Thursday, January 15. 2009
Everybody at Maggie's has seemed too busy to do much writing of his own this past month or so, so we have been throwing up link posts without adding much to them. I am in the same boat at the moment.
 Ars Psychiatrica on The Impossible Profession
Eric Kandel on the biology of psychotherapy
Neoneo on long-term psychotherapy.
Photo of Freud demonstrating his tobacco-inspired analytic technique via Neoneo.
Wednesday, January 14. 2009
In the mailbox today, on one of those long sticky-notes:
 "Irish woman looking for a housekeeping job or helping out on weekends. Please call: (phone #)."
How can one not give her a call? "Helping out" sounds darn good, and so does "Irish." But can she split logs, remove spiderwebs and dustballs the size of raccoons, and do the laundry without bleaching everything to smithereens? And can she make mashed potatoes?
Surely the latter. But I already know the Irish Secret: A whole stick of butter, a thing of sour cream, a cup of heavy cream, and a mountain of salt and pepper. Almost forgot one minor detail - a bunch of boiled potatoes in there too, mashed to a lumpless mush by strong Irish arms.
 John Johansen's "Bridge House" in New Canaan, CT, is for sale.
New Canaan is famous for its collection of modern residential architecture. The prosperous town changed from farmland to suburbia during the height of the modernist craze. John Johansen is the only living member of "The Harvard Five," of whom Philip Johnson is probably the best-known.
I like to look at these houses, but would not want to live in them. For life, I prefer rambling, drafty, random, cozy structures with plenty of fireplaces, and which were never really designed, but just kinda grew over time, like Topsy.
They are asking $5 million for this small but striking house. I am told it needs some "repairs." I like it, but I do not want it.
You can read about the Bridge House here.
Sunday, January 11. 2009
From our guest poster Bruce Kesler:
If conditions and challenges weren’t ominous enough for the new Obama administration, his strong-willed mother-in-law is moving into the White House. If that alone isn’t enough for most, imagine yourself facing a relocation to very difficult new job, almost every one with power affecting you having differing wants and confronting you with demands often at odds with your own, literally not enough money in the world to satisfy everyone’s desires and the demands increasingly undercutting even necessities, and gangs of lethal thugs roaming the streets around you. Even your formerly most staunch supporters begin to report that most of your previous smooth talk is empty that got you the job and that you’re in over your head. Like vultures expecting a fat carcass but facing a rotting pigeon of a meal, they squabble and fight each other. Almost all your mentors expose they haven’t really much clue what to do. Well, here’s a piece of advice: Don’t just do something, stand there. Most of the challenging conditions will sort themselves out. Running around like a chicken without a head, or doing for the sake of doing, will not only likely have little positive effect but will probably have worse consequences.
Let’s go through a brief list:
The Economy: Not every one, but in aggregate, individuals are better deciders of what is worth working for and spending on than any Delphic group in Washington. Money is the motivation to work and risk. The only economic measure by Washington with a track-record of supporting and increasing this motivation is low taxes. Federal spending, on anything, is inefficient and tends to favor means and ends that reduce individual incentives. Further, in excess -- and multi-trillion dollar printing of dollars is certainly excess, it has been proven, sadly repeatedly, to lead to lasting inflation that is even more impoverishing and destructive of incentives.
Healthcare: As we’ve become wealthier, compared to any other nation, the portion of our personal and national incomes that need be devoted to food, clothing and shelter has declined. That has unleashed the means for medical technologies and treatments that, although often overused, we decide we can afford and deem worthwhile to our better living. Every scheme for “reforming” healthcare is based on forcing us, against our better judgment and self-caring, to have less healthcare, through reduced access and innovation. Bureaucrats’ choices of what they think “cost-effective” for spending our own earnings and taxes are not our choices. The only ones to benefit are government-employment and government-employee unions.
Education: Surely, a well-educated workforce, allowed incentives to be productive, enriches most. Major portions of our enormous spending on education, however, are wasted or siphoned off to non-enriching ends. In higher education, we have lavish campuses failing to serve quality or practical degrees. In primary education, we have multiplying programs that shortchange the basics, while teacher unions expend their huge political war chests to battle reforms. Allowing the influx of uneducated illegal immigrants has diverted a large percentage of education spending to their remedial teaching, reducing standards and programs for excellence among the rest. Border and employer enforcement in motion has and will reduce illegal immigration. Budget restraints are directed by those in power to punish the customers. With the necessity of budget restraints evident, those ideologic and self-serving pedagogues will lose some of their influence to undermine core, productive education.
National Defense: From the pains of combat, we’ve learned that a larger professional armed forces is critical. At the same time, sophisticated, expensive major weapons systems cannot be avoided if we are to have deterring diplomacy with major adversaries, or soundly defeat them if diplomacy fails. The ‘90’s, Clinton path of virtually ignoring the emergence of such threats only leads to larger, more dangerous crises. Cutting defense spending to fuel wasteful domestic spending by Washington is proven suicidal behavior. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Cutting the ounce is deceptively self-destructive.
Middle East: Our avoidance of domestic sources of energy and of transmission has increased our dependence upon and hefty self-impoverishing buying of oil from hostile and trouble-making countries. Take that US financial underpinning out from under them and they are less of a global or regional threat, less capable of attacking Israel as well. A regional conflict is less of a threat to itself or the world.
Having, thus, freed up Obama from otherwise counter-productive activities outside the White House, he personally will benefit not only from things sorting themselves out better but will have more time to deal with his mother-in-law.
Saturday, January 10. 2009
Finally back from South Pacific at the Beaumont. Slow, snowy, slippery, mind-rattling drive home through blinding snow on unplowed highways. What a wonderful performance, though, and well-worth the conditions. Ms. Kelli O'Hara is a doll. We saw her in her NYC debut in Light in the Piazza. I'd guess her future looks bright.
The Dyl would have loved this. And, I was thinking, so would the Sipp Clan. A real treat, thanks to Mrs. BD.
When you want the best of anything, or want to be the best in anything, you go to New York. Sinatra said it better. It ain't for everybody, nor should it be. Sure is mightly pleasant to visit, though.
We have many ex-NYC readers who like these sorts of photos, and I am happy to oblige despite my lousy camera skills.
NYC is at its most lovely in a snowstorm. It wasn't coming down heavily yet -
More of my NYC photos below the fold -
Continue reading "South Pacific in the snow"
Friday, January 9. 2009
I sent an article from Psychiatric Times (which we linked a while ago), titled The Decline of Psychotherapy, to a Psychiatric colleague. He responded "Good timing for me. It will be dead just when I am ready to retire from my psychotherapy practice."
The article says:
The number of psychiatrists who provided psychotherapy to all of their patients declined from 19.1% in 1996-1997 to 10.8% in 2004-2005. From 1996 through 2005 psychotherapy was provided in 5597 of 14,108 office visits to psychiatrists lasting longer than 30 minutes, but the percentage of visits involving psychotherapy declined from 44.4% in 1996-1997 to 28.9% in 2005-2006.
People who have never used a good shrink psychotherapist have no idea how helpful we can be, sometimes even very quickly...but sometimes not quickly at all. I wish I could offer examples, but I'm touchy about the confidentiality.
Thursday, January 8. 2009
Wednesday, January 7. 2009
Readers know that I am a collector of formal fallacies. I keep them on the mantle, well-dusted and polished. "Saving the Hypothesis" doesn't strike me as a formal, Aristotelian fallacy, but it surely is a common thing for folks to struggle to salvage a notion in which they are emotionally invested, regardless of new data. We all do that sometimes unless we catch ourselves BSing ourselves.
Larry Anderson at American Thinker proposed this fallacy in relation to the Global Warming Climate Change whatever topic. One quote:
I distinctly remember the first time I had an argument with someone about "climate change." It was a warm spring day in April of 1975. I was walking across the campus at Harvard headed for lunch. A fellow classmate (we were both juniors) ran up to me. He was really excited. He hollered out:
"Have you heard? The ice age is coming. They've proven it with computer studies at MIT."
"How did they prove that there is an ice age coming with computers?" I asked my friend.
"The planet is getting colder. They have the data. And it is going to keep getting colder. They have these computer models --"
I stopped him right there. I knew enough about computers to understand that they were not up to accurately predicting short-term weather patterns -- let alone an ice age.
"No way. Computers aren't that powerful. "
"But they have the data and they have computers!"
"I know they do. But computers spit out whatever they are programmed to spit out. Load a computer with the data that the world has been getting colder; ask it what the weather will be tomorrow, and what do you think the computer is going to tell you? The world is getting hotter? If it does you'd better get a better computer. You hungry?" I replied and I continued on my way to lunch.
The original "climate change" hypothesis was that the planet was getting colder and that it would continue getting colder. That was a very simple hypothesis and was easily proven or refuted. Planet keeps getting colder = hypothesis correct. Planet gets warmer = hypothesis incorrect.
The world got warmer instead of colder. The "climate change" hypothesis was rewritten. This time the planet was facing a catastrophic meltdown. The world was not only getting warmer -- it was going to keep getting warmer at an ever increasing and life-threatening rate.
Readers know that we at Maggie's are ardent conservationists and some like Bird Dog are fair amateur naturalists, but we are neither pagan greenies nor Gaia worshippers - and we have no problem with forest fires. The link last night to two pieces about the Spotted Owl brought to mind Alston Chase's 1996 In A Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Myths of Nature.
Here's a 1996 review of the book from Reason:
 Ten years ago, in his book Playing God in Yellowstone, Alston Chase took on two supposed shining lights in American life: the National Park Service and the environmental movement. Chase showed how the Park Service, captured by an environmental religion that fetishized its vision of nature, was passively allowing exploding elk populations to destroy important parts of Yellowstone National Park. The same misplaced religious zeal threatened the future of the park's grizzly bear population as well.
In a Dark Wood has Chase returning to these themes in a new setting: the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest. Here again, in an excess of religious enthusiasm, the environmental movement is wreaking havoc. Tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of mills representing significant portions of the Pacific Northwest timber industry have been wiped out, and the federal government has lost $20 billion in future timber revenues - money that will have to be recovered from taxpayer pockets. Equally important for Chase, the ultimate outcome is likely to be bad for the environment as well.
As in Yellowstone, Chase finds a false understanding of nature at the heart of the problem. Environmentalists are driven to recover the Garden of Eden - the forest conditions of the Pacific Northwest before Columbus. The spotted owl crusade, as Chase follows its course, becomes a spiritual quest having little to do with forests and owls and much to do with finding personal salvation. . .
Thus, environmentalists willfully avert their eyes from the fact that forest fires swept across the Pacific Northwest with great regularity until their suppression in the 20th century.. . . .
Another case of willful ignorance on the part of environmentalists affected the controversy. The northern spotted owl probably never should have been listed as a threatened species in the first place. Virtually nothing was known about the owl until the 1970s. By the mid-1980s, as environmental groups were deciding that the owl would be the chosen instrument for shutting down federal timber harvesting in the region, there were only a handful of academic studies on the owl. The federal courts then prematurely forced the Interior Department to list the spotted owl under the Endangered Species Act, just as the scientific data were starting to accumulate. When this research finally became available after the owl listing in 1990, estimates of owl numbers soared - from 3,000 to 12,000 and heading still higher. Contrary to the assumption behind the listing, it increasingly appears that spotted owls do well in young forest stands and may even require them.
To be sure, the owl was never the real object. Environmentalists from the beginning sought preservation of the full forest ecology - the "ancient cathedrals," as they conceived these areas. Once again, though, actual science proved uncooperative. "Ecological management" depends on the idea that a forest or other natural system moves through a succession of transitional stages to reach a final equilibrium or "climax" stage. Europeans had supposedly disrupted this happy equilibrium, but the methods of ecosystem management would now restore it.
The ecological vision of succession and climax, offering a (thin) scientific veneer for the environmental gospel, did in fact have wide scientific acceptance until the 1970s. By the 1990s, however, any ideas of an inherent tendency toward stability in nature had been replaced by an evolutionary biology of chaos and unpredictability. As environmental historian Donald Worster commented in 1993, "The climax notion is dead, the ecosystem has receded in usefulness....Nature should be regarded as a landscape of patches, big and little, changing continually through time and space, responding to an unceasing barrage of perturbations."
For environmentalists, however, coming to terms with this new understanding would have been the equivalent of conceding the Garden of Eden had never existed. Not surprisingly, the environmental movement has treated the science about the same way the Catholic Church reacted centuries ago to the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. Indeed, Al Gore, Bruce Babbitt, and other environmental crusaders of the Clinton administration have enshrined ecological management as the official philosophy of the federal government, even as most scientists now say it has no valid foundation.
In a Dark Wood reads like a good novel. Chase sketches the personalities of key participants in the spotted owl drama, often pausing to give a short life history. The book is filled with interesting details and has a strong plot. Indeed, Chase is not immune from some of the same tendencies he criticizes in environmentalists. The spotted owl story is gradually revealed as yet another fierce struggle between good and evil. For Chase, the devil is the idea of the ecosystem and biocentrism, which is corrupting environmentalists - who are basically good people - and leading them into the destructive excesses of contemporary religious warfare.
But there are other ways to interpret the events in the Pacific Northwest. Timber companies with large private lands have thrived, even as competitors dependent on federal land have been eliminated. The spotted owl has proven a remarkably effective anti-competitive device. On the environmental side, there is a constant need to raise large sums of money to pay for fancy buildings and professional staff. Organizational imperatives therefore demand a continuing stream of polarizing conflicts with national publicity to stimulate the faithful's contributions. This is not religion; it is just good business practice.
Nor should one be surprised to find that the environmental gospel may serve other purposes besides inspiring devotion. Indeed, this faith has provided a religious sanction for the takeover of the federal forests of the Pacific Northwest by the new urban and professional groups moving into the region in such large numbers. The conflict became all the more bloody because of the very fact of public ownership of these lands. Politics, not market trading, would have to be the determining factor in deciding the future uses of the lands.
And in the political fray the new recreational groups were not unique in their willingness to fight with whatever tools they could grab. If bad science and clothing themselves in the garb of religious righteousness were what it would take to get control over federal forests, so be it. The spotted owl struggle, in short, was a product not only of a misconceived theology but also of a flawed institutional framework of public land ownership, one which tended to foment conflict and to bring out the worst in those involved.
We view the Greenie movement as political, with little seriousness about real conservation issues. The owl was a tactical tool for the urbanite sentimentalists. They are all about political tactics, and there is no Teddy Roosevelt in them.
Tuesday, January 6. 2009
 General hospitals are increasingly relying on "hospitalists" to care for inpatients, freeing up office practitioner's time for their (steadily less lucrative) outpatient practices.
I have yet to be a hospital inpatient except for childbirth, but I think that, if and when I am, I'd like to see the face of my own Doc daily.
This is a new model for medical practice. More time-efficient? Probably. Less comforting? Probably. Overall, better or not? I cannot say.
Internists, and what few GPs still exist, are having a tough go of it these days: Medicare, which is the bulk of their work, compensates them now at a rate lower than a plumber or electrician in Boston.
Maggie's turns three this winter. Well, more or less three. We actually opened up shop in 2005, but it was more of a practice run for about a year without stats or any visibility. That's the way these intertube thingys go - unless you're a prominent tabloid celeb already like Theo Spark or Caroline Kennedy or Jules Crittenden or Lindsay Lohan or Neoneoneo.
Fact is, we still haven't figured out how to master this blog thing, and we are happily confused about our identity. Erik Erikson would consider us "unresolved," no doubt. Are we a diary? A Kindergarten Show-and-Tell? A Punditorium? A Link Blog?
Well, we call ourselves "eclectic" and and just leave it at that. We post whatever we feel like, and whatever we stumble upon in our lives which we think needs or deserves whatever cyberspace we can offer it. (That's an awkward sentence. We specialize in those, at times. And in incomplete sentences and also in run-on sentences. We always have to dash off to feed the chickens, plow a field, or butcher an ox.)
As we have said at least once a year, readers are our only reward. In our minds, commenters even more so, but we know most people have neither the time nor the inclination.
We seem to be almost doubling our readership each year. By our internal stats (not Sitemeter) we are running around 200,000 visits/month now. (Hits mean nothing other than intertube presence, but they're around 4.5 million per month.) Sitemeter, our Webmeister tells us, isn't very accurate but is useful as a relative measure for comparison purposes. The numbers of "unique readers" is our key metric - and our readers are indeed unique.
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Month |
Unique visitors |
Number of visits |
Pages |
Hits |
Bandwidth |
Jan 2008 |
60848 |
142368 |
586149 |
2427842 |
142.09 GB |
Feb 2008 |
62451 |
147909 |
631575 |
2670829 |
162.42 GB |
Mar 2008 |
134283 |
246126 |
907413 |
3803540 |
200.05 GB |
Apr 2008 |
76613 |
163489 |
647320 |
3052496 |
135.23 GB |
May 2008 |
76803 |
168226 |
646977 |
3332789 |
125.27 GB |
Jun 2008 |
70265 |
154672 |
603236 |
2932034 |
125.92 GB |
Jul 2008 |
82531 |
165326 |
626042 |
3519587 |
136.64 GB |
Aug 2008 |
62195 |
144603 |
530996 |
3244934 |
116.10 GB |
Sep 2008 |
74637 |
165917 |
579300 |
3418257 |
153.49 GB |
Oct 2008 |
84790 |
182258 |
659336 |
3916942 |
150.38 GB |
Nov 2008 |
96213 |
205477 |
1070776 |
4281475 |
149.94 GB |
Dec 2008 |
79422 |
195826 |
1140073 |
4479493 |
137.32 GB |
Total |
961051 |
2082197 |
8629193 |
41080218 |
1734.84 GB |
Why do readership numbers matter to us? Vanity, I guess, and simple attention-seeking. (The real secret, shameful truth is that we enjoy doing this, and that we learn from doing it.)
So that's the annual Maggie's update. If you like us, do us a favor and send us around to folks who might enjoy reading us. We aren't famous - yet.
The price is right.
And, while we're on the subject, a big thanks to Chris Southern Consulting, the Vermont born-and-bred blogmeister who makes this site possible and who solves all the glitches and problems with good cheer. If you need website work, give him a shout.
Monday, January 5. 2009
 We emailed our cuz Mr. Free Market to ask him whether we had borrowed the image of that ceegar-smokin' gal from him. Yes, we had.
He went on to inform us that the lady in question is none other than Miss Dita Von Teese, a burlesque performer and a walkin', talkin' pin-up - with her own web site.
Thermocouples are cool little items, conductors which generate a voltage when subjected to a thermal gradient (Wiki). That's the old thermoelectric effect that you remember from high school physics.
The effect was accidentally discovered by the Estonian Thomas Seebek in 1822. Most of our general-use thermocouples are the inexpensive K-type, Nickel-Chromium and Nickel-Aluminium.
I had the unfortunate opportunity to learn more about our dependence on these mechanisms over the weekend. Among hundreds of other things they are used for, I learned that they control the pilot light on gas water heaters. If the pilot light goes out and your thermocouple sensor is on the blink - no hot water.
 Algore got so many innocent and well-intentioned but scientifically-uneducated people upset with his fear-mongering silliness. It's a damn shame. Those with a familiarity with how science works, and who had no political agenda to drive, just stood back and watched bemusedly.
Finally, even the HuffPo gets it. Harold Ambler's Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted. (h/t, No Looking Backwards, whence the borrowed image.) One quote:
If not carbon dioxide, what does "drive" climate? I am glad you are wondering about that. In the short term, it is ocean cycles, principally the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the "super cycle" of which cooling La Niñas and warming El Niños are parts. Having been in its warm phase, in which El Niños predominate, for the 30 years ending in late 2006, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation switched to its cool phase, in which La Niñas predominate.
Since that time, already, a number of interesting things have taken place. One La Niña lowered temperatures around the globe for about half of the year just ended, and another La Niña shows evidence of beginning in the equatorial Pacific waters. During the last twelve months, many interesting cold-weather events happened to occur: record snow in the European Alps, China, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, the Rockies, the upper Midwest, Las Vegas, Houston, and New Orleans. There was also, for the first time in at least 100 years, snow in Baghdad.
If Lefties want to take over the world's economy, they need to try Plan D.
A reader took these photos this weekend on the CT shoreline. That is the common Ring-billed Gull (sometimes known as the Parking Lot Gull), an inland, fresh-water breeder. They head for the coasts when the fresh waters freeze up.
Gulls take seveeral years to reach maturity and to earn adult plumage. These, I think, are second-year Ring-billed gulls hunting in the surf. First year birds would have a darker brown plumage:
And a good portrait:
Sunday, January 4. 2009
From guest poster Bruce Kesler:
The primary and overriding obligation of a government and its military during war is to accomplish its objectives. Support among its own public and that of influential outside powers is surely important, particularly the longer the armed engagement.
The press’ role can be either constructive toward this, or not. The government may, or may not, be correct in its management of the war and of the press, but it is the government at war that has the requirement to decide, not the press.
It is argued, often correctly, that the press in a war sometimes sees more clearly than the government or offers useful additional insights. Still, it remains that it is the government and its people that suffers from failing to meet war’s objectives, not the press. Failure at war is a far more grievous harm than can be recompensed by a corrections column or apologetic retrospective re-analysis in the newspaper.
Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, in Gaza and the West Bank, have always focused on this priority. All journalists and stringers there are under their strict control, only allowed access to those areas and stories chosen by Hamas and the PA, and physically penalized for straying into criticism or embarrassment of Hamas or the PA. The Western media has gone along with this, in virtual silence and even cover-up, in order to retain any access at all. Meanwhile, the world’s media has had unlimited access and freedom to report anything it wishes in and about Israel. Mostly hewing to excess Western sensitivities and even to anti-Israeli attitudes, much of the world’s media have in effect been active accomplices of Palestinian propaganda. Western and world audiences have thereby been manipulated into undue negativity toward Israel and sympathy toward Palestinians.
Israel recognizes this imbalance and in the current Gaza offensive has taken measures to restrain the press’ undermining of its war effort.
This lengthy article, http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/86631with much more detail than here offers a useful summary of the measures that Israel has taken, and of the establishment press’ opposition. Among Israel’s new approaches is going around the West’s established reporting screen and filters by going directly to the increasingly influential alternative media outlets, including YouTube. As reported in the Jerusalem Post: “'In terms of communicating our message, new media is the future', Brig.-Gen. Avi Benayahu, the IDF's spokesman, told The Jerusalem Post.”
The ending observation made by the Israeli Defense Force spokesman gets to the heart of the matter: “An army has to fight, not to spend its time in front of television cameras.” Israel is not allowing journalists in Israel to enter Gaza at will, to flash emotional scenes – often stage managed by Hamas – to incite the natural distaste the world’s civilians have toward the hell that is war. For that matter, Egypt is also barring entry for journalists via Egypt.
The Israeli Supreme Court, in the manner of a civilized state, has ruled that some safe pooled entry will be allowed. Egypt has no such civilized, independent court. The response by the Western media, from its Foreign Press Association in Israel: “We believe the Israeli Government should ensure unfettered access for the world's media to Gaza during this crisis.” Of note, there is no such press entity or hue allowed in Egypt, but that is not mentioned or mentionable by these Western press representatives.
It is not the responsibility of Israel to cut its own throat by allowing the sensationalist emphasis, negativity and bias of much of the West’s media “unfettered access.”
Friday, January 2. 2009
Kimball reacts to Thomas Franks' WSJ article on the need to "return" to government economic regulation. I think this laissez-faire vs. govt regulation debate is pure politics and boob bait for the economically-uninformed. Kimball agrees. One quote:
The next time someone bemoans the evil of “laissez-faire capitalism” to you, utter the number 69,428. That’s the number of pages in the 2006 edition of the Federal Register, the official government compendium of rules and regulations, the handy-dandy list of things you must do, and not do, if you want to do . . . well, just about anything. “Laissez faire” is the bogey man unhappy leftists use to frighten the credulous. Capitalism was never completely unregulated, and it certainly isn’t unregulated now. In fact, we have much more to fear from the ethic of “défendre faire”–the nanny-state ethic whose ultimate goal is to turn us all into wards of the state. Thomas Frank criticizes rating agencies like Moody’s and banks like Washington Mutual for being insufficiently regulated. But the real problem was not lack of regulation but unintelligent and overbearing regulation. Mr. Frank derides those who believe that “all sin originates with the Community Reinvestment Act” (on which see here), but really he should pause to consider the disatrous effects of that piece of government regulation which, by intruding into the orderly operation of the market in order to further a utopian social goal, helped to precipitate the global credit crisis of 2008.
Read the whole thing. As we repeatedly note here, any crisis, real or manufactured, is used by the power-hungry as an opportunity to grab more. And, unfortunately, this process only ratchets in one direction.
Furthermore, booms and busts have forever been part of human economics - even in command-and-control economies. No-one should ever be surprised that they occur. Like hurricanes, they blow through and knock down the weak trees and blow away the poorly-built structures, leaving space for new opportunities and ventures. People get hurt in the process, which is why we have safety nets.
 Thanks to SDA for alerting us to a new model of the Antikythera Device. It's more of a calculator than a computer.
Most remarkable: they still have the original instruction manual for the 2100 year-old machine. I am missing the manuals for stuff I bought a year ago.
The video about the machine here.
Thursday, January 1. 2009
From guest poster Bruce Kesler:
There are better states of “peace” and lesser ones. A better peace is one that leads to or allows increases in mutual safety and respect; a lesser peace increases the security risks and leads to or allows more or larger conflict and suffering.
If that critical distinction is not understood, dictating decisions, then by default a lesser peace will result as actions are taken that undermine the focus and measures necessary for a better peace.
The primary element needed for a better peace is recognition by all sides that it is preferable to the alternatives. This may require one side to lead the other to this thinking, and that thinking to be reinforced.
Sometimes, either sooner or later, or more usually as a last resort, this will require the side desiring a better peace to take forceful action, including armed ones.
That has always been the regretful but necessary course by Israel since its founding.
Successfully and decisively fending off repeated attacks by neighboring Arab states, soundly defeating them, Jordan and Egypt finally accepted the sense of a better peace with Israel. The intervention of Iran and Syria into Lebanon’s nascent better peace with Israel, via their Hizbullah proxy, destroyed that better peace. But, although Israel’s 2006 incursion into Lebanon was far from decisive, and Hizbullah has rearmed to more lethal levels than before, Hizbullah was severely bloodied and has restrained armed and missile attacks on Israel longer than most expected.
Within, Israel has tried to neutralize the enmity of Palestinians through raising their economics and education above that in Arab countries, succeeding in that but it failing to prevail against the power-lusting thuggery of almost all Palestinian leadership from 1967 to now who see greater personal advantage and profit from encouraging the hate that entrenches their position. Even exiting Gaza, trying to have constructive trade and relations with it, failed to create a better peace as the most extreme of major Palestinian factions – Hamas – forcefully took control and destroyed all facets of external cooperation and internal development, further endangering Israel by thousands of terror missile and mortar attacks moving deeper into Israel till now about 700,000 in Israel are within range.
The West, particularly the US, has properly labeled Hamas as the primary culprit in Gaza’s downward spiral, and its targeting by Israel’s restrained and focused retaliations. But, at the same time, the West has insisted on allowing flows of “humanitarian” food and medical supplies to enter Gaza, including from Israel. This relieves suffering, but both through waylaying by Hamas for its own benefit and through reducing Gazan’s need to demand compromise or have hostility toward Hamas, it has contradicted the quest for a better peace. Even now, during active hostilities, this Western demand continues.
It is harsh but necessary that all supplies to Gaza be cut off during present circumstances. That is war.
Israel, it is said by all observers, cannot realistically afford to nor hope to eradicate Hamas. But, it – with the West’s support – can at least hope to so bloody and weaken Hamas as to possibly – not probably, but better prospects than any other alternative – create conditions for a better peace through so weakening Hamas’ stranglehold on Gaza as to allow the opening for Gazans with Arab states’ active involvement to develop a better peace of security and respect under the realistic deterrence of facing a sharp sword of retaliation.
Along with a complete cutoff of external supplies, it may be necessary for Israel to launch a short land offensive into Gaza to further uproot Hamas strongpoints and infrastructure, to drive the point home that Hamas dare not face Israel’s purposeful and firm deterrence measures.
Stopping now, especially when the point is not sufficiently driven home, and appearing to kowtow to misled pacifist demands from the West, will only accomplish a disrespect for Israel’s deterrence and lead to another shorter-lived lesser peace.
Although, according to the latest Rasmussen poll, only 31% of Democrats back Israel’s choice to take military action in Gaza (75% of Republicans do), ironically soon to be president Barack Obama can right now provide the voice that can lead to a better peace. Obama’s coy silence fosters Hamas’hope or expectation that a soon less resolved US will, in effect, save its necks by demanding Israel halt its attacks on Hamas. If Obama would forcefully speak out now in favor of Israel’s measures and express his determination to continue to do so until Hamas assuredly ceases its missile attacks upon Israel, Obama could both prevent the necessity of Israeli troops having to enter Gaza and persuade Hamas that it can only lose more by its intransigence. A better peace could emerge.
That would be real hope and change all would welcome.
Wednesday, December 31. 2008
From my window, this afternoon:
More photos of this happy bird below the fold.
Editor: Darn nice pics, Gwynnie. Given his hunting success around your bird-feeder, he'll be back often. My diagnosis is in the comments, so folks can make their own minds up first.
Continue reading "Who ate my sparrow? (photos)"
Tuesday, December 30. 2008
This is reposted from Sept, 2007 for Gramsci Week -
 Yesterday's handy summary of Gramsci put me ta thinkin'. I realized that when I am in the mood to be appalled by a pure strong dose of Gramsci thought, I check out what insanity our friend Van Helsing at Moonbattery has to offer.
Top of his blog right now - Bloomberg compares US in Iraq to Brits during the Revolution. Perfect Gramscian confusion. The amoral elements of New York love to create moral equivalents because it makes them feel sophisticated. Of course, Bloomberg is the embodiment of the intrusive Nanny State too: it's miraculous that he is one of the world's most successful and exuberant Capitalists.
And then next I happened to stop by David Warren for my weekly visit and read Reconstructing the Family. Yes, it's about Gramsci again.
This stuff is everywhere. Am I a victim, a pitiful captive of counter-revolutionary Bourgeois Thought which causes me to believe that this stuff is utter, malevolent nonsense designed to mess with your mind?
Photo: The Minuteman in Lexington, MA, who is the moral equivalent of an Al Qaida Jihadist.
Bruce Kesler sends this post:
What does CNN cite for this? Groups, mostly of young Arabs, numbering several hundred to several thousand having street demonstrations in the following countries: England, Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Iran, the Sadrist neighborhood in Baghdad, Iraq, and even in Israel. Ironically, and tellingly, none interviewed saw any reason to protest Hamas terror rockets and mortar barrages into Israel. This is what CNN calls the world! Or, is this CNN’s market that it caters to?
On Saturday. As you can see from the age of the trees, these rocky woods were pasture 50-60 years ago. The remains of Chestnut trees, tragically felled by the Chestnut Blight in the early 20th century, can still be seen slowly disintegrating on the forest floor.
Tired dog after walk:
Monday, December 29. 2008
 Just watched a Red Tail grab a squirrel from my bird feeder. Squirrel was, understandably, not happy about it at all.
They usually miss them. This guy came out of nowhere, fast, like an Israeli jet. Nature red in tooth (?) and claw. Those squirrels are over-fed and full of juicy fat. Happy dining, pal. Now I wish the Sharpies would pick off the rest of my pesky English Sparrows.
 Is "small government Republicanism" a fantasy? Are libertarian ideals silly utopian fantasies?
It's a good debate, and it would be fun if enough readers are home or working this week to join in via comments. We have three fine pieces on the topic today: Jennifer Rubin: How do you fight Obama's New New Deal? The GOP must reject big government: LAT Where should Conservatives draw the line? Am Thinker
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