Maggie's Farm

TNR has always had more influence than its small (and shrinking) subscription base would suggest.

As I was reading Roger Simon's bit on the subject of TNR's most recent suicidal hijinks with Beauchamp, the answer came to me to the question "Why does anyone care at all about TNR?" After all, TNR has fewer  subscribers than Maggie's Farm has visitors in one month - and we are tiny.

We care not only because TNR was once a serious, thoughful magazine which many respected even if disagreeing (up through Andrew Sullivan's excellent editorship), but the main reason we care is because many of us policy and politics junkies relied on TNR in our foolish and liberal youths. We eagerly awaited its arrival in the mail. We have a sentimental attachment to the old rag. She always made us think, and she was always literate - more so than any blog I know. Way beyond what Timesweek was.

However, even my considerable sentimentality has its limits. TNR has passed them at this point.

I feel the same way about the NYT which I cancelled in disgust two years ago: I like the Book Review; I like their Arts pages; I like their Food stuff; I like their Theater stuff and and Car stuff and the Science section, etc - but their corrupting political partisanship and their PC obsession spoils all of the good stuff for me. Dang - I guess I could say the same thing about The New Yorker too since Tina Brown destroyed it for me.

Sad, sad, and sad. Past loves, all undone by a grandiosity that made them want to change the world in their own image, instead of being satisfied with the highly worthy and noble goal of illuminating it.

How much does happiness depend on money and opportunity? Or is happiness just a fortunate state of mind? I tend to think the latter.

Money provides choices, which are wonderful things, but choices do not make people happy. Indeed, I believe that many would be happier with fewer choices in our choice-intoxicated America.

Arthur Brooks in City Journal on What Really Buys Happiness? It's mostly about income. A quote:

Edwards is one of a group of liberal politicians, policymakers, and social activists who want to reduce economic inequality through greater taxation and redistribution of wealth. And their plan draws inspiration from a particular academic theory: that inequality is socially destructive because it makes people miserable. As a scholar working in the field of public policy, I have long witnessed hand-wringing about the alleged connection between inequality and unhappiness. What first made me doubt this prevailing view was not some new scholarly study but rather that when I questioned actual human beings about it, few expressed any shock and outrage at the enormous wealth of software moguls and CEOs. On the contrary, they tended to hope that their kids might become the next Bill Gates.

Read it all. It appears that liberals and the left tend to be unhappier people in general. Perhaps we conservatives just are genetically blessed with sunnier dispositions.

Dr. Roy Spencer on the growing numbers of AGW deniers, at TCS:

Little damage was done by the Gore-Newsweek assault, though, since the attack amounted to little more than a verbal "Well, your mama wears Army boots!" It didn't help matters that the magazine's own columnist, Robert Samuelson, published a follow-up article saying the allegation of bribes offered to scientists "was long ago discredited" and that "the story was a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading."

Next, I'm happy to report that we skeptics have been getting a steady stream of new recruits. In the last year or so, more and more scientists have been coming out of the closet and admitting they've had some doubts about this whole global warming thing.

In fact, chances are that your favorite TV weather person is a closet skeptic (unless it's Heidi Cullen). But please observe the "don't ask - don't tell" rule. Most broadcast meteorologists are not ready for the public embarrassment that would accompany their outing.

And lastly, I have been heartened by new scientific intelligence that we skeptics have been gathering. I can predict there are more surprises to come, with some pretty powerful tactical weapons yet to be deployed. Climate scientists are beginning to question long held assumptions - which is almost always the first step toward a major scientific discovery. So stay tuned.

Oh, and by the way, in the interests of a fair fight, the next time someone sees Al Gore, could you ask him to stop calling us "global warming deniers"? I don't know of anyone who denies that the Earth has warmed. I'm sure this has just been an honest misunderstanding on Mr. Gore's part, and he'll be more than happy to stop doing it.

Girding for a vigorous debate. That is good for science. Read the whole thing.

Re those Brit Christians who want to call God "Allah": I am not one of those who says "It's all the same god, so what does it matter what we call him/her/it?" They aren't "all the same," and I happen to be a happy monotheist.

I like this from Insty: "I SAY CALL HIM "HERMAN," OR I'LL START BLOWING SHIT UP."

Atheism is selling books. Joseph Bottum at First Things thinks it's about politics - and about selling books.

Brewton says, of Bottum's piece, that the Atheists are getting desperate and frustrated:

At the apogee of atheistic materialism, in the 1830s, Auguste Comte’s well-intentioned expectation was that all the world would quickly recognize the superiority of his Positivistic philosophy and its Religion of Humanity.  People from the rest of Europe, from America, and from Asia, he assumed, would all come to sit worshipfully at his feet to learn the proper new system of socialist government and its canon of materialistic ethics. 

Central to the process, of course, would be accepting the belief that there is no God other than human reason and that the proper object of worship is Man in the abstract, Humanity.

To the horror of liberal-Progressive-socialists, the world did give Comte and his followers a respectful and lengthy hearing, but didn’t like what ensued – the slaughter of tens of millions of human beings by 20th century atheists in the Soviet Union, National Socialist Germany, Red China, and elsewhere.

Today, with Christianity rebounding strongly in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and more than holding its own in the United States, the New York Times, Christopher Hitchins, Richard Dawkins, et al have become desperate to reassert the superiority of their own minds.

Socialism advances via invented crises to alarm the people, or to seduce the people, into foregoing the markets for goods and services.

It is a deceptive strategy designed to prey on the worst, most infantile instincts of Americans. Re the big lies about the uninsured, we posted the above YouTube already. Hillary goes Shrillary over socialized medicine: Gateway

I have no doubt that Hillary is a socialist, whether she admits it to herself or not. Anyone who wants the State to take over the medical businesses, which are 16% of our economy, and the oil industry, which is ? % of our economy, has a good start on taking over all of it.

Well, I know that isn't hot news. I think we may have already linked Dr. Dalrymple's speech on Cultural Confidence but, if not, we should. It confirms my long-held opinion that the Western "intelligensia" in general isn't very intelligent when it comes to the real world. A quote from a quote on the speech at Thompson:

If you believe that the history of your culture is nothing but a catalogue of horror, massacre and the oppression of others, then you will not be very assiduous in its defence once it comes under concerted attack. Among intellectuals, at any rate, the history of crimes and catastrophes is more popular than that of achievement; and this view eventually communicates itself to society at large, to the point when it is not even realized that there is any achievement to record. In any case, there is a natural tendency, at least in the modern world, to take progress for granted the moment it is made, but never to accept problems as being an inevitable part of human life… 

Two years ago the separate $20 million gifts to Harvard and Georgetown for Middle Eastern Studies programs by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal sparked a short-lived focus on what such academic programs are doing.

From a piece by John Miller at Students for Academic Freedom:

Because Middle Eastern studies aspired to immediate relevance, it became vulnerable to mixing scholarship and activism, with combustible results. Many professors believed they should become activists for positive change, such as modernization in the Arab world -- a helpful concept, but perhaps a job best left to diplomats and nonprofit groups.

"A lot of what they do is just glorified advocacy journalism," says Rubin of AEI. To complicate matters, Middle Eastern studies isn't rooted in a traditional academic discipline. Like African-American studies and women's studies, it's an interdisciplinary response to dramatic events and social movements. Because of this, the field has a tendency to attract teachers and students with passionate political beliefs that can get in the way of objective research. Although several sub-fields of Middle Eastern studies have flourished, especially in early history, art and architecture, and a few other areas, these subjects are far removed from the modern strategic concerns that Middle Eastern studies might be able to address.

Read the whole thing. h/t, Minding the Campus

Malanga at City Journal on "The New Privatization." Apparently infrastructure has market value, so it makes sense to wonder why governments should be running these things. A quote:

Daley seeks federal approval to auction the rights to operate Midway, Chicago’s second-largest airport, as part of a federal project to demonstrate the benefits of privatization. Midway would be the second airport, and the first major hub, to enter the program. (The first was Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, New York, which the Pataki administration privatized in 2000.) In Colorado, the independent state authority that operates the Northwest Parkway, a Denver-area toll road, is evaluating bids for a 50-year lease to run it; the transaction could raise $500 million. New Jersey governor Jon Corzine is thinking of selling the New Jersey Turnpike, which could yield some $20 billion, though he’s also considering floating municipal bonds, backed by the turnpike’s tolls, which would raise less money but allow the state to continue operating it. Many smaller-scale deals are in the works, too. The Macquarie director said last fall that he anticipated as many as 25 toll-road privatizations in the U.S. over the next two years, potentially pouring $80 billion into government coffers.

Selling existing assets may turn out to be only a small part of this promising story. With far more money to deploy than there are public assets to sell, investors are now vying to help governments build and operate new infrastructure, and budget-squeezed states are taking them up on their offers.

Read the whole thing. Yes, that is the Brooklyn Bridge.

h/t, Town Hall

Wake up before it's too late. And no, it's not about the Moslems this time. It's about Brussels. The Economist details the deliberate deceit. A quote:

A month ago Luxembourg's prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, observed that new treaties always involve hefty transfers of sovereignty, before asking if it was “intelligent” to draw attention to this in places like Britain. And last week, the other convention vice-chairman, Jean-Luc Dehaene, a former Belgian prime minister, offered a broader conclusion. In an interview with Le Soir, Mr Dehaene declared it “dangerous talk” to want too much “transparency and clarity” in the EU.