Monday, May 7. 2007
"It ain't my first rodeo." The Fred Thompson Breitbart TV interview.
 Poverty is, of course, relative. The functional American poor have cars, washing machines, and cell phones. Poverty statistics themselves can be a snare and a delusion, especially if they are defined as the bottom whatever-% of the population, as the Brits do.
If you use that method, there will always be a bottom whatever-%, no matter what sort of safety net is provided through government, and our amazing abundance of American charities, most of which are desperate to find somebody - anybody - to help. In fact, if you declare yourself poor in this neck of the woods, 20 government agencies and 20 charities will descend upon you like vultures - if only to justify their existence. Poverty in the US is defined as below a $20,000 (declared) income, not by a percentage. I include "declared" in parentheses because there is a heck of a lot of black market labor out there where the boss would far rather hand you a pile of bills than put you on the payroll. We all see it, daily, just as well all see folks who will only accept cash. Is "poverty" a useful concept at all, nowadays? I wonder. Or is it like "global warming" - just a handy excuse to expand government and entitlements? Tools for politicians? What rankles me is that American poverty figures are driven by political agendas rather than by truth-seeking. Thus American poverty can include recent high school grads in their first job living at home. Or grad students, or hippies living off the land in northern California. Or addicts who don't get to work. Or crusty Appalachian hill-dwellers who don't like to come down to town to work (the original hippies), but poach, grow some stuff, make a little 'shine, and send the wife to town for the monthly check. Or other sorts of voluntarily poor such as those who won't move to where the jobs are, or rural and inner-city single 17 year-old moms with four kids. Or those whose second jobs are paid under the table. Or an unmarried couple where the partner works part-time at WalMart. The icing on the cake, though, is that American income figures do not include any government or charitable transfers, grants (welfare, Social Security Disability, unemployment checks, etc), housing subsides or the value of subsidized housing, or other benefits such as food stamps, child care, and Medicaid. If that money is not included, there is nothing government can do to change the numbers. Furthermore, poverty numbers do not take assets into account - just income. Thus I would be a poverty stat by being a 70 year-old Maine potato farmer with a paid-off 150-acre farm, living on Social Security in the big old family farmhouse, and selling $16,000 of potatoes every year. (I like to use Maine as an example because they have high poverty stats, but no-one going hungry or without a pick-up truck.) The estimable Arnold Kling at TCS makes the case that the only war on poverty that works is the building of character in a capitalist system. One quote: Our moral and mental development, and the high productivity that accompanies it, have taken place under a system of decentralized capitalism. I would claim that the capitalist system accounts for more than 100 percent of the reduction in poverty that has taken place over the past hundred years. How can capitalism account for more than 100 percent of the reduction in poverty? Is that mathematically possible? If we take into account the factors that have retarded poverty reduction, then we can argue that, by overcoming those factors, capitalism accounts for even more than 100 percent of poverty reduction. That is, if world poverty has fallen from 90 percent to 20 percent over the past 200 years, then capitalism would have reduced it by even more were it not for the retarding factors. Ironically, the biggest factor retarding the capitalist solution to poverty may well be the crusade to end poverty using conscious planning. Certainly if one includes among the planned solutions to poverty the experiment with Communism (and I see no reason why it ought to be excluded), then the case against intentional anti-poverty efforts is rather compelling. Simply compare poverty in North Korea with that in South Korea, for example.
Kling is probably correct about the world in general, but, in the US, I doubt that applies because we are already a wealthy nation with plenty of jobs and no meaningful unemployment. You have to know there is work for everyone when my supermarket now has folks with Down's Syndrome doing shelving and bagging - which I think is wonderful. But first, I want to know who the poor are, and what they own, and what they do all day. I am not hard-hearted, but I am hard-headed. My guess is that the truly American poor are mainly emotionally or physically disabled, dysfunctional, or exploitative and sociopathic - or the voluntarily poor (which includes new immigrants) or temporarily poor - and thus unlikely to benefit much from any kind of job growth. Please correct me if I am wrong about any of this. Addendum: Bruce Kesler of Democracy Project was kind enough to send some readings explaining how poverty has been dealt with in the US. 1. The Safety Net Delivers. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2. The Effects of Government Taxes and Transfers on Income and Poverty. US Census Bureau 3. Federal Transfer Payments to Low-income Households Tops $17,000. The Tax Foundation Photo: Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (1936) during the Dust Bowl years. This 37 year-old mother of 7 would be benefitting from much help today, if her pride would permit her to accept it.
 Quote from Paul at Powerline:
The U.S. has now seen the leadership of both France and Germany pass to figures who believe, as a general matter, that American power is a force for good in the world, and not something that needs persistently to be constrained. Let's hope that in 2009 the U.S. still has a leader who concurs.
How long do we wait for the American Dems to figure out what the Europeans have figured out?
The Father of Modern Climatology, Reid Bryson, says anthropogenic warming is bunk. (h/t, Drudge)
LaShawn is generally a sweetly reasonable, mild-mannered soul, but here she vents on illegals. One quote: Working- and middle-class Americans are the ones suffering. While illegal alien scourge-supporting elites are living it up in gated communities in California, for instance, everyone else is dealing with hispanic gangs. While the elites are working the kind of jobs that put them in contact with zero illegal aliens (well, maybe the janitor), working class folks have to compete for jobs with people who aren’t supposed to be here. Forget that illegal aliens are working for less money. I’m a staunch supporter of the free market, and if legal aliens were driving down wages, I’d complain less loudly. But since the market is being manipulated by illegal means, that’s a problem. (Understatement of the year!)
Yes, there is a great deal of frustration out there in the land about this, especially because the Repubs and the Dems have decided, in a de facto conspiracy of cowardice, not to make it an issue of contention (except for Tancredo).
Sunday, May 6. 2007
Photo stolen from a good analysis at Publius Pundit. Other comments and links at Gateway, to whom I owe a h/t for the former piece. There is no doubt that Sarko had the babes on his side, which is a good sign. Maybe we need to re-think our view of the government-teat-sucking, cafe-drinking, work-allergic, lazy-ass cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Did I just write that? I take it all back, after today. TigerHawk feels similarly, and has a lot of interesting Sarkozy quotes. Yes, Sarko is a Yankeephile. And he is conservative by French standards - but not by American standards.
 Vote "YES" on impeachment of Bush, and vote early and vote often. As noted at Wizbang,
I urge you... no beg you.. to vote YES early and often as W. C. says, "MoveOn.org and the Kos kids drive the Democratic Congressional agenda. If we can get them focused on impeachment, it will distract them from passing bad laws."
You can help whip the Soros-funded nuts into a psychotic self-destructive frenzy by pouring a bit of gasoline on the flames as an amateur agent-provocateur. For my reasons for impeachment, I said "Bushitler is a Capitalist mass-murdering facist dictater." (Typos deliberate, for authenticity.) I will send a few more from my other rarely-used email addresses, with much stronger comments. Yes, it is beneath Maggie's Farm standards of decorum, probity, integrity, and respect for all humanoids to suggest such a devilish act, but we just report. You decide for yourself. You vote here. Of course, if you actually believe that Bush should be impeached for something, you'll be voting on my side - for once! Photo: George Soros as Dr. Evil.
Friday, May 4. 2007
 Quoted from Towards a Totalitarian Europe, in Brussels Journal:
Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovksy has warned that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. When people who have worked on higher levels in the EU system note similarities as well, it is time people start taking this idea seriously.
I think people are learning that the best way to destroy liberty is incrementally, from within, working in and around democratic processes, rather than by force of revolutionary arms or invading armies. It's always "for your own good" or "for the greater good," and they always take your guns away first, in case people get cranky about being turned into sheep. This isn't paranoid: I don't think these folks are usually malevolent in intent, but malevolent in effect. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there is a thin line between the Nanny State and authoritarianism, as Tony Blair has amply demonstrated. Similarly, would-be invaders of nations have learned that it is more effective to do so via immigration than with arms. After all, if a million people try to cross a border with weapons they'll get shot, but if a million cross a border unarmed they will lay out a red carpet for you.
Thursday, May 3. 2007
 If you are a true warming believer, it is time to start buying these bargains. A brilliant investment idea from Dust My Broom.
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From Roger Kimball in New Criterion. Quotes: Of course, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. But it is remarkable what a large accumulation of eggshells we have piled up over the last century. (And then there is always Orwell’s embarrassing question: “Where’s the omelet?”) I forget the sage who described hope as the last evil in Pandora’s box. Unfair to hope, perhaps, but not inapplicable to that adamantine “faith in a better world” that has always been at the heart of the socialist enterprise. Talk about a hardy perennial! The socialist experiment has never worked out as advertised. But it continually blooms afresh in the human heart—those portions of it, anyway, colonized by intellectuals, that palpitating tribe Julien Benda memorably denominated “clercs,” as in “trahison de.” But why? What is it about intellectuals that makes them so profligately susceptible to the catnip of socialism? In his last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), Friedrich Hayek drily underscored the oddity: The intellectuals’ vain search for a truly socialist community, which results in the idealisation of, and then disillusionment with, a seemingly endless string of “utopias”—the Soviet Union, then Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Nicaragua—should suggest that there might be something about socialism that does not conform to certain facts. It should, but it hasn’t. And the reason, Hayek suggests, lies in the peculiar rationalism to which a certain species of intellectual is addicted. The “fatal conceit” lay in believing that, by exercising his reason, mankind could recast society in a way that was at once equitable and prosperous, orderly and conducive to political liberty.
A key quote concerns a subject about which our Dr. Bliss is often concerned (she often discusses the regressive effects of the nanny state) - the psychological influences of different forms of government on its citizens: Echoing and extending Tocqueville, Hayek argued that one of the most important effects of extensive government control was psychological, “an alteration of the character of the people.” We are the creatures as well as the creators of the institutions we inhabit. “The important point,” he concluded, “is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives.”
A fine, meaty essay. Read the whole thing.
 Quoted in NRO (h/t, Classical Values), regarding the new documentary Indoctrinate U:
...I was struck by the scientist who said that her students were able to figure out her politics simply by noting what she did not say. Just by teaching her subject, without adding extraneous leftist political harangues, she had revealed herself to be a closet Republican. You won’t believe what happened when the faculty found out about her politics. But the full horror story is almost less disturbing than the reality of that single observation about silence. Particularly in some of the non-science disciplines, it really has gotten to the point where mere silence on matters political is enough to reveal you as the enemy.
Whole short piece at NRO here. Register your interest in seeing the documentary here. See the trailer here. What does it take to be an academic pariah? Be conservative. Powerline. It's not funny. Deeply disturbing and distressing. Maoist. Another plug for the Indoctrinate U documentary. If the main job of education is to transmit foundational knowledge, values, and the culture, it cannot be done without a required core. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) have one. Fun to read. Columbia and Chicago have the best ones I know of, but every college has a potential core curriculum - it's just not required. Only Mom and Dad can require it - and they should. Ask us what we have required, if you're interested. Or maybe I will post it. ACTA is not pleased with the Vanishing Shakespeare. Their report here. Freshman Algebra in 1961. Right Wing Nation. I especially like the quiz questions like "How would you approach this problem?" and "Why can't this problem be solved?" My opinion on high school? No reason for it to be four years. Three is enough to do the job. Trivia question: when and why was American High School increased from three to four years? And, of course, for grown-ups who feel inadequately educated (that should mean everyone), don't take a course. Use The Teaching Company. I have never been disappointed in them. Photo: Columbia's Hamilton Hall, across College Walk. Interesting that Columbia College is now the most competitive liberal arts college in the country, and has the largest required core curriculum and the largest number of required courses. That says something. You can thank Rudy and Bloomberg too, who have cleaned up the city.
Wednesday, May 2. 2007
How do the Repubs get, and keep, Hispanic voters on board? I hate to think in terms of voting blocs, but I guess they do exist, at least statistically. Ken Mehlman, via RCP
For May Day, Dr. Sanity took on the amusing issues which emerge when different victim groups have conflicts. The Socialist Food Chain.
Tuesday, May 1. 2007
Tony Blair's legacy. Quoted from a piece in the Daily Mail (h/t, Samizdata): Tony Blair has shown himself the most accomplished political actor ever to occupy the premiership. He is an orator of near-genius, a performer who has for years dominated party conference platforms, TV studios, Parliament, White House press conferences, even the U.S. Congress. Put him before an audience in his heyday, whether of three people or 3,000, and he could weave a spell worthy of Gandalf. But now let us step over the camera and lighting cables, walk past the brilliantly painted frontage of whichever modern temple of glitz he is patronising - the Millennium Dome would be appropriate - and venture backstage. Examine the real Britain after ten years of Blair.
Read the whole thing.
This is a re-post from May 17, 2006, following Bush's speech on immigration: Robert Samuelson's op-ed in today's Washington Post, almost alone among the commentary I have seen in recent days, takes a sober, rhetoric-free look at the long-term economic and social consequences of our nation's unwillingness to control how many and what sort of foreigners we choose to allow into the United States. President Bush's immigration speech mostly missed the true nature of the problem. We face two interconnected population issues. One is aging; the other is immigration. We aren't dealing sensibly with either, and as a result we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict. On the one side will be older baby boomers demanding all their federal retirement benefits. On the other will be an expanding population of younger and poorer Hispanics -- immigrants, their children and grandchildren -- increasingly resentful of their rising taxes that subsidize often-wealthier and unrelated baby boomers. Does this look like a harmonious future?
Such big-picture analysis of the demographic future of our country - which, unlike the price of oil, the value of the dollar, or the cost of buying a home, can be predicted with a reasonable degree of certainty - is virtually unknown among policymakers or journalists. Continuing, Samuelson argues that in focusing exclusively on illegal immigration, we have missed the forest for the trees: The central problem is not illegal immigration. It is undesirably high levels of poor and low-skilled immigrants, whether legal or illegal, most of whom are Hispanic. Immigrants are not all the same. An engineer making $75,000 annually contributes more to the American economy and society than a $20,000 laborer. On average, the engineer will assimilate more easily.
This ought to be common sense, but such things are rarely if ever discussed honestly or forthrightly. The obsessive desire on the part of Bush and the Senate to flood this country with poor, uneducated, non-English speaking workers will have incalculable consequences down the road for virtually every area of American society, and Samuelson deserves credit for sounding the alarm.
 Today is Illegal Alien Rally Day - a day which mocks American sovereignty and which celebrates the exploitation of American soft-heartedness and soft-headedness.
Boortz has some hard-headed ideas about how to deal with it. One of two Mexican families have relatives in the US, Drudge reports. Does that mean that if illegals are given citizenship, half the population of Mexico could move to the US? Remittances to families in Mexico is Mexico's second largest source of foreign currency, after oil, and far ahead of tourism. Linknzona looks at the crime mess in the Southwest, created by illegals. Of course, they are all criminals by definition anyway. We have 623,000 released alien fugitives in the US. Michelle. From a year ago, Mark Helprin on The Unvarnished Immigration Debate in the WaPo. A quote: Businesses large and small, careerists with Latin nannies, and those who want wages low, the unions suppressed and their gardens well tended have made common cause with their political opposites. The latter, who have embraced multiculturalism and bilingualism, and who, though they may be little blast furnaces of ostentatious compassion, are in their disdain for America as ruthless as commissars, would be delighted to see it changed any which way as long as it becomes unrecognizable. If you worry about the potential for California and the Southwest to calve like melting glaciers and cleave to Mexico, or vice versa, the left will mock your distress as it once mocked and reviled anticommunism. And in the same vein the equanimity of the business right is similar to the self-satisfaction of those who would have sold Lenin the rope with which he planned to hang them. This is the lobby, strange as it may seem, for illegal immigration.
Working in Mexico: The following is a re-post from about a year ago. A comment from a director with Southwest Bell in Mexico City. I spent five years working in Mexico. I worked under a tourist visa for three months and could legally renew it for three more months. After that you were working illegally. I was technically illegal for three weeks waiting on the FM3 approval. During that six months our Mexican and US Attorneys were working to secure a permanent work visa called a FM3. It was in addition to my US passport that I had to show each time I entered and left the country. Barbara's was the same except hers did not permit her to work. To apply for the FM3 I needed to submit the following notarized originals (not copies) of my: 1. Birth certificates for Barbara and me. 2. Marriage certificate. 3. High school transcripts and proof of graduation. 4. College transcripts for every college I attended and proof of graduation. 5. Two letters of recommendation from supervisors I had worked for at least one year. 6. A letter from The St. Louis Chief of Police indicating I had no arrest record in the US and no outstanding warrants and was "a citizen in good standing." 7. Finally; I had to write a letter about myself that clearly stated why there was no Mexican citizen with my skills and why my skills were important to Mexico. We called it our "I am the greatest person on earth" letter. It was fun to write. All of the above were in English that had to be translated into Spanish and be certified as legal translations and our signatures notarized. It produced a folder about 1.5 inches thick with English on the left side and Spanish on the right. (The remainder of his note on continuation page below)
Continue reading "Illegal Immigration: Mayday Mayday Mayday"
Monday, April 30. 2007
I finally read this idiotic piece which has been going around, Why Women Hate Hillary. I read it to make sure I wasn't missing something meaningful. The author's point seems to be that Hillary isn't female, so she is an extension of the patriarchy. But what got me was this quote: We want a break with the past, optimism, and a recommitment to the government caring about and serving the needs of everyday people. We want what feminism began to fight for 40 years ago—humanizing deeply patriarchal institutions. And, ironically, we see candidates like John Edwards or Barack Obama—men—offering just that.
"Humanizing institutions"? What? Institutions are always out for themselves. So just tell me this - Which do you really want? A Mommy, or a Daddy, or a husband? And, whichever you want, why the heck would you look to government to fill that role? This is one of the most immature things I have read in a while. The author wants a Mommy, I think.
Saturday, April 28. 2007
Another person who needs to wake up. The guy is single-handedly slowing the American economy. His fear of inflation, as a newbie, is ridiculous at this time. Out-of-control inflation is not a current problem. We are driving below the speed limit, and he is putting on the brakes. Probably worrying about his long-term reputation as a tough guy, but he is hurting everybody, and especially marginal homeowners. Not that our economy is doing poorly - it is fine - but he is fighting the last war, and not dealing with the present.
He is the best horse the Dems have in their stable. I hope they wake up to him. Dark horse? Smart guy, impressive, normal, and not as full of it as the others. Not programmed, and not overly phony. Obama is the current hero of the "anybody but Hillary" Dems. But Obama is going nowhere, especially after the "debate" last night when he hemmed and hawed about the theoretical question about what to do after Jihadists destroyed Chicago and Dallas. "Get international support" or whatever he tried to say. (It cannot be very comforting to the people of Illinois and Texas that France, China, Russia and Germany are needed to defend them.) Hello! The guy is another empty suit, an educated fool and does not deserve serious consideration. I am sure he is a nice guy, but if he were white, he'd be another Dennis Kucinich. Newness, platitudes, "anybody but Hillary", and skin color are the only sources of his appeal. Savvy Dems should take a look at Richardson. He has the common touch, and he is real, relatively speaking.
I do not think everyone in Iran takes the Mullahs seriously. The Iranians aren't stupid, and they have strong Western sympathies. Good people, and many of them quite worldly, educated, and sophisticated, but with a populist government from hell. With a decent election, they could be like Turkey in a minute, and applying for membership in NATO and the EU. Their people want to join the real world, but they have been outvoted by the peasants. That's democracy, assuming their votes are legit, which one might reasonably doubt. I like the Iranians, but their leaders are insane. Gateway.
"I am not a hero." Read the rest.
What a bunch of mind-numbed morons. Michelle. No wonder the hedgies prefer Dartmouth kids: we think more normal, and we reject PC.  More stuff later today, but the Missus and I are going for a morning ride on this lovely spring day to try to tire these winter-weary horses. We plan to do a Pony Express-style morning, to try to remind all of our dumb beasts about what we expect from them. A morning grapefruit and a Bloody Mary or two, and then canter or gallop the piss out of them on the trails, fallen-tree jumps, deep mud, and all, until they listen and obey.
You have to deal with them with an "attitude," at this time of the year: I have been known to jump off and slug a horse in the face, a useful technique that I learned long ago from an Irish trainer. It makes an impression, if you don't break your wrist. There is nothing as fine as a Saturday morning ride on pea-brained, wacked-out Hunters in the early spring in Yankeeland. Battle them back into submission and obedience, if you have the heart. We will bring some of the pups to follow us, and wear them out too. A goal for a Saturday: tired horses, tired dogs, and a tired wifie taking a nap. Then light a fire in the library, gather the pups around, pour a double Scotch, and catch up on the blog readin' and writin,' and find the Dutch Courage to approach the paperwork mountain. A late casual dinner with pals, I see on the calendar. Perfect. And then Nirvana: a nightcap, beddie and bookie. I call it a balanced life. You have to build it the way you want it. In America, you can. Church tomorrow morning. Photo: the Missus in our ring, on Ben.
Gee, I hope they are nice to these terrorists, and don't torture them or do anything mean, unkind or insensitive. Offer them social workers? Or maybe they should just release them to the UK, where they can go on Welfare and plot to deliver the coup de grace to Britain? Or to Gitmo-By-The Sea, where they can watch TV, lift weights, grow fat, work on their tans, and study Koran? Story at Dino.
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