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.
Bullying and protectionism have a lot in common. They both use force (either directly or through the power of the law) to enrich someone else at your involuntary expense. If you’re forced to pay $20 an hour to an American for goods you could have bought from a Mexican for $5 an hour, you’re being extorted. When a free trade agreement allows you to buy from the Mexican after all, rejoice in your liberation — even if Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney and the rest of the presidential candidates don’t want you to.
It has always struck me as contradictory that the Left, with its internationalist bent bred of Marx's "international socialism," contains so much in the way of a nationalist-protectionist bias (although Clinton did not have this bias - to his credit).
I guess it's really just pandering to the unions and to the resentful - and to hell with the consumers. As Landsberg notes, everybody benefits from free trade of goods or labor, whether it's town to town, state to state, or country to country.
Insty found these quotes from a CBS News report on Fred Thompson discussing religion:
Mixing theology and social issues on the campaign trail is rare for Fred Thompson, but he discussed it today answering a question from a member of the audience.
A woman asked him if he would “as a Christian, as a conservative” continue President Bush’s programs to combat global AIDS.
“Christ didn’t tell us to go to the government and pass a bill to get some of these social problems dealt with. He told us to do it,” Thompson said.
“The government has its role, but we need to keep firmly in mind the role of the government, and the role of us as individuals and as Christians on the other.”
He received a round of applause for his answer, and went on to expand on the role of government in fighting AIDS and other diseases.
Some of the comments under the CBS News piece are good, including:
Fred actually understand federalism and the proper role of the government. This is really going to confuse the media.
From a piece in Popular Mechanics, Biofuel Hype in Washington:
It’s great that our politicians have discovered the need for new energy technologies. But it appears that Washington is determined to put its money—our money—on the wrong horse. Right now, researchers are studying a host of energy solutions, including hydrogen, high-mileage diesel, plug-in hybrids, radical reductions in vehicle weight and cellulosic ethanol (made from cornstalks, switchgrass or other nonfood crops). It is far too soon to say which of these holds the most promise. But, instead of promoting experimentation and competition to find the best solutions, politicians seem ready to declare ethanol the winner. As a result, our nation could wind up with the worst of both worlds: an “alternative” energy that is enormously expensive yet barely saves a gallon of oil.
In 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.
As I recall, this is what it looked like when I was there. It is fun, for a Yankee skier, to find seriously challenging hills without icy patches. A daughter snapped this shot up on Telluride last week, while taking a cranium-endangering, high-mountain, virgin-powder run through the trees:
I have been a fan of Pollan since I read his Second Nature, which tells his story of a city-dweller buying a country house in northwestern CT and learning about the land, the local critters, and especially about gardening. Suburban and country folk have long-known what he slowly learned, but his fresh eye is illuminating, especially his take on gardening as a war with a nature which wants to return his man-altered spaces to woodland succession - via the weed phase.
He has a new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. One of his points seems to be that nutritonal "science" is in its infancy, and that it has little to tell us about what to eat. He recommends eating whatever you grandmother would have cooked. Sounds like my kind of book. He is an engaging writer on any topic. New Yorker quality, but no politics.
As noted in this Shrinkwrapped piece we recently linked the young, the immature and the foolish may harbor fantasies that a politician can have any positive effect on their lives.
They will learn...maybe - if they are able to learn and grow from experience. Truth is that only I can shape - or redeem - my gift of life.
Interesting piece by Goldsmith (former Mayor of Indianapolis and now Harvard Prof) in The American: What's Left for Government To Do? He asks what the core functions are of governments in the free world. It's a damn good question.
One quote:
Functions such as law enforcement and public safety are typically considered inherently governmental. But as the mayor of Indianapolis for two terms (1992–1999), I outsourced the operation not only of a jail but also of an airport and a utility—with good results. It was hard not to be amused, as the GAO panel debated the definition of an inherently governmental function, by the fact that the federal building we were meeting in was under the protection of a private security firm. Even if we could agree on core government functions that had to be walled off from contractors, we would be left with a thorny question: what happens when government turns out not to be very good at inherently governmental work?
(Readers know that we do not focus on Iraq, mainly because so many others do it better and because our military sophistication is minimal. We have also mentioned that, while skeptical about going into Iraq, we have also seen great geopolitical opportunities there for the US, the Iraqi people, the ME, and for the benefit of the world in general, if the progress continues. Failure is not an option.)
According to the conventional narrative, Al Qaeda was rejected by Iraqis because they murdered Iraqis. They were far more vicious and hateful than the Americans they vowed to expel. The narrative is correct, as far as it goes, but Al Qaeda is detested for more than mere thuggery. Other armed groups have been able to maintain at least some popularity even though they also murder Iraqis. None of the others, though, violent though they may be, are so thoroughly totalitarian, so alien to the traditions of Iraqi culture, and so hostile to its centuries-old social fabric. Al Qaeda in Iraq tears at Iraq’s traditional culture as viciously as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia.
If you want to understand Al Qaeda in Iraq – its methods, its rise, and its fall – you’ll find their story has more in common with the Shining Path’s guerrilla and terrorist war in Peru than with the Islamic religion as practiced in the mosques of Fallujah.
We now have a large number of American and British officers who can pick up a phone from Washington or London and call an Iraqi officer that he knows well—an Iraqi he has fought along side of—and talk. Same with untold numbers of Sheiks and government officials, most of whom do not deserve the caricatural disdain they get most often from pundits who have never set foot in Iraq. British and American forces have a personal relationship with Iraqi leaders of many stripes. The long-term intangible implications of the betrayal of that trust through the precipitous withdrawal of our troops could be enormous, because they would be the certain first casualties of renewed violence, and selling out the Iraqis who are making an honest-go would make the Bay of Pigs sell-out seem inconsequential. The United States and Great Britain would hang their heads in shame for a century.
The insurgents would be finished when an Iraqi soldier in uniform boarded a bus, got off at his local market, and walked home.It seemed a million miles away then. Well, based on this picture taken Sunday, it's come -
Mitt Romney is a damned good, capable man but, for whatever reasons, he did not catch fire. I'd say he's out in this kindergarten game of musical chairs. I'd like to see him somewhere in the government - but far away from the subject of medical insurance.
And I'd say John McCain, who I like as a person but many of whose views I strongly disagree with, is back in the game.
I yearn for the old days of the smoke-filled rooms. But at least I can still ignite a Cuban stogie up here in my own little library, while hoping for the death of Fidel.
What has become of the American middle class? George Will provides some insight.
Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 -- because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled, from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. "So," Rose says, "the entire 'decline' of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder." Even as housing values declined in 2007, the net worth of households increased.
Apparently, the disappearing middle class is disappearing because they are getting richer. Or perhaps I should say, we are getting richer.
I recently stumbled upon this essay, Taking Liberty, by the one-time Clinton official William Galston. He is trying to make the case that liberals and leftists should not abandon the words "freedom" and "liberty" (which he notes that they have done). A quote:
Liberals seldom talk about Social Security or other programs in terms of freedom. But they should. George W. Bush certainly does. In his second inaugural address, Bush accepted the validity of Roosevelt's concept of Four Freedoms. But he went on to contend that in today's circumstances, his brand of conservatism--his so-called "ownership society"--offers more effective means to traditional New Deal ends: "By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear." In essence, the president was saying that his solution to Social Security's fiscal problems would provide seniors with the freedom from want and fear they had come to expect, but with two additional liberties: freedom of choice, and freedom from government dependence.
I find his arguments highly debatable, particularly in the way in which he conflates personal freedoms (eg the option of retirement) with political freedom from state power and coercion. Read the whole thing.
Why do we extend to universities the priviledge and advantage of being tax-free and partly if not largely tax-supported institutions?
What is it that they do which is so special? Is it their duty to be conservators of knowledge and wisdom, or to be "adversarial" critics of society?
I would make the case that few of the great thinkers of world history worked for universities, almost none of the great writers, and, until the past 30-40 years, few to none of the great scientists. I would make thae case that, in a world of high liteeracy and high levels of education, professsors no longer represent a unique intellectual priesthood as they might have in the Middle Ages. And I would make the case that there is nothing about being a professor which renders their views of anything outside of their teaching expertise of any more value than my own views.
Mark Bauerlein takes on The Adversarial Campus. One quote:
...the Adversarial Campus Argument isn't really an argument. It's an attitude. And attitudes aren't overcome by evidence, especially when they do so much for people who bear them. For, think of what the Adversarial Campus does for professors. It flatters the ego, ennobling teachers into dissidents and gadflies. They feel underpaid and overworked, mentally superior but underappreciated, and any notion that compensates is attractive. It gives their isolation from zones of power, money, and fame a functional value. Yes, they're marginal, but that's because they impart threatening ideas. The powerlessness they feel rises into a meaningful political condition.
The idea of academic administrators and professors picturing themselves as Luke Skywalker figures - pitted against an evil empire of oppressive bourgeois vales - is rather quaint and not without comic potential. And, as we’ve seen, ‘rebellion’ of this kind is often difficult to distinguish from absurdity, psychodrama and reactionaryrole-play.
Santa Claus is bipartisan. The Bush administration is unveiling its plan to rescue people who gambled and lost in the housing markets when the bubble burst.
We now have a bipartisan tradition of the government stepping in to rescue people who engaged in risky behavior -- whether by locating in the known paths of hurricanes in Florida or in areas repeatedly hit by wildfires over the years in California or by doing things that increase the probability of catching AIDS.
Why not also rescue people who gambled away their life's savings in Las Vegas? That would at least be consistent.
Apparently the only people who are supposed to be responsible are the taxpayers -- and they are increasingly made responsible for other people's irresponsibility.
Since weather events have always existed, all the warming alarmists need to do is to blame every weather event on global warming, or, to stay on the safe side, "climate change." From John Tierney in the NYT:
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”
“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.
Tierney is quite correct: it's boob bait for the gullible and ignorant, regardless of what the climate is doing. Climate isn't local weather. Read the whole thing.
Did agriculture make a mess of the world? From Hunter-gatherers: Noble or Savage? in The Economist. It begins:
Human beings have spent most of their time on the planet as hunter-gatherers. From at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of agriculture around 73,000 years later, they combined hunted meat with gathered veg. Some people, such as those on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Sea, still do. The Sentinelese are the only hunter-gatherers who still resist contact with the outside world. Fine-looking specimens—strong, slim, fit, black and stark naked except for a small plant-fibre belt round the waist—they are the very model of the noble savage. Genetics suggests that indigenous Andaman islanders have been isolated since the very first expansion out of Africa more than 60,000 years ago.
About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called agriculture and some say that they, and their planet, have never recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin deficiency, new diseases and deforestation. Human height actually shrank by nearly six inches after the first adoption of crops in the Near East. So was agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”, as Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist and professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, once called it?
Landsberg on 
From a piece in Popular Mechanics, Biofuel Hype in Washington:
I have been a fan of Pollan since I read his 
A fine man, but maybe a sucker for every passing political fad and fashion? 
Scientificalistical proof 
Friends just returned home from 10 days at