important new book, Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State, at Powerline. One quote:

Voegeli seems to understand welfare state liberalism like Whitaker Chambers understood Communism, from the inside. Jonah Goldberg has written of him: "Bill Voegeli has become my new James Q. Wilson -- the egghead I always read even if I don't think I'm interested at first."

Boortz: THE GOLDEN AGE OF GOVERNMENT UNIONS IS OVER

Legal Insurrection: Unions Rescued In Rhode Island

These things should be illegal. The intrinsic conflict of interest would never be legal in business.

NYS borrowing from pension fund to make annual required payment to pension fund. Just like Euroland.

I have heard of people who use credit cards to pay the interest on other credit cards.

From a discussion about the current education of men in America at Chicago Boyz:

Boy/men seem not to be dropping out to “do” something but dropping out to do even less. The number of young marriages in which not only is the wife the breadwinner but the husband isn’t even taking care of children is increasing. These often dissolve – perhaps because women are too conventional to respect a mate who plays video games all day while they work or perhaps because women want children of their own rather than merely a needy husband. (No, I’m not going to diss a stay-at-home dad – I’m sure it is a useful choice; but many are childless marriages. Few women are at home for the years pre-baby.) And we should at least recognize that a woman does offer something in terms of child-bearing and child-nursing a man doesn’t. Besides, I don’t see choices – I see drift.

Like I always say, most men were made just for fishin, huntin, and lovin.

Addendum, from a post by AVI:

I started opining 20 years ago that feminist resentment was largely driven by women who had followed the directions and played by the rules, excelling in school - which was considered the automatic qualifier to success. We were all told To get a good job, get a good education, not just the girls. Then they left school and found that there were other, less-familiar laws of the marketplace which had seldom been mentioned. Heck, I felt the same way. Those boys and young men they had beaten, beaten fair and square at school, were finding all these other routes to success.

A re-post from Aug. '09, for Flag Day -

All of the flags on houses in our Woodstock, VT photos reminded me that we have not had a flag since we rebuilt the side entry porch about 14 years ago.

Shame on me. It's a grand old flag.

I ordered a set from this place today. I will place the bracket low, so I can easily pull the pole out in rain or at night. I am not in favor of those night-lit flags, but I recall that Barry Goldwater had an automatic flagpole at his place in Arizona that lowered and boxed the flag at evening, and raised it in the morning.

I loved Barry, but that sort of hi-tech flagpole seems cheesy - and lazy - to a Yankee like me.

From City State at The American:

For the first time in recorded human history, more than half of the world’s population has moved into a city or its environs from rural areas and small towns.

Considered historically, this process of urbanization has moved at lightning speed, especially in the past half-century.

- Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.

- What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

Both from Flannery O'Connor

Colorado's 3rd District (h/t, Moonbattery). Yes. I like the cut of his jib.

- Washington Reb is working on getting past a sound-bite conservatism, with Russell Kirk at his side.

- Steyn on "We are the ones we've been waiting for." (I would never wait for myself. In general, I tend to be annoyed with myself.)

NAACP Branded As "Racist" For Promoting Idea That Black People Are Stupid. Make sure you go to Ace's link and watch the very brief video.

The pathetic part is that these folks don't see how they are beclowning themselves, and if they know what black holes are, it doesn't show. They are looking for black hos. Black hos, if they are seeking them, are easy to find on 11th Avenue in the 30s and 40s after 9 pm, along with the white and hispanic and even asian hos. It's as multicultural as a White House Cabinet.

Black holes are a trickier business.

The issue, of course, is not stupidity. Stupidity comes in all colors, as does beclownment. The issue is using real or feigned ignorance, or real or feigned paranoia, or real or feigned offense, to score points by bullying innocents. That is immoral.

Very good brief history of medical insurance at National Affairs: Health Care and the Profit Motive. One quote:

When it comes to health care, liberals and conservatives often seem to be living in two different worlds. To those on the left, America's health-care system is a heartless capitalist jungle: a place where the bottom line is king, and the working poor are exploited. President Obama, for example, has accused insurance companies of holding Americans hostage in exchange for profits, and doctors of cashing in on children's sore throats by needlessly removing their tonsils. The right, meanwhile, sees American health care as an outpost of socialism: The government distorts prices and suppresses innovation, impairing the quality and affordability of care and constraining individual autonomy. Hence Republicans' call for less government involvement in insurance, and their complaints that heavy-handed Medicare rules are the source of our woes.

Simply put, liberals believe that health care is treated as a market commodity today but should not be, and conservatives think that health care is not treated as a market commodity but should be.

From the Pope Center (h/t, Doug Ross):

Our study of the University of Michigan, for example, found that in 2005 an in-state male with no parent ties to the school, a 1240 cumulative SAT, and 3.2 high-school grade-point average had a 92 percent chance of admission if black and an 88 percent chance if Latino – but only a 14 percent chance if white and a mere 10 percent chance if Asian.  Our study of six North Carolina schools – North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina campuses at Asheville, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Wilmington – found the same pattern. 

1. From Insty,

THIS IS INTERESTING: The Road To Serfdom is currently the #1 book on Amazon.

2. From Vanderleun, The Road to Serfdom as a Comic Book

Fat union guy bussed in to Arkansas to make phone calls, from Powerline's Hey, union man: Another look:

From Am Thinker, How to Fight Back against Public Unions: A Primer. He begins:

We have reached a potential turning point in the relationship of public employee unions and the electorate they ostensibly serve. Over the past year, there has been a steady drumbeat of criticism focused on public unions and the havoc they have wrought on our public finances. Governments -- city, country, state, and federal -- are drowning in red ink Our taxes are flowing to ever-voracious government workers (whose own ranks are growing steadily while the private payrolls shrink); they are better compensated than private workers in comparable positions.

What is to be done?

In my view, public unions should be illegal due to conflict of interest.

h/t, NE Repub:

“As good as this bar is,” said Angus, “I still prefer the pubs back home in Glasgow. There’s a fine place called the Smiling Bull of Lochanvar. The landlord goes out of his way to please… when you buy four drinks, he’ll buy the fifth drink.”

“Well, Angus,” said Brian, “at the Red Lion Pub in London, the barman will buy the third drink after you buy the first two.”

“Ahhh, dat’s nothin’,” said Patrick, “at me pub in Limerick, the moment you set foot in the place they’ll buy you a drink, then another, all the drinks you like, actually. Then, when you’ve been fully served, they’ll take you upstairs and make sure you get laid, all on the house!”

Angus and Brian were suspicious of this claim. Patrick swore every word was true. “Did this actually happen to you?”

“Not meself, personally, no,” admitted Patrick, “but it did happen to me sister quite a few times.”

Self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics.

No kidding. You can't even try to discuss economic issues with them. I call it "Fairy-tale Economics." Exceptions to the rule? Plenty of them, mainly the Wall Streeter limousine Libs who dominate the upper levels of finance in America.

The problem with CPR is remembering what to do when your adrenaline begins surging because it looks like somebody is trying to die. (Some of the other problems are those of cracking some ribs of some guy who doesn't need it, or of keeping "alive" somebody whose brain is already dying or dead. Knowing when to use CPR is as important as knowing how.) 

Coyote offers this useful reminder: Super Sexy CPR

We have been promoting the documentary The Lottery. I see that the WSJ covers it: Storming the School Barricades - A new documentary by a 27-year-old filmmaker could change the national debate about public education.

Another one on the same topic coming out in the fall, Waiting for Superman.

It's a movement! People want choice, not government monopolies.

Making money without working. I have not made a penny in my retirement account for 10 years. It is mostly equities. The long view, from Tiger. Probably just tracks inflation, but what do I know?

Arrogant idiot Derek Bok thinks government needs to provide us with happiness. More at Moonbattery.

Says I, just give me my freedom, and I'll figure out how to be as happy or unhappy as I chose to be - and I'll do it my way, and definitely not the way a Harvard President would do it for himself - or "for me."

Furthermore, I do not need any government Soma. I can handle unhappiness just fine and I can take my lumps like a man, when necessary. Life wasn't meant to be a bowl of cherries, nor did I ever expect it to be.