Thursday, October 21. 2010
Finally, the soft sciences are willing to take another look at culture: The NYT, the Soft Sciences, and the Slow, Stupid Return to Reason. Steinberg begins:
A rather astonishing piece appeared in the New York Times this week, offering some degree of hope that the pursuit of scientific truth has a chance of once again becoming the dominant theme in university science.
Maybe human fate is a teensy bit more complicated than "Who is oppressing who?" Indeed, studying cultures and subcultures is a fascinating task which calls on depth of knowledge from all fields.
Sunday, October 17. 2010
Destroying Schools to Achieve Racial Justice. Weissberg begins:
I've long suspected that the federal government is consciously subverting American education. Deep inside the Department of Education, there must exist a top-secret Bureau of Educational Disasters (BED) whose mission is to concoct alluring but guaranteed-to-fail, academic achievement-killing policies whose sole benefits are more jobs and mindless paperwork. These would be the folks who recently bribed states to retain academically troublesome students whose behavior hindered decent students so as to make America "better educated," i.e., a nation of high school "graduates" barely able to read their diplomas.
Thursday, October 14. 2010
h/t to SDA for reminding me of this old Milton Friedman talk Lesson of the Pencil. Basic economics.
"Nobody knows how to make a pencil."
Tuesday, October 12. 2010
 Peggy Noonan gets it right this time: Revolt of the accountants (behind $ wall). A quote:
There is a real fear that government, with all its layers, its growth, its size, its imperviousness, is changing, or has changed, who we are. And that if we lose who we are, as Americans, we lose everything.
This is part of what’s driving the sense of political urgency this year, especially within precincts of the tea party.
Much of her essay is at Never Yet Melted, who comments:
The liberal elite, when faced with resistance to its agenda, invariably contemptuously labels its opponents as people afraid of change. Peggy Noonan, in one of her better columns... in the Wall Street Journal, explains that the popular revolt which is going to bury the democrat party in the next cycle of elections is fueled by perfectly legitimate fear of, and opposition to, change: change in the nature of the country’s character and culture.
Villainous also has some good commentary in A Nation of Insurors, including this:
Governments do not elect themselves. Politicians make promises and we pick and choose from the menu they present to us. Representative government, unrestricted by some limiting principle, inevitably reflects the human failings of the governed. The problem is not government, nor too many bean counters, but our own desire to insulate ourselves from risk.
Where is this leading us? I think we are in a battle for soul of this nation, with those who understand moral hazard in a pitched battle against those who don't. There is an illusory security to be found in large numbers. Somehow we feel safer in a crowd. Making society more interconnected and interdependent doesn't eliminate risk - it expands it.
From Roff at US News, The Tea Party Movement Is a Middle Class Revolt:
All across America the people derided by the likes of Sinclair Lewis as “Babbitts” are awakening. They are beginning to reassert themselves, pushing back, saying “No” for the first time in a long while. It may not last--the politicians may find a way to mollify them or they may give up and go home. Or they may change the country. Either way they are a more serious, more substantive movement--even in what the smart set patronizingly likes to point out are its inconsistencies and innocence--then what the columnists and commentators who deride them are willing to acknowledge.
The arrogance and condescension of the "smart set" particularly irks me. The "Babbitts" are the people who create the jobs, pay the taxes, raise the families at great sacrifice, build America - and contain in them a picture of what America is about. The smart set consistently underestimates - excuse me - misunderestimates - the common sense, decency, and patriotism of Americans who exist outside the Beltway.
"Babbitts" want to be left alone by the government as much as possible, and to be powerful only within their own lives. That's freedom. Every time government imposes one more law, one more demand, one more impossible-to-meet-or-to-understand regulation, people feel their autonomy slipping away.
See this: Americans' Image of "Federal Government" Mostly Negative
Monday, October 11. 2010
What's required to revive America is major structural overhaul. This is a task of historic proportions - not unlike the simplification of law by Justinian in ancient Rome. Our founding fathers never imagined that democracy would become a one-way ratchet - always adding laws but never repealing them. Nor did they intend law to be a form of central planning. The Constitution sets forth our governing goals and principles in only 16 pages.
It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
Sunday, October 10. 2010
From the Redneck Tree-Hugger: "Barack Obama has awakened a sleeping nation."
This is a Maggie's sort of fellow. h/t, reader.
Saturday, October 9. 2010
 A review of a new book of his letters. One quote:
One journal entry tells us that he turned down a job at the University of Chicago lest Saul Bellow and the sociologist Edward Shils—both of whom taught there—discover that he was not as smart as they thought he was.
I love that humility from a politician. Readers know that I do not view poltics as a career: I like to view it as a temporary public service for care of country. However, I do understand that these people want jobs with good benefits. Who doesn't enjoy freebies with a job without heavy lifting?
Thursday, October 7. 2010
Friday, October 1. 2010
From VDH's From the Unbelievable to the Passé:
Statism versus free markets is about as easy to understand as the difference between Singapore and Greece, and yet here we go again. This weird suicidal statist impulse seems for Obama to trump almost every other consideration: he may well destroy the Democratic Party for a decade just when it was recovering; he has so terrified private enterprise that trillions of dollars in capital are simply sitting out his first two years, waiting for the end of his congressional majorities, and hence his agenda to implode.
All this goes on as Obama sees the EU running away from precisely what he wishes to implement, while at home a high-tax, high-entitlement, redistributive economy like California has managed to destroy the most richly endowed human and natural landscape — agriculture, tourism, high-tech, oil and gas, Hollywood, Napa Valley, Silicon Valley — in the nation. And yet here we continue down into the abyss.
Thursday, September 30. 2010
 It must be some failure of multicultural education in the West when we imagine that other people in the world want what we want. Things like peace, material well-being, freedom, etc.
Bruce Thornton notes The West fails to imagine that its adversaries might have different values. One quote:
Munich in particular illustrates the dangers of projecting one’s own motives or goods onto an aggressor. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain failed to imagine that Hitler and the Germans, fired by revanchist passions and the lust for recovering lost prestige and power, were eager for conflict and had spent most of the interwar period preparing for it. Worse yet, this ignorance of true motives puts one at a disadvantage when dealing with an aggressor, who can conceal his aims under the pretext of diplomatic negotiation (as Hitler did), thus buying time and misdirecting his adversary by the duplicitous endorsement of ideals he knows are important to the West.
Yes, you could make a case that the Sudetenland was part of Greater Germany - Austria too - but that's not what it was about.
Thornton's piece is mainly about militant Islam. In the West, we often prefer to be in denial of the evil intentions of others. I'm sure there is a psychological explanation for that. To me, it just seems like a pleasant Edenic fantasy.
Wednesday, September 29. 2010
From Charles Kesler's The Stakes of Obamacare:
Judged by his own standards, however, Obama has good reason to take pride in his record. For his presidency already has accomplished a historic transformation of American government. Thanks to his victories on the bailouts, health care, and financial regulation, government's size, cost, and agenda have swelled enormously and are set to expand further over the long term. Obamacare may be controversial, but it's the law now. He's succeeded in what many liberal commentators and politicians, and most conservatives, too, thought impossible—launching a fourth wave of liberal social reform, adding to the storied legislative accomplishments of the New Freedom, the New Deal, and the Great Society.
and
Among its other effects, this act marks a new stage in the decline of constitutional government in America. One sign of this was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's remark, "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy." After shepherding the equally massive financial regulation bill into law, Senator Christopher Dodd was moved to say something very similar: "No one will know until this is actually in place how it works." In late August, Senator Max Baucus, Finance Committee chairman, chimed in: "I don't think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health care bill....We hire experts." These statements make both an epistemological and a political point. The first is that these bills are so long, complicated, and unreadable that no one who isn't an expert can possibly decipher them. That implies, in turn, that no amount or quality of democratic deliberation can clarify them to citizens, and in most cases to legislators, in advance. Indeed, Pelosi suggests that political debate itself, "controversy," mostly dims public understanding by generating "fog." The second point is that neither she nor Dodd nor Baucus is especially troubled by this breakdown in democratic accountability. With this kind of legislation, they imply, there's no choice but to trust the experts—not merely those who patch the law together, but perhaps more importantly those who implement it. For the truth is that this kind of bill, almost 3,000 pages long, will mean what the bureaucrats say it means.
Or if one wants to be generous, this kind of bill will mean what the bureaucrats, in conjunction or conspiracy with their congressional overseers, say it means. In short, these bills are not so much laws as administrative to-do lists. They are contrivances fit only for the modern liberal state, ambitious to regulate all local and state affairs from the center, which means through a bureaucracy of experts or so-called experts. The result is not a government of laws but of men, albeit men who think themselves wise.
Read the whole thing. It is clear that the Dems were and are willing to risk losing any or all control in Congress in exchange for getting this done. As Kesler says, they are playing the long game, and this version is just a beginning. It's meant to fail, and they will rescue it with their next step. If they had been more clever and had chosen a less circuitous route, they would have simply planned on Medicare For All. People love their Medicare.
It's worth losing a battle or two to win a war. For the Left, it is war and they really don't mind the short-term sacrifice of some pawns and a bishop this November. It's just a predictable bump on the road to utopia, and I do not think they really care too much about it. They already have the golden fleece: our bodies.
Tuesday, September 28. 2010
 It's been going on for many years, at least since Teddy Roosevelt: While the Left claims to want bipartisanship and compromise, the incremental clicks of the ratchet only go in one direction: toward European-style social democracy.
That's what William F. Buckley Jr. meant by "A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'"
The fatal flaw of democratic systems, of course, is that people figure out they can vote themselves things. The US wasn't planned that way, but it's become that way. Progressives call it Progress.
From Driscoll's Springtime for Algore: A Romantic Pilgrimage to Germany’s ‘Eco–Anschluss’:
...what is it about self-styled intellectuals, “liberals,” leftists, “progressives” who loathe America and think that real progress exists in some far off land, preferably with top-down centralized state-run planning? During the first two decades of the 20th century, American men had built the first mechanized airplane and were spreading electricity throughout the nation, the first big radio networks were going up, skyscrapers were rising ever higher, affordable mass-produced automobiles were rolling off assembly lines, and nascent television technology was being created, all via private enterprise. But instead, the intellectuals of the period look to totalitarian nightmare states thousands of miles away such as the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s Italy, and want to cut and paste their ideas into the American firmament.
What is it about them? I believe I know what it is. Some folks think they are smart enough to run the world. Like Deval Patrick who regrets freedom, they want to be Philosopher-Kings. Trouble is, the mere fact of wanting that role is a sign of lack of wisdom. In my view, humility is the sign of wisdom, and hubris a sign of emotional immaturity.
The UK's Standpoint on Glenn Beck:
We scoff at America and its media and especially its talk-shows, perhaps rightly so. But can one imagine The Road to Serfdom on Richard and Judy (or on Newsnight, come to that), or A Patriot's History of Britain anywhere? From where I stand, one American "shock jock" is doing as much for public education in politics and history as all the BBC's networks put together.
I would not term Glenn a "shock jock" unless basic, grade-school history is shocking. But maybe it is, and maybe it should be shocking. America was meant to be a shockingly new kind of thing.
Monday, September 27. 2010
 At American Thinker, Hoven's The Government Tapeworm:
Government is an organism that tries to maximize its energy intake. It is, in effect, like all other organisms.
Read it. It's about the Romer-Laffer Curve, and how greedy governments can enslave you - almost to the point that you give up, but not quite. A successful work camp never works its inmates to death...unless they are too old or sick to be productive to the State.
Photo is a human tapeworm. They can be up to 35' long, and lay millions of eggs daily. They can be an effective aid to slow and manageable weight loss.
Wednesday, September 22. 2010
Entitlements promised by politicians, but never paid for. Do we all live in a dream world? Pie in the sky? From Biggs' Why Does Government Grow and Grow and Grow? (h/t, Insty) a quote:
As I noted in a recent National Review column on why Social Security reform has proved so difficult, shifting from a pay-as-you-go program to a funded system entails significant “transition costs,” which are borne by the very citizens who would decide to make the change. Since today’s Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits are paid from today’s taxes, if we decide to pre-fund these programs then the current generation must pay twice: first for current beneficiaries, and second for their own benefits. Put simply, to shift from an unfunded program to a funded program, someone must contribute extra funds. When the defining characteristic of domestic policy has been for voters to shift their own cost burdens to future generations, it is highly optimistic to expect current voters to accept a double burden. The expected result is to kick the can down the road, such that deficits grow and future taxpayers become even worse off. My own take: it was the transition costs associated with Social Security personal accounts, more than the risk of investing Social Security taxes in stocks, that doomed President Bush’s 2005 reform drive to failure.
Read the whole thing, because it is the best explanation I have seen. I do understand that pols seem to want to keep their big shot jobs in DC, but, in the process, China will ending up owning us.
By the way, I would like my lifetime net Social Security contributions as a lump sum, please, at age 65. That's all I ask for. You can even ignore inflation, so it's been my free long-term loan to you, Uncle Sam. It is my account, right? Just hand it over, and I won't give you any more trouble. I'll use it to pay off my mortgage, and live happily ever after...
Soft tyranny, manliness, Western Civ, the Leftism of the campuses, etc. Video interview with Harvard's Harvey Mansfield thanks to Powerline.
It's a long interview, and well-worth every minute. I am now a confirmed Mansfield fan.
Monday, September 20. 2010
First off, Wendy and I would like to offer our sincere thanks for the positive comments the original ProCon post received. You can certainly sense that people are itching for a change.
These ProCon posts will be a small series until the election. Future posts will deal with various aspects and related articles, but today I wanted to cover some of the points raised in the comments. There being 27,000 words on the site, most of the raised issues were covered there, but rather than just tossing out links to answer the commenters, I thought I'd expound on them here. Rather than quote anyone, I'll just generalize.
1. "There isn't enough time between now and November to be effective."
That's just plain ol' wrong. Anyone who believes that has no idea how truly flaky American voters are and how many of them still don't know for sure who they're voting for when they wake up on Election Day. That flyer you hand them at the grocery store that morning might make all the difference.
Yes, it's embarrassing to admit the average American voter is so fickle, often picking a candidate for the flimsiest of reasons, but that matters not. We don't care any more about 'embarrassing' than the fact that it's 'tacky' to go after people's wallets, rather than intelligently discussing the issues as we did during the last two elections. And I needn't remind you what happened using that respectful little tactic.
This is war, and convention be damned.
2. "Web sites don't do any good."
No argument there. The 'home base' we want you to set up isn't for blogging and collecting readers and, in fact, the subject is never raised. You certainly can blog on it if you want, but it's two main functions are to act as a backdrop for the inspiring, hopefully-vote-changing 'motivational' posts and as a base of operations for your own endeavors, be it organizing a neighborhood Tea Party or collecting carpool riders for a Tea Party in the big city. It also gives you a sense of involvement and is demonstrative proof that you're actually doing something — as referred to fawning over your fave blogger's latest words.
Continue reading "ProCon: The Commentariat Speaks"
Sunday, September 19. 2010
I found the whole of Peter Saunder's 2008 essay, Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul.
It's a classic. The key quote:
Capitalism offers no grand vision of the future, for in an open market system the future is shaped not by the imposition of utopian blueprints, but by billions of people pursuing their own preferences.
Yep. Under control systems, people are forced to pursue the preferences of their supposed betters. I do not believe in "betters."
Saturday, September 18. 2010
BD's tab dump this morning addressed poverty in America. Who are the poor? What is in their lives, he wondered. Tiger provides this:
...by simple, homey measures of comfort and convenience, the lowest rung on the income ladder lives better lives today than the average middle-class Americans of the last generation.
Poverty is not materially poor in the US. Sometimes I think it is just spiritually poor. What's a "good life"? Is it having a microwave? Not to me - nothing to do with a good life. I lack one, and do not want one. Not trying to be Marcus Aurelius or Thoreau here. I was under the poverty line for seven years - "working poor" - and I had a great simple life in poverty-stricken, jobless, but scenic western MA. Now I am making money in New York, and my life sucks more in many ways. I do meet more delightful females but, for one thing, I have less time for the fall hunting season. I do love the City, however, and feel invigorated every time my feel hit the sidewalk in the morning and I see the hustle and bustle and all the beautiful, slinky HOPAs and MILFs headed to work in their cool New Yorky outfits.
Plus I love the endless demands and rigors of my job, which test and stretch my brains and character every day and often all night too. I am trying to figure out what I really want in life besides beer, money, pals, dogs, guns, and fun sex. I realize now that I do not know, but that as a Yankee I know I do not want it to be easy. I want to work at least as hard and long as my old man did and does, and I know I need more God in my life.
I will not burden our readers with my inner confusions (but it is why I have been semi-AWOL here since my August boating adventures. I explained that to our Editor a while ago, and he was kind, understanding, encouraging, and teasing as he always is).
Amid much fanfare, the Democratic National Committee unveiled its inspiring new logo the other day:
Whoops! My mistake. That was the prototype. Here's what the above was eventually reduced to by the DNC graphics department:
Naturally, a number of right-wing bloggers immediately asked the obvious question.
And the answer is...
Not long, not long at all!
Available here. A very interesting blog site, and kudos on a great design and a masterful response.
Friday, September 17. 2010
Well, I've been busy. 27,000 words, 55 pages and counting.
A couple of months ago I hooked up online with a very sharp lady named Wendy Calloway. We had both mentioned in blog comments what a dismal failure the right-wing blogs turned out to be after the '06 (historic Democratic sweep) and '08 (Obama) elections, so I contacted her and asked her if she'd like to dissect the entire mess, piece by piece, and reevaluate everything; what worked, what didn't, and what to do about the latter. Therein followed about a thousand emails, a bunch of phone calls, and a big 'master file' of the future web site that we passed back and forth.
As for the '06 and '08 elections:
We immediately came to a few conclusions:
— That the pundits are correct. From Ace of Spades to James Taranto, everyone agrees that it's the independents who win or lose elections. Occasionally, as in 2008, national fervor will sweep someone into office, but for normal, average elections it's the independents, centrists and moderate Democrats who make the real difference in the voting booth.
— That the blogs on both sides of the fence weren't very effective. Just ask Ned Lamont. It was simply more 'preaching to the choir' and obviously didn't make any difference with the aforementioned independents, centrists and moderate Dems. For every few we picked off, DailyKos and MyDD got theirs.
— Most money used in campaigns is ill-spent. Bluntly put, lawn signs haven't won an election yet. There, in the privacy of the voting booth, it's almost always something deeper than that. While we heartily endorse getting our candidates' names into the public eye, we leave that to the large organizations.
So we decided to focus on that "something deeper", which usually translates to matters of the heart (patriotism), the mind (common sense), and matters of the wallet, such as "Will I be able to pay the rent next month?"
The reference to Ned Lamont is quite apt. He was the Connecticut senatorial candidate that DailyKos, MyDD, et al, got behind. His election was supposed to be their 'crowning moment' as they showed the world what blogpower was all about.
The point the above quote makes is that he got crushed in the election. Fat lot of good all that blogpower did.
Continue reading "ProCon: Back to the (grass) roots"
Wednesday, September 15. 2010
I suppose it does, in a way. J.K. Rowling is one example.
It never makes sense to me for people to be concerned about income inequality - or inequality of wealth. As Dylan was quoted as saying in our link this morning, "The world owes you nothing. Not one single thing."
One reason I feel inequality is a bogus issue has to do with the Ezra Klein quote above:
The top 1 percent, for instance, has gone from capturing about 8 percent of the national income to 18 percent.
"Captured"? Like piracy? That's a childish and fallacious zero-sum view of income. It's not like there is a set number of dollar bills out there to be distributed. J.K. Rowling did not "capture" income - she created wealth out of nothing, which is what wealth-creators do. In the process, she created income for book stores, Amazon, printers, her employees, etc. - along with vast tax income for the UK. Furthermore, she got herself off the dole.
Due to my needs for personal wealth creation, I don't have time today to do a full essay on what is problematic about the concern about income inequality. I will say, however, that I think it's about politics, not economics.
Maybe I will complete my thoughts later, but you have probably had the same thoughts already.
Sunday, September 12. 2010
Here's an excellent explanation of it. Yes, it's Alinsky/Gramsci-type strategy.
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