In England, Climate change belief given same legal status as religion
In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that "a belief in man-made climate change ... is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations".
The most famous climate change believer of all stands to make a bundle. Al Gore could become the world's first carbon billionaire
For the NY Times, John Broder examines Gore's dual role as advocate and investor.
The values of my fringe homeschooling family have become urban chic now
Growing up in a home-schooling family in rural Texas, I got used to thinking of myself as fringe. Like a good number of home schoolers, my parents distrusted television, the food industry, the medical profession, and, well, just about anything that average middle-class Americans considered normal. Most of my brothers and sisters were born in our parents’ bedroom and never made the pilgrimage to the local hospital for vaccinations. We spent lots of our days away from textbooks, trying our hands at growing and raising our own food and tackling grown-up chores. We did not catch many episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or eat many Pop-Tarts.
Needless to say, I was, for much of my adolescence, preoccupied with proving I was “mainstream”—that despite all this natural, organic, precocious living, I was capable of consuming as thoughtlessly as everyone else. Now, as a post-college transplant to New York, I have to do a rapid reverse. Never did I imagine that what I once considered my parents’ annoying “alternative” choices would be lifestyle gospel in New York, praised on the cover of cool magazines, evangelized by all sorts of celebrities. Now, I’ve started to think of my parents and their obscure home-schooling friends living in tiny, isolated American towns as some kind of urban prophets.
Phyllis Chesler on A Lesson Learned in Kabul
Once, long ago, I was held captive in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Yes, I went there of my own free will, but I was only 20 years old and in love with my college sweetheart
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If one survives such a grand and dangerous adventure, one learns some important lessons.
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Thus, at too young an age, I already understood that barbarism and hatred of the Other is indigenous to Islam; it is not caused by Western “evil.” Intra-tribal and religious-sect feuding is a permanent way of life in the wild, wild East.
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I could never get anyone in the American civil rights, anti-war, feminist, or post-colonialist movements to understand this. They needed to blame the Big Bad West for the world’s problems. They also needed to identify the developing world as intrinsically innocent, pure, victimized.
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My people: Western feminists, leftists, gay liberationists, progressives, absolutely refuse to stand up to Islam’s subordination and bestial persecution of women, dissidents, and homosexuals. The same activists who easily condemn Christianity and Judaism as “misogynists” are hushed about Islamic misogyny in practice.
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Now I and a handful of others are trying to tell the truth about Islamic gender apartheid. Those of us who are raising the alarm are being demonized as “Islamophobes,” “racists,” and “fascists.” Yet, in my opinion, western civilization, beginning with Europe, will be won or lost on the issue of women’s rights.
Richard Fernandez writes one of the best essays of the year that begins with a mother's lament over the BBC's cocaine culture.
Why have we become so indifferent to counterfeits? So willing to accept the clever facsimile for the ostensibly real? In part because perceptions are now such a big part of the economy that for so long as perceptions appear to be OK, then the economy must be ‘OK’. In recent years management literature has talked extensively about the “servitization of the products” The modern economy no longer produces “things”. It produces intangibles called services. Insurance, banking, government, tourism, retail, education, social services, franchising, news media, hospitality, consulting, law, health care, environmental services, real estate and personal services now dominate the activity of the Western world. We produce satisfaction.
Perhaps the key difference between an economy based on things relative to that based on services is that the “truth” of things is self-evident while the value of services is often based on perception. Perception is often the proxy for value in a service economy. Indeed it often comprises the value itself, at least in the entertainment industry and possibly in news. It immediately follows that in a huge market for intangibles where “children’s programs”, sporting events, entertainment, academic degrees, derivatives, mortgages, ‘health care’, news and environmental indulgences are traded for vast sums telling the unflattering truth can be extremely costly. Stay away from the truth unless you absolutely positively have to.
In a market for fantasy the truth has little or no value.
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One of problems economists should study is what happens when the overall truth content of a servitized economy declines. Whereas the “truth” of a ton of steel is the steel itself, what is the truth of a bundled subprime mortgage? What is the truth content of a credit default swap? Perhaps we don’t know, and this circumstance has directly led to the current economic crisis. The financial meltdown is from a certain point of view, a pure crisis of information. What we don’t know (or better yet what we do know but ain’t so) is hurting us.
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Bad information destroys. We need to be free of bad information. Perhaps the underlying reason for the large and seemingly growing crisis in the Western World is that its truth reserves — the percentage of its information store that actually corresponds to reality — have fallen below a critical level and its institutions are attempting to cover the deficit by frantically printing more lies. Maybe the reason why finance, politics, news, real estate and environmental services are in dire such straits is that they among the service industries have the biggest portfolio of defective information. And it’s killing them. While there may be a tendency in the service economy to increase the amount of spin for short term gain in the long run survival depends on its minimization. We have to know where we are, if we are to avoid getting lost.
The way to the truth is to take the shortest path back to reality.
I've been pondering for a while now why truth matters so little to many people.
We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.
Update: Richard Fernandez responds in The Lordlings
“They don’t even notice.” But in the end, they must. The one thing no generation of parents can protect their children from is reality. No inheritance can withstand the foolishness of heirs. The harsh arithmetic on the frontier, the terrible outflow of dollars and cents, the gradual and then sudden loss of credibility as people see they are dealing not with serious people but with gilded fools cumulate their irresistible effects. In the end the gay parade of capering children enters a dark cavern and the entrance shuts behind them. Those who don’t want to join in this cavalcade have two duties.
The first is to survive; to have the wit to realize that if something can’t go on, then it won’t. The administration is touting “green shoots”. Others might use the phrase “pushing up daisies”. People who can tell the difference have got to rig for depth charges and evade worst; but be ready to take aggressive productive action where they can.
But the second duty is more important. Those unentranced by the magic flute have an obligation to remember what happened; to keep the history books free of revisionism so that by shame and memory those pied pipers who led a generation astray can never return unchallenged to sound their witching tune again.
What happened in Britain that in that once great democracy, one-fifth of the electorate would consider voting for the BNP, a genuine fascist party?
Shannon Love on The Collapse of the British Liberal Order
liberal orders don’t slowly evolve into authoritarian ones. Instead, they become less and less effective until they suddenly collapse into an authoritarian order. People simply lose faith that the liberal order can function and they throw their support behind an authoritarian order just to survive.
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The major problem in resisting authoritarian orders is the simple fact that they usually work quite well in the short term. In the 1920s, Mussolini was widely admired across the political spectrum for saving Italy from imploding after years of red socialist strikes and violence had all but shut down the country. Hitler pulled Germany out of the Great Depression spectacularly. The communists did manage to rapidly industrialize peasant economies (albeit at a staggering cost in lives).
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The BNP could very well rise to power by quickly and easily fixing problems that many Britons see going unaddressed by the left.
Britain faces major problems with a permanent economic underclass, low economic mobility, illegal immigration and a large, vocal and often violent unassimilated Islamic subculture. The native working class in particular feels squeezed by economic competition from low-cost immigrants. More importantly, they have seen themselves relegated in social status to the bottom of the heap.
So who lost Britain? The Labour Party, once home to the working class.
Labour wanted mass immigration to make Britain more multicultural says former Labour advisor
The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.
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He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".
Melanie Phillips writes The outrageous truth slips out: Labour cynically plotted to transform the entire make-up of Britain without telling us
There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage.
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Now the political picture has been transformed overnight by the unguarded candour of Andrew Neather's eye-opening superciliousness. For now we know that Labour politicians actually caused this to happen - and did so out of total contempt for their own core voters.
David Pryce Jones on Nick Griffin, the BNP leader
Griffin is far from a Hitler or Mussolini, far even from suitably streamlined European fascists of today like Jorg Haidar or Jean-Marie Le Pen. Overweight, he waddles. His face seems designed to be incapable of smiling, and he has no humour, no powers of persuasion, no gift for repartee. This glum figure is undoubtedly a racist, an anti-Semite, an ignoramus, and a liar about the unsavory things he has done and said on his way towards the top of the BNP.
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Griffin has only one point to make, namely that immigration is out of control and British people no longer feel that this is their country.
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Nobody seems to have worked out that mass immigration and the welfare state are incompatible. British people see immigrants receiving benefits, housing, and the rest of it on a scale that is neither deserved nor available to them. Post-war governments, whether Conservative or Labour, have created this confusion and taken every measure to pretend either that it is not happening or that it doesn't matter.
Mike McNally on Britain's New Star on the Far, Far Right
The BNP speaks to the white working classes, a constituency which feels increasingly alienated, neglected, and abandoned by a “New” Labour party which once drew the bulk of its support from those same people. In broad terms, these are people who feel left behind by the pace of social and economic change. They are concerned about the erosion of what they see as their British identity under a government obsessed with promoting multiculturalism. More pressingly, they feel under pressure from mass immigration [3], angered by the continuing transfer of political power away from their elected leaders and into the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats of the European Union, concerned by rising crime, and alarmed by the spread of Islamic extremism.
Labour long ago lost the big battles of economic ideas to the Conservatives, but Britain’s cultural establishment has succeeded in making left-wing and “progressive” views on immigration, Europe, and crime the orthodoxy of the ruling classes, despite their unpopularity at the ballot box. (A former Labour advisor recently revealed how Tony Blair and his ministers encouraged mass immigration to socially engineer a “multicultural” Britain and “rub the right’s noses in diversity.”)
The social consequences of unwed mothers are long-lasting and heart-breaking.
Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"
In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class -- and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study."
Another student angrily challenged me: "You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us." When I did, not one hand went up.
Making the Grade Isn't About Race. It's About Parents by Patrick Welsh.
It's not about race though that is what school administrators and community activists focus on. There's plenty of money for schools.
"The real problem," says Glenn Hopkins, president of Alexandria's Hopkins House, which provides preschool and other services to low-income families, "is that school superintendents don't realize -- or won't admit -- that the education gap is symptomatic of a social gap."
Hopkins notes that student achievement is deeply affected by issues of family, income and class, things superintendents have little control over.
In The Daddy Gap, Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess points to a 2005 Kay Hymowitz piece in City Journal. Kay Hymowitz is a trenchant observer and writer about the marriage gap that is increasingly responsible for the growing divide between economic classes.
1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.
By now, these facts shouldn't be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto "baby mamas." Not so; it is a largely low-income--and disproportionately black--phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal--one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.
Until black leaders come to grips with what is really happening in the inner cities, the plight of black males and black females will only get worse.
The men won't grow up, won't become fully formed, but stay passionless and apathetic, distraught in their failure to launch. As a black woman pleaded, "Enough of this selfishness: Time for black men to act like men."
Too many young girls may yearn for marriage, but making babies is something they can do, something they believe they must do if they want meaning in their lives. Misbegotten health policies are not teaching young girls that they are too young to start families, but giving them contraceptives without parental consent and essentially saying do what you want.
The model of the two-person, mother-father model of parenthood is being changed to meet adults' rights to children rather than children's needs to be known and , whenever possible, by their mother and father. It's the ultimate selfishness that will continue to cause ruin in people's lives and in our society.
How do we respond to the fact that so many children are starving for a father?
Peter Francese is a demographic trends analyst at Oglive & Mather. He sees four major, emergent trends that will come into even sharper focus with next year's census. What America will look like in 2010.
1. The Grandparent Society. Grandparents will number almost 70 million in 2010 and are growing 5x faster than the population as a whole.
This, Francese says, is the most fascinating development in recent memory, the morphing of America into a multi-generational society in which grandparents, their adult children, and their children’s children are all living in the same house, with the grandparents offering both economic and emotional support.
This coincides with a staggering increase in births to single mothers; today, one in four children is born to an unmarried woman. And, as Francese puts it, “Who needs the help of grandparents more than a single mom?” The upshot, he says, is that Americans 50 years and older control the vast majority of assets and show the most economic growth; he thinks advertising dollars should shift from the current 10% spent on that demographic to 40%.
2. The "rocketing ascendancy of women in America"
3. The growing Hispanic population, up 42% as America becomes ever more multicultural.
4. The migration pattern to the South and West.
The Midwest and Northeast are hemorrhaging jobs and residents, while the South and the West have seen a huge uptick in residents (and, California aside, are doing better economically).
I meant to link this earlier this week, but it got lost in all my open tabs.
As a fan and user of Pandora, I was fascinated to learn more about The Song Decoders.
On first listen, some things grab you for their off-kilter novelty. Like the story of a company that has hired a bunch of “musicologists,” who sit at computers and listen to songs, one at a time, rating them element by element, separating out what sometimes comes to hundreds of data points for a three-minute tune. The company, an Internet radio service called Pandora, is convinced that by pouring this information through a computer into an algorithm, it can guide you, the listener, to music that you like. The premise is that your favorite songs can be stripped to parts and reverse-engineered.
It can take 20 minutes to amass the data for a single tune. This has been done for more than 700,000 songs, by 80,000 artists. “The Music Genome Project,” as this undertaking is called, is the back end of Pandora.
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Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant.
According to this Reason report by John Stossel, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was shared by Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win this prize
whose life's work demonstrates that politicians and bureaucrats are not nearly as good at solving problems as regular people. Ostrom, the first woman to win the prize (which she shared with Oliver Williamson of UC-Berkeley), is a political scientist at Indiana University. The selection committee said that she has "challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource-users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts"
A Nobel Prize for Showing that Freedom Works
Not only is government help often not needed, Ostrom says it usually screws things up because bureaucrats operate in an ivory tower ignorant of the local customs and the specific resource.
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Fundamental for advocates of freedom is not "the market" narrowly conceived, but the broader realm of consent and contract.
David Warren, one of the finest essay writers today, quotes another great essayist Charles Lamb, in defending Rush Limbaugh from the journalists who won't admit to spreading false quotes that are know to be false because Everybody knows
"The people" have always wished to be flattered, but they do not benefit from that service. And while it is too much to go about slashing their tires, it is important to war constantly against what "everybody knows." For what everybody knows is usually displaced some distance from the truth, and often in opposition to it. "Western Civ" was not built upon what everybody knows, but to the contrary. It was assembled in the face of darkest human nature, by the assiduous efforts of small and often persecuted minorities, trying to get at the surprising truth, and then spread it.
According to my research, 72% of Americans agree with Howard Beale -- they really are "mad as hell." Second, 57% now believe that their children will inherit a worse America than they did, and just 33% believe their children will have a better quality of life than they have.
This wasn't just any single poll. My research includes interviews with 6,400 people from December 2008 through April 2009 that allow me to analyze opinions by gender, age, ethnicity, partisanship and more. It is buttressed by two dozen "instant response" groups of 30 voters in almost a dozen states over the last 100 days. No matter how I slice and dice the results, we're a very unhappy people.
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image from Zorger
If you talk in depth to self-described angry Americans -- as I have -- you don't hear raving demands or reckless hate. What you hear is fear.
But you also hear a belief in American values that many thought were lost. An incredible 88% believe in the adage "live free or die." Conversely, just 35% agree with the statement, "I want it all, and I want it now," and a slight majority (54%) believe "if it feels good, do it." It's nice to know that freedom beats obtaining more stuff. And when asked to choose from a list of social and cultural challenges facing America, the highest priority is "restoring personal responsibility." (Even in these toughest of economic times, all most Americans are asking for is a hand up, not a handout.
Frank Luntz reports on What Americans really want
The core American complaint about politics is that wrongdoing isn't punished, other than at the next election.
For business and political elites, the message should be clear: Restore trust.
The success of the human species is all due to our mastery of fire and cooking, a scientist claims.
Hot food not sex was the basis of our relationships.
We are the “cooking ape”, according to Richard Wrangham, a noted British anthropologist and primatologist at Harvard University. The unrivalled success of the human species is down to our mastery of flame and our use of it to transform raw food into cooked. Ours is a species built on hot dinners, not cold plants and berries. ..
“I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals,” Wrangham explains in his new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. “Cooking increased the (calorific) value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time and our social lives.” He argues, as no one else has done before, that cooking was pivotal in our evolution.
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Cultural, historical and culinary clues point to the plausibility of Wrangham’s intuition. There is no society on Earth that does not cook; not a single people exists on raw food alone.
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“I couldn’t believe that nobody had thought about the energetic significance of cooked food [cooking releases locked-in calories by breaking down molecular structures in plants and meat; without cooking, some material passes straight through].
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Cooking would have made a radical difference to the creatures who mastered it: it made plants and meat more calorie-dense; it spared our ancestors from the marathons of mastication required with raw foods (wild chimps spend up to five hours a day gathering food and chewing it); it was easier on the gut. It is utterly within the bounds of belief that the first hominid to put a flame to his food started an extraordinary chain of evolutionary events that culminated in us, the ape in the kitchen.
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Human beings are unique in that when we cook, we do it to feed others as well as ourselves (other apes, even those who pair-bond, forage for themselves and don’t share). And in almost all societies it’s women who tend the stove. Having a husband ensures that a woman’s gathered food will not be stolen, while having a wife means a man will have an evening meal.
To some, though, this train of thought — that the way to a man’s heart really is through his evolutionarily shrunken stomach — is even more heretical than the idea that we are the cooking ape. “People don’t like it because over the past decades we have understood that our social system comes through the competition for reproductive partners. I’m saying, pair bonds are firstly about food, and that gave a platform to develop those relationships further.”
Be Afraid—Be Very Afraid by David P. Goldman
The horror-film genre is multiplying like one of its own monsters, showing six-fold growth over the past decade—turning what used to be a Hollywood curiosity into a mainstream product. Not only the volume of films but their cruelty has increased, with explicit torture now a screen staple.
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But there is a pattern to the highs and lows of the horror genre that may reflect something specific about Hollywood’s feeding of the mood of the United States—something about America’s encounter with truly horrible events, from the Second World War through Vietnam and down to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the lingering conflict in Iraq. Terror loiters in dark corners just off the public square.
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Subgenres such as erotic horror (mainly centered on vampires) and torture (the Saw series, for example) dig deep into the vulnerabilities of the adolescent psyche. Given the success of these films over the past ten years, the number of Americans traumatizing themselves voluntarily is larger by an order of magnitude than it has ever been before.
Camille Paglia is always worth reading. Here she is, an Obama supporter, on whatever happened to liberals.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.
How has "liberty" become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals?
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But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.
When they looked at the observable data instead of the computer models, MIT scientists found that Carbon Dioxide was irrelevant in climate change.
Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT has published a paper which proves that IPCC models are overstating by 6 times, the relevance of CO2 in Earth’s Atmosphere.
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Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT’s peer reviewed work states “we now know that the effect of CO2 on temperature is small, we know why it is small, and we know that it is having very little effect on the climate.”
The global surface temperature record, which we update and publish every month, has shown no statistically-significant “global warming” for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now persisted for very nearly eight years.
Go to the link above or this pdf from the Science and Public Policy Institute to see the graphs and scientific explanations to see why the theory of man-caused global warming is completely false.
All of this data leads to the conclusion that the UN/IPCC models are not only wrong, they are so far off the mark as to be laughable. The satellite and bathythermograph data clearly do not match the IPCC theory, which means that the theory is incorrect.
What this data does tell us is if CO2 concentration should double, global temperatures will not rise by the devastating 6 degrees F the UN predicts, but by a completely harmless 1 degree F. The ERBE data shows an Earth system that is radiating more heat into space as sea surfaces warm, in other words a system at equilibrium, and is clearly demonstrated by observed data. The UN theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming is dead wrong.
The big conclusion is devastating:
There are only a couple of conclusions to be made of this. Either the world has been misled by scientists working for the UN and IPCC due to faulty science, or faulty science has been deliberately used in a global scheme to generate tax revenues for the Governments instituting Cap and Trade Taxation policies.
Remember this as Congress takes up cap and trade in what can be called an Economic Suicide Pact that won't work but will bring the largest tax increase in American history.
Roger Scruton makes you think again about a lot of things. Here he is on The Importance of Gratitude
In the religions that are familiar to us, the idea of grace is of fundamental importance. The term (Latin gratia) translates a variety of words in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and Sanskrit, but all the sacred texts seem to point in the same direction, affirming that God’s relation to the world as a whole, and to each of us in particular, is one of giving.
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The idea that the world is sustained by gift is second nature to religious people, who believe that they should be givers in their turn, if they are to receive the gift on which they depend for their salvation.
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But, as we know, we are entering a new period of human history, in which religious faith is not the normal condition into which children are born. Young people grow up without those rituals, such as grace before meals, which rehearse the distress of their ancestors, and which remind them of their amazing good luck in finding food on the table and comfort all around. Gratitude, if it occurs at all, is for special occasions, when some individual makes a point of stepping in to help them. And many things that were once seen as gifts are now seen as ‘rights’, for which it would be inappropriate to feel gratitude, since if you have a right to something it is, in a sense, already yours.
A gift-giving culture
There is, in the gift-giving culture, a display of gratitude at the moment of gift, and a kind of rejoicing that warms the hearts of those involved. On the gift day the tribe does not merely put aside old quarrels; it feels a renewed surge of affection towards its neighbours. This affection is a kind of moral capital on which it may draw in times of conflict. It delays belligerence, providing the breathing space in which offences can be rectified before it is too late.
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The round of drinks in a pub
We have some familiarity with this from an equivalent ritual in our own communities, which is that of the round of drinks in the pub....the ritual replenishes the bank of affection, helping to create the barrier to belligerence on which close-knit communities depend. And the participant feels, at the moment of giving, an outrush of affection towards each of his companions in turn. He is confirmed in his social membership.
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While charity deals in gifts, justice deals in rights. And when you receive what is yours by right you don’t feel grateful.
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When gifts are replaced by rights, so is gratitude replaced by claims. And claims breed resentment. Since you are queuing on equal terms with the competition, you will begin to think of the special conditions that entitle you to a greater, a speedier, or a more effective share. You will be always one step from the official complaint, the court action, the press interview, and the snarling reproach against Them, the ones who owed you this right and also withheld it.
A couple of weeks ago George Will quoted Saul Bellow to reveal the mindset of statists.
Even more than the New Deal and the Great Society, Obama's agenda expresses the mentality of a class that was nascent in the 1930s but burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s. The spirit of that class is described in Saul Bellow's 1975 novel "Humboldt's Gift." In it Bellow wrote that the modern age began when a particular class of people decided, excitedly, that life had "lost the ability to arrange itself":
"It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. ... This arranging has been the one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, had now to be managed by exceptional persons. He was an exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power."
The LA fires have now burned more than 144,000 acres and is only 38% contained but progress is being made.
The threat to the historic observatory and crucial TV and radio transmission towers atop Mt. Wilson had also lessened after intense brush-clearing and back-burning efforts
Suspicions are high that the fire was deliberately set.
Turns out that federal authorities didn't clear the brush away from the wildfire areas because of liberal pressure,
Months before the huge blaze erupted, the U.S. Forest Service obtained permits to burn away the undergrowth and brush on more than 1,700 acres of the Angeles National Forest. But just 193 acres had been cleared by the time the fire broke out, Forest Service resource officer Steve Bear said.
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"This brush was ready to explode," said Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, whose district overlaps the forest. "The environmentalists have gone to the extreme to prevent controlled burns, and as a result we have this catastrophe today."
Prescribed burns are intended to protect homes and lives by eliminating fuel that can cause explosive wildfires. The wildfire that has blackened 140,000 acres — or nearly 219 square miles — in the forest over the past week has been fed by the kind of tinder-dry vegetation that prescribed burns are designed to safely devour.
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Government firefighters set thousands of blazes each year to reduce the wildfire risk in overgrown forests and grasslands around the nation. Prescribed burns can also be used to improve overall forest health and increase forage for wildlife.
Obtaining the necessary permits is a complicated process, and such efforts often draw protests from environmentalists.
I think this is the most sensible public policy suggestion I've ever heard and there's no chance it will happen in my lifetime.
Where's the Environmental Impact Statement on Health Care?
You know how that the Congress in its infinite wisdom has outlawed incandescent light bulbs beginning in 2012 so that we will all have to use those corkscrew fluorescent bulbs with the lousy weak light that require hazardous waste disposal when they break or burn out and they burn out far more quickly than they are supposed to - all to save energy?
Well, Howard Brandston in the Wall St Journal writes Save the Light Bulb! is of the same mind.
Will some energy be saved? Probably. The problem is this benefit will be more than offset by rampant dissatisfaction with lighting. We are not talking about giving up a small luxury for the greater good. We are talking about compromising light. Light is fundamental. And light is obviously for people, not buildings. The primary objective in the design of any space is to make it comfortable and habitable. This is most critical in homes, where this law will impact our lives the most. And yet while energy conservation, a worthy cause, has strong advocacy in public policy, good lighting has very little.
He makes a brilliant suggestion, but calls it a modest proposal to try out in public buildings, congressional offices and in the homes of elected officials for 18 months
Based on the data collected, the Energy Independence and Security Act and energy legislation still in Congress would be amended to conform to the results of the test. Or better yet, scrapped in favor of a thoughtful process that could yield a set of recommendations that better serve our nation's needs by maximizing both human satisfaction and energy efficiency.
As a lighting designer with more than 50 years of experience, having designed more than 2,500 projects including the relighting of the Statue of Liberty, I encourage people who care about their lighting to contact their elected officials and urge them to re-evaluate our nation's energy legislation so that it serves people, not an energy-saving agenda.
So what's the end game and why the great rush? Mark Steyn tries Untangling the Spaghetti
The end-game is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. By “dependent”, I don’t mean merely welfare, although that’s a good illustration of the general principle. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you’re assuring the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the vast bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything.
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In the normal course of events, the process takes a while. But Obama believes in “the fierce urgency of now”, and fierce it is. That’s where all the poor befuddled sober centrists who can’t understand why the Democrats keep passing incoherent 1,200-page bills every week are missing the point. If “health care” were about health care, the devil would be in the details. But it’s not about health or costs or coverage; it’s about getting over the river and burning the bridge. It doesn’t matter what form of governmentalized health care gets passed as long as it passes. Once it’s in place, it will be “reformed”, endlessly, but it will never be undone.
Theodore Dalrymple on the British health service, Man vs. Mutt
In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain, and on the whole it is better to be a dog.
As a British dog, you get to choose (through an intermediary, I admit) your veterinarian. If you don’t like him, you can pick up your leash and go elsewhere, that very day if necessary. Any vet will see you straight away, there is no delay in such investigations as you may need, and treatment is immediate. There are no waiting lists for dogs, no operations postponed because something more important has come up, no appalling stories of dogs being made to wait for years because other dogs—or hamsters—come first.
The conditions in which you receive your treatment are much more pleasant than British humans have to endure. For one thing, there is no bureaucracy to be negotiated with the skill of a white-water canoeist; above all, the atmosphere is different. There is no tension, no feeling that one more patient will bring the whole system to the point of collapse, and all the staff go off with nervous breakdowns. In the waiting rooms, a perfect calm reigns; the patients’ relatives are not on the verge of hysteria, and do not suspect that the system is cheating their loved one, for economic reasons, of the treatment which he needs. The relatives are united by their concern for the welfare of each other’s loved one. They are not terrified that someone is getting more out of the system than they.
graphic from American Digest
When Barbara’s lung cancer reappeared during the spring of 2008 her oncologist recommended aggressive treatment with Tarceva, a new chemotherapy. However, Oregon’s state run health plan denied the potentially life altering drug because they did not feel it was "cost-effective." Instead, the State plan offered to pay for either hospice care or physician-assisted suicide.
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The answer is simple. Oregon state officials controlled the process of healthcare decision-making—not Barbara and her physician. Chemotherapy would cost the state $4,000 every month she remained alive; the drugs for physician-assisted suicide held a one-time expense of less than $100. Barbara’s treatment plan boiled down to accounting. To cover chemotherapy state policy demanded a five percent patient survival rate at five years. As a new drug, Tarceva did not meet this dispassionate criterion. To Oregon, Barbara was no longer a patient; she had become a "negative economic unit."
Physicians for Reform want you to know What This Means for You
If you’re a journalist, want to help people and want to tell the truth, what truth are you going to tell? Why, the truth you think helps people, of course!
Technically, that’s the truth.
But it’s very different than the truth.
Why Most Journalists Are Democrats: A View from the Soviet Socialist Trenches
It is unbelievable to watch what is happening in California. In terms of unemployment, the hardest hit state is California and the hardest hit county in California is Fresno with a jobless rate reaching 40% in some towns.
There's been a three year drought, the farmers in the most productive valley in the world are really hurting, the government controls the water and they are not giving any to the farmers.
It's all going to the delta smelt.
This is not a story about fish. Rather, it is a story about how efforts to save the fish through a court-ordered water shortage have pushed a region already brought to the brink by recession over the edge.
It is also a story about how farmers are fighting back, using almost unimaginable stories of economic hardship to argue for a reversal of environmental rules that could see their farms thrive once again, but also endanger wildlife that may never come back.
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Last December, fresh restrictions meant to protect the fish were imposed, effectively shutting down the spigots and starving the Central Valley farmers of water.
Those in Fresno County saw their monthly allotments evaporate, virtually overnight. Here's how Mr. Allen recalls it: “When it came time to get my initial water allocation in January, we were told it would be zero. In February, my heart was pounding. Zero again. March, same thing. April, zero.” By that point, most of his crop of winter wheat had already withered and died.
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Today, Interstate 5, the highway that slices through the San Joaquin Valley, is flanked by parched fields. Signs, in English and Spanish, proclaim: “Congress-created dustbowl” and “No water, No future” and “Like foreign oil? You'll love foreign food.”
The bitter irony that farm families in the region known as America's salad bowl are flocking to food giveaways at churches and community centres is lost on no one.
Without water, farmers have left an estimated 200,000 hectares of once-productive farmland fallow. Thousands of farm workers, mainly Spanish-speaking migrants, have been laid off.
Mr. Howitt estimates lost farm revenue in the San Joaquin Valley could top $2-billion this year and will suck as many as 80,000 jobs out of its already-battered economy.
The problem is the Endangered Species Act, which, unless you impacted, you have no idea how draconian it is. The basic problem is there is no balancing of interests between animal and humans. Once a species is declared endangered, it doesn't matter how much money it costs to 'save' the critter or what economic devastation it creates in the surrounding human community, the species must be saved.
Now the California water agency is changing its course on the delta smelt and petitioning the federal government to reconsider its protections for the delta smelt citing new information about another population of smelt that's not effected by the state water operation.
I'm all for protecting ecosystems and endangered species, but not at such an egregious human cost.
Like Todd Allen in How green was my valley
His farm, a million-dollar operation in good times, is 70-per-cent financed. He also owes money on three tractors, a $140,000 drip system, which is useless to him now, and his house.
“I've never been in a predicament like this … so, if I can survive this year, I can survive anything,” he says, blinking back tears.
When he began to farm full-time 20 years ago, he had a consistent water supply. He also had 10 employees and started with 600 hectares of cantaloupe, cotton and wheat.
This year, he has laid everyone off and is doing what little labour is left himself.
“You know, I am really scared for my family. I have two daughters and I thought I had a future going out here, and now I can't even sell this land because, without water, it is worthless,” he says.
“It seems like in this economy the government would look for quick fixes instead of throwing money at everything. All they have to do is turn the pumps on. The water is there.”
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But most farmers here say they don't want a handout. At a town hall meeting in Fresno a few weeks ago, tempers flared as farmers flustered Interior Department officials by shouting: “We don't want welfare, we want water.”
GovernmentCare’s Assault on Seniors
Since Medicare was established in 1965, access to care has enabled older Americans to avoid becoming disabled and to travel and live independently instead of languishing in nursing homes. But legislation now being rushed through Congress—H.R. 3200 and the Senate Health Committee Bill—will reduce access to care, pressure the elderly to end their lives prematurely, and doom baby boomers to painful later years.
The Congressional majority wants to pay for its $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion health bills with new taxes and a $500 billion cut to Medicare. This cut will come just as baby boomers turn 65 and increase Medicare enrollment by 30%. Less money and more patients will necessitate rationing. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 1% of Medicare cuts will come from eliminating fraud, waste and abuse.
How it began with comparative effectiveness research which Betsy McCaughey writes is code for limiting care based on the patient's age.
The assault against seniors began with the stimulus package in February. Slipped into the bill was substantial funding for comparative effectiveness research, which is generally code for limiting care based on the patient’s age. Economists are familiar with the formula, where the cost of a treatment is divided by the number of years (called QALYs, or quality-adjusted life years) that the patient is likely to benefit. In Britain, the formula leads to denying treatments for older patients who have fewer years to benefit from care than younger patients.
When comparative effectiveness research appeared in the stimulus bill, Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., (R., La.) a heart surgeon, warned that it would lead to “denying seniors and the disabled lifesaving care.” He and Sen. Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) proposed amendments to no avail that would have barred the federal government from using the research to eliminate treatments for the elderly or deny care based on age.
From Family Security Matters who, unlike just about everyone in Congress, has read the health care bill
PG 425 Lines 4-12 Government mandates Advance Care Planning Consultations. Think Senior Citizens end of life prodding.
Pg 425 Lines 17-19 Government will instruct & consult regarding living wills, durable powers of attorney. Mandatory!
PG 425 Lines 22-25, 426 Lines 1-3 Government provides approved list of end of life resources, guiding you in how to die.
PG 427 Lines 15-24 Government mandates program for orders for end of life. The Government has a say in how your life ends.
Pg 429 Lines 1-9 An "advanced care planning consultant" will be used frequently as patients’ health deteriorates.
PG 429 Lines 10-12 "advanced care consultation" may include an ORDER for end of life plans. AN ORDER from the Government to end a life!
Pg 429 Lines 13-25 - The Government will specify which Doctors can write an end of life order.
PG 430 Lines 11-15 The Government will decide what level of treatment you will have at end of life.
Who will decide what treatment you will get? Your doctor or the government. George Will asks about Our New Medical Judges?
If President Obama has his way, another such unelected authority will be created -- a manager and monitor for the vast and expensive American health-care system. As part of his health-reform effort, he is seeking to launch the Independent Medicare Advisory Council, or IMAC, a bland title for a body that could become as much an arbiter of medicine as the Fed is of the economy or the Supreme Court of the law.
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Under his plan, the president would name five physicians or other health-care-savvy members to serve for five-year terms on its board, picking one of them as chairman. Like the nominees to the Fed and the Supreme Court, they would have to be confirmed by the Senate.
Each year, IMAC would have two responsibilities. First, it would recommend to the president updated fees that Medicare would pay doctors, hospitals, rehab centers, nursing homes, labs, home-care and ambulance services, equipment manufacturers, and all other providers. That is now done by Congress itself, and the lobbying by potent hometown individuals and institutions is one reason Medicare costs keep growing.
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....Second, IMAC would annually recommend a set of broader reforms to improve the quality or reduce the cost of medical care. On each report, the president would have 30 days to approve or reject the recommendations, but he would have to act on the whole package, not pick it apart.
If he approved, the package would go to Congress and could be overruled only by joint action of the Senate and House within 30 days. Absent that, the secretary of health and human services would order the changes into effect.
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Americans will have to decide if they are comfortable having those commissioners determine how they will be treated when they are ill.
Since it's been a particularly cold and rainy summer, I appreciate even more the benefits that can accrue from global warming. Before this article in the London Times, I had no idea that the rise of the Inca civilization is attributed to a 400-year-period of warm weather.
Climate study puts Incas’ success down to 400 years of warm weather
According to new research, an increase in temperature of several degrees between AD1100 and 1533 allowed vast areas of mountain land to be used for agriculture for the first time. This fuelled the territorial expansion of the Incas, which at its peak stretched from the modern Colombian border to the middle of Chile.
“Yes, they were highly organised, and they had a sophisticated hierarchical system, but it wouldn’t have counted a jot without being underpinned by the warming of the climate,” says Dr Alex Chepstow-Lusty, a palaeo-ecologist from the French Institute for Andean Studies in Lima, Peru.
As the treeline moved higher up the mountains, the Incas re-sculpted their landscape to maximise agricultural productivity. They carved terraces into the mountainsides and developed a complex system of canals to irrigate the land.
“It was the perfect incubator for the expansion of a civilisation,”
All I could think of when I read that the Health Care Bill will direct the HHS secretary to develop "Standards for Measuring Gender" --As Opposed to 'Male' and 'Female' was Monty Python's The Life of Brian.
This is great news.
Dramatic discovery by Jewish-American scientists could change world; anti-radiation medication proves effective, safe in tests. Further experiments to be fast tracked, FDA approval possible within 1-2 years
The ground-breaking medication, developed by Professor Andrei Gudkov – Chief Scientific Officer at Cleveland BioLabs - may have far-reaching implications on the balance of power in the world, as states capable of providing their citizens with protection against radiation will enjoy a significant strategic advantage vis-à-vis their rivals.
For Israel, the discovery marks a particularly dramatic development that could deeply affect the main issue on the defense establishment's agenda: Protection against a nuclear attack by Iran or against "dirty bomb" attacks by terror groups.
Gudkov's discovery may also have immense implications for cancer patients by enabling doctors to better protect patients against radiation. Should the new medication enable cancer patients to be treated with more powerful radiation, our ability to fight the disease could greatly improve.
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'Stable, safe, and easy to inject'
The company's subcontractor in Europe is already prepared to embark on mass production. Meanwhile, emergency regulations in Israel allow the government to purchase drugs on short notice, even if they are still in the process of being approved. Notably, the medication in question is not a vaccine, but rather, a preventative drug administered via one or several shots.
The medication works by suppressing the "suicide mechanism" of cells hit by radiation, while enabling them to recover from the radiation-induced damages that prompted them to activate the suicide mechanism in the first plac
When I worked at the Department of Interior, one of the perennial issues was that of the wild horses. They reproduced wildly and in their large numbers did extreme damage to rangeland - public, private and leased, But since the public had such a romantic image of wild horses, they were never culled. Instead, the faint hope was they would be adopted one by one. What resulted was lawsuit after lawsuit against the government for the way they were managing the wild horses.
But never in my wildest imagination, could I have dreamed up the legislation that just passed the House - Restore Our American Mustangs Act or ROAM.
Mark Steyn takes it away in a do-not-miss piece A symbol of the Old West meets the gelded age.
On Friday, the House passed the Restore Our American Mustangs Act – or ROAM. Like all acronymically cute legislation, its name bears little relation to what it actually does: It's not about "restoring" mustangs. The federal Bureau of Land Management aims for a manageable population of 27,000 wild mustangs. Currently, there are 36,000, and the population doubles every four or five years. To prevent things getting even more out of hand, the BLM keeps another 30,000 mustangs in holding pens – or, if you prefer, managed-care facilities. That's to say, under federal management, one in every two "wild" horses now lives in government housing.
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To facilitate the release of the tame "wild horse" population, the act adds to their present 33-million acre habitat (that's bigger than New York State) another 20 million acres – or approximately the size of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont combined. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the total tab at around $700 million – ie, chump change. If you look for it in the line-item budget, it comes down at the bottom under "rounding error." It's a mere ten-and-a-half grand per mustang. If you're wondering why it costs more to keep a horse on 52 million acres of wilderness than it does to stable him at an upscale horse farm in New England, that's because, in order to prevent the mustang population doubling again by 2013 and requiring the annexation of another 50 million acres (i.e., an area the size of Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands combined), the bill mandates "enhanced" contraception for horses and burros.
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In 1971, the United States Congress recognized mustangs as "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West." And surely nothing captures the essence of the "pioneer spirit" than living on welfare in a federal care facility while being showered with government contraceptives. Welcome to America in the gelded age.
Back in 1977, many people believed that overpopulation would lead to global catastrophe. It was such a problem they argued, that even the most extreme totalitarian methods should be used like:
• compulsory abortions
• the government should take babies away from single mothers or force them to have abortions
• the government could dictate family size
• people who cause "social deterioration' could be compelled not to have children
• mass sterilization of human beings through drugs in the water supply would be OK so long as it didn't harm livestock
• a "planetary regime" should control the global economy and dictate by force the number of children allowed to be born.
Forty years later, we can see how wrong their scientific predictions were because we now know that many countries are in demographic death spirals.
So what happened to the crank scientists who advocated such totalitarian methods as a solution for a problem that took care of itself?
Well, John Holdren became the United States Science Czar, the new Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Presumably, he's advising President Obama on a host of scientific issues among them climate change and embryonic stem cell research. Know that he advocated the disturbing and crackpot policies listed at the beginning of this post in a book he co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich science in 1977 called Ecoscience.
So fantastic, disturbing and frightening were his ideas that Zombietime felt it necessary to scan pages of the book so people could see that the quotes weren't made up. John Holdren, Obama's Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet.
Does Holden still believe them? No one knows. He's never disavowed them. But I sure care now that climate change is the global catastrophe du jour . I'm wary of all alarmists especially when they advocate such undemocratic, despotic methods and are now advising the President.
Xavier Le Pichon has a remarkable article up (Speaking of Faith @American Public Media), Ecce Home (Behold Humanity)
A geophysicist, Le Pichon writes of the fragility and evolution of our humanity beginning with a small child dying in Calcutta through the poignant tale of his father taking care of his mother through her long and painful decline.
Who is this child that the tidal wave of human misery has deposited among the dozens of other “dying destitutes”, as announced on the board at the entrance: “Home for dying destitutes”. Why did I have to travel over ten thousand kilometers to meet him so that he would completely reorient my life?
Suffering has suddenly swept my soul: it has washed away everything in me. How so much suffering that I had not even noticed could be present next to me? As I had been standing on the crest of the advancing wave of our scientific and technologic civilization, I did not even glance at the debris left over by its flow. I was looking ahead. And suddenly, among the debris of my civilization, this child becomes for me a person, the most important person in my life.
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Contrarily to what is often assumed, the weak and imperfect parts are often those that allow the evolution to occur without any revolution. This is true for the evolution of life, which is in great part based on the occurrence of coding errors during the duplication of the genetic information. One can ask whether it is not also true of our societies. We tend to dissociate the individuals who are well adapted to our social life from those that have difficulties to follow the pace that is imposed on them by our life style. Yet a society that separates the producers from the others considered as dead weight, even as marginal or excluded individuals, is a hard society, characterized by conflicts and often by complete rejection of minorities. It is sad and pessimistic. On the contrary a society where all are well integrated has a much more adaptable structure, with a different, easier and more conciliatory mode of life. It is often happier and more optimistic.
He finds that even Neanderthals fed and looked after severely handicapped members of their communities who were too disabled to contribute to the quest for food.
this experience of welcoming the suffering of our neighbor is at the very heart of our identity of humans since the origin.
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Thus human societies have reorganized themselves about a new pole governed by the presence of suffering and death, which is related to the realization of the fragility and vulnerability of its members. Actually, we tend to judge the degree of humanity of a society through the way in which it takes into account in its organization the presence of suffering and death.
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Taking care of fragile and vulnerable individuals has revealed to humans their own fragility and vulnerability. It has forced them to enter this dark world of fear in order to learn to live with it. They have realized that the human individual is a unique reality that keeps its unity under widely changing aspects from the fetus to the aged person at the end of his life.
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Father Thomas Philippe co-founder of L’Arche with Jean Vanier said: “If we take away from someone who is suffering, any meaning to his suffering, if we make him feel even indirectly that his suffering is useless and is a burden to the community, what is left for him? Despair.” We must welcome each person in such a way that she retains her full dignity and still have a sense of having something to offer to the community.
He learned from the deep transformation of his father's heart and the suffering humanity of his mother a deep mystery
What my mother and father experienced together during her long and painful illness helps us to understand a little better the nature of this mysterious transformation of relationships which comes when we welcome handicap, suffering and illness. If this welcome is made with dignity and love, the person we welcome becomes the one who leads us into a new deepening of our true humanity. That person changes us deeply as she also changes the nature of the community around them. My mother who had played such an important role during her active life to form the bonds that unified our family had at the end of her painful life an even greater influence in maintaining our unity and in deepening the heart of my father while she appeared to be utterly powerless. One can say that she radiated much more love than what she had received. She had revealed to those who had welcomed her with love a new depth of their humanity. They now better understood that they had a heart and could only find happiness in love.
From the splendid HBO miniseries John Adams , Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Adams go over the draft for the Declaration of Independence.
Here is the theme song. You'll see the earlier American flags inscribed "Don't Tread on Me", "Appeal to Heaven" and "Unite or Die".
Peggy Noonan writes in Making History
Then John Adams rose. He wished he had the power of the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, he said; surely they had never faced a question of greater human import.
He made, again, the case for independence. Now is the time, the facts are inescapable, the people are for it, we are not so much declaring as acknowledging reality. "Looking into the future [he] saw a new nation, a new time, all much in the spirit of lines he had written in a recent letter to a friend: '. . . We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.' " Outside the wind picked up and the storm struck hard with thunder and lightning. Storms had in the past unnerved Adams, but he spoke steadily, logically and compellingly for two hours.
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..on the morning of July 5, the people of Philadelphia started getting their hands on independently printed copies of the Declaration, and the impact was electric: My God, look what they said yesterday—"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." And on the 6th, a local newspaper carried the text of what had been agreed upon on the 4th. And so the celebration of the Fourth of July as one of the signal moments in the history of human freedom, was born. And so we mark it still.
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Almost two years ago, I was lucky enough to tour Mount Vernon with a dozen people including him. (If I were David McCullough I would know the date and time. But I know the weather.) At the bottom of a stairway leading to the second floor, we chatted for a moment, and I asked him how he accounted in his imagination for the amazing fact of the genius cluster that founded our nation. How did so many gifted men, true geniuses, walk into history at the same time, in the same place, and come together to pursue so brilliantly a common endeavor? "I think it was providential," he said, simply.
IN the years following his presidency, Thomas Jefferson had time to contemplate more deeply on freedom and reflect on the importance of education of the citizenry.
He wrote in 1810 in a letter to William Duane, "The information of the people at large can alone make them the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political and religious freedom."
Elsewhere he wrote in a letter to Charles Yancey in 1816, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
All of which makes even more alarming a recent survey of Arizona high school students who were asked basic questions of citizenship that are asked in the test given to candidates for U.S. citizenship. Only 3.5% of the public high school students passed!
• More than 70 percent of Arizona high school students were unable to identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.
• 75 percent were unable to correctly identify the first 10 amendments to the Constitution as “The Bill or Rights".
• More than two-thirds of the students surveyed could not identify the two parts of the U.S. Congress.
• Half of the public school students surveyed could not identify the two political parties in the U.S.
• Eighty-five percent of students surveyed did not know the length of a term of office for a U.S. Senator.
• Only 26 percent of students correctly answered “the President” when asked who is in charge of the Executive Branch of government
• Only 26.5 percent of students identified the first President of the United States as George Washington.
God help us if our schools can not educate students in the most basic elements of our history or the responsibilities of citizenship. People are losing the true sense of freedom as a call to personal responsibility not escape from it.
When Pope Benedict visited the U.S. and spoke at the White House last year, he spoke of freedom in a fresh way.
"Freedom is not only a gift, but also a summons to personal responsibility. ...The preservation of freedom calls for the cultivation of virtue, self-discipline, sacrifice for the common good and a sense of responsibility towards the less fortunate. It also demands the courage to engage in civic life and to bring one's deepest beliefs and values to reasoned public debate. In a word, freedom is ever new. It is a challenge held out to each generation, and it must constantly be won over for the cause of good. Few have understood this as clearly as the late Pope John Paul II. In reflecting on the spiritual victory of freedom over totalitarianism in his native Poland and in eastern Europe, he reminded us that history shows, time and again, that "in a world without truth, freedom loses its foundation," and a democracy without values can lose its very soul. Those prophetic words in some sense echo the conviction of President Washington, expressed in his Farewell Address, that religion and morality represent "indispensable supports" of political prosperity. values can lose its very soul. Those prophetic words in some sense echo the conviction of President Washington, expressed in his Farewell Address, that religion and morality represent "indispensable supports" of political prosperity.
Roger Scruton on Beauty and its corruptions
Kitsch is a mould that settles over the entire works of a living culture, when people prefer the sensuous trappings of belief to the thing truly believed in. It is not only Christian civilisation that has undergone kitschification in recent times. Equally evident has been the kitschification of Hinduism and its culture. Massproduced Ganeshas have knocked the subtle temple sculpture from its aesthetic pedestal; in bunjee music the talas of Indian classical music are blown apart by tonal harmonies and rhythm machines; in literature the sutras and puranas have been detached from the sublime vision of Brahman and reissued as childish comic-strips.
Simply put, kitsch is a disease of faith. Kitsch begins in doctrine and ideology and spreads from there to infect the entire world of culture. The Disneyfication of art is simply one aspect of the Disneyfication of faith -and both involve a profanation of our highest values. Kitsch, the case of Disney reminds us, is not an excess of feeling but a deficiency. The world of kitsch is in a certain measure a heartless world, in which emotion is directed away from its proper target towards sugary stereotypes, permitting us to pay passing tribute to love and sorrow without the trouble of feeling them.
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The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism. The attempt to defend beauty from pre-modernist kitsch has exposed it to postmodernist desecration. We seem to be caught between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams, the other in savage fantasies. Both are forms of falsehood, ways of reducing and demeaning our humanity. Both involve a retreat from the higher life, and a rejection of its principal sign, which is beauty. But both point to the real difficulty, in modern conditions, of leading a life in which beauty has a central place.
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To point to this feature of our condition is not to issue an invitation to despair. It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only -- or even at all -- in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way. The art, literature and music of our civilisation remind them of this, and also point to the path that lies always before them: the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial. And that, in a nutshell, is what beauty teaches us.
Fyodor Dostoevsky once made an enigmatic remark, "Beauty will save the world" about which Alexander Solzhenitsyn organized his Nobel Lecture on Literature in 1970
And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable,
unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.
And in that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoyevsky to say that “Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy. After all, he was given the gift of seeing much, he was extraordinarily illumined.
And consequently perhaps art, literature, can in actual fact help the world of today.
Richard Fernandez, Carnival of grotesques
My first reactions to Andrew Breitbart’s article were a) that the lines between the serious and bizarre in modern culture have drawn dangerously near each other; and b) who heck makes up rules like “Black beats white. Gay beats white. Black beats gay.” I’m sure that Breitbart is right in perceiving them - in fact we should call them Breitbart’s Laws.
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If Poets were the unacknowledged legislators of Shelley’s world, then who are unacknowledged legislators of ours? If Shelley’s commentary remains valid then the true authors of Breitbart’s Laws are the Carnival of Grotesques collectively referred to as popular culture. They make the rules to which we subconsciously conform.
In the Wall Street Journal today, a review by Bill Kaufman of a new book that extols the virtues of one room schoolhouses that only became evident after they were lost, Small Wonder by Jonathan Zimmerman.
In One Room, Many Advantages
The attempt to abolish one-room schoolhouses, whether by the carrot of state aid or the stick of government fiat, set off one of the great unknown political wars of U.S. history, pitting farm people who "invoked classic themes of liberty and self-rule" against the "mostly urban elites" who "would wage zealous battle against the rural one-room school." Typically, two Delaware schoolconsolidators informed the hicks that "modern education . . . is less romantic and more businesslike, more formal, more exact, more specialized, done according to tested methods and a standard schedule." Such grim exactitude sounded like prison to parents used to the comparatively anarchic and localized governance of rural schools.
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The one-room school was "neither as rundown as critics claimed nor as bucolic as defenders imagined," Mr. Zimmerman writes. But its champions understood its flaws. They were defending the principles of local autonomy and human-scale democracy. Mr. Zimmerman quotes a "rural mother" who lamented: "Individuality will be lost, the pride taken in 'our' school and 'our' teacher gone. Haven't the parents who bear the children anything to say?"
Not in the consolidated schools they didn't, except in PTA debates over which kind of brownies to sell at the bake sale. "Thousands of rural parents did resist consolidation," Mr. Zimmerman says; they struggled to save the one-room symbols of "their vanishing local communities." But true to Joni Mitchell's lyric, the rest of America didn't know what it had till it was gone.
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The idealization of the little red schoolhouse, Mr. Zimmerman concludes, reflects a rueful awareness that in modernity Americans "gained the whole world of technological conveniences and lost the soul of their communities."
It's the largest generation gap in 40 years
Asked to identify where older and younger people differ most, 47 percent said social values and morality. People age 18 to 29 were more likely to report disagreements over lifestyle, views on family, relationships and dating, while older people cited differences in a sense of entitlement. Those in the middle-age groups also often pointed to a difference in manners.
Religion is a far bigger part of the lives of older adults. About two-thirds of people 65 and older said religion is very important to them, compared with just over half of those 30 to 49 and 44 percent of people 18 to 29.
In addition, among adults 65 and older, one-third said religion has grown more important to them over the course of their lives, while 4 percent said it has become less important and 60 percent said it has stayed the same.
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Paul Taylor, director of the Pew Social and Demographic Trends Project...cited a greater tolerance among younger people on cultural issues such as gay marriage and interracial relationships.
We're not yet at Boomsday yet, but it's hard not to wonder if an intergenerational clash is in the offing in the not-too-distant future when they begin to realize how much debt they have inherited.
In Christopher Buckley's imaginary dystopia in Boomsday, when America teeters on the brink of economic disaster as the boomers start retiring, the younger generation, incensed at their growing financial burden, calls for an economic Bastille Day. One proposed solution to the growing social security crisis - offering senior citizens free botox and no estate tax, if they go into government-sponsored suicide clinics for "voluntary transitioning".
Since returning home after four days away sans computer, I'm just catching up on all the news in Iran.
What strikes me most of all is the participation of women in the protests. For a long time, I've believed that positive changes in the Mid East would come from the; they are the most oppressed and have the least to lose.
Under the burkas, chadors, and headscarves, we are seeing young women in jeans, wearing lipstick, with blond and frosted hair, who see their chance for real political change that would change their lives. La Femme Zahra holding hands with her husband Mousavi, tells crowds, "This is the moment to stand."
A young woman, shot to death is now the symbol of the protestors. Neda is now the 'Angel of Iran' and the 'Angel of Freedom'. The mullahs are so afraid of women rising up, they shoot them.
Are the Ayatollahs learning that hell hath no fury like 34 million women scorned, forced out of the workplace, harassed and humiliated by religious police for three decades? I have noticed some of the bravest protesters in Iran have been women, including a few who have been without headscarves and showing a great deal more of their figures than the regime would approve. Roger Cohen of the NY Times has noticed this, too.
.... Iran's women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I've seen them urging less courageous men on. I've seen them get beaten and return to the fray. "Why are you sitting there?" one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. "Get up! Get up!"
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More than 60 percent of Iran's university students are women, but women only make up perhaps 15 percent of the workforce.
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Women left alone with children after the death or desertion of a husband are particularly hard hit in a culture that openly discrimintes in employment. So are those in abusive relationships with fathers or husbands. One of Iran's dirty little secrets is how many women are forced into prostitution. News stories from 2002 reported as many as 300,000 women were engaged in prostitution in greater Tehran. In an area with a population then estimated at 12 million that is close to 5% of the total female population.
Iranian-American journalist Roya Hakakian sat down with ForbesWoman to discuss her native country's current climate and the situation facing women--and men--in Iran today
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Iran has had a robust women's movement for several decades now. But in the late 1990s, a new generation took charge; and in the early 2000s, they managed to organize and unite in ways that women had not since the revolution in 1979. It started as petition movement to collect signatures to ban stoning women to death and has spun out to become the "One Million Signatures Campaign."
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The feminist movement, which has been ongoing in Iran, has now joined the broader public movement against the regime.
So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to learn that the Basij are targeting women, both young and old.
I hope this expands around the country. It is sorely needed. And everyone benefits.
It is not a panacea, but researchers who have studied some of the country’s 300-plus intergenerational facilities over the past decade say the best of them provide some of the best care available for frail seniors.
Elderly adults participating in structured activities with children are more focused and in better moods than when children are not involved, scientists have found. Moreover, adults continue to be in better spirits after the children leave, suggesting the interactions may have lasting effects. Even adults with mild to moderate cognitive deficits do better when involved in activities with children.
Many older adults resist day care, even though it can delay or prevent a move to a nursing home and is less costly than professional home health care. A facility with children can seem especially humiliating. Some families get their loved ones through the door by urging them to volunteer to help with the children.
“The families tell them, ‘You have to go. The children need you,’” Ms. Hamilton-Cantu said.
photo by Iris Schneider
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Elderly adults in age-integrated daycare programs don’t actually take care of children — that’s the staff’s job — but they do have an enormous impact on children’s lives, researchers have found. Compared to their peers in traditional preschools, children in intergenerational daycare programs are more patient, express more empathy, exhibit more self-control and have better manners.
At ONEgeneration, there are no etiquette courses per se, but every time children and adults come together for an activity — and that can happen as many as eight times a day — they greet each other with, “Hi, neighbor!,” and shake hands. Children have been known to spot elderly strangers in malls and restaurants and call out to them: “Hello, neighbor!” Sometimes they even walk over and shake their hands.
David Warren, Zahra's Revolution
The recent election was not the cause, but the trigger, of what is suddenly happening on the streets.
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But Mousavi's proposed modest reforms could hardly have excited the students, or the masses following in their train.
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But, cherchez la femme! What made Mousavi the fuse for an explosive force was not himself, but his wife, Zahra Rahnavard. In the course of the election campaign, she ignored Islamist precedent, and took to the hustings on her husband's behalf. This tiny grandmother, wearing regulation chador, but with very loud scarves, has wandered around the country lighting fires.
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She has used her social authority as a grandmother -- pillar of social order -- to turn conventions upside down. Going well beyond her husband's promises, she has demanded an end to discrimination against women, an end to the morality police, an end to supervision of the universities. It is she who has communicated to the students (in every Asian country the vanguard of the elite): "This is the moment to stand!"
More from the London Times
A diminutive 64-year-old grandmother who refuses to be bound by the rigid constraints imposed on women in Iran proved more than a match for the President of the Islamic Republic yesterday.
Zahra Rahnavard had already broken all precedent by actively campaigning for her husband, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a relative moderate who is President Ahmadinejad’s strongest challenger in Friday’s presidential election. Yesterday she went a step further by summoning the domestic and international media to a press conference at which she tore into the President for lying, humiliating women, debasing his office and betraying the principles of the revolution.
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Dr Rahnavard offered further inducements. She promised that her husband, if elected, would appoint women to Cabinet posts for the first time, and name many female deputy ministers and ambassadors. He would end discrimination and ensure that women were no longer treated as second-class citizens. He would release women’s rights activists from prison and abolish the “morality police” who, during Mr Ahmadinejad’s first term, cracked down on women deemed to be dressed inappropriately. She even suggested that women should not be forced to cover their heads.
From the Daily Mail comes a photograph of the infamous Romanian tattooist responsible for the 56 stars on Kimberly's face who now offers to pay for 27 of the stars to be removed while still insisting 18-year-old Kimberly wanted all 56.
Words fail.
So How's It Going in Iran? by Michael Leeden with photos from The Big Picture.
But the key element is the people. They are only just beginning to understand the reality of their situation. Virtually none of them imagined that they would be in a revolutionary confrontation with the regime just two days after the electoral circus, and few of them can realize, so soon, that they can actually change the world. I think the Mousavis now understand it (they know that they are either going to win or be destroyed). It remains to be seen if they can instruct and inspire the movement.
Much will depend on their ability to communicate. The regime has been waging a cyberwar against the dissidents, shutting down websites, cell phones, Facebook, and the like. As most people have learned, the basic communiations tool is Twitter, which somehow continues to function. Bigtime Kudos to Twitter, by the way, for postponing its planned maintenance so that the Iranians can continue to Tweet. Would that Google were so solicitous of freedom.
We don’t know who’s going to win. The Iranian people know that they’re on their own; they aren’t going to get any help from us, or the United Nations, or the Europeans. But paradoxically, this lack of support may strengthen their will. There is no cavalry on the horizon. If they are going to prevail, they and their unlikely leaders will have to gut it out by themselves. God be with them.
I always wondered where 'Hispanic' came to mean a racial category. That it started with Richard Nixon and come to flower under Jimmy Carter I never would have guessed.
From the LA Times, Judge Sotomayor, a mythic 'Hispanic'.
Jonathan Zimmerman thinks she should be judged on her merits as do all sane people and not because she's 'Hispanic'.
I put the term in quotation marks because it's a recent invention, dating to the 1970s and '80s. Before then, when Sotomayor was growing up with her Puerto Rican family in New York City, she was not Hispanic.
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All that would change in 1977, when the Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to classify Americans as one of four races -- white, black, American Indian/Alaskan Native or Asian/Pacific Islander -- and also to distinguish between two ethnic categories, "of Hispanic origin" and "not of Hispanic origin." Since then, the census has asked people their race and whether they're Hispanic, which is not listed as a "race" per se.
Increasingly, however, Americans thought of it as such. Government agencies used "Hispanic" alongside "Asian" and "black," making Hispanic into a de facto racial category. Businesses and educational institutions counted Hispanics -- or, sometimes, "Latinos" -- as a race in diversity and affirmative action reports.
Not surprisingly, then, Hispanics became more likely over time to identify themselves as a separate race too. In the mid-1990s, 60% of the respondents to a study of more than 5,000 Latin American immigrants self-identified as "white," for example, but only 20% of their children did so.
That's an unprecedented development, as the United States had continuously absorbed people formerly identified in the census as from nonwhite races into the white majority. Jews, Italians and Slavs were all once classified as separate races; now, they're white. But Hispanics are moving in the opposite direction -- from white to nonwhite. In our minds, at least, they've become a minority race.
Roger Scruton on the humanities, Farewell to Judgment
People of my generation were taught to believe that there are human universals, which remain constant from age to age. We were taught to study literature in order to sympathize with life in all its forms. It doesn't matter, we were told, if Shakespeare's political assumptions do not coincide with ours. His plays do not aim to indoctrinate; they aim to present believable characters in believable situations, and to do so in heightened language that would set our imaginations and our sympathies on fire. Of course, Shakespeare invites judgment, as do all writers of fiction. But it is not political judgment that is relevant. We judge Shakespeare plays in terms of their expressiveness, truth to life, profundity, and beauty. And that is how you justify the study of English, as a training in this other kind of judgment, which leaves politics behind.
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Conservatives often complain about the politicization of the universities, and about the fact that only liberal views are propagated or even tolerated on campus. But they fail to see the true cause of this, which is the internal collapse of the humanities. When judgment is marginalized or forbidden nothing remains save politics. The only permitted way to compare Jane Austen and Maya Angelou, or Mozart and Meshuggah, is in terms of their rival political postures. And then the point of studying Jane Austen or Mozart is lost. What do they have to tell us about the ideological conflicts of today, or the power struggles that are played out in the faculty common room?
Deconstructionism and Post-modernism reigns in today's universities, yet no one is happy or could be happy with the poverty of spirit on offer.
Scruton in an interview
The rhetoric of deconstruction is not so widely adverted to today as it once was. But that is not because its tenets are no longer embraced but rather because they have become so familiar that they no longer seem shocking. The nihilistic assumptions of deconstruction have not been jettisoned, they have been internalized: more and more they are simply taken for granted as part of the accepted and expected intellectual furniture of the time.
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The most flagrant example is the university, an institution that was entrusted with the task of preserving and transmitting what Matthew Arnold called "the best that has been thought and said" but that since the 1960s has become a refuge for radical political activism
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Dostoyevsky once claimed that if God does not exist then everything is permitted. Considerable ingenuity has gone into proving Dostoyevsky wrong. To date, though, the record would seem to support him.
It just so happens that a British biographer, novelist and man of letters, A.N.Wilson who had made it his business to skewer faith as irrational has recently converted.
A.N. Wilson explains himself in Why I believe again
Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist “explanations” for our mysterious human existence simply won’t do – on an intellectual level.
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When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love....Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.
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My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again.
From Look who's a believer now.
Those who later recanted their atheism went on from this common start to begin to doubt their doubts. They gradually decided that their rationalistic method was too narrow: It could pick holes not only in Christianity but in any attempt to distinguish between right and wrong or to articulate the meaning of life. They came to realize that they could only tear down and thus were left intellectually with no habitable place to live. John Henry Gordon, who held the only full-time, salaried secularist lecturer position in England, came to believe that secularism was a creed of "mere negations."
Having realized that their method was flawed, they then began to reconsider faith. Christianity, they discovered, spoke to the deepest realities of human experience.
Even the left-wing German philosopher Jürgen Habermas stunned his followers lately with this statement:
“Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”
Roger Scruton always has a most interesting, clear-headed and intelligent take on just about everything, so any new Scruton article is a fresh delight.
In Vino Veritas: I'll drink to that or having to do with vicious or virtuous desire.
Puritanism turned an absolute no into an absolute yes. And it looked around for other pleasures that it could forbid, not because God was offended by them but because they offended the thing that had replaced God in the Puritan conscience — namely the Self. Any pleasure harmful to the self must now be subject to the same absolute condemnation as had been directed against the pleasures of sex. Hence the hysterical campaign against smoking, which has not taken the form of advising against something harmful, but the far more alarming form of condemning that thing as a sin. You can portray young people on the screen as engaging in sexual orgies, beating each other up, swearing and exhibiting every kind of nastiness. But you must never show a young person with a cigarette in his hand, since that will be condoning and encouraging sin.
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For there is no doubt that the wrong kind of drinking is not just offensive to the new God of Self, but offensive also to the old God of Others, who is the God of love. Drunkenness does not merely harm the individual. It can destroy his capacity for human relations and turn his world into a sea of bitterness.
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It is vital, if we are to save one of the greatest of human goods from the new Inquisition, that we find another and more humane way to approach the problem of alcohol. And that is why we should take a lesson from Aristotle, and see the question not in terms of thou shalt and thou shalt not, but in terms of the right and the wrong way to drink. And we should try to understand the distinction between virtuous and vicious drinking by reflecting on wine, since it has been, in our civilisation, both the vehicle of the real presence of God, and the symbol of our ways of reaching him.
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Alcohol in general, and wine in particular, has a unique social function, increasing the garrulousness, the social confidence and the goodwill of those who drink together, provided they drink in moderation. Many of the ways that we have developed of drinking socially are designed to impose a strict regime of moderation. Buying drinks by round in the pub, for example, has an important role in both permitting people to rehearse the sentiments that cause and arise from generosity (yet without bearing the full cost of them), while controlling the rate of intake and the balance between the inflow of drink and the outflow of words.
The practice of buying rounds in the pub is one of the great cultural achievements of the English. It enables people with little money of their own to make generous gestures, without the risk of being ruined by them. It enables each person to distinguish himself from his neighbours and to portray his individuality in his choice of drink, and it causes affection progressively to mount in the circle of drinkers, by giving each in turn the character of a warm and hospitable friend.
I've come to the conclusion that in far too many cases, race has become a brand.
Reading the news and commentary about Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina woman" remarks, it turns out she repeatedly made the same comment in multiple speeches between 1994 and 2003 according to Congressional Quarterly.
It just doesn't make sense that a white man would be excoriated as a racist while a black man or a Latina woman would be applauded for making essentially the same statement.
Identity politics may help in getting ahead but it's nonsense when it comes to the ability to decide complex issues of law.
When it comes to winning the race, there's only one.
Stem cells used to help cure sight loss
COATING a common contact lens with stem cells could help restore a person's sight, Australian scientists have found.
University of New South Wales medical researchers used the technique to treat the damaged corneas of three patients, all of whose vision improved within weeks of the groundbreaking procedure.
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Stem cells were harvested from the eyes of each patient and then cultured inside a contact lens, which was then stuck onto a damaged cornea in a "transplant'' of regenerative cells.
"The procedure is totally simple and cheap,'' said the university's Dr Nick Di Girolamo.
"Unlike other techniques ... there's no suturing, there is no major operation, all that's involved is harvesting a minute amount - less than a millimetre - of tissue from the ocular surface.''
The lens stayed on for 10 days allowing stem cells to change their form, colonise and repair the cornea.
With so many successes from adult stem cells, I can not understand why any scientist or researcher would want to get entangled with the moral quagmire of embryonic stem research
There will not be enough doctors, heath care or money when we boomers get old. We will have to take care of each other. Time we started learning how by paying attention to what our elderly people need most and that is to be seen and appreciated.
Mother Theresa, beatified by Pope John Paul II said "There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread."
True Grit : Growing Old in America by Jude Acosta
Ours is one of the few civilizations in recorded history that not only ignores the aged but devalues them. The way we have placed such emphatic priority on youthful sexuality, incessant and needless entertainment, and endless consumerism has in effect put the accrued wisdom of the elderly at philosophical and spiritual odds with everything the modern American marketplace stands for. We are a nation of Peter Pans and we believe that somehow we can avoid growing up if we just pretend that aging, like death, is for someone else, not us. And like very young children we cover our eyes and make believe the aged are not there.
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The irony is that while the increasing number of elderly in America may need more care and companionship than ever before, many, like my friend, Mr. Garry, will in fact be more alone. With less family living nearby, fewer social invitations, and little or no value in a world that places material success on par with spiritual salvation, they are often stuck at home, unable to care for themselves well or at all, and dependent upon government services instead of family. For many Americans, particularly those who live in front of the television, the aged and infirm are all but invisible.
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According to a growing number of mental health experts, loneliness is the greatest contributing factor to all manner of illness in our culture. University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo and writer William Patrick in their book Loneliness (WW Norton, 2008) state that loneliness is so serious a condition that it puts people at risk for heart disease, cancer and respiratory and gastrointestinal ailments. Citing three decades of research, they point out that loneliness can disturb our levels of stress hormones, immune function, and even gene expression, while positive human interaction increases levels of oxytocin, a bonding hormone that reduces blood pressure and cortisol levels. In this sense, loneliness is transformed from a purely "emotional" state to a measurable biochemical one.
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Contrary to current media spin, it does not take a whole village to change the situation of the elderly in this country. It takes one person, one moment, one conversation at a local park, and, like a sacred witness, the willingness to see them.
Before I read The Case for Working with Your Hands, I quickly jotted down what first came to my mind.
1. You see what you have accomplished.
2. Your job can't be outsourced.
3. You have time to contemplate all the mysteries of life and death
Matthew Crawford is more eloquent.
[C]onfrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts.
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The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.
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The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.”
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There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.
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The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience
Gagdad Bob on Memorial Day
Memorial Day -- like any holy-day -- is not a remembrance of things past, but of things present; or, a recollection of people and events of the past for the purpose of re-membering and reuniting ourselves with the eternal. It is a remembrance of things surpassed -- or of the fixed stars that transcend and illuminate our lives below, and without which we would surely lose our way.
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We remember our heroes because they illuminate the eternal realm of the heroic, a realm that we must treasure and venerate if we are to survive as a culture. Not only is the hero a transcendent archetype, but he is only heroic because he has risked all in defense of another permanent archetype -- truth, liberty, beauty, the good, etc.
"No greater love than this, that one should lay down his life for his friends."
So many have died so that we could be free.
A lovely piece by Vanderleun reminding me that Miracles and Wonders Continue
And so, while the petty politicians bleat, and the small and not so small wars rage on in fits and starts, almost everyone on the Earth will sleep tonight with someone they don't really mind all that much. And tomorrow the kids in the playground across the street will run and skip and jump at recess. And tomorrow our planet, one of many like it or perhaps alone in the universe, will turn full of much more goodness and grace than hate and suffering.
And tomorrow, somewhere in mid-heaven, floating weightless between the Earth and the Sun, men and women will carefully repair and refurbish a telescope so that we might see ever deeper into the whole of creation, and perhaps even, just a bit, into the mind and purposes of God.
Born and raised in Mozambique, now a naturalized citizen, Paulo Sediro is suing a New Jersey medical school and claiming he was harassed and ultimately suspended for identifying himself during a class cultural exercise as a "white Afro-American"
After Serodio labeled himself as a white African-American, another student said she was offended by his comments and that, because of his white skin, was not an African-American.
According to the lawsuit, Serodio was summoned to Duncan's office where he was instructed "never to define himself as an African-American & because it was offensive to others and to people of color for him to do so."
"It's crazy," Serodio's attorney Gregg Zeff told ABCNews.com. "Because that's what he is."
'White African American' Suing N.J. Med School for Discrimination
Who decided that every one with black skin was an Afro-American and that Afro-Americans can't be white? That everyone from Mexico or Guatemala or Nicaragua should be called Hispanic? That American Indians wanted to be called Native Americans instead of Shawnee, Sioux or Navajo?
Once people accept being labelled, it becomes easier to accept that one can only believe certain things and that's what identity politics is all about.
Last week, after attending a concert with a friend, we strolled in the spring evening on the streets of Cambridge and bumped into friends of my friend. The woman, who I heard later had a gay son who died of AIDS, said she had just come from a showing of new film "Outrage" which purports to out several politicians saying they were secretly gay while publicly opposing legislation like gay marriage.
When I demurred from the premise that anyone's privacy should be violated in such a way and said maybe they were against some legislation on policy or political grounds, the woman hissed, "They're evil."
After that incident Bookworm's post on The inevitable result of identity politics resonated
The film “Outrage,” however, typecasts gays, and denies them the right to examine issues through a lens other than their own sexuality. I say this without knowing or caring whether the men and women named in the movie are actually gay. What I care about, deeply, is the pressure the gay community imposes upon its members to abjure independent thought, and to march lockstep through a series of complicated and contentious issues.
For a community that, a mere 40 years ago, broke free of the shackles imposed against it, it’s a real tragedy that it now insists upon imposing similar shackles upon itself.
James Hudnall is a far stronger voice against political correctness saying PC is censorship, bigotry disguised as manners, an attempt at mind control and evil in PC Must Die.
Well, this is more than interesting: it's important because it goes to the heart of the truth of many claims that underlie the positions people have taken on the political issues before us.
American Psychological Association: No "gay" gene
A decade or so ago (1998) the APA (American Psychological Association) released a brochure titled ""Answers to Your Questions about Sexual Orientation and Homosexuality" that contained the following statement: "There is considerable recent evidence to suggest that biology, including genetic or inborn hormonal factors, play a significant role in a person's sexuality."
However, they have just released a new brochure and it appears that they have backed off of that somewhat. The new statement says: "There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles..."
The former President of NARTH ( National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality), A. Dean Byrd, Ph.D., MBA, MPH had this comment on the APA's new position: "Although there is no mention of the research that influenced this new position statement, it is clear that efforts to 'prove' that homosexuality is simply a biological fait accompli have failed." He went on to say: "The activist researchers themselves have reluctantly reached that conclusion. There is no gay gene. There is no simple biological pathway to homosexuality."
If homosexuals aren't born that way, then it follow that some homosexuals can change their sexual orientation if they want to.
Charlie Butts quotes
Peter LaBarbera, who heads Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, believes the more recent statement is an important admission because it undermines a popular theory.
"People need to understand that the 'gay gene' theory has been one of the biggest propaganda boons of the homosexual movement over the last 10 [or] 15 years," he points out. "Studies show that if people think that people are born homosexual they're much less likely to resist the gay agenda."
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"It's irrefutable from a medical standpoint that people can leave the homosexual lifestyle," he argues. "Homosexuality is defined by behavior. Untold thousands of people have found freedom from that lifestyle through either reparative therapy or through -- frankly, most effectively -- a relationship with Jesus Christ."
That there are such political agendas is confirmed by one famous homosexual Andrew Sullivan who wrote with respect to the hate crime legislation now pending in Congress
The real reason for hate crime laws is not the defense of human beings from crime. There are already laws against that - and Matthew Shepard's murderers were successfully prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in a state with no hate crimes law at the time. The real reason for the invention of hate crimes was a hard-left critique of conventional liberal justice and the emergence of special interest groups which need boutique legislation to raise funds for their large staffs and luxurious buildings. Just imagine how many direct mail pieces have gone out explaining that without more money for HRC, more gay human beings will be crucified on fences. It's very, very powerful as a money-making tool - which may explain why the largely symbolic federal bill still hasn't passed
One of the big issues that is being pushed is the hate crime legislation already approved by the House and now pending in the Senate, Senate Bill 1105, Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act. It's also called the "Pedophile Protection Act" because the definition of "gender identity" is not defined and an amendment to exclude pedophiles from the definition was defeated.
I'm against all hate crimes period. If it's a crime, it should be punished, period. I see no difference whether a husband kills his wife, the immigrant down the street or the gay at a bar. It's murder. Adding the gloss of 'hate' is only an invitation for the government to intervene arbitrarily in some cases not others, based on what they perceive to be in the mind of the perpetrator. It's mind-reading. It's a thought crime.
The pending bill which adds "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" to an already existing flawed law would make it even worse.
Jules Crittenden on Aidan Quinn, the transgender trolley driver who was texting his/her girlfriend while driving and plowed into the back of the trolley ahead, injuring 50, causing $10 million in damages and who knows how many lawsuits against the MBtA
Never mind the texting, the three speeding tickets and one accident in recent years and the relative youth at 24. Should people who deny fundamental biological facts and claim to be of the opposite gender be entrusted with large public conveyances that carry dozens of commuters? Would it be discriminatory to question their judgment and stability? Should the NTSB be looking at possible medical issues, such as any effect hormone treatments for example might have on behavior, perception and judgment?
He says
I have no problem with blokes dressing like sheilas and vice versa. It’s a free country. I do have a problem with the government officially endorsing delusion, however, and engaging in bizarre exercises in political correctness that create public safety risks.
George Packer on The View from a Roofer's Recession via Crunchy Con
“It’s the technology,” the roofer said. “They don’t know how to deal with a human being. They stand there with that text shrug”—he hunched his shoulders, bent his head down, moved from side to side, looking anywhere but at me—“and they go, ‘Ah, ah, um, um,’ and they just mumble. They can’t talk any more.” This inadequacy with physical space and direct interaction was an affliction of the educated, he said—“the more educated, the worse.” His poorer black customers in Bedford-Stuyvesant had no such problem, and he was much happier working on their roofs, but the recession had slowed things down there and these days he was forced to deal almost entirely with the cognitively damaged educated and professional classes.
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“They hire someone—this has happened several times—so they don’t have to talk to me,” he went on, growing more animated and reddening with amazement. “It’s like they’re afraid of me! So they hire a guy who’s more comfortable dealing with a masculine-type person. I stand there and talk to the customer, and the customer doesn’t talk to me or look at me, he talks to the intermediary, and the intermediary talks to me. It’s the yuppie buffer.”
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This was a completely new phenomenon in the roofer’s world: a mass upper class that was so immersed in symbolic and digital cerebration that it had become incapable of carrying out the most ordinary functions—had become, in effect, like small children with Asperger’s symptoms
The dirty little secret of environmentalists is that they think their favorite places, for some the world, are be better off without people.
Although it took some years to complete the task of creating a fictional wilderness in Yosemite, all the valley's residents were eventually evicted, and in 1914 their land became a national park - no natives welcome.
This tactic became known as "the Yosemite model" and was replicated around the country, and eventually around the world
No natives allowed by Mark Dowie
Refugees from conservation have never been counted; in fact they're not even officially recognized as refugees. But the number of people displaced from traditional homelands worldwide over the past century, in the interest of conservation, is estimated to be close to 20 million, 14 million in Africa alone. It is a sad history, and one that has forced conservationists to reevaluate the hero status of their movement's founders, and to reconsider the idea of protecting biological diversity by removing humans from the mix.
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I have traveled all five inhabited continents, visiting hundreds of indigenous communities, some in conflict with western conservation and others in harmony. While tension persists, I have found an encouraging dialogue growing between formally educated wildlife biologists, who once saw humanity as inimical to nature, and ancient aboriginal societies that have passed their remarkable ecological knowledge from generation to generation without a page of text or the benefit of PowerPoint. And I have been heartened to find, mostly in the field, a new generation of conservationists who have come to realize that the landscapes they seek to protect contain high biodiversity in part because people who have been living there, some for thousands of years, are living right.
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As cultural ecologist Gene Anderson observed, many of the world's traditional societies long ago came to "some kind of terms with their environment, or they would not have lasted long enough to become 'traditional.' " They are, in the language of ecology, living sustainably. And it seems self-evident now that the only way global conservation is going to succeed in its mission of preserving wild places and biodiversity is to end the counterproductive practice of evicting these proven land stewards from their homelands, and instead work together with them in developing sustainable ways of living
The outbreak apparently contained, Mexico officials decide today whether to reopen schools and businesses.
Noted is the willingness of millions to wear face masks which the LA Times says may not stop the flu virus but shows a healthy respect for manners.
And a flair for fun.
From the Guardian, custom face masks take to Mexico's streets
Walter Williams on Law vs Moral Values
A civilized society's first line of defense is not the law, police and courts but customs, traditions and moral values. Behavioral norms, mostly transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. They include important thou-shalt-nots such as shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat, but they also include all those courtesies one might call ladylike and gentlemanly conduct. The failure to fully transmit values and traditions to subsequent generations represents one of the failings of the so-called greatest generation.
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During the 1940s, my family lived in North Philadelphia's Richard Allen housing project. Many families didn't lock doors until late at night, if ever. No one ever thought of installing bars on their windows. Hot, humid summer nights found many people sleeping outside on balconies or lawn chairs. Starting in the '60s and '70s, doing the same in some neighborhoods would have been tantamount to committing suicide. Keep in mind that the 1940s and '50s were a time of gross racial discrimination, high black poverty and few opportunities compared to today. The fact that black neighborhoods were far more civilized at that time should give pause to the excuses of today that blames today's pathology on poverty and discrimination.
Peter Wood explores how college today is shaping the American character of the young.
Children never learn or remember all the details of they are taught, but they drink in the basic messages about what is important and what’s not. In that sense, America has its own madrasses—secular madrassas of multiculturalism and sustainability. We call them public schools. Ashley Thorne’s article here last week, “Green Goblins,” pondered the recent poll of American school children by an environmentalist group that purported to find, “One out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that Ma Earth won't exist when they grow up.” Our success in teaching reading and math may be a bit spotty, but our success at instilling eco-apocalyptic fear in preteens is outstanding.
American Character, the Remix: How College is Shaping Us Now
The character that contemporary American education seems most to foster is also a person unmoored to any abiding sense of reality. He or she—more often she given that about 58 percent of the students are young women—is ambitious, dissatisfied, and vaguely angry. College has made it a settled fact that America is a profoundly unfair society, but that the “structural inequalities” run so deep that there is little that can be done about them. This allows the alternatives of resentful passivity or frenetic pursuit of symbolic protests and acts of atonement. Often you see both in the same person. Lethargically pessimistic one day, stridently assertive the next.
You may have already seen this but if you haven't, read about Kevin Roose, the student at Brown University who "infiltrated" Liberty University
"As a responsible American citizen, I couldn't just ignore the fact that there are a lot of Christian college students out there," said Roose, 21, now a Brown senior. "If I wanted my education to be well-rounded, I had to branch out and include these people that I just really had no exposure to."
Formed in 1971, Liberty now enrolls more than 11,000 residential students, along with thousands more who study through Liberty's distance-learning programs. The university teaches creationism and that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, while pledging "a strong commitment to political conservatism" on campus and a "total rejection of socialism."
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He lined up a publisher — Grand Central Publishing — and arrived at the Lynchburg campus prepared for "hostile ideologues who spent all their time plotting abortion clinic protests and sewing Hillary Clinton voodoo dolls."
Instead, he found that "not only are they not that, but they're rigorously normal."
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Roose said his Liberty experience transformed him in surprising ways.
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Once ambivalent about faith, Roose now prays to God regularly — for his own well-being and on behalf of others. He said he owns several translations of the Bible and has recently been rereading meditations from the letters of John on using love and compassion to solve cultural conflicts.
He's even considering joining a church.
From an interview in Newsweek
Did you ever feel guilty about deceiving your new friends?
I did, and I tried to be as honest as I could. When people asked, I told them I'd come from Brown. I expected raised eyebrows, but often what I got was pity. They thought I was fleeing secularism, and they'd say, "Oh, Liberty must be a breath of fresh air." And I'd be like, "You have no idea."
His book is
"The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University" (Kevin Roose)
He's also started a blog where he promotes his book and discusses other matters like Bible literacy: Why you need to know the Bible (even if you're an atheist)
For all the talk of America as a nation founded upon Judeo-Christian values, one humbling fact remains: As a culture, we know startlingly little about the Bible. As Stephen Prothero points out in his book Religious Literacy, studies have shown that only half of U.S. adults know one of the four Gospels by name. More than half are unable to identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible, and 60% can’t name five of the Ten Commandments. Sadly, our collective slide into biblical illiteracy doesn’t seem to be reversing itself among the younger set–according to Prothero, 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple.
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By getting a solid foundation in the Bible in my Liberty classes, I gained access to an incredible amount of cultural capital. Suddenly, hidden metaphors in classic works of literature leapt out at me from the page, and I caught the subtle scriptural references embedded in political stump speeches
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Outside the classroom and the newsroom, biblical literacy is also important in our personal lives. For better or worse, America is a nation with a deeply entrenched religious divide, and knowing the language of the Bible can help secular liberals reach across faith boundaries and build common ground with even the most conservative Christians.
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The Bible is, quite simply, the most influential book in history. It’s the all-time best seller, the book whose pages have inspired wars and toppled regimes, whose words have given hope and comfort to billions of believers. And knowing almost nothing about it–as I did before my semester “abroad” at a Christian college–greatly hinders a person’s ability to participate knowledgeably in our country’s most important cultural discussions. Atheist or believer, Jewish or Christian, I hope–and pray–that this holiday season will inspire us all to learn a little more about the book in whose shadow we all live.
How to capitalize on global warming by finding the Big Green. Al Gore shows us the way
According to public disclosure information, Gore was worth somewhere between $1 million and $2 million in 2000. Not quite eight years later, Gore is estimated to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million..... When you look out at what Al Gore has done, it’s evident that he figured out on a way to capitalize on the creation of Big Green while becoming the official doomsday prophet that has helped to build Big Green into the monetary powerhouse that it has become.
For those who are terrified by the continuing prophecies of imminent disaster, it's a helpful corrective to read the Earth Day predictions of 1970.
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Kroft observes to real estate agent Kevin Moran. “There was a time, I think, when people felt really bad about not paying off a debt.”
“Yeah, I think in those days, loans were made by your local banker or building and loan associations or savings and loan,” Moran replies. “They were guys you saw in the grocery store. They were on the little league team with you, the PTA, the school. And I think as mortgages became securitized and Wall Street became involved, they became very transactional and there was no relationship built with the borrower and the lender. And I think that makes it easier for someone to see it as an anonymous party at the other end of the transaction and just walk away from it.”
“Just a business decision,” Kroft says.
Patrick Deneen explores the consequences in Walkaway
One can hardly be surprised at the vulture economy that will spring up as the carcasses begin to putrefy. However, what is most arresting for me in this posting is the growing evidence of shamelessness among our middling debtor class, a vice that can be itself directly traceable to the elites of our society, in particular those quasi-aristocrats who were the trustees and caretakers of our society and its norms. These people of visibility and distinction in settled communities - established businessmen and storekeepers, attorneys and doctors, clergy and civic figures - have reneged their status as responsible keepers of their community and as conveyors and exemplars of its norms, and now ironically are reaping the harvest that they have sown.
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Just as our economy has shown us no sense of obligation and concern, so too in return are ordinary people shucking off the social norms or covenants that bound us in communion and fidelity. There is a great unraveling taking place, and at times I do truly fear for the future of this nation.
Is TARP a criminal enterprise?
Larry Kudlow asks
Is the whole TARP plan a criminal enterprise? Sounds farfetched, I suppose. But after reading about Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky’s report, it may well be that TARP is just one big criminal problem.
Listen to this: Barofsky’s investigators reported Monday that they have opened 20 criminal probes into possible securities fraud, tax-law violations, insider-trading, and mortgage-modification fraud related to TARP. Yup, those are criminal probes. Barofsky is the special IG overseeing the bailout program. And for some reason the mainstream media refuses to report this on the front pages where it belongs.
Barofsky’s report spans 247 pages. And it says that the very character of the bailout program makes it “inherently vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse, including significant issues related to conflicts of interest facing fund managers, collusion between participants and vulnerabilities to money laundering.”
By the way, one of Barofsky’s recommendations is for Treasury to abandon its whole plan of buying toxic assets from banks and investors. The IG’s report also notes that what started last October as a single-purpose $750 billion effort to buy toxic securities has morphed into twelve separate programs that cover up to $3 trillion in direct spending, loans, and loan guarantees. In other words, TARP is nearly equal in size to the entire federal budget.
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Think about this: TARP, which is now linked to substantial criminal activity, has ballooned to the size of a second federal budget and represents the biggest government-directed intrusion into the economy in history — vastly bigger than the New Deal. And not only is there TARP for banks, insurance companies, and non-bank financial institutions, but also for GM, Chrysler, and various auto suppliers, and perhaps soon enough for credit cards, newspapers, and other sectors of the economy.
Much as I am dismayed about the direction of the economy, I'm more distressed at what John Bogle calls the Crisis of Ethic Proportion
The old notion of trusting and being trusted -- which once was not only the accepted standard of business conduct but the key to success -- came to be seen as a quaint relic of an era long gone.
The proximate causes of the crisis are usually said to be easy credit, bankers' cavalier attitudes toward risk, "securitization" (which severed the traditional link between borrower and lender), the extraordinary leverage built into the financial system by complex derivatives, and the failure of our regulators to do their job.
But the larger cause was our failure to recognize the sea change in the nature of capitalism that was occurring right before our eyes. That change was the growth of giant business corporations and giant financial institutions controlled not by their owners in the "ownership society" of yore, but by agents of the owners, which created an "agency society."
The managers of our public corporations came to place their interests ahead of the interests of their company's owners. Our money manager agents -- who in the U.S. now hold 75% of all shares of public companies -- blithely accepted the change. They fostered the crisis with superficial security analysis and research and by ignoring corporate governance issues. They also traded stocks at an unprecedented rate, engaging in a dangerous spree of speculation.
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What's to be done? We must work to establish a "fiduciary society," where manager/agents entrusted with managing other people's money are required -- by federal statute -- to place front and center the interests of the owners they are duty-bound to serve. The focus needs to be on long-term investment (rather than short-term speculation), appropriate due diligence in security selection, and ensuring that corporations are run in the interest of their owners. Manager/agents need to act in a way that reflects their ethical responsibilities to society. Making that happen will be no easy task.
Tax Day Tea Parties around the nation on Google Maps
Self-organized, the tax day tea parties are protesting higher taxes and out-of-control government spending. The Wall St Journal says
What's most striking about the tea-party movement is that most of the organizers haven't ever organized, or even participated, in a protest rally before. General disgust has drawn a lot of people off the sidelines and into the political arena, and they are already planning for political action after today.
Stop Spending Our Future
Adjusted for inflation, the proposed deficit is 3 times what we spent on WW2 and 24 times what was spent on The New Deal.
The dichotomy of market and state places us between the Scylla of seeking profit in all of our interactions and the Charybdis of coercive force and intrusive regulation. When both the state and market are properly limited, room is made for the vital institutions of social life to flourish and for a culture of charity to be truly nurtured.
It's actually quite sad when people think that's the only choice they have.
William Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, was in New York last week for a conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to answer the question "How did they get away with it."
Now Black won a reputation as the senior regulator who cracked down on banks in the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s ,so he knows what he's talking about. His interview by Bill Moyers last week on PBS was extremely disturbing and damning.
Hat tip Rod Dreher, Williamm K. Black, The government is lying to us.
Black goes on to say how can we justify not having a first-rate, nonpartisan investigation finding out why this happened and how it can be prevented. Why aren't we having that? Because, he says, the government literally doesn't want to know, or rather, doesn't want the public to know. Black alleged that the government is lying about the bank losses to maintain artificial public confidence. Moyers pinned him down on this point, asking if he really did believe that the Obama administration is intentionally deceiving the public.
Black: "Absolutely. Because they are scared to death of a collapse. ... I think they are sincerely just panicked: 'We cannot let big banks fail.'"
And if they keep lying about it? Black says banks will stay enormously weak, and the government will continue "obscene giveaways of taxpayer money."
You can watch the interview here and read the transcript.
Here are a few excerpts:
Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have.
It begins in the boardrooms and the CEO offices and this is how they do it.
Well, the way that you do it is to make really bad loans, because they pay better. Then you grow extremely rapidly, in other words, you're a Ponzi-like scheme. And the third thing you do is we call it leverage. That just means borrowing a lot of money, and the combination creates a situation where you have guaranteed record profits in the early years. That makes you rich, through the bonuses that modern executive compensation has produced. It also makes it inevitable that there's going to be a disaster down the road.
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Liars' loans mean that we don't check. You tell us what your income is. You tell us what your job is. You tell us what your assets are, and we agree to believe you. We won't check on any of those things. And by the way, you get a better deal if you inflate your income and your job history and your assets.
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This stuff, the exotic stuff that you're talking about was created out of things like liars' loans, that were known to be extraordinarily bad. And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That's why it's toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking, during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it's scandalous what came out. What we know now is that the rating agencies never looked at a single loan file. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found, and I'm quoting Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, "the results were disconcerting, in that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined."
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Black said it was more than a financial crisis, it was a moral crisis, a fundamental lack of integrity. In the Savings and Loan crisis only about 10% of the CEOs engaged in fraud.
So, 90 percent of them were restrained by ethics and integrity. So, far more than law or by F.B.I. agents, it's our integrity that often prevents the greatest abuses. And what we had in this crisis, instead of the Savings and Loan, is the most elite institutions in America engaging or facilitating fraud.
I'm not the only one feeling overwhelmed. Neo who took a wait-and-see attitude at the beginning finds it curious that her liberal friends
are turning away from politics even more than usual, especially considering that they should be joyfully lapping up the wonderful news, now that their man Obama is in. I believe that their turning away is both a attempt at protecting themselves from the anxiety of hearing about the financial crisis, and a reaction to a feeling of “something just isn’t right with Obama” in the pits of their stomachs.
Peggy Noonan sees the loss in Obama fervor as well:
There is considerable goodwill for the president, and all the polls show considerable support—half the nation in a time of sustained crisis is not a small thing—but one wonders for the first time if Mr. Obama's support isn't becoming, in the old phrase, a mile wide and an inch deep. Something has been lost in terms of fervor when one talks to Obama supporters.
They like the man but not his policies:
Messrs. Schoen and Rasmussen had 83% of respondents saying his programs will not work, 82% saying they're worried about the deficit, 78% worried about inflation, and 69% worried about the increasing role of the government in the economy.
She quotes a good friend of Obama, Tom Coburn, Republican Senator from Oklahoma:
"I believe President Obama has proposed the most significant shift toward collectivism and away from capitalism in the history of our republic. I believe his budget aspires to not merely promote economic recovery but to lay the groundwork for sweeping expansions of government authority in areas like health care, energy and even daily commerce. If handled poorly, I'm concerned this budget could turn our government into the world's largest health care provider, mortgage bank or car dealership, among other things."
I'm with Neo when she writes Feel overwhelmed? Maybe you're supposed to
It hasn’t always been so frenetic, but it is now. Things are happening so fast and so furiously that people have no time to process the amazingly complex issues involved, and the radical changes being proposed and in many cases implemented.
The frantic pace is supposedly happening because we are in crisis mode. But I’m certainly not the only one to wonder whether the sense of crisis is being purposely escalated in order to speed up the passage of controversial and “transformative” legislation. And to be very wary of where this “change” is really leading us.
Looking at the cards Obama has already played, Neo concludes at least as a 'working hypothesis' that
Obama as a man of the Left , that he is insufficiently devoted to the age-old American idea of liberty but is instead a committed statist, and that the mind-numbing pace of his change is deliberate and has been effective so far.
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But he also knows that those more in the middle will not be noticing much, until the deeds are done. And he is counting on them to look away and hope for the best. The question is whether his pace is fast enough, and whether they will catch on—and whether they will then understand what is happening, or care.
...in the long violent saga of mankind we have rarely done anything as benign as going shopping, rarely devised anything as socially advantageous as property rights and the rule of law, rarely enriched the poor or enhanced lives as we did by creating capitalism.
War, pestilence. And your problem is shopping?
Daniel Finkelstein in the London Times on whether there is a fairer, more rational alternative to capitalism.
The eminent physicist Freeman Dyson is profiled in the New York Times as The Civil Heretic
IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”
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Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees. “The biologists have essentially been pushed aside,” he continues. “Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”
On the same day, the London Telegraph reported on the Swedish scientist who's been researching sea levels for 35 years and knows about sea levels than any one else in the world who quite boldly states, the rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told.". Also a "total fraud" and a "colossal scare story".
Think about that and Obama's $2 trillion climate plan that Senate staffers say will cost three times what the President estimated.
Just how a massive tax increase on gasoline and electricity will get us out of recession is beyond me. The fact that it's even being considered is infuriating, based as it all is on flawed computer models, questionable science, serial exaggerators and fundamentalist believers.
Last Impressions
When it's all going down the tube, what stuff sticks around to the end?
The following recently appeared on eBay:
"everything I own furniture, jewerly, family heirlooms: I have medical issues and need $ to take care of myself"
The seller, redbettle81, writes:
"I offer all of my belongings for sale. Everything complete. I have 40yrs of furniture, professional tools, household items, clothes, family heirlooms, etc. You can imagine this is quite a bit. . , However I will not sell my Miniature Pincher (Jack) he is dear to me. You can have everything you want and dispose of the rest or take it all for keeps, no matter. I was an electronic security expert for many years and have fallen on hard times with damaging high blood pressure, heart attack, etc and can no longer work. I made mistake many years ago of not saving so now I pay the price of facing living on the street at 51yrs old. Family is non-existent so I fend for myself and like it that way. I some things thatare collectibles and some that are in new condition. I will be happy to forward picture of items soon as I get a camera. Thanks for reading this message."
Marty Calhoun of Dickson, Tenn. -- redbettle81 -- says he didn't get any bidders. Just some people sniffing around, whom he sizes up as con artists.
His situation, he says, is that "after years and years of having everything -- house, furniture -- you don't really need this stuff. You just sit around and look at it."
He's already sold his father's gun from World War II. Far more painful, he's sold the Harley. "I just want some kind of fresh start out of life," he says. "Things are going down. It's hard to explain. But I'm letting go."
Everything's in storage, and he's living in a one-room place with "a cot, a dog, a TV. Got a laptop. Bunch of crates with clothes in them. Gonna try and keep the dog forever. He always wags his tail. Always there for me. Dog's good to me. Love the dog.
"I lay here and think what did I blow all those tens of thousands on. You just think so much about life when you start selling things. Reflect back on everything. You don't need this.
"You just let it go. Let it go."
Morals: the one thing markets don't make by Jonathan Sacks
I recall another conversation with a successful investment banker. He told me that the first thing he had to establish was his character, his reputation for trustworthiness and honesty. Without that, he would have been unable to trade. Nowadays, he said, deals no longer depend on character but on lawyers.
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Common to these stories is the gradual disappearance of the cluster of principles that went by the name of morality. Whatever its source - religion, conscience, custom or code - it meant that there are certain things you don't do because they are not done. You don't reward yourself when customers, clients or shareholders or employees are suffering losses. You don't pay yourself out of all proportion to what you pay others. You don't take advantage of your position just because you can. You are guided, even if no one is watching, by a sense of what is responsible and right. Without that internalised code of honour and trust, no institution can be sustained in the long run.
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The market economy has generated more real wealth, eliminated more poverty and liberated more human creativity than any other economic system. The fault is not with the market but with the idea that the market alone is all we need.
Markets don't guarantee equity, responsibility or integrity. They can maximise short-term gain at the cost of long-term sustainability. They don't distribute rewards fairly. They don't guarantee honesty. When it comes to flagrant self-interest, they combine the maximum temptation with the maximum opportunity. Markets need morals, and morals are not made by markets.
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They are made by schools, the media, custom, tradition, religious leaders, moral role models and the influence of people. But when religion loses its voice and the media worship success, when right and wrong become relativised and morality is condemned as “judgmental”, when people lose all sense of honour and shame and there is nothing they won't do if they can get away with it, no regulation will save us. People will outwit the regulators, as they did by the securitisation of risk so no one knew who owed what to whom.
I don't like to write about politics but I am very disturbed at the deliberate stoking of populist rage against the people whose jobs are to unwind that mess at AIG. It's inciting mob violence and it has to end.
Busload of Crazies to Tour Homes of AIG Executives This Weekend…and ACORN’s behind it
ACORN if you remember has signed on to be a "national partner" in the 2010 US Census despite its history of voter fraud and bullying intimidation of banks and prior ties with the Obama campaign.
Even the powerful Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers who formerly supported ACORN now proposes hearings on the activist group after accusations that ACORN engaged in a pattern of crimes ranging from voter fraud to a mob-style "protection" racket.
Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times
Yes, the $165 million in bonuses handed out to executives in the financial products division of American International Group was infuriating. Truly, it was. As many others have noted, this is the same unit whose shenanigans came perilously close to bringing the world’s financial system to its knees. When the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, said recently that A.I.G.’s “irresponsible bets” had made him “more angry” than anything else about the financial crisis, he could have been speaking for most Americans.
But death threats? “All the executives and their families should be executed with piano wire — my greatest hope,” wrote one person in an e-mail message to the company.
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By week’s end, I was more depressed about the financial crisis than I’ve been since last September. Back then, the issue was the disintegration of the financial system, as the Lehman bankruptcy set off a terrible chain reaction. Now I’m worried that the political response is making the crisis worse. The Obama administration appears to have lost its grip on Congress, while the Treasury Department always seems caught off guard by bad news.
And Congress, with its howls of rage, its chaotic, episodic reaction to the crisis, and its shameless playing to the crowds, is out of control. This week, the body politic ran off the rails.
There are times when anger is cathartic. There are other times when anger makes a bad situation worse. “We need to stop committing economic arson,” Bert Ely, a banking consultant, said to me this week. That is what Congress committed: economic arson.
How is the political reaction to the crisis making it worse? Let us count the ways.
Mark Steyn calls it The Outrage Kabuki.
In between appearances on Jay Leno and his “March Madness” picks, Barack Oprompta also found time to compare AIG executives to suicide bombers:
I think it's more Chicago Razzle Dazzle, but the Canadian Financial Post asks Is this the end of America?
As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?
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One test of whether we are witnessing the end of America is how many more times Americans put up with congressional show trials of individual business people and their employees, slandering and vilifying them for their actions and motives. And for how long will they tolerate a President who berates business and corporations as dens of crime and malfeasance? If the majority of Americans come to accept the caricatures of business as true, then America is closer to the end of its life as a global leader, as a champion of markets and individualism.
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Reform of health care, environmental policy, education, energy, banking, regulation — every nook and cranny of the U.S. economy has been put on alert for major change. Expansion of government spending, plunging the U.S. into unprecedented deficits, is without parallel. In economic policy, through regulation and control of energy output, financial services and monetary expansion, the U.S. government has embarked on a fundamental reshaping of America. It is designed, in short, to bring on the end of America.
The spillover effect of all this on the rest of the world promises to be dramatically disruptive.
UPDATE Thank God, the protest was a bust - one busload and 20 media vans
Surprising comments and support of the Holy Father and the remarks he made on AIDS in Africa.
I would say that this problem of AIDS cannot be overcome with advertising slogans. If the soul is lacking, if Africans do not help one another, the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem. The solution can only come through a twofold commitment: firstly, the humanization of sexuality, in other words a spiritual and human renewal bringing a new way of behaving towards one another; and secondly, true friendship, above all with those who are suffering, a readiness — even through personal sacrifice — to be present with those who suffer. And these are the factors that help and bring visible progress.
Andrew Klavan responds in Score One for the Pope
I’m not a Catholic—and I’m pretty sure I’ll never become one—but I’ve read a fair amount of the writings of Pope Benedict XVI and it’s clear to me the man is a theological genius. I find it amazing that the Vatican could have followed a genuine hero like John Paul II with a mighty mind like Benedict’s. He is the Last European, the last man to truly understand the ideas that formed the foundation of Europe’s greatness. When he leaves, they may have to turn off the lights of the continent.
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But this latest flap about Benedict’s remarks on condoms and AIDS—this is absurd.
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First of all, the Pope is a religious leader not a doctor. His job is to give spiritual not medical advice and I don’t think any “expert” anywhere can deny that “a new way of behaving towards one another,” sexually would improve people’s lives and perhaps ultimately put an end to AIDS altogether.
But more than that, it really does seem that moral approaches to AIDS prevention work better than merely physical ones—that is to say, that condoms cannot do the job, “if the soul is lacking.”
He points out
if you carefully read the New York Times editorial attacking the Pope’s statement, you’ll find out that the Pope pretty much got it right. After first touting reports from the CDC and the Cochrane Collaboration on the effectiveness of condoms for individuals who use them “consistently and correctly,” the editors go on to confess that both groups acknowledge, “The best way to avoid transmission of the virus is to abstain from sexual intercourse or have a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with an uninfected person.”
From Harvard Square, Edward Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at Harvard.
“The pope is correct,” Green told National Review Online Wednesday, “or put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope’s comments. He stresses that “condoms have been proven to not be effective at the ‘level of population.’”
“There is,” Green adds, “a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction ‘technology’ such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by ‘compensating’ or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.”
Green added: “I also noticed that the pope said ‘monogamy’ was the best single answer to African AIDS, rather than ‘abstinence.’ The best and latest empirical evidence indeed shows that reduction in multiple and concurrent sexual partners is the most important single behavior change associated with reduction in HIV-infection rates (the other major factor is male circumcision).”
In its obsession with condoms, the Western public-health community has been every bit as dogmatic as the pope. And it has been even more blinkered to the realities of Africa, which is arguably in the grips of a huge religious and moral revival that has a huge potential to be wielded in the fight against AIDS. Church attendance is soaring, and Africans are willing to make sacrifices, of both their money and their pleasure, for moral causes. In this respect, it is not Benedict and the Catholic Church who are out of touch. It is the West and its condom myopia.
Peter Hitchens in The Daily Mail
*Conventional wisdom says the Pope is stupid and wrong to say fidelity and abstinence are better than condoms at guarding Africans from AIDS.
Conventional wisdom, as usual, is talking out of its backside. What the Pope says matters only if anyone listens to him. If nobody does, his opposition to condoms won’t stop anyone using them and will make no difference. If lots of people listen to him, his support for marital fidelity will persuade many people to follow this path, and so save untold lives.
The experience of such countries as Uganda suggests very strongly that he is right when he says this, and that fidelity is a far better protection than a rubber sheath. The only real hope is a change in sexual habits.
I am not a Roman Catholic, but I am weary of the concerted smearing and misrepresentation which the Pontiff constantly faces.
The number of U.S. Births Breaks Records - 4.3 million babies born. Sadly, about 40% (39.7%) were born out of wedlock.
That means 40% of those babies won't have a father bound to them by marriage to their mother.
By coincidence, today is the feast day of St. Joseph and the subject of the homily Pope Benedict XVI gave in Cameroon
St. Joseph, he said, "is not the biological father of Jesus, whose Father is God alone, and yet he lives his fatherhood fully and completely......"To be a father means above all to be at the service of life and growth."
That's what those 40% of newborns will lack - an adult male who will devote himself to their lives and growth.
More on the statistics
By racial/ethnic group: 27.8 percent for non-Hispanic whites (up from 26.6 percent in 2006);
a really appalling 71.6 percent for blacks (up from 70.7 percent);
65.2 percent for American Indians/Alaska Natives (up from 64.6 percent);
51.3 percent for Hispanics (up from 49.9 percent); and bringing up the rear,
Asians/Pacific Islanders at a paltry 16.9 percent (but still up from 16.5 percent).
What fathers bring to the table in the service of life and growth of their children. All quotes from Why Marriage Matters for Children which also has citations to all the studies referenced.
Protection against poverty
David Ellwood, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, notes:
"The vast majority of children who are raised entirely in a two-parent home will never be poor during childhood. By contrast, the vast majority of children who spend time in a single-parent home will experience poverty.
Reduced risk of criminal behavior
After studying murder and robbery rates in our nation’s cities, Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson observed, “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.” This is why neighbors should thank the married mothers on their block.
Reduced risk of substance abuse
Regardless of gender, age, family income, race or ethnicity, adolescents not living with a biological mother or father are 50 to 150% more likely to abuse and be dependent on substances and need illicit drug-abuse treatment compared to their peers living with both biological parents.
Reduced risk of sexual abuse
The journal Pediatrics reported in 2002 that, “Children residing in households with adults unrelated to them were 8 times more likely to die of maltreatment than children in households with 2 biological parents. Risk of maltreatment death was elevated for children residing with step, foster, or adoptive parents.”
Greater likelihood of educational attainment
Sara McLanahan of Princeton University finds that “regardless of which survey we looked at, children from one-parent families are about twice as likely to drop out of school as children from two-parent families.”
Children from biological two-parent families have, on average, test scores and grade-point averages that are higher, they miss fewer school days, and have greater expectations of attending college than children living with one parent. Additionally, of those from either type of family who do attend college, those from two-parent families are seven to 20 percent more likely to finish college.5
Children from divorced homes are 70 percent more likely than those living with biological parents to be expelled or suspended from school. Those living with never-married mothers are twice as likely to be expelled or suspended.
Greater physical health and mental well-being
The National Center for Health Statistics found that children living with their biological parents received professional help for behavior and psychological problems at half the rate of children not living with both biological parents.16 Other studies show the general health problems of children from broken homes is increased by 20 to 30 percent, even when adjusting for demographic variables.
Learning that 40% of newborns will not have these advantages is profoundly discouraging.
The Pope is in Africa, so naturally the talk turns to condoms.
"I would say the opposite. I think that the reality that is most effective, the most present and the strongest in the fight against AIDS, is precisely that of the Catholic Church, with its programs and its diversity. I think of the Sant'Egidio Community, which does so much visibly and invisibly in the fight against AIDS ... and of all the sisters at the service of the sick.
"I would say that one cannot overcome this problem of AIDS only with money -- which is important, but if there is no soul, no people who know how to use it, (money) doesn't help.
"One cannot overcome the problem with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem.
"The solution can only be a double one: first, a humanization of sexuality, that is, a spiritual human renewal that brings with it a new way of behaving with one another; second, a true friendship even and especially with those who suffer, and a willingness to make personal sacrifices and to be with the suffering. And these are factors that help and that result in real and visible progress.
"Therefore I would say this is our double strength -- to renew the human being from the inside, to give him spiritual human strength for proper behavior regarding one's own body and toward the other person, and the capacity to suffer with the suffering. ... I think this is the proper response and the church is doing this, and so it offers a great and important contribution. I thank all those who are doing this."
Let's look at the research done by Harvard professor Edward Green, senior research scientist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies in "Rethinking AIDS Prevention: Learning from Successes in Developing Countries" , a book reviewed by Douglas Sylva in Saving Life
There are, however, no condom "successes" in Africa. Something like 700 million condoms are shipped to the continent, year in and year out, courtesy of the U.N., the U.S., and the EU, yet infection rates remain stubbornly high. The UNICEF official approvingly cites Botswana's commitment to condoms — "Let us follow the decision of the government of Botswana" — but about 35 percent of that country's population is infected. That's the example the rest of the world should follow?
Whenever someone, usually an obscure African churchman, dares to raise such uncomfortable questions, the full might of the AIDS establishment comes down to smite him, and he is condemned as a religious zealot. Finally, though, there is a challenger to condom dominance who cannot be so easily dismissed. He is a distinguished public-health official, a paragon, in fact, of establishment credentials: Edward C. Green, senior research scientist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Green has had an epiphany of common sense and now has the courage to criticize the role of his colleagues as prophylactic missionaries to the Third World. In his important new book, Rethinking AIDS Prevention, he exposes the failure of the condom approach, and explains why AIDS experts cling to this failure.
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Obviously, such people have a personal interest in ensuring that the basic lesson of the AIDS epidemic — promiscuous sex cannot be made consequence-free — never gets learned. As our "polypartnering" devotee makes clear, "we should not use the HIV/AIDS crisis as an excuse to revert back" to the bad old days of monogamy. And thus enters the lowly condom; it allows proponents of the sexual revolution to trumpet as "safe" risky sexual behavior.
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Green makes the reasonable request that African public-health measures should be designed with the best interests of Africans in mind; most especially, that the schoolchildren of Africa should not be handed a box of condoms, and subjected to a program designed for the clients of New York's gay bathhouses, but encouraged instead to delay sexual activity.
Miss, Mrs, Madame and Mademoiselle, Frau and Fraulein, Senora and Senorita, all words banned by EU bureaucrats in Brussels who have decided such words are sexist because they refer to a woman's marital status.
And that's not all. No more sportsmen, statesmen, headmasters or headmistresses, policeman or policewoman.
Helpfully, the bureaucrats have issued a booklet with guidelines in 'gender-neutral' language sent out by the Secretary General of the EU Parliament.
I like the Scottish Tory MEP Struan Stevenson who described the guidelines as 'political correctness gone mad'.
He said: 'This is frankly ludicrous. We've seen the EU institutions try to ban the bagpipes and dictate the shape of bananas, but now they seem determined to tell us which words we are entitled to use in our own language.
'Gender-neutrality is really the last straw. The Thought Police are now on the rampage in the European Parliament.
'We will soon be told that the use of the words "man" or "woman" has been banned in case it causes offence to those who consider 'gender neutrality' an essential part of life.'
Saint Patrick in his own words in his confession
I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many, had for father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a priest, of the settlement [vicus] of Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age. I did not, indeed, know the true God; and I was taken into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people, according to our deserts, for quite drawn away from God, we did not keep his precepts, nor were we obedient to our priests who used to remind us of our salvation.
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I am greatly God's debtor, because he granted me so much grace, that through me many people would be reborn in God, and soon after confirmed, and that clergy would be ordained everywhere for them, the masses lately come to belief, whom the Lord drew from the ends of the earth, just as he once promised through his prophets: 'To you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Our fathers have inherited naught hut lies, worthless things in which there is no profit.' And again: 'I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles that you may bring salvation to the uttermost ends of' the earth.'
March 17, St. Patrick's Day is a legal holiday in Boston, Suffolk County, but not because of the Irish. It's Evacuation Day commemorating the day in 1776 when British forces under General Howe evacuated Boston driven out by General George Washington and his continental army.
The password that day?
"Saint Patrick"
Timothy Carney on the lobbying and profits of stem cell research
The Biotechnology Industry Organization, which represents drugmakers and for-profit laboratories, quickly endorsed Obama’s new policy. “We fully support and are enthusiastic about President Obama’s decision to allow the National Institutes of Health to fund embryonic stem cell research,” said BIO President and Chief Executive Officer Jim Greenwood.
Financial headlines around the world indicated Greenwood and BIO’s member companies had reason to celebrate: “Industry set for stem cell profits”; “Stem cell buzz may help industry”; “Shares of Stem Cells [Inc.] rally on Obama’s news.”
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Destroying human embryos to harvest stem cells has never been illegal in the United States, and many laboratories have been carrying out this sort of research for years, either with private money or with state taxpayer money. Obama’s decision gives these businesses — and any that now want to jump on the bandwagon — access to federal taxpayer money for their efforts to turn human embryos into profits.
Consider an analogy. What if President George W. Bush had announced he was lifting many restrictions on oil drilling on federal lands — on Alaska’s Northern Slope, in the Gulf of Mexico, in national parks and forests, and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts? He might have trumpeted this as “depoliticizing drilling” and “restoring geology to its rightful place.” Imagine the outrage of environmentalists — and the catcalls from Democrats charging it was a gift to the oil industry.
One important difference between this imaginary Bush story and the real Obama story: It’s nascent human beings, not virgin tundra, being trampled by Obama’s policy.
Another interesting contrast: BIO spent $7.7 million on lobbying last year, compared with $4.9 million spent by the American Petroleum Institute.
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But that’s just the tip of the lobbying iceberg. As of the end of last year, BIO was retaining 18 different outside lobbying firms, including some of the giants of K Street: Covington & Burling, Patton Boggs, Foley & Lardner, and Hogan & Hartson, to name a few.
Charles Krauthammer, Morally Unserious in the Extreme
Bush had restricted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to cells derived from embryos that had already been destroyed (as of his speech of Aug. 9, 2001). While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned -- and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived -- human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.
I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix
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George Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.
Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."
Are embryos potential human beings? In an interview with Sanjay Gupta on CNN former President Clinton is completely confused about the very nature of embryos, thinking they are not fertilized because if they were.....
video on YouTube transcript here
Clinton: I don't know that I have any reservations, but I was - he has apparently decided to leave to the relevant professional committees the definition of which frozen embryos are basically going to be discarded, because they're not going to be fertilized. I believe the American people believe it's a pro-life decision to use an embryo that's frozen and never going to be fertilized for embryonic stem cell research....
But those committees need to be really careful to make sure if they don't want a big
storm to be stirred up here, that any of the embryos that are used clearly have been placed beyond the pale of being fertilized before their use. There are a large number of embryos that we know are never going to be fertilized, where the people who are in control of them have made that clear. The research ought to be confined to those....
And that is the one thing that I think these committees need to make it clear that they're not going to fool with any embryos where there's any possibility, even if it's somewhat remote, that they could be fertilized and become human beings.
I wonder how many others share his confusion and don't understand that embryos have been fertilized and are in every respect human beings, very teeny tiny, alive with the potentiality of an eighty-year life span.
Susan Konig
At least one CNN stem-cell report, however, featured not a human but a a rat with a bum leg hobbling around his cage like - well, like Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy.
The CNN newsgal explained helpfully, "Look at this poor little rat, there's clearly something wrong with his legs." Then, to the reporter's "Now, look!" delight, the rat - treated with stem cells derived from human embryos - was running all over the place on strong, healthy rat legs.
So, we were watching a rat whose life had been dramatically improved, thanks to the sacrifice of . . . potential human babies. Wasn't this a Far Side cartoon?
Research shows that adult and umbilical-cord stem cells provide the materials needed for stem-cell research - embryonic stem cells are not needed to cure and treat diseases. So why is the pro-embryonic-research lobby so loath to admit this? Because if we say that destroying human embryos for scientific research is wrong and unnecessary, it's harder to say that abortion is fine.
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But with research that destroys embryos, there are no mothers - just embryos orphaned in the lab. And looming behind the stem-cell issue is cloning: The scientists can make more embryos when they run out.
Will we allow a whole industry of conceiving and harvesting human life, if it's for the greater good? And if it's OK to create and destroy human life for medical research, why limit abortion at all?
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There's the rub.
The Myth of Relativism and the Cult of Tolerance
The multiculturalist claims that we should not judge others because moral values are culturally relative; i.e., what is right in one society may be wrong in another.
The concept of right and wrong is, itself, parochial. The enlightened multiculturalist understands that his culture’s values are just as arbitrary as his neighbor’s. If pressed for an explanation for why he follows his culture’s mores, he will tell you he chooses to obey them as an obeisance to his tradition -- that and nothing else.
Notice how condescending this person’s attitude is -- not just to his own culture -- to every culture. Every intelligent and committed Christian, Hindu, Moslem, or Jew (Buddhist’s are a slightly different story) that follows the moral teaching of her religion, not only believes that her values are objectively valid, she can offer arguments, with varying degrees of cogency, for their validity. (Notice also that many of these values and arguments are the same from religion to religion. This fact should tell us something.)
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Of the major religions, Christianity is the most susceptible to this rendition of the siren song of tolerance because it prides itself on not judging others.
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The cult of tolerance is Christianity without the guilt, without the work; it is Christianity without the faith, the hope, and the love. The cult of tolerance is selfishness disguised as Christianity.
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Unlike traditional moral relativism where the strongman rules because “might makes right,” politically correct moral relativism claims to be democratic. In truth, it is far from it. Tolerance, in its politically correct guise, is the imposition of a standardless standard upon the masses.
Mark Steyn on The Brokest Generation
Our kids are the ultimate credit market, and the rest of us are all pre-approved!
the future of all our children is that they’ll be paying off the past of all their grandparents.
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This is the biggest generational transfer of wealth in the history of the world. If you’re an 18-year old middle-class hopeychanger, look at the way your parents and grandparents live: It’s not going to be like that for you. You’re going to have a smaller house, and a smaller car — if not a basement flat and a bus ticket. You didn’t get us into this catastrophe. But you’re going to be stuck with the tab, just like the Germans got stuck with paying reparations for the catastrophe of the First World War. True, the Germans were actually in the war, whereas in the current crisis you guys were just goofing around at school, dozing through Diversity Studies and hoping to ace Anger Management class. But tough. That’s the way it goes.
Charles Murray in the 2009 Irving Kristol Lecture says important things about The Happiness of the People about the nature of a well-lived life, why the European model stifles human flourishing and American exceptionalism.
And since happiness is a word that gets thrown around too casually, the phrase I'll use from now on is "deep satisfactions." I'm talking about the kinds of things that we look back upon when we reach old age and let us decide that we can be proud of who we have been and what we have done. Or not.
To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don't get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché "nothing worth having comes easily"). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.
There aren't many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements. Having been a good parent. That qualifies. A good marriage. That qualifies. Having been a good neighbor and good friend to those whose lives intersected with yours. That qualifies. And having been really good at something--good at something that drew the most from your abilities. That qualifies. Let me put it formally: If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith. Two clarifications: "Community" can embrace people who are scattered geographically. "Vocation" can include avocations or causes.
The stuff of life--the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one's personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships--coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness--occurs within those four institutions.
Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that's what's wrong with the European model. It doesn't do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.
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I'm not talking about all Europeans, by any means. That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.
If that's the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that's the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble--and, after all, what good are they, really? If that's the purpose of life, why spend it worrying about neighbors? If that's the purpose of life, what could possibly be the attraction of a religion that says otherwise?
Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well-lived requires engagement with those around us. That is reality, not idealism. It is appropriate to think that a political Great Awakening among the elites can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more fun to lead a textured life, and to be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives. Perhaps events will help us out here--remember what Irving Kristol has been saying for years: "There's nothing wrong with this country that couldn't be cured by a long, hard depression."
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The drift toward the European model can be slowed by piecemeal victories on specific items of legislation, but only slowed. It is going to be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional, and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it is: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.
When I read the composer Morten Lauridsen explain how a Zubaran painting, filled with religious imagery, inspired his piece Magnum Mysterium, I knew immediately that I wanted to blog about. But I diddled around and never got to it.
When Gerard Vanderluen posted "O Magnum Mysterium:" The Persistence of Sacred Beauty, I knew I never could do it as well as he.
In an arresting and rare explication and meditation on the origins of great art in our time, composer Morten Lauridsen writes of his own work and the work of a long dead master in It's a Still Life That Runs Deep. The essay reveals a bit, but just a bit, about how inspiration can leap from one medium to another in art and, by such a leap, gain even more power.
Lauridsen's exegesis also reveals how all great art tends to exist outside of time and to defy the "moral, spiritual and aesthetic relativism" that reduces most of our "attempts" at art to rubble. He does so by reminding us that great art, like God, exists outside of time.
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I've seen the painting by Zurbarán and I can attest to the fact of its strange power to arrest the pace and still the attention into contemplation. The underlying symbolism of the work was unknown to me until Lauridsen made it explicit, but I don't find it surprising. After many years of ignorant acceptance of one gruesome and ugly step downward in art after another that I witnessed when I wandered around in New York's overheated and overhyped art scene, I came to the reluctant conclusion that most contemporary art was garbage, that it had no soul, and that deep down... it was shallow.
In It's a Still Life That Runs Deep. Lauridsen contemplates the beauty of Francisco de Zubaran's "Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose.
The painting projects an aura of mystery, powerful in its unadorned simplicity, its mystical quality creating an atmosphere of deep contemplation. Its effect is immediate, transcendent and overpowering. Before it one tends to speak in hushed tones, if at all.
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For "O Magnum Mysterium," I wanted to create, as Zurbarán had in paint, a deeply felt religious statement, at once uncomplicated and unadorned yet powerful and transformative in its effect upon the listener.
Read the whole piece and listen to the beauty Lauridsen created, "a quiet song of profound inner joy."
Victor Davis Hanson in Accounting for California's suicide.
Critics disagree. Some cite expanding but inefficient state government, out-of-control state pensions and oppressive taxes. Or are the chief problems costly prisons and astronomical rates of incarceration, illegal immigration, unchecked welfare, and excessive regulation and environmental restrictions?
All these explanations may be valid. But less discussed is the underlying culprit: a weird sort of utopian mindset. Perhaps because have-it-all Californians live in such a rich natural landscape and inherited so much from their ancestors, they have convinced themselves that perpetual bounty is now their birthright — not something that can be lost in a generation of complacency.
I don't think there's a more entertaining - or illuminating - writer on financial topics than Michael Lewis.
Here he is on Wall Street on the Tundra in Vanity Fair.
Iceland's coalition government collapsed in January, fallout from the financial collapse
Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.
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Back away from the Icelandic economy and you can’t help but notice something really strange about it: the people have cultivated themselves to the point where they are unsuited for the work available to them. All these exquisitely schooled, sophisticated people, each and every one of whom feels special, are presented with two mainly horrible ways to earn a living: trawler fishing and aluminum smelting. There are, of course, a few jobs in Iceland that any refined, educated person might like to do. Certifying the nonexistence of elves, for instance. (“This will take at least six months—it can be very tricky.”) But not nearly so many as the place needs, given its talent for turning cod into Ph.D.’s. At the dawn of the 21st century, Icelanders were still waiting for some task more suited to their filigreed minds to turn up inside their economy so they might do it.
Enter investment banking.
David Plotz, an editor of Slate reads the Good Book
Should you read the Bible? You probably haven't. A century ago, most well-educated Americans knew the Bible deeply. Today, biblical illiteracy is practically universal among nonreligious people. My mother and my brother, professors of literature and the best-read people I've ever met, have not done much more than skim Genesis and Exodus. Even among the faithful, Bible reading is erratic. The Catholic Church, for example, includes only a teeny fraction of the Old Testament in its official readings. Jews study the first five books of the Bible pretty well but shortchange the rest of it. Orthodox Jews generally spend more time on the Talmud and other commentary than on the Bible itself. Of the major Jewish and Christian groups, only evangelical Protestants read the whole Bible obsessively.
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And something like that happened to me five, 10, 50 times a day when I was Bible-reading. You can't get through a chapter of the Bible, even in the most obscure book, without encountering a phrase, a name, a character, or an idea that has come down to us 3,000 years later. The Bible is the first source of everything from the smallest plot twists (the dummy David's wife places in the bed to fool assassins) to the most fundamental ideas about morality (the Levitical prohibition of homosexuality that still shapes our politics, for example) to our grandest notions of law and justice. It was a joyful shock to me when I opened the Book of Amos and read the words that crowned Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
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Not to sound like a theocratic crank, but I'm actually shocked that students aren't compelled to read huge chunks of the Bible in high school and college, the way they must read Shakespeare or the Constitution or Mark Twain.
Later in a forum, he explains why he read just the Old Testament
I was giving the Bible a very irreverent, very personal reading. As a Jew, I felt I could do that with my Bible, the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament, more or less). I did not feel I could do it with the New Testament, because I couldn't treat the life of Jesus fairly. I think that Christian readers would have a right to expect a New Testament reading from someone who belonged to the group, not from some outsider chucking spitballs. But maybe I should have kept going: My Christian friends tell me that reading the OT but not the NT is like leaving the play at intermission.
Since I just started reading the Bible about two years ago, I can relate to a lot to what Plotz says. I was spurred to join a Bible study group at my church to fill in what I felt was a huge hole in my education which loomed larger after reading what Camille Paglia said:
“The Bible is a masterpiece. The Bible is one of the greatest works produced in the world. The people who all they have is the Bible actually are set up for life. Not only do they have a spiritual vision given to them but artistic fulfillment,”
By studying the Bible in a group, I learned much more than I would have on my own. I can also recommend Peter Kreeft's book. A professor of philosophy at Boston College, he illuminates the historical and theological themes and offers insights in such clear language, that anyone can use his book as a useful guide.
Hey, bet you don't what a Gaussian copula function is.
It's a Recipe for Disaster and the Formula that Killed Wall Street
Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.
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Investors exploited it as a quick -and fatally flawed- way to assess risk.
David Li incidentally is a star mathematician who grew up in rural China in the 1960s. Ah, the irony.
No one knew all of this better than David X. Li: "Very few people understand the essence of the model," he told The Wall Street Journal way back in fall 2005.
"Li can't be blamed," says Gilkes of CreditSights. After all, he just invented the model. Instead, we should blame the bankers who misinterpreted it. And even then, the real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb, hedge fund manager and author of The Black Swan, is particularly harsh when it comes to the copula. "People got very excited about the Gaussian copula because of its mathematical elegance, but the thing never worked," he says. "Co-association between securities is not measurable using correlation," because past history can never prepare you for that one day when everything goes south. "Anything that relies on correlation is charlatanism."
A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.
In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.
In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue
I like this theory, but I haven't a clue how to pronounce the scientist's name "Hrdy".
The next article in the Science section of the New York Times is more baffling. Commercials make TV shows more enjoyable.
“The punch line is that commercials make TV programs more enjoyable to watch. Even bad commercials,” said Leif Nelson, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the new research. “When I tell people this, they just kind of stare at me, in disbelief. The findings are simultaneously implausible and empirically coherent.”
That approaching wave of pension debt is bigger than it looks.
The purpose of this site is to provide an overview of the multiple pension crises that are about to drown America's taxpayers.
From the blog, The column that sparked this website: "Land a State Job and Become an Instant Millionaire"
California state government employees have an employer who regularly and by law provides a $40-50,000 contribution to each employee’s pension account — year in and year out — good budget times and bad. (And in bad years they borrow the money!)
The California state government provides a “defined benefit” pension plan to each of its employees. Such “defined benefit” pension plans are far more generous than any 401(k) or defined contribution pension plan available from any other employer in the state! In fact, the plan is so generous that it makes the average state employee a millionaire after only 22 years of work!
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It would require putting $56,889 ($1,251,562/22 years = $56,889) into your 401(k)/IRA or other retirement account every single year during those 22 years! When you work for the state, the state does this for you!
Is the state’s pension plan overly generous? The Sacramento Bee and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have been whining about it lately — are they jealous? The state’s own Legislative Analyst has determined that California’s pension plan provides nearly twice the benefit of the next highest state.
No wonder California is in so much trouble and going bankrupt. California, the wave of the future.
Richard Wrangham of Harvard University where he is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology believes it is.
Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.
In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals.
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Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It “denatures” protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.
Why do People Cook?
Quantum mechanics tells us that, rather than fade into nothingness, the world becomes more and more energetic as we look at ever-smaller parts of it. If we peer at a tiny region of space we see that it is not empty but boiling with particles that pop randomly into and out of existence for tiny parts of a second. This description of reality is certainly puzzling, but we can take comfort that even that great American physicist Richard Feynman, who said that no one really understands quantum physics.
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If our current scientific description of the universe is reduced to a single statement, it is that the universe is a patch of light that evolved.
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Science insists on our commonality. DNA analysis shows us that everyone alive today shares a mother who lived in Africa some 150,000 years ago. Our DNA also shows us that we are descended not just from apes but from slime, a story that takes our descent back some 3 billion years. But the story does not stop there. We are, as poets often remind us, made of star dust. In turn, the stars themselves are clouds of hydrogen gas that condensed and ignited. And even further back in time, before there was any hydrogen gas, the universe was once - for the merest moment in time after the Big Bang - a curious landscape in which there was a field of energy made out of Higgs bosons.
The story of science as we understand it today can now trace our descent - and the descent of all things - back to the origins of the universe. Surely that makes science the greatest story ever told. In a world filled with divisiveness of all kinds, how wonderful to be reminded that we are all in this together.
Christopher Potter on the 'God Particle' - or how Scientists are on the verge of unlocking how the universe was formed
Somehow I think whatever they find will be amazing yet will open up still more questions to answer.
At least one neuroscientist warns that social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users, shortening attention spans, encouraging instant gratification and making young people more self-centered.
Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, believes repeated exposure could effectively 'rewire' the brain.
'My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.'
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'I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf,' she said.
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A study by the Broadcaster Audience Research Board found teenagers now spend seven-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen.
I think it's not just a phenomenon for younger people. Many are wondering whether Google is Making Us Stupid.
what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
If you haven't read Digital Overload is Frying Our Brains, it's probably because you been distracted no doubt due to digital overload.
Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, interviewed.
Our society right now is filled with lovely distractions — we have so much portable escapism and mediated fantasy — but that's just one issue. The other is interruption — multitasking, the fragmentation of thought and time. We're living in highly interrupted ways. Studies show that information workers now switch tasks an average of every three minutes throughout the day. Of course that's what we have to do to live in this complicated world.
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This degree of interruption is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity. That makes sense. When you're scattered and diffuse, you're less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it's hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking.
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Interruptions are correlated with stress, and a cascade of stress hormones accompany that state of being. Stress, frustration and lowered creativity are pretty toxic. And there are studies showing how the environment shapes brain development in kids.
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Dark ages are times of forgetting, when the advancements of the past are underutilized. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we'll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering.
"Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age" (Maggie Jackson)
Something’s amiss when a girl in kindergarten, all of 40 pounds, is led away in handcuffs by police.
Philip Howard on the legal shackles that keep us from doing what's right and what makes common sense.
The totality of stupid rules and lawsuits does not come close, however, to describing the effects of the modern legal order. It has changed our society. In this new legalistic culture, people no longer look inside themselves to do what’s right. Instead they focus on possible legal implications. What if something happens? How will you justify your decision?
Defensiveness has swept over the culture like a giant wave, drenching daily choices in cold water. Doctors routinely order tests and procedures that they don’t believe are needed—squandering so many billions of dollars, according to some estimates, that the waste could provide health insurance to the 47 million Americans who are uninsured. Hardly any disagreement in the workplace is far from the threat of a possible discrimination claim. Teachers and principals spend their days filling out forms and “making the record clear,” just to show they’ve been attentive to legal concerns. Authority has been turned upside down. A 2004 survey by Public Agenda found that 78 percent of middle- and high-school teachers in America have been threatened with lawsuits or accused of violations of rights by their students.
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We have it backward. The legal shackles that frustrate teachers, doctors, and managers in daily dealings are not the inevitable price of a working social order. Modern law is a main cause of the decline of our social order. Schools and hospitals are failing in part because the people within them no longer feel free to make decisions to make them work.
America indeed is in a crisis—a crisis of individual freedom. We have lost the idea, at every level of public life, that people can grab hold of a problem and fix it. We have become a culture of rule followers, driven to frame every solution in terms of existing law or possible legal risk. Gradually, without noticing when it happened, we’ve lost our ability to make the choices needed to run a society.
Are we really on the verge of losing millions of books published before 1985?
Walter Olson on The New Book Banning
It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.
The problem is the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA), passed by Congress last summer after the panic over lead paint on toys from China. Among its other provisions, CPSIA imposed tough new limits on lead in any products intended for use by children aged 12 or under, and made those limits retroactive: that is, goods manufactured before the law passed cannot be sold on the used market (even in garage sales or on eBay) if they don’t conform.
Why is Congress doing nothing about this?
The American Library Association spent months warning about the law’s implications, but its concerns fell on deaf ears in Congress (which, in this week’s stimulus bill, refused to consider an amendment by Republican senator Jim DeMint to reform CPSIA)
The cost for a library to comply is prohibitive. One librarian estimated that 75% of the books in her children's library are pre 1985. The cost of testing each of them would be more that the entire city budget.
Ace asks Who needs free books or cheap clothes in this economy anyway, right? Or retail jobs, or charity?
Walter Olson at Overlawyered quotes the associate executive director of the American Library Association, ”Either they take all the children’s books off the shelves,” she said, “or they ban children from the library.”
As well as the president and publisher of Random House Children's Books, Chip , “This is a potential calamity like nothing I’ve ever seen. The implications are quite literally unimaginable. …It has to be stopped.”
Ace sums it up.
So, to recap: Henry Waxman and his accomplices (including, we should note, many Republicans,) have managed to pass a bill which, inter alia,
1) requires the destruction or other removal of huge supplies of secondhand clothes, in winter,
2) may or may not preclude libraries from lending huge chunks of their childrens’ collections,
3) effectively removes as-yet-uncalculated amounts of inventory from salability from small- and medium-size businesses, without compensation.
Every one of these stickies attached to a building in Guatemala is inscribed "Te amo Christina".
This photograph won honorable mention in the National Geographic International Photo Contest
From a passalong I saved just for today, what love means to children, aged 4-8.
"When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love."
Rebecca - age 8
When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth."
Billy - age 4
"Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other. "
Karl - age 5
"Love is what makes you smile when you're tired."
Terri - age 4
"Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My Mommy and Daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss"
Emily -age 8
"Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen,"
Bobby - age 7
"If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate,"
Nikka - age 6
"My mommy loves me more than anybody. You don't see anyone else kissing me to sleep at night." Clare - age 6
"Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day."
Mary Ann - age 4
"I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones."
Lauren - age 4
"When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you."
Karen - age 7
"You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget,"
Jessica - age 8
A four-volume Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization seems to be 'Too Christian' for Academia?
Wiley-Blackwell, a major academic press, was set to release its four-volume Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization this month. According to the encyclopedia’s editor, George Thomas Kurian, the set had been copy-edited, fact-checked, proofread, publisher-approved, printed, bound, and formally launched (to high praise) at the recent American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature conference. But protests from a small group of scholars associated with the project have led the press to postpone publication, recall all copies already distributed, and destroy the existing print run. The scholars’ complaint? The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, they have reportedly argued, is “too Christian.” “They also object to historical references to the persecution and massacres of Christians by Muslims,” Kurian says, “but at the same time want references favorable to Islam.”
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Political correctness in academic publishing is nothing new, but it would be unusual, to say the least, for ideological pressure to lead a publisher to reverse itself so late in the process, especially given the significant financial losses involved in pulping a print run of a gigantic four-volume encyclopedia. As Kurian puts it, “This is probably the first instance of mass book-burning in the 21st century.”
Is it any surprise that a "Me-first" attitude fails children?
Children's lives are being blighted by Britain's selfish society, a landmark report concludes.
The Good Childhood Inquiry claims that almost all of the problems now facing young people stem from the culture of "excessive individualism" that has developed in recent decades.
It says the "me-first" attitude of adults is causing family breakdowns, competition in education, a growing gap between rich and poor, unkindness among teenagers and premature sexualisation by advertisers.
The pioneering two-year investigation, backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and based on interviews with 35,000 children, parents and professionals, claims British children are less happy than those in almost any other developed country.
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The study blames these problems squarely on the growth of a struggle for personal status and success, which it says has filled the vacuum created by the decline of religious belief and community spirit.
Rep Kanjorski: $550 Billion Disappeared in "Electronic Run on the Banks"
It was about September 15th [sic]. … On Thursday at about 11 o’clock in the morning the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of, uh, money market accounts in the United States to the tune of $550-billion was being drawn out in in a matter of an hour or two.
The Treasury opened up its window to help, and pumped in $105-billion into the system, and quickly realized it could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close down the operation, to close down the money accounts. … If they had not done that, in their estimation, by 2 PM that afternoon $5.5-trillion would have been withdrawn and would have collapsed the U.S. economy and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.
We talked at that time about what would have happened. It would have been the end of our economic and our political system as we know it.
So that's what former Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernake told the Congress behind closed doors, scaring the bejezzus out of them and shocking them into supporting the first $700 billion to bail out the banks.
More at Capitalism Gone Wild
A young woman put on a black abaya to go to a small town in Alabama, named of all things, Arab, Arab, Alabama, to see how people would react.
"I expected people to say, 'What is this terrorist doing here? We don't want your kind here,' " said Woldt, a 22-year-old blue-eyed Catholic, recalling her anticipation before stepping into a local barbecue joint. "I thought I wouldn't even be served."
Instead, Woldt's experiment in social anthropology opened her own eyes. Apart from the initial glances reserved for any outsider who might venture through a small-town restaurant's doors, her experience was a pleasant one.
On her way to the bathroom, Woldt said, "One woman's jaw dropped, but then she smiled at me. ... That little smile just makes you feel so much better."
This unexpected experience has just been one of Woldt's takeaway moments on her current journey. She is one in a team of five mostly 20-something Americans, led by an esteemed Muslim scholar, who are crisscrossing the nation on an anthropological mission. Their purpose: to discuss American identity, Muslim identity, and find out how well this country upholds its ideals in a post-September 11 world.
Muslim in America: a 'voyage of discovery'
Another report on the project
Despite Ahmed's unqualified conclusion that Americans stereotype Muslims -- he and his team have encountered almost unqualified graciousness -- particularly as they toured the South.
Now, I can understand, much as I don't like it, bailing out the banks because without a functioning financial system, the economy breaks down.
What I don't understand is the pressure to pass the stimulus bill, in truth a spending bill. This recession is nowhere near as bad as the recession in 1981-1982 or 1973-1975 as this graph from JMF shows
Viking pundit via Maggie's Farm says
Including debt service, the cost of the Generational Theft Act is estimated at $1.175 trillion, all of which will be borrowed to be paid by America's children.
Think of it this way: we're going to borrow and spend almost one Russia, or one India. We could buy South Korea or Mexico. We could have our own continent by purchasing Australia and all their handsome actors and actresses. We could have Belgium, Sweden, and still have some pocket change left over for Greece. We could have five Hong Kongs.
Personally, I'd much rather buy Australia.
Harvard economist Robert Barro, says in the Atlantic
This is probably the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s. I don't know what to say. I mean it's wasting a tremendous amount of money. It has some simplistic theory that I don't think will work, so I don't think the expenditure stuff is going to have the intended effect. I don't think it will expand the economy. And the tax cutting isn't really geared toward incentives. It's not really geared to lowering tax rates; it's more along the lines of throwing money at people. On both sides I think it's garbage. So in terms of balance between the two it doesn't really matter that much.
"The financial system created a fog so thick that even its captains could not navigate it."
In Our Epistemological Depression, Jerry Muller argues that major recessions are characterized by something novel.
This crisis was not created by something that gets reflected in the financial system, but a crisis caused within the financial system itself.
The most important bubble of the last decade or so was not of the housing sector, but of the financial sector, a bubble reflected by the 20 percent of S & P 500 profits that were made in the financial sector.
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a large role was played by the failure of the private and corporate actors to understand what they were doing. Most heads of ailing or deceased financial institutions did not comprehend the degree of risk and exposure entailed by the dealings of their underlings—and many investors, including municipalities and pension funds, bought financial instruments without understanding the risks involved.
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Diversification and complexity, which are both supposed to reduce risk, turned out to have unintended and unanticipated negative consequences. The purported virtues mutated into vices.
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Without financial institutions that people have faith in, a fiscal stimulus is unlikely to have much of a multiplier effect.
Straight from central casting comes Harry Markopolus says Dana Milbank in the Washington Post
geeky, with too-big glasses and a prominent comb-over. When he spoke, it was in the vocabulary of a man who had watched a lot of detective movies.
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a next-generation Dirty Harry -- a derivatives industry vigilante, part Lt. Columbo, part Adrian Monk, with a dash of "Dragnet" and "Lethal Weapon" sprinkled throughout his testimony.
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Markopolos recounted how he figured out Madoff was a fraud ("It took me about five minutes") and how he proved it ("I did about four hours of modeling").
The lawmakers were impressed. "I would like to just say for the record that I see you as a modern-day Greek hero," said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.).
Markopolos had a knack for blunt and colorful language befitting an action hero. He recommended that the SEC hire industry veterans who "have gray hair or no hair." He looked up at the panel's chairman, Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.), who is gray and mostly bald. "You'd be perfect," Markopolos said.
He used detective-movie phrases, such as "There is no light and only darkness." Wall Street, he said, has a "code of silence," and Madoff now is held "under penthouse arrest."
The sleuth's choicest words were reserved for the SEC, which he assaulted with a vengeance once directed at Madoff. "I gift-wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them, and somehow they couldn't be bothered," he complained.
There was so much animus against Sarah Palin by so many, including many friends, that I could never understand. Yuval Levin manages to explain some of it in The Meaning of Sarah Palin.
Indeed, the overheated response to Palin’s presence on the national stage, from both friend and foe, was oddly disconnected from Palin’s actual actions, statements, and record. It was a turn of events no one could have anticipated, and one that has much to teach us about American political life in our day.
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Palin was assigned every view and position the Left considered unenlightened, and the response to her brought into the light all manner of implicit liberal assumptions about cultural conservatives. We were told that Palin was opposed to contraception, advocated teaching creationism in schools, and was inclined to ban books she disagreed with. She was described as a religious zealot, an anti-abortion extremist, a blind champion of abstinence-only sex education. She was said to have sought to make rape victims pay for their own medical exams, to have Alaska secede from the Union, and to get Pat Buchanan elected President. She was reported to believe that the Iraq war was mandated by God, that the end-times prophesied in the Book of Revelation were nearing and only Alaska would survive, and that global warming was purely a myth. None of this was true.
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To be sure, some criticisms of Palin were entirely appropriate. She had no experience in foreign or defense policy and very little expertise in or command of either.
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The reaction to Palin revealed a deep and intense cultural paranoia on the Left: an inclination to see retrograde reaction around every corner, and to respond to it with vile anger. A confident, happy, and politically effective woman who was also a social conservative was evidently too much to bear. The response of liberal feminists was in this respect particularly telling, and especially unpleasant.
“Her greatest hypocrisy is her pretense that she is a woman,” wrote Wendy Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago.
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Applied to politics, the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.
Sarah Palin embodied a very different notion of politics, in which sound instincts and valuable life experiences are considered sources of knowledge at least the equal of book learning. She is the product of an America in which explicit displays of pride in intellect are considered unseemly, and where physical prowess and moral constancy are given a higher place than intellectual achievement. She was in the habit of stressing these faculties instead—a habit that struck many in Washington as brutishness.
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This is why Palin was seen as anti-intellectual when, properly speaking, she was simply non-intellectual. What she lacked was not intelligence—she is, clearly, highly intelligent—but rather the particular set of assumptions, references, and attitudes inculcated by America’s top twenty universities and transmitted by the nation’s elite cultural organs.
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The reaction of the intellectual elite to Sarah Palin was far more provincial than Palin herself ever has been, and those who reacted so viscerally against her evinced little or no appreciation for an essential premise of democracy: that practical wisdom matters at least as much as formal education, and that leadership can emerge from utterly unexpected places. The presumption that the only road to power passes through the Ivy League and its tributaries is neither democratic nor sensible, and is, moreover, a sharp and wrongheaded break from the American tradition of citizen governance.
That how's you tell a person's class?
The wealthy fidget, yawn and generally appear rude, say researchers.
Researchers said those born into privilege may feel less of a need to make a good impression and so are more inclined to fidget when talking to other people.
In contrast, their poorer counterparts are anxious to make a good impression and so are more attentive.
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, in the U.S. studied videotapes of 50 conversations between pairs of strangers.
Those from wealthy backgrounds appeared more distracted, playing with their hair, removing flecks of dust from their clothing, fidgeting and doodling.
However, those who were less well off made more of an effort to engage in conversation with the other person, they found.
The study also revealed that when other people were shown clips of the tapes, they were able accurately to guess the person's socioeconomic status based on their body language alone.
The article continues
Previous research has shown that those who fidget are less likely to become fat because they are getting valuable exercise without being aware of it.
proving the needlepoint saying You can never be too thin or too rich or apparently too rude.
The effects of the world wide financial crisis are revealing deep strains on peaceful civil society. I am afraid this is just the beginning.
Muslim population 'rising 10 times faster than the rest of society'
The Muslim population in Britain has grown by more than 500,000 to 2.4 million in just four years, according to official research collated for The Times.
The population multiplied 10 times faster than the rest of society, the research by the Office for National Statistics reveals. In the same period the number of Christians in the country fell by more than 2 million.
David Coleman, Professor of Demography at Oxford University, said: “The implications are very substantial. Some of the Muslim population, by no means all of them, are the least socially and economically integrated of any in the United Kingdom ... and the one most associated with political dissatisfaction.
You can feel the testosterone and more in the air as Muslim youths, 'peace' protestors, shouting Allah Akbar chase London policemen down the street.
Video at Harry's place.
It's hard to make any sense of this - Nurse suspended for offering to pray for patient's recovery.
At last week's hour-long meeting, Mrs Petrie says she was told the patient had said she was not offended by the prayer offer but the woman argued that someone else might have been.
In too many places, the right not to be offended has trumped both freedoms of religion and speech. What results is 'thought police'.
Nat Hentoff points out what little notice was paid to the U.N. Resolution on December 18, 2008.
In an 83 to 53 vote, with 42 abstentions, the U.N. General Assembly urged nations to provide "adequate protections" in their laws or constitutions against "acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general."
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Only Islam and Muslims are specifically named in this resolution against religious defamation, sponsored by Uganda on behalf of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, and cosponsored by Belarus and Venezuela. Opponents included the United States, a majority of European countries, Japan and India.
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Floyd Abrams, the nation's leading protector of the First Amendment in the Supreme Court and in his writings. In his Dec. 9 lecture on global communications, issues at the United Nations itself in New York, he cited a recent study by the European Center for Law and Justice finding "that laws based on the concept of 'defamation of religion' actually help to create a climate of violence."
"Violators of these laws, as applied in most Muslim countries, are subject to the death penalty,
Last week we learned about the two grandparents who had cared for their 5-year-old grandson and 3-year-old granddaughter almost since birth because their mother was a drug addict were considered by social services 'too old' at 59 and 46 to care for them adequately. The children were removed and placed in foster care in preparation for adoption by a gay couple over the objections of their mother who wants their grandparents to raise them.
They were stripped of their carer's rights and informed they would be barred from seeing the children altogether unless they agreed to the same-sex adoption.
The distraught grandfather said: "It breaks my heart to think that our grandchildren are being forced to grow up in an environment without a mother-figure.
"We are not prejudiced, but I defy anyone to explain to us how this can be in their best interests. The ideal for any child is to have a loving father and a loving mother in their lives."
Peter Hitchens writes about how bad it is.
If I never again had to read or write a word about homosexuals, I would be very happy. I really don't want to know what other people do in their bedrooms. But these days they really, really want us all to know. And, more important, they insist that we approve. No longer are we allowed to keep our thoughts to ourselves, while being polite and kind.
We are forced to say that we think homosexuality is a good thing, that homosexual couples are equal in all ways to heterosexual married couples. Most emphatically, we are compelled to agree that homosexual couples are just as good at bringing up children as the children's own grandparents. Better, in fact.
Many people who believe nothing of the kind now know that their careers in politics, the media, the Armed Services, the police or schools will be ruined if they ever let their true opinions show. I am sure that many of them regularly lie about their views, to avoid such trouble.
We cringe to the new Thought Police, like the subjects of some insane, sex-obsessed Stalinist state, compelled to wave our little rainbow flags as the 'Gay Pride' parade passes by.
I don't know about you, but I'm getting awfully nervous about all these bailouts and stimulus plans.
Cary Doctorow at Boing Boing says the Bailout costs more than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the moonshot, S&L bailout, Korean War, New Deal, Vietnam war and NASA's lifetime budget COMBINED.
There seems to be no shame I just wonder how Merrill Lynch paid out $15 billion in bonuses after it took $10 billion from TARP. John Carney calls it Wall Street's Sick Psychology of Entitlement.
Even the sharpest critics of the bailout never imagined that it would be used to make wealthy idiots even wealthier.
It seems to have embarrassed Bank of America sufficiently that they have shown the door to former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain.
Mr. Thain resigned from Bank of America on Thursday following news that Merrill Lynch had rushed out its year-end bonuses, paying them just before Bank of America completed its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and sought $20 billion in additional government bailout money.
Nick Gillespie says
taxpayers now guarantee some $8 trillion in inscrutable loans to a financial sector that collapsed from inscrutable loans.
Political interference seen in bank bailout decisions
"It's totally arbitrary," says South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. "If you've got the right lobbyist and the right representative connected to Washington or the right ties to Washington, you get the golden tap on the shoulder," says Gov. Sanford, a Republican.
Instapundit hit a bullseye when he wrote
This is not so much a stimulus, as a massive transfer of wealth from the politically unconnected to the politically connected.
It's a good thing that the majority of boomers plan on working in retirement, because more and more will have no other choice,
I want some TARP, they're giving money away for free
After reading Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 years by the senior economics editor of the Wall St Journal, the book seems prescient.
For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.
A few weeks ago I started a post entitled "What are we afraid of". I didn't publish it because it was all too depressing, so instead I just focused on just how big is a trillion. But I want to include some quotes by the Anchoress
I wonder if we are finally moving past the adolescent angst, and the numbness, and ... simply waking up to the fact that a bunch of loud, exploitative so-called “friends” crashed the house, called it a party, drank all the liquor, cracked Mom’s prize crystal egg and then decided to have a tug-of-war donnybrook on the front lawn before toilet papering the trees, puking and passing out. The press? Some “friends.” Congress? Some “statesmen.”
Hungover, we’re stumbling around, and realizing that if we do not start demanding adult behavior, adult leadership, less spin and a little honesty, not only from our leadership and our “elites” but from each other, we’re not going to be around to demand much of anything, of anyone.
She in turn quotes Peggy Noonan
In terms of public support, Mr. Obama shouldn't get too abstract. He should be thinking hardhats. People want to make their country stronger—literally, concretely, because the things they fear (terrorism, global collapse) are so huge and amorphous. Lately I think the biggest thing Americans fear, deep down—the thing they'd say if you could put the whole nation on the couch and say, "Just free associate, tell me what you fear?"—is, "I am afraid we will run out of food. And none of us have gardens, and we haven't taught our children how to grow things. Everything is bought in a store. What if the store closes? What if the choke points through which the great trucks travel from farmland to city get cut off? I have two months of canned goods. I'm afraid."
But it was this anecdote that Peggy Noonan told in 2005 that really got me.
Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread? A few weeks ago I was reading Christopher Lawford's lovely, candid and affectionate remembrance of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular family, the Kennedys, circa roughly 1950-2000. It's called "Symptoms of Withdrawal." At the end he quotes his Uncle Teddy. Christopher, Ted Kennedy and a few family members had gathered one night and were having a drink in Mr. Lawford's mother's apartment in Manhattan. Teddy was expansive. If he hadn't gone into politics he would have been an opera singer, he told them, and visited small Italian villages and had pasta every day for lunch. "Singing at la Scala in front of three thousand people throwing flowers at you. Then going out for dinner and having more pasta." Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy "took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. 'I'm glad I'm not going to be around when you guys are my age.' I asked him why, and he said, 'Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.' "
Mr. Lawford continued, "The statement hung there, suspended in the realm of 'maybe we shouldn't go there.' Nobody wanted to touch it. After a few moments of heavy silence, my uncle moved on."
Lawford thought his uncle might be referring to their family--that it might "fall apart." But reading, one gets the strong impression Teddy Kennedy was not talking about his family but about . . . the whole ball of wax, the impossible nature of everything, the realities so daunting it seems the very system is off the tracks.
And--forgive me--I thought: If even Teddy knows . ..
Atlas shrugged.
A marvelous essay by Christine Rosen, People of the Screen in which she describes two different classes, people of the screen and people of the book.
As he tried to train himself to screen-read—and mastering such reading does require new skills—Bell made an important observation, one often overlooked in the debate over digital texts: the computer screen was not intended to replace the book. Screen reading allows you to read in a “strategic, targeted manner,” searching for particular pieces of information, he notes. And although this style of reading is admittedly empowering, Bell cautions, “You are the master, not some dead author. And that is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master”; you should be the student. “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns,” he observes.
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The reason you can’t “screw up” a Dostoevsky novel is that you must first submit yourself to the process of reading it—which means accepting, at some level, the author’s authority to tell you the story. You enter the author’s world on his terms, and in so doing get away from yourself. Yes, you are powerless to change the narrative or the characters, but you become more open to the experiences of others and, importantly, open to the notion that you are not always in control. In the process, you might even become more attuned to the complexities of family life, the vicissitudes of social institutions, and the lasting truths of human nature. The screen, by contrast, tends in the opposite direction. Instead of a reader, you become a user; instead of submitting to an author, you become the master. The screen promotes invulnerability. Whatever setbacks occur (as in a video game) are temporary, fixable, and ultimately overcome. We expect to master the game and move on to the next challenge. This is a lesson in trial and error, and often an entertaining one at that, but it is not a lesson in richer human understanding.
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Such is the end of the tragedy we are now witness to: Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.
The Skeptical Doctor , an entire blog dedicated to the writings of Theodore Dalrymple, yields this gems from just the past month.
Dalrymple is the pen name for Dr. Anthony Daniels who was a prison doctor and psychiatrist for many years before retiring to France.
On the meaning of his pen name, Daniels said he "chose a name hat sounded suitably dyspeptic, that of a gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world."
When Good is Bad
Nowadays, when you ask people how they are, they are as likely to tell you that they are good as that they are well. It is as if you were inquiring after their moral rather than their bodily condition.
Of course, the two have seldom been more closely linked, health, diet and safety having replaced faith, hope and charity as the desiderata of the virtuous life.
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There is an asymmetry in our moral assessment of ourselves: goodness comes from within, badness from without. People, as a general rule, don't ask for an explanation of their good behaviour: only their bad is mysterious to them. In many years of medical practice, no one has ever asked me, "Do you think it could be my childhood that makes me so nice, doctor?"
Destructive Delusions
One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of "recovered memory" of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims. The whole episode would have been funny had it not been so tragic.
And this dissection of the difference between conservatives and liberals, Pot, Meet Kettle.
Modern conservatives tend to see the locus of appropriate moral concern more in personal behavior than in social structure (I am not here concerned with whether they are right or wrong). They believe in personal responsibility rather than causation by abstract social forces. They do not believe in entitlement, their own or anyone else’s, or in an indefinite extension of rights. They do not believe in perfection, and they think that even improvement usually comes at a cost.
Modern liberals, by contrast, tend to focus their moral concern more distantly from themselves, on the more abstract political and economic sphere. For example, the personal sexual code does not concern or worry them much unless it is restrictive. They believe that bad behavior finds its origin in social forces rather than in man’s soul. They believe in everyone’s entitlements, which are never met quite sufficiently and need to be extended endlessly. For them, the perfect society will result in perfect people.
Polite, considerate, self-controlled, law-abiding, tolerant of all eccentricities, humble and modest are adjectives once used to describe the British not that long ago.
Today, the British are often described as loutish, violent, drunken, sluttish, boastful and brutish.
the young British find themselves hated, feared, and despised throughout Europe, wherever they gather to have what they call “a good time.” They turn entire Greek, Spanish, and Turkish resorts into B-movie Sodoms and Gomorrahs. They cover sidewalks with vomit, rape one another, and indulge in casual drunken violence
Indictable crime has increased 900% since 1950
What happened to the British character?
Theodore Dalrymple explains from the inside what happened to The Quivering Upper Lip.
When my mother arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she found the people admirable, though not without the defects that corresponded to their virtues. By the time she died, two-thirds of a century later, she found them rude, dishonest, and charmless.
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Lack of self-control is just as character-forming as self-control: but it forms a different, and much worse and shallower, character. Further, once self-control becomes neither second nature nor a desired goal, but rather a vice to avoid at all costs, there is no plumbing the depths to which people will sink.
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Two things are worth noting about this shift in national character: it is not the first such shift in British history; and the change is not entirely spontaneous or the result of impersonal social forces.
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The moralization of the British in the first third of the nineteenth century—their transformation from a people lacking self-control into exemplars of restraint—was the product of intellectual and legislative activity. So, too, was the reverse movement.
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Habits become character. Perhaps they shouldn’t, but they do.
It's an essay with horrifying details and not to be missed.
Money is based on trust says Niall Ferguson Confidence in the free market and capitalist institutions is based on trust.
What is money after all but a promise to pay?
Without a foundation in society based on religion or religiously-based ethics, there's no reason to believe that such promises will be kept.
We're in such a mess because Congressmen and bankers abused our trust to satisfy their political agendas or their greed.
Investors' Business Daily takes note of the Pope's remarks to say
What he really said was not clairvoyant, but self-evident: Economic freedom demands ethics.
Of course, we are not without fault as Ed Morrissey writes in Has America learned a lesson about consumption?
the period between the last recession and now has been marked by the unique phenomenon of assets-based consumption. We need a return to income-based consumption, and the transition is going to sting:
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The entire precipice was built on sand, and it’s now turning into quicksand. For some, the lesson will come too late. For the rest of us, it’s a lesson we need to learn for good. Many of us have heard the advice our parents and grandparents learned in hard economic times: Don’t spend beyond your means. Many in the previous couple of generations had a well-deserved skepticism about credit, and they’ve been proven right yet again.
Niall Ferguson was prescient when he started his book to explain the current economic crisis in the span of 4000 years of financial history. (Hat tip to Cat at Brits at their Best.) He saw the liquidity crisis coming.
"The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World" (Niall Ferguson)
Here is Ferguson, Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, speaking with Harry Kriesler at the University of California, Berkely on his new book.
It's wonderful to be able to hear and learn so much on the internet. The good news is that U.S. has a better chance of riding out the crisis than other countries because people around the world believe that the correct response is to put their cash into dollars
A remarkable essay by R.R. Reno, We Need Roots.
Life is better—richer, deeper, thicker—for our loyalties and loves.
I share this Chestertonian sensibility, which is why the new music from the English folk band, Show of Hands, gives me goose bumps.
“Redbrick cottage where I was born / Is the empty shell of a holiday home. / Most of year there’s no one there. / The village is dead and they don’t care.”
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“Country Life” is not a polemic against free markets or Thatcherism. It thrusts against the left as well. “No one marched to subsidize and save the country way of life,” they sing. We are reminded that so-called progressive politics long ago shifted its focus toward securing lifestyle freedoms for the new-economy winners (gay-pride marches, women’s rights marches), as well as toward movements to satisfy the refined moral palates of the educated elites (animal rights, nuclear disarmament, global warming). The local guy with a high-school education and ordinary expectations from life gets pushed to the side.
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The major premise of “Roots” is simple: “Without our stories or our songs / How will we know where we come from?” The minor premise is implied: England now encourages cultural forgetfulness rather than memory. The conclusion: an urgent imperative of cultural renewal that gives this song extraordinary emotional power.
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Social capital is not a fixed asset. It requires regular reinvestment, which we do by committing resources of memory, love, and loyalty. One of the signal features of our age is the belief that we can have everything for nothing. Our multicultural therapists imagine that we can discharge the batteries of national identity, reap gains in tolerance, and pay no costs. But there are costs. As the Show of Hands sings, “We’ve lost more than we’ll ever know.” We can’t stand forever at a distance with our critical doubts and moral reservations. Love rewards only those who venture her commitments.
This loss of "more than we'll ever know" echoes in Degeneration, the number one song in Quebec for by the band called Mes Aieux (My Ancestors)
HT Ron Dreher
Dr. Helen writes about The Traits of Heroes
Stopped. Cold turkey. North Carolina authorities say a shopper clubbed an alleged carjacker with a frozen turkey as he tried to steal a woman's car in a grocery store parking lot Sunday.
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I am in the middle of reading an incredible book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why that explains why it is that some people are prepared for disaster and others are not. One of the chapters in the book is on heroism and it found that those who are heroes like the above turkey clubber have confidence in their abilities. They tend to have an "internal locus of control"--that is, a sense that they shape their own destiny rather than looking to someone else.
Bystanders, on the other hand, tend to feel buffeted by forces beyond their control. 'They pay scant attention to other people's problems. They will concentrate on their own need for survival,'...
According to the book, some common traits of heroes in a study of 450 acts of heroism found a whopping 91 percent of them performed by males. The author notes that this could be a bias of the sample used.... but anyway, the heroes in the study also tended to be working class men. They tended to be truck drivers, laborers, welders, or factory workers--physical jobs that required some risk, just like rescuing. A high number of the rescues were in rural or small-town America and 80% of the rescues happened in places with less than one hundred thousand people. The author opines that this might be because in small towns, people know one another and acts of kindness are recognized and remembered. A strong sense of duty to help others was also mentioned
Paul Gregory writing in First Things on Small Towns
Small-town connectivity also ties one to a place and to the past. People are often born, grow up, marry, raise a family, work, retire, and die all within the same few miles or even acres. Birth, childhood, family, place, memory, and death are all tied tightly together. These few acres or miles are a part of daily experience. You drive by the place where you grew up every day. It is the same with the place where you went to school or played baseball or where your granddaddy used to work. The past is not past in a small town. The past is experienced viscerally and concretely every day. It is a part of today as surely as the ground upon which one walks.
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It is this sort of connectedness to place and people and the past that that makes small towns different. It is not an easy set of slogans that can be trumpeted by a political party or captured in a sound bite. It is the shape of the small town itself which has embedded itself in its people. That shape takes the form of a web that connects that person to a multitude of places and people and past experience. That web becomes the stuff of that person; it is his identity.
Mark Steyn hits it out of the park again in this Thanksgiving note, Which history?
We've taken Cromwell's advice to his portraitist to paint him "warts and all", and show our kids all but solely the warts — spreading disease to Native Americans, enslaving blacks, interning the Japanese. Any non-wart stuff is mostly invented out of whole cloth: the US Constitution has its good points but they all come from the Iroquois, and the first Thanksgiving is some kind of proto-Communist celebration of collective farming.
A few months back, my little boy came home from Second Grade and said to me, "Guess what we learned today?" I said: "Rosa Parks." He said: "How did you know that?" I said: "Because it's always Rosa Parks." And, if you don't learn it in the context of any broader historical narrative, it's just a story about municipal transit seating arrangements.
Teaching only the warts is a terrible thing to do to young children. At its extreme it leads to those British Taliban captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan: Subjects of the Crown who'd been raised in English schools and taught only that the country to which they owed their nominal allegiance was the source of all the racism, oppression, colonialism, and imperialism in the world. Why be surprised that a proportion of the alumni of such a system would look elsewhere for their sense of identity?
But, even in its more benign form, warts-only education leaves a big hole where one's cultural inheritance should be.
The year after the founding fathers declared independence from Great Britain, the war to secure that independence continued through many bleak days. Ira Stoll writes that the national holiday actually began during such dark hours.
For much of 1777, the situation was not much better. British troops controlled New York City. The Americans lost the strategic stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, to the British in July. In Delaware, on Sept. 11, troops led by Gen. George Washington lost the Battle of Brandywine, in which 200 Americans were killed, 500 wounded and 400 captured. In Pennsylvania, early in the morning of Sept. 21, another 300 American soldiers were killed or wounded and 100 captured in a British surprise attack that became known as the Paoli Massacre.
Philadelphia, America's largest city, fell on Sept. 26. Congress, which had been meeting there, fled briefly to Lancaster, Pa., and then to York, a hundred miles west of Philadelphia. One delegate to Congress, John Adams of Massachusetts, wrote in his diary, "The prospect is chilling, on every Side: Gloomy, dark, melancholy, and dispiriting."
His cousin, Samuel Adams, gave the other delegates -- their number had dwindled to a mere 20 from the 56 who had signed the Declaration of Independence -- a talk of encouragement. He predicted, "Good tidings will soon arrive. We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection."
He turned out to have been correct, at least about the good tidings. On Oct. 31, a messenger arrived with news of the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga. The American general, Horatio Gates, had accepted the surrender of 5,800 British soldiers, and with them 27 pieces of artillery and thousands of pieces of small arms and ammunition.
Saratoga turned the tide of the war -- news of the victory was decisive in bringing France into a full alliance with America. Congress responded to the event by appointing a committee of three that included Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia and Daniel Roberdeau of Pennsylvania, to draft a report and resolution. The report, adopted Nov. 1, declared Thursday, Dec. 18, as "a day of Thanksgiving" to God, so that "with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their divine benefactor."
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It turned out, though, that the ideas of thanking God for America's blessings -- and of praying for the spread of freedom everywhere -- would long outlast Adams's career. The concepts still meet with skepticism from time to time. But they are reason enough to pause during tomorrow's football game or family feast and raise a glass to the Founding Father who began our Thanksgiving tradition.
And if your beer bears his name, so much the better.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone
Dr. Bob is one of the best writers on the Internet and one of the most thoughtful. Here he is on Revolution of the Soul which deserves being read in its entirety.
The revolution which started in the 60s with the “me” generation is bearing its bitter fruit — though its aging proponents will never admit it. And sadly, there’s no going back: the changes which have infiltrated and infected the culture, inoculated through education, media, entertainment, scientific rationalism, and a relentless and highly successful assault on reason and tradition, are permanent, and their consequences will only grow in magnitude.
So it’s time for a counter-revolution.
There is an alternative to our current cultural narcissism with its corrosive, calloused, destructive bent. It is not a new government program, nor a political movement; no demonstrations in the street, no marches on Washington. Its core ideology is over 2000 years old, and the foot soldiers of the revolution are already widely dispersed throughout the culture.
This revolutionary force is called Christianity, and it’s long past time to raise the banner and spring into action.
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Then we must act like the counter-culturists we claim to be. Be patient with those who are difficult; be generous in time and money; express gratitude to those around us (when was the last time you wrote a thank you note to your doctor, your contractor, your attorney, to the manager of the store employee who helped you?). Lose the profanity; guard your tongue. Repair broken relationships, as best you can. Be joyful in difficult times, knowing that God is at work in your life despite your difficulties. Be compassionate rather than judgmental to those whose life choices are destructive or misguided. The tattoos and piercings we ridicule are cries of desperation from those hungering for purpose and meaning.
Loneliness is a signal like hunger, thirst and pain that something important is missing - connection with other people - that all humans need says John Cacioppo, author of Loneliness.
"Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection" (John T. Cacioppo, William Patrick)
The best guarantee of a long, healthy and happy life may be the connections you have with other people.
From an interview with the author in US News and World Report, Why loneliness is bad for your health
The painful feeling known as loneliness is a prompt to reconnect to others.
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Humans have a need to be affirmed up close and personal; we see this most often in marriage. But people who don't marry may find meaning elsewhere. We also have a need for a wider circle of friends and family, but we all know that close family connections can be a mixed blessing. And there's a need to feel that we belong to a larger group. Many of us tend to ignore the collective part of social connection until there is an insult or threat. An example is how, right after 9/11, Americans felt very close to one another. There was a harmony and helpfulness that was really quite surprising. Being an Obama-ite during the campaign would be another example of having a collective identity, feeling like you're part of something grand and wonderful.
People who go to church regularly live longer than nonchurchgoers. Why is that?
Churches can be very beneficial—one can feel connected to the group, the church, and to God. Those are actually different things, but both seem to have beneficial effect. God is like a supercharged friend.
Nicolas Gelinas finds comfort in Treasury Secretary Paulson's decision not to use any of the $700 billion financial bailout money to purchase troubled assets from financial institutions in Paulson Bails Out the Bailout
Marano is not an aberration. He’s a representative of a dangerous way of thinking. Much of the financial industry still refuses to acknowledge that its business-model failure is permanent. Far too many people seem to consider that failure the result of temporary, extraordinary market conditions that are—to use a phrase that’s now become an unintentionally humorous cliché—worse than anticipated. But the notion that complex financial engineering could make any long-term security always instantly salable and nearly risk-free was one of the roots of this crisis. Acknowledging its absurdity isn’t a matter of punishment or demonization; it’s a matter of making sure that failed ideas stay dead, so that they don’t come back stronger than before.
But the government has been doing just the opposite. Further, by promising to buy mortgage-related assets, it has given companies like Rescap an incentive to hang on to their bad debt for as long as possible, rather than sell it to those annoying investors offering prices that are too low. And that has delayed what is already likely to be a long, painful recovery.
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To learn why, consider what got us out of our last major banking debacle, the savings and loan crisis of the late eighties and early nineties. William Seidman headed the FDIC in the eighties and later, as head of the federal Resolution Trust Corporation, handled the S&L aftermath. During that crisis, the U.S. government closed down failed S&L institutions and had to sell off their holdings. These holdings consisted of $600 billion in diverse assets, including office buildings, hotels, golf courses, and apartment complexes. “There was no real market” for such assets, Seidman said at Monday’s conference. “We decided we had to create a market. We said, we’re going to start selling these properties at whatever price we could get.”
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What Seidman sensibly dismissed back then—holding on to assets to “get prices up”—was, until Paulson’s announcement today, a key part of the government’s working plan to fix the current crisis. But it’s only when holdouts and their creditors capitulate and start selling assets to private investors at distressed values that the market can begin to find its way to recovery, just as happened in the early nineties.
A remarkable article by Michael Lewis called The End in Portfolio.
The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
photoillustration by Ji Lee
When he wrote Liar's Poker, he thought that there would come a Great Reckoning
when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
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In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?
One of the true wise men was Steve Eisman
It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong or distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded—without actually being insane. A handful of people had been inside the black box, understood how it worked, and bet on it blowing up. Whitney rattled off a list with a half-dozen names on it. At the top was Steve Eisman.
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Eisman wasn’t, in short, an analyst with a sunny disposition who expected the best of his fellow financial man and the companies he created. “You have to understand,” Eisman says in his defense, “I did subprime first. I lived with the worst first. These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn’t give a shit what it sold.”
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The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA. --
“We have a simple thesis,” Eisman explained. “There is going to be a calamity, and whenever there is a calamity, Merrill is there.” When it came time to bankrupt Orange County with bad advice, Merrill was there. When the internet went bust, Merrill was there. Way back in the 1980s, when the first bond trader was let off his leash and lost hundreds of millions of dollars, Merrill was there to take the hit. That was Eisman’s logic—the logic of Wall Street’s pecking order. Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned the least pleasant roles, just happy to be a part of things. The game, as Eisman saw it, was Crack the Whip. He assumed Merrill Lynch had taken its assigned place at the end of the chain.
Dark energy is that hypothetical energy that permeates all space, increases the rate of expansion of the universe, and accounts for about 74% of the total mass energy of the universe.
Dark matter is hypothetical matter that does not interact with the electromagnetic force, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter.
Being a lay person with just a tenuous grasp of science, what this means to me is that nobody knows what the universe is made of. We are in the same place as the mapmakers of earlier times who wrote Terra Incognita for the unknown regions of the earth or "Here be Dragons"
With the addition of "Dark Flow" named to explain the Unknown "Structures" Tugging at the Universe, a discovery that rewrite the laws of physics because it posits structures outside our universe, I now know why my socks go missing.
After the election where I was moved as always by the peaceful transition of power as well as by the notable achievement of Barack Obama, the new president-elect, I turned to more pressing personal matters which partially explains the lack of blogging.
I do want to point to this Time review Search for Civitas about a book written by Daniel Bell almost thirty years ago
"The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism: 20th Anniversary Edition" (Daniel Bell)
The more that Sociologist Daniel Bell peers into the future, the more he seems to respect the past. It would be hard to find anyone more at home in such a variety of contemporary disciplines—economics, politics, the arts, popular culture. Yet Bell is not happy with the trends in any of them. Something precious has gone out of life, he feels. The deficiency makes people harsher, more inward, more aggrandizing. Bell yearns for a restoration of civitas: "The spontaneous willingness to obey the law, to respect the rights of others, to forgo the temptations of private enrichment at the expense of the public weal—in short, to honor the 'city' of which one is a member."
Bell is no mere nostalgia peddler sighing for antique worlds. With acerbic but civil scholarship, he blames today's honorless condition on what he calls "modernism": the cultural movement that started in the latter half of the 19th century and has gathered momentum ever since. Modernism rejects the old, the traditional, the bourgeois in favor of the new, the sensational, the revolutionary. As such, it has dissolved many conventions, and discredited most institutions and values. Today, says Bell, its victory is complete. There is a perpetual, unwholesome rage for the new. Instead of affirming a "moral-philosophical tradition against which the new could be measured," contemporary culture has an "unprecedented mission: an official, ceaseless search for a new sensibility."
Under these conditions, an avant-garde can hardly be said to exist. The most outrageous or destructive idea or art form becomes accepted overnight. "In fact," writes Bell, the chief characteristic of the Establishment "is its eagerness to repudiate its own existence." The condition of art is echoed in politics and the economy. Capitalists have lost faith in their enterprise and are listless about defending it. Capitalism's very success has created a paradox: hard work, discipline and organization make capitalism successful. But the goods it abundantly produces encourage a mindless pursuit of hedonism. Capitalism is thus deprived of any "moral or transcendent ethic." There is a further paradox. The greater the economic growth under capitalism, the higher the expectations. People demand more government services and more protection against adversity. Inflation results, savings diminish, and capitalism is undermined. The only solution is a restraint on private appetite and a return to a public philosophy—a tall order, as Bell acknowledges, in these roiled times.
Usually we think of history as the product of either politics (the struggle for power) or economics (the production of wealth) George Weigel writes but history is better seen through culture in Is Europe Dying?
Europe began the twentieth century with bright expectations of new and unprecedented scientific, cultural, and political achievements. Yet within fifty years, Europe, the undisputed center of world civilization in 1900, produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, a Cold War that threatened global holocaust, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, the Gulag, and Auschwitz. What happened? And, perhaps more to the point, why had what happened happened? Political and economic analyses do not offer satisfactory answers to those urgent questions. Cultural-which is to say spiritual, even theological-answers might help.
Weigel calls for a return to pietas, an ancient Roman virtue that teaches us reverence and gratitude for those on whose shoulders we stand, a fitting subject for this Veteran's Day.
To be patriotic is to acknowledge the patrimony, the legacy, we have been given and which we are duty bound to pass on to future generations. In America, it is not so much the land as the ideas of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. John Schaar explores The Case for Patriotism.
Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American nation unique, and niquely valuable among and to the other nations. But the other side of this conception contains a warning very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we.
He quotes Abraham Lincoln in Philadelphia on the way to Washington for his first inauguration.
I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live... I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence...I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was.something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.
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Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can't be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle--I was about to I say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.
I think this is the best political video I've viewed during the interminable campaign.
And this is the best cartoon.
After Heath Ledger's death, Jack Nicholson was quoted as saying "I warned him."
Ledger recently told reporters he "slept an average of two hours a night" while playing "a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy ...
"I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.
I wondered what happens to any actor with great talent who can pour himself so completely into the persona of a sociopath. Does the permeability of his psyche leave him especially vulnerable?
Can a person become contaminated by a preoccupation with evil?
Maria Hsia Chang explores that question in Peering into the Abyss in the New Oxford Review.
"I think the Joker killed Heath Ledger." So writes licensed attorney and former public defender Jay Gaskill in his review of The Dark Knight. Gaskill is not being melodramatic; he is simply stating what other reviewers only hint at.
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Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." This famous but cryptic quote by Friedrich Nietzsche is understood to be a warning against too close a contact with evil. As one interpretation has it, if a person gazes too long at evil, it will become a part of him. Did Ledger fall prey to this mysterious phenomenon?
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To begin with, who are the potential victims? It appears that "looking into the abyss" refers to anyone whose work or interests brings him into a close proximity with evil. It can be an actor, such as Heath Ledger, who immerses himself too deeply into portraying evil and, in so doing, invites malefic forces into himself. It can be a writer, such as Iris Chang, whose subject is a historical account of man's inhumanity toward man. It can be FBI agents, soldiers, and policemen who enter the arena to directly confront and fight evildoers.
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But how exactly does evil exert its nefarious influence on a person? Evil's baneful effects may be likened to the invisible, odorless, and deadly radiation emitted by uranium. While it is wholly conceivable that writers such as Iris Chang would become disheartened by their research, why should it trigger such an acute depression that life becomes unbearable and relief is sought only in suicide? All of which leads one to wonder just what is this evil that lurks in the abyss.
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It is oft said that the greatest achievement of the Devil is to convince us that he does not exist. Catholic priest and scholar Malachi Martin called this "the ultimate camouflage." As he explained, "If your will does not accept the existence of evil, you are rendered incapable of resisting evil. Those with no capacity of resistance become prime targets for Possession."
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The clergy's reluctance to speak of the Devil and of Hell is all the more ironic because available evidence points to the laity's belief in both. Gallup polls of American adults found that in 2001, 71 percent believed in Hell. Increasing numbers also believed in a personal entity of evil called the Devil, from 55 percent of U.S. adults in 1990 to 70 percent in 2004.
via Chronicles of Atlantis
Forget climate change, the most good can be done by installing toilets and ensuring safe water supplies
Installing toilets and ensuring safe water supplies where needed throughout the world would do more to end poverty and improve world health than any other possible measure, according to a new UN study
Almost 900 million people around the world lack access to safe water supplies, and 2.5 billion people live without access to improved sanitation, according to UN figures.
Says Abe Greenwald
Governments worldwide spend 6 to 16 percent of GDP on healthcare, while a solid showing of plumbers in the private sector could prevent millions of yearly deaths around the globe. It turns out plumbers can save more lives than spread-the-wealth politicians
Because the report was so embarrassing, the government tried to hide the results. This time it's diapers.
But as any parent knows, Pampers rule
Blow to image of 'green' reusable nappy.
When the government doesn't like the results of a study
A government report that found old-fashioned reusable nappies damage the environment more than disposables has been hushed up because ministers are embarrassed by its findings.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has instructed civil servants not to publicise the conclusions of the £50,000 nappy research project and to adopt a “defensive” stance towards its conclusions.
The report found that using washable nappies, hailed by councils throughout Britain as a key way of saving the planet, have a higher carbon footprint than their disposable equivalents unless parents adopt an extreme approach to laundering them.
Kevin Kelly says the fastest growing entity today is information, growing at a rate of 66% a year in The Expansion of Ignorance.
Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More answers, more questions. Telescopes and microscopes expanded not only what we knew, but what we didn’t know. They allowed us to spy into our ignorance.
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Thus even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentialy. In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.
We have no reason to expect this to reverse in the future. The more disruptive a technology and tool is, the more disruptive the questions it will breed. We can expect future technologies such as artificial intelligence, controlled fusion, and quantum computing (to name a few on the near horizon) to unleash a barrage of thousands of new huge questions – questions we could have never even thought to ask before. In fact, it’s a safe bet that we have not asked our biggest questions yet.
Or, to put it another way, we have not yet reached our maximum ignorance.
No matter what your politics or candidate, no one wants the integrity of the electoral process itself violated with voter fraud.
That's why the actions of ACORN are so pernicious. One person using fraudulent voter registrations could vote over a hundred times on November 4th.
So I am all in favor of the simple, low-tech solution suggested by Mark Steyn, proposed by Jim Geraghty and seconded by Miss Kelly: Purple Finger Legislation.
He sees what we are witnessing as "as unfolding chaotic system" with our institutions "firing into the dark".
Richard Fernandez on Taleb's Warning.
There was a time when people explicitly understood their ignorance. And they defended against uncertainty by relying on simpler, less interdependent systems for survival. In case snow blocked the roads they had hams, canned goods, dried beans and sacks of flour in the storeroom. In the event 911 didn’t answer they had a shotgun in back. Family was the insurance against unforeseen crisis. Nation was the refuge against enemies. Culture provided a standard operating procedure which everyone was expected to know.
We have abolished much of that because in our foolish pride, it became an article of faith that we no longer needed them. Canned food is now shunned for the preservatives that it contains. Bacon is bad because it has salt. Allah forbid that there’s a gun in the house. And who could be less ‘with it’ than a woman with five children and a husband who drives a snowmobile. Sarah Palin is hated by sophisticates because she is almost a cliched example of this kind of simplicity. Ha ha ha. Today really cool people live in big cities, dependent on power grids, power circles and power lunches. They imagine there’s no heaven, no countries, nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. Today the truly cultured person is expected to know nothing of his own culture and smattering of everyone else’s. Because they’re certain in their epistemological arrogance they’ll never need any of the things they’ve safely abandoned. Who needs a family when you’ve got a retirement fund?
Lenin once described Communism as “socialism plus electricity”. The modern version of Nirvana is “socialism plus Google”. When will we learn? Never, I fear, while pride and the desire for power rule the human breast
ACORN. First they intimidated banks, then they went after Congress with a combination of bullying, smooth talking lobbyists and campaign contributions to change the regulations at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
Stanley Kurtz outlines how ACORN planted the seeds of disaster.
Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.” “This identity as a uniquely militant organization,” says Swarts, “is reinforced by contentious action.” ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers “tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists...the only truly radical community organization.”
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This sweeping debasement of credit standards was touted by Fannie Mae’s chairman, chief executive officer, and now prominent Obama adviser James A. Johnson. This is also the period when Fannie Mae ramped up its pilot programs and local partnerships with ACORN, all of which became precedents and models for the pattern of risky subprime mortgages at the root of today’s crisis. During these years, Obama’s Chicago ACORN ally, Madeline Talbott, was at the forefront of participation in those pilot programs, and her activities were consistently supported by Obama through both foundation funding and personal leadership training for her top organizers.
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Up to now, conventional wisdom on the financial meltdown has relegated ACORN and the CRA to bit parts. The real problem, we’ve been told, lay with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, however, ACORN is at the base of the whole mess. ACORN used CRA and Democratic sympathizers to entangle Fannie and Freddie and the entire financial system in a disastrous disregard of the most basic financial standards. And Barack Obama cut his teeth as an organizer and politician backing up ACORN’s economic madness every step of the way.
Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter. Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation.
The image is from NASA, a Chandra X-ray photograph showing Cassiopeia A, the youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way.
Dark energy is the name given to the hypothetical force that could be drawing all the stuff in the universe outward at an ever-increasing rate. Current thinking is that 74% of the universe could be made up of this exotic dark energy, with another 21% being dark matter, and normal matter comprising the remaining 5%.
Until now, there has been no good way to choose between dark energy or the void explanation, but a new study outlines a potential test of the bubble scenario.
If we were in an unusually sparse area of the universe, then things could look farther away than they really are and there would be no need to rely on dark energy as an explanation for certain astronomical observations.
But there's a problem with this void idea. It means we live in a special place.
it negates a principle that has reigned in astronomy for more than 450 years: namely, that our place in the universe isn't special.
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"This idea that we live in a void would really be a statement that we live in a special place," Clifton told SPACE.com. "The regular cosmological model is based on the idea that where we live is a typical place in the universe. This would be a contradiction to the Copernican principle."
Kevin Kelly, co-founder and Editor-at-Large of Wired, takes a look at the Narrow Gates of Inevitability
I am a child of science fiction, so I have not come to these heretical notions easily. But I changed my mind looking at our results so fare. The more we investigate the conditions for life --- any life – to spontaneously organize itself, the more remarkably narrow those conditions appear. Life requires a goldilocks’ touch – not too hot not too cold; not too ordered, not too chaotic; not too strong, not too weak. Up and down the scale of reality, from cosmic constants like force of gravity, to the exact size of our planet, to the temperature that ice molecules melt – all these values and hundreds more turn out to hover around sweet spots that permit the dynamic balance of life as we know it to thrive. In fact the dynamic balance of life, persistently hovering between order and disorder requires sweet spots.
Outside of this very thin corridor of parameters, life-as-we-know-it is denied. The more science investigates extropic systems via models and simulations, the more sweet spots it discovers life depends on. When all these alignments are exposed and listed, the confinement of life becomes quite clear.
A lot of people don't quite understand what the charge of elitism means.
Victor Davis Hanson explains that elitism is a state of mind and not to be confused with anti-intellectualism.
It is a world view in which one’s refinements from the commons—whether they are natural or acquired tastes and interests, whether they be intellectual, musical, artistic, architectural, or simply social—are seen as exclusive rather than inclusive.
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Second, elitism is the deliberate deprecation, in active or passive fashion, of the other world of physicality and pragmatism. The true elitist values his books, his music, his refined taste in furniture, food, and fashion to the neglect of how one makes a book, to the absolute uninterest in the construction of a violin, a chair, a fig, or a pair of pants
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Third, the elitist, by his very nature, proves overreaching. That is, he seems in anti-Platonic fashion, to think his expertise in one field is instantly transferable to another. ..the elitist seems to think that his Harvard Law Degree or Stanford PhD, or Victorian on Pacific Heights instantly makes him a far better guide to human nature, diplomacy, warmaking, and governance—almost anything—than does the sheet-rocker or crane operator.
What gets my goat are the people who sneer at those who believe in and pray to God, you know the Christian bible-thumpers.
Doctor Bob said it best:
The secular mindset cannot grasp that in a morally corrupt world filled with evil, that some might be called to seek the wisdom and power of God to resist evil and defend the good, and through such prayers seek the hope and character to transform the world in some small way to a place where good overcomes evil.
Sippican reminds me once again that bedrock knowledge is practical knowledge about how to do things, make things, repair things and generally make life livable for the rest of us. The older I get the more I appreciate the practical wisdom of working men and women.
The End in the Middle or how to move heavy things.
If I told you you had to move that 439 pound box down a flight of stairs, could you do it? Here's what's at your disposal: A thirteen year old boy, his mom, and whatever you have laying around. Easy. By the way; you're in a hurry, because the item is made from cast iron, and it's going to rain. And you can't drop it -- it's precision machinery.
In my mind knowing how to make, install and repair plumbing is far more important to the human race than finding new ways to package and sell sub prime mortgage loans made to people who couldn't or wouldn't pay them back.
Plumbers, after all, know how to segregate waste and send it away to be treated so we don't ever have to touch it. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, under the CRA regulations, required every bank Issuing mortgages to take on bad credit risks in the name of 'fairness'. I learned as a girl "One bad apple spoils the bunch". I could use more vivid metaphors but this one works too.
After Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made sure that bad apples were in every mortgage portfolio, shaky mortgages from every they promised that the good faith and credit of the U.S. government was guarantee every loan. That's why the federal government had to come in and take over and why taxpayers have to pay for all the bad apples. The crisis and insolvency Alan Greenspan warned about has come to pass.
Who is responsible?
I want to see Fannie and Freddie examined for fraud.
Plumbers would never have gotten us into this mess.
Edge also has up the much-talked-about video of Clay Shirky on Gin, Television and Cognitive Surplus
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?
...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer.
From the Edge, Jonathan Haidt on What Makes People Vote Republican
In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.
In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.
Of all the things I read today on 9/11, these are the best.
The Anchoress knows that 9/11 is Remembrance and Prayers that begins with praying the Office of the Dead from the Liturgy of the Hours. Listen to her podcast of the prayer and then follow her links.
Sissy remembers the prayers of Pope Benedict at Ground Zero "Our hearts are one with theirs."
Gerard Vanderleun reposts The Wind in the Heights, a remembrance of his days watching the fires at Ground Zero from Brooklyn. Beautiful, moving, pure gold.
Sujo John tells his incredible survivor's story about being buried alive when the towers collapsed
Today, still etched in Sujo's memory are the people who perished while he survived and the call on his life to tell others about the name that will take them to heaven.
"I see lost people around me," he said. "Watching people die on 9/11 has totally changed my life."
Neo looks back at seven years at things she never could imagine on 9/11.
From 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center comes the USS New York and its motto, 'Never Forget!'
When it was poured into the molds on September 9, 2003, 'those big rough steelworkers treated it with total reverence,' recalled Navy Capt. Kevin Wensing, who was there. 'It was a spiritual moment for everybody there.'
Junior Chavers, foundry operations manager, said that when the trade center steel first arrived, he touched it with his hand and the 'hair on my neck stood up.' 'It had a big meaning to it for all of us,' he said. 'They knocked us down. They can't keep us down. We're going to be back.'
Hat tip the Deacon
The inimitable Camille Paglia on Palin
Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy -- one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama's triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football -- or one of the great light-saber duels in "Star Wars."...This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.
A very interesting article and back story on the pregnancy and delivery of Sarah Palin's infant Trig Paxson Van Palin in the New York Times and just how she balances work and family.
Fusing Politics and Motherhood in New Way
Sarah Palin’s baby shower included a surprise guest: her own baby.
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Most had learned that Ms. Palin was pregnant only a few weeks before. Struggling to accept that her child would be born with Down syndrome and fearful of public criticism of a governor’s pregnancy, Ms. Palin had concealed the news that she was expecting even from her parents and children until her third trimester.
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Ms. Palin’s three-day maternity leave has now become legend among mothers. But aides say she eased back into work, first stopping by her office in Anchorage for a meeting, bringing not only the baby but also her husband to look after him.
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Many high-powered parents separate work and children; Ms. Palin takes a wholly different approach. “She’s the mom and the governor, and they’re not separate,” Ms. Cole said. Around the governor’s offices, it was not uncommon to get on the elevator and discover Piper, smothering her puppy with kisses.
“She’ll be with Piper or Trig, then she’s got a press conference or negotiations about the natural gas pipeline or a bill to sign, and it’s all business,” Ms. Burney, who works across the hall, said. “She just says, ‘Mommy’s got to do this press conference.’ ”
Ms. Palin installed a travel crib in her Anchorage office and a baby swing in her Juneau one. For much of the summer, she carried Trig in a sling as she signed bills and sat through hearings, even nursing him unseen during conference calls.
Todd Palin took a leave from his job as an oil field production operator, and campaign aides said he was doing the same now.
At her baby shower, Ms. Palin joked about her months of secrecy, Ms. Lane said. “About the seventh month I thought I’d better let people know,” Ms. Palin said.
“So it was really great,” she continued. “I was only pregnant a month.”
I bet her husband has been a really big help since he has been on leave from work since the birth.
Never in my lifetime have I seen such a shameful display of piling on as that demonstrated by the mainstream media this week as they picked up and amplified the most disgraceful and lurid rumors about Sarah Palin and her family without any fact-checking or proof. When contrasted with their non-existent reporting on John Edwards affair, a partisan bias was clear.
What was most shocking to me was the outright sexism on display by other women who call themselves feminists. They greeted the surprising but historic selection of Palin, a self made and accomplished woman by any standard, with disparagement and scorn and charges of tokenism, a cynical ploy even that Palin was 'not a real woman' because she is pro-life.
Victor Hanson captures it best. Target Palin
A beautiful, confident, articulate, independent, accomplished—and conservative—woman apparently has enraged Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia, as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America
It was a relief to read the British press.
Sarah Palin: it's go west, towards the future of conservatism
The best line I heard about Sarah Palin during the frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion that greeted her nomination for vice-president a week ago came from a correspondent who knows a thing or two about Alaska.
“What's the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”
“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let's be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.
“The other kills her own food.”
Now we know, thanks to her triumphant debut at the Republican convention on Wednesday, that Mrs Palin not only slaughters her prey. She impales its head on a stick and parades it around for her followers to jeer at. For half an hour she eviscerated Mr Obama in that hall and did it all without dropping her sweet schoolmarm smile, as if she were handing out chocolates at the end of a history lesson.
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It never ceases to amaze me how the Left falls again and again into the old trap of underestimating politicians whom they don't understand. From Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to George Bush and Mrs Palin, they do it every time. Because these characters talk a bit funny and have ridiculously antiquated views about faith, family and nation, because they haven't spent time bending the knee to the intellectual metropolitan elites, they can't be taken seriously.
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No one paid much attention to the fact that she had been elected governor of a state. Or that she got to that office not because, unlike some politicians I could mention, her husband had been there before her, or because she bleated continuously about glass ceilings, but by challenging the entrenched interests in her own party and beating them. In almost two years as Governor she has cleaned out the Augean stables of Alaskan Government. You don't win a statewide election and enjoy approval ratings of more than 80 per cent without real political talent.
One British reporter flies to Alaska and drives to Wasilla .
Sarah Palin: she came from nowhere
At the age of 10, Sarah Palin got her very own bunny rabbit. Which means to say that she crouched down in the grass outside her family home, aimed her shotgun and blew its furry little head off. That's how things work in Alaska. You kill stuff. You freeze it. You turn it into stew.
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Could all the astonishing details I had read about this 44-year-old woman's life possibly be true? Basketball prodigy. Wife of a half-Inuit named Todd who races snowmobiles and calls himself the First Dude. Part-time commercial fisherwoman. Talented moose-killer. Beautiful - former runner-up Miss Alaska. Mother of five (one of whom is named Piper Indy, after the Polaris Indy snowmobile). And, of course, governor - with an Eliot Ness agenda that has seen her take on the members of her own Republican Party, calling out corruption and wasteful government spending, going as far as to auction her predecessor's private jet on eBay.
Alaska's Margaret Thatcher
Oh boy. I don't know what is going to happen next in the Sarah Palin story, but one thing is now for sure: John McCain has picked an Alaskan Margaret Thatcher to be his running mate.
She spoke for 36 pugnacious, stilleto-heeled, in your face, Barack Obama is a limp-wristed cover boy minutes. She blew the roof off. Sarah Palin has now shaken up a presidential race like no other nominee in modern times.
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Having put to rest any doubts that she is a very tough lady not afraid of a fight, many males in the audience - when not giving her a standing ovation - were instinctively crossing their legs--
o an almost primal roar from the Republican delegates, who had just been treated to a barnstorming attack on the Washington media, Barack Obama, and eloquent defence of what it takes to be a mayor and governor, Mrs Palin greeted on stage her 17-year-old pregnant daughter, the father of their baby, Levi Johnston the high school ice hockey hunk who arrived in Minnesota yesterday, her snow-mobiling champion husband Todd, their son Trig born with Down's Syndrome in April, their two other daughters, and eldest son Track, who is to be deployed to Iraq in a week's time.
We are in interesting times.
"She's like a moose going after a cabbage
How perfect is Sarah Palin's First Dude?
It would, after all, take an icy heart not to warm to an oil rig worker and commercial fisherman from the far reaches of Alaska’s North Slope: a man’s man; a beer drinker; a salt-of-the-earth type. ... Adding to the charm were the stories about the 44-year-old sourdough (slang for an Alaskan native) being a stay-at-home dad who cooked for their five children and put them to bed every night.
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When asked what he saw in his future wife, he said: “She was the best-looking girl on the basketball team.”
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The couple were inseparable. They lived five miles apart but talked every night on two-way radios. They fished together in Bristol Bay. When Mrs Palin broke her hand during one particularly brutal trawl, she went straight back out to sea for the next catch. “I couldn’t disappoint [Todd],” she said. “No matter how cold or nauseous, you just didn’t complain.”
WHY, why, why can't WE have a Sarah Palin
The moose-huntin' mom is the most talked-about woman in the world.
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She was an electrifying mix of passion, energy, optimism and plain speaking. The exact opposite of the slippery, two-faced, depressing bunch of third-raters who parade on our Westminster stage.
How life for men has changed.
Newsweek looks at Why young Men Delay Adulthood to Stay in "Guyland." The never-ending party of delayed adulthood does not bode well.
Tony Dokoupil, 28, engaged to be married, examines the 20 something scene and reads the new book Guyland by the sociologist Michael Kimmel.
the traditional markers of manhood—leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father—have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from "a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life." In 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30. Today, less than a third of males that age can say the same.
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he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it's more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility.
Today's guys are perhaps the first downwardly mobile—and endlessly adolescent—generation of men in U.S. history. They're also among the most distraught—men between the ages of 16 and 26 have the highest suicide rate for any group except men above 70—and socially isolated, despite their image as a band of backslapping buddies.
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The happy family man, on the other hand, is an alien concept in Guyland, and all too scarce in popular culture. Men like me, who actually embrace married life in their 20s, are seen as aberrations—or just a bit odd.
"Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men" (Michael Kimmel)
What came to my mind was Kathleen Parker whose book Save the Males is causing a furor.
From the London Times, Where have all the real men gone?
The reality is that men already have been screwed – and not in the way they prefer. For the past 30 years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life’s ills. Males as a group – not random men – are bad by virtue of their DNA.
While women have been cast as victims, martyrs, mystics or saints, men have quietly retreated into their caves.
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NOTHING quite says “Men need not apply” like a phial of mail-order sperm and a turkey-baster. In the high-tech nursery of sperm donation and self-insemination – and in the absence of shame attached to unwed motherhood – babies can now be custom-ordered without the muss and fuss of human intimacy.
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By elevating single motherhood from an unfortunate consequence of poor planning to a sophisticated act of self-fulfilment, we have helped to fashion a world in which fathers are not just scarce but in which men are also superfluous.
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As luck would have it, a Cub Scout’s father was semi-retired or between jobs or something – we didn’t ask – and could attend the meetings. He didn’t have to do a thing. He just had to be there and respire testosterone vapours into the atmosphere.
His presence shifted the tectonic plates and changed the angle of the Earth on its axis. Our boys were at his command, ready to disarm landmines, to sink enemy ships – or even to sit quietly for the sake of the unit if he of the gravelly voice and sandpaper face wished it so...
But, of course, boys don’t stay Cub Scouts for long. We’ve managed over the past 20 years or so to create a new generation of child-men, perpetual adolescents who see no point in growing up. By indulging every appetite instead of recognising the importance of self-control and commitment, we’ve ratified the id.
Our society’s young men encounter little resistance against continuing to celebrate juvenile pursuits, losing themselves in video games and mindless, “guy-oriented” TV fare – and casual sex.
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In the coming years we will need men who are not confused about their responsibilities. We need boys who have acquired the virtues of honour, courage, valour and loyalty. We need women willing to let men be men – and boys be boys. And we need young men and women who will commit and marry and raise children in stable homes.
Unprogressive though it sounds, the world in which we live requires no less.
"Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care" (Kathleen Parker)
I don't write about politics on this blog because so many other people do it so much better and also because I don't want to be defined by politics or my political beliefs. It's a sad fact that too many demonize the other side and make instant decisions on a person based on their political beliefs. Neither party has an exclusive option on truth, goodness or patriotism. Both parties have their loons, radicals and all out crazy nuts.
Politics is important but it's a small part of life.
I used to think it was almost everything. So when I graduated from college, I worked at one of the first campaign consulting firms in the country and worked on several senatorial, a gubernatorial campaign and two presidential campaigns before I went to law school. It was fast-paced, exciting and hard work that can burn you out.
Still, I'm a secret political junkie and when conventions roll around, I fall off the wagon. I inhale political coverage, all the strategy and tactics, the subplots, the speeches, the commentary and the analysts.
Beyond all the appeal to a political junkie, this is truly an historic election. Come November 4th, we'll either have the first African-American president or the first woman vice-president.
The nomination of Barack Obama demonstrates just how far we have come as a nation in putting race behind us. A great part of his appeal is his transcending the old racial divisions that beset us. Some will still say we are an irremediably racist nation but they choose to forget a bloody civil war fought to end slavery, the Civil Rights Act enactedin 1964 outlawing racial segregation in schools, public places and employment and two generations later the nomination the son of a black Kenyan and a white woman from Kansas to be president of the United States. Speaking as one who appreciates political strategy and tactics, Obama has run a brilliant well-organized campaign and inspired countless millions with his rhetoric.
McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate is a WOW. A beautiful mother of five, with one child headed off to Iraq and a new born baby, married to her high-school sweetheart, part-time commercial fisherman, part-time oil worker and world champion snowmobiler, Palin entered politics by way of the PTA, then was elected mayor of her home town, who fought the corruption of the Republican political establishment and won to become governor of the largest state in the union. A self-made woman, she is the mirror image of what we have been led to believe is a feminist. How could she be pro-life, pro-NRA, pro hunting and fishing, for drilling in ANWR, anti-Big-Oil and pro-environment, a tax-cutter and a corruption buster?
She's fresh, real and authentic. As spectacular as her political ascent is, she lives an ordinary Alaskan outdoor life which seems extraordinary to most in the lower 48. She's an ordinary citizen and just as capable to run the government as any ivy-league lawyer from the political class.
I'm become weary of the political class and the professional politicians who have little life experience outside the halls of Congress or a law firm. I like what the Anchoress wrote
I am more and more pleased that she is not another Ivy League lawyer who planned and plotted a political career, but rather a concerned and active, intelligent woman who simply followed her own interests and concerns, and walked through the doors and opportunities as they were placed before her. That’s refreshing - it is also so very “can-do American.”
We forget, sometimes, that Harry Truman was just a haberdasher,
If you're smart, willing to study and have good instincts, you can learn fast what you need to know. Life experience is harder to come by.
Change is already happening.
Boomer narcissism, ageism debunked.
Harris Interactive surveyed 3868 adults between 21 and 83.
Between "the Greatest Generation" and "Gen Y" - five generations of Americans now populate the nation, each distinct and boasting opinions about themselves and one another that often run counter to persistent cultural myths.
Like ageism.
Americans don't hate old people. Americans love old people.
And the Boomers aren't half as fake, annoying and self-absorbed as their collective public image might indicate.
Orson Scott Card is The Ornery American and writing about Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Nobody Was Listening.
Let me quote just one passage from Solzhenitsyn's speech: "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations.
"Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life."
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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died last week. For the last thirty years of his life he was almost unheard-of. He was dismissed by our media elite as a has-been, a grumpy old man who dared to criticize them as scathingly as he criticized the Communists. They declared him No Longer Interesting.
But he is as important as he ever was. He was mostly right about the Soviet Union; he was mostly right about us.
In the Soviet Union, he was seen as dangerous.
In America, he was rendered powerless by sheer inattention.
Responding to consumer demand, Hallmark offers "coming out" cards for homosexuals and now same-sex marriage cards.
The language inside, "Two hearts. One promise" is neutral enough so the card can also work for commitment ceremonies.
Battling the growing phenomenon of anti-Americanism, a British group has organized a website called America in the World. Good for them.
AmericaInTheWorld is a London-based international alliance opposed to anti-Americanism as well as American isolationism. Via our briefings, we aim to provide the number one factual resource for those who wish to hear the case against anti-Americanism. Our goal is to increase understanding of America, to debunk some of the leading myths about the United States, and to make a positive case for a continuing leading role for America in the world.
AmericaInTheWorld is launched and funded by supporters of America in London and around the world. AmericaInTheWorld receives no American government or corporate funding.
Here's a video A World Without The American Soldier
For their launch, they commissioned a poll of 2000 U.K. citizens to find that Large numbers of British citizens consistently and inaccurately think the worst of America.
The first part of our survey would suggest that large numbers of Britons think America is a land where polygamy is legal, where you don't get emergency medical care if you are poor and where there is more racism than in Europe. Britons also think that America provided Saddam Hussein with a large share of his weapons when, in reality, Russia, China and France were responsible for most of the arms exports to his Iraq. On all of these questions Britons are wrong.
Best of all, they are associated with no party and offer fact-filled briefings that can settle many arguments.
California has thousands upon thousands of medical practitioners. The doctors in this case were not seeking to ban in-vitro fertilization for gay couples. They were simply saying, “Don’t make me do it.”
What they want is freedom: freedom to hold their convictions just as gay couples are free to hold theirs. Freedom to depart from a secular-belief system tyrannically imposed by government — governments having been known to impose any number of beliefs deemed de rigueur at the time . . . and remembered now only for their close-minded noxiousness.
In modern America, plenty of room has been made for gay couples and their life choices. We needn’t vanquish religious believers to make those accommodations. Trying to do so, as California is, will not result in harmony and societal progress. It will add to the campaign of political correctness slowly and needlessly tearing the nation asunder.
Andrew McCarthy's Tyranny in the Name of Progress on the decision of a California court to ban religious objections of doctors when it comes to in vitro fertilization for same-sex pregnancies. In North Coast Women's Care v. Benitez, the California Supreme Court
runs roughshod over the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause, seeking to supplant Judeo-Christian principles with the state-imposed religion of secularism. This is a false choice under the federal Constitution, which makes room for both.
I predict that we will see many more such court decisions in a struggle to accommodate both religious freedom and laws banning discrimination against homosexuals.
Forget James Bond, this is what British spies look like. And yes, they had a license to kill
The two peers look like innocent old ladies, but in fact they were two of the Cold War's most formidable spies. They drink tea, stirred not shaken, rather than Martinis, shaken not stirred, and they wouldn't be seen dead in an Aston Martin
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Lady Park, 88, ran agents in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, smuggled defectors out of the Congo in the boot of her Citroën 2CV and was posted to Moscow when the KGB was at the height of its powers. Lady Ramsay, 72, was on the MI6 Iraq desk during the Gulf War and worked in Helsinki when Finland was an intelligence crossroads. She also helped to persuade Oleg Gordievsky, a colonel in the KGB, to defect.
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I always looked just like a fat missionary, which was very useful. Missionaries get around, you know,” Lady Park says.
More Miss Marple than 007: The True Face of British Espionage.
I go away for a few days and war breaks out with Russia invading its next-door neighbor the newly democratic state of Georgia.
Did the balance of power just tip? According to Donald Sensing in Russia's the hare, the UN's the tortoise, yes.
Russia will have its way, whatever its way actually is, and the US and the West will do exactly nothing. The US will not go to war to turn Russia back (nor would the US be able to do so even if it wanted), and Europe can't go to war without the US. Absent a credible threat of force, the protestations of diplomats mean precisely zilch because there are no sanctions that are remotely possible that Vladimir Putin et. al. will think more painful than the benefits of enforcing their will against Georgia.
The balance of power just tipped, folks, and there is not one darn thing we can do about it.
Via American Digest
This makes a lot of sense, certification as an alternative to college.
For Most People, College is a Waste of Time
First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."
You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.
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The incentives are right. Certification tests would provide all employers with valuable, trustworthy information about job applicants. They would benefit young people who cannot or do not want to attend a traditional four-year college. They would be welcomed by the growing post-secondary online educational industry, which cannot offer the halo effect of a BA from a traditional college, but can realistically promise their students good training for a certification test -- as good as they are likely to get at a traditional college, for a lot less money and in a lot less time.
Certification tests would disadvantage just one set of people: Students who have gotten into well-known traditional schools, but who are coasting through their years in college and would score poorly on a certification test. Disadvantaging them is an outcome devoutly to be wished.
Tony Woodlief calls it Adolescent Nation.
Some time ago I saw survey evidence regarding the milestones of adulthood, which researchers defined as: 1) leaving home, 2) finishing one’s schooling, 3) getting a job, 4) getting married, and 5) having children. Whereas in 1960, 65 percent of American males had passed these milestones by age 30, in 2000 only 31 percent had done so. The data for females was little different. Here we have an immediate casualty of America’s burgeoning inability to grow up — the fact that we have to use the clinical terms “male” and “female” more frequently, because “man” and “woman” must be applied with greater selectivity.
We are, it seems, a nation in regression. At least in the past we might have had the cold comfort of shame, but now it seems that the new mood is to proclaim childishness as a virtue.
And another question, Now we can afford decent clothes, why do we not wear them?
A friend who has just returned from Vietnam, whose citizens are poor and hardly travel, told me that the locals are perplexed and shocked by the appearance of the westerners who now go on holiday there.
They do not understand the gracelessness and the self-exposure. For their own part, they are well covered, simply dressed and elegant.
I have noticed this phenomenon in Rwanda, Afghanistan, Natal, Rajasthan, Turkmenistan, and many more places. It was true, too, of the European past, as can be seen in old photographs and paintings. Only where most people are poor are most people well dressed.
From the National Center for Policy Analysis
In his new book, "Makers and Takers," Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford University, explores why conservatives work harder, feel happier, have closer families, take fewer drugs, give more generously, value honesty more, are less materialistic and envious, whine less and even hug their children more than liberals.
Using the latest data and research, Schweizer shows that the claims that conservatives are mean-spirited, greedy, selfish malcontents with authoritarian tendencies are a myth. Instead, he finds that many of these claims actually apply more to liberals than to conservatives.
For example:
• Some 71 percent of conservatives say you have an obligation to care for a seriously injured spouse or parent versus less than half (46 percent) of liberals.
• Conservatives have a better work ethic and are much less likely to call in sick than their liberal counterparts.
• Liberals are two and a half times more likely to be resentful of others' success and 50 percent more likely to be jealous of other people's good luck.
• Liberals are two times more likely to say it is okay to cheat the government out of welfare money you don't deserve.
• Some 55 percent of conservatives say they get satisfaction from putting someone else's happiness ahead of their own, versus only 20 percent of liberals.
• Those who are "very liberal" are three times more likely than conservatives to throw things when they get angry.
Schweizer argues that the failure lies in modern liberal ideas, which foster a self-centered, "if it feels good do it" attitude that leads liberals to outsource their responsibilities to the government and focus instead on themselves and their own desires.
Born after World War II, but old enough to remember the stories told after, I was deeply impressed in the sense of being marked indelibly with stories of the horrors in the concentration camps in Germany and in the former USSR. Both were vivid examples of what could happen in countries that suppressed religion and religious worship.
The Diary of Anne Frank made vivid what it was like to live in hiding and fear of being discovered and what girl could not deeply identify with the young Anne and wonder how she would have acted in the same situation. Perhaps that why in college, I was most interested in studying Germany, Russia and China, totalitarian governments all. I wanted to understand how that was felt in the daily lives of people. You've heard that they governed through fear. Fear, yes, but more than that. A fear strengthened and potentiated by the breakdown in the web of trust that undergirds a truly civilized country. People are atomized, stripped of what is most personal and human about them. From their personal bonds of blood and affection for family and friends to their relationship with the Divine.
Too often in news stories about post-Soviet Russia, Germany and China, the focus is on political or economic recovery. There's more going on than that, witness Requiem for the Romanovs. From what I read, it was a watershed cultural event that brought to the fore the question that until now have been evaded.
In her weeping, the soloist was not alone. Many of the more than 2,000 people who filled into the concert hall of the largest basilica in Russia, the Church of Christ the Savior, bombed by Stalin and rebuilt in the 1990s, wept openly as they listened and watched the tragedy of the last Romanovs unfold.
The story of the last days of the Romanovs is well known. Czar Nicholas II, embroiled in a terrible war with Germany and Austro-Hungary, decided to abdicate his throne on March 15, 1917. Without a single strong leader, Russia was soon in political turmoil. Out of the turmoil, the tiny but compact and single-minded Bolsheviks emerged as Russia's new rulers toward the end of 1917.
Nicholas and his family were soon placed under house arrest. They gardened, read books, prayed. Then, in the summer of 1918, on the evening of July 17, they were taken to the basement room of their prison, and shot to death. Their bodies were then burned.
Russia had made a clean break with its monarchical, and Christian, past.
The age of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and of anti-Christian state atheism had begun.
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the Requiem is far from a "nostalgic recollection" of the "good old days of the czars."
Instead, it is a searing socio-political critique of the atheism and persecution of religious belief central to Russia's communist regime.
While In the largest basilica in Russia, it was a cultural event not a religious service
"This is why we chose to organize this Requiem Concert. This is not a liturgy, not a Church celebration, but a cultural event. We want to participate in the cultural debate in Russia today, and make our case.
The Russian Orthodox Church was the principal sponsor, supported by two American groups; the orchestra directed by a Russian general and the musicians former members of the armed forces.
Bishop Hilarion concluded tonight's Requiem for the Romanovs with these words: "The horror of a national tragedy could not destroy the hope for a breakthrough to light and the inspired certainty that the triumph of evil would be fleeting, and would be followed by a bright future, by growth in spiritual perfection, by restoration and revival. The heroism of the martyrs of the 20th century contains a reflection of the future Kingdom which is transfiguring everyone and everything to live in peace through Christ."
When a white county commissioner in Texas said that central collections had become a 'black hole' because paperwork had become lost in the office, another commissioner one John Wiley Price demanded an apology because the term black hole was 'racially insensitive'
Explaining that a black hole was a science term that referred to 'the invisible remains of a collapsed star, with an intense gravitational field from which neither light nor matter can escape" didn't help.
Price went on to say that language such as 'angel food cake' and 'devil's food cake' were also racially insensitive.
Following a complaint by a women's magazine editor, all 'Men at Work' signs in Atlanta will disappear to be replaced 'Workers Ahead'.
"We're calling on the rest of the nation to follow suit and make a statement that we will not accept these subtle forms of discrimination," said Good, 48.
In the Washington Post, following the survey by the Pew Center that measured the pessimism, dissatisfaction and general curmudgeonliness of 2413 adults in various generations
The results validate any member of the Greatest Generation who ever looked at his or her offspring and sadly thought, "soft." Simply put, boomers are a bunch of . . . whiners.
Baby Boomers Got the Blues - Viewing Life Through Morose-Colored Glasses
"People born in times of cultural renewal tend to take an overt attitude of pessimism," Howe says.
They see their pessimism as a tonic that will wake up the world, then they just end up drunk on disappointment.
They spent a lot of time there and left wonderful paintings in places like Lascaux in southeast France, now closed to the public who must content themselves with a virtual tour at the link.
Says an acoustic expert, the most densely painted areas were those with the best acoustics.
Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there.
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With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn't be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had to use their voices like sonar to explore the crooks and crannies of a newfound cave.
Acoustics expert: Cavemen Must Have Loved to Sing
Because Paleolithic humans had a deep connection with the melodic properties that helped them navigate in a cave, they likely celebrated the unique acoustics by singing in conjunction with their painting sessions.
"Why would the Paleolithic tribes choose preferably resonant locations for painting," he said, "if it were not for making sounds and singing in some kind of ritual celebrations related with the pictures?"
The 4th of July was splendid especially since I had the privilege to see the celebration of America's birthday through a foreigner's eye. When a new friend, a visiting scholar at Harvard said she had no plans for the 4th of July, I invited her to spend it with me and another friend.
After a lunch of hotdogs, beans, chips and beer, we visited Lexington Common and the Minuteman National Park . My foreign friend was much impressed with the natural beauty, the modesty of the monuments and the innocence in the best sense of word of the national park rangers who told the thrilling story of the first battle of the revolutionary war. This could never happen in Europe she said. The closest a European could come to the evident feeling of national pride she saw all around was winning a soccer match. Later at the Boston Pops concert on the Esplanade and the fabulous fireworks, she was amazed at the tenor of the crowd, some 500,000 strong, particularly its civility and self discipline. Living very near a soccer stadium in Europe, she's used to drunken louts who crash bottles on the streets, get into fights and vomit in the nearest space available. Of the crowd in Boston she said "This is so civilized."
Catching up on all the coverage of the 4th, the following caught my attention.
Thomas Sowell on Does Patriotism Matter?
When the intelligentsia in France launched a systematic purge of textbooks after the First World War in order to promote internationalism and pacifism, the epic defense of France seen during the First World War evolved into a "sudden and humiliating collapse" in six weeks to the Nazis despite superior French tanks and planes.
Roger Kimball's thoughtful essay on July 4, America and multiculturalism
I fear that for every schoolchild standing at attention for the National Anthem, there is a teacher or lawyer or judge or politician or ACLU employee militating against the hegemony of the dominant culture, the insupportable intrusion of white, Christian, “Eurocentric” values into the curriculum, the school pageant, the town green, etc., etc.
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Those forces are not isolated phenomena; they are not even confined to America. They are part of a global crisis in national identity, coefficients of the sudden collapse of self-confidence in the West–a collapse that shows itself in everything from swiftly falling birthrates in “old Europe” to the attack on the whole idea of the sovereign nation state. It is hard to avoid thinking that a people that has lost the will to reproduce or govern itself is a people on the road to destruction.
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The threat shows itself in many ways, from culpable complacency to the corrosive imperatives of “multiculturalism” and political correctness. ... In essence, as Huntington notes, multiculturalism is “anti-European civilization. . . . It is basically an anti-Western ideology.”
The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact, they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable. The “sensitivity” of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral vacuousness.
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For what we have witnessed with the triumph of multiculturalism is a kind of hypertrophy or perversion of liberalism, as its core doctrines are pursued to the point of caricature.
While in Bagdad, the wonderful sight of 1200 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in the largest re-enlistment in history, in Saddham's old palace.
The Mudville Gazette reports one command sergeant said
I'll always remember the message you've sent to the adversary: the same guys and girls who've been kicking your butt for the past five years signed up for some more.
Happy Fourth of July!
The greatness of the liberty we've been given is best seen in Lady Liberty, Bartholdi's great sculpture.
Barrymore Laurence Scherer clues us in to some of the allegorical meaning in Liberty as Statue and Symbol.
Liberty's serious demeanor underscores the idea that liberty itself comes at a cost and must not be taken lightly; her robes evoke the republican ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. Her left hand and arm hold a tablet of the law -- like that of Moses descending from Mount Sinai -- inscribed "JULY IV MDCCLXXVI," the birth date of the nation.
Three heart-warming stories.
Beginning with the generosity of donors to the Heifer Project and a pair of goats comes The Luckiest Girl in the World. Nicholas Kristof tells the story.
Work only immigrants would do. Huddled Statues, Working to Be Free.
After 9/11, one woman with no ties to the military found her patriotic calling, Operation Gratitude.
She delivered more than 350,000 packages to soldiers who used the Beanie Babies to reward young Iraqi children for information on hidden IEDs.
Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are the primary jewels we have been given as Americans, part of our common patrimony. To see them under threat and being attacked in Canada was alarming, a little too close to home. Like acid rain and pollution which know no boundaries, such threats should be stopped at the source. And so I have written ...
Whither Canada?
The Chilling Effect of Richard Warman
"Freedom of Speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value"
The good news is that many others are concerned and most of them are playing a much larger part than I. The other good news ...
On Thursday, the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission dismissed the complaint of the Canadian Islamic Congress against Maclean's magazine for printing an excerpt of Mark Steyn's America Alone.
Counsel to the Islamic Congress, Faisal Joseph expressed his disappointment and claimed "inappropriate political pressure."
Steyn was sited at the Prime Minister's Garden and when told of the decision joked maybe he should appeal.
Macleans responded
Though gratified by the decision, Maclean's continues to assert that no human rights commission, whether at the federal or provincial level, has the mandate or the expertise to monitor, inquire into, or assess the editorial decisions of the nation's media. ...We enthusiastically support those
parliamentarians who are calling for legislative review of the commissions with regard to speech issues.
Still to watch is the decision from the HRC of British Columbia and the many cases filed against Christians and others like the comedian recently charged for his offensive comments against a pair of hecklers.
The best solution is to get rid of all the silly pseudo-judicial commissions and revert to the common law which has done quite well over the past 800 years in taking care of the true free speech abuses - fraud, defamation and libel.
One in four British children lives with a lone parent - double the figure 20 years ago.
So Father's Day cards have been banned in Scottish schools "for fear of embarrassing classmates who live with single mothers and lesbians.
While local authorities say teachers need to react to the "changing pattern of family life"
Matt O'Connor, founder of campaign group Fathers For Justice, said: "I'm astonished at this. It totally undermines the role and significance of fathers whether they are still with the child's mother or not.
"It also sends out a troubling message to young boys that fathers aren't important."
When Yang Wenjun won an Olympic gold medal in flatwater canoeing four years, he was awarded the deed to a three-bedroom apartment.
Wang, one of China’s most successful water sports athletes, has never lived in his apartment. He has not seen his parents in three years. At 24, he lives 250 miles away at his sport’s training center, where he is preparing for the Beijing Olympics.
Yang said he could not stand his life.
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Marek Ploch, a Polish-Canadian who is Yang’s coach, knows how much Yang wants out.
“He doesn’t care about the achievement,” Ploch said. “We just count the days to the Olympic Games. After that, it is possible, maybe, for him to relax until the end of his life.”
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“There are many athletes like me who never get the help,” Zou said by telephone. “We are left uneducated, unable to have children and destroyed by a system that told us it would take care of us forever.”
In China’s Medal Factory, Winners Cannot Quit
You'd be surprised at how enamored Europeans are for American culture.
There is the German love affair with the Wild West. Karl May, the best selling German author of all time, first stoked this love in the 19th century with his totally imaginary novels of cowboys and Indians.
Every summer the Karl May Festspiele takes place in several German and Austrian locations and draws throngs of visitors .
