We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
This is an awesome admission of categorical intellectual, political and
moral failure. For two decades greens have arrogated to themselves the
authority of science and wrapped themselves in the arrogant certainty of
self-righteous contempt for those who oppose them. They have equated
skepticism about their incoherent and contradictory policy proposals
with hatred of science and attacked their critics as the soulless hired
shills of the oil companies, happy to ruin humanity for the sake of some
corporate largesse.
He quotes Monbiot:
“All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we
propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None
of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this
mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking
project. I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to
address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise
the contradictions we confront. But even that could be a tall order.”
So many people refused to drink the Kool Aid. I'd like to see the enviros and greenies get back to the sorts of rational conservation efforts which prosperous societies are the best at doing - and truly do care about. Conservation, minus the Socialism and totalitarian aspirations.
Our post about hoarders the other day had me thinking about overeating. Overeating is hoarding fat cells. Once you create new fat cells, you can never get rid of them.
Odd and dysfunctional behavioral symptoms are all ways of dealing with uncomfortable internal states. Most people have at least one character defect or wiring defect which creates some sort of discomfort or uneasiness.
For some people, food is a center of existence and thus becomes a way of coping with being oneself, fending off boredom and a sense of emptiness - all of the cliches. In my line of work, we term this solution "orality." It works, in prosperous societies, and harms no-one but oneself.
For starters, this lady needs a physical job and needs to get out of the house. Her life is too easy, undemanding, and too dull. She'll end up on Disability, if she isn't already. Her son seems like a good kid, and wisely doesn't try to fix her. She has given up on life by taking on the victim role - she is a "victim of a food addiction."
I happen to be a doughnut epicure. I only care for plain doughnuts (God forbid, not "whole wheat"), deep fried in fat to a dark crunchy crust. If somebody insists on a dash of confectioner's sugar on top, that's OK but I'd be just as happy without it.
Cake doughnuts are revolting, like the ones at Bird Dog's favorite coffee joint or at the supermarket. You can feed them to kids and dogs, though, and they seem to thrive on them. Don't even talk about that Krispy Kreme gooey junk.
A real fried doughnut, and a cup of black coffee. Heaven. Then maybe a smoke to finish off the coffee. You do have to look around, though, to find places that make real doughnuts these days. Real doughnut-lovers know where they are.
Is it all about the 2012 election or about national security?Without a doubt, the domestic economy will weigh most heavily. But, the question and peril in the background will be whether matters abroad make the US safer or not and whether our leadership is up to the challenges.
President Obama is, to say the least, conflicted between his leanings toward disengagement from prior foreign commitments and realities on the ground. Potential Republican candidates are, to say the least, also conflicted between Republicans’ ordinary strong suit of sticktoitness abroad and most Americans’ war weariness.
The restrained, many say half-way and too weak or too unfocused, administration path in Libya has highlighted the divide. It comes down to attitudes of do the least, or if doing it do the job. Not even doing the least in Syria, comparable to a comparatively stronger involvement in Libya, further argues for the weakness at our helm.
Nonetheless, the potential Republican candidates as well as the administration’s loyalists continue to spin their PR as if the choices are similar to the 2008 election, if not the 2006, in the case of the Democrats wanting withdrawal, or not important enough to take a strong stand, in the case of Republicans.
Let’s step back, then, to President Bush’s courageous decision to surge in Iraq in 2007. This game changer accomplished our core objective, to set up an Iraq that would not be a sanctuary for terrorists or home of WMDs.
President Obama reluctantly approved a surge-light in Afghanistan while at the same time announcing a quick drawdown and withdrawal. What the American press has presented the public with since is the bravery of our troops operating under highly restrictive rules of engagement, the corruption and backstabbing of Afghanistan’s Karzai, and the sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan. No wonder most Americans want free of the mess.
News reports (Washington Post, for example) have the Obama administration using the death of Osama bin Laden, though anymore a figure-head, as justification to speeding our withdrawal from Afghanistan. But, our core objectives are not met by that, setting up an Afghanistan that isn’t a source of terrorists or a Pakistan whose real nuclear weapons won’t fall into the hands of evil doers.
Peter Bergen, who has long studied bin Laden, national security analyst for CNN and the liberal New America Foundation, delivers a read-it-all analysis in the liberal New Republic of where we’re really at in Afghanistan, “Can We Win in Afghanistan.” Bergen’s article is full of useful background and current information.
In war, perceptions tend to lag behind reality by a considerable distance. In Afghanistan, our efforts were widely thought of as successful for several years after things had clearly begun to deteriorate on the ground. Today, it appears that we have the opposite problem: improvements on the ground that are widely dismissed amid a narrative of defeat.
Bergen believes that President Obama will stay the course. His article was likely written before today’s reports of the Obama administration trying to speed disengagement.
Regardless of whether Bergen will fall into line with this latest Obama administration gambit, his article stands as strong argument why President Obama more hastily trying to retreat should be confronted by those who care more for the US national security than pandering to war weariness for 2012.
Our neglect of national security challenges during the 1990s fed into our being forced to face harsher realities during the past decade. Will we repeat that grave error?
You can sense, in the question she addresses, that childlike yearning for a scientific and medical utopia from which, presumably, unfair forces are excluding us. I call them Edenic fantasies.
The comment thread is interesting in that regard as well.
The appointment at Brooklyn College of an adjunct, Kristofer Petersen, to teach Middle East politics in the Political Science department was defended as academic freedom. This was despite his involvement in touting Gazans as virtual lambs and Israel as a beast, and his heavily slanted reading list.
He continues. In brief, Petersen tells us, Israel is limited to some degree in its oppression but it is “beyond the threshold of atrocity,” and Israel’s oppression of Gazans is largely to maintain its own false identity “myth”, to create cohesion within Israel by creating and demonizing an “Other.”
Is anyone in Brooklyn College’s administration seeing, and is the Political Science department embarrassed? We’ll see, if he is re-appointed.
Kristofer Petersen’s latest is his posted draft of a paper he is to deliver at the American Political Science Association. Petersen asks that his draft not be quoted or cited without his permission. Sorry, Kris, but you posted it and there is a legal concept called “fair use.”
Wrapped in a discussion of two radicals' views of nationalism, Petersen’s piece titled “Beyond The Threshold Of Atrocity: Nationalism, Biopower and Israel’s Occupation of Gaza” offers us this:
While one may desire the Other’s total annihilation, it is impossible to do precisely because the Other helps the nation to imagine itself. The Other tells juridical society in part who they are as a group, as a nation, as an idea – but only insofar as they are permitted to exist as an idealized object of hatred.
Thus,
For late-modern society to derive any value at all from racial oppression, its enemies must be brought to a condition as close to total eradication as possible – without either crossing into conventional genocide or manufacturing suffering in such a way as to contradict myths of the national self-image.
Israel needs Hamas and Gaza to justify its existence!
In his other utterances, Petersen does not support terrorist acts by Hamas. But, Peterson does defend the Gazans who perform them. Rather a thin veil for, in effect, supporting terrorist acts. I’ve read almost all I can – or can stand -- of Petersen’s comments and writings I could find online, and nary a critique of Gazans. Rather he concentrates his focus on single-minded attacks upon Israel.
Israel did not create an “Other” nor does Israel oppress Gazans to serve its racist, colonialist needs.
Brooklyn College, indeed any even semi-credible academic, should recognize that Kristofer Petersen represents the rot within that must be reversed if academia is to retain any self-respect or respect from society or taxpayers.
Somebody referred to the royal wedding as "chick crack." I think it was. I keep hearing about the hats, and I have learned over the years that hats and shoes are crack to females even though guys rarely notice them. Here are some good clips from the pageant.
Speaking of weddings, a horny Insty linked this piece on hot marital sex. Daily sounds pretty good to me. When I was younger, I was a twice-daily guy, or at least a would-be twice-daily guy. However, back then, one time did not mean just "once."
It doesn't take much to keep a guy happily married: lots of sex fun, decent and abundant meals made with love if not with expertise, letting him have his alone time, no nagging about his many flaws, some interesting conversation, no inquiring about his "feelings," and otherwise just generally appreciating his unique wonderfulness. Create a beautiful life for him to live in, and make home a soft, loving haven without the negativity and hassles of life out there. That's all we ask for, ladies. Without those things, our lives aren't very pleasant.
The problem is that the Mrs. is now imagining herself at age 24, marrying Prince William or Duke William or whoever he is. He's a military pilot, too, and most of us guys are neither prince nor military pilot. However, being a hard-working, honest, decent, horny, God-fearing, self-reliant American citizen ought to be enough for any lucky woman.
Yom Hashoah Ve Hagevurah (Devastation and Heroism Day) is each year on the Hebrew calendar the 27th of the month of Nissan. When it occurs on Sunday, as this year, technically it is observed on Monday. However, as most people are off work on Sunday, most observances will be today.
Yes, there was heroism among the devastation. Most of the heroes died in battle or revolt, as in Warsaw. Most died unsung as they gave of themselves to make others' last moments more comfortable; there's a special recognition for some survivors who helped others survive. Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and documentation center, each year highlights the stories of some of the survivors. Here's a fighting hero, for example, and here's one saved by one of the caring Righteous Gentiles.
Here's a photo of Jews collected in one of the ghettos before their slaughter. Just look at each individual face, then multiply: the future and contributions of 1 1/2 million children and 4 1/2 million adults wiped out.
A popular singer and group in the 60’s was Jay and The Americans. Jay Black (Real nameDavid Blatt) was from an Orthodox Jewish background. His most famous song was Cara Mia. They had many top hits. His voice had an operatic/cantorial quality.
He recorded a famous Yiddish song called “Where is the little street?” (Vi iz dus geseleh?) in 1966. Jay adapted it into a version to demonstrate his feelings about the Holocaust. After a long struggle with the record company, he convinced them to let him record it. While recording it he worked with Artie Butler to help him with the arrangement. He added Chagall’s paintings to provide sentimental visions of the Jewish villages in vivid colors.
Hope you enjoy this! The Chagall pictures are spectacular.
The song is performed in English and Yiddish.
Excellent essay on the distinctiveness of the Holocaust from other genocides or everyday intolerance.
That explains it to me. It's the same reason the pols resist Costco in the big blue cities: unions vs. the citizens. Truth is, NYC needs WalMart much more than WalMart needs NYC. WalMart is doing just fine in the US and worldwide. These tough pols and union bosses are making fools of themselves and fools of the voters.
I have no WalMart in my area, but went to Costco this morning to get supplies for church coffee hour tomorrow (cheeses, strawberries, croissants, corn muffins, grapes, vegetables and veggie dip, bagels and cream cheese, etc), and remembered that Gwynnie had told me that they are now selling no-iron dress shirts that are as nice as the Brooks Brothers version at one-third the price. Despite being a loyal and life-long Brooks person, I bought one to try.
I can tell you that some certainly are, some could care less, and some find it an abomination.
Porn, recreational sex, prostitution, rape, illicit seduction, perversions, etc. have been going on since there have been humans. That's a fact. Humans are endowed with the wackiest sex drives and wackiest imaginations of all animals and, depending on conditions and circumstances, not always the most mature or honorable behavior.
But what about the ladies? A teen gal recently told me that somebody said to her, in the bathroom after a frat party, "I am so pissed that I didn't get any dick tonight." How times have changed. Or have they?
I suppose that the voyeuristic TV show Hoarders has raised the visibility of hoarding. It's one of those OCD-type of things that fades from totally insane to fairly normal.
If what you like to hoard is money, then you're just thrifty or stingy. If you like to hoard "collectible" items, then you're a collector: Art, rocks, knives, rugs, guns, pinball machines, etc.
If you can't get rid of stuff you don't really need to the point that it interferes with life, it gets to be a problem. Come to think of it, hoarding money can have the same effect.
I cannot embed this bit. If interested, there are more of these on YouTube - like this one: We can't have people over to our house:
A short time ago, Iran's Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged the Muslim World to boycott anything and everything that originates with the Jewish people.
In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:
"Any Muslim who has Syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has Syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew. If a Muslim suspects that he has Gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be using the method of a Jew named Neissner.
"A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube.
Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil.
If a Muslim has Diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew. If one has a headache, he must shun Pyramidon and Antypyrin, due to the Jews, Spiro and Ellege.
Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of Chloral Hydrate.
Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew.
Should a Muslim child get Diphtheria, he must refrain from the "Schick" reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.
"Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram.
They should continue to die or remain crippled by Infantile Paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas Salk.
"Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of Tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this killing disease.
Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel, and of many other world renowned Jewish scientists and medical experts.
"In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain afflicted with Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Heart Disease, Headaches, Typhus, Diabetes, Mental Disorders, Polio, Convulsions and Tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott."
Are you and I machines? Are we analyzable without remainder into a collection of mechanisms whose operation can be fully explained by the causal operation of physical and chemical laws, starting from the parts and proceeding to the whole? It might seem so, judging from the insistent testimony of those whose work is to understand life.
There is little doubt about the biologist’s declared obsession with mechanisms of every sort — “genetic mechanisms,” “epigenetic mechanisms,” “regulatory mechanisms,” “signaling mechanisms,” “oncogenic mechanisms,” “immune mechanisms,” “circadian clock mechanisms,” “DNA repair mechanisms,” “RNA splicing mechanisms,” and even “molecular mechanisms of plasticity.” The single phrase “genetic mechanism” now yields over 25,000 hits in Google Scholar and the count seems to be rising by hundreds per month. But no cellular entity or process is exempt; everything has been or will be baptized a “mechanism.” In an informal analysis of technical papers I’ve collected, I found an average of 7.5 uses of mechanism per article, with the number in a single article varying from 1 to 32. This is not even counting cognate forms such as mechanistic and machine.
Using mechanical metaphors probably sounded advanced, and scientifically anti-vitalistic 100 years ago, but now it seems quaint. The metaphors we use are important, because they tend to be reified by people outside a given field of expertise.
We easily forget that vitalism was a metaphor, like phlogiston. Our next batch of metaphors for everything will be systems-oriented, until the next new thing comes along.
Teaching writing is a difficult task, if not a nearly impossible one. Eliminating standards and propagandizing is so much easier. So easy, any idiot can - and does - do it.
The thing is, you don't have to know a damn thing about the craft of writing to propagandize. This is truly appalling: Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years. Crazy, for sure, and utterly out of reality and out of usefulness.
You have to either laugh or cry.
It sounds like going to writing class today is like going to shop class and learning about the oppression of the worker instead of how to use a lathe. Might be useful if you want to become a Community Organizer, but not if you ever want to make anything.
Saturday morning, a stroll around the shrubby areas of the Olde Farm revealed a big movement of migrants overnight.
Towhees, calling and scratching in the ground cover:
Flocks of noisy Blue Jays - who do move south in the fall, leaving us in New England with the Canadian birds during the winter. You know what they look like.
Two flocks of about 20 White-throated Sparrows, scratching for bugs under the rose bushes and in the overgrown dead vegetable garden, singing their Spring song:
And a Sharpie buzzed past, doubtless following, and feeding upon, the tasty, tender little migrants:
Good morning, World!
Most images and links from/to the fine CLO bird info website.
In four days, this post is almost outdated. I heard Parula and Palm Warblers singing this morning -
Serious gardeners in New England, especially food-gardeners, build coldframes to extend the growing season. Properly done, you can add at least a month to the growing season for some things.
I used to mess with things like that, but I don't bother anymore. If I lived in Maine, though, I'd definitely have a coldframe full of spinach, leaf lettuces, etc.
I've even tried putting tomatoes out in late April here, but it never works out. Milk jugs, polyurethane, etc. Big hassle. Fact is, around here, if you put them out in late May they quickly catch up to the early birds, and even exceed them because they have endured no cool weather stresses. Tomatoes do not really put on growth without warm nights - above 55 F. We are still in the 30s on some nights.
If you have money to burn, the best thing is a good-sized real greenhouse. I would attach one to the house, with interior and exterior doors, so you could just open the door and let the rich earthy and flower and herb and plant smells infuse the house. Home-grown Beefsteak tomatoes 12 months/year.
Pic is Beefsteaks, the only tomato I truly enjoy eating, especially when hot from the sun. We usually only get a few weeks of them ripening, mid-late August-early September. Is it worth the trouble? For me, it is. It is especially pleasant when you can find a big ripe one that a squirrel or chipmunk has not taken a bite out of.
I had to run home this afternoon to meet with my chimney guy. Actually, not my chimney guy, but my semi-local sheet-metal guy.
I never had a sheet-metal guy, but I'm glad to have one now. He can make whatever you need in his wood-heated shop in an old mill building in CT, and he will install what he makes, too. Cheerfully.
Our old farmhouse has three fireplaces. We needed some new flashing, new collars, caps, etc. to keep the rain and the animals out. That was a piece of cake for the good old guy. He promised me that his patch-up job would outlive me, which isn't saying much. In olde Yankeeland, everything is a patch-up job.
I chatted up his 20-something black assistant. He said "Man, we have a beautiful shop. We can make anything - copper, aluminum, stainless, plain steel - whatever you want. Ducts, flashing, roofs, gutters, whatever. Square ducting, round ducting, whatever you need. We have the technology. We built our own wood stove too."
"What do you do for wood?" I asked.
"Oh, our tree guy friends just dump it off for us. Saves them a dump fee. We cut and split it ourselves. We load the stove up at night, and it's as warm as toast when we come to work in the morning."
Because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly;
Because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape;
Because in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion;
Because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience;
Because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don't want to waste the trip;
Because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters;
Because only in the woods can I find solitude without loneliness;
Because bourbon out of an old tin cup always tastes better out there;
Because maybe one day I will catch a mermaid;
And finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important, but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant - and not nearly so much fun.
Robert Traver
A mermaid, or a cougar in a tree? Cougar safely below the fold -
Traditionally, when Microsoft releases a new version of Internet Exploder, a chill runs through the geek community as we cower and tremble, wondering what have they done to the poor thing this time? Some favorite button is now gone? That one tricky thing it did is now history? That one feature that you found quite useful, but nobody else did, has been removed because nobody else did?
There's always something we can count on to gripe, moan, carp, whine and bitch about.
But, showing that Microsoft can be even crueler than cruel, this time they played the dirtiest trick on all on us:
They didn't change anything.
And if that isn't spitting in the face on tradition, I don't know what is.
Pic: The lovely Melanie proudly displays two of Doc's favorite logos.
Oh, I might also mention that it's now faster than goose shit when accessing blog sites. Review & setup tips are below the fold.
Mark Steyn reports that his childrens' Kinder Eggs were seized by US Customs as he and they crossed the border from Canada to the US. According to Customs: "Many of the toys that have been tested by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the past were determined to present a choking hazard for young children....Last year, CBP officers discovered more than 25,000 of these banned chocolate eggs. More than 2,000 separate seizures were made of this product." As Steyn states, however: "And yet oddly enough generations of European and Latin American children remain unchoked."
If you don't know what Kinder Eggs are, they are hollow chocolate eggs with ingenious little assembly toys inside.
Each Summer, my wife and boys visit grandma in Germany. My wife brings back two egg cartons of twelve Kinder Eggs in each carton. Throughout the year they provide exceptional motivational rewards for the boys. My wife is as paranoid as most mothers about her childrens' safety, and as prone as most to believe most scares. The boys have collected several hundred of Kinder Egg toys. They reacted with deep disappointment this morning when I told them they are now illegal to bring into the US , then asked Mom if they could eat them all before getting on the plane home. My wife is trying to figure out something else as powerful a motivational reward as Kinder Eggs.
There's someone in Washington smiling that another motivation for individual effort has been broken and outlawed.
One of the best things about writing program reviews is that sometimes someone springs out of the woodwork with a better suggestion. A while back I wrote a review on 'Start Menu 7', a replacement Start Menu for Windows 7. But while it works perfectly, it still costs twenty clams.
Enter 'Classic Start Menu' (where do they dream up these wild and crazy names?), a free replacement that mimics the old style menu perfectly. It's also quite configurable so you can get rid on any unwanted Start Menu entries, like "Help & Support", the ultra-worthless 'Search' box, and arrange the columns and icons to just the right size.
But the main thing is that the menus auto-expand — like in the old days — so there's no unnecessary clicking. If I want to access 'Process Explorer' inside of my 'Tools' Start Menu folder, that's 5 mouse clicks with the stock Start Menu, 2 with Classic.
Additional info (and some other program suggestions for Win7) is below the fold.
Credible, mainstream foreign policy analysts express dismay that President Obama’s foreign policy actions are so often contradictory, misdirected from commonly perceived national interests, and counterproductive to even stated goals.
Such critiques, seeking sanity and to avoid extremism and conspiracy theories, just stop there. In these analysts further defense, the facts of foreign policy failures are enough to indict. In their limited purview, that is sufficient. However, if one is searching for deeper explanation in order to avoid or prevent the repetition of such wrong-headedness impaling the US national interests, another additional approach is needed.
In the lack of extensive internal documents (a la, to some extent, the “Pentagon Papers”) a functional analysis of President Obama’s foreign policies looks at outcomes to discern cause(s). When the outcomes are similar, there is more reason to look for common cause. In other words, the outcomes are either consciously purposeful and may have a common purpose and cause, or highly likely due to conditioning. These two can come together when the structure of justification for the conditioning is verbalized and then used by the actor. President Obama’s leftist worldview is that conditioning and conscious purpose.
The caveat must be raised that functional analysis is, like any theory when applied to real life, unable to explain or predict every cause or action, and can be abused to impose an inadequately supported structure. For example, most wizened observers of human affairs agree that “stupidity” is usually a better explanation than “mendacity” in understanding the foibles or mistakes of men.
For example, this criticism was tellingly made by critics of the Cold War revisionist historians who ascribed its origins to exploitive and rapacious capitalism and the consequent purposeful expansionism of America’s leaders, downplaying the role and actions of the Soviet Union’s leaders as well as the gaps in information upon which our leaders had to act or react. Further analyses of the Cold War revisionist historians’ works more simply showed poor historiography. More measured contemporary historians, now with access to more Soviet archives and Western, see some less adventurous motivations and choices by Stalin, communist ideology at work alongside any realpolitik, and more confusion and reserved responses by and among Western leaders in the Cold War battles.
The Marxism underlying the Cold War revisionist historians’ world view was, as is Marxism, a form of functional analysis. From the outcome of post-war global dominance by the US and the conflicts with spreading communism, the cause was ascribed of a “mendacious,” conniving US pursuing resources and seeking the subjugation of colonial peoples.
There will be more future transparency into President Obama’s foreign policies that will expose greater confusion and reservations than seems the case now. The confidence of Americans after World War II, the expansion of our economy, and some racism may have been among causes for some US excesses. President Obama’s foreign policies appear almost the reverse: lack of confidence in US exceptionalism – our deserved heightened confidence in our good motives and actions, neglect of maintaining or growing the US economy, and siding with those opposed to states aligned with or benign toward US foreign policies. In this, President Obama is acting out his leftist upbringing and education.
As with the Cold War revisionist historians, and the wider leftist critique of America, President Obama basically takes and acts upon their view that the US and the West is mostly at fault for conflict and the unreached aspirations of those seen as oppressed.
President Obama was raised and educated in this leftist view. Yes, he is limited by others in our society and politics. But, he has been both consistent and determined in pursuing his view. His half-measures of continuity in Iraq and Afghanistan are compromises with contrary facts and views, but his half-measures are likely to fail and still, thus, further his view. Functionally, President Obama is the foe of the US.
In the Middle East, this functional analysis of President Obama’s foreign policies is most evident. President Obama buys that the source of conflict is the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, and that Israel – the stronger – is at fault. The Palestinians are oppressed by Israel. The other states in the Middle East – all autocratic or despotic -- that have come to terms with Israel or whose policies don’t really threaten Israel are viewed negatively. The states that more actively oppose and threaten Israel are viewed as whom we should favor. Islamist ideology is either ignored or seen benignly as a spur to violence and conflict. Arab states and Iran’s internal policies of corruption, exploitation and repression are not viewed as the source of their backwardness or hostilities.
In short, in functional analysis, President Obama really acts to lessen the power of the US and its exertion and to increase the power and exertions of those opposed to the US and its allies. The rationalizations he has inculcated from his leftist past try to publicly justify this in evasions and euphemisms. Indeed, he may not consciously want the defeat of the West and victories by its foes. But that is the result and it is all rooted in his leftist world view.
Those, of whatever political orientation, who avoid calling him out as, functionally, the foe of Western values and US national interests are doing their listeners a serious harm by reducing the justified wholesale rejection of President Obama’s foreign policies. Worse, they mask the cause and its rejection, allowing it to reappear among others and further harm the US, its values and its allies.
The administration has sat on its hands despite the fact that the Assad regime is one of the most implacable U.S. adversaries in the Middle East. It is Iran’s closest ally; it supplies Iranian weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip for use against Israel. Since 2003 it has helped thousands of jihadists from across the Arab world travel to Iraq to attack American soldiers. It sought to build a secret nuclear reactor with the help of North Korea and destabilized the pro-Western government of neighboring Lebanon by sponsoring a series of assassinations....
Yet the Obama administration has effectively sided with the regime against the protesters.
I find it intriguing that what should be one of the most easily-answerable questions in history:
Who first sailed around the world?
has an incorrect answer.
Ferdinand Magellan, right?
Not even close. All he did was go the equivalent distance. He sailed from Europe to the Philippines, then back again, then, later, out to the New World, around the southern tip and across to the Philippines... where he promptly hired himself and his band of cutthroats out as mercenaries to fight for a local warlord and got an arrow through his noggin as a reward.
So, while he went the equivalent of, he never actually sailed around the world.
So, who did?
The fact that almost nobody knows is what makes this such a great PR victory for Spain, who Magellan sailed for. When you cheat history, you're in the big time.
Has America slowly become a greedy entitlement culture, in which there is no longer any shame in taking from one's neighbors? Wish I had written this, by Harsanyi: If Washington Is So Great, Let's All Pay for It. One quote:
If, as the enlightened voices on the left contend, the American people deeply love their federal services, their dependency programs, their regulations, their industrious public education department, let's all pay. Why shouldn't we take on a proportionally fair share in the joy? Even income tax-paying Americans don't really feel the cost of government because of how we collect taxes. But let's create better consumers. Consumers pay and demand results. Dependents, on the other hand, just demand. They have no reason not to.
In my view, we are at a tipping point when half the country has become pure free-loaders, and many more have their favorite freebies. See Poll shows Americans oppose entitlement cuts to deal with debt problem. I am a flat-taxer. No personal deductions either. No business or corporate taxes, and no estate tax. (I also want means-testing for Social Security and Medicare, which is just one reason I am not in politics).
Think of how much money would be saved on lawyers, accountants and tax-planners. That money could be used productively - by us (not by the government).
Of course, if my American Vision were magically realized, the Left would just re-create the whole mess again. The vote-buying, the handouts, the deductions, etc.
Am I the only person who takes no freebies and wants no freebies from anybody else?
My church holds a Seder on the Thursday before Easter, with the traditional foods (but no Matzoh Balls or Gefilte Fish - I don't think our folks would eat that). A Seder in total silence.
The Last Supper is thought to have been Seder. Maybe the bread was Matzoh?
Alas, we do not serve wine in our church so cannot follow the Jewish tradition of drinking a little too much of it at supper.
I happen to be a doughnut epicure. I only care for plain doughnuts (God forbid, not "whole wheat"), deep fried in fat to a dark crunchy crust. If somebody insists on a dash of confectioner's sugar on top, that's OK but I'd be just as happy without it. 
Somebody referred to the royal wedding as "chick crack." I think it was. I keep hearing about the hats, and I have learned over the years that hats and shoes are crack to females even though guys rarely notice them. Here are some 
Serious gardeners in New England, especially food-gardeners, build 
Well, that was disappointing.
One of the best things about writing program reviews is that sometimes someone springs out of the woodwork with a better suggestion. A while back I wrote a review on 'Start Menu 7', a replacement Start Menu for Windows 7. But while it works perfectly, it still costs twenty clams.
I find it intriguing that what should be one of the most easily-answerable questions in history:
My church holds a Seder on the Thursday before Easter, with the traditional foods (but no Matzoh Balls or Gefilte Fish - I don't think our folks would eat that). A Seder in total silence.