Maggie's Farm

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand 

We are truant in not having added The Atlantic's brilliant Megan McArdle to our blogroll. We will.

A quote from Three Cheers for Retail (h/t Insty) - I remain amazed by how often I think I have found a wonderful link, later to find that Insty has posted it already. Does he really have a day job?

Assessing the health of the economy, we tend to get obsessed with stuff: how much are we making? This is why lost manufacturing jobs so obsess trade foes. But manufacturing isn't where the economic beef is, and hasn't been for some time. Distribution is the dominant force of change in our lives now, whether the distribution vehicle is Wal-Mart, and iPod, or the internet.

Retailers: God rest ye merry, gentlemen. Hopefully not atop your piles of unsold merchandise.

Our blog friend Bert Prelutsky is a Jewish agnostic. A quote from his essay, I'm Happy to Live in a Christian Nation:

Even among some of my friends and relatives, there are those who half-expect their Christian neighbors to start organizing pogroms any day now. They remain unconvinced that Hitler and the Nazis were pagans. And even when I point out that it was American and British soldiers, mainly Christians, who brought down the Third Reich and liberated the concentration camps, it often falls on deaf ears.

A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.

Max Gluckman, as quoted in a piece at Overcoming Bias about the guardians of Ayn Rand

 are all caused by global warming? What about earthquakes, snowstorms, headaches, and malaria?

Droughts, floods and storms have been with us forever. Guess what? Food prices are rising because of the price of oil and because food crops are being displaced, at the moment, by ethanol production.

Am I paranoid to think that the UN hopes to leverage global warming hysteria into money and power?

"Climate change" - whatever that means - hasn't happened yet. It's a computer modeling prediction.

From a piece at LaShawn:

...you cannot, even if you lived 1,000 lifetimes, make a coherent and logically sound argument in favor of racial discrimination in the other direction. Nothing, not even the most heinous act committed against a black person by our government, justifies discriminating against other races in favor of blacks.

Let me put it this way: I have yet to read or hear a coherent and logically sound argument in favor of so-called reverse discrimination. Perhaps one exists. If you’ve read or heard such an argument, do let me know.

But of course, LaShawn does know why: it's racial pandering and racial politics. For me and for LaShawn, people are just plain people. The politicization of skin, historical and at present, is a common human failing - but, sadly, so are many other human evils.

From a piece in the NYT on the malaise in Italy:

Now it is essentially an exquisite corpse, trampled over by millions of tourists. If Italy does not shed its comforts for change, many say, a similar fate awaits it: blocked by past greatness, with aging tourists the questionable source of life, the Florida of Europe.

Coyote wrote this in Feb, 2005:

I resisted the call by a number of web sites at the beginning of the year to make predictions for 2005.  However, now I will make one:  We will soon see calls to bring a tighter licensing or credentialing system for journalists, similar to what we see for lawyers, doctors, teachers, and, god help us, for beauticians.  The proposals will be nominally justified by improving ethics or similar laudable things, but, like most credentialing systems, will be aimed not at those on the inside but those on the outside.  At one time or another, teachers, massage therapists, and hairdressers have all used licensing or credentialing as a way to fight competition from upstart competitors, often ones with new business models who don't have the same trade-specific educational degrees the insiders have....

Such credentialing can provide a powerful comeback for industry insiders under attack.  Teachers, for example, use it every chance they get to attack home schooling and private schools, despite the fact that uncertified teachers in both these latter environments do better than the average certified teacher (for example, kids home schooled by moms who dropped out of high school performed at the 83rd percentile).  So, next time the MSM is under attack from the blogosphere, rather than address the issues, they can say that that guy in Tennessee is just a college professor and isn't even a licensed journalist.

Read the rest of his current piece. Subject also at Moonbattery.

I am a staunch nativist when it comes to wildlife. The damn English Sparrows are really bothering me this year.

We have two pestiferous Limey bird species here in Yankeeland and in the US in general - the English Sparrow (aka House Sparrow) and the Starling.

Both were imported from Albion for a variety of silly  reasons, back before people realized that biological imports create a mess for native species. These were two highly aggressive, invasive species who have wreaked havoc on our gentle native birds. Now, the English Sparrow is the most widely distributed bird on earth.

Today, my irritation is with the English Sparrow. It is not, in fact, a lowly, timid mouselike sparrow at all, but probably a variety of European weaver finch. They are city birds, barn birds, and may fit into European ecology quite well but here they drive out our native sparrows and are dominating my bird feeder this year. I have no interest in feeding them because they can do very well feeding from dumpsters in parking lots and eating horse manure - one of their favorite treats.

As Beantown's Mayor Curley would have said, I'd ship them all back to England if I could.

More about the House Sparrow at CLO here.

I used to view Al Gore as a fairly decent sort, honest as politicians go, affable, sometimes a bit clownish in his sanctimony and pomposity, a bit naive from his privileged youth and from never having held a real job in the real world, probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer but generally a well-intentioned guy who would be a congenial doubles tennis partner.

(I viewed his failure to be seduced by the Clinton slimy charm to be much in his favor. It has often been said that he cannot stand them.)

Traumatic events can short-circuit people's brains, and I think this fellow has experienced a personality change, if not a psychotic breakdown as a result of the ego injury of his agonizingly close loss of the election. Until then, his charmed life had had no apparent disappointments or major rejections, unlike most people who toughen up from the hard knocks of life. Strings of luck tend to make people want to believe it's because of them, and not La bella Fortuna.

I am not one for ad hominems. In fact, I am concerned about this guy's stability, specifically about the form of paranoid disorder known as monomania.

Those with a monomania want everyone else to join in their obsession (eg Captain Ahab). People who think their mission is to save the world are insane by definition.

Meanwhile, Old Man Winter just won't give us a chance to shovel the front walk before slamming us again. I often consider how many heart attacks would be prevented if only globalisticalistic warmening were really happening, but I love winter - I'd miss it. But I am not worried. Unlike Al Gore, I was a science major and I can look at data and stats with a modicum of savvy and healthy skepticism, knowing that 99% of it ends up being wrong - including, already, much of the science I learned in college. Among other things, my Ivy League scientist profs taught me that the world would be entirely without oil by 2000 with none left with which to produce medicines, and that the next Ice Age would begin about then, threatening civilization itself. Meanwhile, I plow the snow from my driveway today with relatively cheap gas: they might be right about the latter - the coming Ice Age. I am in it.

A h/t to JDZ for finding this provocative essay by Mr. Moldbug, Why I am not a Libertarian. A quote:

The Loyalists have no political descendant. There is no American alive today whose loyalty to the British Crown was passed down to him in an unbroken chain from 18th-century Loyalists. You would be about as likely to find a native speaker of Etruscan. Both Democrats and Republicans are factions of Patriot.

And yet: the Loyalists were right. At least on this one rather important question. Britain was not on a path to a weird, 1984-like future with gold braids and epaulets, crushed under the iron heel of the King, the Church of England and the Lords. Rather, the power of throne and altar and fief in Britain had been dwindling almost monotonically since Mary Tudor - a process which of course has continued to this day.

The Loyalists were right. And yet they have no intellectual descendants at all, not in the US and not anywhere else. At least from the point of view of their political DNA, they were simply obliterated - not unlike the Cavaliers, to whom their resemblance is more than passing. And in what folder does almost everyone alive file this event? I'm afraid that folder is progress.

It's a meaty piece, perfect for a sleety, snowed-in afternoon with a glass of brandy and maybe a big hunk of English Stilton. Mr. Moldbug has the disbelief in the word "progress" which we share and have written about here, and he shares my ambivalence about the justifications for the American Revolution (which he terms a "criminal mob"). However, I am glad that it happened and that the US is not joining the EU today.

I may or not be technically a Libertarian, but I do take liberty as an ethical and not a practical matter. There is little that is easy, practical, or neat about liberty.

Image: A nice wheel of Stilton, correctly wrapped in a linen napkin

Brits sign EU Constitution without obtaining the opinion of the citizens. Who owns a nation's sovereignty? Surely not the slimeball politician du jour.

And remind me again - why would a nation willingly give up its sovereignty to unelected foreign officials?  Is this a return to a post-modern monarchy?

Says EU Referendum defiantly today: We are not your citizens! In my opinion, the EU wants subjects, not citizens. But who are they, anyway? Arrogant jerks in suits, who want power and babes.

A healthy trend, from John Fund in Opinion Journal (my bolds):

In 1997, the Stockholm Network had five members; it now boasts more than 130 affiliated groups, stretching from Iceland to Armenia. In Bulgaria, the Center for Market Economics has played a major role in building support for the country's adoption of a 10% flat-rate income tax, effective Jan. 1. "Watch Bulgaria," says Steve Masty, an economic development specialist based in London. "The intellectual light bulbs that have been switched on there are now having real-world results."

More than one guest at the Stockholm Network dinner commented that several countries in Europe that escaped the Soviet bloc less than two decades ago are now pursuing reforms that would be regarded as too radical for Western European electorates. In Slovakia, the introduction of a profit-based health system has led to the entry of two private health-insurance companies that have helped drop the state share of the health-care market to 65% from 80% in just two years.

Read the whole thing. "Free-markets and free people" is what is truly "progressive" in today's world. What is termed "progressive" in the US is retrogressive: it's not the 1930s anymore. Totalitarian socialism and Communism had their chance, and the results were not pleasant. Parts of Europe, Canada, and Australia are moving backwards, and parts forward. What about the US?

Today, the true progressives are the bearers of individual freedom and not the bearers of State power. If the word "progress" has any meaning at all, it should mean the unleashing of the human spirit from external power and control.

Just my humble opinion, but I deem myself smarter and more worldly than politicians and bureaucrats. I do not like or trust people who want power over me. They are sickos, by definition, who should be worrying about running their own lives in a sane and sober fashion instead of trying to run mine.

Who are these people? as my friend L. often asks.

The Dem-controlled House has passed its Energy Bill, which is an exercise in fantasy. For one thing, it requires more ethanol than can be produced by the entire US corn crop. Adios, corn-on-the cob? Adios, grits 'n gravy?

Furthermore, what good do plug-in hybrids do? Where do people think that plug-in electricity comes from - magic? It comes from gas and coal-fired power plants. Duh. What's the difference in whether you burn it in your engine, or the utility burns it? And what difference does it make anyway, with a world market in gas and oil?

I say that I was surprised at the size and the temperature of the comment on a brief piece that was critical of gun control. I shouldn’t have been. Doubtless gun owners, like everyone else, are motivated by many things. Ditto for those who would outlaw possession of guns. But behind the panoply of motivations there is, I suspect, this fundamental philosophical divide: On the one side are people who see that we live in a free society, understand that freedom is not free—that it can often be quite an expensive quality—and who understand further that preserve freedom requires that individuals stand up for themselves, physically as well as in other ways.

On the other side of the divide are people who see that we live in a free society, who may also understand that freedom is not free—they, too, might admit that it can often be quite an expensive quality—but who wish to cede important parts of that responsibility to the state. The former are likely to be small-government, low-tax supporters of the Second Amendment. The latter are likely to be big government, high-tax critics of the Second Amendment.

I oversimplify, of course, but I believe the distinction I’ve limned here is a real one and one, moreover, that is worth meditating on, not only with respect to the question of gun ownership but, more generally, with respect to what might be the biggest issue facing citizens in Western democratic countries: the increasing concentration of state power and its intrusion into the fabric of everyday life.

The guy like totally gets it, and he writes better than any of us chicken farmers.

Q: "How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?"
A: "That's not funny."

We believe in good manners and respectful behavior except when it is undeserved, but we also believe in free speech and equal opportunity insults, especially for the purpose of humor, irony, and satire but occasionally to just smack some jerk around when feeling cranky. I am no different from anybody else in this.

From American Thinker, A Quiet Defeat for Political Correctness? It begins:

Maybe this is how political correctness ends; not with a bang, but with a whimper. Across the country, universities that had abandoned in loco parentis in the 1960s because it was too oppressive and intrusive have replaced it with in loco Big Brother programs of political and cultural re-education.

Read the whole thing.

And at Pajamas, The Word Police from Brad Rourke: 

There’s a big fuss at the moment over a list of “no-no words” circulated by an office of the Army. Compiled by someone with expertise in equal opportunity matters, the list purports to be 76 examples of words that simply should not be used in the workplace, as they are hurtful. The email, in fact, has an accompanying PowerPoint titled “WORDS HURT!”

While the majority of the words are ones that would – and should – get your children’s mouths washed out with soap, some are puzzling.

“Colonial,” for instance, is on the list. Ditto “Canuck.” Many are chortling at the evident politically-correct overreach. The list evidently discourages workplace talk about Vancouver’s professional hockey team. Others are predictably angry.

Read the whole thing.

As I said, genteel manners are fine, but "sticks and stones...".  Heck, I have had acquaintances call me a Nazi - and I'm not even a Socialist... or of German ancestry. I'm mostly Libertarian. How they get Nazi out of Libertarian is beyond me.

Where your treasure is, there will also be your heart. Matthew 6:21

Americans are the most giving, generous people in the world. They may hate giving money at gunpoint (taxes), but they take great joy in giving by choice.

If you feel the desire to give either money or time this Christmas, I highly recommend The Salvation Army to you as a worthy recipient.

(Full disclosure: Besides various local charities and my usual membership donations to orgs like the NRA, The Ruffed Grouse Society, and many others, this year I am giving larger checks to The Salvation Army, my prep school, The Nature Conservancy, my church, Ducks Unlimited, World Vision, Doctors Without Borders, and the Marine Corps Scholarship Fund)

A quote from the review of Mead's book by Heather Wilhelm at RCP:

To his credit, Mead acknowledges--unlike some acolytes of the power of liberal capitalism--that the future of the Anglo-American system will, like thousands of years of human history before it, hold perpetual turmoil. The classic human mistake throughout the ages, well illustrated in "God and Gold", is an optimistic one: This time it will be different. This time we've figured it out. Global capitalism, while a tremendous blessing for many, also has its dark sides: cultural clashes, technological surprises, stateless actors impossible to deter. Together, America and Britain have unleashed a world-changing force, brewed over the course of 400 years. Hopefully, in the years to come, it will win enough friends and beneficiaries to help smooth the bumpy ride that awaits us.

Buchholtz at Opinion Journal:

Bill Gates has $56 billion to his name. What would you do if he called your home asking you for some money? You'd hang up on the prankster, of course. Now, what would you do if Harvard, with its $35 billion endowment, called begging for cash? My wife and I take out our checkbook. But maybe we should be hitting up Harvard instead.

Princeton's endowment grew by more than $3 billion last year. Three weeks of gains in the Tiger portfolio would have paid for every undergrad's tuition and for a fresh pair of stripes on the mascot. Princeton's nothing special, at least in this case. Over 60 universities in the U.S. have endowments surpassing $1 billion, a fivefold gain in the past 10 years. This lovely fiscal boom has angered some U.S. senators who want to force Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford and many others to spend more from their coffers. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley threatens to pry open the endowments so that, like other charitable groups, they must spend at least 5% of principal each year, compared with the measly 4.2% they chose to spend in 2006, down from 5.1% in 1994 and 6.5% in 1982.

What's happening here? Are rich schools like survivalists, afraid to spend and waiting for the apocalypse? If we looked in Yale's basements would we find a million rows of canned tuna and bottled Evian, guarded by angry bulldogs? The universities have all sorts of sensible rebuttals.

Read the whole thing.

From Greg Mankiw:

A good topic for class discussion: What are the limits of government redistribution to achieve egalitarian goals?

His discussion here.

A plan is just a guess in a party dress.

Michael Yon, in his exciting Aug, 2005 piece Gates of Fire. How things have changed in Mosul.