We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
This satirical video is intended to show that much of Western aid to Africa " is more about making donors look good than about doing good for the needy."
Aid campaigns implicitly promise guilt reduction and ego inflation for donors. The grinning Radi-Aid singers perform the same sleight of hand, selling scenes of snow, and their own exuberance, as a reason to pitch in.
More subtly, the video recalls “Kony 2012,” a slick short film produced by Americans about the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda that broke records for viral views. The film is the most recent and prominent of Africa-framing fictions produced by nonprofit organizations. Some call the genre “poverty porn,” others call it marketing. Whatever the name, it relies on giving a narrow impression of a person or place from a vast, diverse continent. Such “assistance” turns extraordinary hardship into an ordinary event and ignores the ordinary folks just getting by, or better.
The Radi-Aid stunt parries this trend effectively. Its creators remind viewers of the limited portrait they are painting. The site asks: “Imagine if every person in Africa saw the ‘Africa for Norway’ video and this was the only information they ever got about Norway. What would they think about Norway?”
They would think Norway is cold. (I hear that it is.) But it is other things as well.
Delaying implementation until 2014 helped the president win re-election, but now the bill is coming due. The administration can’t forestall Obamacare’s massive regulatory impact any longer, and the result will keep Congress and the media occupied for months and years to come.
We are beguiled by what political scientist James Payne calls the "philanthropic illusion" -- the idea that the government has money to bestow on needy people and worthy causes. It doesn't. Washington is not a source of wealth, and its subsidies are not largesse
There are apparently sharp differences among commentators on the Gaza ceasefire. Regardless, the Gaza thanksgiving lesson is that Israel and its supporters have far more to be thankful for, and hopeful for, than does Israel's enemies.
On the one hand are those who say that Israel accomplished its primary objectives: degrade Hamas’ rocket and terror capabilities, retain good will of the Western governments that are usually so offended by Israel’s defense measures, establish self-interested constructive relations with the Islamist rulers of Egypt and not undermine the frail not-attacking PA in the West Bank.
On the other hand are those who say that Israel should have launched the ground operation in to Gaza to further punish and eradicate the threats from there and further degrade Hamas’ capabilities, and that the ceasefire agreement is toothless at restraining future Hamas re-arming and attacks.
Emotionally and militarily I lean toward the second hand. As a practical matter I lean toward the first hand. Anyone who has participated in or observed house-to-house fighting knows its brutality and costs in lives, including our own. This time, I don’t think it was worth another Israeli soldier’s life, as little as I care for the surely much heavier Hamas toll or that on the Gazan civilians who back Hamas. Then, regardless of the public words of any ultimate ceasefire agreement, I don’t think that they would hold water unless Hamas were to actually commit to the actions, and non-actions, necessary to their fulfillment.
Meanwhile, we do not know whether Egypt has committed to or will increase its relatively minor blocking of tunnels into Gaza. We do know that President Obama has committed to increasing support to blocking arms imports to Gaza and to increase funding for more Iron Dome anti-rocket defenses. We do know that aside from bluster the Arab states and Turkey were inactive. They could really care less about Hamas, particularly as far as it is allied with Iran. Even Iran, aside from attempted new smuggled weapons, was inactive, as was its other cats paw in the area Hezbullah in Lebanon.
So, regardless of which side of the debate you take, or another, I think the lesson from Gaza is to give thanks for what we have accomplished.
Israel was not weakened but will continue on to successfully defend its right to exist. Since 1948, when Israel’s fate seemed more dire, to now, Israel has managed to survive and prosper. There’s little reason to believe that will change. The Arab states have not prospered nor advanced. As their oil wealth fades and is substituted from US, Israeli, alternative energy, and other sources, their influence or importance will fade. Hamas has created a stinkhole in Gaza, except for those at the top of the regime and its favors who live luxuriously and will pay the price eventually as impoverished Gazans take their measure.
As to those in the West, the decreasing number of dreamers, who propose trading land or rights for peace, their illusion is thinner than ever, at least until there is a miraculous transformation among Arabs. The necessity of strong security measures cannot be denied by any honest peace-hawks.
There’s much to give thanks for, far more than regrets, on this Thanksgiving.
Thing is, domesticated turkeys — the farm-raised ones we eat — are plentiful. And fat. So fat they can’t really fly. (As God as his witness, Arthur Carlson from WKRP in Cincinnati believed otherwise.)
Some things truly are timeless.
I actually remember this, because for weeks afterward every time someone dropped an item, they'd say something like, "As God is my witness, I thought ball point pens could fly."
Happy Thanksgiving, all. Keep an eye out for any low-flying helicopters.
Anthony is the Reuters Social Media Editor, integrating the “ambient wire” that exists on social networks, where news now breaks before anywhere else, into Reuters platforms. He's also host of Reuters TV's "Tech Tonic" and a Reuters columnist.
This is the kind of media bias that must be exposed. In this case, with impact. Thanks to Honest Reporting. (free online subscription)
5:48 pm: At the beginning of the day, I noted an ugly tweet by Reuters’ Anthony De Rosa. One response to De Rosa was sufficiently embarrassing and, uh, viral enough to make the wire service’s social media editor remove his tweet.
“[F]inally, beginning in 1949. . . you and your employer will each pay 3 cents on each dollar you earn, up to $3,000 a year. That is the most you will ever pay.”
What unites all of these stories is the growing failure of America’s local associations — civic, familial, religious — to foster stability, encourage solidarity and make mobility possible.
This is a crisis that the Republican Party often badly misunderstands, casting Democratic-leaning voters as lazy moochers or spoiled children seeking “gifts” (as a certain former Republican presidential nominee would have it) rather than recognizing the reality of their economic struggles.
But if conservatives don’t acknowledge the crisis’s economic component, liberalism often seems indifferent to its deeper social roots. The progressive bias toward the capital-F Future, the old left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity, the fact that Democrats have benefited politically from these trends — all of this makes it easy for liberals to just celebrate the emerging America, to minimize the costs of disrupted families and hollowed-out communities, and to treat the places where Americans have traditionally found solidarity outside the state (like the churches threatened by the Obama White House’s contraceptive mandate) as irritants or threats.
Almost a year ago, I commented on a tax 'solution' which I think could work here in the U.S.
Here we are, post-election, and what are we hearing from Republicans? Astonishingly little pushback, almost no effort to 'obstruct' (not that were ever obstructionist, in my opinion), and a generally held agreement that taxes have to rise because that's what the election was all about.
I doubt the commentary would be vastly different if Romney had won, but the focus on tax increases versus spending cuts would probably be significantly altered. I also don't think that's what the election was all about, either. But that's the meme.
Can the Tobin Tax rise from the dead?
Still, where do we go from here? Every day, we hear that "something has to be done before we fall off the fiscal cliff."
It is sad that so much of what Hanson is describing in this article is coming to pass. While Obama exploited the tribalism to get elected and re-elected, he is not the cause of such divisive politics. One only has to work in a university environment to see where such a racial spoils system is fully entrenched and how counter-productive it can be.
There is no longer a left or liberalism in America. There is only a politics of victimhood that looks on all allocation of employment, college admissions, rewards of any kind as a spoils system to be divided based on formulas that favor formerly underrepresented groups. Visit any website offering jobs of any kind at a university and it will advertise that they are favoring women and minorities.
This is not unfamiliar to anyone who was part of the new left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The people who had worked so hard to end segregation, create vast new opportunities for women and had pushed for a more human rights oriented foreign policy allowed their movement to be taken over by those who sought to use their cause to fuel their own personal ambitions. That is how a movement with humane ideals could degenerate so quickly into a collection of interest groups promoting their own aggrandizement at the expense of the common good.
“Causes begin as movement, develop into businesses and end up as rackets.” This quote or some similar wording is attributed to Eric Hoffer and I believe that it represents what we are seeing transforming America. The Democratic Party did not create this mess but it has cynically exploited it to gain the presidency where it rewards its supporters by filling the federal bureaucracy and judiciary with advocates for the racial, gender and ethnic spoils system.
Within days of the election we have seen Democratic Party appointed judges vote to void the Michigan law, Proposal 2, by which Michigan voters reaffirmed the racial neutrality of the fourteenth amendment. And we have seen the EPA refuse to allow Iowa farmers to use their corn as food and feed grain because environmental extremists demand that it be turned into ethanol. While clearly, this policy is supported by those with an economic interest in it, it could never be allowed without the support of a “sustainability” movement that is incapable of considering the overall economic consequences of its environmental extremism.
The future is not promising. Title IX extremists will now use it to attack American science, attempting to create gender equality of numbers in engineering and physics the way it creates equal numbers of athletes receiving athletic scholarships. In the process it will create an entire new bureaucracy of regulators and compliance officers who will be paid to ensure that college admissions, scholarships and assistantships, post-docs, conferences, speakers at national meetings and the like are assigned to assure that the number of females is greater than or equal to the number of males receiving such rewards. And when people try to resist it, the armies of regulators and compliance officers will respond by declaring that such resistance is a war on women and is evidence that the problem is that we don’t have enough regulators and compliance officers.
I am a generally optimistic person but it is hard for me to see how this is going to end in anything but disaster.
Capretta and Levin: Why ObamaCare Is Still No Sure Thing - The majority of state governors are Republicans, and they have the power to disarm the health-care law.
By the time Sandy hit the northest coastline, she was no longer a hurricane. She had degraded into a husky Nor'easter, but, with the coincidence of a full moon, her storm surge was well above that of the ordinary Nor'easter. Not a "megastorm" as the news hyped it.
I knew that just by taking a walk outside on that Monday evening. Blustery, but not hurricane-blustery. In the northeast, we are accustomed to the inconveniences of powerful Nor'easters. Trees fall down. The sea surges over the beach. Not unusual.
However dramatic and destructive Sandy was, she was nothing like other storms of the past century. What has changed is not storms (we've had far fewer in recent decades). What has changed is coastal development in historic flood zones in the densely-populated northeasern US.
It's a bad idea, and should never have been subsidized by the federal government. It's the same stupidity on the gulf coast. Free market flood insurance would have largely prevented most of the damage because people would not have built things in flood zones. Subsidized flood insurance had the predictable unintended consequence of promoting development of flood zones. A perverse incentive. Flood zones should be for animals, not for peoples' houses.
My pic is Fairfield, CT's Greenfield Hill Congregational Church. Timothy Dwight was once pastor there. This back country congregation was gathered in 1725. History of the church here. Always must remember that a church is the people, not the building.
How Free Speech Died on Campus - A young activist describes how universities became the most authoritarian institutions in America:
A 2010 survey by the American Association of Colleges and Universities found that of 24,000 college students, only 35.6% strongly agreed that "it is safe to hold unpopular views on campus." When the question was asked of 9,000 campus professionals—who are more familiar with the enforcement end of the censorship rules—only 18.8% strongly agreed.
The Democratic Party is defined by the broken family in the same way that the Republican Party is defined by the family. It is a refuge for minority groups where fatherlessness leads to single mothers and government dependency and for white middle-class Julia types who use government dependency as a substitute for parental dependency.
Take away the family and millions of seniors have no recourse for their needs and even their survival, but to turn to the government.
It has long been my view that the O is/was a celebrity candidate, a fluffy media creation lacking in substance and in mastery of anything but smooth talk. A sweet-talking guy. For a related essay, see A Tale of Two Cities - Hollywood’s influence on politicians advances not inexorably but in cycles.
I began to make a mental list of the potential news items over recent years which would have been pounded, would have been subjects of relentless, damaging front-page stories, had Obama been a Republican.
- More Americans in poverty than in decades - More homeless than in decades - The Food Stamp/EBT Card Presidency - Ongoing urban addiction, despair, and fatherless kids - Worst recovery from a recession in history - Benghazi would already be worse than Watergate - Mexican gun-walking scandal - The Hurricane Sandy mess - The catastrophic "Arab Spring" - Obama's compulsive lying - The taxpayer's loss of billions on GM - The taxpayer's loss of billions on green energy, crony failures - Obama's time on golf courses - Obama's divisiveness - Obama's coziness with Wall St. moguls - The Obama family's carbon footprint and insanely lavish vacations - Obama's errors of fact, eg 57 states. (Remember Dan Quail and potatoes?)
Add your own lists and items in the comments. It's therapeutic!
I think he's right, at least in part. Rush's tendency is to imagine that voters apply hard logic. It puzzles him when they do not. However, in retail politics, cultural signals and tribal signals matter. Policy wonks like me think it's superficial, but you can't get a policy until you win an election. There are plenty of low-info voters out there who vote on emotion, affinity-feelings, and things like that.
Mitt Romney was an excellent candidate on paper, but too many voters just couldn't "relate" to the guy. Actually, he did quite well, all things considered. A quote from Ace's post:
This was Breitbart's main idea, that politics was simply the expression of choices and preferences that had already been decided by the culture.
The "culture" doesn't care what gays do, and doesn't want to know or to think about it. The "culture" likes pop music. The "culture" is squeamish and ambivalent about abortion, and prefers to sort-of accept it and ignore it. These things are signals, not real policy issues. Let's face it: Conservatism and Libertarianism is a bit dorky. Mitt Romney probably never heard of Beyonce, and all I know of her is the name. Would not know her from Adam. I am more of a JS Bach guy. An East Village dork, but you wouldn't know it if you met me in the pub.
When recent graduates don’t know how our government is supposed to work or how our economy works — and they voted for Obama by a wide margin — that’s a general-education problem.
Is it possible he really doesn't know what is going on? I recall reading that, at the Harvard Law Review, he never did any of the work or ever wrote anything, and would just stop in occasionally to briefly say Hi to everybody. It's curiously unengaged, and many hard-working people might term it lazy.
Why pursue the job if you don't like to work? Or is the presidency really the easiest job in the world in which 99.9% of the effort is delegated? How many private sector CEOs play as much golf and basketball as Obama does?
Roger has opined here that the job is to be a political figurehead on the bow of a great partisan ship. You show up once in a while, and some PR person tells you what to say. You say it in mellifluous tones, then run off to the golf course or to a fancy fund-raising party where everybody kisses your behind.
The $40,000 Volt is basically a $17,000 Cruze - with a 500 lb., 25-mile range, eight-hour-to-charge battery.Which is toxic when spent - and costs somewhere between $8,000 and $15,000 to replace.
Nothing seems real anymore, not preelection federal data on jobs or food stamps or the release of such “facts”; not foreign-policy information like an Iranian attack on a drone; not the supposedly competent federal relief in response to Hurricane Sandy. Even Saddam Hussein’s plebiscites could not achieve margins like the 19,605 to 0 we saw in 59 Philadelphia precincts. Does anyone care?
I want you to tax the crap out of the blue states in which I live because I put country ahead of personal fortune. Not because I want to hear my tax-loving liberal neighbors squeal like stuck pigs. I’m better than that.
Mammograms leading to unnecessary treatment
Black Friday planner: Shoppers, get your game face on! 
1850 travel ad. Drive carefully, readers, this holiday weekend. We cannot afford to lose a single one of you.
The sun unleashed a 
So how’s it 
Perhaps it can be, if you are never engaged with any of the details. In response to our link this morning to