Tuesday, January 20. 2009
Despite being older than Insty - old enough to remember the Civil Rights era - I'll ditto Insty on his post. I always want the best for our country, and wisdom for our leaders government employees.
I refuse to term them "leaders" because, as a cranky Yank, I rarely follow anybody unless they're going where I am going.
We have never done an "open thread" here at Maggie's. In the spirit of 'change," let's give it a semi-open try.
"Hope" and "Change" are empty vessels. What do our readers want for Hope and Change (if anything)?
 I have never enjoyed inaugurations, whether I voted for the guy or not. They have always seemed too much like coronations to me, neither fitting the role nor the country. We build 'em up to superhuman size...and then we tear 'em down. Our founders rightly feared that human nature would try to turn Presidents into kings. Yes, it is kinda cool that we elected a young black guy, but just to say that is not only racist but also rather adolescent.
Blame Bernie Madoff's parents
Two thirds of African-Americans believe King's vision has been fullfilled.
From The Day the Newspaper Died in The New Yorker:
Soon after Jefferson came to power, he, like Adams, developed doubts about the unbounded liberty of the press. Printers, Jefferson complained, just days after his election, “live by the zeal they can kindle, and the schisms they can create.” In his second Inaugural Address, Jefferson ranted against printers who had assaulted him with “the artillery of the press,” warning that he had given some thought to prosecuting them. During his beleaguered second term, Jefferson suggested that newspapers ought to be divided into four sections: Truths, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Lies. What Jefferson wanted for the nation under his governance was a “union of opinion.” But that, of course, can never be the aspiration of a democracy—a point that newspapers have been very good at making over the two centuries since.
A critical view of Bush's tenure, at Reason
Wanted: More Nazis
From Mark Levey Leave the New Deal in the history books:
By 1939 Roosevelt's own Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, had realized that the New Deal economic policies had failed. "We have tried spending money," Morgenthau wrote in his diary. "We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!"
The problem was that neither Roosevelt nor President Herbert Hoover before him grasped the essential nature of the crisis, which was not the stock-market crash, but global deflation. At the end of the roaring '20s, an overhang of intergovernmental war debt from World War I, coupled with falling commodity prices and a currency crisis, had started the decline. Weak credit structures and European banks hurt by wartime inflation worsened it. When the Austrian Creditanstalt Bank failed, it ignited a global banking crisis that slashed across the international financial system cutting down everything in its path. Deflation went into full howl.
The same perils are now confronting President-elect Barack Obama, as the risk of deflation casts a long shadow over the economy. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have been correctly focused on shoring up financial institutions to prevent a collapse of the financial system, and stave off a severe decline in the general price level. If that were to occur, the unspoken fear has been that the U.S. and global economy could go into a deflationary death spiral that would cause the collapse of the international financial system.
From Karlgaard in Forbes: A Failure of Morals not Capitalism:
Many people do blame capitalism for bringing us to this low moment in the economy. Do they have a point?
They do if capitalism, as they define it, is devoid of any underlying morality. True enough, it is hard to see any underlying morality when one surveys the present carnage caused by liar loans, shady banks, duplicitous politicians, Ponzi schemers and regulators angling for Wall Street jobs.
This weekend, I caught a BBC radio program on the meltdown in “The City”--London’s financial district. The program quoted many young Brit bankers who said morality was a barrier to personal success in The City. Better to have the sociopath gene if one wants to become a billionaire.
Whole thing here.
Monday, January 19. 2009
 More snow yesterday and last night. This has been a wonderful winter thus far, cold and snowy, and cozy indoors. I got myself some nasty frostbite on my hands splitting and stacking firewood this past week. Just beginning to heal with the help of the BD daughter's special hand lotion stuff. Having sons is a darn good idea, but daughters take care of you.
Photo is my snow-covered duck boat.
16 things it took me 50 years to learn. Dave Barry
Are new jobs "stimulating"?
Jules needs a new system if he is going to continue to put up with his family's resentment of his blogging. His slow loading was bugging me, too.
Jew-baiting, then and now.
Bill Moyers vs. Abraham Foxman
"The sheer arrogance is breathtaking." Samizdata. Same in the US.
Towards market-based universities. Ward Connerly.
It's always fun to kick Tom Friedman around. He is indeed a legend in his own mind.
James Hansen: Obama has just 4 years to save the world. Meanwhile, Princeton Physics Prof unloads on the AGW charlatans
A parody or not?, from Slate's whine wine critic.
George Lakoff's job is to find new metaphors with which to render statist and socialist agenda items more palatable. Wilkinson discusses Lakoff's notion of "countries as clubs." I kept misreading this as "countries as country clubs." Free golf for all? or "Free the Golf Foursome"?
More details from the proposed Dem spending that you might have missed.
Middlebrow Messiahs and The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of The Great Books
A blog the Dyl found: The Contemporary Calvinist. He posted Jonathan Edwards' 70 Resolutions. It's all good.
The Eastern Church: How much do you know about it? One quote:
Eastern priests expect not only regular confession, but regular attendance, and most Eastern priests do not consider only every Sunday regular attendance. Both the Byzantine and Orthodox priests here expect attendance at Vespers as well as Matins and Liturgy on Sundays. The Orthodox parish offers Vespers and confessions every Wednesday and Saturday evening, and the priest expects attendance on Wednesday evenings, as well as Holy Days, in order to receive the Eucharist. Both priests require regular confessions.
The Plague hits Al Qaida. How nice for them.
 I agree with this quote at Am Thinker:
It can be stated without fear of serious argument that no previous president has been treated as brutally, viciously, and unfairly as George W. Bush.
Bush 43 endured a deliberate and planned assault on everything he stood for, everything he was involved in, everything he tried to accomplish. Those who worked with him suffered nearly as much (and some even more -- at least one, Scooter Libby, was convicted on utterly specious charges in what amounts to a show trial).His detractors were willing to risk the country's safety, its economic health, and the very balance of the democratic system of government in order to get at him. They were out to bring him down at all costs, or at the very least destroy his personal and presidential reputation. At this they have been half successful, at a high price for the country and its government.
Related: Bush's Rehabilitation. Krauthammer.
Related: War on Terror most successful US military operation in history. Jefferson on the pirates has nothing on him.
Related: Bush saved ten million African lives. He is better appreciated in Africa than in the US.
Related: To trash Bush was to belong. Related: The infantile tantrums Bush endured, without any hostile reaction from him or from his admin.
Sunday, January 18. 2009
30 people for dinner uses one heck of a lot of appetizer plates, gumbo bowls, dinner plates and dessert plates, serving trays, pots and pans, utensils, wine glasses, linens, etc. It's our family tradition to leave it all out overnight so everything sticks hard to them, then take on the challenge in the morning. However, every last bit is cleaned up now. In keeping with the times, we did the whole thing without any servants/helpers. I am happy to have a left-over mountain of cheese grits. I can live on that stuff.
Well, we are blessed with wonderful friends. And, by the way, I need to mention that the person who "offered to bring desserts" last night is not only a fine lady and a talented pastry chef - but also an avid hunter and shooter. I was afraid she might try to pull a Cheney on me someday in a pheasant field if I didn't add that important detail.
Seen at the bird feeder this morning: A fine male Eastern Towhee (image). One wouldn't think it, but they are technically large sparrows. Early migrant, or over-wintering? They are indeed less common in New England than they used to be, for unknown reasons. They are woodland birds, and our eastern woodlands have been expanding as New England agriculture becomes less profitable.
 Somehow, Tiger just can't get it into his head that Big Corporations are evil, and should be destroyed. A quote:
...to Democrats, virtually every jurisdiction in the world is becoming a corporate tax haven compared to the United States. The federal and state corporate income tax rate in New Jersey, not the highest in the United States, is seven percentage points (or approximately 20%) higher than France, 11 percentage points (or around 35%) higher than Australia and the United Kingdom, and 29 percentage points (or around 250%) higher than in Ireland.
Folks, we are not going to rebuild our economy by vilifying public U.S. corporations that are operating businesses in "tax havens," even tiny little islands in the Caribbean. The relatively new accounting rules around corporate tax (known as "Fin 48" to the cognoscenti) wrap corporate taxes up in the same intensive audit review as other financial reporting. Sure, there will be the occasional case of fraud, but the top U.S. corporations (and even much smaller ones) now have vast internal audit staffs that blow the whistle on any attempt -- which now cannot come from the "top" -- actually to evade taxes. No, if you want to stimulate economic activity in the United States, massively reduce the corporate tax. At least make us competitive with, say, France, which any corporation would prefer to the United States as a location for its profits.
A new progressive's guide to action, from The Nation. Good grief. These folks live in the 1930s.
It's not your great-great-great-great grandfather's Bank Medici
The Milky Way: Not snack-sized anymore
Obama's apparent energy policy. Let's hope it's not what it looks like.
Best Blog? We considered nominating him for the Maggie's Farm Most in Need of Medication Award.
In case you missed it, here's the video of 1549 going into the river.
Surber on Hillary:
Nobody is dumber than someone who thinks she knows it all.
Omama is no Lincoln. He's a Copperhead. Thus far, anyway.
JC Phillips on the taxes on soda pop:
There is no scientific research linking non diet drinks with obesity.
It's not really a nanny state thing: It's a new tax, pure and simple, disguised with virtuous intentions.
Saturday, January 17. 2009
Got an email from the NJ in Maine. He had -19 degrees F last night, with snow flurries. Lowest thermometer he'd ever seen in person. Possibly too cold for downhill skiing, even for tough guys. Sounds like pub weather to me. I have heard a number of people say that this cold is due to global warming. Of course - everything is. It's 3 here right now, and our Dr. Bliss is skiing in New Hampshire. Maggie's Farm people like cold weather. It makes us feel alive - and we get to use our gear.
 Two links about coffee: 7 cups of coffee cause you to hallucinate. Also, drinking coffee reduces risk of Alzheimer's/ Photo from the latter article.
A little research on commercial airplane ditchings. Related: Somebody who studies bird-plane collisions
A very good Snow Goose recipe. On a serious note, I think I might make this hors d'oevres tonight, with Canada Goose breast. But I'm afraid the goose will end up overcooked.
Historian offered a choice. Sort of a Hobson's Choice.
The deliberate dumbing down of America. Video
Ace on asexuality:
I'm not being misogynist when I say that men and women are basically alien species living together on the same planet, united only by our matching genitals.
OK, but is matching the best word?
A mere $217,000 per job. That's my money. I earned it.
Road to Serfdom. A condensed version.
Everybody has reported that Bush's wiretapping was legal. It will remain in force, I think.
A gay sex orgy for the inauguration. Dare I ask what rimming has to do with the inauguration? Maybe Chris Matthews might know.
Rick Moran:
Geithner is lying when he says he “forgot” to pay his taxes. This is a given. It also insults our intelligence when he claims that his failure to pay the IRS what he owes is an “honest mistake.” We will now see if the rest of the Washington Democratic establishment plays along with Geithner and pretends they believe his lies, thus perpetrating a “business as usual” climate in the Obama government rather than the promised reform that so many believed so passionately he could bring about.
It is a little lie, a white lie, but telling nevertheless. And like Republican lawmakers preaching “family values” who get caught with their pants down around their ankles, anyone who preaches reform and changing the way Washington does business and then tolerates the bald faced lying of Geithner can and will be rightly accused of rank hypocrisy if they don’t do the right thing and yank this tax dodge from consideration for any high office in the Obama Administration.
Or are Democrats to be allowed a different standard of hypocrisy because of bad economic times?
I appreciate the dilemma. Geithner is a good choice, but I think I tend to worry more about the accuracy of my taxes, and general law obedience, than he does. And I have less to lose. He's a smart and clever Wall Street/DC yuppie.
Friday, January 16. 2009
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show... ”
- Andrew Wyeth. Andrew Wyeth dead at 91. Illustrator? Artist? What's the diff? They called his Dad, NC Wyeth, an "illustrator." Image above is Andrew Wyeth's Long Limbs, 1999.
Who voted for Obama? Patriot Post (scroll to Patriot Perspective)
How to deal with a home invasion (h/t, Alphecca). Related: Gun Salesman of the Year
More details of the plane crash
Look on the bright side: Consumer prices fall again. It's a good time to buy stuff.
Citigroup Citibank Whatever update. Thanks for nuthin, Sandy Weill.
What if Israel had lost the Six-Day War?
The mess that is Putin's Russia
Scathing about Bush's Presidency: View from the Right. OK, Lawrence, but drop it now. Just look at these people.
From guest poster Bruce Kesler:
Only when voters speak out loudly, and only occasionally even then, do our legislators take heed. Newly elected president Barack Obama and his choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services former Senator Tom Daschle, who is also tasked as “health reform” czar by Obama, say they intend major changes in how Americans receive health care, with government taking vastly increased control.
The latest Rasmussen poll reports that most Americans are highly skeptical and unwilling to pay higher taxes for it: Forty-three percent (43%) of U.S. voters say the quality of health care in America will get worse if a government-run health insurance plan is created to compete with private plans. Thirty-three percent (33%) say quality will get better, and 10% say it will stay the same… Forty-seven percent (47%) of voters say it is better to expand coverage through private health insurance plans than through government-run programs like Medicaid. Thirty-five percent (35%) believe the opposite to be true, with 17% not sure. In a survey last April, just 29% of American adults supported a national health insurance program overseen by the Federal Government…. just 36% favor a government-controlled health plan for the uninsured if it means an increase in their income taxes. Fifty percent (50%) are opposed to such a plan for those who cannot get insurance if it means a tax increase, and 14% are undecided….
A majority of U.S. voters (58%), however, oppose any kind of government-controlled health plan if it means they have to change their own insurance coverage.
Wednesday’s overwhelming vote in the US House to pass the huge expansion of the SCHIP program, formerly passed by the last Congress and twice vetoed by President Bush, is touted as a “down payment” on Obama-Daschle getting their way on their bigger healthcare goals. Republican efforts to amend the SCHIP bill – for example, requiring that sponsors who pledged to support legal immigrants do so -- were not allowed by the Democrats in the House. The recent empirical evidence in Hawaii was ignored that allowing those with high incomes -- those with incomes up to $80,000 may enter SCHIP -- results in many abandoning existing insurance and greatly increased government deficits. Hawaii abandoned the unaffordable program:
State health officials argued that most of the children enrolled in the universal child care program previously had private health insurance, indicating that it was helping those who didn't need it.
As with many of Obama’s choices for top spots, Tom Daschle’s nomination is running into some turbulence over his dealings with his own “charitable” tax deductions and associations with a “charity” that may have abused its status for political ends – as too many do. He’ll likely be confirmed anyway, especially with Democrat control of Congress.
Yet, as opposition has mounted in Congress – reacting to heavy public opposition – over the lack of transparency and use of hundreds of billions of dollars of “bailout” funds and Obama’s intents for over a trillion dollars more, the portent for Obama-Daschle “charities” getting their way to control over the 15% of the US’s economy in healthcare diminishes.
Thus the key question: Will data dash Daschle?
Thursday, January 15. 2009
 Hot women cheat on their husbands. Dog bites man.
Chavez changes his tune, begs for US oil bids.
The Inaugu-palooza
Thank you, President Bush. Anchoress
The Islamic way of war. Middle East Forum
Joe Who?
Reason #1343 to screw the UN
Moral inversion: Che = Batman
Who can improve schools - parents or bureaucrats? Bureaucrats will only protect their own interests. That's their primary job.
In favor of de-skilling. From Stumbling:
Rather than raises people’s skills to fill demanding jobs, why don’t we cut the demands of those jobs? Deskilling is cheaper than education.
Makes sense to me. I ain't overly eddicated, but I does OK wit my wits and from the School of Hard Knocks which taught me to always come back stronger and smarter when the mean old world knocks me down.
Here's what the "smart" stimulus will include. I earned that money. Related: The ethics of taxation.
Boortz:
Since when does the IRS acknowledge the concept of an "innocent mistake?"
From Nyquist:
According to President Bush, “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
The president’s statement is logically correct, but strategically nonsensical. While the “expansion of freedom” is desirable for America, it is prohibitively costly and beyond our capabilities. It antagonizes every despot on the planet, and causes them to join with our enemies.
From AVI:
...Jesus must be made into the Original Gandhi. Rubbish. Christian pacifism is a high calling, and it might be asked of any of us. But it is not the only calling, and not the highest.
From Luskin:
Conservatives may rightly object to all this government meddling in private markets on general principle. But the more salient objection is that government has botched it. The attempts to deal with failures at Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia were not rescues or bailouts at all—they were wipeouts, seemingly intended more to punish than to rescue. They were government takings of private property for public use—seizures of shareholder wealth in troubled firms in the name of saving the system—without the just compensation promised in the Fifth Amendment and often beyond the legal authority of the government agencies involved.
Editor: As always, I (and our other contribs) added to this NJ post. I just got an email from a BD pup that she could see the airplane in the Hudson from her window on the West Side of Manhattan. That pilot is a hero. You have to admire those nerves of steel and the quick thinking. That was a 3-4 minute flight. I want that pilot Sully on my next flight.
What are these?
An anti-love drug? Brilliant concept. It would eliminate a lot of human misery, frustration, and despair. But it would destroy the music industry.
Raccoon for dinner? Why not? Times are tough, right? Personally, I prefer possum. Possum tastes like chicken, coon tastes like bear.
Dems who hate US taxes. Funny, we now have the new head of the Treasury and the Chairman of Ways and Means, each of whom have been refusing to pay their income taxes. Things must be looking up.
TED spread says TARP is working.
Q&O: End the war on drugs
Why spending stimulus is needed. Becker-Posner. Tiger agrees.
A meaningful tax favor for the semi-rich: A patch for the AMT. I'd guess that the AMT has been hitting Congressmen. It hit me last year because I rent and have no mortgage deduction. In fact, I have zero debt.
About a really big electric motor
How to evaluate gummint health proposals. Coyote
Wednesday, January 14. 2009
It's Climate Change!
We're all gonna die! Global warming causes global cooling, dummy. All sophisticated, bien pensant folks understand that.
Meanwhile, the supposedly Kyoto-friendly Euros beg for more fossil fuel. We thought they gave it up for Lent forever. Yeah, I know: "That was then, this is now."
And more: I guess it's still too hot in Madison, WI. Isn't it nice that those sanctimonious moonbats are trying to save the world by bossing people around?
In the new surveillance societies, why can't we watch back at the watchers? Glenn Reynolds
Wrong, Megan. As with his taxes, it's a question of whether Geitner, certainly an impressive fellow, is interested on obeying the law. He forgot.
State pension losses approach a trillion
Science is rational: scientists are not. Gene Expression
For a mere $495, the spiritual vibes of your water can be improved
Obama cult update. What if they did this with Pres. Bush? h/t, Ace
Why stimulus spending doesn't work
Good traders had high pre-natal testosterone.
China's web users approach 300 million. And not one of them reads Maggie's Farm.
Did you realize that McCain won 29 states and Obama 19? Plus map and other stats.
Staid, cautious John at Powerline:
Alarmists, of course, say that the current cooling is just an instance of natural weather variation that doesn't disprove their theory. The problem is that, for them, nothing disproves their theory. No matter how resolutely the Earth's climate refuses to conform to their models, they ignore the evidence and cling to their theory. This isn't science, it's a combination of faith and politics.
The global warming theory has been around for quite a while. I first learned about it in 1970. But the theory was hatched during a cold period in the Earth's climate, so it initially went nowhere. Instead, the alarmists spent the 1970s warning us that the next Ice Age was imminent. It was only when the climate fortuitously started to get warmer that the global warming theory began to get traction. If it now becomes clear to everyone that the climate is cooling, not warming, government proposals to destroy advanced economies in a bizarre war on carbon--a trace ingredient in the atmosphere that is necessary for life on earth--will be non-starters.
Tuesday, January 13. 2009
Photo: Not far from Palm Beach, yesterday. (Theo)
Eating lettuce is selfish? All eating is selfish, isn't it?
More on Carol Browner's socialism.
2.5 million pounds for this Woman's Studies student's virginity. Watch some Sheikh from Dubai buy it.
Embracing the Sacred: Orthodox Catholic
From AVI: Did Steven Pinker lie? Part 1 and Part 2
College affordability: A wolf in sheep's clothing
More on the voluntary human extinction movement. Why don't they set an example?
Back so soon? Chrysler wants more $. So do I. They ain't stupid - Chrysler is owned by a hedge fund. Related: GM CEO must be out of his mind.
From Wizbang, who has some good historical market graphs:
...the United States has suffered five periods between 1920 and today where the value of the stock market dropped greater than 40% -- 1929 to 1932, 1937, 1973 to 1974, 1987, and 2008. Both of the market drops during the 1930's were either worsened or directly caused by misdirected government intervention.
Department of Government Stupidity: You have to recycle paper but burn biomass. What's the difference? Also, When government runs something... eg High-Def.
Not your ancestors' England. Gateway. Good grief. They have a civil war now.
A new circus comes to town. PJ O'Rourke. h/t, Jules
Hillary intervened at least 6 times to protect husband's donors. Am I surprised? I am only surprised they only found 6 thus far. Dem sleaze = Dog bites man. No front page story there.
How do you know when you're in San Francisco? Photo via the Pro-Hamas Victory rally in SF:
Monday, January 12. 2009
 Photo on right from Denver. Denver?
Jonah with the New Deal Re-revisited, plus a nifty video: NRO
Climate Change Warning: 30 below (F). Going to be cold as hell in the Northeast this week, and I am planning to be skiing in VT this weekend now that hunting is like totally over.
I'm gonna try to nullify my life. It's about addictions.
Supremes to hear reverse discrimination case
The Extinction Theory of Scientific Progress.
Relativism: Paving the Road to Radicalism. Like we always say.
Cool blog: Language Log. Found via Volokh
A new flight from California?
One for the record book. Feds admit error after destroying a guy's life for years - David Stockman. Usually they can at least find that you picked your nose in public in 1997, and send you up the river for a few years. Besides private jets, money can also get you effective lawyers - and justice.
Russell Kirk, quoted at Bainbridge on utopianism:
Ideology, I venture to remind you, is political fanaticism: at best it is the substitution of slogans for real political thought. Ideology animates, in George Orwell’s phrase, “the streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets.”
I think any version of utopianism is psychotically delusional, but I'd love to give life a try with gummint's boot off my neck. At the least, I'd like to be able to light up a Cuban in a pub, and I'd be willing to let them pick my pocket a little bit for their vote-buying schemes.
It's good to know we missed at least one bubble. The Art Market Bubble: On the folly of investing in modern art. Kimball
Stolen from Driscoll:
"Our friends on the left have put their faith and hope in President-elect Barack Obama. Those of us still on the fence about him hope that he is at least half as great as they say. That is more than the Bush-haters ever offered Bush, so perhaps it is a place to start."
The Anchoress
How did we miss this story? Prize farmer run over by dog tractor driver. We let our dogs drive all of our vee-hickles, and this sort of thing hardly ever happens.
CO2 Fairytales. Am Thinker
Failcare in MA. Surber. More from Rick Moran.
Story with a moral: The pirates
Fr. Neuhaus' study:
There was a colossal sound system, for he loved music, especially Bach; there were bookcases containing the Lutheran Book of Worship, from which he and the ecumenical Community of Christ in the City, with whom he lived, prayed vespers every evening, before and after his reception into the Catholic Church; and there were ample supplies of bourbon and cigars, both of which Richard regarded as essential complements to the ongoing, boisterous conversation that was his intellectual and spiritual lifeblood.
To heck with yourself and your family. Sacrifice for the greater good.
Further thoughts on our Open Letter re business careers, from Tiger.
Joe the Plumber's new career
Campaigning isn't governing. Pajamas. Related: From each group that supported Obama, an agenda
Dump Dodd? Fine, but it's not possible to elect a Conservative in CT. Or is it?
WSJ: Palestinian demographics and the fighting culture:
If we seriously want to avoid another generation of war in Gaza, we must have the courage to tell the Gazans that they will have to start looking after their children themselves, without UNRWA's help. This would force Palestinians to focus on building an economy instead of freeing them up to wage war. Of course, every baby lured into the world by our money up to now would still have our assistance.
Golda Meir famously said something like "We will have peace when the Palestinians care more about their kids than they do about killing Jews."
Sunday, January 11. 2009
From our guest poster Bruce Kesler:
If conditions and challenges weren’t ominous enough for the new Obama administration, his strong-willed mother-in-law is moving into the White House. If that alone isn’t enough for most, imagine yourself facing a relocation to very difficult new job, almost every one with power affecting you having differing wants and confronting you with demands often at odds with your own, literally not enough money in the world to satisfy everyone’s desires and the demands increasingly undercutting even necessities, and gangs of lethal thugs roaming the streets around you. Even your formerly most staunch supporters begin to report that most of your previous smooth talk is empty that got you the job and that you’re in over your head. Like vultures expecting a fat carcass but facing a rotting pigeon of a meal, they squabble and fight each other. Almost all your mentors expose they haven’t really much clue what to do. Well, here’s a piece of advice: Don’t just do something, stand there. Most of the challenging conditions will sort themselves out. Running around like a chicken without a head, or doing for the sake of doing, will not only likely have little positive effect but will probably have worse consequences.
Let’s go through a brief list:
The Economy: Not every one, but in aggregate, individuals are better deciders of what is worth working for and spending on than any Delphic group in Washington. Money is the motivation to work and risk. The only economic measure by Washington with a track-record of supporting and increasing this motivation is low taxes. Federal spending, on anything, is inefficient and tends to favor means and ends that reduce individual incentives. Further, in excess -- and multi-trillion dollar printing of dollars is certainly excess, it has been proven, sadly repeatedly, to lead to lasting inflation that is even more impoverishing and destructive of incentives.
Healthcare: As we’ve become wealthier, compared to any other nation, the portion of our personal and national incomes that need be devoted to food, clothing and shelter has declined. That has unleashed the means for medical technologies and treatments that, although often overused, we decide we can afford and deem worthwhile to our better living. Every scheme for “reforming” healthcare is based on forcing us, against our better judgment and self-caring, to have less healthcare, through reduced access and innovation. Bureaucrats’ choices of what they think “cost-effective” for spending our own earnings and taxes are not our choices. The only ones to benefit are government-employment and government-employee unions.
Education: Surely, a well-educated workforce, allowed incentives to be productive, enriches most. Major portions of our enormous spending on education, however, are wasted or siphoned off to non-enriching ends. In higher education, we have lavish campuses failing to serve quality or practical degrees. In primary education, we have multiplying programs that shortchange the basics, while teacher unions expend their huge political war chests to battle reforms. Allowing the influx of uneducated illegal immigrants has diverted a large percentage of education spending to their remedial teaching, reducing standards and programs for excellence among the rest. Border and employer enforcement in motion has and will reduce illegal immigration. Budget restraints are directed by those in power to punish the customers. With the necessity of budget restraints evident, those ideologic and self-serving pedagogues will lose some of their influence to undermine core, productive education.
National Defense: From the pains of combat, we’ve learned that a larger professional armed forces is critical. At the same time, sophisticated, expensive major weapons systems cannot be avoided if we are to have deterring diplomacy with major adversaries, or soundly defeat them if diplomacy fails. The ‘90’s, Clinton path of virtually ignoring the emergence of such threats only leads to larger, more dangerous crises. Cutting defense spending to fuel wasteful domestic spending by Washington is proven suicidal behavior. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Cutting the ounce is deceptively self-destructive.
Middle East: Our avoidance of domestic sources of energy and of transmission has increased our dependence upon and hefty self-impoverishing buying of oil from hostile and trouble-making countries. Take that US financial underpinning out from under them and they are less of a global or regional threat, less capable of attacking Israel as well. A regional conflict is less of a threat to itself or the world.
Having, thus, freed up Obama from otherwise counter-productive activities outside the White House, he personally will benefit not only from things sorting themselves out better but will have more time to deal with his mother-in-law.
Yes, I did have a good hunt yesterday. Thanks for asking. Grouse. Got two, missed two. Passed on shooting one in a Birch tree. Passed on a Woodcock in a swamp because I could not remember whether they were still in season. I was right to pass on that tempting bird. Tired legs from tramping through the snow all day.
 Iraq politics. Sounds like normal.
We all want longer, healthier lives but it's going to cost us. WaPo. One quote:
We are on a collision course between our wish to live longer, healthier lives and our capacity to pay for that wish. Whether we can somehow avoid the collision is perhaps the most important domestic issue of this century. From now on, health care costs will be up there with globalization, terrorism and climate change as a force shaping our world.
Let's fry up some fresh Sea Kittens. Perfect for those good folks who like to eat pussies.
JC Phillips: My New Year's resolution is to make more soup. Mine too.
The MLA is so mad at David Horowitz that they could spit. Idiots. See, unlike Bill Ayers, David had second thoughts about The Revolution. h/t, Viking
The vacuity of contemporary art.
Kudlow on Obama's tax cuts. The Repubs fear Obama's tax-cutting ideas. But Pelosi wants to punish the earners. She's a paleo. In my view, gummint cannot spend to prosperity. It's no different from living high off your home equity.
Fourth quarter GDP coming on Jan 30. What if it isn't terribly bad?
Chutzpah is right. We need to legalize illegals to save our economy. Um, what?
Insty:
WELL, IF YOU ASK ME, free markets are “social justice.”
Ayn Rand warned us about this stuff.
LA: "Put Jews in the ovens." This refrain is going around. It's an old song, and one of the ugliest.
Good point at Neoneo about Obama's negativity.
Saturday, January 10. 2009
 We have been officially notified that Maggie's Farm has probably won the top blog award from the highly-respected ICEIE.
It's quite remarkable and deeply gratifying to us, especially since we think blog awards tend to be bogus and a bunch of baloney, and therefore have nothing to do with them.
But not this one. This one is a keeper. The Grand Pricks. We will treasure it always.
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