Tuesday, July 18. 2006
We have no idea why Al Gore refused to use this image in his movie. It graphs itself. 
Is mass migration needed, now that women have quit having kids? A quote from Brussels Journal: “Europe and Japan are now facing a population problem that is unprecedented in human history,” said Bill Butz, president of the Population Reference Bureau. Countries have lost people because of wars, disease and natural disasters but never because women stopped having enough children. Japan announced that its population had shrunk in 2005 for the first time, and that it was now the world’s most elderly nation. Italy was second. On average, women must have 2.1 children in their lifetimes for a society to replenish itself, accounting for infant mortality and other factors. Only one country in Europe – Muslim Albania – has a fertility rate above 2. Russia’s fertility rate is 1.28. Writer Spengler in the Asia Times Online commented that demography is destiny: “Never in recorded history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what the Europeans have chosen to do. Back in 1348 Europe suffered the Black Death.” “The plague reduced the estimated European population by about a third. In the next 50 years, Europe’s population will relive – in slow motion – that plague demography, losing about a fifth of its population by 2050.”
Read the whole thing.
Monday, July 17. 2006
Ya gotta watch this video. I would You-tube it, but I don't know how. Rapid download, definitely worth it. life_as_a_guy.asf
Sunday, July 16. 2006
Watch the whole thing. h/t, our cousin at FMFT . Needed this guy at the posting below.
Saturday, July 15. 2006
Re-posted from 7-5-05 Mark Helprin Update Soldier of the Great War is my favorite of the four books of his I have read, but many know him only through his WSJ opinion pieces. An excellent interview, mini-bio, and update in Harvard Magazine. An excerpt from the piece: No living authors influence his writing, Helprin says. Instead, his lodestars include Dante, Shakespeare, Melville, Mark Twain. There are indeed echoes of Twain in his new novel, Freddy and Fredericka, due out this summer. It narrates the journey of a wayward British royal couple rusticated to America, where they travel incognito and survive hilarious adventures that read, as the dust jacket has it, “as if de Tocqueville had been rewritten by Mark Twain (with a deep bow to Harpo Marx).” Helprin is a classicist. He believes in history, tradition, and eternal verities. He values aesthetic symmetries and the literary forms the centuries have passed down to us. To Helprin, the principles of modernism are fatal to art, and he has no truck with the avant-garde. “The avant-garde are frauds,” he bluntly declares. “Modern literature is all cool and detached, even though a lot of modern writers are passionate about their politics. To me, passion should be for literature, and reason and detachment for politics. “A lot of people hate heroes,” he continues. “I was criticized for portraying people who are brave, honest, loving, intelligent. That was called weak and sentimental. People who dismiss all real emotion as sentimentality are cowards. They’re afraid to commit themselves, and so they remain ‘cool’ for the rest of their lives, until they’re dead—then they’re really cool.”
Photo by Jim Harrison in Harvard Magazine Update: Did read Freddy and Frederika this past winter. It would work for beach reading.
Friday, July 14. 2006
Please get rid of your log-ins for comments. You would have triple the comments if you got rid of them. What's the point of creating an obstacle to comments? In my experience, the systems never work, and Blogger, for example, never lets me on, despite having signed up properly a year ago. If you want comments from our team of brainiacs, get rid of those dang nuisances. Just delete obnoxious or unwanted comments or trolls - it's like vacuuming the house. No big deal. Just reading the anti-spam letters is tough enough - I cannot even read my own - X and K and H are indistinguishable. 
Thursday, July 13. 2006
Something new on Broadway.
Speech by Marine Maj Gen Michael R Lehnert, commanding general of Marine Corps Installations-West, Camp Pendleton, CA, to the San Diego Chamber of Commerce Military Affairs Advisory Council, 26 June 2006. Good morning ladies and gentlemen, Eight days ago, I was present in the audience when Tom Brokaw addressed the 2006 Stanford graduating class. After the initial pleasantries and one-liners, Mr. Brokaw said something unexpected. He told the class that they were the children of privilege, fortunate to be attending one of the finest educational institutions in the country, the anointed because they had both the test scores for admittance and parents who were able to afford their tuition. He noted that they could likely expect rapid advancement in almost any endeavor they choose and that they were destined to lead the most powerful country in the world. The class was beaming. And then Brokaw reminded them that the liberties and freedoms they enjoyed were being defended by young people their age that did not have their advantages. That at this time thousands of men and women were fighting, dying and suffering debilitating injury to ensure that the rest of us could live the American dream. There was an uncomfortable shifting in the seats, followed by slow but growing applause from the audience. When we sent my son to Stanford four years ago, we filled out a form asking for demographic information. One of the questions for the parents said, what is your profession? After it was a list of about thirty professions including doctor, lawyer, congressman, educator, architect. Military was not listed so I filled in "other." Read the rest, below.
Continue reading "The Lehnert Speech"
Wednesday, July 12. 2006
Ted Nugent was being interviewed by a British journalist. The journalist
asked, "What do you think the last thought is in the head of a deer before you shoot it? Is it`Are you my friend?` or is it `Are you the one who killed my brother?'"
Nugent replied, "They aren't capable of that kind of thinking. All they
care about is, 'What am I going to eat next, who am I going to screw next, and can I run fast enough to get away. They are very much like the French in that way."
Is this how FOX News feels amongst the MSM? Shamelessly stolen in the communist manner from the Evil Capitalist Mr. Free Market: 
Monday, July 10. 2006
I view evil as sin without guilt or remorse. I define sin more or less Biblically. Evil does exist in this world. My Leftist academic friends refuse to see it because it would mess up their world-view and they might have to fight something a bit more dangerous than golfer Republicans with pink pants, and my re-born Fundie pals (yes - academia has some closet Bible-readers) insist that the word is "Devil" with the "D", not "Evil." There is a culture gap there which will never be crossed. "Devil" implies an external force; "evil" implies a human source. But put me in the "Believing in Evil" column anyway, even though C.S. Lewis convinced me that it makes as much sense to believe in a God as in a Devil. And I do believe in a God, although my degree of faith varies day to day. It would chart like the Dow Jones, with its long-term upward trend. The denial of evil is dangerous. It leads naive or willfully naive folks to trust when they should not. Whenever I consult with a new patient, one of the first several things I quietly assess is their degree of what we call "sociopathy" - the strength of their conscience. Not whether they behave well, but whether they care enough in their bones about the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, integrity or deception, manipulation vs. genuine vulnerability, self-interest vs. genuine love. It's not about how they act in public, or about what they say - successful sociopaths can be actors and good schmoozers, flattering, engaging and ingratiating, and sometimes charismatic. Those traits are red flags. Sociopathic people are rarely awkward or genuinely vulnerable. And while they are ultimately "takers" and "users," they don't want that to show, and, if they're really good, they can even make you feel good about it. They'll tell you how great you look and buy you a drink while they pick your pocket. It is important for a psychiatrist because sociopathic people are beyond help, and we should not take their money. They don't tell us the whole story, and they shade it, distort it, provide false confessions and play other tricks. They cannnot help it, and that is the tragedy. Self before all, Self as God. Like Tony Soprano. And they find ways to justify or "rationalize" (a shrink term for justifying or excusing sin) this to themselves, or they don't even bother. Yes, they feel pain, but it's the wrong kind. There's only narcissitic pain - self-pain, or shame, or self-pity. But, even as I write this, I see myself falling into my own trap, i.e. talking about evil as if it were pathology. It is not. When evil is strong, it is a form of spiritual death, of soul death - a thing that "chokes the breath of conscience and good cheer" and which brings pain and misery and destruction to others with it. This happens because the experience of soul-lessness, of inner hunger, of spiritual emptiness, drives people to fill the emptiness with money, power, admiration, adolescent-style nurturing, attention, a feeling of self-importance, multiple love or sex partners, "substances," etc. - always putting their image needs, and instinctive needs, first. Life as an extension of high-school. Feeling like objects, they treat others as objects too - as sources to fulfill their needs and hungers. When I try to blend my psychoanalytic training with my religion, I view self-love as one key to thinking about evil. I don't mean ordinary vanity and conceit - I mean the hidden destructive self-interest which is easily concealed behind any number of facades, such as modest, victimized, or innocent demeanors, for common examples. Pride, envy, vengefulness, destructive or angry inner selves - these sins reside in all of us, which is why we need Christ to bail us out - but only evil can put on a real show of care. The only thing psychiatrists have to offer to evil is prayer. Why discuss this in The Blog? Because I think it is relevant to our view of the world, not just our personal lives. The Stalins and Hitlers and Saddams and Castros are too easy. Don't be paranoid in life - just insist that trustworthiness and decent intentions be proven, whether in world affairs or in your personal life, before you bestow the gift of trust. And, for Heaven's sake, don't look for those good things in the world of international affairs. Just think about it for one second - who would want to be President of Russia? Or Dictator of Venezuela? The only reason I have some trust in Bush is because I don't believe he ever really wanted the job, or felt worthy of it. That is a "plus" in my book.
Sunday, July 9. 2006
Whitmore, 1969 - Back from Vietnam, seeking salvation in Bob Dylan Fiction from The Atlantic's fiction edition: We drove under a tin-white sun. In Des Moines my brother and I had each dropped a tab of acid, and now the Midwest rushed at us—great rows of corn and swaths of open field, a startling horizon of alfalfa haze. We stared out at a diorama of little wooden bridges and clapboard houses, processions of blinking radio towers, neither of us speaking. My brother, Whitmore, drove like a man skipping bail, forcing my father’s Oldsmobile into a high-pitched whinny. He streamed his hand out the window, his knuckles whistling in the wind. Slightly mesmerized, I watched his hand as it fishtailed into an elegant sine curve. We were listening to Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home on the eight-track. This was the summer of 1969. Men were getting ready to land on the moon. The girls I knew wore slacks and smelled of sandalwood and cherry vodka. You could fit the whole world inside an album cover. My brother had his other hand on the wheel, his index finger raised like a flagpole in exclamation at the music. He seemed to be saying, Here, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you. When “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” played, I saw a single tear appear in my brother’s right eye. I looked out my window at the neon-green farms and the heat shimmering off the blacktop roads, pretending not to notice. Whitmore was twenty-three—four years older than I was. He had returned to us a few months earlier after a two-year stint in Vietnam. In the Los Angeles airport, as he disembarked from his transpacific flight in uniform, a young woman with braids spat at him. This event had dogged him all summer. He didn’t talk much about his two years in Southeast Asia, but every now and then—when a young girl with an organdy bow in her hair sang at our church, or when my mother forced him to receive one of her hugs—he wept. One night, as we ate dinner, my parents and I stopped in mid-chew to see Whitmore, his face blotched red, quietly bawling into his pork chops and mashed potatoes. My mother touched the back of his hand, and Whitmore looked up as if someone had slapped him in the face. Trying to make light of the situation, my father said, “I didn’t think much of the pork chops either.” My mother visibly winced, but Whitmore started to laugh. He said, “This will stop, Dad. You’ll see.”
Read the whole thing in The Atlantic before the privilege is taken away.
When I read this piece at And Rightly So, I thought it sounded like a pretty good list of reasonable family advice from a "school health teacher" - whatever that is. Then I looked back and saw that it was her list of signs of "dysfunctional families." See if you agree.
We posted on remote-controlled
flying toys a short while ago, but this is one to add to the list. It's a flying wing, and flies for 6 minutes on one charge. Wonderful fun. Don't be put off by its apparent simplicity. Six and seven year-olds can master it but, of course, all of such toys are really for adults, aren't they? You can get the Rookie here.
Saturday, July 8. 2006
 We are always a day late and a dollar short.
Happy Birthday yesterday, Ringo! God bless ya for what you helped add to our lives. Tangled Web Where did the time go? Good question.
Thursday, July 6. 2006
Is it moral to sell your kidney? Your placenta for stem cells (or does it belong to your kid?) What are the ethics - if any - and morals of commerce of the human body? Which is an indirect way of asking what the morals and ethics of capitalism are. We know what many libertarians would say, but what would each of us say? Eric Cohen at New Atlantis has a fine wide-ranging essay on the subject, covering Calvin, Voltaire, Weber, Adam Smith, Irving Kristol, etc etc.: Biotechnology and the Spirit of Capitalism. Couple of quotes: In 1991, with the last vestiges of communism crumbling and the Cold War ending, Irving Kristol warned that the greatest threats to a capitalist future were spiritual and cultural. “In a sense,” he said, “it is all Adam Smith’s fault. That amiable, decent genius simply could not imagine a world where traditional moral certainties could be effectively challenged and repudiated. Bourgeois society is his legacy, for good and ill. For good, in that it has produced, through the market economy, a world prosperous beyond all previous imaginings—including socialist imaginings. For ill, in that this world, with every passing decade, has become ever more spiritually impoverished.” In the end, Smith’s error was his lack of “eschatological realism.” Man is not simply an average being who seeks to improve in material ways. He is also an imperfect being who yearns for perfection, a mortal being who yearns for immortality, and an ambitious being who sometimes believes that he can make others more perfect or less mortal through his own mastery of nature. And so Adam Smith’s world of practical commerce—a great success—is still haunted by the Protestant desire for other-worldly grace and by Voltaire’s desire for “terrestrial paradise.” We demand that material progress offer salvation—which is exactly what socialism once promised and what biotechnology may promise in the future. Or we demand that material progress be abandoned in the name of salvation—soberly, by those who seek to preserve sacred retreats in a profane world, or radically, by extremists who seek to dismantle modern life altogether.
Read the whole thing. It's an education.
Wednesday, July 5. 2006
Reposted from July 27, 2005  The young Cornell engineer Willis Haviland Carrier patented his "Apparatus for Treating Air" in 1906, for industrial purposes, and it was quickly taken up by the paper industry. By 1926, Hudson's Department Store in Detroit had A/C, which was a huge draw. His technique came to him in an instant of inspiration at a train station. By 1928, residential machines first became available, and after the war they became common in new housing developments. But their appearance in movie theaters in the 40s was maybe the most dramatic event - even more important than the magical moment of color in the Wizard of Oz. The A/C alone was worth the price of the 25-cent ticket. The first air-conditioned car was the 1940 Packard.
While we must be grateful to Mr. Carrier on days like today, the downside is that his machines eliminated the traditional months-long July and August vacations to places like New Hampshire, Cape Cod, Maine, and the Berkshires, where at least nights are cool and breezy. And it eliminated the wonderful screened "sleeping porch" which late 1800s houses often located on the second floor, in the back, of course. My Great Aunt Buffie had one, and her bed got moved out there for the summer. Camping out, in town. And I suppose it made the old front porch redundant too, where you rocked and sipped beer or lemonade in your undershirt to the tune of the crickets and katydids, smoked a Lucky or two, watched the young folks promenading past, flirting and courting, and could hear, in the distance, the muted, murmering conversations of the neighbors on their porches. A/C pulled people indoors, and isolated them, I suppose, from both neighbor and nature. Not to mention its effect on high-rise buildings - A/C is right up there with Mr. Elisha Graves Otis and his elevator. Many traditionalist Yankees continue to eschew air conditioning at home, but they don't sleep very well in the summer. And they drip sweat on their paperwork. They view A/C as a weenie pantywaist luxury, unnatural and indulgent. Which it is, for sure. But what a fine and inexpensive luxury. Surely it's not a sin? Call me ambivalent about it - but I could not work without it. A major effect in the US was that it permitted the huge business growth, and population growth, of the South and the Southwest. I guess you could blame Carrier for the Red State phenomenon, in a way. You can read about the the A/C compressor and refrigerant works here, and more about Mr. Carrier here.
Tuesday, July 4. 2006
Rhode Island's multi-talented  George M Cohan sent the following letter to a show biz paper on July 4, 1906 (borrowed from a Steyn piece):I write my own songs because I write better songs than anyone else I know of. I publish these songs because they bring greater royalties than any other class of music sold in this country. I write my own plays because I have not yet seen or read plays from the pens of other authors that seem as good as the plays I write. I produce my own plays because I think I’m as good a theatrical manager as any other man in this line. I dance because I know I’m the best dancer in the country. I sing because I can sing my own songs better than any other man on the stage… I play leading parts in most of my plays because I think I’m the best actor available. I pay myself the biggest salary ever paid a song and dance comedian because I know I deserve it. But believe me, kind reader, when I say, I am not an egotist.
Read Steyn's piece, You're a Grand Old Flag, which began as You're a Grand Old Rag My image of Cohan is entirely mixed-up with Jimmy Cagney, who played Cohan in the 1942 Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Monday, July 3. 2006
We recently wrote about Pogo. A reader emailed us this one - thanks. 
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