"Give war a chance"

Robert Farley reviews David Axe's War is Boring, a graphic novel depicting his experience as a war correspondent from 2006 -2008. Farley recounts Axe's appearance at a conference on Africa:

David gave a very grim appraisal of the state of conflict in Chad and Darfur, suggesting that it was very hard to know who the good guys and bad guys were, and that Western intervention efforts may have helped extend the life of the conflict. A student asked him "What would you do to save Darfur?" David seemed a bit surprised with the question, then finally responded "Don't save Darfur. Screw Darfur."

It's fair to say that the audience was surprised by this. Indeed, at least one member of the audience was quite irritated; the "screw Darfur" idea seemed oblivious to the suffering of refugees, and could be understood to imply a certain racist indifference to the fate of non-Europeans. This isn't how I read the comment, however; I understood it to be an argument along the lines of Edward Luttwak's "Give War a Chance," which argued that Western intervention tends to prolong wars by preventing victory. In the case of Chad and Darfur, I thought that Axe had an entirely reasonable point.

Precisely. One side's usually as bad as the other which is why we should get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Let them kill each other.

Just when I think this blog is dead, something amusing pops up

Obama: "The attack ads are worse than at any time in history."

No they aren't but the funny thing is that ABC news (yep even they have noticed) did a survey that showed that most of the Democratic negative ads are personal attacks whereas most of the Republican ads are attacks on Democratic policies. This vid is via Ace who opines:

When people (usually liberals) say stuff like this what they really mean is, "it's so mean and unfair when you conservatives fight back. Why can't you be 'a good conservative'? You know, like Gerry Ford?"

The vid is from Reason:

Have this year's negative political ads really "taken dirty to a whole new level, as CNN's Anderson Cooper frets? Is a "return to civility...a relic of a bygone era," as President Barack Obama laments?

Er, not exactly.

If anonymous political speech, the other widely decried villain of this political season, helped found the United States, attack ads are as American as apple pie. If you fancy yourself a patriot or a history buff, you will most certainly approve this message, which is taken from statements made by, for, and against the nation's founders. For historical sources, go here.

Sunday sermon by P.J.O'Rourke

The Republican Party Reptile speaks.

From They Hate Our Guts - and they’re drunk on power:

Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. When politics is the technique of seduction, good looks are unnecessary, good morals are unneeded, and good sense is a positive liability. Thus Democrats are the perfect Lotharios. And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option.

Give yourself a treat and read the whole thing.

Jane Austen couldn't write

One of the best English novelists ever was bad at spelling and grammar:

Jane Austen couldn't spell, had no grasp of punctuation and her writing betrayed an accent straight out of The Archers, according to an Oxford University academic.

Prof Kathryn Sutherland said analysis of Austen's handwritten letters and manuscripts reveal that her finished novels owed as much to the intervention of her editor as to the genius of the author.

Page after page was written without paragraphs, including the sparkling dialogue for which Austen is known. The manuscript for Persuasion, the only one of her novels to survive in its unedited form, looks very different from the finished product.

"The reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on the issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation. But in reading the manuscripts it quickly becomes clear that this delicate precision is missing.

"This suggests somebody else was heavily involved in the editing process between manuscript and printed book," Prof Sutherland said.

The editor in question is believed to have been William Gifford, a poet and critic who worked for Austen's second publisher, John Murray.

"Gifford was a classical scholar known for being quite a pedant. He took Austen's English and turned it into something different - an almost Johnsonian, formal style," Prof Sutherland said.

"Austen broke many of the rules for writing 'good' English. Her words were jumbled together and there was a level of eccentricity in her spelling - what we would call wrong.

"She has this reputation for clear and elegant English but her writing was actually more interesting than that. She was a more experimental writer than we give her credit for. Her exchanges between characters don't separate out one speaker from another, but that can heighten the drama of a scene.

"It was closer to the style of Virginia Woolf. She was very much ahead of her time."

Amongst Austen's grammatical misdemeanours was an inability to master the 'i before e' rule. Her manuscripts are littered with distant 'veiws' and characters who 'recieve' guests.

Elsewhere, she wrote "tomatoes" as "tomatas" and "arraroot" for "arrowroot" - peculiarities of spelling that reflect Austen's regional accent, Prof Sutherland explained. "In some of her writing, her Hampshire accent is very strong. She had an Archers-like voice with a definite Hampshire burr."

Over 1,000 of these handwritten pages will be placed online from Monday as the culmination of a three-year project led by Prof Sutherland in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries, King's College London and the British Library. The collection reunites the letters and manuscripts for the first time since 1845, when they were scattered by the terms of her sister Cassandra's will.

They range from fiction written in early childhood to the manuscript for Sanditon, the novel that Austen was writing when she died in 1817. Sadly, the manuscripts for Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Emma, her most famous novels, were destroyed after being set in print.

Shakespeare couldn't spell either.

Why I gave up surfing

Surfer killed by shark:

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — The victim of a fatal shark attack at a beach northwest of Los Angeles cried out to his friend for help as the shark flashed out of the water with no warning, bit into his leg and pulled him under in a tide of red blood, the friend said Friday.

Matthew Garcia was two feet away from his friend, 19-year-old Lucas Ransom, when the shark attacked with no warning, he said. The whole attack lasted seconds while the pair were bodyboarding about 100 yards from the shore.

"When the shark hit him, he just said, 'Help me, dude!' He knew what was going on," Garcia told the AP. "It was really fast. You just saw a red wave and this water is blue — as blue as it could ever be — and it was just red, the whole wave. Even the barrel was red."

As huge waves broke over his head, Garcia tried to find his friend in the surf but couldn't. He decided to get help, but turned around once more as he was swimming to shore and saw Ransom's red body board pop up. Garcia swam to his friend and did chest compressions as he brought him to shore.

When I was growing up in South Africa, we all surfed. One friend lost an arm to a shark, another lost a leg and one was killed. A few years later shark-nets were installed. When I moved to San Francisco, I still surfed for a few years until there was a shark attack north of San Francisco.

Turn on, Start Up, Drop Out

Hyper-libertarian Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel's appalling plan to pay students to quit college:

If you've seen The Social Network, you may have caught a passing glimpse of Peter Thiel. Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook, putting up $500,000 to finance the site's original expansion in 2004.
...
Thiel's philosophy demands attention not because it is original or interesting in any way—it's puerile libertarianism, infused with futurist fantasy—but because it epitomizes an ugly side of Silicon Valley's politics.
...
To describe Peter Thiel as simply a libertarian wildly understates the case. His belief system is based on unapologetic selfishness and economic Darwinism. His most famous quote—borrowed from Vince Lombardi—is, "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser." In a personal statement produced last year for the Cato Institute*, Thiel announced: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The public, he says, doesn't support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn't support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron," he writes.

If you want to go around saying that giving women the vote wrecked the country and still be taken seriously , it helps to be handing out $100 bills. What differentiates Thiel's Silicon Valley style of philanthropic libertarianism from Glenn Beck's screaming-raving-weeping variety is a laissez-faire attitude toward personal behavior and the lack of any demagogic instinct. Thiel, who is openly gay, wants to flee the mob, not rally it through gold-hoarding or flag-waving. Having given up hope for American democracy, he writes that he has decided to focus "my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom." Both his entrepreneurship and his philanthropy have been animated by techno-utopianism. In founding PayPal, which made his first fortune when he sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, Thiel sought to create a global currency beyond the reach of taxation or central bank policy. He likewise sees Facebook as a way to form voluntary supra-national communities.

Of course Jacob Weisberg, who wrote this hit-piece, is a blithering leftist idiot. I may not be an extreme libertarian like Thiel but he's onto something. Most students get liberal arts degrees which aren't worth the paper they're printed on but cost them tens of thousands of dollars.

PS Thiel recently held a gathering in New York for conservative homos at which Ann Coulter spoke.

PPS It was Herbert Spenser who gave Darwin the phrase "the survival of the fittest." "Economic Darwinism" is more correctly called "Spenserianism."

Li'l Abner and Steve Reeves

I had never seen Reeves as Li'l Abner. Of course I knew Abner from the comics in the Sunday paper. I always liked him because he reminded me of my sweet and simple farm-boy cousins but I stopped reading comics when I went to boarding school at the age of 11 and never got back into them so I'm finding out stuff on Wiki that either I never knew or had forgotten. For instance:

Li'l Abner Yokum: The star of Al Capp's classic comic strip was hardly "little"; Abner was 6' 3" in his stockinged feet (if he wore stockings) and perpetually 19-years old. A naïve, simple-minded and sweet-natured hillbilly boy, he lived in a ramshackle log cabin with his pint-sized parents. He inherited his strength from his irascible Mammy, and his brains from his less-than-brainy Pappy.
...
He was a paragon of innocence in a sardonically dark and cynical world.
...
Abner's main goal in life was evading the marital designs of Daisy Mae Scragg, the virtuous, voluptuous, barefoot Dogpatch damsel.
...
Pappy Yokum: Born Lucifer Ornamental Yokum, pint-sized Pappy had the misfortune of being the patriarch in a family that didn't have one. Pappy was so lazy and ineffectual, he didn't even bathe himself. Mammy was regularly seen scrubbing Pappy in an outdoor oak tub ("Once a month, rain or shine.")
...
Salomey: The Yokums' beloved pet. Cute, lovable and intelligent, (arguably smarter than Abner, Tiny or Pappy) she was accepted as part of the family, ("The youngest," as Mammy invariably introduces her.) She's 100% "Hammus Alabammus"—an adorable species of pig, and the last female known in existence. A plump, juicy Hammus Alabammus is the rarest and most vital ingredient of "ecstasy sauce", an indescribably delicious gourmet delicacy. Consequently, Salomey is frequently targeted by unscrupulous sportsmen, hogbreeders and gourmands (like J.R. Fangsley and Bounder J. Roundheels), as well as unsavory boars with improper intentions (like Boar Scarloff and Porknoy). Her moniker was a pun on both salami and Salome.

My Andy recently found these pics of Reeves as Li'l Abner.



I used to love Reeves' movies when I was a boy so I took a trip down Memory Lane. Stephen L. Reeves (January 21, 1926 – May 1, 2000):

He was an American bodybuilder and actor. At the peak of his career, he was the highest-paid actor in Europe.

Born in Glasgow, Montana, Steve Reeves moved to California at age 10 with his mother Goldie Reeves, after his father Lester Dell Reeves died in a farming accident.[1] Reeves developed an interest in bodybuilding in high school and trained at Ed Yarick's gym in Oakland. By the time he was 17, he had developed a Herculean physique, long before the general interest in bodybuilding. After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Army during World War II, and served in the Pacific.

After his military service, Reeves began an acting career and, between 1954 and 1968 played many different roles but is mostly remembered as Hercules. And that's the way I remember him - as Hercules not Li'l Abner.

The first pic is of Reeves in the Army and the last one is Li'l Abner with the Yokum's pet pig, Salomey.

The face of fanaticism

Sullivan posted this as his "Face of the Day":

People demonstrate on October 19, 2010 in Paris against pension reform. France faces a sixth day of national protests against President Nicolas Sarkozy's reforms, with the stakes rising after youths battled riot police and filling stations ran dry. A placard reads, "When order is injustice, disorder is a beginning of Justice'.

That mask can't hide the insanity in the man's eyes. He has the eyes of a fanatical Marxist or a Muslim terrorist. But he's not a Muslim so I guess he's a fanatical Marxist - you know one of the true-believers in communism who are stirring up the "useful idiot" students.

The "It gets better" campaign

Lately many "gay bloggers" have been posting videos of older queers telling younger fags not to kill themselves because "it gets better."

Mike Barthel:

The Google Trends spike over the last year for "bullying" is impressive, and it's all around us: the car ad that was recut to change a kid fleeing bullies into merely a friendly race between youngsters; the members of the Westboro Baptist Church being described as bullies (rather than, say, insane bigoted cultists, which would apparently be less damning!); and, of course, the Times Styles section on bullying in kindergarten.
...
The most visible recent examples, of course, involve gay teens killing themselves after being bullied. That increases the perception that bullying is not just something vaguely unpleasant that you have to deal with, but a threat to the survival of our loved ones.

It's a long article and includes Barthel's story about how he was bullied at school and gave the bully a bloody nose and what became of the bully:

[T]he one web hit I turned up is… a picture of my former tormentor in SWAT gear, participating in a simulated takedown of a school shooter.

He concludes:

Meanwhile, we're telling kids that it gets better. Which means we're pretending that adults are far less terrifying creatures.

Precisely. As my dad said to me when he made me learn boxing because I was a sissy: "It's time to man up!"

The world's weirdest animals

And where to spot them:

The western tarsier - The huge eyes of this pocket-sized primate - each bigger than its brain - are surely nature's most outlandish night vision goggles, while it's huge feet and powerful back legs mean it is capable of leaping from tree to tree in search of insects and small invertebrates. The tarsier is native to Borneo and parts of Sumatra.

How to prune a passion flower plant

Ron's passion flower, growing in his courtyard garden, has grown 12ft up a trellised wall. He now asks for advice on pruning:

It is really just a matter of trimming it a little around now if necessary, just to tidy it up and stop it flapping in the winter wind.

What is left (which may become extremely threadbare during the next few months) will provide a little protection for the lower regions and the roots of the plant in the event that we have a spell of really nasty weather.

Ron should then go back and prune his climber properly in March or April, when the weather starts to warm. He should be quite tough-minded at this time, cutting the entire plant back to within about 3ft of the ground and forcing it to start all over again.

This will mean that the plant will flower quite late in the summer, but it will do so on the fresh and attractive new growth that will reclothe the trellis extremely quickly.

Why VAT stinks

From Ace's favorite fag, Gabriel Malor:

The value added tax is back in the news and worse, in the few days since Mitch Daniel's suggestion that the United States adopt a VAT, I'm seeing it proposed more and more from (so-called?) conservative commentators. Often, they pair a VAT with a flat income tax and suggest replacing the existing federal income tax scheme.

It should go without saying that the VAT is an exceptionally bad idea, whether it's paired with a flat tax or a fair tax or any other tax and whether it replaces the federal income tax or not. Whatever its merits, they are outweighed by its key features: the VAT obscures for the taxpayer just how much money is being sucked up by the government; it is prone to Congressional abuse; and it is, in the words of economists, "efficient."

Yes, you can put VAT on each and every sales receipt. But unless the taxpayer keeps and diligently tallies every receipt, he will have no idea what he's ended up handing over to Uncle Sam.

This feature of the VAT is a tax-and-spend liberal's wet dream because it keeps the taxpayer-voter in ignorance of how much of his property the government is appropriating over time. Even under the current complicated income tax scheme, the taxpayer-voter has a pretty good idea of how much of his annual income gets sent off to Washington, D.C. And he can then make reasonable predictions and demands and votes when Congress starts fiddling with tax rates. But for the average American, if Congress were to adjust a VAT, the question "how much does this affect me or my business" becomes difficult to answer. Again, unless the taxpayer-voter has been keeping track of his consumption.

And there, too, a VAT gives Congress even greater means to target disfavored industries and individuals. Progressive nannies can push for a higher VAT on soda and fast food. Social conservatives can push for a higher VAT on...er, morally questionable commerce. Other major targets: the oil industry (after all, they should pay more for being Gaia-raping capitalists); the pharmaceutical industry (it's for the children, somehow); and, without a doubt, Big Tobacco (for obvious reasons).

Economists laud the VAT because it is a "more efficient" means of collecting taxes. As a conservative, hell as a taxpayer, I am not in favor of more efficiency in letting the government take what's mine. I acknowledge the need for a government and the obvious necessity of paying for one. But simultaneous efficiency and obscurity are not on the top of my list for features of a tax scheme. I want what taxes I'm paying to be SCREAMINGLY obvious. And I want to be able to get that information any time I want, but particularly when I'm asked to elect or reelect these jokers in Congress. (In fact, it is for this reason that I support moving Tax Day from April 15 to the first Monday in November. Let's put Tax Day nearer to Election Day.)

In short, the VAT is exactly the type of tax scheme that conservatives shouldn't want. And pairing it with a flat income tax does not alter its key features, that is, it's patent deficiencies. It's disappointing to see conservatives using the Obama-spawned budget crisis as an excuse to propose a fundamentally awful tax scheme. Shame on them.

Hitler Exhibit Explores a Wider Circle of Guilt

“Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime”:

BERLIN - As artifacts go, they are mere trinkets — an old purse, playing cards, a lantern. Even the display that caused the crowds to stop and stare is a simple embroidered tapestry, stitched by village women.

But the exhibits that opened Friday at the German Historical Museum are intentionally prosaic: they emphasize the everyday way that ordinary Germans once accepted, and often celebrated, Hitler.

The household items had Nazi logos and colors. The tapestry, a tribute to the union of church, state and party, was woven by a church congregation at the behest of their priest.

“This is what we call self-mobilization of society,” said Hans-Ulrich Thamer, one of three curators to assemble the exhibit at the German Historical Museum. “As a person, Hitler was a very ordinary man. He was nothing without the people.”

This show, “Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime,” opened Friday. It was billed as the first in Germany since the end of World War II to focus exclusively on Adolf Hitler. Germany outlaws public displays of some Nazi symbols, and the curators took care to avoid showing items that appeared to glorify Hitler. His uniforms, for example, remained in storage.

Instead, the show focuses on the society that nurtured and empowered him. It is not the first time historians have argued that Hitler did not corral the Germans as much as the Germans elevated Hitler.

But one curator said the message was arguably more vital for Germany now than at any time in the past six decades, as rising nationalism, more open hostility to immigrants and a generational disconnect from the events of the Nazi era have older Germans concerned about repeating the past.

“The only hope for stopping extremists is to isolate them from society so that they are separated, so they do not have a relationship with the bourgeoisie and the other classes,” Mr. Thamer said. “The Nazis were members of high society. This was the dangerous moment.

“This we have to avoid from happening.”

Precisely. European nationalism is dangerous and that is why the ruling elite bureaucrats' religion is political correctness. Americans, being more civilized than Europeans, do not have that problem. Our patriotism is not based on ethnicity but on individual freedom. Unfortunately Democrats still pander to group identity politics as power-hungry people will. It's called "divide and conquer."

Lady Chatterley trial - 50 years later

Dominic Sandbrook worries that since then nothing is deemed to be 'obscene’ - The filthy book that set us free and fettered us forever:

Fifty years ago this week, amid extraordinary international publicity, the Old Bailey was the venue for a trial that did more to shape 21st-century Britain than hundreds of politicians put together. The case of the Crown versus Penguin Books opened on Friday, October 21, 1960, when courtroom officials handed copies of perhaps the most notorious novel of the century, D H Lawrence’s book Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to nine men and three women, and asked them to read it. They were not, however, allowed to take the book out of the jury room. Only if Penguin were acquitted of breaking the Obscene Publications Act would it be legal to distribute it.

What followed, said one eyewitness, was a “circus so hilarious, fascinating, tense and satisfying that none who sat through all its six days will ever forget them”. But it was a circus that changed Britain forever. Though few then could have realised it, a tiny but unmistakeable line runs from the novel Lawrence wrote in the late 1920s to an international pornography industry today worth more than £26 billion a year.
...
In many respects, the celebrated landmark trial was actually something of a farce. The defence team, led by Gerald Gardiner, a founder member of CND, lined up 35 distinguished witnesses convinced of the book’s literary merit, including E M Forster, Cecil Day-Lewis, Rebecca West and Richard Hoggart. The Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, the very prototype of a trendy Anglican clergyman, even told the court that Lawrence showed sex as “an act of holy communion”, and agreed vigorously when asked if it was a book that “Christians ought to read”.

By contrast, the Crown case was in trouble from the start. Although the prosecution drew up a long list of potential witnesses who might condemn Lawrence’s book as obscene, none of them agreed to testify. At one point they even considered flying over an American literary critic who had once condemned the book as “a dreary, sad performance with some passages of unintentional, hilarious, low comedy”, although they eventually abandoned the idea. Instead the prosecution team wasted time before the trial going through the book line by line with a pencil, noting down the obscenities: on page 204, for example, one “bitch goddess of Success”, one “––––ing”, one “s–––”, one “best bit of c––– left on earth” and three mentions of “balls”.
...
On November 2, after just three hours’ deliberation, the jury acquitted Penguin Books of all charges. Almost immediately, the book became a best-seller. In 15 minutes, Foyles sold 300 copies and took orders for 3,000 more. Hatchards sold out in 40 minutes; Selfridges sold 250 copies in half an hour. In one Yorkshire town, a canny butcher sold copies of the book beside his lamb chops.

Saturday house

India's richest man Mukesh Ambani moves into £630m 27-storey home:

Ambani, his wife and three children have moved into the building which is named Antilia, after a mythical Island. It contains a health club with a gym and dance studio, at least one studio, a ballroom, guestrooms and a range of lounges and a 50 seater cinema.

There is even an elevated garden with ceiling space to accommodate small trees.

The roof has three helicopter pads and there is also underground parking for 160 cars, which will come in handy for guests at Ambani's forthcoming housewarming party.

From the top floors of the 173m high property are spectacular views of Mumbai and of the Arabian Sea.

The 53 year-old tycoon is not only the richest man in India but the fourth richest man in the world. In total there is reported to be 37,000 square metres of space, which is more than the Palace of Versailles.

To keep it running smoothly requires 600 staff.

The true size of Africa

Reginald Bassey posts an enlightening map and chart. (Click to biggify.)

The most common system for drawing maps is the Mercatur projection which makes the land masses of the northern hemisphere look larger than they really are. Africa is actually larger than the USA, China, India, Japan and the whole of Europe combined.

The total land area of the world is 148,940,000 sq k (57,510,000 sq mi.)

Africa is 11,668,598 square miles or more than one-fifth of the earth's landmass.

Don't you hate it when Walmart starts selling Christmas stuff before Halloween? I don't

We just watched our first Christmas movie tonight and it made me feel all warm and cozy. That's why I like to start my Yuletide season as soon as the nights get cold.

I was just thinking how politics (and reality in general) is pretty cold, merciless and unfair and how nice it is to feel all warm and cozy, full of goodwill to all men. That's why I love Christmas.

But there's a time and place for everything. That's why we don't celebrate Christmas all year round. Problem is that liberals want Christmas all year round while conservatives know that the bills for all that abundance must be paid sooner or later and, while liberals think that money grows on Christmas trees (well, any tree for that matter), conservatives know that it doesn't.

Politics is about money and conservatives prefer to pay for the party beforehand while liberals party and run up debt like there's no tomorrow.

And politics (and economics) are divisive. So it's nice to have a nice warm and cozy Christmas as a break from the harsh reality. As it's written in Ecclesiastes:

To everything there is a season, and
a time to every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born, and
a time to die;
a time to plant, and
a time to pluck up
that which is planted;

A time to kill, and
a time to heal;
a time to break down, and
a time to build up;

A time to weep, and
a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and
a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and
a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and
a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and
a time to lose;
a time to keep, and
a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and
a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and
a time to speak;

A time to love, and
a time to hate;
a time of war; and
a time of peace.

If you get more from the government than you pay in taxes, you can't vote

Over at The Corner there's been some discussion about not allowing government employees to vote. Of course it's all been on the level of "If I were Queen for a day..." or "In a perfect world..."

But, if you're interested in contributing to the discussion about what our future will be like - increasing enslavement to Big Brother government or increasing individual freedom and sovereignty - then it's a worthwhile thought exercise.

The way I see it is simple. If you contribute more taxes towards government services than you receive from government, then you can vote. That means that not only can recipients of government handouts NOT vote but neither can government employees. And that includes Congress, POTUS and SCOTUS.

The problem of parasites voting themselves more and more of other peoples' money is thereby solved.

The "Great American Novel" vs a good movie

It was always my dream to write a long complex novel full of wonderful characters, lots of drama and scintillating conversation but...the fact is that it seems not only contrived but unnecessary. Real people are so much more interesting than the fake people in a novel. And fact, as the truism says, is stranger than fiction.

Don't get me wrong. I love a good story. It's just that I'd sooner watch a movie than read a novel. (And I prefer movies based on true stories.) I know that the same amount of writing (mental effort and imagination) goes into a good screenplay as a novel but I just like my stories to be less than two hours long and - and this is the clincher for me - I don't like to spend too much mental energy on fictional characters. A movie puts fictional characters in perspective. A novel blows them out of proportion.

Just 2% of gay people have 23% of the total reported gay sex

From one of the guys who runs the dating site OKCupid:

We run a massive dating site and therefore have unparalleled insight into sex and relationships. Here's what we've found, in numbers and charts.
...
First of all, gay people are not sexually interested in straights.
...
Gay people aren't promiscuous. Another common myth about gay people is that they sleep around, but the statistical reality is that gay people as a group aren't any more slutty than straights.

Median Reported Sex Partners

* straight men: 6
* gay men: 6
* straight women: 6
* gay women: 6

* 45% of gay people have had 5 or fewer partners (vs. 44% for straights)
* 98% of gay people have had 20 or fewer partners (vs. 99% for straights)

It turns out that a tiny fraction of gays have single-handedly two-handedly created the public image of gay sexual recklessness—in fact we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.
...
Straight people have gay sex, too.

Another inquiry that had unexpected results: we asked 252,900 straight people have you ever had a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex?

Almost a quarter answered 'yes'.

As for straight men, a surprisingly high 13% have had a same-sex experience, and another 5% haven't yet but would like to.

Using the incredible power of computers, we were able to break down this question geographically. Here are straight people who either have had or would like to have a same-sex experience in the continental U.S. and lower Canada. You can see some sharp geographic divides.

Awesomely, the mountain West lives up to its Brokeback reputation, and Canada is orange nearly coast-to-coast. Even in the yellow and blue areas, you can see pockets of gay curiosity in interesting places: Austin, Madison, Asheville. Anywhere soy milk is served, basically.

[Red is "more gay curious" and blue is "less gay curious" and yellow is in-between. What's up with Oregon? Maybe it's because our women are so butch and they can't tell the difference between their wives and their local lumberjacks.]

Guns and roses vegetables?

At the Phuket Vegetarian Festival:

A devotee of the Chinese shrine of Samkong, pierces his cheeks with toy guns during a procession of the Vegetarian Festival on October 11, 2010 in Phuket, Thailand. Ritual Vegetarianism in Phuket Island traces it roots back to the early 1800s. The festival begins on the first evening of the ninth lunar month and lasts for nine days. Participants in the festival perform acts of body piercing as a means of shifting evil spirits from individuals onto themselves and bring the community good luck.

Are "Small-Government Americans" incoherent?

James Poulos:

Americans want to break our national addiction to entitlement spending. But they know that'll restore some burdens. And they're already feeling pretty burdened. It's not incoherence at work. It's a recognition that things have gotten so bad that it's going to hurt to steer our federal governance back toward our founding principles. Who wants to volunteer to feel that pain?

It's not easy to turn back the clock 100 years to pre-Woodrow Wilson days.

I hate Woodrow Wilson

John Moser:

Today’s New York Times features a roundtable called “Hating Woodrow Wilson,” in which a number of scholars address the fascination certain conservatives such as Glenn Beck have with America’s twenty-eighth president.

Once we see that Wilson was the first president openly to repudiate the principles of the Founders, and sought to replace the notion of limited government with an expansive administrative state, it becomes far easier to understand why conservatives dislike him.
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Once we see that Wilson was the first president openly to repudiate the principles of the Founders, and sought to replace the notion of limited government with an expansive administrative state, it becomes far easier to understand why conservatives dislike him.

Recipe: Pumpkin Cheesecake with Pecan Penis Topping

Of course it's really "Pumpkin Cheesecake with Pecan Praline Topping" but the photo was rather suggestive. Actually it sounds delicious.

Naked redneck chick post: chickens used to eat our ancestors

Oops! Our ancestors used to eat chicken? Nope I was right the first time:

The discovery of multiple de-fleshed, chomped and gnawed bones from the extinct primates, which lived 16 to 20 million years ago on Rusinga Island, Kenya, was announced today at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's 70th Anniversary Meeting in Pittsburgh.

At least one of the devoured primates, an early ape called Proconsul, is thought to have been an ancestor to both modern humans and chimpanzees. It, and other primates on the island, were also apparently good eats for numerous predators.

Geert Wilders' "Islamophobia"

This is from an article titled Mainstreaming Hate that would like to paint Wilders as a hater but fails.

Geert Wilders is slowly but surely making Islamophobia an accepted element of political rhetoric in the Netherlands -- and he's got his eyes on the United States, next:

Wilders's success rests almost entirely on such strident rhetoric. To give an idea of the tone of his discourse in the Netherlands, he has called for a "head rag tax" on women wearing headscarves. He favors banning the Quran, wants to close Muslim schools but not equivalent Christian or Jewish ones, wants to force immigrants to sign "assimilation contracts," and wants to include the "Judeo-Christian character" of the state in the constitution.

But some Dutch analysts warn that it is a mistake to "blacken" Wilders's name too much or lump him with fascism or Nazism. "For one, he's not anti-Semitic," says Alfred Pijpers of the Clingendael Institute of International Relations in The Hague. Israeli officials have indeed privately commended him as "a friend of Israel." Pijpers says that Wilders has more in common with the Tea Party activists in the United States than with any old-style European right-wing party, because he can't really be classified as either right-wing or left-wing. His party has also embraced a left-wing populist defense of the Netherlands' besieged welfare system, and he scores points with his tough stance against crime, which he often links to immigrants.

His outspokenness has made him a hated figure for some Muslims, and he lives under constant police protection. Recently, an Australian imam called for his beheading, the last in a long line of threats. Wilders himself argued in July on the website muslimsdebate.com that he does not hate Muslims -- he just opposes Islam and wants Muslims to liberate themselves from its shackles.

Science And Poetry

Stuart Kauffman:

In my years at the University of Calgary, I came to know Canadian poet Christian Bok, who, to the amazement of all, published a book of poetry that became a best seller both in Canada and the UK. Prior to that, Christian did his Ph.D work on the long relation between science since Newton and poetry. His is a subtle understanding, mine a more roughshod version of what I learned from him.

Soon after Newton, with the Anglo-Continental West stunned at the success of Newtonian mechanics and celestial mechanics, Alexander Pope would write: “God said let there be Newton and All was Light.” His generation of poets celebrated Newton and the new physics and felt that beauty lay in rendering to metaphor what was true in the scientific world view that was rapidly emerging.

But Newton’s physics is a physics of Actual happenings.
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This determinism led 18th century scholars and many lay people to abandon the theistic God that acts in the universe, in favor of a deistic God who created the universe to run with Newton’s laws, wound up the clock of the universe, and let it go. The deistic God had no further role in the deterministic unfolding of the universe.

In response, Bok told me, the English Romantics arose in rebellion. Keats wrote of science with its “rule and line,” denuding us of our humanity and, spirituality in face of a deistic God, and wrote with Shelly, Coleridge, and others who were dismayed at science and determined to do battle to regain ground for our deepest humanity.
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Then in the 1950s, C.P. Snow wrote his famous essay, The Two Cultures, decrying the fact that the then dominant literati and the lesser esteemed scientists lived in two worlds that could not talk to one another.
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On the dominant view of the mind, the mind is a Turing machine. A Turing machine is utterly definite. Given a position of the reading head, the symbols on the tape, the rules in the machine for moving or not moving on the tape, erasing symbols on the tape depending upon the definite discrete state of the head, and moving to a new state among the discrete states of the head, the Turing machine is an abstraction of Descartes’ animal body as a machine, clockwork in the visions of his day. Our minds are algorithmic. Artificial Intelligence is the offspring of this view. On it, science itself is an algorithmic activity needing no metaphor, the signal case of the fully definite, the mind is nude of rich non-computable allusions, notwithstanding the very interesting connectionist strand in AI.

But is the mind algorithmic? I think not, and think we need poetry to unite the Two Cultures and rediscover our deeper humanity.

I advance two reasons among many.

Click to read the rest.

Jack Kerouac: "Life is too sweet to waste it on self propaganda"

Ouch! I guess this applies to mini-bloggers in spades:

Among the items sold at the literary auction at Bonhams and Butterfields on Monday was a 1961 letter from Jack Kerouac to two friends, Jacques Beckwith and Lois Sorrells. Kerouac had been typing on the page, got a letter from Sorrells then switched gears, abandoning his thought (mostly) to write a letter to them. This is what he typed at the top of the page, before the letter:

I can just see the shabby literary man carrying a "bulging briefcase" rushing from one campus to another, one lecture club to another, nodding confirmation with his hosts that he is right, hurrying to the next town ... a whole gray career of proving himself to others, to as many as can hear him, that he was right ... till finally people say: "Here comes the self-prover again, O dear ... bring out the papers and the canapes." This my friend is what I will become if I accept all lecture offers, TV appearances, radio interviews and start arranging with reviewers and critics who want information and my books through me, a great long lifetime in a briefcase proving my work and my work itself stopped dead at the level where I took to proving myself. So, I say, life is too sweet to waste on self propaganda, I quit self promotion, I enter my page.

This was four years after the publication of Kerouac's greatest work, "On the Road." None of his other books would have the reach or impact of that book -- few do -- but he'd been publishing regularly in the years after. There was a 1958 follow-up, "The Dharma Bums," and "Lonesome Traveler" in 1960.

If you know Kerouac's biography, you know that in 1969 he died of internal bleeding associated with cirrhosis, brought on by years of excessive drinking. It is easy to look back at this refusenik Kerouac, the one crying against self-promotion, as the one who would hear the call of self-destruction, who was resigned, miserable, dissipated.

And yet.

Kerouac was only 47 when he died. Click to read the rest.

A useful new site announcing new releases

When it drops.

This Brit understands and loves the USA

Daniel Hannan talks with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about his new book, The New Road to Serfdom - A Letter of Warning to America:

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: [You write that] “The United States is becoming just another country.” How far along are we?

DANIEL HANNAN: The abandonment of American particularism started with the first Roosevelt but really took off with the second. Like most bad things, it happened from good intentions. FDR saw himself as the champion of the masses against the lobbies. Convinced of his moral rectitude, he tolerated no constraints on his power. He sidelined the legislature, ignored the conventional two-term limit, ruled by executive order, tried to pack the Supreme Court and constructed a massive federal bureaucracy, much of which is still in place.
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Other countries are defined by territory, language, religion, ethnicity. Yours is defined by a constitution, and the dream of liberty that found form in that constitution. You don’t have to be American to share that dream, which is why the world has a stake in your success.

Dog post of the day

Saturday house

When I see a house like this, it makes me want to start posting Saturday houses again.

Quentin Crisp - the quintessential queen

Tonight we watched the 2008 movie An Englishman in New York about the last 20 years of Quentin Crisp's life. The actor John Hurt plays Crisp. (Hurt played the role of Crisp in the 1975 movie The Naked Civil Servant based on Crisp's memoirs published in 1968.)

Quentin Crisp was the quintessential queen but he was a brave man and a true gentleman. He was born Denis Charles Pratt on 25th December 1908 in Surrey:

Crisp was an English writer and raconteur. He became an icon of homosexuality in the 1970s after publication of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, brought to the attention of the general public his defiant exhibitionism and refusal to keep his sexuality private.
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After leaving school in 1926, Crisp studied journalism at King's College London, but failed to graduate in 1928, going on to take art classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

Around this time, Crisp began visiting the cafés of Soho – his favourite being The Black Cat in Old Compton Street – meeting other young homosexual men and rent-boys, and experimenting with make-up and women's clothes. For six months he worked as a male prostitute, looking for love, he said in a 1999 interview,[citation needed] but finding only degradation.
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Crisp attempted to join the British army at the outbreak of World War II, but was rejected and declared exempt by the medical board on the grounds that he was "suffering from sexual perversion". He remained in London during the 1941 Blitz, stocked up on cosmetics, purchased five pounds of henna and paraded through the black-out, picking up G.I.s, whose kindness and open-mindedness inspired his love of all things American.

In 1940 he moved into the bed-sitting room he would occupy for the next four decades, the first floor apartment at 129 Beaufort Street. Here he stayed until he emigrated to the United States in 1981. In the intervening years he never attempted any house-work, saying famously in his memoir that "After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse".

He left his job as engineer's tracer in 1942 to become a model in life classes in London and the Home Counties, and continued posing for artists for the next three decades. "It was like being a civil servant," he explained in his autobiography, "except that you were naked." Pamela Green, who went on to be a famous glamour model of the 1950s and '60s, remembers him at St. Martin's School of Art, as “very thin with a skin so white it almost had a greenish tinge”.

Crisp had published three short books by the time he came to write the The Naked Civil Servant.
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When his autobiography was reprinted in 1975 on the strength of the success of the televisual version of The Naked Civil Servant, Gay News commented that the book should have been published posthumously. Quentin said this was a polite way of telling him to drop dead. Crisp was not sympathetic to the Gay Liberation movement of the time. "What do you want liberation from?" he asked in a 1974 chance encounter with Peter Tatchell. "What is there to be proud of? I don't believe in rights for homosexuals."
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Crisp then took the show to New York [and] Crisp decided to move to New York permanently and set about making arrangements. In 1981 he arrived with few possessions and found a small apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
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Crisp remained fiercely independent and unpredictable into old age. He caused controversy and confusion in the homosexual community by jokingly calling AIDS "a fad", and homosexuality "a terrible disease". Crisp commented after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales: "She could have been Queen of England [sic] – and she was swanning about Paris with Arabs. What disgraceful behaviour! Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering."

Crisp returned to England to do a show but died soon afterward on 21 November 1999 a month before his 91st birthday.

He was always true to himself, a true individualist, a full-time satirist and a part-time philosopher. Some quotes:

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

There are girls [fag hags] who do not like real life... Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love — a kind of sexual intercourse that will happen to them without their having to take too horribly much notice. Even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to know that this will not be so persist in these relationships. They provide an opportunity to lavish emotion on a pseudo-man without paying the price that in heterosexual circumstances would be inevitable.

I now know that if you describe things as better as they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you are called a satirist.

It would be impossible to get through the kind of life that I have known without accumulating a vast unused stockpile of rage. Retaliation, though, was a luxury I could never afford. On the physical level I was too feeble. On any other I was not rich enough. I never dared to be rude to anyone. I never knew that I might not need him later.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.

An autobiography is obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

Life was a funny thing that occurred on the way to the grave.

Needless to say Crisp was hated by "gay activists" because he would not conform to their group-think or promote their agenda.

The opposite of sharia is liberty

Boortz:

This email finally made it to my inbox. A psychiatric rescue squad is on the way:

I am perplexed that so many of my friends are against a mosque being built near Ground Zero. I think it should be the goal of every American to be tolerant. The mosque should be allowed, in an effort to promote tolerance.

That is why I also propose, that two gay nightclubs be opened next door to the mosque thereby promoting tolerance within the mosque. We could call the clubs "The Turban Cowboy" and "You Mecca Me So Hot". Next door should be a butcher shop that specializes in pork and have an open barbeque with spare ribs as its daily special.

Across the street a very daring lingerie store called "Victoria Keeps Nothing Secret" with sexy mannequins in the window modeling the goods. Next door to the lingerie shop, there would be room for an Adult Toy Shop (Koranal Knowledge?), its name in flashing neon lights, and on the other side a liquor store, maybe call it "Morehammered"

Actually, the only reason that I posted this thing is to irritate some Muslims out there who see negative remarks about their religion as offensive but who have nothing much to say about the numbers of innocent people who are killed by this peaceful religion every year.

The (Orange) Free State

A road trip through the Free State:

Smack in the middle of the undulating emptiness of the Karoo desert, enclosed by towering outcrops with scary names like the Valley of Desolation, Graaff-Reinet looks like a place that has seen a bit of history.

The town was established by Dutch settlers in the late 18th century. Many of the buildings carry the date they were built on the gabling – 1837, 1841, 1852 – just to remind you how long the Afrikaners have been in residence here. They were already well ensconced in 1901, when, according to a monument in the town, several of their young men were executed by the British Army for the crime of wearing khaki in a public place.

Up the main street, flanked by Cape Dutch houses, their verandas freshly whitewashed, their roofs a uniform blue, not much appears to have changed over the years. Walking past the muscular church modelled on Salisbury Cathedral, you half expect to encounter a covered wagon full of determined Voortrekkers making their way north.

But it was a more personal history that was on the mind of one of our party as we arrived in the symbolic heart of Afrikaner land.
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Desolation Valley is appropriately named. An echoing rift of jag-toothed outcrops, it could easily double as Middle Earth or the badlands of Wyoming. With the winter sun setting behind the hills, leaving the eagles to swoop and shriek in a gathering gloaming, it made Death Valley look inviting.

But from the top of the 3,000ft outcrop, the view of Graaff-Reinet was so clear it took us back in time. We could see the old town marked by the bend in the river. The neat clapboard houses, the schools with their trim sports fields, the church with its substantial tower, visible for miles across the desert.

The Free State was one of two Afrikaner republics (modeled on the USA by the Boers) which were defeated by the British during the Boer War and then occupied and turned into colonies of the British Empire. It used to be called the Orange Free State:

The republic's name derives partly from the Orange River (just as the Transvaal Republic was named after the Vaal River), which in turn was named in honour of the Dutch ruling royal family, the House of Orange, by the Dutch settlers under Robert Jacob Gordon. The official language in the Orange Free State was Dutch.
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In 1824 farmers of Dutch, French Huguenot and German descent called Trekboers (later shortened to Boers) from Cape Colony who were seeking pasture for their flocks settled in the country. They were followed in 1836 by the first parties of the Great Trek. These emigrants left Cape Colony from various motives, but all were animated by the desire to escape from British sovereignty.

My mother and my Joubert ancestors came from the Free State.

The Valley of Desolation in the Great Karoo desert:

Nobel Literature Prize to Mario Vargas Llosa

The Peruvian writer is the first South American winner of the prize since it was awarded to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian writer, in 1982.

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936:

Like many Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career; over the course of his life, he has gradually moved from the political left towards the right. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted. He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 with the center-right Frente Democrático (FREDEMO) coalition, advocating neoliberal reforms. He has subsequently supported moderate conservative candidates.
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He studied Marxism in depth as a university student and was later persuaded by communist ideals after the success of the Cuban Revolution. Gradually, Vargas Llosa came to believe that Cuban socialism was incompatible with what he considered to be general liberties and freedoms. The official rupture between the writer and the policies of the Cuban government occurred with the so-called Padilla Affair, when Fidel Castro imprisoned the poet Heberto Padilla. Vargas Llosa, along with other intellectuals of the time, wrote to Castro protesting against the Cuban political system and the imprisonment of the artist. Vargas Llosa has identified himself with liberalism rather than extreme left-wing political ideologies ever since.
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Over the course of the decade, Vargas Llosa became known for his staunch neoliberal views. In 1987, he helped form and soon became a leader of the Movimiento Libertad. The following year his party entered a coalition with the parties of Peru's two principal conservative politicians at the time, ex-president Fernando Belaúnde Terry (of the Popular Action party) and Luis Bedoya Reyes (of the Partido Popular Cristiano), to form the tripartite center-right coalition known as Frente Democrático (FREDEMO). He ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 as the candidate of the FREDEMO coalition. He proposed a drastic economic austerity program that frightened most of the country's poor; this program emphasized the need for privatization, a market economy, free trade, and most importantly, the dissemination of private property. During the campaign, his opponents read racy passages from his novels over the radio in an apparent attempt to shock voters.[citation needed] Although he won the first round with 34% of the vote, Vargas Llosa was defeated by a then-unknown agricultural engineer, Alberto Fujimori, in the subsequent run-off. Vargas Llosa included an account of his run for the presidency in the memoir A Fish in the Water (El pez en el agua, 1993). Since his political defeat, he has focused mainly on his writing, with only an occasional political involvement.

His first son, Álvaro Vargas Llosa, who was born in 1966, is an international libertarian activist:

He is a proponent of free-market economics and democracy under the rule of law, calling for more open trade between Latin America and the United States. He has been critical of the legacies of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba and Bolivia, and more recently, the policies of the Hugo Chávez government in Venezuela and the Evo Morales government in Bolivia.

I have actually met (through his nephew who was a friend of mine) one of the literature Nobelists, probably one of the worst ever: Harold Pinter, who got the prize in 2005. He was the darkest, creepiest and most depressing man I have ever met. Pinter's acceptance speech at the prize-giving was a vicious anti-American rant. (His nephew, my friend, who was always a bit mentally unbalanced, later committed suicide.)

The "pay to spray" controversy

An interesting discussion over at The Corner about the pay to spray controversy. I've only quoted snippets from the arguments. Click on the links to read more details.

Firefighters watch as home burns to the ground:

OBION COUNTY, Tenn. - Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won't respond, then watches it burn. That's exactly what happened to a local family tonight.

A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.

Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.

The mayor said if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck.

This fire went on for hours because garden hoses just wouldn't put it out. It wasn't until that fire spread to a neighbor's property, that anyone would respond.

Turns out, the neighbor had paid the fee.

"I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong," said Gene Cranick.

Daniel Foster:

I have no problem with this kind of opt-in government in principle — especially in rural areas where individual need for government services and available infrastructure vary so widely. But forget the politics: what moral theory allows these firefighters (admittedly acting under orders) to watch this house burn to the ground when 1) they have already responded to the scene; 2) they have the means to stop it ready at hand; 3) they have a reasonable expectation to be compensated for their trouble?

The counterargument is, of course, that this kind of system only works if there are consequences for opting out. For the firefighters to have put out the blaze would have opened up a big moral hazard and generated a bunch of future free-riding — a lot like how the ban on denying coverage based on preexisting conditions, paired with penalties under the individual mandate that are lower than the going premiums, would lead to folks waiting until they got sick to buy insurance.

Kevin D. Williamson:

Dan, you are 100 percent wrong.

The situation is this: The city of South Fulton’s fire department, until a few years ago, would not respond to any fires outside of the city limits — which is to say, the city limited its jurisdiction to the city itself, and to city taxpayers. A reasonable position. Then, a few years ago, a fire broke out in a rural area that was not covered by the city fire department, and the city authorities felt bad about not being able to do anything to help. So they began to offer an opt-in service, for the very reasonable price of $75 a year. Which is to say: They greatly expanded the range of services they offer. The rural homeowners were, collectively, better off, rather than worse off. Before the opt-in program, they had no access to a fire department. Now they do.

Jonah Goldberg:

Why isn’t there a happy middle ground? You can pay 75 bucks upfront or, if you wait until your house is on fire, it will cost you, I dunno, $10,000? Lots of things work like this.

Here’s the more important part of the story, letting the house burn — while, I admit sad — will probably save more houses over the long haul. I know that if I opted out of the program before, I would be more likely to opt-in now. No solace to the homeowner, but an important lesson for compassionate conservatives like our own Dan Foster (Zing!). As Edmund Burke said, example is the school of mankind and he will learn from no other.

John Derbyshire:

Dan, Kevin: I am entirely with the South Fulton fire department here. In the terms of Nico Colchester’s great 1996 essay, they are being crunchy rather than soggy:

Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. . . . Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty. . . . The richer a society becomes, the soggier its systems get. Light-switches no longer turn on or off: they dim.

One of the duties of conservatives in this soggy fallen world is to stand up for crunchiness. For the fire department to have extinguished the Cranicks’ fire would have been soggy, even aside from the considerable degree of sogginess it would have left on the property.

Daniel Foster:

Jonah, you know how to hit a guy where it hurts: deploying my precious Burke against me and calling me the dread double C-word. But notice, my argument isn’t about the wisdom of the policy, or of Mr. Cranick for not opting into it. It’s about what to do if you’re the fire chief sitting in front of the burning house.
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I’m not convinced by Derb’s argument that the Cranick’s house should have been left to burn to teach us all a valuable lesson.

Daniel Foster:

Ton of e-mail on this Pay to Spray stuff. This one, from an ex first-responder is sensible even if I don’t fully buy it:

The city took a logical, if not well thought out, step toward fiscal responsibility and personal accountability.

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One more reader response, this one comes closest to convincing me that I’m a bleeding-heart nanny-state liberal (are there rehab programs for that sort of thing?):

So what he was really willing to offer was to pay reasonable costs. But he already had an opportunity to do the reasonable thing by signing up in advance, and declined. So why should anyone get outraged when he gets what’s coming to him? As far as I can see, the only plausible source of outrage was that he didn’t realize in advance how severe the penalty might be.

Kevin D. Williamson:

All this talk of fire departments reminds me of an important fact: Some of the best, fastest-moving, most dedicated, and most effective fire departments I’ve seen at work have been volunteer fire departments. But I suppose if you can’t be bothered to pay $75 to subscribe to the local firefighting service, then you surely cannot be bothered to set up a volunteer fire company in your county.

Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite newspaper photos by the great Mike Mooney, one of my all-time favorite newspaper photographers: a volunteer firefighter in Lower Merion, Pa., rescues Oreo the cat from a house fire — just barely.

First, I must say that I have never seen a cat look that defeated. Most will fight to their deaths - even attacking their rescuers. That's happened to me twice and I will never rescue another cat.

Second, I posted this because I wanted to start a discussion with Chas and Andy about financially supporting our local volunteer rural fire dept.

What’s wrong with America that it needs “transforming”?

John Derbyshire, an immigrant like me, at The Corner today:

This whole business of “transforming America” strikes me as odd. It’s a big theme for leftist politicians, and always gets wild cheers. But do any large number of Americans actually want this country “transformed”?

On Radio Derb last week I noted Rep. Luis Gutierrez telling the House immigration subcommittee that through mass immigration we “transform America and make it a vital, energetic economic engine of the future.” I asked:

What’s wrong with America that it needs “transforming”? At which point did Americans ask to have their nation “transformed”? Are Americans so dissatisfied with their nation in its current state that they want it “transformed”? Where is the evidence for that? Why would leaving the U.S.A. un-transformed — just the way it is — why would that be a bad policy?

I fell in love with America at first sight when I arrived here in 1973. The energy and vigor; the widespread generosity and kindness (I couldn’t have spent Thanksgiving alone if I’d wanted to); the ease with which you could get things done; the universal patriotism — flags everywhere on the Fourth, the anthem at Yankee Stadium … I guess I’m coloring it with nostalgia to some degree, but I do remember how wonderful it all seemed — wonderful, wonderful.

Why did it need “transforming”? It was a really nice place. And why does it still need transforming?

Precisely! I fell so much in love with America the first time I came here on vacation in 1977 that I decided to return in 1978 permanently. Only those who hate it want to transform it.

"Now that human cloning is achievable will it inevitably become desirable?"

From Joan Frawley Desmond's review of the movie "Never Let Me Go":

A haunting tale of a “brave new world” of cloned people, who come of age in a society that rejects their common humanity, Never Let Me Go was published in 2005 to critical acclaim. It’s been adapted for film audiences, and is now in theaters for a limited U.S. engagement. A timeless portrait of human transcendence, it also serves as a blueprint for a “culture of death” unique to the contemporary utilitarian mindset.

Written by Kazuo Ishiguro — the British writer that earned global fame with The Remains of the Day, a riveting story of a class-bound butler in pre-war England — Never Let Me Go isn’t fizzy “date night” material.
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Ishiguro created a similar narrative framework in subsequent novels that also explored the characters’ fitful struggles to engage the darker truths that lurk just beyond their fixed preconceptions about the world. This approach seems especially suited to the larger cultural backdrop for Never Let Me Go, a story set in contemporary Britain about human clones educated to fulfill their predestined mission as organ donors who will not survive middle age.
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[It] exposes the moral contradictions inherent in our present use of contemporary reproductive technologies: methods of assisting fertility or curing diseases that are predicated on the destruction of human life.
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[W]e may find ourselves re-examining the culture’s incremental tolerance of attacks against nascent human life, from legal abortion to the laboratory creation of embryos destroyed during research. Once moral absolutes are discarded, utilitarian equations, which employ a cost-benefit analysis to establish the value of individual lives, seem too fragile, or adaptable, to prevent future abuses of reproductive technologies.

Ishiguro acknowledges this grim truth, though he doesn’t belabor it. Indeed, some will reach very different conclusions about the moral dynamics at play here. After all, many desperate patients and their families have already accepted the necessity of employing embryo-destructive research to advance future cures.

From mongrels to poodles

Ursula Goodenough on The Evolvability Of Dogs:

One of my daughters recently moved in with me for a while, and she brought along her dog Oscar. As a life-long cat person, this was a first, and I’ve become enchanted. This led me, in the context of last week’s discussion of food domestication, to read up on the domestication of the dog from the wolf, an event followed much later by the establishment of some 300 dog breeds. (Oscar is decidedly a mongrel). I learned that amazing insights into dog genetics have been acquired in the past few years; an excellent online-accessible review article provides details and references.
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Fossil evidence of dog-human cohabitation goes back 30,000 years, and genetic evidence indicates that most modern dogs descend from a wolf —> dog domestication event that took place in central Asia. Until recent times, these domesticated dogs were interbreeding “mutts,” moving across the planet with their journeying humans and probably on occasion back-crossing with wild wolves. And then, some 200 years ago, dog breeding was initiated in England, generating the highly inbred and distinctive lines we encounter today.

The rest of the article is full of scientific facts.

Net politics makes fiction reading difficult

Kevin Hartnett :

All forms of desire have their natural enemies and I find that nothing saps my desire to read fiction like the Internet does. This is partly physiological—too much time at the computer withers my brain—but it’s partly dispositional, too. After the last round of primaries a couple Tuesdays ago, I spent an hour reading articles about the Tea Party. When I came up for air I was in an explicitly present-tense state of mind where anything written more than an hour ago seemed to be based on a world that had already been subsumed. Novels, which require a willingness to attend to more enduring themes, don’t hold up very well by this perspective.

Politics as a whole has a fairly degrading effect on my fiction drive.

So that's why I haven't been able to read fiction for the past 20 years. Well, that and the fact that most current fiction is such crap.

Crimea - The Last Crusade

From a review of Orlando Figes' Crimea - The Last Crusade:

The war, in which Britain and France took on Tsarist Russia to defend the tottering Ottoman Empire, is often lost amid the detritus of the Victorian age. Yet, as Figes points out, the war was a seismic historical event, representing the collapse of the old Concert of Europe, hobbling Russian power for almost a century, and paving the way for the emergence of Germany and Italy as unified nation-states.

It was the last “old” war, with regular truces to clear battlefields of the dead; more importantly, it was also the first “truly modern war”, a conflict of steamships and railways, covered by war correspondents and press photographers.

The death toll, too, was a chilling harbinger: in total, Figes suggests, at least 750,000 men lost their lives, many through illness and disease. “It was a horrible scene,” one British officer wrote after surveying the aftermath of the Battle of the Alma. “Death in every shape and form.”

At the time, most British soldiers had no idea why they were fighting Russian peasants in the hills of the Crimea. To modern eyes, too, the causes of the war seem bewilderingly esoteric: essentially, it represented the death throes of the Ottoman Empire, which had dominated south-eastern Europe for centuries but had become a sclerotic invalid.

What Figes captures superbly is the extent to which this was a religious war. At the heart of the Tsarist regime was the idea of Holy Russia, with the emperor as defender of Orthodoxy and heir to Byzantium. To Nicholas I, a military enthusiast who slept on an army camp bed every night, no dream glittered more brightly than that of reclaiming Constantinople from the Turks and celebrating mass in Hagia Sophia.

“Nothing is left to me but to fight, to win, or to perish with honour, as a martyr of the holy faith,” he explained in 1854, “and when I say this I declare it in the name of Russia.”

Nicholas’s adversaries were rather less mystical but just as colourful. France’s Napoleon III was an extravagantly moustachioed little man who craved military success to legitimise his regime. In Britain, the key factor was the pressure of public opinion, whipped up by newspapers that cast the Orthodox Tsar as a “semi-pagan” bully and the Muslim Sultan, rather implausibly, as a champion of “religious toleration”.

Nobody better exploited this mood than Viscount Palmerston, the cynical Whig populist who became the embodiment of Victorian jingoism. If Palmerston had got his way, the allied forces would probably have gone all the way to Moscow. His goal, he told his colleagues, was to smash the Russian Empire forever, ensuring eternal British dominance in Asia.

In reality, the British and French forces rapidly got bogged down outside the Crimean port of Sevastopol, which became their primary goal for the majority of the war.

Thanks to new rifle and artillery technology, the slaughter was horrendous: at Inkerman in November 1854, 15,000 men were killed in just four hours. The British troops, many of them recruited from Ireland, suffered particularly badly, thanks not least to a ludicrously amateurish officer class that should have been reformed years before. Under-equipped and ill-supplied, thousands of British soldiers also died unnecessarily from cholera and dysentery. “Ah! These English,” wrote one French officer. “They are men of undoubted courage but they know only how to get themselves killed.”

Figes proves an excellent guide to the vagaries of the battlefield, the suffering of the ordinary soldiers and the way in which the war became a crucial part of late-Victorian patriotic mythology, contributing to a new ethos of muscular Christianity. His use of Russian archives in particular lifts this book above its predecessors, but he also finds room for such well-known stories as the Charge of the Light Brigade and the rise of Florence Nightingale.

The Charge Of The Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

This poem was written to memorialize a suicidal charge by light cavalry over open terrain by British forces in the Battle of Balaclava (Ukraine) in the Crimean War (1854-56). 247 men of the 637 in the charge were killed or wounded.

Half a league half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

The rest of the poem is here.