Everyone is a libertarian when it comes to his or her own choices.

Coyote, in a piece titled Statists in Libertarian Clothing

Good things interfere with good things, and bad things interfere with good things.

Tonight, we were able to manage to attend a nice cocktail party, and then to get out to dinner with dear friends we haven't spent time with in a while. There are only so many weekends in a year, and only so many years in a lifetime. Keeping up with friends, and doing the things you want to do, fills the calendar.

This summer, for example, I realize that I cannot golf, work in the gardens, work on my tennis game and play a match or two, go fishing or sailing on the coast with friends, help the Mrs. pick out new ceiling lighting for the hallways, go riding with the Mrs. on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, get to church, and sit by the pool and read with a cigar and a scotch which often ends up as a little siesta. Not to mention evening social engagements and the occasional invitations for sporting clays and skeet.

Don't even mention wanting time to spend messing with these internets.

There are fewer conflicts in the fall and winter up here. For one thing, no yard and garden chores other than wood-splitting and cleaning up fallen limbs and trees in the pastures. Still, I like to go for ducks or goose or grouse or pheasants, but I have a Saturday morning men's tennis group, and you cannot hunt in CT on Sunday. Plus we like to ski in New Hampshire and sometimes Vermont, and I usually have some weekend jobs for work that are needed on Monday.

Nothing I do is particularly expensive (other than keeping the horses, maintaining the pool, and keeping a stock of Cuban Dominican smokes). It's all about time - and making choices.

I think I am going to give up the golf this year. If I ever retire - which I do not intend to ever do willingly - maybe I can take it up again. And I am going to hire people to do the mowing even though I enjoy it. I make this promise to myself.

We are always told that accepting limits is the biggest part of maturity but, when it comes to my plan-to-do list, that aspect of maturity still is tough for me. Friends tell me that I have too many interests.

"Apparently the healing is not complete." Clintonistas supporting McCain?

"Guardian Moonbats discover environmentalism's shrieking authoritarianism"

Limousine Liberals: Gore and his gas-guzzlers

Help needed with Obama jokes.

How is this for paid maternity leave? Who would ever hire a woman of child-bearing years with that plan?

And speaking of pregnancy, Mr. Free Market notes:

Men are likely to give in to the temptations of a beautiful woman while women work hard to resist the charms of a handsome man, a new study claims. The research found that even men who say they are committed to their wives and girlfriends are vulnerable to the advances of a flirt.

...and how much did that brilliant study cost?

Photo: One of our Farm Flirts, courtesy of Theo. Call me "vulnerable."

An argument ex silentio claims "You respond with silence, thus I am proven right."

From Wiki: 

"In general, the claim that the absence of something demonstrates the proof of a proposition. An argumentum ex silentio ('argument from silence') is an argument based on the assumption that someone's silence on a matter suggests ('proves' when a logical fallacy) that person's ignorance of the matter or their inability to counterargue validly."

Of course, there are many reasons for silence besides an inability to make a counterpoint, including a simple lack of interest in pursuing a line of discussion or, as I have often found myself doing in debates with Liberals, reverting to silence out of a feeling of futility.

In the blog world, the common expression "crickets chirping" is a cute way of implying an ex silentio argument. Sometimes it's right, sometimes an error.

Augean Stables has a pretty good example of this fallacy in a debate he is engaged in about the al Durah affair.

From Robert Samuelson, a quote:

Today's global economy baffles experts -- corporate executives, bankers, economists -- as much as ordinary people. Countries are growing economically more interdependent and politically more nationalistic. This is a combustible combination. The old global economy had few power centers (the United States, Europe, Japan), was defined mainly by trade and was committed to the dollar as the central currency. Its major countries shared democratic values and alliances. Today's global economy has many power centers (including China, Saudi Arabia and Russia), is also defined by finance and is exploring alternative currencies to the dollar. Major trading nations now lack common political values and alliances.

It is no more possible to undo globalization than it was possible, in the 19th century, to undo the Industrial Revolution. But our understanding of international markets, shaped by impersonal economic forces and explicit political decisions, is poor.

Obama wants to nationalize our public schools? That is utterly insane. My town would never surrender that to the people who run the Post Office. And his effete nuttiness about languages: French, maybe, to read Baudelaire; German for Goethe and Wagner; Spanish to read Don Quixote and to speak to the yard guys - but Mandarin for business and for the future. Maybe Cantonese.

This is all so sophomoric that it is embarassing. It's amateur hour in America. (The guy, by the way, speaks no foreign language.)

I see these sorts of phonies all the time.

Bloom off the rose. People think Obama is pandering to them. Duh.

Similarly, Powerline:

It's fair to say that Obama has now admitted that he was wrong about the most important national security issue that has arisen during his brief time in public life.

Straight-talking Bush: Americans are smart enough. Al Gore, the Dems, and the enviros have wanted expensive power for many years. They are getting what they wanted for us.

From NE Repub:

A quote from a piece on Obama at Belmont Club:

It’s not fair to accuse BHO of a “bait and switch”. The hook was never concealed and even the worm was always labeled as fake. For anyone who was prepared to listen, Obama was always brutally honest to his audience. In his book, the Audacity of Hope, Obama was aware of the vast untapped market for dreams. In fact he knew that selling his audience anything less would be bound to disappoint them.

I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them. Which perhaps indicates a second, more intimate theme to this book?namely, how I, or anybody in public office, can avoid the pitfalls of fame, the hunger to please, the fear of loss, and thereby retain that kernel of truth, that singular voice within each of us that reminds us of our deepest commitments.

It’s a remarkable paragraph, one which captures the excitement of salesman who knows he can close the big deal if only he glides over the fine print. It’s hard to blame Obama, already aware of his audience’s eagerness to believe, for failing to volunteer the messy details. There was no deceit. BHO’s loyalties have been unswervingly for himself and if the customer asked him no questions he would tell them no lies.

Update: His website is now being cleaned of any criticism of the surge.

Related: Obama not funny. Protein

Our Editor mentioned to me that one of our most-searched posts ever in recent times has been The World's Largest House - other than searches for "Farm Porn."

Adjustable beds. Not cheap, but good fun. h/t, Mousin'

Smoking is good for your memory and concentration. h/t, Theo. I would say it's essential.

Budweiser sold to Belgians. OK with me. I don't drink their watery brew anyway. I do own their stock, however.

What to do about Zimbabwe. Q&O. Nothing we can do. Sometimes one just has to admit that you can't do anything about it.

What Obama wanted, or wants, in the Middle East

There's a brilliant idea. Let the kids vote. I think they would vote for free candy. It is a Dem approach, isn't it?

Dems search their souls (and votes) about drilling for oil. Singleton

Is free speech a dying American quirk?

There is no fight against cancer. If it wants to kill you, it will. Everybody dies. Carpe diem.

The diminishing returns of political pandering. Reason

His own gay identity, at 15. What can I say?

Sweden: Always insane.

Blame for Baltimore's rot

Not a joke: To Iraq with Chuck Hagel

Derbyshire, re Obama:

His instinctive liberalism aside, Wonder Boy doesn't strike me as any more vain, stupid, or dishonest than your average politician. He does, though, strike me as awfully lightweight — the lightest-weight of any major Presidential contender I can recall. We have interns round the office with deeper life experience than Obama. Heck, I've had goldfish with deeper life experience than Obama. JFK at least had a boat sunk under him.

Photo of a stalwart Maggie's Farmer courtesy of Theo.

Somehow, the Lefties have managed to make people feel a bit guilty about pursuing self-interest. (Lefties, however, tend to be very good at making money for themselves. Everybody is concerned with their own interests.) Nevertheless, they advise folks to vote on their self-interest: to vote themselves benefits from other peoples' labor, risk-taking, and creativity. 

That's the essential hypocrisy of Liberal-Leftism.

I do believe in service and duty: to God, family, country, and one's fellow man - in that order. A quote from Self-interest is bad? at Weekly Standard:

If you don't take good care of yourself and your family, what good can you possibly be to anybody else?

A provocative essay at Boston Review: Reentry: Reversing Mass Imprisonment.

I do not agree with many of the author's points, but all of the issues and debates are touched upon, and the author does make the correct point that not all criminals are incorrigible sociopaths. I also agree that we over-use jail time, which ought to be mainly for violent and comparably major offenses. Certainly not for drug addicts or financial offenders. Large fines. After all, many of our hard-earned tax dollars go to support those folks in jail. A year of jail time costs us more than a year of Ivy League "education" would.

Everyone has broken a rule. As a rule of thumb, you have to break quite a few to get caught. My advice: teach and learn the rules, and do not break them.

I think it's time to ask, again, what sorts of consequences we, as a society, want to impose for violations of the rules we make. And no weight-lifting equipment in our jails, please.

One quote:

As the social crisis of urban America supplied the masses for mass incarceration, the penal system itself became more punitive. The tough-on-crime message honed by the Republican Party in national politics since the Goldwater campaign of 1964 spoke to the racial anxieties of white voters discomfited by civil rights protests and summertime waves of civil unrest felt in cities through the decade. Conservatives charged that liberals coddled criminals and excused crime with phony root causes like poverty and unemployment. President Nixon launched a war on crime, only to be surpassed by President Reagan’s War on Drugs, which applied the resources of federal law enforcement to the problem of drug control. Policy experts abandoned rehabilitation, concluding that prisons could only deter and warehouse those who would otherwise commit crime in society. These politics produced a revolution in criminal sentencing. Mandatory minimum prison sentences, sentencing guidelines, parole abolition, and life sentences for third-time felons were widely adopted through the 1980s. The no-nonsense, tough-on-crime politics reached a bipartisan apotheosis with President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which launched the largest prison construction project in the nation’s history. As a result of these changes, prison time—as opposed to community supervision—became the main criminal sanction for felony offenders.

Read the whole thing. Link above.

(By the way, I am a supporter of Prison Fellowship. I believe that Christ can save anybody's soul.)

Am Thinker.

The mysteries of zero always interested me, too. If you have five apples on a table, and take away five, how many apples are there? Still five, just not on the table. I am a concrete thinker.

From Dr. Roy Spenser's excellent site, via piece at Am Thinker titled New Hope for Global Warming Deniers:

At HuffPo, with good reason: The week that should have ended all of McCain's presidential hopes.

That upsets me. I raised money for McCain. He has had months of an open field to run down like a rock star and a winner. (Of course, Obama has had plenty of campaign-killing weeks too.)

Perhaps their plan is to let Obama blow himself up...or perhaps they are asleep at the switch. But all I can see from here is that Obama is dominating the press. As they used to say in Hollywood, "Bad press is better than no press."

Does McCain want to win this election? He's the better man, and the media is (of course) trying to bury him, but why is he in hiding? He has disappeared since the primaries, and that was a long time ago.

My friends are all afraid that he is trying to pull a Bob Dole election.

Where's the Viagra? Where's the "hope"? Where's the promise? Where's the inspiration? Where's the America? Where is the darn campaign?

This year, he should be running like an Eisenhower, as the calm, moderate, rational, calming, optimistic, stabilizing, patriotic and America-loving guy that you can trust not to take big risks, roll the dice, and make a mess. Sanity.

That's tough, in a roll-the-dice and pray-for-the-best sort of year. Still, I believe that Obama's politics are his own worst enemy.

Samizdata used that word in an amusing bit, so I would venture to guess that it is a Libertarian term. It captures some of the religious-like faith some place in their governmental masters and institutions.

I need to add that word to my lexicon.

Remarkable tennis today. Much more interesting than the men's tennis during the Sampras years. Today's match will be long-remembered. The Spanish are celebrating tonight, for sure. But to get to my main point -

Besides possibly helping to provide a minor degree of economic independence from the big oil nations, is there any logic behind biofuel?

This question came up in conversation last night, when it was mentioned that the demand for biofuel may be driving up the cost of food, and even causing third-world starvation.

One person mentioned the notion that biofuels are somehow greener and less polluting because they come from plants. Of course, the current geological consensus is that oil comes from plants too, but that's another topic.

How much do biofuels pollute? I took a quick unscientific glance around the 'nets during the rain delay:

Biofuels may produce more greenhouse gases than oil

Biodiesel: How much pollution does it really create?

Biofuel backlash: High prices, pollution worries hit consumers

Biofuel Crops Increase Carbon Emissions

and from Time Magazine, The Trouble with Biofuels:

According to researchers at Princeton University and the Nature Conservancy, almost all the biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels, if the full environmental cost of producing them is factored in.

I think the message is that, even if you consider CO2 a "pollutant" (which I do not), and even if you consider global warming a planetary crisis (which I do not), the only convincing rationale for subsidizing biofuels with our taxes and with our higher food prices (a hidden tax) is a geopolitical one.

Hope our readers are enjoying this weekend. I am going for a ride over hill and dale and field and fountain with the Mrs. in an England-like cool foggy drizzle in a moment, but Jack, our Quarter Horse, looks a little lame this morning - maybe it's a sore hoof - and I'm not sure which animal I want to mess with today.

But I wanted to make sure to post this link to a discussion about Special Ed and "special needs" kids. I have a number of friends and acquaintances who are dealing with PDD and autism and the like in their kids and grandkids.

The author of this piece at Pajamas has personal experience as the parent of a disabled kid.

Yesterday, a friend who follows Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's career closely mentioned the fallout in LA government from his dramatic and rigorous financial disclosure reforms.

LA, famous for its long history of corruption and ineffectiveness as exemplified by the Katrina fiasco, has elected Mr. Clean and people are fleeing government service - and coming up with any excuses they can for doing so. He is applying a heavy-duty disinfectant.

I Googled jindal financial disclosure and found page after page after page of stories about commission members' resignations. How many of these resignations are for simple privacy reasons and how many are to avoid revealing compromising information is anybody's guess, but my friend suspected mostly the latter.

Forbes noted, however,

Those standards require disclosure of details about virtually all sources of income, including amounts earned, and details about property ownership. That led to complaints that some people were turning down invitations to serve on public boards, and some were planning to resign, rather than disclose the information.

The law approved will still require board members and their spouses to disclose information about income, including their employers and businesses in which they own an interest.

and in the same article notes that the LA legislature decided to ease up on some of the disclosure requirements.

Still, I think this marks the end of business as usual in LA.

From BBC:

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

The ruling comes as part of Google's legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.

Are you OK with that? Whole report here.