Saturday, December 22. 2007
I'd vote for Fred with pleasure. I like him, I like his ads and I do keep those guys and gals in my prayers. (I do like plenty of the other guys too, though.) h/t, Insty
 A short piece at Stumbling helped me get a grip on a theme which had been nagging at me in an unformed way. As he says,
"Freedom doesn't make us happy." If my memory serves me, Freud said sort of the same thing about freedom from neurosis. Indeed freedom does not, nor is it intended to, by the usual uses of the term happiness. However, everyone defines happiness somewhat differently for themselves, and many do not find it to be a worthy pursuit in and of itself. Indeed, many look back in their lives and recognize that some of their toughest times were their "happiest" in retrospect because they were contending with challenge and discovering things about themselves and about life. Read the Stumbling piece. A QQQ earlier today noted that democracy is simply an effort to provide individual freedom from State power (but it can be a path to tyranny too). We believe that freedom has intrinsic value, and is a correlate of the dignity and capacity for self-determination of the individual. It is thus a Western ideal. Serfs and slaves know where they live and where their next meal is coming from, and thus have a foundation for material happiness. Being free is much more daunting and may not be for everybody (as Dr. Bliss often says) - but you get to chose your meal and take your own chances. In a free country, which the US still mostly is, each of us citizens can be an aristocrat of the human spirit. (And with a little luck and a little determination each one of us, even those on welfare, can live with more material blessings than King George lll had - eg endless hot water, large-screen TVs - which I will not permit in my house -, iPods, genuine medical treatments, central heat, and abundant fresh, healthy, delicious food from all over the world.) And, regardless of all of the above, I wish our readers a Happy Christmas and a re-birth of the Holy Spirit in all who seek it. Editor's comment: Yes, materialists understand simple animal happiness but not spiritual and psychological aspirations, and they tend to misunderestimate the soul and the capacities of everyone, except themselves, to figure out life and reality.
 How Monica Lewinsky turned journalism inside-out: Surber. Also, I found myself wondering whether anyone has named their baby Monica in the past ten years.
Photo: Monica with Bill, 1995.
Much of climate debate is exactly backwards. Advocates are spending far too much time arguing over how important that it is that others change their behavior, usually in ways that those doing the advocating would want regardless of climate change. In this way climate change becomes not a problem to be solved but a political weapon in service of other goals. R. Pielke, Jr., via Flares
Friday, December 21. 2007
My 16 year-old daughter would not let me go to bed last night until she finished trying to convince me to support Ron Paul for President. She had many points to make, with many references to Constitutional details. She had been a Fred fan up until the past few weeks. God bless her, she does know her Constitution. And, with this post, we will probably not mention Paul's name again on this site. Why not? Because I think he's a crank, and we try to stay away from cranks. We are cranky enough as it is.
Iraq news coverage drastically declines as war news improves - with graph. Sister Toldjah
From No Left Turns, a quote: The Journals of the late Arthur Schlesinger have received a good deal of attention, but most of it has concerned Schlesinger’s writing style, personality, or the broad topic of keeping and publishing diaries. The strangely neglected question of Schlesinger’s politics is finally addressed by the New Yorker’s George Packer, writing as one liberal assessing another. “In [Schlesinger’s] long record of speeches, conferences, lunches at the Century, and dinners at Mortimer’s,” observes Packer, “there’s an unmistakable sense that liberal politics belonged to a small group of the rich and famous who all knew one another and knew what was best for the rest of the country, while knowing less and less about the rest of the country. . . . It’s possible, even if you agree with almost every position Schlesinger held, to find the smugness and complacency not just annoying but fatal. His crowd made liberalism a fat target for the New Right; Reagan and his heirs seized the language and claims of populism from liberals who believed that they had had permanent possession [of it] ever since Roosevelt.”
Read the whole brief piece.
...the conflation of democracy with liberty is fallacious but I realise that we have quite a bit of work to do at the axiomatic level to bring that once obvious and widely accepted fact back into the broader intellectual meta-context. The notion that "our democracy depends on individual freedom" strongly implies that freedom should or does serve democracy. I would argue that democracy is not an end in and of itself at all but at best merely a tool by which freedom is pursued by mitigating the power of the state. Samizdata, on The Ideological Divide
Thursday, December 20. 2007
Here. h/t, Don Luskin My favorite: "An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well." -- Lead sentence to a May 2 front-page story by sportswriter Alan Schwarz about an academic paper alleging discrimination in foul calls against black NBA players.
From Borowitz: December 17, 2007.
Clinton Says Being Married to Hillary 'Has Never Influenced My Behavior;' Former President Defends Role as Campaign Spokesman
Addressing questions about his objectivity as a campaigner for his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), former President Bill Clinton said today that being married to Sen. Clinton "has never influenced my behavior in the least little bit."
During an interview on PBS' "The Charlie Rose Show," the former president said that those who accuse him of favoritism towards his wife "have got it all wrong, because, you know, Charlie, I've pretty much lived my entire life as if I wasn't married to her at all."
Mr. Clinton added that in order to demonstrate his objectivity about Sen. Clinton's qualifications, he would remove his wedding ring and keep it off for the duration of the campaign.
"As far as I'm concerned, from this day on I'm single," the former president said.
During the free-wheeling one-hour chat, aides to Mr. Clinton gathered in the studio control room and frantically attempted to induce the engineers to cut short the interview, with one aide trying to pull a cable out of its socket in the hopes that it would plunge the studio into darkness.
But their efforts were in vain as the former president continued his unbridled monologue, at one point touching on the similarities between a president and a prostitute.
"Being a president is a lot like being a thousand-dollar-a-night call girl, Charlie," he said. "Experience matters."
 Putin.
Which is the greater lost cause: Russia or Time Magazine? Authoritarian-oriented Russia always loves The Man With The Whip. But why Time?
We never signed Kyoto, but we did better than all of them. Insty. Not that it matters to me at all. I believe that it's all baloney. Speaking of which, what is Surface Air Temperature anyway? I thought only the tropospheric temp mattered. Meanwhile, Germany pitches a fit about controlling emissions of their cars. Maybe they didn't think this stuff applied to them. Hey, why doesn't Mercedes just make a Peel P50:
Wednesday, December 19. 2007
 Attack Machine is on a subject we have discussed recently: the desire of some voters, mainly on the left, to seek more from politicians, or from government, than can be possibly delivered.
We recall that, when Christ arrived in Jerusalem, much of the enthusiastic crowd who greeted him with palm leaves were counting on him to be a political, if not military, savior for Judea - not a saver of souls for Judea and the world. Indeed, that was the meaning of the palms. The piece, Obama as Messiah, quotes Oprah: “We need a leader who’s going to touch our souls. Who’s going to make us feel differently about one another. Who’s going to remind us that we are one another’s keepers. That we are only as strong as the weakest among us.” “Are you the one?” It’s a question the entire nation is asking — is he the one? South Carolina — I do believe he’s the one.”
I am only as strong as the weakest amongst me? Give me a break. It's a sad day when people equate their government with their country, and seek inspiration, strength or - God forbid - spiritual injections from political leaders. It is infantile, un-American, and too close to blasphemy in its sentiment. False idols, false gods. It's pitiful. Pitiful because in a land of hard-won freedom we have earned the adult privilege of building our own lives, by our own individual lights, informed by our own spirits and our own gifts and our own beliefs. Therein lies the beauty and the grandeur of it - the faith in the individual - and that is why we hire random jerks to do the grimy government work: it's so they can protect us from enemies and tyranny, and to keep us free to pursue our personal goals in our own ways, as best we can. That is all I ask of these job-seekers. If anybody imagines that a politician or the government will change their life for the better, they are nuts. It does not take much history education to know that. In fact, the only reason we ever mention politics on this blog is because we wish to be left alone, and because some other arrogant jerks without normal difficult jobs, with the fantasy that they somehow know better than us, wish to bother us and to abscond with our hard-won freedoms and our hard-earned shekels - representing our sweat and time and tears and, in fact, our lives - to keep their stupid easy jobs. We do not appreciate that particular scam.
It's time we linked this documentary again, with ice and snow everywhere. It's especially good on capturing the "new green morality" which is supposed to supplant the old moralities.
We are truant in not having added The Atlantic's brilliant Megan McArdle to our blogroll. We will. A quote from Three Cheers for Retail (h/t Insty) - I remain amazed by how often I think I have found a wonderful link, later to find that Insty has posted it already. Does he really have a day job? Assessing the health of the economy, we tend to get obsessed with stuff: how much are we making? This is why lost manufacturing jobs so obsess trade foes. But manufacturing isn't where the economic beef is, and hasn't been for some time. Distribution is the dominant force of change in our lives now, whether the distribution vehicle is Wal-Mart, and iPod, or the internet. Retailers: God rest ye merry, gentlemen. Hopefully not atop your piles of unsold merchandise.
Our blog friend Bert Prelutsky is a Jewish agnostic. A quote from his essay, I'm Happy to Live in a Christian Nation: Even among some of my friends and relatives, there are those who half-expect their Christian neighbors to start organizing pogroms any day now. They remain unconvinced that Hitler and the Nazis were pagans. And even when I point out that it was American and British soldiers, mainly Christians, who brought down the Third Reich and liberated the concentration camps, it often falls on deaf ears.
A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation. Max Gluckman, as quoted in a piece at Overcoming Bias about the guardians of Ayn Rand
Good point: How come drunk women are assumed irresponsible and cannot give consent, but drunk guys are expected to make sober, sexless choices when they have a bit of a buzz going, and the girl next to him looks like a horse but, to him at that moment, looks like Marilyn Monroe? Englishman's Castle. Isn't that based on a sexist assumption that women are mentally frail, but men are strong? Most men aspire to mental, physical, emotional and spiritual strength. It doesn't mean that they achieve it.
Tuesday, December 18. 2007
Elder Bush denies Bill Clinton notion. How stupid do they think we are?
From a piece in Opinion Journal, a quote: Ironically, these government handouts are creating the tuition problem. Tuition has risen about three percentage points faster than inflation every year for the past quarter-century. At the same time, the feds have put more and more money behind student loans and other financial aid. The government is slowly becoming a third-party tuition payer, with all the price distortions one would expect. Every time tuition rises, the government makes up the difference; colleges thus cheerfully raise tuition (and budgets), knowing the government will step in.
and Our financial-aid system also hurts middle-class applicants. Parents who have saved money for their child's tuition quickly find that, by the strange calculus of financial aid, they are charged more for college tuition than if they had blown their savings on a bigger house.
Read the whole thing.
Stanley Kurtz at The Corner
EJ Dionne wonders whether Hillary Clinton's arrogance has gotten the better of her. I wonder that too. Isn't she just another one of those thousands of arrogant, self-satisfied Wellesley gals, born on third base and thinking that they hit a triple, who are taught that they are anointed to run the world? And how come she didn't get into Radcliffe if she's so darn smart? What were her SATs? My question: Did Obama pull a rope-a-dope on her? Related: The anybody-but-Hillary vote. Apparently younger men cannot stand her, and some older women seem to like her, for whatever reason.
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