We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Scriptorium. We are all Merton fans here. A quote from that link:
The most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice, but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling, the more he is convinced of his own infallibility. And if the sheer force of his own self-confidence communicates itself to other people and gives them the impression that he really is a saint, such a man can wreck a whole city or a religious order or even a nation. The world is covered with scars that have been left in its flesh by visionaries like these.
Every day I feel more steamed about this "stimulus." This is no stimulus. Dear readers, we are in the process of getting scammed, hoodwinked, tricked - in a way that Bernie Madoff could only dream about doing in his wildest dreams. The statists are literally trying to pull a fast one over on me. It's the biggest money and power grab since Lyndon Johnson, and nobody knows all of the details, implications, or the long-term consequences - not to mention the undiscussed or unintended (or quietly-intended) consequences.
It's a trickster's delight. Are we such easy marks? I hope not. They hope most of us are uninformed morons and will defer to their superior wisdom. The House bill goes far beyond the usual pork. It changes the role of the federal government in our lives, and is intended to do so. This is no short-term stimulus for an ugly recession; this is long-term change via centralization of power and money using today's fears about the economy as a convenient excuse.
Why is it long-term? Heck, it's not just long-term; this stuff is forever. How difficult is it to "cut" a program? Well, no more difficult than trying to take a lollypop out of a kid's mouth. The socialist ratchet wrench has no reverse setting.
Yes, I am not pleased with hopey-changey thus far.
That's what the stimulus bill was about—not knowing what time it is, not knowing the old pork-barrel, group-greasing ways are over, done, embarrassing. When you create a bill like that, it doesn't mean you're a pro, it doesn't mean you're a tough, no-nonsense pol. It means you're a slob.
That's how the Democratic establishment in the House looks, not like people who are responding to a crisis, or even like people who are ignoring a crisis, but people who are using a crisis. Our hopeful, compelling new president shouldn't have gone with this bill. He made news this week by going to the House to meet with Republicans. He could have made history by listening to them.
To call the economic legislation now moving through Congress a stimulus bill obscures its full implications. The measure represents the most ambitious effort in decades to swell public spending on domestic priorities such as education, infrastructure, and scientific research that many Democrats consider the foundation stones of sustained prosperity.
The Democratic plan . . . provides the biggest surge in long-term public investment since President Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. . . .
[T]he bill also emphatically expands programs targeted more at the far term than the near term — from aid to schools in low-income areas ($13 billion) to expanded college loans ($16 billion) and scientific research ($10 billion). In normal times, Congress might never enlarge so many programs at once. But, as with Reagan's tax cut, the crisis-induced demand for action may suspend the normal laws of political gravity — and allow Democrats to redirect federal priorities as boldly as Reagan did. "This is a once-in-a-25-year opportunity to [implement] a lot of our agenda," a top House Democratic aide says.
For the amount spent we could have given every unemployed person in the United States roughly $75,000.
We could give every person who had lost a job and is now passing through long-term unemployment of six months or longer roughly $300,000.
There has been pork barrel politics since there has been politics. The scale of this pork is beyond what had ever been imagined before — and no one can be sure it will actually do much stimulation.
Wall Street didn’t have Obama’s chutzpah. And it didn’t do nearly the damage to the nation that this bill will do. (Via Dan Riehl).
The U.S. National Debt was $930 billion in 1980, or 33% of GDP. Today it is $10.7 trillion, or 76% of GDP. The National Debt has grown by 1,150% in 28 years. With the planned fiscal stimulus (taxing future generations), the National Debt will reach 100% of GDP during the Obama administration. When Argentina’s economy collapsed in 1998, their National Debt as a percentage of GDP was 65%. The Great Deniers say we are not Argentina. They say we are safe because the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency of the world. This is like jumping off a 20 story building and as you pass the 10th floor someone yells out the window asking how you are doing. You answer, “Good, so far”.
The war initiated by Japan, first by invading China, then by declaring war on the United States and Great Britain, resulted in more than 24 million deaths in allied countries – 23.8 million of them being Chinese. The loss of life to other countries included: 106,000 Americans; 86,000 Indians; 57,000 Philippinos; 52,000 British; 17,000 Australians; and 12,000 Soviets. The logic of invading and declaring war on so many countries had to do with securing resources for Japan’s economic self-sufficiency.
As the Emperor explained, it was merely incidental that Japanese self-preservation and self-sufficiency required the killing of more than 24 million foreigners. It was this unfortunate byproduct of Tokyo’s policy that unleashed “American imperialism.”
Read the whole thing. We Americans tend to be isolationists unless we are poked with sharp sticks. Whether at home, in our towns, in our states, or in our country, we like to be left alone to lead our lives as best we can.
I thought he was elected to run the city, but he seems to prefer controlling what we put in our mouths. Fats, smokes, soda pop - and now salt!?!
What an idiot. There is not a darn thing wrong with salt. Furthermore, food without salt tastes like cardboard. As a lover of NYC, I have had it with this nanny Mayor. Let's go back to a normal machine sleazebag Dem who will rip you off and pad his pocket and pass money to his buddies - but won't tell you what to eat or drink or smoke. Towns like NYC are for people who want to be free to do what the heck they want, and are not terrified by death.
This Bloomberg guy is a nut. Rich, but still a control freak and a crank. Dietarily-obsessed, too, it seems, with a mild form of eating disorder which causes him to be concerned with what other people do. He's neither my doctor nor my nutritionist nor my Mom, even though he seems to imagine that he is and that I want him to be.
What will be next on his list? Meat? Alcohol? Coffee? Chocolate? Broccoli (which raises cancer risk)? Greens (whose folate raises risk of cancer recurrence)?
...it seems that the model we are following is this one: government and lobbyists use regulation and innovation to stop the market from innovating; government and lobbyists perceive need for that market innovation; government pays market to implement innovation by paying costs of regulation and litigation from taxpayer funds; government and lobbyists finally say the market has failed and only government can provide genuine progress.
The 40-year wish list. That's exactly what I've been thinking. Every Dem in Congress has his long pent-up list, and suddenly he is the kid in the candy shop, with unlimited funds.
I am snowed-in today. Going nowhere past the end of my driveway with my snowplow. My road hasn't seen a plow yet this morning, and it's coming down hard and fast and blowy. Beautiful. I will light a fire, feed the birds, do some plowing, sip some sherry, catch up on some paperwork, and do some billable work too. Maybe find a new topic for a future post, if something piques my curiosity. Maybe bundle up and boot up and take a hike in the woods.
Re the Kesler post below, via the above-named essay at Politico:
“All this stimulus money is geared toward getting consumers spending and borrowing again. But spending and borrowing were the problem in the first place.”
I agree. But since when is politics rational? It's sales and marketing.
Our Editor sent me AVI's piece on the inauguration and the split-verb (and split infinitive) myth. It's clear to me that Justice Roberts' inner grammatical gyroscope resisted the grammatical error in "to faithfully execute..."
This grammatical issue is discussed at Volokh. Well, I will boldly go where many others have gone before, and offer my own views on the subject.
(But first, let me say that some blog writing tends to the off-the cuff, conversational, informal (ie sloppy) writing. Most of us have real jobs, and dash it off. Nevertheless, good habits like good character tends to shine through if we have them engrained. We aren't perfect in that way, and our own Grammatical Sticklers Gwynnie and Dylanologist sit like Jiminy Crickets on our shoulder to try to keep us in line. Grammar School was called that for a reason.)
Are "rules made to be broken"? Well, kinda-sorta. Grammatical rules can be broken for effect. Poets, orators, and good writers do that all the time. However, the effect is lost when the larger context of a transposition of words (a hyperbaton) is grammatically unsound too. Here's a good hyperbaton: "Constant you are, but yet a woman." (Henry IV). Here's one of mine: "I will happily attend your soiree provided that if an interesting selection of single malts and Cuban cigars will be offered."
Life is the same way: if you do one crazy thing, it is dramatic. If you do crazy things all the time, it isn't.
Let's take a look at split infinitives. I am of the school that views them as grammatical errors and as evidence of lousy schooling (but not of lousy intelligence). Split verbshave always been a similar subject of grammatical dispute. It is difficult to have a conversation without using them, but they are awkward-sounding.
I don't want to endlessly beat a dead horse. I suppose my point is that solid grammar and solid language are supportive of clear thinking and clear communication, but that rules can be broken for rhetorical purposes - but only by those who otherwiseuse the rules most of the time.
Sort of off-topic: One of my pet peeves which I see everywhere these days is the use of the quasi-legal term "absent." It is a kind of Lazy English which some seem to feel sounds elevated. "Absent a coordinated Republican resistance, tax-dodger Timothy Geithner will be approved as the new boss of the IRS." What's wrong with good old "without"?
Image: Sculpture of "Grammar" as one of the Seven Liberal Arts, Munster Church, Frieberg, c. 1270. As the source notes, "Notice that Grammar has a pretty good hold on the ear of one student and is holding a hefty cudgel that could whack the split infinitives and dangling participles from between the ears of any young and stubborn head."
Cognitive biases aren't formal logical fallacies, but I put them in my Fallacy Collection anyway.
In one short post in the realm of economics titled When Stupid is Smart,Stumbling hits on a bunch of my old favorites: The Gambler's Fallacy, The Hot Hand Fallacy, the Focusing Effect, The Status Quo Bias, Wishful Thinking, and the like.
He makes the point, as we have done here in the past, that cognitive biases save time, and that sometimes a quick, suboptimal decision is better than a slow, perfect one. Sometimes.
This is why Rush remains so good. He responds to Obama with good cheer and without rancor, while going straight to the heart of the matter. Byron York. One quote:
One more thing, Byron. Your publication and website have documented Obama's ties to the teachings of Saul Alinksy while he was community organizing in Chicago. Here is Rule 13 of Alinksy's Rules for Radicals:
"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
Completely related, The Audacity of Obama at Powerline. He has big plans for us, and it makes me uncomfortable.
Moonbat warmist crank James Lovelock interviewed by a sexy babe named Gaia, at Jules. Lovelock predicts a "90% cull" of humans. I predict that somebody in his family will get him back on his medication.
Close Gitmo? OK. And then what? Laura Ingraham suggested sending them all to Barbra Streisand's neighborhood. The Obama transcript is an embarassment. The guy doesn't know what the heck he's talking about.
“If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don’t you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now?”
Black lawn jockeys - old horse hitching posts - used to be common sights but have largely disappeared across the Eastern US. Some have been changed to whiteface.
How many folks realize that these statues of grooms, which many assume to be degrading images of servitude, were used as the secret road-markers for the Underground Railroad?
As such, they deserve to be preserved with pride and pleasure for the good and just service they provided to runaway, freedom-seeking slaves.
Oftentimes, PC insanity destroys meaningful history.
"Great to have a black guy in the White House (whether or not I like his politics)."
I had the above thought about "a black guy in the WH," and then realized it was a racist thought. It's discriminating (1: making a distinction :distinguishing<a discriminating mark>2: marked by discrimination:a:discerning , judicious<discriminating buyers>) on race. It's just the flip side of the same coin of race-awareness with which loud voices in this country have hammered us with for years.
From a race-awareness (ie racist) viewpoint, what's the difference between "electing the black guy is great" vs. "electing the black guy is bad"? Or electing a white guy is better or worse? Neither do justice to the human inside.
Truth is, we white folks are generally pleased about electing an African-American fellow. However, I believe we are pleased for the wrong reason - our moral vanity. I hear people say "It means we are post-racial." Then they talk about their surprise that so many "other people" would vote for a black guy. It's always "other people," and that's the tell.
If we are post-racial, why is it such a big deal? How is being pleased about voting for a black guy "post-racial"?
I am ready to take on Obama and Congress on the issues, not on skin color. And I will, to the best of my limited ability.
Leonhardt, in The NYT. Makes sense to me. I was there. In my view, some folks hype the badness simply to rationalize government power and money grabs.
The Big Three car-assemblers are dead men walking, and have been for years. I do have a concern about the banks, however, because when governments end up owning them, politics ends up running them. That is even worse than having politics run medical treatment.
Maybe it's a query: Which is worse: Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and Nancy Pelosi controlling your doctor - or controlling your bank?
The United States consumes about 21 million barrels of oil a day. Just over a third is domestically produced, while the rest is imported from a diverse array of sources from Latin America to Canada to Africa and the Middle East. The top five sources are geographically diverse: Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela and Nigeria. If Americans want to wring their hands in fear of being held hostage to oil imports, they might worry about a Big Five conspiracy: a secret Riyadh-Ottawa-Mexico City-Caracas-Lagos cartel that turns off the tap one day. If that sounds impossible and ridiculous, it’s because it is.
David Ogilvy had, and still has, a near-mythic stature in the world of advertising and marketing. However, his life was far more interesting than that.
Paul Carroll's WSJ review of a new bio of Ogilvy begins:
David Ogilvy (1911-99) had a grand life. He also had a boundless personality and a lot of fresh ideas, not to mention the luck of a booming postwar economy and the genius to take advantage of it. He helped transform the world of advertising -- and generally in a good way, even for those of us who usually find advertising an annoying distraction from important things, like sports.
Despite being older than Insty - old enough to remember the Civil Rights era - I'll ditto Insty on his post. I always want the best for our country, and wisdom for our leaders government employees.
I refuse to term them "leaders" because, as a cranky Yank, I rarely follow anybody unless they're going where I am going.
The Cato Institute's James Bovard was struck by the plight of Vernon, Conn., a town ravaged in the winter of 1995-96 by, er, slightly more snow than they'd expected. So FEMA sent them a check for $40,023. Vernon had 30,000 people, and its town snow-removal costs that winter were $258,000. "That's just $8.60 per person," Bovard pointed out, "less than a 12-year-old charges to shovel out a driveway after a good snowfall."
So why did they need "federal emergency" aid? Because the town had only budgeted $104,516, and so claimed to be "overwhelmed" by the additional costs. They could have asked the good burghers of Vernon to chip in an extra five bucks apiece. But why bother when FEMA's so eager to give you a warm bath in the federal love nectar? The town government wised up pretty quickly. The next winter, they set the snow-removal budget at just $69,383.
So a "federal emergency" is no longer a nuclear strike on Cleveland or even a Category Three hurricane, but now a snowfall in New England and an inaugural ball at the Mayflower Hotel.
Such hysterical boo-hoo-ism is not the Can-Do America I know and love. I keep wondering how much "We can't do it" is embodied in "Yes We can."
The more he willingly takes on the Lincolnesque or Caesarian mantle, the more the media worries that we have put too many expectations on Obama. Well, surely one way to lower our expectations would be to take a night-flight on a 737 to DC from Chicago, rather than reenact train-bound Young Mr. Lincoln. (Remember, unlike Lincoln, Obama flew back to Chicago from DC to take the train back to DC again). It sort of reminds one of the lectures about the Obama family off limits / Obama family center stage for photo-ops and interviews.
and
The 2005 Bush inauguration, despite occurring in boom times, was, I remember, deemed by the media as crass and a rich man’s fest, insensitive to the general poverty around. The more than twice as expensive 2009 Obama inauguration, despite occurring in a severe recession, is a measured and proper celebration of diversity and landmark progress. Annuit coeptis indeed.
That's what the stimulus bill was about—not knowing what time it is, not knowing the old pork-barrel, group-greasing ways are over, done, embarrassing. When you create a bill like that, it doesn't mean you're a pro, it doesn't mean you're a tough, no-nonsense pol. It means you're a slob.
The war initiated by Japan, first by invading China, then by declaring war on the United States and Great Britain, resulted in more than 24 million deaths in allied countries – 23.8 million of them being Chinese. The loss of life to other countries included: 106,000 Americans; 86,000 Indians; 57,000 Philippinos; 52,000 British; 17,000 Australians; and 12,000 Soviets. The logic of invading and declaring war on so many countries had to do with securing resources for Japan’s economic self-sufficiency. 
The OED may 
I thought he was elected to run the city, but he seems to prefer controlling what we put in our mouths. Fats, smokes, soda pop - 
Our Editor sent me 
Black lawn jockeys - old horse hitching posts - used to be common sights but have largely disappeared across the Eastern US. Some have been changed to whiteface. 
David Ogilvy had, and still has, a near-mythic stature in the world of advertising and marketing. However, his life was far more interesting than that.