Tuesday, November 10. 2009
I am going to comment on some things our friend TigerHawk said here in his piece on government payment for abortions. Says he:
I do not believe that the Constitution can reasonably be read to confer a "right" to an abortion.
The US Constitution was not designed to "confer" rights: it was designed to circumscribe the power and jurisdiction of the Federal State by a group of independent states who, knowing human nature, were deeply suspicious about any expansion of Federal, centralized power after their experience with Britain. According to our founding documents, human freedom is conferred by God to us as individuals, not by man and not by government.
The "Bill of Rights" Amendments were not designed to confer rights either. They were added, on the insistence of the feisty New York delegation, just to make some of the implied meaning crystal clear (and I suppose they were wise to do so, but it makes it appear that unspecified freedoms - or "rights" - do not exist)... except for Amendments lX and X which were intended to cover almost all human actions:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Thus, in my view, abortion should have been ignored by the Supremes. Not a Federal case. It may be rightly a legal issue on the state level, and is certainly an individual moral issue.
The language of "rights" is tricky, easily abused and distorted, and I do not like it. As an American, I do not and should not need specified "rights" to anything - all I need is a clear delineation of the limit of the powers of government, and I will find a way to get on with it in life.
I can bear arms - and do a million other things that aren't listed. But that doesn't mean that the government should buy me guns. So the question of who pays is another issue entirely. Insurance plans vary widely in the elective things they cover. Most people prefer less expensive plans which do not cover elective procedures, and clearly most people do not want to pay for other peoples' elective abortions.
They don't want to pay for other peoples' IVF either.
Am I right or wrong about all this? Just to be clear, this is not a pro-abortion post...
Sunday, November 8. 2009
Every once in a while a book comes along that reveals a startling gap in our understanding of the world, our passions and desires, and ourselves. Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle is such a book.
The 236-page (plus copious footnotes) book is written in layman’s ease while delving in Harvard case-study depth, based on over 100 interviews of those who made it happen, into the question of how a tiny, imperiled nation with a relatively miniscule population came to be a leader in international hi-tech and a leading prosperous economy.
As I literally devoured the book, heavily highlighting its insights, I kept wondering why I, a student of Israel, hadn’t seen this before. The authors themselves, one an editor of the Jerusalem Post and the other a senior fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations and member of global investment firms, finally answer: “We assumed there must be some book that explained what made the start-up scene so vibrant and seemingly impervious to the security situation. There wasn’t. So we decided to write one.” Thank you Saul Singer and Dan Senor.
Continue reading "Start-Up Nation"
 I posted on the AMA's initial support of the Dem bill in the House, last week. I cannot imagine how a doc could support that thing if they care about their patients, their practices, and the huge advances American medicine has produced for the world over the past two generations. Not to mention the freedom factor which, for me, is right up there with high quality medicine in importance. Come to think of it, I hold freedom higher.
As I read it, the Dem's bill is a five-ten year plan to get the entire population on the government plan, which combines aspects of HMOs and of Medicaid - and to make docs essentially government agents. Treatments will need to be government-approved, and the whole thing will be cost-driven. (If you thought dealing with your HMO was bad, try dealing with 111 government agencies.) Furthermore, it contains the seeds (mainly punitive taxes) of destruction of medical innovation. Betsy McCaughey has some of the insidious details.
Well, the AMA members are rebelling. One quote:
Support for Pelosi's reform bill is by no means unanimous in the medical community. On Friday, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) announced their opposition to the House bill.
“Overall," CNS President Dr. Gerald E. Rodts stated, in announcing the organization's opposition, "we believe this legislation will ultimately limit patient choice by putting the government between the doctor and the patient, which will interfere with vital patient care decisions. As it stands, this House bill could amount to a complete government takeover of healthcare.”
That's true. It will. The bill is cleverly back-loaded so that some of the positive things (like coverage of preexisting conditions) go into effect immediately, but the things people will hate go into effect after the next pres election. The Lefty Dems have always been long-distance runners on the road to Socialism and government control and planning. ("The deep swimmers of the Left," as I recall, was David Horowitz's term for it. I suspect that is what Obama and his team are.)
The hubris is astonishing. They want all of us working on their plantation - and they seem to believe that they are smarter than we, the people. Which they are definitely not.
As I have been saying, government is the most worrisome, powerful and dangerous special interest group in the country. In the end, all that we Conservatives have to offer voters is liberty. Many voters prefer their bowl of lentils (photo). It is a shame.
Update: AMA wimps out. Those docs sold their souls - and their patients' well-being - in exchange for protection of their paltry Medicare reimbursements. Pathetic.
Friday, November 6. 2009
November 9 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, put up by the communist rulers in 1961 to stem the drain from behind the Iron Curtain of those to whom freedom meant everything. There was widespread shock throughout the West at the end of the Cold War, which seemed endless, costly and perhaps unwinnable, and the fall of the existential threat of communism and its terrible toll on mankind, which to some seemed impervious or even eventually triumphant.
Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, writes about “Tyranny Set In Stone: Why We Must Not Forget The Lessons Of Berlin.”
As we look around the world today, a melancholy spectacle greets our gaze. The Soviet Union is no more, but a minatory if diminished Russia has taken its place. A possibly nuclear Iran. A confirmed nuclear North Korea and Pakistan. Preposterous anti-American strongmen like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. An increasingly rampant threat of Islamofascism. The enemies of freedom and the West are more numerous than ever. It is here that the two deepest lessons of the Berlin Wall lie. First, that tyranny frankly confronted can be defeated. But, second, that the victory of freedom is never final: it must always be renewed not only through our willingness to acknowledge and struggle against evil, but also through a forthright proclamation of our own founding principles. It is this last requirement of freedom that seems most difficult for Western intellectuals. To quote Kolakowski once more, there is “one Great Cause that has persisted more or less intact throughout the past decades in the Leftist mentality: the loathing of democratic countries. Allegiances changed, but if there was something enduring in Leftist politics, it was this: in any conflict between a tyrannical and democratic country, the tyrants were right and democracy wrong.” One would have thought that the admonitory tale of the Berlin Wall would provide an incontrovertible disabusement. Alas, it is a lesson we have yet to absorb.
President Obama is too disinterested, and occupied accomplishing nothing, to attend the 20th anniversary celebration in Berlin.
P.S.: Here's another rumination on 1989 and another fall.
Those who don't remember, or who never learned about communism, might want to read this short essay.
Wednesday, November 4. 2009
The Associated Press screwed the pooch*, in multiple ways, in its reporting of the release by the JFK Presidential Library of previously classified recordings of President Kennedy's meetings in 1963 with advisors about Vietnam. The discussions involve the unauthorized cable from the State Department lending support to a coup against South Vietnam’s President Diem.
1. The JFK Presidential Library, administered by the National Archives, expressly admonishes in its press release: “Members of the media are cautioned against making historical conclusions based on the sound clips and transcript alone.”
The AP’s report, instead, leads with, “Newly released White House tapes from the Vietnam War era portray President John F. Kennedy wrestling over the fate of South Vietnam's strongman in a situation that appears to mirror President Barack Obama's quandary today in dealing with Afghanistan's shaky government.” The AP’s headline: “Tapes show Kennedy was conflicted over Saigon coup” My local newspaper one-upped the AP by changing the headline to “Like Obama with Afghanistan, Kennedy had issues with an ally.” (Sorry, the website for the San Diego Union-Tribune is still down, but once up you can find the link there.)
2. The AP report concludes with a sheer ignorance by its reporter, Barry Schweid: “The battlefield situation gradually worsened for South Vietnam and the United States, and the conflict drew to a close under President Richard M. Nixon. All U.S. ground troops were gone by March 1973, and the United States evacuated Saigon in April 1975.”
In fact, the battlefield situation, after the governing and combat chaos spawned by the US backed 1963 coup against Diem, stabilized and, indeed, markedly improved after the almost total decimation of the Viet Cong during and after Tet ’68, then under President Nixon’s turning command over to General Abrams (see here) whose direction reduced the North Vietnamese forces to barely subsisting across the borders in sanctuaries, then with US logistics and airpower backing it up the South Vietnamese Army roundly defeating the North Vietnamese invasion of 1972. It was the post-Watergate abandonment of US pledges to supply airpower and arms to South Vietnam, perpetrated by the liberal majority that got control of the US Congress, that led to the downfall of South Vietnam to the massive invasion from North Vietnam in 1975.
3. In between, the AP doesn’t bother to mention that JFK’s Ambassador to Vietnam, Frederick Nolting, in the recordings released says, “my view is that there is no one that I know of who can – who has a reasonably good prospect of holding this fragmented, divided country together except Diem.” Many careful scholars of Vietnam have documented that Diem was falsely portrayed by some influentials in the media and within the US government’s advisors. The coup unleashed years of governmental instability and weakness within Vietnam, requiring heavier US commitment of troops to hold and reverse the unleashed downslide in South Vietnam’s defenses. (See, for example, here.)
4. President Kennedy, in the period in these tapes, is not in favor of the coup unleashed by his State Department. In effect, though, he at least ultimately acquiesced.
In no substantive way does the situation in Vietnam during the 1960’s parallel that in Afghanistan today, except in the muddled thinking within our White House and Congress, poor MSM reporting, and the American people’s declining confidence in and tolerance for unsuccessful half-way measures.
Tuesday, November 3. 2009
Sunday, November 1. 2009
When I left New York City in 1968, after graduating college, I like many of my fellow graduates from working and lower middle-class families sought our opportunities elsewhere, and most metropolitan elsewheres were better than NYC. The job market was still strong in NYC, but opportunities for advancement better elsewhere, the costs of living and taxes lower, the public services better, public safety higher.
Today, the New York City disease has spread more widely around the country. Most major metropolitan areas, the hub of most states, have seen their infrastructure serving the upward mobility and the financial and personal security of their upward-striving or holding-on working and middle class deteriorate over the past 40-years.
Still, there’s striking differences among the states, and the results show.
William Voegeli writes in today’s Los Angeles Times, "The Golden State isn't worth it." Voegli compares California to Texas, “Our high-benefit/high-tax model no longer works, especially compared with low-tax states like Texas.” Voegeli says, “These alternatives, of course, define the basic argument between liberals and conservatives over what it means to get the size and scope of government right….[T]he superior public goods that supposedly justify the high taxes just aren't being delivered.”
It’s not ideologues who are moving. For example, I recently ran into a couple I was friendly with in San Diego during the ‘90’s, he a French doctor-scientist and she a Dutch-Indonesian. They compared San Diego favorably in all respects (except cuisine) to living in Europe, and were happy to be here. Then they moved to a better job in Silicon Valley, where despite higher income they could afford a house half the size and they felt surrounded by selfishly aggressive strivers. Then they moved to Austin, Texas, where they could afford a much larger house for their family, in an excellent neighborhood with top schools, the cultural life is vibrant, and the daily courtesies among residents are welcoming and provide good role models for their children. These products of Europe are a reality test of America.
Voegeli continues: “Overall, the Census Bureau's latest data show that state and local government expenditures for all purposes in 2005-06 were 46.8% higher in California than in Texas: $10,070 per person compared with $6,858.” Between 2000 and 2007, “16 of the 17 states with the lowest tax levels had positive "net internal migration," in the Census Bureau's language, while 14 of the 17 states with the highest taxes had negative net internal migration.”
Why?
The high-benefit/high-tax model can work only if things are demonstrably not equal -- if the public goods purchased by the high taxes far surpass the quality, quantity and impact of those available to people who live in states with low taxes.
Today's public benefits fail that test, as urban scholar Joel Kotkin of NewGeography.com and Chapman University told the Los Angeles Times in March: "Twenty years ago, you could go to Texas, where they had very low taxes, and you would see the difference between there and California. Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California's government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class.
How?
None of this happens by accident. California's interlocking directorate of government employee unions, issue activists, careerists and campaign contributors has become increasingly aggressive and adept at using rhetoric extolling public benefits for all to deliver targeted advantages to itself. As a result, the political reality of the high-benefit/high-tax model is that its public goods are, increasingly, neither public nor good. Instead, the beneficiaries are the providers of the public services, and certain favored or connected constituencies, rather than the general population.
What to expect?
The recession will eventually end, and California's finances will get better. Given its powerful systemic bias against efficient and effective public services, however, the question is whether the state will ever get well. California's public sector has pinned its hopes for avoiding fundamental reform on increased federal aid to replace dollars the state's fed-up taxpayers refuse to surrender. In other words, residents in the other 49 states -- the new 49ers? -- would enjoy the privilege of paying California's taxes. Their one consolation will be not having to endure its lousy public services.
If, on the other hand, America's taxpayers (and China's bond buyers) succumb to bailout fatigue, California may reach the point at which, after every alternative has been exhausted, it is forced to try governing itself competently.
It’s not just California, or New York City, but throughout much of America today that we’re seeing the hollowing out of the infrastructure and services and opportunities that built America’s uniqueness and success compared to the rest of the world. And, big-government advocates are clamoring for yet higher taxes. The New York Times reports today that “Faced with anxiety in financial markets about the huge federal deficit and the potential for it to become an electoral liability for Democrats” the White House and congressional Democrats are seeking some way to reduce the huge federal deficits they have created, and that more taxes are their prescription.
Government workers and their unions are prime beneficiaries of our heavy taxes. Most of even the made-up stats recently released about jobs saved or created by the federal appropriation of the near $1-trillion “stimulus” show relatively few and most of those among government workers. The $1-trillion, likely to be much more, cost of the wholesale upheaval of 1/6th of the US economy in health care – which really only serves about the 25% of those who truly need it who don’t have insurance at the expense of the 85% of Americans who do have coverage -- will fall heavily upon the working and middle class. The $trillions of indirect and direct taxes of the “cap-and-trade” illusory environmental bill will also add $thousands each year to each American's costs of living, to the economic benefit of profiteering fat cats and their politicos who garner contributions.
At root this may be an ideological battle, as Voegeli says. But, it is really a practical battle between those who aspire and work for a better life and those relatively few who would squander its underpinnings for their own greedy benefits. The real populist revolt is already shaking Washington and state capitals, and much more is to come.
Thursday, October 29. 2009
Remember this piece from Am Thinker a couple of years ago?
From Patriot Post:
Our Constitution's principle author, James Madison, wrote, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined [and] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce."
Concerning the legislature's authority, Thomas Jefferson asserted: "[G]iving [Congress] a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole [Constitution] to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please. Certainly, no such universal power was meant to be given them. [The Constitution] was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect."
Sunday, October 25. 2009
This is a re-post of an NJ piece from a couple of years ago -
There are people living "deviant" lifestyles in the Northeast, and, sadly, they are frequently invisible and marginalized. After much searching to locate the most deviant family your reporter could find in western Massachusetts, we decided to interview Jim and Sarah D. We summarize our interview with this extremely deviant, euphemistically-termed "traditional family," here:
 Social deviant Jim D. 42, leads what we might best term a paleo life, largely out of touch with modern reality and seemingly oblivious to the exciting opportunities of modern lifestyle choices. Married for 21 years, with three kids, Jim drives 25 minutes to work each morning in his 8 year-old Subaru sedan. A college grad, Jim, on his fourth job, is CFO of a medium-sized manufacturing corporation based in Pittsfield, MA, making around $120,000 per year, not including generous benefits.
"I worked my way up the ladder to reach my level of incompetence," he laughs. "The job is a daily challenge, so I try to meet it each day determined to have some fun with it, and to rise to the challenges with a can-do spirit, corny as that sounds. I go to work every morning wondering what sort of pitch will be thrown to me, and hoping at least to hit a single. When I get stuck and confused, I call Sarah to talk it over." Really? "She's my partner, in every way. We joke that by combining the two of us, we add up to one barely competent human."
Jim claims his wife is "great to me and for me" and says "I love my kids to death." They go to their Presbyterian Church together every Sunday, and they tithe. "Budgeting our tithing is a blessing to us," says Sarah. Jim and Sarah have a date night every Thursday night, and family Sunday dinner with his in-laws.
They have lived modestly, and have accumulated over $500,000 in their 401-K savings. Jim says "Business hasn't been loyal to its employees for 20 years, so you have to take care of yourself. That's fine with me. My Dad did it by always living below his means, which were minimal for a long time, and I do the same. Unlike my Dad, though, I doubt anyone will let me continue working as long as I want to."
What did his Dad do? "He quit high school to join the Army. Hated school. They stuck him in the Corps of Engineers. Then worked up to a construction supervisor as a civilian, which he still does. He will never quit work, although he could retire now if he wanted to. He owns three houses; rents two and lives in one. The job gives him something to grouse about, and gets him out of the house and out into the world."
When asked what were the most important things in his life, Jim answers "Knowing God and being a responsible adult male. Working hard, paying my bills, being a good parent and husband, a good citizen and a good friend." For hobbies, Jim and Sarah enjoy gardening, jogging in the Berkshire Hills, and cooking together. When their first child was born, they gave their TV away and have been without one since. "Brain rot," says Sarah. "It interferes with family time, and we didn't want the kids to be passive zombies."
Sarah was a grammar school teacher until the kids came. "I would never have married a woman who wanted to work while we had young kids," Jim says. "That's an experiment with human nature I would not want to subject them to." As the kids enter high school, Sarah is planning to return to teaching high school English this time, having made herself "an amateur expert" in Medieval and Renaissance literature over the past 15 years. "I polished up my French, and learned Italian." What's her dream job? "Teaching Beowulf and Dante."
"Unlike Sarah, I was the first kid in my family to ever go to college," Jim says. "My first day at UMass, my Mom insisted I wear a jacket and tie. That is how traditional - or out to lunch - my parents were then. Mom baked a huge layer cake when I got my admission letter. They were both children of immigrants, my Dad's parents from Romania and my Mom's from Ireland." He says "UMass set me up for a fine career, but I had no big dreams. I just wanted to be able to support my family, and to find a way to have a fairly good time doing it. Math was easy for me, so I majored in it, but I made sure I got myself educated as widely as I had time for, while staying on the Rugby team and without too many drunken nights. I took some accounting classes to be practical about the future, but I met Sarah in a Chaucer class. She was cute as hell, and I said to her after class 'I don't think I belong in this class.' She said 'Let's discuss it.' The rest is history."
Politics? As Sarah says "We go to every Town Meeting, and we speak up when an issue is important to us. We don't obsess too much about national politics. We are local." When pressed on the issue, they confessed "Well, we do listen to Rush when we have the chance, but we are usually too busy."
Wednesday, October 21. 2009
Via Shaw at PJ:
...too many modern liberals bristle when we suggest that checks, limits, and restrictions must be placed on this government largess. “Why,” I have been asked, “should I have to provide proof for some sort of means test in order to receive assistance funded by tax dollars?” Indeed, these same people will question why there should be limits on welfare payments or how we can expect recipients to begin working after a period of time in order to receive such benefits.
Tuesday, October 20. 2009
Sunday, October 18. 2009
From Nyquist's What the Founding Fathers Would Say from last year:
The United States is a great country, even now. But the country has followed a path of degeneration via political correctness. To recognize this truth one only has to read Mariam Grossman’s Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student. Grossman is a psychiatrist who works at an American university. “Radical politics pervades my profession,” she explains, “and common sense has vanished.” According to Grossman, “There is a tacit approval of promiscuity and experimentation…. Infection with one of the sexually transmitted viruses is a rite of passage; it comes with the territory. Abortion is the removal of unwanted tissue, sort of like a tonsillectomy.”
The main threat to any great country, quite naturally, comes from within.
Read the whole thing.
Saturday, October 10. 2009
 The WSJ notes:
Germany's health-care system was brought to life in 1883 by Otto von Bismarck and became the model for virtually every such state-directed national insurance plan since. Alas, the German system is starting to come apart at the financial seams. Germany's system relies on a handful of state-supported health insurers. This week they informed the government that the system was on the brink of a financial shortfall equal to nearly $11 billion.
Read the whole thing about how it all went wrong.
This site reminds us of Bismarck's role in the creation of the modern Fascist-Welfare state.
One snippet of Krauthammer's Oct 5 speech at the Manhattan Institude on foreign policy (h/t, Gateway):
The whole speech is here. Worth the time.
Tuesday, October 6. 2009
- The FTC and the internet: Insanity, inanity - and danger.
- Also Insty: YOU CAN’T SAY THAT: At the UN, Obama Administration backs limits on free speech. As the piece in the Weekly Standard begins:
The Obama administration has marked its first foray into the UN human rights establishment by backing calls for limits on freedom of expression. The newly-minted American policy was rolled out at the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council, which ended in Geneva on Friday. American diplomats were there for the first time as full Council members and intent on making friends.
That is creepy.
- And in Ottowa, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant testify to the Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Monday (h/t, SDA). Videos at YouTube. Here's one of them (the second one):
The life of a conservative professor in America. Am Thinker
Monday, October 5. 2009
James Capretta makes the case that the real national economic crisis is the growth of middle class entitlements in his excellent essay, The New Middle Class Contract.
The danger as he sees it (and as I see it) is to risk suffocating the goose that lays the golden eggs which have (not really) paid for our existing middle-class entitlements.
One quote from his essay:
Some liberal politicians, including the president, have sought to use this moment of instability — when all past certainties seem suddenly in question — to advance their longstanding agenda and expand the role of the state in health care, energy, education, and other sectors, taking on new spending commitments and in effect exacerbating the dangers of the old middle-class contract. As Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said in November 2008: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
But the shock of the economic crisis may also make Americans more open to serious entitlement reforms that Emanuel, President Obama, and many other Democrats have long resisted. The logic of the case for reform is much like that of the case for the recent emergency interventions: the need for a bold response to an enormous problem, aimed at regaining some equilibrium and allowing again for sustainable economic growth and prosperity. This is the time to explain to the public just how grave the prospects for our entitlement system — and therefore for our larger economy — really are, and to argue for a serious and sensible change of course.
The impulse to insulate the middle class from the cost consequences of their choices — an impulse that has defined our longstanding middle-class contract — has done great harm and stands to do far more. The remedy must be to redesign our entitlements so that the choices the middle class makes in terms of work, family, and health care will promote more productivity, efficiency, and wealth, rather than the shrinking of the labor force and the growth of government.
Done right, a new arrangement would both strengthen our fiscal outlook and improve the economic standing of American families.
Yes, he is an idealist. His whole essay at National Affairs.
Sunday, October 4. 2009
At First Principles. Just one quote:
The British, seeking to adapt to the aspirations of a modern, democratizing age, weaned themselves from Magna Carta. The Americans, “born equal, instead of becoming so,” in Tocqueville’s phrase, found in Magna Carta a symbol of political liberty, silently ignoring its feudal excrescences and adopting the common law insofar as it was, in the later words of Joseph Story, “applicable to the situation of the colony, and . . . not . . . altered, repealed, or modified by any of our subsequent legislation.” The Americans eventually established many of the Charter’s provisions in written constitutions of their own.
Saturday, October 3. 2009
 All the talk about Letterman reminds us of our prescient post from June, Hey Jenny Slater, Hey Jenny Slater, which was a reaction to Letterman's unfunny jokes about Sarah Palin's baby. One quote from the post:
Letterman's congenital problem manifested itself in spades. He is a Beta male in an industry filled with Beta males. Even the industry's a Beta. He's not even an entertainer -- his job is to talk to and about entertainers. They say politics is show-business for ugly people, and the similarities are manifest. Politics is often home to Beta males that try to cut in front of the big men on life's campus by the side door. Same deal. That's why they get along famously.
That's why men like Letterman always end up groping the help. All the Beta males do this. Look at John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Bob Packwood, Newt Gingrich... this will grow monotonous. They're lame, and know it, and so they try to get themselves in a position of power over the men they used to resent, and the women they never had a shot at. But the men are all dorks of one sort or another, and the women they never had a shot at are still out of their range. They can lord it over whatever women are handy, but eventually find that they are in the thrall of someone as defective as they are.
Re-read that good post if you want. Link above.
Toon from I Own The World via Am Digest
Tuesday, September 29. 2009
At Am Thinker, The Perils of a 'Policy' President.
In my view, the real problem isn't the politics - it's the hubris. Few people who enjoy creating big plans and schemes for other peoples' lives have ever even tried to run a candy shop. That's the problem.
Saturday, September 19. 2009
 As you know, Irving Kristol died yesterday at 89.
Memorandum has a good selection of essays on Kristol's life this morning.
From a WSJ piece, this was from a 1975 Kristol WSJ commentary:
Symbolic Politics and Liberal Reform, Dec. 15, 1972
"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," wrote Oscar Wilde, and I would like to suggest that the same can be said for bad politics. . . .
It seems to me that the politics of liberal reform, in recent years, shows many of the same characteristics as amateur poetry. It has been more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer rather than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves. Indeed, the outstanding characteristic of what we call "the New Politics" is precisely its insistence on the overwhelming importance of revealing, in the public realm, one's intense feelings—we must "care," we must "be concerned," we must be "committed." Unsurprisingly, this goes along with an immense indifference to consequences, to positive results or the lack thereof.
Roger Kimball's piece yesterday quotes this bit from Kristol:
The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society — the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions — are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will — perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably — twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.
Tuesday, September 15. 2009
Nothing at all against eggheads. There is a place for them, but not in roles of power.
Academics and eggheads spend their professional lives insulated from the realities that most of us deal with every day. They play with ideas, and are not familiar with running a business and making a payroll, for example, while most normal folks spend their days dealing with tough realities and unsecure, demanding, worrisome, and often unpleasant jobs.
This from Why eggheads shouldn't be running things:
Making government policy from radical, unfiltered, untested ideas turns citizens into guinea pigs and puts the country at high risk for destabilization and other unpredictable consequences.
Part of what allows academia to produce radical ideas is the absence of failure. Their ideas are rarely applied to real world problems. You don't have to "go back to the drawing board" unless you have a reason to do so.
Academia isn't a mill for practical solutions. It is intended as an environment for expanding thought to open the mind to new possibilities unbridled by law, ethics, morality, practicality and other elements of civilized society. "Eggheads" in academia are on the far side of the spectrum from those who should make policy to govern.
Editor's comment/addendum:
This discussion reminds me of a recent conversation with the Dylanologist about the history of cartography. In Medieval times, there were two sorts of maps of the known world: academic schematic maps with Jerusalem in the center, all circled by an ocean, and there were maps made by sailors. The former category represented an idealized view of the world, and were useless for travel. Idea-driven, not even intended to be fully realistic. The Hereford map is one of many examples:
The(se) maps were not used as navigation tools but instead served as visual histories, teaching objects, and illustrations of religious or philosophic ways of understanding the world and what was seen as God’s creation.
In fact, they were pursuing a "narrative" about the world.
At the same time, European sailors were producing practical Portolan maps to go from port to port. These maps, presumably ignored by, or a matter of of indifference to, the ivory towers, were useful and accurate. Here's a well-developed medieval Portolan map:
Monday, September 14. 2009
Collect your best debating points here: Hawk vs. Dove on crime and punishment. Dalrymple.
As a retired prison shrink, Dalrymple knows whereof he opines.
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