Maggie's Farm

A beautiful Tommy Makem solo.  RIP to a fellow who brought so much Irish delight to the earth.

Watch somebody try to say that this Army report on the TNR story is a "coverup."

Love potion #9.  Is love a mental illness?

Is there a double standard for anger in the workplace?

The women of the X Games.

Kos says he will purge the Dem Party. Who is this guy, and why does anyone listen to him?

Dems are anti-Semitic, says Kesler.

Quoted by Tony Blankley in a piece at Never Yet Melted:

On June 25, the following resolution was tabled in the House:

“That this House, while paying tribute to the heroism and endurance of the Armed Forces, in circumstances of exceptional difficulty, has no confidence in the central direction of the war.”

That would be June 25, 1942. The House would be the House of Commons in London, England. And the government in which no confidence was expressed was that of Winston Churchill.

Maisons au bord d'une route (1881)

Sarkozy to vacation in New Hampshire. Good choice. Our News Junkie is up there right now, humping his way up Mount Moosilauke, upon which dwells the sacred spirit of Dartmouth College.

Armed robots on patrol in Iraq.

Brits nix pain meds. Not "cost effective." Neither is life itself cost-effective after 70. God spare us such insanity.

Photo: South peak of Mt. Moosilauke

Two bridge collapse videos in 24 hours. Here's the Minneapolis video.

Cartoon of the Day, at Dr. Sanity.

Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome. Driscoll

"That's my story and I'm sticking to it." Bill Clinton

The Cognitive Psychological concept of "Confirmation Bias" falls under the broader scope of my Fallacy and Logic portfolio here at Maggie's Farm.

Furthermore, it fits well into one of the main themes of Maggie's, which is to detect the insidious and fact-defying "narratives" by which we busy citizens are presented information by politicians and news organizations.

I have no doubt that we are sometimes guilty of both Confirmation Bias and Selection Bias at times - but we try to be aware of it, just as we try to be aware of the flaws of inductive reasoning. "One swallow does not make a summer", we try to remind ourselves. On the other hand, much of common sense consists of inductive "reasoning" wherein we happily greet the first swallow of summer.

This comes up today because our editor emailed me a short piece by Protein Wisdom comparing a Michael Yon Iraq report with a WaPo report. Of course, I tend to go with the Yon because he is on the ground and has no axe to grind, while I know full well that the WaPo, like the NYT, is fighting a propaganda battle and weeding out the news that will interfere with their narrative du jour.

Real life is too complex and messy for neat narratives and clean stories. That's why we love them so much. And that is why politicians and the MSM and trial lawyers, and anyone with an agenda, try to feed simple fairy tales to us.

One thing I often find myself wondering about these common biases is to what extent they are conscious manipulations, and to what extent they are automatic. With politicians, of course, one can assume that they are calculated manipulations most of the time, because those folks need the job and they need the attention.

On the other hand, I know plenty of people who just don't take in information that would conflict with their narrative about something (selection bias), and only permit into their brains information which seems to be consistent with the narrative they have adopted (confirmation bias). I have been guilty of that plenty of times, but I am more aware of it now when I am tempted.

We humans would be more rational beings if we dumped all of the fairy tales and worried about facts. Alas, "facts" can be subject to the same biases, as every scientist and attorney knows all too well.

Still, "Facts are stubborn things." - Ronald Reagan

So says Brownstein in the LA Times. Excuse me, but isn't  providing medical care a basic parental responsibility?

Some adults have such an infantile view of life that it makes me gag. Brownstein should be all over the parents, not Bush. 

Did the world turn upside down while I was busy?

Via Free Republic. He is going to grab the Reagan mantle before Fred ambles up to the starting gate.

I think Rudy learned a thing or two during his post-Mayor years in the real world.

We need scientists, experts, federal research grants, etc, to help us understand things like this. Where would we be without such people to splain it all to us?

We posted a piece this week on the terrible recent home invasion in Connecticut, about 20 minutes from where I live. By coincidence, this was the same week I was taking my required Concealed Carry course down in Bridgeport (which was excellent, and good fun blasting away at targets with 9mm Glocks and H&Ks, plus some .22 revolvers).

One could not help but wonder what good protection might be from home invasion. In the reported story, the good doctor was downstairs, and knocked out by the invaders with a baseball bat immediately, then tied up and carried to the basement. No handgun in the bedside table would have been of any use.

As home invasion becomes more common, I wonder what good protection might be, unless you carry 24 hrs/day, as many do. I had a good chat, during a break in the course, with a husky young black kid with a du-rag, silver earrings, and pants half-falling off - nicest kid in the world - who wants to be a bank guard. He told me that he was dozing in front of the TV when he was awakened by an intruder, while the rest of his family was upstairs.

The intruder was a bit frightened, and this kid told him to leave in 3 seconds. The minute the guy turned, the kid slammed him in the back of the head with an aluminum baseball bat that was lying around. The kid had been at softball that afternoon, and never put his bat away.

The one swing knocked the guy out. He called the cops who cuffed the skull-fractured intruder and took him away in an ambulance. He said the cops came back one more time to ask more questions, and told him "You done good, kid." He never heard any more about it.

I told him to forget being a bank guard - go into the Army. He told me his Dad was a jarhead, and his granddad was in the Army. I told him he had an innate tactical sense. The way my life is, I do not have enough contact with du-rag kids. (I told my wife the story, and told her that the kid looked scary until I chatted with him. She said "It's just fashion: he wants to look scary, and you want to look dorky.")

A man's home is his castle. My friend and I concluded that a short-barreled pump 12 ga., like a trench gun, might the the best tool - assuming it's handy. It is tough for an amateur to hit anything moving with a handgun, unless it's ten feet away.

Photo on top: The Petit family of Cheshire, CT, the victims of the home invasion/rape/murder. Photo below, The entrance to The Tower, of course. 

Finally, flights to Asia on which you can smoke a cigar. 

I have a hunch that there is a strong market for smoking flights, especially since most folks in Asia and in Europe seem to enjoy the pleasures of tobacco. Those flights to Hong Kong and Singapore are long, and not everybody has a private jet - yet. 

The rise of a black underclass in America since the 60s has been troubling, and puzzling, to me for years. Wasted lives, wasted opportunities, wasted talents. It's been around for so long that many seem to forget that it did not exist before or during the war - or even in the 50s.

From before the Civil War, and since then, many people of all colors worked and died to bring the full freedoms of citizenship to black Americans. The emergence of a self-destructive underclass in the wake of all of that work is heartbreaking. From In the Heart of Freedom, from Myron Magnet in City Journal, a quote:

Two April days threw a clarifying light on the state of race in America. On the 11th, North Carolina’s attorney general exonerated three white Duke students of the rape charges that a black stripper had lodged with much press fanfare a year earlier. The next day, CBS fired shock jock Don Imus for calling black Rutgers women’s basketball players “nappy-headed hos.” Between them, these events suggest an explanation for America’s most vexed social question: in a country whose chief domestic imperative for 50 years has been ending racism and righting long-standing wrongs against blacks—with such success that we now have an expanding black middle class, a black secretary of state, black CEOs of three top corporations, a black Supreme Court justice, and a serious black presidential candidate—how can there still exist a large black urban underclass imprisoned in poverty, welfare dependency, school failure, nonwork, and crime? How even today can more black young men be entangled in the criminal-justice system than graduate from college? How can close to 70 percent of black children be born into single-mother families, which (almost all experts agree) prepare kids for success less well than two-parent families?

The legacy of slavery and racism isn’t the reason, economist Thomas Sowell has long argued. That legacy didn’t stop blacks from raising themselves up after Emancipation. By World War I, Sowell’s data show, northern blacks scored higher on armed-forces tests than southern whites. After World War II and the GI Bill, black education and income levels rose sharply. It was only in the mid-1960s that a century of black progress seemed to make a sudden U-turn, a reversal that long-past events didn’t cause. Beginning around 1964, the rates of black high school graduation, workforce participation, crime, illegitimacy, and drug use all turned sharply in the wrong direction. While many blacks continued to move forward, a sizable minority solidified into an underclass, defined by self-destructive behavior that all but guaranteed failure.

What was going on in the mid-sixties that could explain such a startling development? Political scientist Charles Murray gave the first answer to that question: welfare benefits sharply rose just at that moment. Offering more purchasing power than a minimum-wage job, the dole, he argued, provided an economic incentive for women to have out-of-wedlock babies and for their boyfriends to live off their welfare payments, too.

Is a sub-culture of dependency the issue? I don't know. Read the whole thing.

Photo: The Clifton School on Merritt Island, Florida, 1890

I have a friend who is at Bandon this week.

He says that it is the real deal - a true windy Links golf course.

It looks darn pleasant, and almost makes me wish I played golf. But I already have more than enough hobbies and chores.

To what extent should "public goods" be subsidized? What are the limits?

Transportation is taxpayer-subsidized or government-run in the US. Airports, roads and highways, and mass transit, for starters. All of these things were once entirely private ventures.

In the Boston to DC corridor, Amtrak is a wonderful thing and it is heavily used. It's quicker and cheaper than driving and parking, and it takes you from downtown to downtown instead of to a distant airport.

Whether Amtrak is overly-subsidized is another question, which I cannot answer. However, I would ask these folks who are mooning Amtrak in Calif. whether they would like their California interstates taken away. The NY Sun a while ago was not too keen on Amtrak subsidies, but when they discuss the far-cheaper cost of busses, they ignore the fact that the highways they use are government-built and maintained.

Photo: A high-speed Acela engine

Has anyone seen this film? Someone mentioned it to me today with a strong recommendation. Here's the Amazon description:

Nestled deep in the postcard-perfect French Alps, the Grande Chartreuse is considered one of the world's most ascetic monasteries. In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Gröning wrote to the Carthusian order for permission to make a documentary about them. They said they would get back to him. Sixteen years later, they were ready. Gröning, sans crew or artificial lighting, lived in the monk's quarters for six months filming their daily prayers, tasks, rituals and rare outdoor excursions. This transcendent, closely observed film seeks to embody a monastery, rather than simply depict one. It has no score, no voiceover and no archival footage. What remains is stunningly elemental: time, space and light. One of the most mesmerizing and poetic chronicles of spirituality ever created, INTO GREAT SILENCE dissolves the border between screen and audience with a total immersion into the hush of monastic life. More meditation than documentary, it is a rare, transformative experience.

You need to know, if you do not. Alan Caruba's piece at Intell. Conservative begins thus:

In a month, August 20 and 21, the leaders of the United States, Canada, and Mexico will sit down together in Montebello, Quebec to discuss making the borders between these three nations disappear. They will discuss progress on a vast highway project passing through America to link Mexico with Canada.

So far, no one has asked the citizens of these three nations whether they want to do this. It is not up for a vote in Congress and, indeed, Congress has no supervision over the gnomes in the U.S. Department of Commerce who are busily “harmonizing” the laws under the auspices of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP).

Read the whole thing.

The New New Atheism by Berkowitz in Opinion Journal. A quote:

Unlike the Enlightenment atheism of the 18th century, which arose in a still predominantly religious society and which frequently went to some effort to disguise or mute its disbelief, the new new atheism proclaims its hatred of God and organized religion loudly and proudly from the rooftops. And unlike the anti-modern atheism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which regarded the death of God as a catastrophe for the human spirit, the new new atheism sees the loss of religious faith in the modern world as an unqualified good, lamenting only the perverse and widespread resistance to shedding once and for all the hopelessly backward belief in a divine presence in history.

Is it not odd that intelligent people would view that as an important thing to do? I often think of modern proselytizing atheism as a form of religion, in which they replace God with a devil, who now must be driven from the land. I agree with Berkowitz' piece that the arguments are both thin and emotion-based, with minimal philosophical or theological background.

I am finally scheduled for the required course to get my Connecticut concealed-carry license. I can't wait. Luckily, I have kept my record of violent felonies to a bare minimum thanks to a high innate degree of self-restraint, so they cannot deny me.

Gotta love freedom.

The Brits are one thing, but I cannot believe that the manly Aussies voluntarily gave up the right to self-defence. What can be more basic?

National Press Club permits CAIR to ban press from panel audience. This is sick, shameful, cowardly, dhimmitudinous, and truly un-American. Story at Don Surber.

The correct response to the CAIR complainers should have been "Sorry guys, but this is America."

Thoughts about it at Riehl.

From Timbro (h/t, No Pasaran):

If the European Union were a state in the USA it would belong to the poorest group of states. France, Italy, Great Britain and Germany have lower GDP per capita than all but four of the states in the United States. In fact, GDP per capita is lower in the vast majority of the EU-countries (EU 15) than in most of the individual American states. This puts Europeans at a level of prosperity on par with states such as Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia. Only the miniscule country of Luxembourg has higher per capita GDP than the average state in the USA. The results of the new study represent a grave critique of European economic policy.

In a funny kind of way, we Americans should be pleased that Euroland is so relatively poor. That way, it remains a lovely museum of the past to visit, just like Vermont.

For those who appreciate the engineering marvel of bridges, Dr. Bob has #17 in his photo series on the construction of the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

I have been following the construction with Dr. Bob all along. This is a new section of roadway being guided into place.

I am in awe of people who can design and build such wonderful, useful things.