Ann Coulter's broken jaw wired shut

I just found out now but it happened last week. Of course the leftie bloggers are celebrating. I like Ann but she sure can put her foot in her mouth occasionally. Even I want to make a joke about it: Did she insert both feet at the same time? No one seems to know how she broke her jaw but it comes at a bad time as she has just published her latest book, Guilty.

Blogging in the Mideast - hope for the future

From Gulf Political Blogs:

In societies with high internet penetration, blogs can have a democratizing, community-building function. Although we've seen this in the United States, its occurrence in politically closed societies such as Bahrain is significant because of the nexus of people it can bring together in certain types of interactions. I don't know all the ramifications that the term "public sphere" has in political science, but it sounds like a local one may have emerged in certain Gulf states of a type that would have been unlikely prior to the internet.

And here's an interesting video: Iran - A nation of bloggers.

So call me a pie-eyed optimist but I have hope for the Mideast - actually for the whole human race. No, I don't believe that there will be ever be a Utopian heaven on earth but it won't be hell on earth either; just human beings going about their business of raising kids and earning a living.

War caused by population growth and competition for resources

I was going to title this post "Daily duh - a commie see the light." But he distills the theory so neatly that I resisted the snarky title:

[A]ll wars are ultimately about resources, even if the combatants aren’t consciously aware of it. All life, in fact, at its most fundamental level is about competition for resources. Evolution has been driven by this competition for billions of years, and today’s animals, plants, bacteria, protozoa, and fungi all exist because they competed successfully with their rivals in the past. If we are to have any chance of avoiding the wars of tomorrow, as the destructive power of today’s weapons tells us we must, then we have to address this most basic of biological problems: The fact that as the population of any species grows, the pressure on its natural resources increases and competition becomes more severe.

[...]

The human migrants who crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas about 15,000 years ago found a continent filled with large, easy-to-hunt mammals, and among their limited human skeletal remains we find no evidence of violence. But by about 5000 B.C., as numbers and competition increased, some human skeletons from hunter-gatherer societies in North America show evidence of scalping, or have arrowheads embedded in them. A thousand years ago, in the American Southwest, the Anasazi and Fremont peoples were foragers who also grew maize. Some built elaborate cliff dwellings. The study of tree rings demonstrates that the area was subject to some decade-long droughts, and during these times the region seems to have been beset by raids and warfare. The population retreated to high pinnacles on the edges of deep canyons. They hid small caches of grain in hard to reach places and positioned boulders to roll down on enemy clans. Human skeletons show signs of malnutrition, decapitation, and cut marks on long-bones suggesting cannibalism.

Some Rousseauean anthropologists protest that reports of cannibalism represent a racist desire to denigrate other cultures, but the scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Excavating an Anasazi site in the American Southwest dating from 1150 a.d., Brian Billman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found cooking vessels and the butchered remains of four adults and an adolescent. Sensitive immunological tests revealed evidence of human muscle protein in the pots; even more convincing, the same tests found evidence of human meat in preserved human feces found at the site. When food is scarce, competition becomes increasingly intense and cannibalism, like team aggression, aids survival.

[...]

The thought that rapid population growth could increase conflict is hardly new, and certainly Thomas Malthus accepted this relationship in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population.

[..]

John May, the World Bank’s demographer for Africa, has drawn attention to the demographic pressure that had built up in Rwanda by the time of the 1994 genocide. The population of Rwanda was two million people in 1950, and on average each woman had almost 8 children. By 1994, average family size had fallen slightly to 6.2, but the population had quadrupled to almost eight million, resulting in a population density of 292 people per square kilometer, the highest in all of Africa. James Fairhead, an anthropologist from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, adds an economic dimension to the analysis. Preceding the Rwanda genocide, Fairhead points out, agricultural land prices had reached an astronomical $4,000 per hectare in a country where many people lived on less than $500 a year. “Land,” Fairhead concludes, “is worth fighting for and defending.”

[...]

Can all conflict be reduced beyond even team aggression and resource competition, down to the single factor of population growth? It’s not quite that simple, but a deeper investigation of the role of population increase shows quite clearly that growth rate and population demographics function as significant triggers for raiding, wars, and even terrorism. If we hope to reduce the number and severity of these violent incidents in our world, this is a relationship we need to understand. Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut and his Russian colleague Andrey Korotayev provide important quantitative insight into the dynamic connections between population growth and conflict. In a careful study of English, Chinese, and Roman history, they showed a statistical correlation between an increase in population density and warfare, although not surprisingly the impact of population growth was not immediate but took some time to develop. It is not the infant playing at the hearth but the hungry landless peasant twenty years later who causes the conflict. Adjusting for this and other variables (such as the fact that wars themselves tend to reduce population), and using robust data on population growth from church records in England along with historical data on conflict, Turchin and Korotayev found that intervals of relative peace and rapid population growth were followed by periods of conflict and slower population growth. Their study suggests that population growth accounts for a powerful 80–90 percent of the variation between periods of war and peace.

[...]

Water, for example, is becoming a key constraint on development and quality of life in many places. Thanks to dwindling supplies and burgeoning populations, the Middle East and much of North Africa now have one-third as much water per capita as in 1960. Israel has already exploited 95 percent of the available water supply in the country, and uses it efficiently; there is no new supply to tap. In the Gaza Strip, seawater is contaminating groundwater supplies as fresh water is pumped out to supply the growing population.

It has been a common theory for quite some time that war was caused by population growth and competition for resources such as hunting grounds, arable land, water or, nowadays, oil. But it will increasingly be about water in the future especially in Africa and the Mideast.

I love winter

The gray skies, fog and bare trees are beautiful. As the South African poet, Roy Campbell, writes:

I love to see, when leaves depart,
The clear anatomy arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive.

I'm taking my usual Sabbath from blogging today.

Murdoch ‘absolutely despises’ O’Reilly

Michael Calderone:

In Michael Wolff’s forthcoming biography of Rupert Murdoch, “The Man Who Owns The News,” the author writes that the media mogul has seemed to turn away lately from his cable news network, and isn’t fond its top-rated personality, Bill O’Reilly.

“It is not just Murdoch (and everybody else at News Corp.’s highest levels) who absolutely despises Bill O’Reilly, the bullying, mean-spirited, and hugely successful evening commentator,” Wolff wrote, “but [Fox News chief executive] Roger Ailes himself who loathes him. Success, however, has cemented everyone to each other."

“The embarrassment can no longer be missed,” Wolff wrote, in another section of the book. “He mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it. He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.”

Wolff describes Murdoch as not wanting News Corp. to be defined by Fox News. And so last year’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal, he wrote, “was in no small way about wanting to trade the illiberal—the belligerent, the vulgar, the loud, the menacing the unsubtle—for the better-heeled, the more magnanimous, the further nuanced.”

Actually not only do I dislike O'Reilly, I dislike lots about Fox News (but I dislike it less than CNN or the Networks.) The new "music" that Fox plays between segments is really nasty vulgar stuff. Most of the "personalities" are likable enough except for the revolting Geraldo and Cavuto is unbearable the way he shouts down his guests. I bet he was an overbearing bully at school - the ugly fat big boy whom everybody loathed. But there's no denying that the Fox babes are the best and classiest in the business.

Unfortunate domain names

Internet domain names consisting of run-together words that can be parsed in unintended ways.

Firstly there is "Who Represents?", a database of agencies for the rich and famous, the domain name of which is www.whorepresents.com. Second is the Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views: www.expertsexchange.com. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island: www.penisland.net. Need a therapist? Try www.therapistfinder.com. And if you want to stock up on bedding plants, try the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales, Australia: www.molestationnursery.com.

A truly Black Friday

Wal-Mart worker trampled to death in Black Friday stampede:

A Wal-Mart worker died after being trampled when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island store Friday morning, police and witnesses said.

The 34-year-old employee, a temporary maintenance worker, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too...I literally had to fight people off my back."

[..]

Before police shut down the store, eager shoppers streamed past emergency crews as they worked furiously to save the store clerk's life.

"They were working on him, but you could see he was dead, said Halcyon Alexander, 29. "People were still coming through."

Only a few stopped.

"They're savages," said shopper Kimberly Cribbs, 27. "It's sad. It's terrible."

Yes, savages is the right word. The first time that I shopped on Black Friday was soon after I arrived in the USA. I went to the sale at Macy's in San Francisco and was so horrified by the banshee-like behavior of my fellow shoppers that I vowed never to shop on Black Friday ever again.

Black Friday? Nope - Red Friday for some

Ten retailers may go out of business:

A year ago, not many people would have thought Circuit City would be in bankruptcy now. Linens 'n Things, Mervyn's, Whitehall Jewelers and Steve & Barry's have either shut down or are closing huge numbers of locations since they moved into Chapter 11.

The most astonishing fact about the retail industry now is that the environment has gotten much worse than it was when each of these businesses began to fail. Sales at stores across the country will be down this holiday season. Some analysts believe that the numbers will be as bad as for any fourth quarter in thirty-five years.

Adding to the problem of slow consumer spending brought on by the recession is an unprecedented liquidity crisis. Retailers who need access to capital for inventory, rent, and personnel costs are finding that it is nearly impossible to get access to funds without a pristine balance sheet and a history of substantial positive cash flow.

[...]

Here is a list of ten companies which may well not make it if their sales drop by double digits this holiday season compared to last:

1. Bon-Ton Stores

2. Dillard's

3. Talbots

4. Pier 1

5. Cost Plus

6. Williams-Sonoma

7. Chico's

8. Fitch

9. Eddie Bauer

10. Rite Aid

Fifteen years ago, just as I was about to open our restaurant, there was a seminar in San Francisco called "Growing your Business." One of the speakers was the founder of Williams-Sonoma. He cautioned against expanding a business too quickly and losing control over it. I took that to heart. I watched over the years as he did not take his own advice.

Within three months of opening the restaurant we had four major rave reviews and everyone urged me to expand. I sat down and crunched the numbers and realized that the only way to expand was to assume debt and the interest on the debt would eat up my profits. I decided not to do what all other retailers do: borrow the capital for inventory, mortgage, and personnel costs.

I was just a country-bumpkin and preferred to "pay as you go." The idea of borrowing money with only a hope (based on "projected business") of ever being able to repay it did not appeal to me. So I decided that we would just plod on one day at a time. We had to turn customers away because we did not have the staff to serve them. Eventually we stopped taking "walk-ins" and only served customers who had reservations. There was a three month waiting list to get in.

Business just got better. I was able to charge more and sell more expensive wines - and keep a tight rein on quality control which I would have lost if I'd had too large a staff to personally supervise. And I had no debt other than my mortgage.

Then the dotcom bubble happened in 1999 and we lost many of our big spending customers. My most expensive inventory was wines. We had a huge wine cellar. I cut my wine inventory down from 200 cases to 100 cases and stopped buying very costly wines.

Then 9/11/2001 happened and that put an end to my tourist business. I made further cuts. Still my only debt was the mortgage and we kept paying that until we sold up in 2003 and walked away with three times as much money as I had paid for the building. The restaurant was no longer a going concern so I simply closed it as I did not have to worry about business debts.

The big retailers all buy their inventory on credit and don't pay the wholesalers and manufacturers till they sell it. Consumers have not been buying so the inventory sits unsold. It's no way to run a business. Short-term business debt is just as responsible for the economic mess as those toxic mortgages.

Whatever hapened to the old-fashioned idea of "paying as you go?"

An atheist's "God"

From Steve Paulson's interview with biologist Stuart Kauffman:

We should see the ceaseless creativity of nature as sacred, argues biologist Stuart Kauffman, despite what Richard Dawkins might say.

Biologist Stuart Kauffman has plenty of experience tilting at windmills. For years he's questioned the Darwinian orthodoxy that natural selection is the sole principle of evolutionary biology. As he put it in his first book, "The Origins of Order," "It is not that Darwin is wrong but that he got hold of only part of the truth." In Kauffman's view, there is another biological principle at work -- what he calls "self-organization" -- that "co-mingles" with natural selection in the evolutionary process.

[...]

In his recent book, "Reinventing the Sacred," Kauffman has launched an even more audacious project. He seeks to formulate a new scientific worldview and, in the process, reclaim God for nonbelievers. Kauffman argues that our modern scientific paradigm -- reductionism -- breaks down once we try to explain biology and human culture. And this has left us flailing in a sea of meaninglessness. So how do we steer clear of this empty void? By embracing the "ceaseless creativity" of nature itself, which in Kauffman's view is the real meaning of God. It's God without any supernatural tricks.

[...]

I have a very explicit reason for wanting to use the word "God." It's the most powerful symbol humanity has created. We have been worshiping God or gods at least since the sacred earth mother 10,000 years ago in Europe. In the Abrahamic tradition, our sense of God has evolved. For example, the Israelites, 4,500 years ago, had Yahweh, who was a ferocious warrior, a law-giving God. That's a very different god than the one that Jesus spoke of, a God of love. So our sense of God just in the Abrahamic tradition has evolved.

The question is whether we choose to take our most powerful, invented symbol and use it in a new way to mean the creativity in nature itself. Is it more astonishing to believe in a God who created everything that has come to exist -- planets, galaxies, chemistry, life and consciousness -- in six days? Or is it even more astonishing and awesome to believe what is almost certainly the truth: namely, that all of this came to be all on its own? I think the second.

[...]

You don't accept traditional beliefs about God. But are you carving out a different space from atheists, especially the scientists who are atheists?

I absolutely am. Take Richard Dawkins' book "The God Delusion." It's a very good book. And I know Richard, and he lays out the atheist case well. It appeals to the billion or so of us who do not believe in a supernatural God, and who've hidden in the corners, particularly in the United States, where religion is so widely adhered to. But it will do no good whatsoever in bridging the gap between those who do believe in some form of God and the secular humanists like Dawkins and myself who do not. We need something else.

Well, Dawkins does not want to bridge that gap. He wants to convince those religious believers that they're wrong.

Absolutely. But I think Richard is wrong. Not that there's a supernatural god. I think that there's something else. I think the creativity in nature is so stunning and so overwhelming that it's God enough for me, and I think it's God enough for many of us if we think about it. You see, Richard's view, and those of the new atheists, is simply not going to reach out and persuade those who hold to the standard Abrahamic religious views to consider something else. Whereas I hope what I'm saying may help create a new kind of sacred space.

It's refreshing to hear an atheist not be dogmatic the way Dawkins is. Dogmatic atheists like Dawkins seem to me to be just as fanatical as fundamentalist Muslims. Atheism is Dawkins' religion and he proselytizes just as heavy-handedly. To believe that there is no God is as much a leap of faith as to believe that there is a God. Kaufman is a true scientist and philosopher much like our Deist Founders, Franklin and Jefferson.

The first national Thanksgiving

From James S. Robbins's essay:

The first national Thanksgiving was observed by Congressional decree on December 18, 1777. But this celebration was not tied to the tradition of the Pilgrims at Plymouth; it arose from the politics of the American Revolution, and in particular was the result of congressional intrigue against General George Washington.

I did not know this. If you're a history buff, read the whole essay. It's a treat.

Giving thanks

When I pray, I don't ask for anything because I know that I already have everything that I need and, if I do happen to need anything else, my needs are already known to my Creator and will be taken care of. Prayers to me mean simply singing the praises of God and giving thanks for what I have been given. So every morning before I start saying my prayers, I count my blessings. I don't go on and on with a laundry list of blessings but stick to those that I regard as the most important. Every morning I thank God for:

The gift of life; for every breathe and heartbeat; for my healthy body.

Peace of mind and the grace that has been showered on me all my life. (As long as I can remember I've always had "Someone to watch over me.")

My family (which nowadays consists only of my son and my sister.)

My friends Chuck and Andy (who more like family to me than simply friends.)

My beautiful home (with special thanks for the water in the creek and well and a good septic tank.)

My animals, dogs, cats, canaries, chickens and ducks.

My truck and my car.

My good neighbors.

My prosperous business and my (mostly) good tenants.

Today I add a few more. I am grateful for:

Being fortunate enough to be able to come to the USA.

Our wise Founders and the wonderful legacy they left us.

The brave men and women of our armed forces.

The words of inspiration and the beautiful music and works of art which wise men through the ages have bequeathed to us.

On Thanksgiving Day I celebrate arriving in the USA 30 years ago, meeting Chuck 27 years ago, meeting Andy 16 years ago and buying this beautiful farm and forest 5 years ago.

I have discovered that a heart filled with gratitude is the nearest thing to experiencing Heaven on earth and that counting my blessings brings more and more.

Happy Thanksgiving

Hectic day

I have to do three days work today. I may blog later tonight but, in case I don't, let me wish you a Happy Thanksgiving now.

Putting the bail-outs in proper perspective

From The Big Picture:

Whenever I discussed the current bailout situation with people, I find they have a hard time comprehending the actual numbers involved. That became a problem while doing the research for the Bailout Nation book. I needed some way to put this into proper historical perspective.

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

Oh, come on! 4.6165 trillion dollars is not THAT much bigger than 3.92 trillion, It's only about seven hundred thousand million dollars (700,000,000,000) more. What's a few hundred billion between friends in high places? Oops! Wasn't seven billion the first figure that Paulson floated last month and now it's nearly five trillion? Better start printing more money.

If this goes on much longer, it will be cheaper (but not as comfortable) to wipe your anus with dollar bills than toilet paper.

Bureaucrats attack the tax-payer

Not really but it sure reminds me of "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Oregon's Kafkaesque bureaucratic idiocy

Last year the accountant who handled my taxes was fired and one of the senior partners in the firm took over the account. It was then discovered that the fired accountant had made an error of judgement in filing my corporate taxes in 2005 and 2006. I won't go into too much boring detail but it has to do with the fact that my corporation does not own my real estate. I do. The corporation merely owns the business which manages, maintains and rents the real estate. This meant that I had overpaid taxes two years in a row. (If you own rental property and want to know the details, email me. A simple lease will save you tax dollars.)

Anyway, I sent in revised returns last June. The IRS refunded $6,000 within three months. Today a check for $600 from Oregon arrived as a refund for 2006. (God alone knows where the refund for 2005 is.) At the same time a bill for $140 also arrived. This was for the $120 which they figured I owe on my 2006 taxes plus interest and a penalty. After I picked my lower jaw off the floor at the sheer idiocy, I realized that it was not stupidity but duplicity. The State of Oregon thinks I'm so dumb that I'll fall for their scam. Oh, I'll pay it to avoid further penalties but I'll contest it - not for the money which is trivial but because I absolutely loathe bureaucracy.

I dutifully read Kafka in high school but never had much sympathy as I found him too depressing but, when stuff like this happens, I can completely understand why he wrote The Trial and The Castle.

California is not much better. When I sold my properties there before moving here, the state withheld $40,000 just in case I owed them taxes. I didn't owe any taxes but I've had to kiss that money goodbye because Sacramento is even more of a Kafkaesque nightmare than Salem.

Now you know why I hate government. Whatever political party or politician promises to dynamite all Federal and State bureaucracies has got my vote. As Reagan said:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Boy, I hate bureaucrats - and of course they're all unionized which means you can't fire them. But you can console yourself - come the revolution - with the thought of putting them in front of firing squads - if you can get them to stop gossiping on the phone and painting their toenails long enough.

Obama to the left bloggers: "Thanks for your help - now go away"

Some Republicans are sore losers but, if you think our internecine battles are bad, then just check out the leftist bloggers and see how they're eating their own.

Obama's supporters in the blogosphere are up in arms that, now the election is won, Democrats are ignoring them:

The bloody civil war for the soul of the Republican party – if it still has one – following its devastating losses this year, is being fairly well-documented. But less noticed is the growing internecine battle for the soul of the Democratic party, a fight which could prove to be no less bloody in the coming weeks, months and years.

Many of Barack Obama's most influential supporters in the blogosphere – the ones who, justifiably, believe they played an enormous role in helping to bring him to the dance – are growing none to happy with the direction for "change" being signalled by both him and, even more so, the Democratic leadership in Congress.

[...]

At Americablog, another hugely popular and aggressive supporter of the Democratic party throughout the election cycle, an angry John Aravosis responded by charging:

Democrats have sent a clear message to all of you out there, to the entire blogosphere. ... You don't matter to these people. They don't fear you, so they don't care what you think.

They need to either fear your ability to hurt them, or envy your ability to help them. The netroots has entered envy territory, but the fear factor is lacking. The Democratic party, the Democratic establishment, doesn't like you. They want you to go away. That is, until the next time they need you.

BTW Americablog is part of the gay mafia that specializes in outing gay Republicans.

This is only the beginning. With Gates agreeing to stay on under Obama, the Iraq war is going to look like a picnic compared with the internecine battles in the Democratic Party. It seems sore losers have nothing on sore winners.

Silly news roundup

Woman celebrates wrong birthday 106 times:

London - One of Britain's oldest women has been celebrating her birthday on the wrong day - for more than a century.

Lena Thouless, 106, a great-grandmother from Bowthorpe, Norwich, has spent all her life celebrating her birthday on 23 November.

But detective work by her daughter, Lena Brooks, discovered she should have been blowing out the candles the day before, reports the Daily Telegraph.

Mrs Brooks, 55, also of Bowthorpe, was stunned to discover purely by chance that the extraordinary centenarian was actually born on 22 November.

She found her mother's birth certificate and is baffled why the family has always marked the occasion a day late.

Mrs Brooks said: "We were quite surprised when we found out. I have asked but no one in the family has any idea how the mishap occurred. But we still celebrate with mom on the 23rd as that's the day she has come to know as her birthday."

What surprised me about this story was not that Mrs Thouless got the date of her birthday wrong for 106 years but that she gave birth to her daughter, Mrs Brooks, at the age of 51.

Bacon bar snapped up by chocolate-lovers:

London - The world's first bacon-flavoured chocolate bar is proving an unlikely success with British consumers.

Selfridge's, the only British stockists of the American invention, sold its entire stock in 48 hours and is urgently seeking more, reports the Daily Mail.

Mo's Bacon Bar, which contains chunks of smoked bacon combined with milk chocolate, sells at a pricey £5,99 per 85g bar.

Ewan Venters, food and restaurant director at Selfridge's, said: "Bacon and chocolate sounds like a strange combination, but the execution is fantastic. It's a real explosion of flavours and people love it."

But the Daily Mail's Claudia Connell, a self-confessed chocolate addict and bacon fan, described it as "the most unpleasant thing ever to have passed my lips".

"The chocolate is intensely salty and the smokey bacon pieces are horribly out of place in something so sweet. The whole sensation is like eating chocolate that has been dunked in an overflowing ashtray," she wrote.

Cheating cooks know that the trick to giving anything a "bacon flavor" is something known as "liquid smoke." The problem with "liquid smoke" is that, if you add too much, it makes food taste like an ashtray. Still, I'm game to try Mo's Bacon Bar.

Space station recycled urine passes the taste test:

Houston - After several days without luck, astronauts finally ran a successful test on equipment that turns urine into drinking water - a necessity for supporting the international space station's crew, which will soon double.

"Not to spoil anything, but I think up here the appropriate words are 'Yippee!"' space station commander Mike Fincke told Mission Control early on Tuesday morning, shortly before bedtime.

"There will be dancing later," Mission Control replied.

Okay, I confess that I edited the headline just a bit. No one has actually volunteered to drink the stuff yet. But at least the machine now works. It would be awful if one of the crucial steps in turning pee into yippee went wrong.

"Conservative" means being fiscally responsible, thrifty, living within one's means.

I guess that means that I'm not a real "conservative." If I ran my business the way that all these corporations begging for bail-outs do, I'd be in real trouble. Paulson can talk for an hour and say nothing. No one, not even George Bush, has spelled out exactly where the money for this corporate welfare aka government bail-outs will come from.

They're all waffling because there is something that they don't want to say: there is nothing wrong with the economy except for one thing. Ever since the $4 gas this past summer, Americans have cut back on spending and Wall Street, through it's mouthpieces like Paulson and Bernanke, wants to stimulate consumerism. There is a huge inventory of unsold goods on the shelves.

But real wealth is not based on how much we consume; how many toys we buy. If you own your house, what do you spend the big money on? More fancy furniture or fixing the roof? All these hundreds of billions of bail-out dollars would be better spent fixing out leaky water pipes, rusting bridges and deteriorating roads.

But that would not achieve what the big corporations want. They want you to buy their toys. Spending money on fixing our infrastructure would have lasting benefits but it means not spending money on toys which is why the latest talk is about pumping more money into the credit card companies.

If Bush, Bernanke, Paulson and the movers and shakers of Wall Street are regarded as "conservatives", then obviously I am not a "conservative." But I really resent letting them steal the word. To me "conservative" means exactly what it says: being conservative and cautious not only culturally but fiscally; being thrifty and living within one's means.

Martin Durkin on the welfare state

From Jamie Glazov's interview with Martin Durkin, the producer of the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle:

Durkin: The Welfare State, pioneered in Britain of course, has corrupted this country to its core. It has transformed the country caricatured by Noel Coward and others – essentially pretty decent, self-reliant, and plucky – into a country which is thuggish, selfish, mindless, dispirited and lost. Gone is the British stiff upper lip. Modern Britons are moaning, self-pitying inadequates. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne’er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world’s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine.

I’m sorry to sound cross about this, but I don’t think people fully realise what’s happened. Britain has, I think, the highest crime rate of any industrialised country in the world. It is twice as high as the US. The violent crime rate is higher in London than New York. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse, the highest teenage pregnancy rate and the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease in the modern industrial world.

All this happened in just 40 years - both here and in the UK. Welfare also created the sick ghetto and white trash subcultures in the US.

24- Redemption: what crap

We recorded it yesterday and watched it tonight. I was going to write a long review about what nonsense it is but I really can't be bothered to waste my time. All I'll say is: it reminded me why I don't watch TV. Nuff said. I think I need some ipecac.

Five ideas to save conservatism

Not bad:

-OPPOSE LIBERALISM: All of this talk about “the direction of conservatism” is bullshit (and yeah, I realize this is a post about “the direction of conservatism…”) . From Burke to Metternich to Gingrich, the only responsibility of conservatism has been to provide a principled check on otherwise-unfettered social experimentation. Of course anti-ideology is, paradoxically, the most ideological thing you can think of. But it’s also the one thing that connects Chris Dodd to gun-toting Paulites, or Buckley conservatives to Fallwellite religious fascists. Forget abstract debates over neoconservatism and realism, or states rights or populism or judicial constructionism or the ownership society–the conservatives need to remind people that “conservatism” is a very basic and widely-appealing concept.

-DON’T GIVE UP ON SOCIAL CONSERVATISM. BUT DON’T EMPHASIZE IT EITHER: This is part and parcel of my first suggestion. The Rove-Palin divide-and-conquer strategy clearly isn’t a winner anymore, and conservatives really have nothing to gain from taking a hard-right stance on social issues. Then again, they have a lot to lose from giving up on them altogether. A “hate the sin, not the sinner” tack should win back to the social center that’s been voting blue in recent years: basically, conservatives should promote traditional values without championing measures that would punish those who don’t. This could mean greater federal subsidies for adoption programs and other abortion alternatives. And it would mean scrapping any and all Palin-like rhetoric on making all abortions illegal everywhere. And it would especially mean dropping this absurd crusade against same-sex marriage altogether–while, perhaps, emphasizing the importance of traditional values in non-traditional family settings.

-DUMP THE DRUG WAR: Need an issue that’ll win back the youth vote while moving conservatives in a simultaneously cautious and more progressive direction? Well, you’re welcome Michael Steele, ‘cuz this is a guaranteed winner. It’s in line with conservative ideology–the drug war is personally invasive and requires costly military and diplomatic interventions in countries that should be irrelevant to us. It also provokes utterly unnecessary confrontations with tinpots like Hugo Chavez, and costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year. Government thrift, personal liberty and a rational foreign policy are conservative hallmarks. Ending the drug war would prove that the “movement” (in so much as there is one) is dead serious about all three.

-RUN DAVID PETRAUS FOR PRESIDENT IN 2012: If the past 8 years have proven anything, it’s that ideology doesn’t matter if you’re winning. Indeed, winning is the one issue on which David Brooks and his archrival Sarah Palin probably agree–which is to say that they both think winning is a good thing. After basically winning an unwinnable war and doing more for America’s standing in the world than anyone in government, Petraus will be well positioned for a successful 2012 or 2016 presidential run. And he’s a registered Republican.

-FOUND AN OPINION JOURNAL OTHER THAN THE NATIONAL REVIEW AND THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Both have gone from being quirky voices of reason in American political discourse to being unreadable party rags. Commentary could fill the conservative intellectual void, but it’s best years are far behind it: for now, there has to be an infusion of new ideas and a way of making them appealing to what few idealized, intelligent and contrarian types remain in this country. A kind of National Review 2.0 could be something for those people to rally around.

Also dump Malkin, Coulter, Hannity and O'Reilly as spokesmen. Keep Limbaugh - at least he's got a sense of humor and some humility.

The news today = Monty Python's Flying Circus

I read the news today - oh boy!

The True Size Of The Crisis:

The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

...The worst financial crisis in two generations has erased $23 trillion, or 38 percent, of the value of the world's companies and brought down three of the biggest Wall Street firms.

...The money that's been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It's nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures.

This is beyond ridiculous. I'm beginning to think that Obama's plans to fix our roads and bridges is saner than bailing out Wall Street. Problem is: I know that he and the Democrats will make a mess of it but at least the money will be used to employ Joe the plumber rather than pay Joseph the hedge fund scammer's bloated bonus.

Oliver Stone’s Bush film

I loved Oliver Stone’s Bush film — and I know why the critics hated it:

The movie W. did not provide the crude anti-Bush agitprop that the reviewers craved, says Rod Liddle. This was precisely its strength: we need to get inside the minds even of those we most deplore.

[...]

All of the reviewers I trust — and quite a few I don’t — slagged the film off, or damned it with the faintest of praise. The excellent Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian called it a ‘solemn hagiography’, a ‘frankly timid’ film that ‘pulled its punches’. Time Out’s reviewer whined that it ‘made excuses’ for George W. Bush and was neither ‘coruscating or edifying’.

It’s an odd thing. I thought the film was terrific — witty, well-acted (apart from by Ms Thandie Newton, who played Condi Rice as if she were a vaudeville turn) and humane.

[...]

But my suspicion is that it’s a good film and that the reviewers didn’t particularly like it for reasons other than the purely cinematic. The clue is in that phrase of Bradshaw’s, ‘pulled punches’. I think British film reviewers didn’t like W. precisely because it invested the appalling President with a degree of understanding, with a soupçon of humanity.

I probably won't bother to see it because I didn't like the Stone movies (JFK, Nixon) that I've seen so far.

Agatha Christie - hidden tapes found

Mystery of the missing tapes:

A couple of months ago her grandson Mathew Prichard was going through her old effects at her home Greenway, in south Devon, and to his astonishment found a box full of old tapes and an old Grundig Memorette reel-to-reel tape recorder. Hidden for over 35 years, and dating back to the 1960s when she was making working notes for her biography, published in 1978, the tapes reveal an intriguing glimpse into the intimate life of one of the world’s most private and reclusive writers.

[...]

First off, the bad news for the many Christie aficionados (worldwide her novels have sold over two billion and are in 45 languages): the tapes do not reveal what happened during the 11 days that Agatha Christie went missing in 1926. Christie, whose first marriage was disintegrating, completely disappeared. The public and press, in true mystery-novel style, were convinced she was dead, perhaps from suicide. After a mass search, she was found at the Hydro Hotel, Harrogate, looking quite well and with no explanation for the episode other than amnesia. She never spoke about it (her family now accept her biographer Laura Thompson’s view that she had some form of breakdown) and sadly the tapes hold no clues to this elusive period.

[...]

In another tape, she explains how she came to create Miss Marple, the elderly spinster who acts as an amateur sleuth for 12 novels. She is adamant that Miss Marple is not based on her grandmother, but admits there are similarities: ‘She had this in common with my grandmother that, although a completely cheerful person, she always expected the worst of anyone and everything and, with almost frightening accuracy, was usually proved right.’

She also rejects the idea — despite many of her fans wishing it so — that Poirot and Miss Marple could ever meet because Poirot was such an egoist and would not like to have an ‘elderly spinster’ giving him advice. Poirot, of course, would not fit into the cosy world of Miss Marple: ‘They are both stars, and stars in their own right. I shall not let them meet unless I feel a very sudden and unexpected urge to do so.'

[...]

Agatha Christie would also be the first to admit she was not a great literary writer and never set out to be, and what is clear from the tapes is that she was happy her books gave entertainment, enjoyment and escapism.

"Witness to War"

This was in our Sunday newspaper.

A local leftie goes to Iraq:

A free-lance photographer gains a new understanding of Iraq and a new respect for the soldiers of the U.S. military.

I went to Iraq not knowing at all what to expect. What I found was a new appreciation for what our military men and women go through. They have an enormous and dangerous task ahead of them, and a vast majority of the time they do it with respect, sensitivity and honor. The Iraqi people who have been standing up against oppression by radicals and insurgent groups inspired me. The Iraqi individuals who work and sacrifice alongside U.S. troops expressed genuine love and concern for their country, and they are thankful for the U.S. presence.

[...]

I was against this war from its inception. Most, if not all, of the reasons given to justify this war turned out to be false or half-true at best. I wish we could wind back the clock, but we cannot change the fact that we invaded Iraq. We and the Iraqi people must continue to work together to ensure that Iraq will be better than it was before.

"All Passion Spent"

We watched this 1986 BBC mini-series based on the novel by Vita Sackville-West (published in 1931) over the past few nights. It's brilliant. If you're in the mood for some real adult fare, then I recommend this.

We were remarking afterwards that British "literary" TV shows have deteriorated in the past ten years. Nowadays they are simply costume dramas with the "literary" guts ripped out whereas a show like "All Passion Spent" was true to the book. This dumbing down of "literary" TV shows seems to have coincided with British TV shows now being made with the American market in mind. I find that ridiculous. Any American who enjoys British "literary" TV shows is probably familiar with the literature on which they are based and enjoys intellectual stimulation.

The novel is centered around Lady Slane, an 88 year old woman whose husband has just died. For 70 years she has been the dutiful wife of a “great man”, a Viceroy of India and Prime Minister of Britain and father of her six children who are now also aging and have grandchildren of their own.

When their father dies, the children descend on their mother and start deciding her fate. They tell Lady Slane that she cannot live alone because (as Sackville-West writes) "all her life long, gracious and gentle, she had been wholly submissive - an appendage." Her children think that she has no mind of her own because all she has ever been is a wife and mother.

But Lady Slane has a surprise for her children. She decides that she is going to do exactly as she pleases. She tells her children: "I am going to be completely self-indulgent. I am going to wallow in old age...I want no one about me except those who are nearer to their death than to their birth." All she wants is to live alone with her elderly French maid in a small cottage in Hampstead which is completely "unfitting of her stature."

At one point Lady Slane is having a conversation with an old acquaintance from India. He tells her that he has found that his memory has improved with age. She agrees.

I agree too. I have found that my mind, while it may not hold trivial facts in my short-term memory as well as it once did - especially since I had a stroke 5 years ago, can now recall vividly things that happened decades ago. By "vividly" I mean with an astonishing amount of detail; even the smells. And these memories are not simply thoughts. They are "visions" in that I can "see" "hear" and "smell" my memories in my mind's eye - a bit like a waking dream.

This started recently, maybe a few months ago, and I was so startled at first that I thought to myself: "I wonder if I am about to die. Drowning people supposedly see their whole lives flash before them. Is this like a slower version of that?" It's not like I even have to make any effort to remember the past anymore. These vivid recollections pop up on their own but only when I am quiet and contemplative; usually writing or reading. They don't happen when I am busy - fortunately.

The title of Sackville-West's novel, "All Passion Spent", comes from John Milton's poem, Samson Agonistes:

All is best, though we oft doubt,
What th' unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
Oft he seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns
And to his faithful Champion hath in place
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns
And all that band them to resist
His uncontrollable intent.
His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismist,
And calm of mind all passion spent.

The role of Lady Slane was played by Wendy Hiller, one of my favorite British actresses. She is not very well known in the USA because she did not make many movies. She acted mostly on stage. George Bernard Shaw cast her in his plays "Saint Joan," "Pygmalion" and "Major Barbara." When a film version of "Pygmalion" was made in 1938, he insisted that Hiller play the part of Eliza Doolittle. As she got older, she specialized in Ibsen's plays and I saw her on stage as as Mrs. Alving in "Ghosts" in Edinburgh in 1972. She died in 2003 at the age of 91.

Wendy Hiller at the peak of her beauty in her 30s:























And as I saw her on stage when she was 60:

Another "Brave New World" moment: the new aristocracy, "celebrities"

Toby Young writes:

Fifty years ago, the sociologist Michael Young—my father—published a book that, in his own words, gave him a minor claim to immortality. A dystopian satire in the same vein as 1984, it was an attempt to sound a warning bell about various social and political trends by describing a future in which they had come to fruition. It wasn't as successful as Orwell's book, but it did enjoy some afterlife thanks to a word my father coined to describe the new ruling class that would hold sway in this nightmarish future. It was called The Rise of the Meritocracy.

People are often surprised when I tell them that my father invented the word "meritocracy"—they assume it must have been around for ever—and even more astonished to learn that he wasn't a fan. How could anyone be against meritocracy? It seems incomprehensible today.

[...]

I believe it is largely due to the emergence of a new class that my father didn't anticipate and which, for want of a better word, I shall call the "celebritariat." I am thinking of the people featured in Heat magazine, rather than Hello!—the premier league footballers and their wives, pop stars, movie stars, soap stars and the like.

[...]

If the celebritariat really does play a role in legitimising economic inequality, it is also because ordinary people imagine that they, too, could become members. A YouGov poll of nearly 800 16-19-year-olds conducted on behalf of the Learning and Skills Council in 2006 revealed that 11 per cent said they were "waiting to be discovered."

Some commentators believe that the preponderance of reality shows and their casts of freaks and wannabes—the lumpen celebritariat—have devalued the whole notion of stardom. Yet the YouGov survey discovered that appearing on a reality television programme was a popular career option among teenagers, and another poll found 26 per cent of 16 to 19 year olds believe it is easy to secure a career in sports, entertainment or the media. If the existence of the celebrity class does play a role in securing people's consent to our winner-takes-all society, then the fact that the entry requirements are so low helps this process along. If people believe there is a genuine chance they might be catapulted to the top, they're more likely to endorse a system in which success is so highly rewarded.

[...]

After that, their "specialness" will take care of the rest.

The music critic Albert Goldman identified this attitude in his 1978 book on the disco phenomenon: "Everybody sees himself as a star today. This is both a cliché and a profound truth. Thousands of young men and women have the looks, the clothes, the hairstyling, the drugs… the self-confidence, and the history of conquest that proclaim a star… Never in the history of showbiz has the gap between amateur and professional been so small." (Quoted by James Wolcott in "Now, Voyeur," Vanity Fair, September 2000.)

[...]

Will the day come when the celebritariat endangers its own existence by becoming a self-perpetuating elite, closed off to new members? There are signs that this is beginning to happen, with the children of famous people inheriting their celebrity status, just as aristocrats inherited their parents estates.

When I first started reading this, I thought" "So what's the big deal? Toby Young is British and therefore very class conscious. Who cares if a few louts become movie and sports stars?"

Then I read that final paragraph and realized what he was getting at. There's a lot of money involved and I agree that it is kind of creepy to think that Brangelina's or Magic Johnson's kids will one day rule the roost. Ugh!

And then I had another Brave New World shudder. I think I'm getting old and curmudgeonly.

45 years ago today

Two of my favorite writers, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley, died on Nov. 22, 1963. I did not know that they had died at the time. I only found out years later.

But I did know that JFK was assassinated on that day. I will never forget it. I was living in a Catholic monastery at the time and of course JFK was a Catholic hero. We got out of Mass and had breakfast a usual and then went to the rec room expecting to play a game of snooker or ping-pong but the snooker and ping-pong tables were covered with the pages of the Saturday newspapers announcing that JFK had been killed on the previous day.

A drizzly, foggy day

It calls for some logs on the wood stove, warm soup and a nap. See you later.

The end of the American Revolution - "universal health care"

From How Tom Daschle Might Kill Conservatism:

The GOP strategist had been joking about the upcoming presidential election and giving his humorous assessments of the candidates. Then he suddenly cut out the schtick and got scary serious. "Let me tell you something, if Democrats take the White House and pass a big-government healthcare plan, that's it. Game over. Government will dominate the economy like it does in Europe. Conservatives will spend the rest of their lives trying to turn things around and they will fail."

And it turns out that the fearsome harbinger of free-market doom is the mild-mannered ex-U.S. senator with the little, red glasses, Tom Daschle. He'll be the guy shepherding President Barack Obama's healthcare plan through Congress via his probable role as secretary of health and human services.

[...]

Recently, I stumbled across this analysis of how nationalized healthcare in Great Britain affected the political environment there. As Norman Markowitz in Political Affairs, a journal of "Marxist thought," puts it: "After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments."

Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: "Blocking Obama's health plan is key to the GOP's survival."

When 71% of all Americans (and even 58% of Republicans) want "universal health care," then you know we are well on our way to the Brave New World of European-style welfare statism.

I've known for quite a while that socialism and eventual one world government (probably under the UN) is where the West is headed which is why I'm not nearly as exercised by the leftward tilt as most conservatives are. It's inevitable.

Yes, I'm saddened that we are going to throw away the greatest experiment in human freedom ever devised before we have even realized its full potential. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time.

Even our Founders knew that democracy had a built-in danger: that, once people had figured out that they could vote themselves all sorts of government largesse, they would vote themselves into debt and out of freedom.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

I may change the name of this blog to The Drunk Blogger and just get pickled for the next 8 years. In fact I may just get pickled for the rest of my life. I'm just glad that I won't live to see the Brave New World in all its glory.

PS Maybe I should have titled this post not "The end of the American Revolution" but "the end of redneck self reliance." But that makes me feel even sadder. We're as dead as the dodo or the dinosaurs. I need a drink. Or maybe I should become Amish and console myself that "the meek shall inherit the earth."

Mike Huckabee and libertarians

I never could stand Huckabee not only because he's a huckster but because he is not a Reaganite. He's a European-style Christian Democrat. Yes, I know that he's smart and has seen which way the wind is blowing for social conservatives aka the "religious right" many of whom are not averse to big government, "universal health care" etc. But that doesn't mean he's right. It just means that he's an opportunist.

John Henke writes:

We've seen a lot of social conservatives upset over today's intemperate attack by Kathleen Parker (Note: she was unnecessarily contemptuous, but her point that "the Republican Party -- and conservatism with it -- eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one's heart where it belongs" is worth serious consideration).

Well, I am a libertarian, so let's talk about the Kathleen Parker of the social conservative crowd: Mike Huckabee.

This week, Huckabee called libertarians the "real threat" to the Republican Party.

[...]

We've come quite some way since 1975, when Reagan said "I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism."

I'm a libertarian. Of course that's "libertarian" with a small "l." I can't stand big "L" "Libertarianism" anymore than Huckabee can but small "l" "libertarianism" is simply the classical Lockean liberalism which inspired our Founders. The word was invented because socialists had stolen the word "liberalism."

But Huckabee may be the future of the GOP. We're in for a ride. Fasten your seat-belts and please don't throw up on your friends when we go around the curves.

The "gay blogger" in a snit over DADT

Obama has announced that he will not keep his campaign promise to repeal DADT (sorry but I don't do links to the "gay blogger):

Two major Clinton hacks are among the transition team - Fred Hochberg, perhaps the central pillar of the Human Rights Campaign and Clintonite dead-ender, and Roberta Achtenberg, formerly at HUD. The legacy of these people was DOMA, a doubling of the rate of discharges of gay servicemembers, and the perpetuation of the irrelevant Human Rights Campaign. Appointing people like these Clinton retreads and establishment Dems is of a piece with pushing DADT repeal back years.

Let us review the politics of this: the most recent poll shows 75 percent of the American public favors lifting the ban, including 64 percent of Republicans. But Obama cannot go there until 2010. It's sooo controversial. I understand the need not to repeat Clinton's errors, especially at the very beginning of an administration. Delaying and consulting is fine. But the way in which gay servicemembers, risking their lives for their country as we speak, are still regarded as radioactive in the Democratic establishment, enabled by the internalized homophobia of the Human Rights Campaign, is appalling.

I once met Roberta Achtenberg when I lived in San Francisco. I did not like her. She's hard, cold and calculating; a tough (and realistic) lesbian and a politician above all else. I find it ironic that I (and 64 percent of my fellow Republicans) are more open-minded on this issue than Obama.

PS the Human Rights Campaign is THE gay lobby in DC. Cynical gays joke that the HRC (Human Rights Campaign) is simply the tool of HRC (Hillary Rodham Clinton.) And they're right.

Updating the definition of "racist"

Peter Kirsanow:

[T]he better dictionaries are in the process of updating the definition of racist to reflect contemporary usage:

Racist—n.,adj. 1. Any person who performs any act, holds any belief or makes any statement that negatively reflects upon or adversely affects Barack Obama or his policies, positions, interests, conduct, associates, or holiness. 2. Any act, belief or statement that negatively reflects upon or adversely affects Barack Obama or his policies, positions, interests, conduct, associates, or holiness. Synonyms: conservative; Republican; red state; rural; churchgoer; gun owner.

Commies: "Proof that Palin is a blood-thirsty redneck"

Sarah talks to the press at a turkey farm while (OMG!) turkeys are being butchered in the background.



I loved the emails to Byron York especially these:

Killing is what happens on farms. Seriously. I'm saying this as a farmer.

City people think that farms are "where life happens." Nonsense. Farming is about killing stuff. I don't even raise livestock or poultry and I have to kill stuff.

I can get crops to grow by simply putting seed in the ground. The rest of my job is to kill, kill, kill. Kill weeds. Kill insect pests. Kill vertebrate pests. Whether by herbicide, pesticides, shooting, trapping, stomping, you name it — I spend far more time killing than I do making something grow. Mother nature takes care of the growing. I have to remove the competition. There have been days when I've trapped 50+ pocket gophers and shot 100 ground squirrels - before lunch. They needed killing, and the next day, more of them were killed because they needed killing. At other times, I've shot dozens of jackrabbits at night and flung them out into the sagebrush for coyotes to eat.

And none of that starts in with helping neighbors slaughter steers, lambs, chickens, etc.

That's farming: killing. Lots of it.

Want to know why this nonsense is 'news'?

Because an increasingly large cohort of America in the lower 48 (and probably Hawaii) are p—-ies. They have no clue where their food comes from, they don't hunt, they don't fish, so they get to act all high and mighty about scenes like this.

In Alaska, they have critters that consider humans food. Absent high powered rifles, humans are not at the apex of the food chain in Alaska. That will tend to give people a different perspective than the silk pantywaists in the lower 48.

And:

She should tell the media that she apologizes and she'll do her next interview inside an abortion clinic.

Here's Tim Blair's roundup of reactions, AS BAD AS IT GETS:

TURKEYS DIE AS GOVERNOR PALIN TAKES QUESTIONS FROM MEDIA

GOV. SARAH KEEPS TALKING WHILE TURKEYS GET SLAUGHTERED BEHIND HER

GOV. PALIN APPARENTLY OBLIVIOUS TO TURKEY CARNAGE OVER HER SHOULDER

Hilarious!

Parts 4 and 5 of Peter Robinson's interview with Shelby Steele

Steele says no white candidate could have won the 2008 presidential election armed with Barack Obama’s policies.

Peter Robinson: Mark Steyn wrote soon after the election,

"The president-elect’s so-called tax cut will absolve 48 percent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all. Just under half the population will be on the dole. By 2012 it will be more than half. This will be an electorate where the majority will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism and innovation over the cocoon of the nanny state….That will be the death of the American idea."

Shelby Steele: Right. But you know what’s interesting to me about that? No white candidate in America could have won an election based on those policies. That’s the interesting and insidious thing to me. No white man—John Edwards could never have won an election based on policies like that. So the price America is paying for its racial history is this reversion. And that same racial moral authority is going to be Obama’s biggest weapon as president. Who is going to want to stand in his way? Because whites are still motivated by race, the dummies.

Steele says racism – in the aftermath of the 2008 presidential election — is now located by default in the Republican party. How can the GOP shake this stigma? Steele says the process won’t be easy, and that it may very well lead Republicans to betray the values that have made America great.

Steele: Whites in general used to be stigmatized as racists. By going with Obama, liberals now feel that they’ve escaped that stigma. That means the stigmatization of whites is now focused on the Republican Party and on conservatism as a point of view. [Liberals say] this is where racism is now located, and we can isolate it in those red states in the South and Southwest.

It is going to be a difficult, difficult struggle for the Republican Party. My fear is that Republicans will end up betraying what is good about them—the values of fairness and merit—to get back in the game. That’s how societies decline. [They] trade away those values.

New economic worry: deflation

If it's not one thing, it's another.

Consumer prices drop by record 1% in October:

Closely-watched index shows the largest drop seen in last 61 years.

The big drop in inflation reflected not only a huge fall in gasoline and other energy costs, but widespread declines in other areas. Core consumer prices, which exclude food and energy, fell by 0.1 percent last month, the first drop in core prices in more than a quarter-century.

There were price declines for clothing, new and used cars, and airline fares.

[...]

While some are worried that the price retreat could raise the prospect of a deflation, a prolonged bout of falling prices, most economists believe that current conditions are not likely to set the stage for such a development, which last occurred in the U.S. during the Great Depression.

Falling prices raise worries about deflation:

If price declines continue and become more widespread, there’s a risk the downward trend could feed on itself in a spiral that can take on a ruinous momentum. It’s called deflation. And some economists are warning the threat is increasing.

[...]

Although the risk is still considered relatively small, concern about deflation is one reason stocks have been hammered this week, sending the broad Standard & Poor's 500 to its lowest close since 1997 Thursday. The rapid slowdown in the economy, coupled with the collapse of housing and financial markets, has increased the threat of a broad, sustained drop in prices.

While deflation might sound welcome, in fact it can be devastating to borrowers, banks and businesses. The Great Depression in the 1930s was accompanied by deflation of 10 percent per year, reflecting the widespread lack of demand. Falling prices in the 1890s made it impossible for farmers to keep up with mortgage payments, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke noted in a 2002 speech on the topic.

As prices fall, consumers and businesses become less willing to spend and invest, worsening the economic downturn, as happened in Japan's "lost decade" of the 1990s.

A sustained drop in prices hurts in two ways. First, because consumers and businesses anticipate prices will continue to fall, they would likely cut back further on spending and investment. Why shell out $1,200 for that flat-panel TV today when you can get it for $800 six months from now?

As spending dries up, the economy starts to shrink; about two-thirds of the U.S. gross domestic product is based on consumer spending. As GDP shrinks, so do the companies providing those goods and services for consumers. As companies shrink or go out of business, unemployment rises. Out-of-work consumers have less money to spend, which cuts deeper into the economy. Once the cycle takes hold, it's very difficult to stop.

Deflation brings another, potentially bigger problem for an economy swollen with too much debt. Inflation is good news for anyone who owes money because, as prices rise, spending power is eroded and the real value of money declines. When inflation is rampant, you get to pay back the $1,000 you borrowed last year with dollars that are worth a little less each year.

That debtor advantage is turned upside down if deflation takes hold. As prices fall, the spending power of your money goes up. But so does the real value of your debt — because you have to pay it back with money that has increased in real value.

[...]

The recent, huge injection of hundreds of billions of dollars into the banking system should help offset deflationary pressures. Tax cuts could help, along with further increases in government spending on rebuilding roads and bridges. As the government pumps money into the economy and financial system that generally boosts inflation and should limit the odds that deflation could take hold.

The First Mother-in-law

Brit Hume showed this video on Fox yesterday. I loved the expression on Michelle's face. You just know that she wears the pants in the family. She's as tough as nails. I really could like her. What a pity she's a commie.

No blogging till later tonight

It's raining today.

This painting ("Rain Falling in Alsace") by Axel Rouvin is huge so click it to enlarge it.

Barcelona

Dirty Harry recommended this movie and I've enjoyed most of his recommendations so I rented it from Netflix. We just watched it tonight and I enjoyed it so much I thought I'd mention it now rather than waiting to do so when I do my monthly video reviews.

From IMdB:

Ted [Boynton], a stuffy white guy from Illinois working in sales for the Barcelona office of a US corporation, is paid an unexpected visit by his somewhat less stuffy cousin Fred [Boynton], who is an officer in the US Navy. Over the next few months, both their lives are irrevocably altered by the events which follow Fred's arrival, events which are the trivial stuff of a comedy of manners at first but which gradually grow increasingly dramatic.

Will Stillman wrote and directed it and it's definitely autobiographical. Stillman lived in Barcelona for 2 years in the 80s and this movie distills his take on the ignorant and idiotic European anti-Americanism and satirizes it mercilessly. The satire is dry and very subtle. It's a "dialogue" movie. Just the kind that I like. For instance:

Ted Boynton: Positive thinking is fine in theory. But whenever I try it on a systematic basis... I end up really depressed.

[...]

Ted: Spanish girls tend to be really promiscuous.

Fred: You're such a prig.

Ted: No, I wasn't using "promiscuous" pejoratively. It's just a fact. They have completely different attitudes toward sex.

Fred: Well, I wasn't using "prig" pejoratively.

[...]

Marta: I don't go to bed with just anyone anymore. I have to be attracted to them sexually.

[...]

Woman : You can't say Americans are not more violent than other people.

Fred: No.

Woman: All those people killed in shootings in America?

Fred: Oh, shootings, yes. But that doesn't mean Americans are more violent than other people. We're just better shots.

[...]

Fred: My jazz rule is: If you can't dance to it, you don't want to know about it.

[...]

Fred: "Yankee" and "gringo" are obviously pejorative, but it's the standard dictionary term that's the most insulting of all. "Estadunidense." Dense. D-E-N-S-E. It's the same spelling. Dense: thick, stupid. Every time you hear it. Estadunidense-dense-dense. It's like a direct slap in the face. It's incredible.

Montserrat: I think you are too sensitive.

Fred: Oh great, now we're too sensitive.

[...]

Fred: I think it's well-known that anti-Americanism has its roots in sexual impotence, at least in Europe.

[Said about the commie creep, Ramon, who becomes impotent as soon as he has "known" a woman once.]

[...]

Ted: Maybe you'd like an analogy. Well, take... take these ants. In the U.S. view, a small group, or cadre, of fierce red ants have taken power and are oppressing the black ant majority. Now the stated U.S. policy is to aid those black ants opposing the red ants in hopes of restoring democracy, and to impede the red ants from assisting their red ant comrades in neighboring ant colonies.

Ramon: That is clearly the most disgusting description of U.S. policy I have ever heard. The Third World is just a lot of ants to you.

Jurgen: Those are people dying, not ants.

Ted: No, I... I don't think you understand. I was reducing everything to ant scale, the... the U.S. included. An ant White House, an ant CIA, an ant Congress, an ant Pentagon...

Ramon: Secret ant landing strips, illegally established on foreign soil.

Fred: Where are the red ants?

Ted: [pointing to an ant hill] There.

[Fred crushes the ants. Ted cringes and the Europeans gasp in outrage - one of the funniest scenes in the movie.]

[...]

Marta: Ramon is very persuasive, and he painted a terrible picture of what it would be like for her to live the rest of her life in America, with all of its crime, consumerism, and vulgarity. All those loud, badly dressed, fat people watching their eighty channels of television and visiting shopping malls. The plastic throw-everything-away society with its notorious violence and racism. And finally, the total lack of culture.

[Yeah, right! Europe is so cultured that dozens are killed in riots every time they play soccer.]

[...]

Fred: Maybe you can clarify something for me. Since I've been, you know, waiting for the fleet to show up, I've read a lot, and...

Ted: Really?

Fred: And one of the things that keeps popping up is this about "subtext." Plays, novels, songs - they all have a "subtext," which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that's right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what's above the subtext?

Ted: The text.

Fred: OK, that's right, but they never talk about that.

[...]

Marta: I think there is something fascist about a boy who immediately talks of marrying a woman he likes.

Fred: I don't think Ted is a fascist of the marrying kind.

[...]

Fred: You think wedding vows are going to change everything? God, your naivete is astounding! Didn't you see "The Graduate"?

Ted: You can remember "The Graduate"?

Fred: Yeah, I can remember a few things. Apparently you don't. The end? Katharine Ross has just married this really cool guy - tall, blond, incredibly popular, the make-out king of his fraternity in Berkeley - when this obnoxious Dustin Hoffman character shows up at the back of the church, acting like a total asshole. "Elaine! Elaine!" Does Katharine Ross tell Dustin Hoffman, "Get lost, creep. I'm a married woman"? No. She runs off with him - on a bus. That is the reality.

[Doesn't that describe the idiotic ending to the idiotic movie, "The Graduate" perfectly?]

[...]

Ted: You see, that's one of the great things about getting involved with someone from another country. You can't take it personally. What's really terrific is that when we act in ways which might objectively seem asshole-ish or, or, incredibly annoying, they don't get upset at all. They don't take it personally. They just assume it's some national characteristic.

Fred: They're calling us pigs. That's meant to hurt!

Stillman obviously loved Barcelona but loathed the Barcelonans. As a foreigner living in Europe for ten years, I could relate to it completely. European cities are fascinating because of the history but Europeans are not. They are not in awe of their own history as we are. Most of them are barbarians and the rest of them are simply pretentious snobs.

Barcelona was made in 1994. Stillman has made two other movies: Metropolitan (in 1990) which was nominated for an Oscar and The Last Days of Disco (in 1998). I intend to watch them too.

My dream treehouse

Boy! I just love treehouses. The first treehouse that I ever knew was my friend, Ernest's. His grandpa had built him a treehouse in the tree above his (grandpa's) aviary which was filled with exotic finches, budgerigars and fantail doves.

Ernest and I would spend many a lazy summer afternoon up there "settling world affairs" listening to the peeping of the finches, the chatter of the budgies and the the cooing of the doves. Well we were only little boys so "settling world affairs" was a very simple, friendly and enjoyable task.

I've got plans for a treehouse between three Douglas firs on the hill above the farmhouse which has a panoramic view of the Pacific ocean. But it won't be quite as elaborate as this one featured in Popular Mechanics (my favorite childhood magazine.) (HT Ace.)

Treehouses have come a long way from a few planks nailed to a tree with "no girls allowed" scrawled across one of the boards:

In fact, the best ones take quite a bit of fresh engineering. Take this treehouse, for instance, on one of the San Juan Islands in Washington. At 1140 sq ft, with several decks, a lofted bed, plumbing, electricity and all the fixings, it's a house like any other. But it's also a house that needs to accommodate the Douglas fir tree it's built on, and trees sway and grow.

Charles Greenwood of Treehouse Engineering, a professional engineer with almost three decades of experience in the field, designed the San Juan abode with this in mind. Greenwood added a series of house-to-ground mounts that take some of the stress away from the trees: The system lets them rock in the wind without shaking the house off of its load-bearing supports.

But I almost prefer this one:

Not all treehouses are deep in the forest. All it takes is one good, sturdy trunk: This Scots Pine fits the bill. Derek Saunderson and his team at Amazon Treehouses fashioned the Lodge after an existing home on a plot in the Scottish Highlands, using a two-tiered support system of planks that hug the tree at both its midsection and near to the ground.

There's not a thing about this loch-side dwelling that isn't scenic. It's got plenty of water-facing windows that offer views and natural light. Its staircase, not to be outdone by the rest of the construction, runs between two large boughs of the pine as it leads up to the Lodge.

Treehouses such as this aren't cheap—an elaborate one like the Lodge can cost in the ballpark of $100,000.

There are another 8 treehouses at the link - each one more amazing than the one before. Drool.