Maggie's Farm

What is Liberal-Left pacifism all about, and is it any different than defeatism? I have always viewed it as a sort of knee-jerk anti-Americanism; an unhealthy death wish. Why is the battle in Lebanon termed a "crisis"? Why is a cease-fire "urgent" here, and not in Darfur? Paul at Powerline suggests that the notion of war by the clock is a mental compromise between pacifism and the unwillingness to totally abandon the idea of self-defence. One quote:

The concept of fighting a war for a limited, pre-established duration is, to put it gently, a post-modern one. Prior to the left's call for a time-table in Iraq, I'm not aware of any precedent for this peculiar approach to warfare. So it is fair to ask, what are the reasons why Israel should be allowed only a few weeks to finish a military operation it initiated in order to prevent its citizens from being bombed by an enemy committed to Israel's destruction?

Read the whole thing.

Update: And for more truth on the subject, you can hear it from the horse's mouth - Tom Hayden - via HH.  And yes, may I say it again: I didn't leave the Dems; the Dems left me.

Update: And the NYT predictably adopts the Syrian view of the world. Blue Crab. God forbid they adopt an American view of the world, which would not be cool or fashionable.

This quote in Ecological Economics reinforces what people like Rush have been saying for years: The radical enviros - unlike the rational conservationists like all of us at Maggie's Farm - want to run the world, just like the Jihadists. We hate people who want to run the world. Indeed, we hate anyone who wants to run our lives. Does that make us permanent rebellious adolescents? Dreams of power always wear benevolent masks these days: it's the fashion. In the good old days of Atilla, such window-dressing wasn't necessary.

In the second half of the 20th century, neoclassical economics and its derivatives came to dominate economic thinking, teaching and policymaking. Humanity is increasingly feeling the consequences of this blinkered vision: the ever-widening gap between the very rich and all the rest, and between developed and underdeveloped nations; globalization without global coordination for the common good; and economically induced climate change, with the mid-century prospect of an Earth unable to support even current levels of human population. Meta-externalities from economic systems are draining the resources on which they depend, from families and other institutions that educate and socialize human beings, to water, air, soil, and the diversity of species.

Their solution to these crises? Let them run the world.
My solution to these crises? Let me run the world.

I have always felt that the purpose of secondary education is to make it possible, within their potential, for everyone to have the chance to be an informed, honorable citizen with the basic values and morals of our country and our traditions, and to be made capable of functioning in a literate world.

And that the practical purpose of a college education was for those of a scholarly bent to be able to read the Sunday NYT from cover to cover and understand every detail and every reference - from the Book Review to the Arts to Business, etc.  Plus the Tuesday Science Times. (Just an example - not an endorsement of the NYT's political agenda.) But I never thought that it was practical at all, or job-training - I thought it was mind-training and life-enriching. You can't really "get" the world until you've studied Geology and Locke and Bernini and Adam Smith and the glory of the calculus and Biochemistry and Statistics and Plato, and learned Shakespeare. Well, you might think you "get it," but you don't know ----. "The less you know, the smarter you think you are," as my pal Bird Dog likes to say.

Fact is, you can do 99.9% of the necessary work in America without a college education - look at Bill Gates, Bob Dylan, Abe Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Edison, many Brown University graduates, and tens of millions of honest, hard working folks, etc etc etc.

But I have to accept that I may be old-fashioned and that times have changed. It appears that, for many, a college degree is now a job "credential," and we all know that there are many colleges out there which are very happy with below-average high-school-level work, as long as they can fill the seats and bring in the $. This is a pathetic, decadent development but it reflects the deterioration of standards and expectations in our society.

I've spent a fortune providing education to my kids, as my Dad did for me, and as his Dad did for him. Maybe I am a bit of a snob, but I always felt that public education, in our time, was the K-Mart version of the thing. But I've been wrong before, once or twice...at most.

Speaking of Locke, let's hear him on education: 

 "Locke continues: “Having laid the foundations of virtue in a true notion of a God, such as the creed wisely teaches, as far as his age is capable, and by accustoming him to pray to Him, the next thing to be taken care of is to keep him exactly to speaking the truth, and by all the ways imaginable inclining him to be good-natured.” "

Read entire, re Locke vs. Dewey:  Click here: How Far Have We Fallen?

We posted on remote-controlled
 flying toys a short while ago, but this is one to add to the list. It's a flying wing, and flies for 6 minutes on one charge. Wonderful fun.

Don't be put off by its apparent simplicity. Six and seven year-olds can master it but, of course, all of such toys are really for adults, aren't they?

You can get the Rookie here.

A propos of the post by Bird Dog below on Race in Hawaii, and before I go out for a rousing morning ride with the spouse on antsy horses who need exercise badly, due to all of the rain we have had, I thought I might highlight a piece by LaShawn entitled Georgia's Darkies, which begins thus:

Update (4:31 p.m.): A judge has decided that blacks in Georgia (use BugMeNot to bypass reg.) are too helpless to go to the DMV and obtain a free state-issued ID.
———————————————————————————–

Even if I lived a thousand lifetimes, I don’t think I’ll ever understand why there aren’t more black people outraged by the implication that blacks are ignorant and helpless. Every time I hear or read about some white liberal arguing for lower academic standards for black children, supporting set-aside programs for black-owned businesses, and blaming “racism” for crime and other pathologies, I want to vomit.

But I retch alone.

But of course, LaShawn: everybody of every color enjoys a freebie - it's human, but undignified and shameful - so folks try to rationalize it so as not to feel embarassed or sleazy. See our piece on White Guilt. LaShawn's whole piece here.

However, I believe that all of the opposition to voter ID is about permitting vote fraud. No-one legally in the US lacks some form of ID, if only a library card. To prove the point, the only time I have ever voted without having to show ID was in NYC, in 1970-something. If I had no conscience, I could have voted all day long.

I'd love to see a serious audit of NYC voting, someday. Not holding my breath.

By the way, the judge involved was a racist, I believe. And I hate to throw that kind of ugly term around, but only a racist could make such a contemptuous and paternalistic ruling, like a good plantation-owner exercising pseudo-Christian noblesse oblige. We are way past that. In fact, I find Americans all to eager to open their arms to anyone and everyone, with remarkable naivete at times. Let's expect the best from all, and reproach the worst when it occurs, and ignore this skin-color BS - it is superficial and disgusting and un-American. Putting people in color groups is kindergarten.

Show me who you are. I could care less what you look like.

 - Reposted from May 12, 2005

Voegeli on "Values" vs. Morals

Morality is a distinctly unfashionable subject. Nothing fun about it, I guess, and I guess life in the USA has become about fun and self-gratification and "fulfillment" - ie the religion of Self - instead of about being solid grown-ups. Perpetual adolescents instead of Atticus Finches. Sometimes I feel like Rip van Winkle, waking up to a world in which all that is sacred and deep has been replaced by neon lights. Many would rather talk about "values" or "ethics"  than about morals. As I see it, we'd all like an escape clause from being bound by morality, me included. And yes, I have had my stumbles too - but I haven't been able to let myself rationalize them. In this piece, Voegeli addresses the politics of absolutism and relativism. Tough subject. Made me re-think what people are really saying when they say "That's a value judgement." Good, thoughtful piece. Wish I had written it:

"The term "values" has become so widely used as a synonym for "moral beliefs" that it is hard to remember the term has a history. Though Max Weber did not invent the fact-value distinction, his profound influence on American social scientists caused them to promote the idea here after World War II. They insisted that their study of society was scientific because it was confined to statements of fact, which could be empirically verified or disproven, differentiating such statements from "value-judgments." "Values" were irrational, subjective personal preferences. Because value-judgments could not be tested, none could be described as true or false, much less as wise or foolish, or good or evil. A debate between people with opposed views about the meaning of justice would as pointless as a debate between people with different favorite flavors of ice cream.

The fact-value distinction has swept all before it. It's hard to find any American who doesn't speak the language of values and value-judgments, or who understands that this distinction is a recent innovation, one never employed before the last century and incomprehensible or ludicrous in any age but our own."

Read entire.

At a July 4th party last night, saw the daughter of friends - hadn't seen her in a year or more. Last time I saw her, she had purple hair and body piercings, acted sullen, etc. She graduated from Princeton two years ago, and has been working at a media company in NYC since graduation.

At the party, where we all took part in reading pieces of the Declaration of Independence and drank gin and tonics, this nice young gal - who no longer has purple hair, etc., told me that she is joining the US Army and beginning Basic Training in September.

I said "God bless you." I asked all about how they do boot camp for gals, etc. Some is co-ed, and some is not. Interesting. She wants to go into Army Intelligence. She should.

She said "They didn't quite know what to make of my resume."

I said, "Read Illario Pantaro's Warlord."  She didn't know about it.

What a fine thing to hear about on the Fourth of July. The moral of the story for me was: Never judge a kid by what they're like as a teen-ager, because most of them grow up.

For the third time this weekend - at least - I find myself reading NYT publisher Suzlberger's recent commencement address, this time in an update, dealing with the financial transaction tracking report, at Dinocrat.

What he said was, as posted by Dino:

his generation “had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government. “Our children, we vowed, would never know that. So, well, sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” the publisher continued. “You weren’t supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights,...”

So this guy still buys into the adolescent grandiosity of the 60s. This guy still thinks that earthly paradise, beyond history and human nature, can be created -but now with the NYT in the vanguard of world peace, love, justice, etc. See our NYT and Love Beads link in Recent Essays - but I didn't think he was this stuck in a myth and a delusion. Has he ever held a job, or met any normal non-Manhattan people? And was he even there in the 60s? If he was, he would know how nutty it was.

Along with his honorary degree, these comments earn Pinch an honorary doctorate in Moonbatism, for having demonstrated both his grandiosity, his lack of realism, his reflexive anti-Americanism, and his inability to understand evil in the world - unless it's the evil American military, and the evil, brain-dead, ignorant, knuckle-dragging, uneducated, red-neck, right-wing extremist nutjobs like us at Maggie's.

Reposted from December, 2005

This is going around the net: You will enjoy these. Ahh... names like Charley Weaver, Rose Marie, Paul Lynde, George Gobel, and Vincent Price. They sure were quick-witted.If you remember The Original Hollywood Squares and its comics, this will bring a tear to your eyes. These great questions and answers are from the days when game show responses were spontaneous and clever, not scripted and (often) dull as they are now. Peter Marshall was the host asking the questions, of course.

Q. Do female frogs croak?
A. Paul Lynde: If you hold their little heads under water long enough.

Q. If you're going to make a parachute jump, at least how high should you be?
A. Charley Weaver: Three days of steady drinking should do it.

Q. True or False, a pea can last as long as 5,000 years.
A. George Gobel: Boy, it sure seems that way sometimes.

Q. You've been having trouble going to sleep. Are you probably a man or a woman?
A Don Knotts: That's what's been keeping me awake.

Q. According to Cosmo, if you meet a stranger at a party and you think that he is attractive, is it okay to come out and ask him if he's married?
A Rose Marie: No, wait until morning.

Q. Which of your five senses tends to diminish as you get older?
A. Charley Weaver: My sense of decency.

Many more fine ones, below:

I don't know what the New York Times is thinking, but I suspect it feeds their vanity to imagine that they are being valiant journalists by publishing the methods we use to track down terrorists. Legal methods, mind you.

If I had the time, I would post more on this - but for the moment, I just have to say that this behavior is treasonous and contemptible, not to mention dangerous. Not to mention provocative: are they hoping the Justice Dept will charge them with something, to boost shrinking sales?

Like adolescents, you might almost think that they keep testing the limits. Then, when they get into trouble, imagine what they will scream? "Fascism, freedom of the press, Bush=Nixon=Hitler=my mean parents who grounded me, etc."

A classic 1960s Leftist maneuver was to "expose oppression" by pushing the limits and breaking laws until somebody was forced to react. Then you get to be a martyred hero of the Revolution!

"Like wow, really cool, dude. Let's smoke one more and go protest something, and maybe get us arrested or else pick up some groovy chicks, and buy us some groovy love beads and a bottle or two of Mateus, and bring the hippy chicks back to our pad and light the herbal candles. Far out, man. We have a plan! And we might get lucky. I hope they shave their legs or I'll barf, dude. Hey, slow down man - come on, and pass me that joint. And yo, hey - is there any pizza or ice cream or beer left from last night? Shoot, now I think I need a nap before we go to protest. Let's get arrested later, OK, man? Ban the Bomb, or Ban Bush or whatever - just don't ban the bong! Dig ya later."

God forbid, if we have another 9-11, the NYT will quickly exchange their love beads and pot for their grown-up suit and Scotch, and be the first to complain that no-one connected the dots. If I were Gonzales, I'd be on them likes flies on horse poop. Can you imagine this sort of thing during WW2? Would they have published that we broke the Enigma code?

Editor Update: I see the Anchoress has had the same thought. She summarizes other reactions to the NYT's treachery. I added a few sentences to this piece. Some readers ought to take a moment to forward this post to the Times' Public Editor, so they might have the chance to get into reality before they go to jail.

Honestly, I have had it with Islam. I no longer entirely trust the existence of a "moderate Islam," and the wise VDH agrees. (On the other hand, there seem to be millions of Iraquis who want freedom and democracy, so I don't know.)

But my real issue today is why do the Dems keep pushing on this "Run away" theme? (Why do they always want to run away? Since they are Leftist in orientation, I can understand them wanting to bend over for the tender mercies of the glorious (ex-)Soviet Union or the charming, humane and sensitive Mao - but for these Jihadists? What do they see in them?)

I guess it's a reflex for them - but I'd hate to have them as my band of brothers at Agincourt, or Poitiers, or the Battle of the Bulge. Or, God forbid, by my side in the Israeli Army. Or Lexington and Concord - they would invite the Brits in for tea. Wizbang has the latest farce today - thank goodness for the sense of Lieberman, one of the few Dems who understands what is going on.

Why run away like a frightened bunny, when you have a chance to scoop up a few thousand Jihadists, and to create a sane, free country in the heart of the Middle East? It seems like a no-brainer to me, and it could change the world in a very positive way. Yes, they will kill some Americans as they hide behind their women and children, and they will set off bombs forever, like the Palestinians - but we will kill lots more of them. And our guys don't want to run away - they want to stand and fight.

Running from a bunch of gangs of stone-age religious-fanatic sociopaths who want to kill us and to destroy Western Civilization is just not the American way. The buffoon Murtha has been totally discredited here at Powerline, and Kerry - he still thinks he is in Vietnam and lives in a one-man time-warp.

As linked below in Dr. Sanity's exasperated post, where are the Dems when we have a chance to wipe out a major outpost of Jihad? Where is their spirit, where is their determination to protect...and what is with this scared bunny rabbit deal? All it does is to encourage them, as Somalia did when Clinton ran like a scared rabbit, and Madeleine Albright tried her "We're nice" approach (which Saddam, Osama, Kim Sung Il, Iran, Hamas, etc interpreted as weakness and fear).

Lastly, what is this solicitude about "bring our boys home"? These guys are professional soldiers, trained and paid to fight, eager to use their craft, eager to confront danger, and tough and deadly. If they kill a few civilians by mistake, that's too bad - but I forgive them. War is hell, and we could be carpet-bombing Fallujah if we wanted to: instead, we have been trying the friendly, slow, surgical approach (which no other nation on the planet would even bother with, except the Brits).

They can come home when their job is done, but all they will do is sit around their base camp bored, and take classes and practice while waiting for the next chance to use their abilities: they aren't social workers. (Well, the National Guard guys volunteered too, and seem to have their heart in their work, but I know it's not their career.) God bless 'em all, and God protect them all.

Editor's Note: It isn't like The Barrister to post such intemperate pieces, such as many other blogs do. Pure rants and tantrums, however therapeutic, are beneath the dignity of Maggie's Farm, and add little to the discussion. I modified it, but I still do not like the tone.

Our own Dr. Bliss just blew off some steam on this subject (scroll down to "bitching"), but now I see more in the same vein from Dr. Sanity. She is right to be disgusted and fed up. A quote from her piece:

Every time I see our country accept the premises of the insane political correctness promulgated by the political left--a doctrine that claims that, while all cultures and countries are equal; you, America, are uniquely bad and evil and must be punished for your sins. Every time I witness the hysteria mounted when America falls short of its own ideals--and then willingly and honorably acknowledges the fact and takes steps to correct it; every time I witness the granting of moral equivalence between America and the barbaric terrorists who get a free pass from the international community and the MSM for their behavior (being a terrorist means never having to say you're sorry as far as the left is concerned)-- I am appalled.

Is there no decency, no honor left in the Democratic party anymore? Has most of the world gone completely insane? Is the suicidal appeasement of evil and the denigration of good now the norm? And what will happen to the world if America is finally beaten down and just...shrugs...when the next international crisis arises.

My opinion, Dr. Sanity? Yes. And have another beer while we try to figure out how to buy CBS!

"Category error" is one of those terms that I use intuitively (AKA lazily), but never looked into.

The definition is ascribing a property to something whch cannot have that property, thus placing it in the wrong, inaccurate, or misleading category of things.

Example: "It's like comparing apples with oranges." (It's an odd expression, since they are both round fruit, etc, but we know what is meant by the analogy.)

Often category errors are simply cute ways of speaking or figures of speech, without intent to confuse, as in:

Example: "My car doesn't want to start." (attributing intentionality to a pile of metal)

Example: Socialist ideas marched through Europe.

Example: "My computer can't think fast today."

or humorous:

Ex: "My brain is trying to kill me" (Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes)

or colorful and poetic:

Ex: :"..while my guitar gently weeps."

When a psychiatrist says "The id is at war with the superego" (Dr. Bliss would never speak that way), that entails a sort of category error by attributing "thingness" and capacity for action to abstrations (also entails the fallacy of "reification" - closely related - eg. attributing "thingness" to abstract concepts). Thus while the statement basically says nothing, it's a useful if awkward kind of shorthand for something that is meaningful. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle, in his very readable mega-classic The Concept of Mind, represents the latest word on the ways we think of mental things - (and slays Descartes in the process).

How can category errors be used to trick people? It just takes a little sleight-of-hand.

One often used by medical malpractice plaintiff's lawyers and all kinds of trial lawyers is to attempt to conflate two distinct categories:  "accident" with "error."  Thus: "Ladies and gents of the jury, it is clear that if Mr. Jones had bothered to built a stronger fence around his pool, the thunderstorm that knocked down the tree would not have crushed his fence, thus permitting the neighbor, poor old widow Mrs. Smith's only friend, her cute little white Shitzu (show photo), to drown in the pool, leaving her bereft and traumatized, requiring years of costly psychiatric help and daily taxi rides to the Pet Cemetery. Ladies and gentlemen, this was no weather accident - this was negligence pure and simple with a catastrophic result."

Here's another:

"2900 children died from firearms in 2004. Handguns must be made illegal." What category errors are involved here? First, they define "children" as age 0-19, thus including gang warfare and criminal actions in the numbers. Second, they include suicides, which accounts for 33% of that number, and accidents, which are 6%. Third, they do not mention how many of those deaths were via illegal firearms - eg. already banned). Fourth, they do not mention how many of those deaths were by handgun. Thus by confusing and mixing categories, an effort is made to maximally dramatize the effect. 

A now-classic example is the famous "hockey stick" graph which is meant to demonstrate man's effect on climate. The hockey stick graph represents an insidious category error, because it uses tree-ring climate data for most of the graph, but the recent upswing is from entirely different data - surface temperature - so it is like counting bushels of oranges in this year's apple crop.

Editor: My apologies to The Barrister, but I did a bit of work on this one also, making it a bit too long.

Take a look at these two scenarios quoted from work by the experimental philosopher Knobe, from a piece by Chris at Mixing Memory, and see whether you can figure out why people respond as they do:

Scenario 1: The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, 'We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.'

The chairman of the board answered, 'I don't care at all about harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program.'

They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed.

Scenario 2: The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, 'We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, and it will also help the environment.'

The chairman of the board answered, 'I don't care at all about helping the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program.'

They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was helped.

Chris begins his comments thus:

Most participants who read the first scenario, the vast majority of participants say that the chairman intentionally harmed the environment (a morally bad outcome), whereas when they read the second scenario, very few participants say that the chairman intentionally helped the environment (a morally good outcome). Why is this? I haven't the slightest idea...

It's an interesting question about the ways people intuitively assign intention, and thus guilt. Clearly you lose points in life for indifference to harm, but get no points for doing good with indifference - as in doing the right thing for the wrong reason, or arriving at a correct answer despite faulty logic. The discussion here.

Planned Parenthood announces that they will make a major effort to elect "Progressives" this fall. (Yes, PP accepts taxpayer funds.) If they said "Democrats," the IRS would be all over them. But they will only support Democrats.

Just one more front organization for the Revolution! Can non-profits legally do that?

There are many Republicans for Choice out there, mainly ladies. Just be careful about to whom you give your money, ladies. May I assume that the dollars donated by prosperous, "enlightened" white ladies in St. John suits to provide abortions to poor teens, are going to this political effort?

You're an enlightened world citizen. Your T-shirt says "9/11 was an inside job." You're pretty sure we're living in a fascist state, that President Bush taps the Dixie Chicks' phones, Christian abortion clinic bombers outnumber jihadis, and the war on "terror" is a distraction from the real threats: carbon emissions and Pat Robertson. Then you learn that 17 people were arrested in a terrorist bomb plot. How do you process the information? Let's take it step by step.

Gosh, that's horrible, you think. But no -- that's what they WANT you to feel. Recall the prime directive: Question Authority (unless he's a college professor). The plotters must have been impoverished olive farmers radicalized by the removal of Saddam Hussein. Why, if someone came in and toppled your president, you'd go to their country and ... well, you'd thank them. Unless they did it for the wrong reasons! Then you'd blow something up. Like an SUV dealership. At night. Anyway, you understand; you care a lot about Iraqis these days. You think about Iraq more than China, to be honest, but it's not as if you'll scrape off your "Free Tibet" bumper sticker -- unless it's to make room for "Free Darfur." Or "Hands Off Darfur," depending.

Wait a minute: The "terrorists" were Canadian? You can understand someone blowing up trains in Spain and London. They sent troops to an illegal war cooked up by neocons who want to kill brown people for Exxon and Jesus, or something. You can understand, reluctantly, blowing up teens in an Israeli pizza parlor, because the Jews took the West Bank from the sovereign, ancient nation of Palestine. (How can a liberal socialist country behave so poorly? The world is full of mysteries.) But Canada? Isn't Michael Moore from Canada? You can get medical marijuana from married gay doctors in Canada, and no one has guns. You console yourself: Maybe they were really planning to attack the U.S.

Take a minute and read the rest.

From the NY Post's review of Big Al's movie:

Gore claims, with pie-chart-in-the-sky dreaminess, that unspecified measures can reduce emissions to 1970 levels. He assesses the tradeoff between the economy and the environment with the kind of buffoonery you'd expect in a Marxist comic book, displaying a cartoon of a scale with Earth on one side and bars of gold on the other. "OK, on one side we have gold bars," he says. "Mmm, mmm, don't they look good!"

Why doesn't he get specific and replace the "gold bar" side of the scale with, say, a $50,000 tax on SUVs? The ensuing destruction of the car business would hurt blue-collar workers, not the rich. What if global warming continued unabated? Gore's faith-based pessimism would lead him to call for even more taxes.

People are skeptical about global warming because it builds up to the same chorus as every other lefty hymn: more taxes, more hypocritical scolding (the film is the brainchild of Larry David's wife, Laurie, part of the community of people who drive a Prius to the private plane) and especially more America-bashing.

Gore says that America, alone, is the problem. Taking us to China, he ignores the filth spewed into the air by its coal-fired cities. He does not meet with bronchitic citizens who wear surgical masks outdoors and pause to hawk up brown gunk every few minutes. Instead, he tells us America is lagging behind. "China," he says, "is on the cutting edge" of environmentalism. Nonsense.

Gore is a dangerous evangelist for whom all roads lead to his sole, holy revelation. Remember how his son was injured in a car accident, the story he told at the 1992 convention? He's still telling it, and what was once touching has become exploitative. This time, the accident's meaning is that he wondered whether the Earth would still be there for his son.

Read the whole thing.

After reading Novak's commments, I decided not to go but, like Bird Dog, I let the family go by themselves while I worked in the vegetable garden.

The gave it a 7 or 8 as a thriller, and said the religious aspect was functionally trivial and not worth getting excited about. Shrinkwrapped has a review. This blog will write no further on this silly subject: movies are entertainment. We have bigger fish to fry...or do we?

After the Civil War, the great general, hunter and ornithologist headed West and spurred the movement to protect Yellowstone Park.

Who knew? I need to read more about "Little Phil."

Image below: Sheridan on Rienzi, at the Battle of Cedar Creek

Everyone is familiar with this very common fallacy, most often used in politics and informal debate  but rarely in formal disputation because it is so transparent.

When you use a straw man fallacy, you argue off the point, or with a distorted, exagggerated or extreme version of your adversary. Thus one creates an easy target to demolish. It is so quick and easy to do, it is often used on TV.

It is well to always bear in mind that fallacies are used to manipulate and to trick the minds of the listener or reader. As a rule of thumb, one can assume that they are rarely used out of ignorance or by mistake.

Example: "I am opposed to a border fence because America needs low-wage workers."  That is an example of arguing off the point, making it seem as if someone is opposed to access to unskilled labor.

Example: "We should let Iran develop nukes because other countries have them, like Israel and France, so why shouldn't they have them?" That is another off-the-point argument - it does not explain why Iran in particular should have nukes.

Example: "Bush wants to be a dictator because he wants to listen to my phone calls."  That is a classic straw man - that is a case of reacting to an invented position.

Example: "The NRA wants hundreds of children and teens to be killed annually." That's another classic straw man, akin to "The swimming pool companies want hundreds of kids to drown annually," or "The ladder manufacturers want hundreds of guys to break bones annually."

As in the last two examples, straw man fallacies often use demonization fallacies, a subset of straw man arguments. Demonization has some effectiveness in argument, since we all know that evil does exist in the world, and we are always happy to be able to locate evil outside of ourselves. Thus the typical election year theme: "The Republicans want to starve women and children, take away your Social Security, pollute your air, and ruin your life."

On the day of Bush's speech, Tancredo offers his well-known views at Human Events. A quote:

Americans are not in a mood to negotiate the matter of “regularization” for 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens -- and Newt Gingrich has pointed out the amnesty would ultimately legalize up to 36 million -- until they see we have in fact achieved secure borders. Once that is done, once our laws are being enforced, then we can begin to discuss the problem of how to deal with the millions of illegal aliens already living here.

Read it all.

Home from the splendid 1909 Fort Washington Avenue Armory (right amongst Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center) and the USFA Super-Regional Junior Tournament, with the granddaughter.

There is a lot I don't know about fencing, but I do know that it demands far more athleticism than I had imagined, and that it is a sport based on tactics and trickery. Very mental, like all mano a mano games. But strength matters plenty, or they would not have boys separate from the girls.

She has her share of bruises, but she failed to draw any blood from her opponents, as I suggested. She was handily defeated by the powerful US #1 in 14-and-under foils, but otherwise did OK. I have no doubt that it is more fun to do than to watch, since everything happens so fast that it is barely visible. If you haven't seen this, the scoring is partly electronic. Their vests and weapons are wired. Fights are quick and devilishly intense.

T-shirt on sale: Fencing: Invented by Men, Pefected by Women.

Here's half of the top floor of the Armory, filled with young fencers, coaches, and volunteer expert referees. I never ceased to be amazed by all of the little worlds of dedication that America consists of - with no government "help". 

Got the radio on in my Dodge pick-up, but I hate to work far from the truck when she's on 770 WABC on Saturday afternoon, which I pick up easily from NYC, up on our hill.

(Taking a minor beer break. Beer and chain saws -perfect together.) 

She interferes with my outdoor work, and it is her fault. 

Who do I love more - Monica or Laura? A gentleman would never say.

What is "Supermax"? That's where Moussoaouoioui will spend his life. Nice place, full of lots of fun guys with a wild streak. But not quite the YMCA:

Young man, there's no need to feel down.
I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground.
I said, young man, 'cause you're in a new town
There's no need to be unhappy.

Young man, there's a place you can go.
I said, young man, when you're short on your dough.
You can stay there, and I'm sure you will find
Many ways to have a good time.