The BIG event in our neck of the woods

Every year, from Thanksgiving until New Year's Day, our local botanical gardens, Shoreacres, is decorated (by volunteers) with hundreds of thousands of lights. More than 80,000 people come from all over to see the spectacle every year.

The first year that we went, there were busloads of Japanese tourists and every year you will meet tourists from all over Europe. So far I've met people from France, Denmark and Germany and even Brazil. (Last year when I took my sister and friends from South Africa, we seem to have made quite a big splash in a small pond and ended up in the news as "visitors all the way from Africa.") Of course all the locals go to "see the lights" every year.

The first photo is of the fountain in the middle of the gardens with the Gardener's Cottage in the rear. The second photo is of the parlor in the cottage which is an old Victorian building (the rooms are amazingly small) where free hot cider and home-baked cookies are served by volunteers every night.

Three bachelors, two widows and a partridge in a pear tree

Last year we had my sister and two friends (whom I had not seen in 40 years) here from South Africa for Christmas. It was a hectic time because we were tour guides and hosts. This year will be a quieter affair with the two widows (who live opposite the mailboxes which are about a mile down the road from our farm) coming for Christmas dinner.

Gail lost her husband a year or so after we bought our farm. Then her sister, Bonnie, from Kansas lost her husband a couple of years ago and came to live with Gail. They are the sweetest nicest people you could wish to know. But most of my neighbors are wonderful except for one family - but then every neighborhood has at least one trashy family with more old junker cars than livestock in the yard.

It will be a "quieter affair" but not dull. The last time Bonnie and Gail visited was for lunch in summer and we spent most of the day sitting at a picnic table under the peach tree yakking about the neighbors and all the exciting things that have happened to them: how our mutual neighbors went to Israel on a pilgrimage and a weasel got into their chicken coop and slaughtered most of their chickens. Talking about trips to foreign shores and the well-being of our livestock is not regarded as boring in this neck of the woods.

This year we'll probably spend most of the time talking about the really big news in our neck of the woods: forming a "local improvement district" to pave the dirt road that leads from the village to our farms. There are nearly 90 families involved along the five mile stretch of "main" road and six offshoot roads. We've had two meetings at the volunteer fire department station so far. It's very exciting being at the birth of a small democratic co-operative effort. I'll blog about it one day and probably bore you all to tears.

I wish I'd said this #358 - the financial crisis

From Dana Perino's address to the press on the NYT's editorial about Bush's latest speech on the economy:

Most people can accept that a news story recounting recent events will be reliant on '20-20 hindsight'. Today's front-page New York Times story relies on hindsight with blinders on and one eye closed.

The Times' 'reporting' in this story amounted to finding selected quotes to support a story the reporters fully intended to write from the onset, while disregarding anything that didn't fit their point of view. To prove the point, when they filed their story, NYT reporters were completely unfamiliar with the President's prime time address to the nation where he laid out in detail all of the causes of the housing and financial crises. For example, the President highlighted a factor that economists agree on: that the most significant factor leading to the housing crisis was cheap money flowing into the U.S. from rest of the world, so that there was no natural restraint on flush lenders to push loans on Americans in risky ways. This flow of funds into the U.S. was unprecedented. And because it was unprecedented, the conditions it created presented unprecedented questions for policymakers.

In his address the President also explained in detail the failure of financial institutions to perform normal and necessary due diligence in creating, buying and selling new financial products — a problem that almost no one saw as it was happening.

"...the most significant factor leading to the housing crisis was cheap money flowing into the U.S. from rest of the world, so that there was no natural restraint on flush lenders to push loans on Americans in risky ways."

This is exactly why banks all over the world have been sucked into the financial crisis which is now global. They bought "derivatives" or packages of loans (which were a mixed batch of good and bad paper) like hot cakes. That's not to say that our financial wizards are not also to blame for creating these shaky "derivatives" in the first place.

Chris Matthews lactating three times a day?

Mark Hemingway quoting from Slate:

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Berkeley, studies the emotions of uplift, and he has tried everything from showing subjects vistas of the Grand Canyon to reading them poetry—with little success. But just this week one of his postdocs came in with a great idea: Hook up the subjects, play Barack Obama's victory speech, and record as their autonomic nervous systems go into a swoon.

In his forthcoming book, Born To Be Good (which is not a biography of Obama), Keltner writes that he believes when we experience transcendence, it stimulates our vagus nerve, causing "a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat." For the 66 million Americans who voted for Obama, that experience was shared on Election Day, producing a collective case of an emotion that has only recently gotten research attention. It's called "elevation."

[Snip]

Keltner believes certain people are "vagal superstars"—in the lab he has measured people who have high vagus nerve activity. "They respond to stress with calmness and resilience, they build networks, break up conflicts, they're more cooperative, they handle bereavement better." He says being around these people makes other people feel good. "I would guarantee Barack Obama is off the charts. Just bring him to my lab."

It was while looking through the letters of Thomas Jefferson that Haidt first found a description of elevation. Jefferson wrote of the physical sensation that comes from witnessing goodness in others: It is to "dilate [the] breast and elevate [the] sentiments … and privately covenant to copy the fair example." Haidt took this description as a mandate. Since it's tricky to study the vagus nerve, he and a psychology student conceived of a way to look at it indirectly. The vagus nerve works with oxytocin, the hormone of connection. Since oxytocin is released during breast-feeding, he and the student brought in 42 lactating women and had them watch either an inspiring clip from The Oprah Winfrey Show about a gang member saved from a life of violence by a teacher or an amusing bit from a Jerry Seinfeld routine.

About half the Oprah-watching mothers either leaked milk into nursing pads or nursed their babies following the viewing; none of the Seinfeld watchers felt enough breast dilation to wet a pad, and fewer than 15 percent of them nursed. You could say elevation is Oprah's opiate of the masses, so it's fitting that she early on gave Obama her imprimatur.

Chris Matthews must be changing shirts three times a day.

Or at least having "thrills going up his leg" three times a day. I'm glad that Mark didn't say that Matthews was lactating three times a day - although I wouldn't be surprised if he did.

Roy Campbell's last visit to his native South Africa

I have written about Roy Campbell, the South African poet, before:

The Bloomsbury types, like Virginia Woolf, detested Campbell because he sided with Franco and the Royalists in the Spanish Civil War. They also detested J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Hilaire Belloc and other Catholic writers who also sided with Franco only because Franco was against communism and the destruction of the Catholic church.

Tolkien introduced Campbell to C.S. Lewis who did not like Roy Campbell at first because the South African poet had taken sides against the "heroic Communist revolutionaries" during the Spanish civil war - but Lewis was an atheist at the time. After Lewis had become a Christian he warmed up to Campbell. Tolkien probably liked Campbell because they were both Catholics and had both been born in South Africa.

[...]

Campbell later told his daughter, Anna, about his final break with the Bloomsberries when he and Virginia Woolf were both guests at Vita Sackville-West's house, "Long Barn" (which he describes as "something between a psychiatry clinic and a brothel.") This took place a few months before Woolf killed herself. Anna recalls:

What put the finishing touches to [my father's] malaise at Long Barn was coming across Virginia Woolf, crawling about under the bushes. She raised her face so ravaged by madness that he fled.

[...]

I love Roy Campbell not only for his poetry (which was excellent - T.S. Elliott thought that Campbell's poetry was better than his own) but because I can relate to his life so well. Like him, I was born in Durban and I matriculated from the same school as he did. He condemned apartheid in the 1920s even before there was a name for it and he hated communism and pretentious Marxisant dilletantes.

Virginia Woolf and the other Bloomsberries of course were playing the same game back in 1930s as the current commies do now - describing anyone who attacked their communist rubbish as "Fascist." Campbell was no Fascist but he did loathe communism.

Laurence Durrell came to Roy Campbell's defense over the allegations of the poet's "Fascism" thus:

He made enemies. He was held up as a Fascist by the poets of the Left but since they had already decreed that Plato was a Fascist, this too was something of a compliment. I once heard this wicked Fascist calmly recall that he had to leave South Africa because of the hostility he had aroused by seriously defending the cause of the Blacks in his writings....

When Campbell read Hitler's Mein Kampf, he declared: "Good gracious, this man won't do - he's a teetotalitarian vegetarian!"

[...]

Campbell and Tolkien saw the creeping liberal/commie danger and were in the fore-front of the fight against the rising socialist tide. What they had in common also was their Catholicism. It seemed that the only voices of opposition to the growing commie culture in Britain at that time were conservative Catholics like Tolkien, Campbell, Waugh, Chesterton, Belloc etc. They were horrified at the British populace's growing passivity and dependence upon the welfare state.

[...]

Tolkien convinced Lewis that he was deluded to be an atheist but it was Roy Campbell who finally won over C.S. Lewis in the battle against Fabianism/communism.

Campbell wrote reams of poetry - most of it pretty vicious anti-communist political satire (but some of it is not - it's primitive and passionate and African.) He realized even back in the 1930s that the worst commies - worse than all the nazis, bureaucrats, freedom-hating nosy-parking busy-bodies put together - were elitist leftie "academic" dilletantes playing with "intellectual ideas."

Whether the chosen agent of destruction
Be plague or famine, earthquake or eruption,
Conquistadores, like Cortes or Pizarro,
Or Commissar, more bigoted and narrow,
Or, worse than all, a snowy-haired professor,
Of a neat violin the fond possessor,
To fiddle when it all goes up in flames,
The crime is one: the sentence is the same!

[...]

Campbell became one of England's greatest poets with stops on the way during his youth as a bullfighter and anti-communist in Spain and later enlisting in Britain to fight against Hitler.

Campbell had to go to boot-camp when he was over forty in order to get into the army and by that time he was physcially pretty beat up already. But he ended up being an NCO and only got discharged after he had contracted malaria in East Africa where he was a spy for the Allies.

I transcribed the quotes below from Chapter 33 of Unafraid of Virginia Woolf - the Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell by Joseph Pearce.

At the end of 1953 Campbell went on a lecture tour in America.

America is absolutely marvelous, especially Chicago and Milwaukee the corn and cattle lands where wealth consists in real values - meat, bread and beer. The affability and true kindness of the people is remarkable, esecially in Chicago which is a magnificent spectacle, especially at night; with the statue of Ceres with her foot on the moon. I have never heard anything so stupid as the propaganda that makes out that Americans are undeveloped - I get audiences of hundreds (for tens in Oxford and Cambridge) sometimes 1200 - and their responses are more intelligent than in England.

Beneath the optimism and his claim that "this country gives me new faith" there was a re-emergence of the crudest reactionary politics. Senator McCarthy and general MacArthur were described as the "two greatest Yanks" and he had nothing but contempt for Adlai Stevenson, who had been the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate in the previous year's election. Campbell was staying with Stevenson's former wife, whom he described in a letter to [his friend] Lyle as "a leading anti-left." "Mrs Adlai is anti her husband's politics and a great girl," he declared in a letter to [his wife] Mary. To Lyle he reported that Stevenson's former wife had said, "how can those mugs, grown up men, listen to Adlai - I was only 17 when I met him and I found him out before I was 19."

In December, he arrived back at his farm in Portugal where he heard that the University of Natal intended to confer an honorary doctorate on him. Campbell had always been controversial among the leftist South African intelligensia mostly because he had fought for Franco's side against the communists in the Spanish Civil War.

But in, 1952, Campbell had somewhat rehabilitated himself in the eyes of the South African intelligensia by co-signing (with four other South African writers including Alan Paton who had recently become famous when he published his anti-apartheid novel, Cry the Beloved Country) an open letter to the South African government protesting the removal of the Coloureds (mixed race South Africans) from the voters' roll.

Delighted at this belated recognition from his native land, he began making plans to travel to South Africa.

[...]

Intoxicated by the rekindling of his love for South Africa, Roy gave an ill-advised and highly controversial address at the degree ceremony, which was held at the Pietermaritzburg City Hall on March 20. Abandoning his carefully prepared notes, he careered off on a tangent, giving free reign to his reactionary politics. His defense of South Africa and his vigorous attack on England led many to assume, quite wrongly, that Roy was defending Prime Minister Malan's racial policies. Later in the speech he condemned such policies, referring to "the dangerous and suicidal plight of our country," but by that time the venom of the rest of his speech had led many to the false assumption that Campbell's defense of South Africa indicated a defense of apartheid. As his audience listenened with a growing sense of unease and astonishment, Roy dismissed Churchill as a "valiant but superannuated Beefeater," denounced Roosevelt as "a tittering zombie" and condemned the part they had both played in "the Yalta booby trap" which had consigned half of Europe to Stalin's dictatorship.

[...]

In spite of the cool reception, Roy was unrepentant. On the following day he wrote to Rob Lyle. "I made a shock speech mostly about the fuss being kicked up about our ten million natives by people guilty of the sale of two hundred million natives of Europe to a far worse slavery, that tittering zombie Roosevelt and his henchman, the once valiant but senile Beefeater, Winston, sold half of Christendom for a bottle of vodka at Yalta, etc." In his anger he almost appeared to be condoning Malan's racist regime while simultaneously condemning American hypocrisy on the issue of apartheid.

...the whole of the set-up here has been criminally exaggerated - Zulus and Indian who got their MA's and BSc's and BA'skneeling on the same cushion as me got uproarious applause from the whites. Throughout half the USA they wouldn't even have been allowed in the same Hall.

[...]

While Roy was busy stirring up a hornet's nest in South Africa, Mary, alone in Portugal, was writing anxiously beseeching his early return.

[...]

Roy's reply, giving his reasons for wishing to tarry in South Africa a while longer, was prophetic. "I am longing to see you my beloved - but this is the last time I will ever set eyes on my beloved country (How I love it!) so let me take in all I can before I finish with it."

Joseph Pearce really did not understand Campbell. Very few people did. I, however, can relate to Campbell completely. Like him, I went to live in England for many years because I was hated by my fellow South Africans for opposing apartheid and, like him, I was then condemned when I turned against my liberal friends in Britain and the USA for their hypocrisy and self-righteousness about apartheid.

After I had lived in the USA for 5 years, I returned to South Africa and found that a lot had changed in those 5 years. Apartheid was finished in civilian life and had only to be dismantled legally. When I got back to the USA, Jesse Jackson and a bunch of other holier-than-thou simpletons were calling for disinvestment in South Africa.

Only Reagan seemed to understand that South Africans were moving to end apartheid at their own pace and that disinvestment would hurt the very people it claimed to want to help. Sure enough American firms closed their factories and hundreds of thousands of workers were left unemployed. But the leftists patted themselves on their backs and told themselves that they were on the side of the angels. That's when I realized that I could never be a Democrat and, when I became a citizen a few years later, I registered as Republican.

I'm sure Campbell would also have been a Republican if he had ever immigrated to the USA. He would have loved the irony of being called racist for belonging to the party which brought an end to slavery and enacted the first anti-racist policies in the 1950s.

The tedious task of transcribing from a book

I've spent the whole morning transcribing some passages from Chapter 33 of Unafraid of Virginia Woolf - the Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell by Joseph Pearce. I'll post it when I'm finished although I know most people will not be interested. It's for my own future reference and for a Wikipedia entry that I'm working on.

$1.6 billion for white-collar welfare bums

$1.6 billion went to bailed-out bank execs:

Records show bonuses, chauffeurs, health club benefits, financial planning.

Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits last year, an Associated Press analysis reveals.

The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages.

Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.

[...]

Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits last year, an Associated Press analysis reveals.

The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages.

Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.

[...]

The 116 banks have so far received $188 billion in taxpayer help. Among the findings:

The average paid to each of the banks' top executives was $2.6 million in salary, bonuses and benefits.

Lloyd Blankfein, president and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, took home nearly $54 million in compensation last year. The company's top five executives received a total of $242 million.

[...]

# Richard D. Fairbank, the chairman of Capital One Financial Corp., took a $1 million hit in compensation after his company had a disappointing year, but still got $17 million in stock options. The McLean, Va.-based company received $3.56 billion in bailout money on Nov. 14.

# John A. Thain, chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch, topped all corporate bank bosses with $83 million in earnings last year. Thain, a former chief operating officer for Goldman Sachs, took the reins of the company in December 2007, avoiding the blame for a year in which Merrill lost $7.8 billion. Since he began work late in the year, he earned $57,692 in salary, a $15 million signing bonus and an additional $68 million in stock options. Like Goldman, Merrill got $10 billion from taxpayers on Oct. 28.

[...]

Banks that got bailout funds also paid out millions for home security systems, private chauffeured cars, and club dues. Some banks even paid for financial advisers. Wells Fargo of San Francisco, which took $25 billion in taxpayer bailout money, gave its top executives up to $20,000 each to pay personal financial planners.

At Bank of New York Mellon Corp., chief executive Robert P. Kelly's stipend for financial planning services came to $66,748, on top of his $975,000 salary and $7.5 million bonus. His car and driver cost $178,879. Kelly also received $846,000 in relocation expenses, including help selling his home in Pittsburgh and purchasing one in Manhattan, the company said.

[...]

Goldman Sachs' tab for leased cars and drivers ran as high as $233,000 per executive. The firm told its shareholders this year that financial counseling and chauffeurs are important in giving executives more time to focus on their jobs.

JPMorgan Chase chairman James Dimon ran up a $211,182 private jet travel tab last year when his family lived in Chicago and he was commuting to New York. The company got $25 billion in bailout funds.

Maybe I'm not a real Republican because I find this disgusting. I'm all for big fat paychecks for CEOs who run companies successfully but I find it ridiculous when they still stuff their pockets after a business has failed and I feel it is downright immoral when they then take welfare from us taxpayers on top of that. I'm Republican enough that I don't want to see government interfering with executive pay but it's time to let these people know that we are not amused and find them revolting. In fact they are thieves.

It's time to bring the Christmas cactuses out from the dark

Christmas Cactus, Thanksgiving cactus and Easter Cactus are all closely related species in the genus Schlumbergera. They are originally cloud-forest epiphytes (growing in trees like orchids) from the Organ Mountains north of Rio de Janeiro in southeast Brazil. What we now know as "Holiday cactus" are hybrids of Schlumbergera truncata and Schlumbergera russelliana which were first inter-bred 150 years ago in England.

My mother used to grow them in South Africa but they will not bloom unless the night-time temperature is lower than 55F for two months and they get less than 14 hours of light per day for 6 to 8 weeks. Night-time temps seldom dropped below 55F on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa so my mom used to put them in a dark closet for two months to force the blooms.

Lots of people end up throwing them away after their first bloom because they never bloom again. That's because people keep their houses too warm. It's worth pampering them because they can last for decades and you are rewarded with spectacular flowers that last for months.

I was given a ten year old Christmas cactus nearly 30 years ago. It grew too big and had to be split into three plants which are now sitting in planters in the enclosed back porch which is unheated. They are all covered in flowers and ready to brought into the living room for the holidays.

Apart from the temperature requirements, they are fairly easy to grow. They do not like to be in direct sunlight. They are not a desert cactus so they are not drought tolerant and prefer to be consistently moist but do not like to be water-logged as the roots will rot.

The most common flower color is lavender but they come in many colors from pure white through all shades of pink and lavender to orange and red.

Pumpkin pie

I had never eaten pumpkin pie till I came to America. I looked forward to trying it for my first Christmas here but I was disappointed by it's heaviness and lumpiness and never tried baking the traditional recipe. Then my sister came to spend Christmas with me after I had been here about 5 years and I decided that she had to have pumpkin pie while she was in America but I decided to make my own version.

When I opened my restaurant in San Francisco, it became popular with vegetarians and kosher Jews because so much of my South African peasant food was vegetarian. I decided to use my own pumpkin pie recipe because it uses no eggs. It was a hit. People would order whole pies to take away. Here it is.

I use butternut squash instead of pumpkin because it is less watery and more flavorful. You can use a simple semi-sweet short pastry pie-shell or cheat and use a graham cracker pie-shell. The short pastry pie-shell should be pre-baked. And whip up at least a pint of cream with two tablesoons of caster sugar (or confectioner’s sugar) and a dash of vanilla or almond. (I prefer almond essence unless it's real vanilla essence.) You can't have enough whipped cream.

Use about a pound and a half of butternut squash which will yield about half that weight of flesh after you've discarded the rinds and seeds. This is usually about two large squashes. Quarter them and boil them. Throw away the seeds and rinds and place the flesh into a colander to cool and drain. I don't like overly sweet stuff so I mix the drained flesh with only about a cup of raw unrefined cane sugar - usually Mexican but any coarse brown sugar will do. The crunchiness adds an interested texture.

Meanwhile melt a 4oz stick of unsalted butter in a skillet and add a pinch each of ground cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamon seeds and fennel or anise seeds. As soon as the spices bubble remove from heat. This should take less than a minute. (This process is called varga by the Indians. It is meant to refresh the spices.) Stir the spices (and butter) into the pumpkin flesh and add a pinch of salt. (Salt is the secret of all tasty food even sweet stuff.) Plop the mixture into the (pre-baked) pie-shell. Serve with huge dollops of whipped cream and glass of tawny port.

This version is light and fruity unlike the heavy stodgy version filled with flour and eggs.

The Employee Free Choice Act Is Unconstitutional

Richard Epstein in the WSJ:

A top priority of the incoming Democratic Congress and Obama administration is the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act. The EFCA, as is well known, introduces a card-check procedure that allows a union to gain recognition without an election by secret ballot. Thereafter a government arbitration panel can impose, without judicial review, all the terms of an initial two-year collective "agreement" if the parties cannot negotiate an agreement within 130 days.

It is commonly supposed that economic regulation is immune to constitutional challenge since the New Deal. That's not the case with this labor law.

Peter Kirsanow explains:

Firstly, its card check provision violates employers' First Amendment rights by effectively depriving them of the opportunity to convey to their respective workforces counterarguments on the merits of unionization. Secondly, its mandatory arbitration provision could result in takings in violation of the Fifth Amendment by granting government-appointed arbitrators the unreviewable power, e.g., imposing labor costs on employers.

Weird and wonderful clouds

Andy the Urban Redneck posted a picture of a punch-hole cloud today. Here's another:

Punch Hole Clouds may appear as a circular or oval holes in a layer of supercooled clouds; sometimes they assume a form of a perfect circle and persist for quite a long time, drifting together with the cloud layer. One explanation seems to blame the air traffic (the jet contrail intersections) combined with a thermal inversion (a circular motion of a rising warm air).

And, if you think that's weird an wonderful, how about this? It's a pancake stack of lenticular clouds (know to aviators as "lennies") over Mt Rainier in Washington.

















There are plenty more pics of strange clouds here.

Ohio official who illegally accessed Joe the Plumber's files resigns

From The Columbus Dispatch:

Helen Jones-Kelley, the state official placed on unpaid leave for improperly accessing confidential information from state databases on “Joe the Plumber,” has resigned.

Two senior managers at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services who were involved in the incident also are being ousted, The Dispatch has learned.

"My professional career, and the legacy of service I have established, has been, and continues to be, far too important for me to allow my reputation and my commitment as a servant leader to be disparaged. I also remain concerned for the safety of my family and myself."

"Servant leader?" Here's a pic for Chas and Andy who haven't seen what this POS looks like yet. To me Ms Smiley-face Jones-Kelley looks like the kind of bureaucrat who would turn her grandmother over to the Gestapo if it benefited her. Click to enlarge for the full horror.

The Brits were sane about guns once upon a time

This guy should soon expect a visit from Airstrip One's Thought Police.

If each of us carried a gun we could help to combat terrorism by Richard Munday:

The firearms massacres that have periodically caused shock and horror around the world have been dwarfed by the Mumbai shootings, in which a handful of gunmen left some 500 people killed or wounded.

For anybody who still believed in it, the Mumbai shootings exposed the myth of “gun control”. India has some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian Mutiny.

[...]

The Mumbai massacre also exposed the myth that arming the police force guarantees security. Sebastian D’Souza, a picture editor on the Mumbai Mirror who took some of the dramatic pictures of the assault on the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, was angered to find India’s armed police taking cover and apparently failing to engage the gunmen.

[...]

The Mumbai massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but probably it could not have happened to Londoners 100 years ago.

In January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back – and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.

Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.

That armed England existed within living memory; but it is now so alien to our expectations that it has become a foreign country. Our image of an armed society is conditioned instead by America: or by what we imagine we know about America.

[...]

In the past two decades the enactment of “right to carry” legislation in the majority of states, and the issue of permits for the carrying of concealed firearms to citizens of good repute, has brought a radical change. Opponents of the right to bear arms predicted that right to carry would cause blood to flow in the streets, but the reverse has been true: violent crime in America has plummeted.

[...]

“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India,” Mahatma Gandhi said, “history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”

Mahatma Gandhi said that? I'm shocked! And pleased.

Videos I rented in the past month

All Passion Spent

This was so good that I gave it a separate review when I watched it. At the time I wrote:

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.

That led me to rent the movie, "Pygmalion."

Pygmalion (1938)

When snooty phonetics professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) meets Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller), he bets his friend that he can elevate her lowbrow speech and pass her off as a duchess at a grand ball in just three months. Through an unrelenting string of exasperating drills, Henry transforms the uncultured Eliza into an elegant lady. Along the way, he falls in love with her … but Henry's too stubborn to admit it.

"My Fair Lady" was based on George Bernard Shaw's play and one of the reasons that it is one of my favorite musicals is because Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe's librettist, stuck so closely to Shaw's play.

Shaw's original ending made it clear that Eliza did not marry Henry but, in the movie, the ending was changed:

Despite the intense central relationship between Eliza and Henry, the original play ends with her leaving to marry the eager young Freddy Eynsford-Hill. Shaw, annoyed by the tendency of audiences, actors, and even directors to seek 'romantic' re-interpretations of his ending, later wrote an essay for inclusion with subsequent editions, in which he explained precisely why it was impossible for the story to end with Higgins and Eliza getting married.

Some subsequent adaptations have changed this ending. Despite Shaw's insistence that the original ending remain intact, producer Gabriel Pascal provided a more ambiguous end to the 1938 film: instead of marrying Freddy, Eliza apparently reconciles with Henry in the final scene, implying that they probably will get married. The musical version My Fair Lady and its 1964 film have similar endings.

Moondance Alexander (2007)

When plucky teen Moondance (Kay Panabaker) finds a lost pony named Checkers, she immediately feels a bond with him. Convinced that he's a champion jumper, Moondance persuades Checkers' owner (Don Johnson) into training the two of them for the Bow Valley Classic. Based on a true story, this touching family drama from director and co-writer Michael Damian also stars James Best and Lori Loughlin.

I love horse (and dog) movies but this was crap. We stopped watching after ten minutes.

Snow Buddies (2008)

Dylan Sprouse, Jim Belushi and Kris Kristofferson lend their voices to this family-friendly tale about a feisty pack of golden retriever puppies that embarks on an Alaskan adventure. When they find themselves stranded in the northern wilderness, the canine offspring of famed sports star Air Bud team up with an experienced sled dog and a husky pup, who teach them the importance of working together.

Yep, I got this movies because it has dogs in it. It's not very good - just an hour and a half of silly fun.

Mapp and Lucia (2-Disc Series) (1985)

Snobbery and cattiness are raised to an art form in E.F. Benson's comic tales of provincial English society. Miss Elizabeth Mapp (Prunella Scales) and Emmaline "Lucia" Lucas (Geraldine McEwan), two social butterflies from the 1920s fictional seaside village of Tilling-on-the-Sea, maintain a long-standing, comical feud that routinely manages to involve neighbors, townspeople and other innocent bystanders.

We watched this over 20 years ago when it was first shown on PBS but, when I found that it had recently been released on DVD, I decided to watch it again. It's just as good the second time around - in fact better because since then I have read the five E.F. Benson novels on which the miniseries is based. Prunella Scales is even funnier (and more obnoxious) as Mapp than she was as Sybil (John Cleese's "wife") in "Fawlty Towers" and Geraldine McEwan is, as always, brilliant. Once again Netflix gets it wrong. The novels were set in the 1930s not the 1920s.

The Rainbow / The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1988)

Author D.H. Lawrence's understanding of the 19th-century woman is revealed in two BBC adaptations of his work. Imogen Stubbs stars in The Rainbow as young Ursula Brangwen, whose search for love is doomed by a lifetime spent daydreaming about perfection. Zoë Wanamaker and Colin Firth star in The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, the portrait of a woman mired in a loveless marriage and the consequences of her attraction to a younger man.

"The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd" (which was D.H. Lawrence's first stage play) is autobiograhical. He fleshes out the autobiographical details of his youth in his later novel, "Sons and Lovers."

In "The Rainbow" we first meet Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the sisters who are also at the center of Lawrence's later novel, "Women in Love" (which was made into a movie by Ken Russell.)

One either loves or hates Lawrence. He happens to be one of my favorite writers probably because I discovered him at an early age when I read my father's contraband copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover." ( It was banned in South Africa at the time - 1963.)

A Room With a View (2007)

On a trip to Italy, prim aristocrat Lucy Honeychurch (Elaine Cassidy) steals a kiss from a handsome commoner (Rafe Spall) but pays a heavy emotional price when she sees him again in stuffy Edwardian England in this spirited adaptation of E.M. Forster's classic novel. The talented cast includes Elizabeth McGovern as Lucy's mother, Timothy Spall as the socialist Mr. Emerson and Sinéad Cusack as the flamboyant Miss Lavish.

Another of my favorite writers is E. M. Forster. I had seen the Merchant-Ivory version of "A Room with a View" (with Helena Bonham Carter) several times so I was interested in seeing this version. (Merchant-Ivory made two other movies based on Forster's novels: "Howard's End" and "Passage to India.") The Merchant-Ivory version is lavish and beautiful but this version is much closer to Forster's novel.

Dead Gorgeous (2002)

There's nothing pretty about murder and deceit in this episode of PBS's acclaimed series "Mystery!" When two old friends, Antonia (Helen McCrory) and Rose (Fay Ripley), run into each other after years of separation, they discover they have one tragic thing in common: They're both unhappily married. So, they hatch a plan to kill each other's spouse, enabling them to start anew. But can each woman live up to her end of the bloody bargain?

This is as much a comedy as a mystery story. It has a very satisfying ending.

The Dark Knight (2008)

Batman (Christian Bale) teams with Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) to continue dismantling Gotham City's criminal organizations in this sequel to Batman Begins. But a psychotic new villain known as the Joker (Heath Ledger) threatens to undo all their good work. The star-studded cast includes Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman, Anthony Michael Hall, Michael Caine and Eric Roberts.

The DVD was released last Tuesday. It arrived yesterday (in spite of a "long wait" warning on Netflix) and we watched it last night. It was directed by Chris Nolan who made the only other Batman movie worth watching, "Batman Begins." Sure it's only a comic book story but there's an underlying stern judgementalism and moralism in both of Nolan's movies that appeals to me - the ending is particularly satisfying. And the non-stop action and explosions were terrific.

Heath Ledger was brilliant as The Joker. This is not a movie for kids. Ledger makes The Joker really dark and evil and I wouldn't be surprised if this role drove him over the edge to where he ODed on drugs. Actually he probably already had seen the dark side through his drug use. I know that my drug use in the 60s showed me the dark side. (Ledger plays opposite Maggie Gyllenhaal in this movie and acted with Maggie's brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, in "Brokeback Mountain.")

R.I.P. Paul Weyrich

Ed Feulner:

In the early ‘70s, when most conservatives were reduced to wringing their hands and resigning themselves to life in the political wilderness, Paul just seemed to know what was needed to break the liberal stranglehold. On March 23, 1973, he became the founding president of The Heritage Foundation, which became the policy vanguard for the conservative movement.

Ed Feulner is current President of The Heritage Foundation.

Global warming - brrr!

It has been the coldest here in ten years. Even the water pipes froze and burst at the RV Park. Fortunately we were able to finish building our well-house at the farm just before this cold snap and the pump did not freeze this year.

Cold snap brings lowest temp in decade:

Coos Bay, Oregon

“You’d have to go back 10 years exactly to see when it was colder,” said Ryan Sandler, meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Medford.

Sandler looked back through his records to December 1998, when it was 20 degrees.

I see that even Las Vegas had 3 inches of snow:

On Wednesday, the snow prompted the cancellation of all flights in and out of Vegas and dusted palm trees and marquees along the Strip with accumulations that were expected to reach 3 inches.

Snow piled up around the famous "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign on the south end of the Strip, as visitors parked and posed for pictures wearing hooded jackets.

[...]

Even Malibu got a dusting of snow, as the usually balmy city saw a half-inch in the afternoon.

Snow in Malibu! It's definitely global warming.

Nuff said #314,875: Alan Greenspan - "Guilty as charged"

George A. Selgin at the Ludwig von Mises Institute places the blame for our current economic problems firmly on Greenspan's shoulders.

Greenspan was first appointed Fed chairman by Reagan in 1987 and he was re-appointed by succeeding presidents (who were also bamboozled by his supposedly "libertarian" economic and monetary philosophy) until he retired in 2006. Reagan was attracted to Greenspan because of his association with Ayn Rand but I saw Greenspan's con job a long time ago:

He was lauded for his handling of the Black Monday October 19, 1987 stock market crash, which occurred very shortly after he first became chairman, as well as for his stewardship of the Internet-driven, "dot-com" economic boom of the 1990s. This expansion eventually ended in a burst in March 2000 leading to an economic downturn, including negative GDP growth in the first quarter of 2001.

[...]

In the early 1950s, Greenspan began an association with famed novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand that would last until her death in 1982. He wrote for Rand’s newsletters and authored several essays in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Rand stood beside him at his 1974 swearing-in as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

[...]

Alan Greenspan has been married twice. His first marriage was to Joan Mitchell in 1952; the marriage ended in divorce one year later. He dated newswoman Barbara Walters in the late 1970s. In 1984, Greenspan began dating journalist Andrea Mitchell. Greenspan at the time was 58, and the also once divorced Mitchell was 20 years his junior at the age of 38. In 1997, they were married by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Greenspan seems to like shiksas named Mitchell.























Anyway - nuff said!

Greenspan played along with Reagan's libertarian economic policies and then sucked up to Bush Senior's "read my lips" policies and then played second fiddle to Clinton's "blow me" crap. He's a con-man much like his mentor, the demented Ayn Rand. He's a weather-vane like all opportunists such as Mike Huckabee, Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter - he'll turn whichever way the wind is blowing because that's where the money is.

PS Of the Austrian economists, the always optimistic Ludwig von Mises is my economics hero far and above the rather pessimistic Friedrich Hayek and fairly cynical Joseph Schumpeter.

PPS I think you can guess that I have been wanting to vent against this POS for a long time. Meanwhile we're stuck with his two decades-long legacy of dishonesty and bullshitty "monetary policy." May his duplicitous soul rot in hell. Or is that curse unnecessary? I'm sure being married to Andrea Mitchell is worse than hell.

Smoking Loon

For dinner we had Alaskan sock-eye salmon fillets with potato latkes, peas, carrots and a bottle of Smoking Loon pinot noir 2007. Smoking Loon is a California winery. I can't find this on the Net so I'll paraphrase from the label on the bottle: "Smoking Loon got it's name from the vintner who is nuts. He puffs away on a cigar while mixing his wines."

Don Sebastiani describes the pinot noir thus:

This very generously fruit driven wine is a must with smoked game hen with bitter greens or Wild Salmon with a rich Béarnaise Sauce and roasted beets with a champagne vinaigrette.

365Corks describes it thus:

Saturday, 9/22, Little Rock, AR

There is no joy in Hawgville as the mighty Razorbacks have lost to the Wildcats from the Bluegrass state. No heartburn on my part as I didn't go to the U of A, or just Fayetteville, as it is known. We had our neighbors over for the game and ended up trying two different bottles of the Smoking Loon Pinot Noir. We tried the 2006 bottle first, followed by the 2005. Dark, ruby red in color, they both exhibited a strong nose with lots of strawberry/cherry aromas. On the tongue we noted the strawberry, cherry, light spice and a touch of oak. Smooth, excellent finish made both of these winners. No real difference was noted between the 2006 and 2005 as both were equally good. Based on the absurdly, at least for a Pinot Noir, low price of $9.99 each, it was extremely easy to award both of these 4 Corkscrews. Smoking Loon is part of the Don Sebastiani chain and I've been surprised how consistent their Pinots have been and am sure we'll be picking up more bottles in the future. Sit Long, Talk Much, Laugh Often, Drink Wine!

It was on sale today at $7. I intend to buy a whole case of it tomorrow. Compared with the over-rated Oregon pinot noirs (often 14 bucks or more a bottle) it is a lovely wine.

Joseph Schumpeter

Andy McCarthy:

Just finished reading excellent columns by Rich and Thomas Sowell — where else but NRO do you get two Schumpeter references in one day?

Rich Lowry:

Last week, the Bush administration all but committed bailout funds to the — in the great economist Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase — “hopelessly maladapted” auto companies.

Thomas Sowell:

A renowned economist of the past, J. A. Schumpeter, used to refer to progress under capitalism as “creative destruction” — the replacement of businesses that have outlived their usefulness with businesses that carry technological and organizational creativity forward, raising standards of living in the process.

Joseph Schumpeter (1883 – 1950) was an economist and political scientist born in Moravia in present-day Czech Republic:

From 1925-1932, he held a chair at the University of Bonn, Germany. With the rise of Nazism in central Europe, he moved to the United States and lectured at Harvard in 1927-1928 and 1930. He would teach there from 1932 until his death in 1950. During his Harvard years he was not generally considered a good classroom teacher, but he acquired a school of loyal followers. His prestige among colleagues was likewise not very high because his views seemed outdated and not in synch with the then-fashionable Keynesianism.

[...]

Schumpeter's most popular book in English is probably Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. This book opens with a treatment of Karl Marx. On the surface level, this piece seems to support socialism. Schumpeter's reasoning was that an overt defense of capitalism would prompt the book only to be read by those who already supported capitalism. Therefore, he believed that he must masquerade as a supporter of socialism to entice the young socialist to read his work. In the end, he hoped to awaken self-recognition in the reader to the flaws of socialism. While he is sympathetic to Marx's theory that capitalism will collapse and will be replaced by socialism, Schumpeter concludes that this will not come about in the way Marx predicted. To describe it he borrowed the phrase "creative destruction," and made it famous by using it to describe a process in which the old ways of doing things are endogenously destroyed and replaced by new ways.

Schumpeter's theory is that the success of capitalism will lead to a form of corporatism and a fostering of values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals. The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism; it will be replaced by socialism in some form. There will not be a revolution, but merely a trend in parliaments to elect social democratic parties of one stripe or another. He argued that capitalism's collapse from within will come about as democratic majorities vote for the creation of a welfare state and place restrictions upon entrepreneurship that will burden and destroy the capitalist structure. Schumpeter emphasizes throughout this book that he is analyzing trends, not engaging in political advocacy. In his vision, the intellectual class will play an important role in capitalism's demise. The term "intellectuals" denotes a class of persons in a position to develop critiques of societal matters for which they are not directly responsible and able to stand up for the interests of strata to which they themselves do not belong. One of the great advantages of capitalism, he argues, is that as compared with pre-capitalist periods, when education was a privilege of the few, more and more people acquire (higher) education. The availability of fulfilling work is however limited and this, coupled with the experience of unemployment, produces discontent. The intellectual class is then able to organise protest and develop critical ideas.

[...]

In the same book, Schumpeter expounded a theory of democracy which sought to challenge what he called the 'classical doctrine'. He disputed the idea that democracy was a process by which the electorate identified the common good, and politicians carried this out for them. He argued this was unrealistic, and that people's ignorance and superficiality meant that in fact they were largely manipulated by politicians, who set the agenda. This made a 'rule by the people' concept both unlikely and undesirable. Instead he advocated a minimalist model, much influenced by Max Weber, whereby democracy is the mechanism for competition between leaders, much like a market structure. Although periodical votes from the general public legitimize governments and keep them accountable, the policy program is very much seen as their own and not that of the people, and the participatory role for individuals is severely limited.

[...]

The research of entrepreneurship owes a lot to his contributions. He was probably the first scholar to develop its theories. He gave two theories, sometimes called Mark I and Mark II. In the first one, the early one, Schumpeter argued that the innovation and technological change of a nation comes from the entrepreneurs, or wild spirits. He coined the word Unternehmergeist, German for entrepreneur-spirit. He believed that these individuals are the ones who make things work in the economy of the country. In Mark II, developed later as professor at Harvard, he asserted that the actors that drive innovation and the economy are big companies which have the resources and capital to invest in research and development. Both arguments might be complementary today.

[...]

Robert Heilbroner was one of Schumpeter's most renowned pupils, who wrote extensively about him in The Worldly Philosophers. Other outstanding students of Schumpeter's include the economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Robert Solow, Nobel Prize in Economics, was his student at Harvard, and he expanded on Schumpeter's theory.

Quotes:

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.

Democracy is a political method, that is to say, a certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political - legislative and administrative - decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself.

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

For the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity may be assumed, each class resembles a hotel or an omnibus, always full, but always of different people.

The ballot is stronger than bullets.

The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses. . . . It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

It is not true that democracy will always safeguard freedom of conscience better than autocracy. Witness the most famous of all trials. Pilate was, from the standpoint of the Jews, certainly the representative of autocracy. Yet he tried to protect freedom. And he yielded to a democracy.

Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.

To the believer Marxism presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions.

The religious quality of Marxism also explains a characteristic attitude of the orthodox Marxist toward opponents. To him, as to any believer in a faith, the opponent is not merely in error but in sin. Dissent is unapproved of not only intellectually but also morally.

PS I did this post because Chas and Andy have asked me before who Schumpeter was.

"Warming" must be Newspeak for cooling

War is peace and freezing temperatures means the earth is warming.

Cold weather sets records in several cities:

White Sulphur Springs reported 29 degrees below zero to the National Weather Service today, stretching way beyond the last daily record low of 17 degrees below zero set in 1922.

Other towns breaking records on Sunday were Lewistown with -25 degrees this morning (24 below was the previous record) and Dillon with 16 degrees below zero (the last record low was 15 below).

Fort Benton and Boulder tied previous record lows of 23 and 20 degrees below, respectively, and Havre and Great Falls are both on their way to shattering previous records as well.

Global warming a danger to wild animals

It's 20F and the sugar water in the hummingbird feeders is frozen solid. Andy is busy giving them new sugar water. Hopefully it won't freeze during the day.

Most Americans are not dumb

Majority opposes auto bailout, poll shows:

Overall, 55 percent of those polled oppose the latest plan that Chrysler, Ford and General Motors executives pitched to Congress last week, on par with public opposition to earlier, pricier efforts.

[...]

Opposition to the automaker bailout is fueled by the widespread perception that the companies themselves are responsible for their predicament, not the faltering economy. In the new poll, three-quarters of Americans said Detroit's woes are mainly the fault of its own management decisions, and a sizable majority of those who blame the front office object to government help.

Nor have Detroit's Big Three made significant progress persuading the public that bankruptcy proceedings would deepen the broader economic slowdown. Sixty percent said it would make no difference or would be good for the economy if one or more of the companies were forced to restructure under the protection of bankruptcy laws.

Democrats are among the most wary of the economic impact of failure, with 42 percent saying it would hurt the economy. They are more apt to advocate federal aid — 52 percent support it, up from 42 percent support for previous versions of the rescue bill. But they, too, are deeply critical of company managers — 72 percent fault Detroit's strategies, not the overall economy.

Republican opposition has grown stronger, with 69 percent now against the bailout, an increase of 12 points since chief executives from General Motors, Chrysler and Ford last appeared on Capitol Hill to plead their case. Half of all Republicans polled now strongly oppose the plan.

Overall, independents continue to lean against the plan, with 57 percent opposing it and 41 percent supporting it.

Regional differences remain sharp.

About six in 10 of those in the South and West are opposed to the bailout, while those in the Northeast and Midwest, home to much of the affected manufacturing base, are split evenly on the idea.

In many cases regional divisions appear to trump partisan sentiment. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, a 51 percent majority in the South oppose the plan, as do 49 percent of those in the West, while broad majorities of those in the Midwest (56 percent) and the Northeast (61 percent) support the loans.

Poofter penguin problems

It seems like a lot of penguins are queer. Maybe it's because they look like snobby European metrosexual toffs in tuxedos waving pinkies with limp wrists. Remember this story from New York Zoo in 2002?

The romantic story of Wendell and Cass, tuxedo-clad life partners, as told by their keeper:

Inside this little man-made concrete exhibit -- designed to simulate the rocky islands off South Africa from which they originate -- philandering female penguins angle for better nests; jilted lovers pick up and move after a love-interest freezes them out; and love triangles are inevitable, complete with messy fallout and recrimination.

[...]

Wendell and Cass already had curled up together for the night, and they weren't coming out of their cozy burrow anytime soon, according to penguin keeper Stephanie Mitchell. Living monogamously in a high-rise nest above the rest of the crew, the guys tend to ignore the sexual high jinks going on down below.

Maybe they were just bachelors dedicated to a peaceful life and didn't like drama. At the time I thought it may be just because they were South Africans like me but then, in 2004, another couple of (Argentinian!) Central Park Zoo's gay penguins ignited debate:

Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan, are completely devoted to each other. For nearly six years now, they have been inseparable. They exhibit what in penguin parlance is called "ecstatic behavior": That is, they entwine their necks, they vocalize to each other, they have sex. Silo and Roy are, to anthropomorphize a bit, gay penguins.

When offered female companionship, they have adamantly refused it. And the females aren't interested in them, either.

At one time, the two seemed so desperate to incubate an egg together that they put a rock in their nest and sat on it, keeping it warm in the folds of their abdomens, said their chief keeper, Rob Gramzay. Finally, he gave them a fertile egg that needed care to hatch. Things went perfectly, and a chick, Tango, was born.

For the next 2 1/2 months they raised Tango, keeping her warm and feeding her food from their beaks until she could go out into the world on her own.

Maybe penguins go gay because it's so cold in the Antarctic and they're simply cuddling up. Mind you, I can't remember reading about any Polar bear poofters. [WARNING: That article also goes on about the filthy perverted bisexual bonobo apes which are related to chimps.]

In 2005 Fox reported that Gay Penguins, Roy and Silo, Broke Up:

New York City's most famous gay penguin couple has split up.

Even worse, one of them has taken up with a female penguin new to the Central Park Zoo, the New York Post reports.

Silo and Roy, two male chinstrap penguins native to the South Atlantic, made local headlines six years ago when they came out with their same-sex relationship.

Since then, the pair have successfully hatched and raised an adopted chick — after trying to incubate a rock — and become role models for six other same-sex couples among penguins at the zoo.

That all ended when Scrappy, a single female newly arrived from SeaWorld in San Diego, caught Silo's eye.

"Silo and Roy stopped spending as much time together or building a nest," said John Rowden, curator of animals at the zoo.

Silo promptly moved in with Scrappy, building a new nest with her. Zookeepers were at a loss to explain Silo's sudden conversion.

I blame that sexy California girl. I know how those California girls can do things to a weak-minded fag.

Now comes this story from Germany. Zoo tempts gay penguins to go straight:

A German zoo has imported four female penguins from Sweden in an effort to tempt its gay penguins to go straight.

The four Swedish females were dispatched to the Bremerhaven Zoo in Bremen after it was found that three of the zoo's five penguin pairs were homosexual.

Keepers at the zoo ordered DNA tests to be carried out on the penguins after they had been mating for years without producing any chicks.

It was only then they realised that six of the birds were living in homosexual partnerships.

Director Heike Kueck said that the zoo hoped to see some baby penguins in the coming months.

She said that the birds had been mating for years and one couple even adopted a stone that they protected like an egg.

Kueck said that the project has the support of the European Endangered Species Programme because the penguins, which are native to South America, are an endangered species.

A biologist will be on hand to monitor the experiment.

But introducing the Bremerhaven penguins to their new Swedish friends may not be as successful as hoped after earlier experiments revealed great difficulties in separating homosexual couples.

In case they show no interest, the zoo has also flown in two new male penguins "so that the ladies don't miss out altogether", Kueck added.

Well, if California girls can make New York pansies go straight maybe those Swedish girls can straighten out German poofters.

Uh oh! It looks like even the Chinese commies now have poofter penguin problems.

Gay penguins expelled from zoo colony for stealing eggs are given their own to look after following animal rights protest:

A pair of gay penguins thrown out of their zoo colony for repeatedly stealing eggs have been given some of their own to look after following a protest by animal rights groups.

Last month the birds were segregated after they were caught placing stones at the feet of parents before waddling away with their eggs.

But angry visitors to Polar Land in Harbin, northern China, complained it wasn't fair to stop the couple from becoming surrogate fathers and urged zoo bosses to give them a chance.

In response, zookeepers gave the pair two eggs laid by an inexperienced first-time mother.

'We decided to give them two eggs from another couple whose hatching ability had been poor and they've turned out to be the best parents in the whole zoo,' said one of the keepers.

'It's very encouraging and if this works out well we will try to arrange for them to become real parents themselves with artificial insemination.'

Wildlife experts at the park explain that despite being gay the three-year-old male birds are still driven by an urge to be fathers.

'One of the responsibilities of being a male adult is looking after the eggs. Despite the fact that they can't have eggs naturally, it does not take away their biological drive to be a parent,' said one.

One campaigner who did not want to be named welcomed the move and said: 'It wasn't fair to stop them becoming parents and keep them apart from all the other birds just because of the way nature has made them.'

Last month zookeepers said the couple were removed from the group not because of discrimination, but so as not to disturb the colony during hatching time.

Which brings us to the topic of gay adoption. Hmmm! On second thoughts: I don't think I'll touch that with a ten foot pole - except to say that the Chinese better get used to two males raising eggs, er, babies. Thanks to their one-child-per-family policy and the widespread abortion of female babies, there are now nearly twice as many Chinese boys as girls.

Let's hope that all those Chinese boys grow up to be poofters who like to play house and raise babies rather than like the Thebans whose Sacred Band were warriors feared by all Greeks. Oops! I forgot: the Sacred Band was an army made of up of homosexual couples who were such courageous warriors because they were willing to die for each other.

With any luck the Chinese will turn out more like this:

More eConOMIC relief

From Problems with preventing foreclosures:

Shelter is something you consume; it’s not an investment. Bailing out homeowners is rewarding the people who treated housing as an investment and not a consumption good, a fulfillment of personal need. Preventing foreclosures is often a matter of rescuing people from their failure to properly assess risk, not from some unforeseen natural disaster. Let’s not pretend this is any different from bailing out imprudent or inept investment bankers.

Or auto-makers, ski-resort operators etc etc etc.

"White people stink - Japanese people taste the best"

The jungles of Papua New Guinea are a different world - the land of headhunters and cannibals:

Brave Italian photographer Iago Corazza travelled the country, the island at the end of the world, and took photos of its fascinating inhabitants, who still live a Stone Age existence.

“You find people here who can describe the taste of human flesh,” the photographer said of his travels.

Anthropologist Olga Ammann describes it more succinctly in the book. She quotes people who have eaten other humans: “The meat of white people smells too strongly and is too salty.”

The Japanese are meant to taste the best, according to her study - the only thing that beats it is the meat of their own women.

But is cannibalism just a myth, or does it still exist on the island? It has been banned there for over 50 years – but it is reported that some tribes still eat the flesh of people who have died.

Evidence of this is the current prevalence of the Kuru illness in tribe members, which is associated with cannibalism.

I've read several books about Papua New Guinea. They were not "tamed" until Methodist missionaries from Australia went there in the 1950's. Some of what I read made even my hair curl - and I grew up with plenty of hair-curling stories in South Africa.

Reagan's 1986 amnesty for illegals still haunts us

Mark Krikorian:

A judge has ruled that visa-overstayers from the 1980s can apply for amnesty under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) — you remember, that one-time amnesty that would never be repeated. The application period extends through January 2010, meaning that 24 years after the passage of IRCA, illegal aliens will still be applying for it. By that standard, in the unlikely event an Obamnesty were to pass next year, people could still be signing up in 2033.

And Mark Steyn:

I'd be interested to hear Mark Krikorian's thoughts on this Los Angeles Times story. Everything about it is nuts, starting with the headline:

Settlement Opens Up Amnesty For Tens Of Thousands Of Immigrants

What "amnesty" would that be? Some new McCain reach-across-the-aisle deal? A grand Obama inaugural celebration? No, it's the Reagan amnesty. You remember - the one from nigh on a quarter-century ago. Yes, folks, they're still admitting applicants to the '86 amnesty - illegal immigrants who were turned down back in the mid-Eighties but stayed on to file appeals, class-action suits and what have you. The opening sentence nicely captures the surreal world of US immigration law:

For two decades, Anaheim businessman Erkan Aydin has taken on a task unimaginable for most immigrants like himself: trying to convince the U.S. government that he was here illegally.

And it gets better from there:

The settlement marks Schey's third and final class-action lawsuit over the 1986 amnesty law. The previous lawsuits, both settled in 2003, resulted in more than 150,000 immigrants being allowed to apply for amnesty...

In the second lawsuit, Schey argued against the rejection of amnesty applicants who had returned home and reentered with a valid visa. Immigration officials at the time held that the reentry was legal, breaking the continued illegal residency required for amnesty. Schey argued, however, that the reentry was illegal because the immigrants would have to have lied about themselves when they applied for the visa to return.

Got that? The US government's argument is that legally entering on legal, valid US paperwork is legally invalid for US residency, while the illegal immigrant counters that, as his legal paperwork was illegally acquired, it should be sufficiently invalid to be valid for US residency.