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.
John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate set off a fiercely contemptuous reaction. The chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said Mrs. Palin's sole qualification for high office was that she had never had an abortion. The comedian Bill Maher scoffed at the idea that "this stewardess" would be first in the line of succession. The scorn moved The Atlantic Monthly's Clive Crook to write that "the metropolitan liberal, in my experience, regards overt religious identity as vulgar, and evangelical Christianity as an infallible marker of mental retardation. Flag-waving patriotism is seen as a joke and an embarrassment."
The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley Jr. wrote: "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." From Richard Nixon's invoking the "silent majority" to Mrs. Palin's campaigning as a devout, plainspoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists and academics have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from disparaging the very people whose votes are indispensable to the liberal cause. The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.
Buckley's identification of the political fault line running beneath the campus quadrangle was confirmed by "UD," a blogger for "Inside Higher Ed." Belittling Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho, UD concluded, "A lot of Americans don't seem to like highly educated people, and they don't want them running the country." He continued:
We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents' religion. If they don't get this in college, they're not going to get it anywhere else.
Thus, higher education is remedial education, and the affliction it remedies is an American upbringing.
Read the whole thing (link above). Voegli captures one of those things that bugs the heck out of me. But I am "mentally retarded," so I guess my view doesn't count. We aren't opposed to "higher ed." However, we believe in common sense, and we believe that the intelligent will and do educate themselves, and that the foolish will remain foolish with their degrees. Especially nowadays, with our degraded standards and expectations (examples - it is possible to graduate from college in the US today without ever taking any calculus, physics, statistics, economics, or American History).
For the blank youth in a land without history, there is no past except as a scrambled mess of tropes, images and symbols to be combined and recombined in the way that amuses them best. There is only the wide open future. A future that is at once hopeful and hopeless. Ahead revolutions beckon. Each revolution excites them, and then fails, hardening them. They are told over and over again that the future belongs to them. But at some point they are forced to realize that in truth nothing belongs to them. Not the past. Not the present. And most certainly not the future.
"Maybe nothing is really bad, since I am convinced that we will win the future."
Abbie Hoffman
Historical inevitability. The conviction that WE WILL WIN THE FUTURE. It makes the difference between victory and defeat. An advancing army is worth far more than a retreating army of twice its size. The difference is in morale. In expectation. A retreating army expects to be beaten. An advancing army expects to win.
Map that analogy onto countries and ideologies. Consider how conservative political parties act in almost every country. As if they expect to be beaten. They expect it because they lost that sense of historical inevitability. The Goldwater campaign challenged Democratic voting blocs with, "In your heart you know he's right". Today most conservative parties 'know' in their hearts that the left is right. They quibble with their tactics and nitpick the implementation, but they have come to agree on the basic ideas.
In the US and the UK, the Republicans and the Tories are willing to agree to every one of the left's cultural agendas, as long as they're allowed to make some cuts in the budget. In Israel, Netanyahu is doing a fantastic job on the economy, while arguing that he should be allowed to carve up Israel on the installment plan, not in one lump sum. Imagine if after the Battle of Saratoga, the American colonies had agreed to go back under King George III's rule, as long as George Washington was made Finance Minister with the authority to review the books. We won't need to worry about the cultural war or restoring some sense of purpose to the nation, once we've trimmed 11 percent off the expendables budget.
This is the species of absurd madness we are dealing with here-- because even when they win elections, conservative parties act like losers, determined to prove that they aren't the bad guys. That they are tolerant, decent and generous. Good losers in short.
Last year’s choice by my alma mater CUNY’s Brooklyn College of the sole Common Reading book distributed to all incoming students for discussion and work in required English classes was particularly marred by the author’s additionsof anti-US and anti-Israel comments and statistics that were radical and fraudulent. I had a rolein raising the issue to national attention and criticism.
This year’s choice – Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat -- probably won’t raise as many hackles, as the focus is less a prominent political hotspot, Haiti. That may indicate welcome increased sensitivity by the selection committee, but this year’s choice still suffers most of the deficiencies as last year’s.
The book’s primary theme is the author’s upbringing in Haiti, separated from her parents who had immigrated to the US, she and brothers later joining them, and the relations among the extended family. However, the book’s critical attitude toward the US role in Haiti’s sad history of violence, poverty and instability, and the death in immigration detention of the author’s aged uncle, are strong secondary themes that provide the mileau for the tale.
One may argue that these are the author’s acquired views in this personal narrative. But, the prominence of those secondary themes brings the book, and the college, directly into major current political arguments over broader US foreign and immigration policies. This slant is in stark contrast to the author’s reflections exclusion of gratitude to the US for the youngsters’ success in the US. She is an acclaimed writer, her brothers also established in white collar jobs at the time of writing the book. Further, the book does not provide enough political context to allow a better understanding of the author’s criticisms of US policies in Haiti or US immigration practices.
In short, the book is part of the “victimology” and Leftist memoir literature so popular among our liberal elite, compared to earlier immigrants’ books about thankfully escaping repression and poverty in their countries of birth, then struggling and succeeding in the freedoms in the US.
That isn’t to say there isn’t enough in the book to show the horrible conditions in Haiti, that reading between the lines shows the youngsters’ success in the US, that an autopsy of the 81-year old uncle’s death revealed the cause as a previously unknown pancreatic condition, or that the author’s grandfather and uncle had been rebels and the family’s politics aligned with critics of the US in Haiti.
The book is still a poor choice for launching discussion of the political issues raised by the author. It is marred by the underlying anger of the author and her lack of appreciation of the US, her presentation of the US as an oppressive presence in the consciousness of her family, and the lack of underlying contextual details about US foreign and immigration policies. The incoming student will likely read or hear in the classroom discussions little else about the issues from broader or conflicting perspectives or facts.
Amongthe laudatory comments by some Brooklyn College faculty for the book, a senior professor there – Robert Cherry -- raises some of the problems with the book:
Family Tales in the Service of a Political Agenda
Brother, I’m Dying has little about the daily life of Haitians; their jobs, social and cultural institutions. Instead, Danticat focuses on violent episodes in Haitian history: Trujillo’s killings on the Dominican border; U.S. occupation, Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes repression, and Haitian riot policy behavior. Rather than providing the reader with detailed information, Danticat chooses to promote emotional outrage by presenting tales of family members that accompany each of the episodes.
How true are the tales she has been told? How much has she embellished these accounts? What we do know is that telling these tales as first‐person accounts make them seem factual and puts faces and lives onto important episodes in Haitian history. In particular, Brother, I Am Dying uses Danticat’s family’s tales to invest its reader with emotional outrage at U.S. Haitian policy.
For me, this became clear when she placed Uncle Joseph’s childhood tale after this chilling account of his death in a US immigration detention center. Danticat writes, “Fearing that he might be captured by the Americans to work in the labor camps … Granpe Nozial ordered him to never go down the mountain.” Family illness, however, forced Joseph to seek medicine in town where he sees [US Marines] “white men …kicking the thing on the ground as though it was a soccer ball to one and other with the round tips of their boots. Taking small steps to stand the same distance away as other bystanders, my uncle finally saw what it was: a man’s head.” Thus, from the beginning of his life until its end, Joseph experienced first hand the inhumanity of U.S. policies towards Haitians.
While I sympathize with her pain, and even sympathize with her political agenda, it does not negate my concerns. Absence its political agenda, the book offers little to inform us about the Haitian experience. Brother, I’m Dying should be supplemented by panel discussions of the important issues it raises: U.S. Haitian policy, Immigration Detention Centers, and the issues children face when they are reunited with their parents in the U.S. when they are teenagers.
Professor Cherry informs me that the English Department is considering such discussions. If so, one may expect the Left and liberal leanings of the English Department faculty to emphasize the charges of economic imperialism prompting the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934, but notthat the dominance of its economy by German immigrants was feared in the midst of WWI, the huge building of infrastructure there by the US, or that its liberal constitution was written by then Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.
One may expect the criticisms by pro-immigration lobbies that detention practices are substandard and harsh, but not that the deaths from all causes in detention are a tiny fraction of detainees (about 107 out of over 2.5 million, about 5 per 10,000, during 2003-2008; even the January 2010 New York Times reportof critics says, “In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.”). The Center for Immigration Studies, opposed to liberal immigration policies, contendsthis is a much lower rate of death than in US prisons. The comparison, however, raises many apples and oranges measurement difficulties that need to be clarified. Both sides agree that many improvements to detention policies and practices have been made in the past six-years, after the author’s uncle died in detention, and both sides agree that there is much – if differing – that needs to be done. – Of note here is that the author’s 81-year old uncle, with a valid visa to enter the US, was fleeing gangs that wanted to behead him and asked for temporary political asylum instead of just entering the US on his visa and overstaying it as so many do, so he entered the detention-adjudication system for a few days, dying there from a previously unknown pancreatic condition despite blood/urine and scan tests provided.
I’ll add a personal note. The apartment that the author’s parents lived in was in my Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn, less that 20-years later. I walked a mile to Prospect Park. Their apartment was a block away from the park. The apartment buildings where her parents lived were considered much better than the one in which I was raised. The author’s father was a tailor who in the US became a gypsy cab driver. He raised and educated successful children. My poor immigrant grandparents were, also, tailors, who sewed until retirement for poor health in their ‘60s, and raised and educated a successful family (my aunt was in the first classes at the new Brooklyn College). I drove a cab on graveyard shifts while at Brooklyn College, and like the author’s father was mugged. We were raised to be appreciative of the freedoms and opportunities in the US. It seems that the author of Brooklyn College’s 2011 Common Reading is less so. That is a distinct problem plaguing colleges and the US today.
The only difference is that they have cops, guns, jails, and armies to back them up and to require their clients' cooperation. An armed monopoly but yes, we consented to the original deal in 1787. I was just a kid back then, but I was all for it, believing it put government in a tight little cage. I did not anticipate, back then, how damn good their mass marketing would become over the centuries. Mass marketing was simple and primitive in those days.
To their credit, the professionals sincerely believe what they're saying. Sure their own interests happen to align with their rhetoric. But so what? Professional politicians have long ago stopped noticing such things and they shortened "Conflict of Interest" to Synergy a while back. They genuinely and truly believe that the government can't afford to make any real spending cuts. That if it did, the system would fall apart. And they're right. Their system would fall apart.
The system is too big to gradually reform. It's interconnected with too many expectations. And a major expectation is that it will keep on going this way. Government is an industry. And numerous industries have grown up around it. You can cut a hundred million, a billion, here and there, and that will just spur on competition among special interests. But you can't dramatically cut spending. If you do an entire supra-economy that has grown up over the regular economy collapses.
Of course that's exactly what has to be done. The professional politician represents the supra-economy. The one that's based on regulation, subsidies and grants. That employs everyone from union organizers to sensitivity trainers, consultants, administrators, suppliers, lawyers, managers and anyone whose job in the private or public sector is tied into the government.
Government is, in fact, the biggest business in the USA - the industry with the most guns, the most revenue, the most employees, the most power, and the most private jets too. But since this leviathan tends to be run by people who could not run a corner candy shop yet has armed persons behind them, it continually expands while losing money every day.
That is, as long as China has a single spare yuan to lend to it to maintain the illusion that it is a going concern. Yes, I know. We voted them all into office. Our bad.
I'm going to do a post on Perry this Friday and would like to include a video. I've looked over a handful on YouTube and most of them are 'okay', but nothing really jumps out. If anyone has a favorite vid that puts him in his best light, please leave the link or name in the comments.
Also, any links or other juicy tidbits would be appreciated. If there's any truth to the rumor that he's secretly a transgender drag queen posing as a closet transvestite, let me know. We'll get to the bottom of this sordid story, and I note for the record that the Perry camp has not officially denied it, which probably means it's true.
Pic: Chuck Norris + Rick Perry = Awesomeness Unveiled
Much of it has only been available in French. Review here. A quote from the review:
Peace and freedom were at the top of Bastiat's agenda, each cause being indispensable to the other, he believed. Statism was his bane. "The dominant notion, the one that has permeated every class of society," he wrote in the wake of the Revolution of 1848, "is that the state is responsible for providing a living for everyone."
"Poor people!" he lamented of the duped French populace in the same tumultuous year. "How much disillusionment is in store for them! It would have been so simple and so just to ease their burden by decreasing their taxes; they want to achieve this through the plentiful bounty of the state and they cannot see that the whole mechanism consists in taking away ten to give it back eight, not to mention the true freedom that will be destroyed in the operation!"
F-16, call sign Stroke 3, dodging 6 SAM launches during Desert Storm
As the package proceeded to the Iraqi border the weather become steadily worse until everyone was in the weather, unable to climb out into the clear. As planes got out of position, the package finally broke out into the clear just past the Iraqi border. At this time, a large calibre AAA gun began firing on the aircraft. The AAA consisted of extremely large airbursts that looked like big black rain clouds. The AAA, coupled with the confusion of sorting out the package formation, resulted in 25% of the package being sent home at that time. Meanwhile the package, now a 12-ship, pressed on to Baghdad.
As the flight approached the Baghdad IP, AAA began firing at tremendous rates. Most of the AAA was at 10-12,000ft (3,658m), but there were some very heavy, large calibre explosions up to 27,000ft (8,230m). Low altitude AAA became so thick it appeared to be an undercast. At this time, the 388th TFW F-16’s were hitting the Nuclear Research Centre outside of the city, and the Weasels had fired off all their HARMs in support of initial parts of the strike and warnings to the 614th F-16’s going further into downtown went unheard. The F-15’s also provided air cover and departed with the first part of the strike group. Again, a warning that went unheard. Without knowing it 614th TFS F-16’s were all pretty much alone in downtown Baghdad with no air cover and no electronic support assets.
A low overcast deck covered the northern portion of the city which extended south to the point where the AF Headquarters and the Republican Guard Headquarters were mostly obscured, and the package commander, Maj. John Nips Nichols, called a weather abort for those two targets. The southern portion of the city was clear, and the oil refinery was clearly visible to Crud and Stroke flights. As they approached the action point to roll in on the refinery, an SA-2 launch warning was received. The fighters turned to honour the threat missile launch warning, and some SAMs were seen in the air, but they were not an immediate threat. The remaining F-16’s each pinpoint bombed separate refectory towers on the site, and set the refinery ablaze. The destruction was so complete that the flames from the refinery were seen on Cable News Network (CNN) film for the next two weeks.
As the initial SA-2 launch warning faded however, Maj. ET Tullia, Stroke 3, received additional SA-2 and SA-3 acquisition warnings that went unheeded as he rolled in on the towers. The high angle diving delivery, combined with the on-board ECM pod delayed a full SAM missile system acquisition until he pulled off the target and turned south. As the missiles closed, ET's tape reveals the screams of the radar warning receiver into his headset of a missile launch. The missiles overshot and harmlessly detonated above his aircraft, and he turned back to the egress heading.
Multiple SAMs were launched at the package, some ballistic and unguided and some tracking with a full system lock-on. In spite of this, some members of the package refused to jettison their bombs until clear of the city to avoid possible damage to civilian non-combatants. One of the missiles guided toward Clap 4, piloted by Capt. Mike Cujo Roberts. A missile break warning sounded over the radio and Cujo saw the missile as it guided towards him. It passes behind his aircraft and detonates, and Cujo believes he is safe until his aircraft begins to pitch over and he loses control. As the jet approaches negative 1'g', Cujo ejected over downtown Baghdad. No one observed an ejection, nor saw a 'chute.
I have posted about codes of behavior here, several times. It is an important subject for me, and it seems to me that honor is a core concept in Western Civilization (I cannot speak for alien civilizations because I am still struggling to understand my own.). U VA seems to be dealing with this subject now. One quote:
Complaints that a strict Honor Code represent an antiquated, all male, aristocratic standard appropriate only to the slave-holding ante-bellum South in which it originated, that it needs to be replaced by a new standard more attuned to a diverse community with “nuanced perspectives on crime and punishment” sounds more than odd coming from the Grounds of UVa, where “Mr. Jefferson” is not so much a ghost as a virtually live presence. The Declaration of Independence, after all, another "old boy" product, can be described in exactly the same terms.
Perhaps the psychotics at the otherwise wonderful U VA are not aware thatjobs have honor codes, citizenship has an honor code, all relationships have honor codes, science has honor codes, the professions and business have honor codes, supposedly academia has honor codes, every organization and club has an honor code, even the Mafia has honor codes - everything in civilized life is based on honor codes, whether implicit or explicit. That's why it's called "civilized".
Violate them at your peril. At the least, ostracism and social avoidance are unpleasant consequences of violations of mannerly codes, appropriateness codes, and honor codes. In real daily life, just one screw up often is fatal because nobody forgets. The Law only covers the most extreme violations of the codes.
The Democratic party loves taking credit for the social safety net, but they have proven to be completely irresponsible trustees, squandering the trust by borrowing against the sum, and then borrowing against the debt to fund an entirely separate agenda. What began as security for workers mutated into a bureaucracy that existed for its own sake expanding benefits and spending to bulk up its power and influence.
The old worker centered universe was turned upside down. Private sector unions gave way to public sector unions. A non-union public was suddenly forced to subsidize the municipal crony unions of Democratic politicians. Corporate health insurance became mandatory. Illegal aliens showed up for the free health insurance. And the taxpayer kept picking up the tab. Now the system is on the brink, and the trustees have no answer except more spending and a few cuts.
The New Deal had always been rotten with wealth redistribution calculations, but it wasn't unfeasible until fiscal responsibility went completely out the window. The Potemkin Village economics had been there in the 1930's, the unconstitutional mandates, the overreaching regulations and the share the wealth platform. But they had at least used a nation with a solid industrial base and birth rate as their base. Both of those have been sinking for decades, even as spending has been growing...
According to the government’s own survey data, in 2005, the average household defined as poor by the government lived in a house or apartment equipped with air conditioning and cable TV. The family had a car (a third of the poor have two or more cars). For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, a DVD player, and a VCR.
If there were children in the home (especially boys), the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a microwave, refrigerator, and an oven and stove. Other household conveniences included a washer and dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.
The home of the average poor family was in good repair and not overcrowded. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European. (Note: That’s average European, not poor European.) The average poor family was able to obtain medical care when needed. When asked, most poor families stated they had had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs.
Read it and weep, you all in Euroland. Mind you, the majority of American "poor" are mother-only households, too. Maybe our War on Poverty did work, after all, despite the minor detail that it enabled all of the single-parent families with unsupervised kids and alley-cat boyfriends. That's the Law of Unintended Consequences, or the Law of Incentives. Anyway, time to end that War. 40 years of antibiotics ought to suffice for the material comforts and conveniences.
Of course, there is more to life than that, the things money cannot buy and that no government can deliver. And, believe me, those HDTVs will get you get nowhere in life unless lazy and distracted is your goal.
Image is Norman Rockwell's vision of one of FDR's Four Freedoms, Freedom From Fear. In my view, the only Freedom From Fear would be a lobotomy, and the only Freedom from Want is death.
The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,” quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should” do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can” part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good” with a “right.”
Read the whole thing. America has become addicted to the Welfare State same as in Euroland. But if everybody is addicted to freebies, who is going to pay for it all? My favorite examples of Welfare, guaranteed to offend almost everybody who hates to think of it this way:
Government student loans Medicaid Medicare Social Security and Social Security Disability Government housing Home mortgage interest deductions Food stamps Federal Flood Insurance Farm subsidies and the ethanol program The entire VA medical system Federal Unemployment insurance and I did not even include ObamaCare, because I cannot understand it
With freebies - welfare - for all, you might almost think that America was a nation of incompetent leeches rather than a nation of proud, independent citizens who are capable of taking care of themselves and their own problems (unlike the Euroweenies with their serf-like approach to life). I am in one of these programs (VA - but I do not use it. Also, I paid off my mortgage already, foolishly, but think I will take a home equity line so I can get some tax deductions for these Obama years). Interestingly but not surprisingly, most of such progams increase the cost of the "good" itself via market distortion.
What are your favorite welfare programs? And what do you want the government to do for you with your own, and your neighbor's, money which it is not doing yet?
Everything the White House has done in the debt limit fight it has done with an eye toward the president’s reelection. As important as whether he eventually got a “grand bargain” was how the president positioned himself throughout the process in the eyes of the electorate. And while we do not know the details of a final deal, if there is to be one, we do know one thing: Obama won this round. And Republicans helped him.
Did he? I am not sure. Nobody can win this game, but everybody I know who is not a government worker thinks the economy is a disaster.
My shop is cutting staff, both professional and clerical. Not only is biz down, but our CT taxes are up. Also, we figure, assuming Obamacare stays, we'll need to let go three or four professionals, and 4-5 clericals, to cover those expenses without running into the red. We have been here, mind you, for 110 years and have an excellent reputation.
We have never cut staff since the 1930s other than normal firings of incompetents and slackers. Our people know this. Fear is a powerful motivator for effort, but it will not be enough.
It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Who could have anticipated that? Taxpayers bribe people to live in flood zones. Brilliant! For total stupidity, NOLA is not even a flood zone - it is permanently below sea level, and always has been. Why am I, who made the reasonable decision to live above sea level, responsible for the life choices of people who want to live underwater?
And, of course, flood zones and flood plains are basically "wetlands." One might think these places should be protected from development for environmental and flood control reasons. A farm? OK, if you understand that it will periodically get flooded while being delivered a good supply of fresh, healthy silt for your next crop.
I know about flood zones. Part of our property is in one. We keep it in horse pasture, and our pool is down there. House and barns are above. People in 1786 weren't stupid, and they did not expect the government, ie their neighbors, to protect them from nature.
Furthermore, if you believe Al Gore that the water is rising, perhaps we should be bribing people to move further from water...but nobody believes Al Gore anymore.
These Progressives advocated deference to the government for the same reasons Breyer articulates: reverence for experts, belief in majority rule, and the need to protect society from itself.
As a result, Progressive judges approved segregation laws, laws banning private schools, laws limiting women’s ability to participate equally in the workplace, and more. Most infamously, Justice Holmes vigorously approved of forced sterilization of the allegedly mentally infirm, relying on the public interest as articulated by contemporary experts. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he wrote.
While well-intentioned rather than imbeciles, Progressives since Holmes' and Wilson's era have demonstrated more faith in powerful elites, technocrats, social engineers, scientists, and other assorted (mostly academic) experts than in individual freedom - which includes freedom to ignore the experts du jour. The Progessives (ie, modern "Liberals") been misguided about that, ever since. The examples are endless. There's no fool like an educated fool and, as CS Lewis said, there's no totalitarian as dangerous as the one who wants to do you good for your own good.
95% of experts on any topic are shown to be wrong, in time. Not so with common sense, which has endured through history. The unwise, impressionable, and self-impressed are vulnerable to having the common sense educated out of them, and arrogance put into them.
Thirty years ago, the training and practice of medicine was deeply rooted in "inherited" values as much as craft. Physicians were in a noble discipline recast into paladins protecting society, even a bit of its soul, against an implacable adversary. Training was both arduous and flawed (inflated egos and autocratic mice that roared) but with a central purpose. When done well, doctors successfully confronted their most difficult internal challenges, fear of the power of illness and the willfulness to make important decisions when the consequence was uncertain. This "old" medical culture was best expressed by a single term: "My patient." It was as far from provider and client as you could possibly get. "My patient" conveyed both bond and responsibility.
We are about to burn the bridges to this tradition from both ends.
Read it all, because this is what is coming to your town soon with Obamacare. Some of you have already seen it. Mass-market medicine, by the rule-book, "delivered" by anonymous "providers" to the masses. I plan to stick with the old ways for as long as I can.
This post may seem to some as “inside baseball” but it illustrates a wider issue of being diligently informed for civil discourse and for effectiveness in supporting a cause, while not shirking from calling out those -- even allies -- who dangerously undermine that cause.
Europe has a deeper and historic anti-Semitism than in the US, and its Jews are proportionately and politically weaker than in the US. In this sense, European Jews may be more dependent on the efforts of non-Jews to defend themselves and Israel. This defense – here or there -- is based on the increasing realization, among Jews and gentiles, that it is part of a wider defense of the West, its culture and security against Islamist jihadists. Europe has also been more accomodationist toward Islamist offenses and offenders, partly out of post-WWII pacifism and retreat from global responsibilities and partly from it placing its energy and trade interests paramount. Both the US and Europe have activist Leftist and pro-Palestinian communities, but in the US they are far more marginalized in both public opinion and government policy, and there is lower tolerance for them. In Europe, allies are harder to come by, which can lead to infiltration by some who are anti-Islamist jihad but anti-Semitic, and slower reaction.
There is a blog dispute between blog friends, Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs blog and"Baron Bodissey and Dymphna" at Gates Of Vienna (GOV) blog, about the infiltration by some anti-Semites tarnishing of anti-jihadist English Defense League. Geller, an early supporter of the EDL, says she "did not want to write" her post exposing anti-Semitism infiltration within EDL but is required to go there as "I cannot and will not sanction anti-Semitic infiltration." Accordingly, subject to EDL leadership's promised purge of such elements, she has distanced herself from the EDL. The GOV bloggers have reacted with an Open Letter in which they criticize Geller as over-reacting. Geller's reply, in her typical fashion, minces few words:
There’s no arguing with the result of a Rasmussen poll of who was the “greatest founding father”, George Washington. But the choices to select from -- Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington or James Madison? – excluded Patrick Henry and his key role in rallying the new Americans to rebel against Britain and then to enact the new Constitution’s Bill of Rights to further protect individual liberties and states’ rights.
A biographer of Patrick Henry calls him “the first American to sound his displeasure with big government.”
Are you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. No wonder pols have such an easy time fooling people with their BS.
... there has never been any nation even remotely similar to America. Here's why. Most revolutions seek to destroy the existing class order and use all-powerful government to mandate an equality of result rather than of opportunity -- in the manner of the French Revolution's slogan of "liberty, equality and fraternity" or the Russian Revolution's "peace, land and bread."
In contrast, our revolutionaries shouted "Don't tread on me!" and "Give me liberty or give me death!" The Founders were convinced that constitutionally protected freedom would allow the individual to create wealth apart from government. Such enlightened self-interest would then enrich society at large far more effectively that could an all-powerful state.
Such constitutionally protected private property, free enterprise and market capitalism explain why the United States -- with only about 4.5 percent of the world's population -- even today, in an intensely competitive global economy, still produces a quarter of the world's goods and services.
All true, but I resist the notion that wealth and productivity are the goals of freedom. I believe that they just happen to be a side effect of what happens when people are (relatively) free from the control and the infantilization of the state, and are free or forced by reality to pursue whatever the heck in this brief life they decide to pursue, whatever is important to them.
The founders recognized that the political power of groups or factions would become largely the basis for rewards from the state. Thus, they deliberately sought to circumscribe spoils and rewards from government. The difficulty they anticipated in controlling factions was exacerbated by twentieth-century progressivism. In The Rise and Decline of Nations(1982), Mancur Olson shows that factions seek to redistribute rather than create wealth and, over time, impose social and economic rigidities and costs which cause nations to lose vitality and reduce their rate of economic growth. This is America’s early-twenty-first-century affliction, and government-controlled sustainable development would further amplify the role of politics and factions in redistributing scarcity rather than creating wealth. Olson further warned that factions drive political life away from considerations of widespread common interests and spur divisiveness that can even make societies ungovernable.
Our colleges and universities, and the teachers they have educated, have undermined the understanding of, and attitudes towards, Western and American systems of economics and governance, guiding students from public schooling onward to become true believers in the reverse metamorphosis of sustainability. The concept of sustainable development would repeat the historical errors and failures of socialism and communism in the name of protecting nature.
Can I say that Rush was right about all this, back in the 1980s? He saw the Left's need for a new meme, a new narrative. That's around the time when many of us Maggie's folks took the Conservationist path of stewardship instead of the Greenie path of hidden power agendas.
From the I wish I had Written This Department: Voegli's 
I'm going to do a post on Perry this Friday and would like to include a video. I've looked over a handful on YouTube and most of them are 'okay', but nothing really jumps out. If anyone has a favorite vid that puts him in his best light, please leave the link or name in the comments.
At 
By Dr. Joel Levine: 
VDH: