Maggie's Farm

From Byron York's 527 donation update at The Corner:

The top 2007 giver to 527s is — drum roll, please — George Soros, with $3.5 million in contributions to Democrat-affiliated groups.  The rest of the top ten are Rachel Mellon, with $3.48 million to Democratic-affiliated groups, Sheldon Adelson, with $2 million to Republican-affiliated groups, Fred Godley, with $1.1 million to Republican-affiliated groups, Donald Sussman, with $1 million to Democratic-affiliated groups, Stephen Bing, with $883,000 to Democratic-affiliated groups, Robert Bingham, with $812,000 to Democratic-affiliated groups, Lee Fikes, with $600,000 to Democratic-affiliated groups, John R. Hunting, with $593,000 to Democratic-affiliated groups, and Francine Goldstein, with $500,000 to Democratic-affiliated groups. (It should be noted that the two Republicans in the top ten, Adelson and Godley, gave most of their money to Gingrich.)  And you should remember that these are 2007 figures — off-year figures — and the contributions will likely go way up in 2008.

Well, so much for McCain-Feingold. The Lefties took advantage of that loophole before the Repubs, didn't they?

The brilliant one-time lawyer and Warren Buffet partner Charlie Munger (I think the cynical - or should I say skeptical - Munger does the deep thinking, and Buffet is the practical guy) loves Robert Cialdini, who writes about influence and persuasion. Here's Cialdini's The Psychology of Persuasion.

(Also, a lifetime of thought is condensed in Poor Charlie's Almanac: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger)

Most condescending essay I have read today, at Boston Review. 

It's about urban poverty. Not a word about rural poverty, and not a word about American subcultures. Well, it shows how policy wonks think: they think of their fellow adult humans as objects to be improved - by them.

In no way do I believe that Dems have a monopoly on lying and other sins, but I just want to focus on one thing: What do Dems tend to lie about most?

I would suggest that they lie most often to conceal their Leftist agendas from the mass of voters. It's a gramscian tactic, and well-understood and accepted by the Left. (By any means necessary..")

Hillary's latest whopper was an effort to claim, essentially, that she is tough and comfortable with war.

Obama's lie du jour is about his responses to the political questionnaire he completed.

I wish they would decontaminate and simplify our lives by running on what they really want to do. Ah, but they're too "smart" to do that.

You bought a house two years ago, no money down, with a one-year teaser interest-only rate. You knew what you were doing: you gambled that in a year you might be able to make the second year's payments and, if not, the house would have more equity in it. That equity would belong to you.

Can you really blame the mortgage broker?

Or, maybe, you bought a second house or two to rent out, as an investment a speculation, with that same deal, planning to flip it when the time seemed right.

You had no skin in the game, except for your hope for wild profit - it was all the bank's money. You had nothing to lose.

Now the house is worth less than your buying price, and you can't keep up with this year's payment because you didn't get the promotion you hoped for. Logical (if dishonorable) person that you are, you consider dumping your committment and going back to renting again - or hoping that the taxpayer will somehow rescue your reckless real estate  investment gamble.

Well, not to worry. The Dems want to bail you out. McCain thinks it's nuts, and so do I. Am I a heartless Scrooge? In truth, buying a home mortgage is no different from an LBO, or buying options on margin. Didn't these people ever play Monopoly?

Newspapers and pandering politicians call these unlucky gamblers "homeowners," but they aren't. They own nothing but debt and a contract.

As prices drop, houses are becoming more affordable to credible buyers instead of crazy gamblers. And, in ten years, there will be another housing bubble. You can bank on it.

If your house is an investment, and not a home, sell it then.

Editor's note: There are comparable moral hazards with rescuing the banks. See Fed eyes Nordic-style bank nationalization. I am not convinced that we are at that point. Power-people see every problem as an opportunity for a power and/or money grab. Just label it a "crisis."

The NYT did a piece on So You Want to be a Blogging Star?

I guess we would welcome fame and fortune, as long as we could maintain our anonymity. What we would prefer would be to deserve it. But, as Bird Dog often says, we are an "elite boutique blog for the cognoscenti - not mass market." I know he puts it in those transparently flattering terms to feed our vanity and to keep us working without pay, but I know we have some modest impact and some utility for those who have found us.

Anyway, Glenn Reynolds is quoted in the piece:

Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule. “Deal with the rest of your life first,” advises Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who posts constantly throughout the day on his site, Instapundit.com. The volume and regularity has helped make his political opinion site one of the most popular on the Internet. “The blog is best handled by inserting it into the small bits of free time that rest among the bigger chunks of your work.” Mr. Reynolds slips in posts between classes, as a break from writing law review articles and during slow time at home.

We do that too, Glenn. But what is "slow time at home"? Oh, I get it: the wife has a blog too (our blog-friend Dr. Helen).

Photo is the Farmington River, in CT, in autumn.

Here's Charlie Munger:

...almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I've always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower.

...We [should] heed the general lesson implicit in the injunction of Ben Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanack: "If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason." This maxim is a wise guide to a great and simple precaution in life: Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives...

Read all about it at Marginal Rev.

This medical post came in over the transom - a cautionary tale about certain handguns:

460XVR blew my thumb off today! No joke, about 1/2 of my left thumb is gone what's left is a friggin mess. It's pretty hard to type, and I'm only posting because you never know, it might save somebody else a thumb. I was using a 2-handed grip, fired off a Cor-Bon DPX .460 and the blast came violently out the side of the gun. This is an example of how he was holding his revolver. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

At first my thumb was so covered in blood that I couldn't see how bad it was ... and I was full of adrenaline and felt no pain. And honestly it looked really bad, my whole hand was covered in blood and it was kinda gushing.

The blown-off thumb was on my support hand. I'll re-create the grip tomorrow to see where my thumb was, but it's not like I didn't already know not to get any body part near the cylinder gap. And even if I totally screwed up and did, taking my thumb clean off seems a bit excessive?

Just be careful with those 460's. That case operates at such high pressure, it's just asking for trouble. BTW, I bought my 460 new and had exactly 12 rounds through it. Info about the gun, it's a full-size 460 with the 8 3/4' barrel and factory installed compensator.. It's one of the Whitetails Unlimited models. Ammo was 200gr Cor-Bon DPX.

The gun only had 12 or 13 rounds of the Cor-Bon through it, and 10 45 Long Colt rounds through it. So it was essentially still brand new.

Saw a hand specialist while there today. Lots of ways to try and save what's left, but first I just have to hope it doesn't get infected in the next few days then surgery early next week.

The hand specialist I spent a few hours with last night said that in gunshot wounds there is always a lot more damage than is first visible ... same with things like fireworks going off in your hand. A lot more flesh around the wound is dead, and will rot and fall off over the next couple days. That's why it's so important to keep clean, and that's also why they can't do surgery now. If they wrapped new skin over dead skin it would just flake out, possibly turn gangrenous, and they'd have to start all over again. 

If you aren't squeamish, what's left of the guy's thumb is on continuation page:

We'll all know those numbers soon. How soon before they're a bumper sticker?  McCain's first national campaign ad:

From The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature by Brian Boyd in The American Scholar (an excellent magazine, BTW). A quote:

For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.

Read the whole thing.

We linked to Geert Wilder's short movie on the Koran last night. That movie is becoming a cause celebre.

Here's Diana West on "Pre-emptive Rage" at the Wash. Times. My only reaction to the fuss and the predictable Moslem "rage" and the rush of the Left to disparage and attack the film is this: What if Geert Wilders had made a short movie critiquing the Holy Bible? Would anybody say anything?

The Left likes the Islamists (only in the abstract, mind you - not for their dinner parties) because they imagine themselves to be rebelliously anti-Western civilization as they sip their Pinot Noir. The rest of 'em are just scared pantywaists, as Teddy Roosevelt would say, and don't want to poke a rattlesnake.

Photo: Time to bring out Rage Boy again

As I put my hunting gear away for the summer, I am reminded of a deep truth: When buying hunting trousers, always buy 'em at least an inch bigger in the waist.

I always forget to do this, and then, when I put on layers, I cannot button my pants, which makes me feel like I don't have it all together, which hurts my shooting.

And if it's a Bluebird day, then I can just use suspenders - braces - to keep my trousers up. They remain, I believe, a much under-appreciated item of clothing. Like hats, suspenders need to be brought back into style because it isn't fair that only bankers get to wear them. Bankers wear them for decoration, but their real purpose, of course, is so your trouser waist can be loose enough for comfortable sitting, without falling down.

Image: Nice Filson suspenders, rugged enough to last a lifetime in the woods

John Gray, author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, has an excellent short piece in The Guardian titled The Atheist Delusion. (h/t, Flares)

It's the best short piece I have seen on the religious and faith aspects of atheism and secular humanism. As he says, "Secularisation is in retreat, and the result is the appearance of an evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times... As in the past, this is a type of atheism that mirrors the faith it rejects." A quote:

...the belief that history is a directional process is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism. Secular thinkers such as Grayling reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal - a civilisation based on science that will eventually encompass the entire species. In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. Though they suppress their religious content, secular humanists continue to cling to similar beliefs. One does not want to deny anyone the consolations of a faith, but it is obvious that the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning.

Read the whole thing. I think I would like to read Gray's book too.

Roger Kimball on the 60s - Tariq Ali: Fool of '68. A quote:

“Passion,” like “idealism,” is a nostrum that the Left prescribes in order to relieve itself from the burdens of moral accountability. In a subtle essay called “Countercultures,” the political commentator Irving Kristol noted that the counterculture of the 1960s was in part a reaction against a society that had become increasingly secular, routinized, and crassly materialistic. In this respect, too, the counterculture can be understood as part of our Romantic inheritance, a plea for freedom and transcendence in a society increasingly dominated by the secular forces of Enlightenment rationality. Indeed, revolts of this tenor have been a staple of Romanticism since the nineteenth century: Dostoevski’s “underground man,” who seeks refuge from the imperatives of reason in willful arbitrariness, is only one example (a rather grim one) among countless others.

The danger, Kristol notes, is that the counterculture, in its attack on secular materialism, “will bring down—will discredit—human things that are of permanent importance. A spiritual rebellion against the constrictions of secular humanism could end up … in a celebration of irrationalism and a derogation of reason itself.” At a time when the radical tenets of the counterculture have become so thoroughly established and institutionalized in cultural life—when they have, in fact, come more and more to define the tastes, habits, and attitudes of the dominant culture—unmasking illegitimate claims to “liberation” and bogus feats of idealism emerges as a prime critical task.

To an extent scarcely imaginable thirty years ago, we now live in that “moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties.” The long march of the cultural revolution of the 1960s has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of all but the most starry-eyed utopians. The great irony is that this victory took place in the midst of a significant drift to the center-Right in electoral politics. The startling and depressing fact is that supposedly conservative victories at the polls have done almost nothing to challenge the dominance of left-wing, emancipationist attitudes and ideas in our culture. On the contrary, in the so-called “culture wars,” conservatives have been conspicuous losers.

Read the whole thing.

Spitzer's replacement, ultra-clean, Lefty, affable, and not-too-blind-to-notice-babes David Paterson got a government job for his gumada, er, for one of the reported six of them.

Claims his conscience is clean - which it probably is, by New York standards... or by politician standards. Bill Clinton lowered the bar for all Dems, forever.

He doesn't care much for Obama. The Rev likes the Clintons. This is Feb 18, 2008. This guy is a piece of work. Listen:

Last night, a young relation observed that "Writing college application essays is like trying to shit rainbows out your ass."

Mrs. B. commented "If Obama can do that, so can you."

Stanley Kurtz on Obama's speech. With me, you will get no perfect union on far Left-wing policies and judges. Count me out of that love-fest. My other reaction: Even if this guy is blowing up, he is sure dominating the news cycle.

Rush today (approximately): "People say Obama can heal racial divisions. I say that Obama is proof that they have already healed."

Are we being handed slick victimology? The points of the speech summarized, quoted at Q and O:

- Black people have reasons to be angry about slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing discrimination;

- Whites have reason to be unhappy with (pre-reform) welfare, affirmative action, busing, and being called a racist for worrying about black crime rates.

- Wright was wrong in both his racial divisiveness and his belief that American society was static, and progress was not occurring.

- whites needed to do more to raise up black schools and black communities.

Wait! Did he lose a page here - what, if anything is the black community meant to do differently?

Memeorandum has everybody's reactions.

What's the largest oil company in the world? Russia's government-owned Gazprom.
What's the largest company in the world? PetroChina.
What's the largest investment fund in the world? Abu Dhabi's sovereign fund.

The new totalitarian global players, at The Boston Globe

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Was Immanuel Kant's Categorical (ie absolute) Imperative just a fancy way of coming around to the Golden Rule, as Bird Dog suggested the other day?

Kant's ethics fall in the category of deontologogical (ie duty-centered) absolutism: he said that one should not lie even to save a life (but I doubt that he ever found himself in that situation).

To my simple mind, teleological (outcome-based) ethics, like Utilitarianism, are not ethics or morals at all: our daily actions need to be teleological most of the time, but that is about practical judgement - not morality. As a foundation for a moral code, teleological ethics are insidious and dangerous.

Like most people, my moral codes are not carefully thought through. They are mostly inherited from a long line of Yankee Puritans, and Christianity-based. Thus far, they have kept me out of the clink, but have not protected me from doing my share of stupid, cruel, or selfish things. Like most people, I only focus on morals when presented with a moral dilemma that comes up on the radar, because the rest of the time I am on moral autopilot. I guess I'd have to say that my morality is neither deontological nor teleological, but mystical as G.K. Chesterton would say (Ten Commandments, The Great Commandment, etc) in its origins, with a dose of my personal obsessionalism on top.

Still, it's an interesting thought experiment to spend a day thinking about how - or whether - my daily decisions might be different if I consciously and deliberately pretend to adopt a different moral foundation.

Image: Immanuel Kant

Dr. Bliss comment: You are right that one's morality is not arrived at by deliberate thought. Guilt and morality are quasi-internalized during youth. After that, it's all about just learning the rules, laws, and socio-cultural expectations to avoid a messy life. Maybe I will post a draft of a piece I once wrote on the subject for a lay audience.