Maggie's Farm

VDH begins his piece on Obama's career thus far:

I have believed in the power of the goddess Nemesis (“dispenser of dues”) ever since I was introduced to the concept as a teenager studying classics, especially in the texts of Hesiod, Herodotus, and Sophocles.

Some of you know her also as a variant of eastern Karma, or the folk notion of ‘what comes around, goes around’, or the now common “ain’t payback a bitch”? We all agree on the symptoms: overweening success and surfeit (koris) lead to hubris (gratuitous arrogance), which in turn promotes destructive behavior (atê), that at last calls you to the attention of divine Nemesis—who ensures your ruin.  At Rhamnous on the Attic coast there is a beautiful temple to the goddess, proof of her ubiquity and power.

Read the whole good thing.

The Doers vs. The "Thinkers". Well said. A point I have tried to make many times. I once used a talented, design-oriented architect who knew little about construction, and it did not work out well.

So when we did the addition to the barn, I designed it with the builder. Perfect, and on budget.

"We have a test for a rare disease (we’ll call it Jones Syndrome), and the test is 99% accurate, but it returns a false positive in 1% of those tested (that is, 1% of the time the test returns a positive, the disease is not present). If I test positive, what is the probability that I have Jones Syndrome?"

It's not a trick question, it's a question of simple logic - and that's why it's so easy to fool juries with this sort of thing.

OK, we'll add this data:

"How prevalent is Jones Syndrome, that is, what is the probability of my having it, irrespective of any test result? We’ll say that 1 in 10000 have Jones Syndrome, so your untested probability of having Jones Syndrome is 0.01%, or 0.0001."

Answer is below the fold.  Explanation at Right Wing Prof

- The FTC and the internet: Insanity, inanity - and danger.

- Also Insty: YOU CAN’T SAY THAT: At the UN, Obama Administration backs limits on free speech. As the piece in the Weekly Standard begins:

The Obama administration has marked its first foray into the UN human rights establishment by backing calls for limits on freedom of expression. The newly-minted American policy was rolled out at the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council, which ended in Geneva on Friday. American diplomats were there for the first time as full Council members and intent on making friends.

That is creepy.

- And in Ottowa, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant testify to the Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Monday (h/t, SDA). Videos at YouTube. Here's one of them (the second one):

James Capretta makes the case that the real national economic crisis is the growth of middle class entitlements in his excellent essay, The New Middle Class Contract.

The danger as he sees it (and as I see it) is to risk suffocating the goose that lays the golden eggs which have (not really) paid for our existing middle-class entitlements.

One quote from his essay:

Some liberal politicians, including the president, have sought to use this moment of instability — when all past certainties seem suddenly in question — to advance their longstanding agenda and expand the role of the state in health care, energy, education, and other sectors, taking on new spending commitments and in effect exacerbating the dangers of the old middle-class contract. As Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said in November 2008: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

But the shock of the economic crisis may also make Americans more open to serious entitlement reforms that Emanuel, President Obama, and many other Democrats have long resisted. The logic of the case for reform is much like that of the case for the recent emergency interventions: the need for a bold response to an enormous problem, aimed at regaining some equilibrium and allowing again for sustainable economic growth and prosperity. This is the time to explain to the public just how grave the prospects for our entitlement system — and therefore for our larger economy — really are, and to argue for a serious and sensible change of course.

The impulse to insulate the middle class from the cost consequences of their choices — an impulse that has defined our longstanding ­middle-class contract — has done great harm and stands to do far more. The remedy must be to redesign our entitlements so that the choices the middle class makes in terms of work, family, and health care will promote more productivity, efficiency, and wealth, rather than the shrinking of the labor force and the growth of government.

Done right, a new arrangement would both strengthen our fiscal outlook and improve the economic standing of American families.

Yes, he is an idealist. His whole essay at National Affairs.

At First Principles. I still read books. Plenty of 'em. So does Lisa Schiffren: Are books archaic?

Mark Twain hated Jane Austin, but I am happy to see that Norm likes Wallace Stegner. So do I.

And here's a book every Canadian needs to read.

At First Principles. Just one quote:

The British, seeking to adapt to the aspirations of a modern, democratizing age, weaned themselves from Magna Carta. The Americans, “born equal, instead of becoming so,” in Tocqueville’s phrase, found in Magna Carta a symbol of political liberty, silently ignoring its feudal excrescences and adopting the common law insofar as it was, in the later words of Joseph Story, “applicable to the situation of the colony, and . . . not . . . altered, repealed, or modified by any of our subsequent legislation.” The Americans eventually established many of the Charter’s provisions in written constitutions of their own.

You can read the whole legal memo to ACORN posted via Big Government. Devastating. But ACORN seems to have ignored the advice they paid for. h/t, Big Govt

They assumed that none of the laws or rules applied to them. "By all means necessary" is the Gramsci-ite term.

Taxpayers at all income levels could be hit with over $1.5 trillion in new taxes, fees, and other costs over the next 10 years, despite President Obama's repeated promises that he would not raise taxes "one dime" on those earning less than $250,000 a year.

Whole story at Newsmax.

From Drudge:

THE EGO HAS LANDED
WORLD REJECTS OBAMA: CHICAGO OUT IN FIRST ROUND

Re our earlier post today on Balsamic Vinegar, just a note to say that Costco's Kirkland (their house brand) Tuscan extra virgin olive oil is very, very good - far better than any supermarket brand - and a great buy (better than you can buy in specialty stores for twice the price - it is our house olive oil. Costco spent several years selecting the orchards in Tuscany for their oil.). 

And the same goes for their Modena Balsamic. I won't even get into how good their butcher departments are.

An old pal has invited me down to his place on Spring Island again, and this fall we can make it for a long weekend. Do a little hunting and shooting and crabbing, and fishin' too. He is encouraging me to buy a place there, but I am fully invested in real estate already - our little farm and our big mortgage and our big taxes where we live quite happily with our animals, read our books, listen to our music, and have cocktails by the pool (until last week).

(Plus I do have a job which, by my latest calculation, I will need to keep doing until I am 75. That's no problem at all for me, as long as I get (unpaid) time off. I like to work, and I am suspicious of guys who do not - regardless of their age, wealth, etc.)

I do love the southern Low Country, though. Love Charleston and Savannah as much as any place in the USA. Actually, I love lots of places. I have taught myself to enjoy going places without needing to own a part of them.

I just own them by giving them space in my brain and memory.

Via Icecap:

Leading UK Climate Scientists Must Explain or Resign

By Jenniffer Marohasy

MOST scientific sceptics have been dismissive of the various reconstructions of temperature which suggest 1998 is the warmest year of the past millennium. Our case has been significantly bolstered over the last week with statistician Steve McIntyre finally getting access to data used by Keith Briffa, Tim Osborn and Phil Jones to support the idea that there has been an unprecedented upswing in temperatures over the last hundred years - the infamous hockey stick graph. 

Mr McIntyre’s analysis of the data - which he had been asking for since 2003 - suggests that scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the United Kingdom’s Bureau of Meteorology have been using only a small subset of the available data to make their claims that recent years have been the hottest of the last millennium.  When the entire data set is used, Mr McIntyre claims that the hockey stick shape disappears completely. (Yamal: A “Divergence” Problem, by Steve McIntyre, 27 September 2009)

Mr McIntyre has previously showed problems with the mathematics behind the ‘hockey stick’.  But scientists at the Climate Research Centre, in particular Dr Briffa, have continuously republished claiming the upswing in temperatures over the last 100 years is real and not an artifact of the methodology used - as claimed by Mr McIntyre. However, these same scientists have denied Mr McIntyre access to all the data.  Recently they were forced to make more data available to Mr McIntyre after they published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - a journal which unlike Nature and Science has strict policies on data archiving which it enforces. 

This week’s claims by Steve McInyre that scientists associated with the UK Meteorology Bureau have been less than diligent are serious and suggest some of the most defended building blocks of the case for anthropogenic global warming are based on the indefensible when the methodology is laid bare. 

This sorry saga also raises issues associated with how data is archived at the UK Meteorological Bureau with in complete data sets that spuriously support the case for global warming being promoted while complete data sets are kept hidden from the public - including from scientific sceptics like Steve McIntyre.

It is indeed time leading scientists at the Climate Research Centre associated with the UK Meteorological Bureau explain how Mr McIntyre is in error or resign. See post here.

Looks like they were cherry-picking data to get the results they wanted. Why?

Quoted at Conspiracy as Joke of the Day. It begins:

DEMOCRATS: DO YOU REALLY WANT TO REFORM HEALTH CARE, OR DON'T YOU?   Philip K. Howard in the Wall Street Journal:

On Aug. 25, at a town-hall meeting in Reston, Va., Howard Dean, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, was asked why there is nothing in the health-care proposals about liability reform. Mr. Dean replied: "The reason that tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers. . . . And that is the plain and simple truth."

...A few thousand trial lawyers are blocking reform that would benefit 300 million Americans. This is not just your normal special-interest politics. It's a scandal—it is as if international-trade policy was being crafted in order to get fees for customs agents.

Read it all. Link above.

Does anybody take Frank Rich seriously?

I never did ,even when he did the drama reviews.

Not that 64 is old by any means, but the Medicare group is very upset about ObamaCare.

Rightly so. They have a very good deal right now - probably an impossibly good deal - and they are going to lose it to help pay for the younger people who don't want to buy medical insurance.

Once the dog gets a bone, don't try to take it away. Folks on Medicare love their almost-free lunch.

Euroland should just give up on Socialism and try real Communism. It works just great.

Related: Are we witnessing the collape of Liberalism? at Am Thinker. How's that for whiplash?

Support hits new lows. Nobody wants this government mess. Just fix a few simple things, and all will be well.

Samuelson: It's just an exercise in ego gratification. No, it's worse than that: it's about power.

The cost? It's hidden in unfunded mandates for the states to pick up. They will just love that.

This loony, grandiose big government snafu is a train wreck waiting to happen, and Casey Jones is driving that train, high on cocaine. Better watch your speed.

In the WSJ. One quote:

Television does not begin to fill it. To the extent broadcast networks ever tried they now have abdicated to so-called cable news channels. These, in turn, now devote most of their resources to covering celebrities, crimes and sundry social trivia and to prime-time programming that pretends to be analysis and informed opinion while mostly offering the spectacle of extremist heads yelling at each other. There are few resources and even less commitment to covering significant news beyond floods and fires.

The Internet is not filling news vacuums either. There are hundreds upon hundreds of online sites and blogs that claim to provide news, but virtually none of them even pretend to pursue the traditional news role of newspapers, which is to invest in professional staffs dispersed around a community and across the country or the globe to cover, analyze, and only then comment on, events. Actually, all they do is comment.

As to all the free online editions of our newspapers, their business model does not begin to cover the cost of significant news reporting. So the online editions with growing audiences—largely cannibalized from print audiences—rely on the poor print editions for almost all the news they give away. Sadly, there is less and less of that, and the ultimate loser, of course, is the public.

He is right. We are in a time when new paradigms are waiting to be born. (However, his WSJ is still doing fine.) The new paradigm we do not want is this one. The very idea is sick sick sick.