Maggie's Farm

I am filling in for the News Junkie while he is taking an undeserved boating vacation. I'll do my best.

The NY Sun defends Justice Thomas against NYT smears. The piece is highly revealing of the NYT's mind-set, which has nothing to do with the Constitution. From the standpoint of the Left, the Constitution has been replaced by the sentiment of the hour - which is exactly why you need a Constitution.

Lifson on the neglected truths of the immigration debate. American Thinker. Excellent. If this bill dies in the Senate, everyone wins, more or less, and Bush did his best to sacrifice national sovereignty on the altar of the Mexican vote.

Did you see Crisis on Omaha Beach at Powerline? Very mild.

The Prof's revolutionary new cure for ADHD in the classroom.

How is your albedo? A simple way to make the earth colder. But do we really want to? We are having the coldest June in 7,043 years here in Hartford. You can look it up.

Al Gore's hell on earth. At RCP. The man is definitely over the edge. A quote, with Al Gore quotes:

"When we do rise, it will fill our spirits and bind us together. Those who are now suffocating in cynicism and despair will be able to breathe freely. Those who are now suffering from a loss of meaning in their lives will find hope." When we rise, "we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge."

Holy Mackerel, Al! Where's my spare straitjacket? Get the nurse. This is a severe case of psychotic hyperreligiosity.

Re forceful intervention in the world. Barone, as quoted in a piece at Betsy:

Democrats like Biden and Feingold seem to want the United States to abide by children’s playground rules. It’s selfish when you intervene to help yourself, but it’s acceptable when you intervene to help others. It’s egotistical when you do things alone, but it’s commendable when you play well with others. But those rules aren’t much help when a child molester stalks the playground. Sometimes you have to act alone and act out of self-interest to prevent evil people from doing evil things.

It is so basic that one would not think that this needed to be said - but it does.

Ilya Somin at Volokh takes on the paternalistic/fascist notion that our lives should be designed and regulated by experts. I wish I had written it, because Ilya does a great job of ripping the notion to shreds.

...some advocates of libertarian paternalism try to get around the problem of political ignorance by suggesting that their policies be implemented by government-appointed experts rather than by elected officials. This is not a new argument. Totalitarians from Plato to Lenin have argued that the ignorance of the masses can be offset by concentrating power in the hands of an expert elite. So too have some moderate liberal scholars such as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and even libertarian Bryan Caplan. Breyer, the libertarian paternalists, and Caplan would never think of taking the argument as far as Plato or Lenin. But the core logic is similar: the experts know better than the average person - and therefore they should make the decisions.

For advocates of limited government, the rule of experts is like the vampire that refuses to die no matter how often we drive a stake through its heart. We've been fighting it for 2500 years, but have never quite managed to finish it off. Nevertheless, I'm going to put on my vampire slayer hat, and take a wee little stab at it.

Read the whole thing. My opinion, as you might imagine as a Maggie's Farm contributor, is that common sense beats expertise nine out of ten times; that character beats intelligence nine out of ten times, that too many people have the mental disease of wanting to control people they don't even know, and that regular folks like me - "the masses" - are much smarter than the experts think, and quite capable of making our own choices.

The Traveller's Dilemma. It's a variation on the Prisoner's Dilemma, but what is interesting about these games is to play them yourself multiple times, and see what happens. We like Game Theory, but the math eludes us as this point.

But it's not just about math - it's about how illogicality can often be logical. Here's the premise:

Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it.

Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both write the same number, he will take that to be the true price, and he will pay each of them that amount. But if they write different numbers, he will assume that the lower one is the actual price and that the person writing the higher number is cheating. In that case, he will pay both of them the lower number along with a bonus and a penalty--the person who wrote the lower number will get $2 more as a reward for honesty and the one who wrote the higher number will get $2 less as a punishment. For instance, if Lucy writes 46 and Pete writes 100, Lucy will get $48 and Pete will get $44.

What numbers will Lucy and Pete write? What number would you write?

To keep it simple, play with three people - same as The Prisoner's Dilemma. You play it over and over. Of course, they cannot discuss the strategy together.

"Does the Tooth Fairy believe in Atheists?" Joe Carter takes a look at the four varieties of atheism. My view is that every believer is part atheist, and that faith waxes and wanes. Perfect faith was even elusive, for a moment, for Christ on the cross.

"You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Is that the demand which got Jesus killed? It Takes a Church

Pastors have human flaws, are rarely Christ-like, and are frequently sinful in their actions. (h/t, Smart Christian). One commenter to that piece at An Authentic Life makes this excellent observation:

I think a lot of it is the fault of the evolved church community to place the responsibility, and thus the blame, for the spiritual health of the church community solely on the "pastor."  I spent too long in a mainline beaurocracy where we put all the responsibility for leadership, worship, shepherding, and administration of a 1200 member "church" onto one man.  Sure, we had a board of directors and elders, but realistically, we willingly abdicate all responsibility onto him (unless we don't like the color of the carpet). 
Now, I attend a church community where the building takes second-place to the people, and the pastor refuses to be call "pastor" because he places the responsibility for "being Christ" on all of us equally.  We all have a responsibility to sharing the gospel, reaching out to our neighbors, and ministering to the sick and lonely.  I no longer get the easy "out", but my life has been richer for the experience.

The endless of pursuit of equality of education outcome from our loopy cousins across the pond - a quote from a good piece by Melanie Phillips:

Education here has simply been eviscerated in pursuit of the lunatic doctrine that all must have prizes (the title of my own book about this catastrophe back in 1996). Worse still, the government’s reaction to this implosion of standards and the denial of its own culpability has been a witch-hunt against those universities that still try to maintain some semblance of educational rigour, along with an instruction to them to discriminate, on pain of losing government funding, against pupils from not only independent schools but the better comprehensives, precisely to advance the argument made by Willetts that such achievement is proof of injustice.

Meanwhile back on Planet Seattle (from a good piece at Ace):

Dr Caprice Hollins, the Director of Equity, Race & Learning Support for Seattle’s public schools, has previously criticised individualism, long-term planning (or “future time orientation”) and the speaking of grammatical English as “white values.” The expectation among teachers that all students should be responsible individuals and meet certain linguistic and organisational standards is, according to Dr Hollins, a form of “cultural racism.”

Good grief. A guy (or gal? "Caprice"?) with advanced degrees and a government sinecure is advocating what he or she imagines are jungle values for others - but surely not for his- or her-self, since I suspect the job comes with a fine future-oriented pension from the taxpayers who actually work at difficult and/or unpleasant jobs. I think this person is serious, and not presenting satire.

So is it now racist to imagine that black people can be intelligent and can use their brains to adapt to life?

Honestly, I can think of no more effective attitude than that if your goal is to keep black folks marginalized, poor, and stupid, down on the Dem Plantation. Fortunately, I do not think that anyone really listens to these education jerks because blacks are joining the American mainstream in gratifying numbers - and that pleases me immensely.

I would welcome amnesty for the handful of laws that I have inadvertently, accidentally, or stupidly broken during my life - but never intentionally. Never intentionally, because I have an idea in my head of how a good, decent citizen of a free country behaves - and I do my best to meet that.

Give me Amnesty! I'll confess to everything!

From Surber, who has a link to the bill itself:

...could it be that Mitt Romney killed this deal on Tuesday night when he said the McCain-Kennedy bill would do to immigration what the McCain-Feingold bill did to campaign financing.

Ouch.

This proposal could save Republican bacon by allowing all the presidential candidates except McCain to beat up on the amnesty issue.

Americans do not want to reward Criminal Behavior.

Illegal immigration is a felony.

I agree that this Bush-McCain-Kennedy bill is DOA.

A quote from Michael Novak's piece on the subject at First Things:

More and more often on Catholic campuses, left-wing Catholics are hiding their own ideological preferences behind the mantra “Catholic social thought.” To listen to them, you would think that the Catholic social ethic has four main emphatic tenets and five great silences. The four emphases are: (1) pacifism and nonviolence; (2) legal limits on the income of the rich; (3) the extension of the social welfare state for the poorest 12 percent of the American population (about forty million people), until all are lifted by government grants above the poverty line; and (4) the elimination of the death penalty in the thirty-some states that still allow it.

Merely on the terrain of social ethics, this creed is notable for (a) its silence about ending abortion (forty-eight million since 1973); (b) its silence about federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and cloning; (c) its silence about the fourfold increase in violent crime since 1965—committed disproportionately against the poor; (d) its silence about the sixfold increase in father-abandoned families (chiefly among the poor); and (e) its silence about the horrific oppression of Muslim peoples around the world, including the daily assaults on their dignity by secret police, and the normal, regular abuse of their individual rights. We might call these the five silences. But there are others, too.

Read the whole thing.

KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov speaks (h/t, No Pasaran). Topics: Useful Idiots, the Demoralization of the West, and Exploitation of the American Mass Media. I don't know when these videos were recorded.

A home without firearms is like a farmhouse kitchen without a fireplace.

The Barrister

The term "Market failure" has become a fashionable phrase for things that somebody claims "require government intervention" in the economy.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as market failure, given time, fair competition, and honest free markets. Markets always eventually reflect people's economic interests, and their personal desires.

"Market failure" is used, it appears to me, whenever a political agenda, for better or worse, desires to overpower market forces to achieve some postulated "public good." Thus using the loaded term "market failure," as I have seen it used lately, is often a misnomer because it's not the "job" of markets to directly supply "public goods."  Indeed, the term MF can be abused to apply to anything these days: legal help, medical care, the price of gas, environmental protection, eminent domain, Microsoft, wages - you name it. These days, the Left sees market failure everywhere they look for it because they do not like free markets (which means, to me, that they do not approve of the free choices people make).

When politics intervene in markets, with all of the fearsome power of the State behind them, they enter perilous waters, but it is often politically necessary in democracies, and sometimes practically necessary. My political hero Teddy Roosevelt was a great market-intervener with his trust-busting, and I would not care to live in a village without zoning, a country without an army, or to invest my money without the SEC cops to keep markets reasonably honest.

But once the door has been opened to market intervention, there is potentially no end to it. It can be a slippery slope to obnoxious authoritarian (see Mayor Bloomberg telling people what kinds of fat they can eat) and/or socialist solutions. That is the creepy part for a nation which was founded on an ideal of individual freedom (and the property rights which enforce individual freedom against the power of the State), but it has been one of the prime drivers of politics (and political funding) since FDR - who, to my mind - was a noblesse-oblige socialist: "Socialism for thee but not for me."  Sort-of like the Clintons, but they lack the noblesse piece.

Howard Dean sees a "market failure" in the small number of listeners to left-wing talk radio. That's a good example of how a well-functioning market can end up being politically labelled as a "failure:" people don't want what he wants to sell them. See Howard Dean: "We need to re-regulate the media."

Photo: The Grand Bazaar in amazing Istanbul. A wonderful maze of a free market. I advise everyone to save their pennies and visit Turkey - and not just Istanbul. It is a fine and fascinating place to which I am eager to return. And I need a new rug, about 20X30'.

Canada's Menu Foods Income Fund (TSE: MEW.UN) is a major North American contract manufacturer of "wet" pet foods which are sold under a variety of brand names including Iams.

Their recalls have been in the news, as have the the animal death and illness resulting from contaminants in the rice or wheat gluten imported from China.

The only importer whose name I have heard mentioned is the Denver-based Wilbur-Ellis, a large agricultural and chemical company which sold the Chinese product to Menu Foods. My guess is that someone in China added material to the gluten to give it the appearance of containing a higher amount of protein than it did.

Many lawyers will make money on suits between the involved companies, and in class action suits like this one.

One shrewd investor has told me that Menu Foods is an excellent business, and could be a buy around its current depressed price.

Poverty is, of course, relative. The functional American poor have cars, washing machines, and cell phones. Poverty statistics themselves can be a snare and a delusion, especially if they are defined as the bottom whatever-% of the population, as the Brits do.

If you use that method, there will always be a bottom whatever-%, no matter what sort of safety net is provided through government, and our amazing abundance of American charities, most of which are desperate to find somebody - anybody - to help.

In fact, if you declare yourself poor in this neck of the woods, 20 government agencies and 20 charities will descend upon you like vultures - if only to justify their existence.

Poverty in the US is defined as below a $20,000 (declared) income, not by a percentage. I include "declared" in parentheses because there is a heck of a lot of black market labor out there where the boss would far rather hand you a pile of bills than put you on the payroll. We all see it, daily, just as well all see folks who will only accept cash.

Is "poverty" a useful concept at all, nowadays? I wonder. Or is it like "global warming" - just a handy excuse to expand government and entitlements? Tools for politicians?

What rankles me is that American poverty figures are driven by political agendas rather than by truth-seeking. Thus American poverty can include recent high school grads in their first job living at home. Or grad students, or hippies living off the land in northern California. Or addicts who don't get to work. Or crusty Appalachian hill-dwellers who don't like to come down to town to work (the original hippies), but poach, grow some stuff, make a little 'shine, and send the wife to town for the monthly check. Or other sorts of voluntarily poor such as those who won't move to where the jobs are, or rural and inner-city single 17 year-old moms with four kids. Or those whose second jobs are paid under the table. Or an unmarried couple where the partner works part-time at WalMart.

The icing on the cake, though, is that American income figures do not include any government or charitable transfers, grants (welfare, Social Security Disability, unemployment checks, etc), housing subsides or the value of subsidized housing, or other benefits such as food stamps, child care, and Medicaid. If that money is not included, there is nothing government can do to change the numbers.

Furthermore, poverty numbers do not take assets into account - just income. Thus I would be a poverty stat by being a 70 year-old Maine potato farmer with a paid-off 150-acre farm, living on Social Security in the big old family farmhouse, and selling $16,000 of potatoes every year. (I like to use Maine as an example because they have high poverty stats, but no-one going hungry or without a pick-up truck.)

The estimable Arnold Kling at TCS makes the case that the only war on poverty that works is the building of character in a capitalist system. One quote:

Our moral and mental development, and the high productivity that accompanies it, have taken place under a system of decentralized capitalism. I would claim that the capitalist system accounts for more than 100 percent of the reduction in poverty that has taken place over the past hundred years.

How can capitalism account for more than 100 percent of the reduction in poverty? Is that mathematically possible?

If we take into account the factors that have retarded poverty reduction, then we can argue that, by overcoming those factors, capitalism accounts for even more than 100 percent of poverty reduction. That is, if world poverty has fallen from 90 percent to 20 percent over the past 200 years, then capitalism would have reduced it by even more were it not for the retarding factors.

Ironically, the biggest factor retarding the capitalist solution to poverty may well be the crusade to end poverty using conscious planning. Certainly if one includes among the planned solutions to poverty the experiment with Communism (and I see no reason why it ought to be excluded), then the case against intentional anti-poverty efforts is rather compelling. Simply compare poverty in North Korea with that in South Korea, for example.

Kling is probably correct about the world in general, but, in the US, I doubt that applies because we are already a wealthy nation with plenty of jobs and no meaningful unemployment. You have to know there is work for everyone when my supermarket now has folks with Down's Syndrome doing shelving and bagging - which I think is wonderful.

But first, I want to know who the poor are, and what they own, and what they do all day. I am not hard-hearted, but I am hard-headed. My guess is that the truly American poor are mainly emotionally or physically disabled, dysfunctional, or exploitative and sociopathic - or the voluntarily poor (which includes new immigrants) or temporarily poor - and thus unlikely to benefit much from any kind of job growth.

Please correct me if I am wrong about any of this.

Addendum:

Quote from Paul at Powerline:

The U.S. has now seen the leadership of both France and Germany pass to figures who believe, as a general matter, that American power is a force for good in the world, and not something that needs persistently to be constrained. Let's hope that in 2009 the U.S. still has a leader who concurs.

How long do we wait for the American Dems to figure out what the Europeans have figured out?

Vote "YES" on impeachment of Bush, and vote early and vote often. As noted at Wizbang,

I urge you... no beg you.. to vote YES early and often as W. C. says, "MoveOn.org and the Kos kids drive the Democratic Congressional agenda. If we can get them focused on impeachment, it will distract them from passing bad laws."

You can help whip the Soros-funded nuts into a psychotic self-destructive frenzy by pouring a bit of gasoline on the flames as an amateur agent-provocateur. For my reasons for impeachment, I said "Bushitler is a Capitalist mass-murdering facist dictater." (Typos deliberate, for authenticity.) I will send a few more from my other rarely-used email addresses, with much stronger comments.

Yes, it is beneath Maggie's Farm standards of decorum, probity, integrity, and respect for all humanoids to suggest such a devilish act, but we just report. You decide for yourself.

You vote here. Of course, if you actually believe that Bush should be impeached for something, you'll be voting on my side - for once!

Photo: George Soros as Dr. Evil.

From Roger Kimball in New Criterion. Quotes:

Of course, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. But it is remarkable what a large accumulation of eggshells we have piled up over the last century. (And then there is always Orwell’s embarrassing question: “Where’s the omelet?”) I forget the sage who described hope as the last evil in Pandora’s box. Unfair to hope, perhaps, but not inapplicable to that adamantine “faith in a better world” that has always been at the heart of the socialist enterprise. Talk about a hardy perennial! The socialist experiment has never worked out as advertised. But it continually blooms afresh in the human heart—those portions of it, anyway, colonized by intellectuals, that palpitating tribe Julien Benda memorably denominated “clercs,” as in “trahison de.” But why? What is it about intellectuals that makes them so profligately susceptible to the catnip of socialism?

In his last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), Friedrich Hayek drily underscored the oddity:

The intellectuals’ vain search for a truly socialist community, which results in the idealisation of, and then disillusionment with, a seemingly endless string of “utopias”—the Soviet Union, then Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Nicaragua—should suggest that there might be something about socialism that does not conform to certain facts.

It should, but it hasn’t. And the reason, Hayek suggests, lies in the peculiar rationalism to which a certain species of intellectual is addicted. The “fatal conceit” lay in believing that, by exercising his reason, mankind could recast society in a way that was at once equitable and prosperous, orderly and conducive to political liberty.

A key quote concerns a subject about which our Dr. Bliss is often concerned (she often discusses the regressive effects of the nanny state) - the psychological influences of different forms of government on its citizens:

Echoing and extending Tocqueville, Hayek argued that one of the most important effects of extensive government control was psychological, “an alteration of the character of the people.” We are the creatures as well as the creators of the institutions we inhabit. “The important point,” he concluded, “is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives.”

A fine, meaty essay. Read the whole thing.

When reading about the DC Madam who has essentially outed thousands of clients by turning her records over to ABC News, I wonder whether prostitution should be illegal. (I used to think that the pill and the "sexual revolution" - if there was any such thing - would render prostitution obsolete, but I guess not.)

I am not asserting that it should be legal (I tend to think not, but it is legal in Nevada, isn't it?) - just wondering. What do y'all think? 

Many of our younger friends, and my colleagues at the firm, spent the week before last visiting colleges with their high-school age kids. Ambitious kids often aspire to our venerable, prestigious Ivy League colleges, but the Ivies do not have the space for all of the smart, curious, motivated and talented kids who apply.

These days, you need a hook. A very big hook, if you have the misfortune to be a white male with 1600 SATs.

Why? Because nowadays, the most competitive colleges "construct" a class. They don't simply take the kids they like; they take the best applicant from each of a large number of columns. The best violinist, the best oboeist, the best squash player, the best quarterback, the best legacy applicants, the kids of the biggest donors, the one who won the most international math tournaments, etc. Plus their prospecting for ultra-talented kids is world-wide now: Just look at the names on Ivy tennis, soccer, or fencing teams - globalization at work. They might have a category for smart, well-rounded kids, but they keep that secret.

Fortunately, in America there are tons of equally good alternatives for kids who would like to excel, many which have not become commie propaganda mills yet, and many of which are far less expensive. In education, you do not get what you pay for, you get what you can take in.

In our firm, we have associates from all sorts of colleges and from all sorts of top 20 law schools. We realize that it's a big world out there, and that it's not like my day, when having an Ivy pedigree seemed like a social and professional requirement (and admission was less selective). Those days are gone, and it might be for the best, but I am not sure. I prefer values to brains, assuming the brains are adequate.

Editor's Note: A reader sent in this photo of Harvard's University Hall, taken on a college visit with a child a week ago.

I finally read this idiotic piece which has been going around, Why Women Hate Hillary. I read it to make sure I wasn't missing something meaningful.

The author's point seems to be that Hillary isn't female, so she is an extension of the patriarchy. But what got me was this quote:

We want a break with the past, optimism, and a recommitment to the government caring about and serving the needs of everyday people. We want what feminism began to fight for 40 years ago—humanizing deeply patriarchal institutions. And, ironically, we see candidates like John Edwards or Barack Obama—men—offering just that.

"Humanizing institutions"? What? Institutions are always out for themselves. So just tell me this - Which do you really want?  A Mommy, or a Daddy, or a husband? And, whichever you want, why the heck would you look to government to fill that role? This is one of the most immature things I have read in a while.

The author wants a Mommy, I think.

Another person who needs to wake up. The guy is single-handedly slowing the American economy. His fear of inflation, as a newbie, is ridiculous at this time. Out-of-control inflation is not a current problem.

We are driving below the speed limit, and he is putting on the brakes. Probably worrying about his long-term reputation as a tough guy, but he is hurting everybody, and especially marginal homeowners. Not that our economy is doing poorly - it is fine - but he is fighting the last war, and not dealing with the present.

He is the best horse the Dems have in their stable. I hope they wake up to him. Dark horse? Smart guy, impressive, normal, and not as full of it as the others. Not programmed, and not overly phony.

Obama is the current hero of the "anybody but Hillary" Dems. But Obama is going nowhere, especially after the "debate" last night when he hemmed and hawed about the theoretical question about what to do after Jihadists destroyed Chicago and Dallas. "Get international support" or whatever he tried to say. (It cannot be very comforting to the people of Illinois and Texas that France, China, Russia and Germany are needed to defend them.) Hello! The guy is another empty suit, an educated fool and does not deserve serious consideration.

I am sure he is a nice guy, but if he were white, he'd be another Dennis Kucinich. Newness, platitudes, "anybody but Hillary", and skin color are the only sources of his appeal.

Savvy Dems should take a look at Richardson. He has the common touch, and he is real, relatively speaking.

I do not think everyone in Iran takes the Mullahs seriously. The Iranians aren't stupid, and they have strong Western sympathies. Good people, and many of them quite worldly, educated, and sophisticated, but with a populist government from hell. With a decent election, they could be like Turkey in a minute, and applying for membership in NATO and the EU.

Their people want to join the real world, but they have been outvoted by the peasants. That's democracy, assuming their votes are legit, which one might reasonably doubt. I like the Iranians, but their leaders are insane.

Gateway.