The Spirit Level aka The Watermelon Conspiracy

Every sane person knows that the global warming alarmists are stealth communists: like watermelons; green on the outside but red inside.

James Delingpole on "the most important book of 2010":

As the sharper among you will long since have recognised, the reason I bang on about AGW is not because I’m obsessed with “Climate Change” but because I recognise it as a strategically vital campaign in a much broader global culture war. On the outcome of this war depends not only the future of Western civilisation but also more immediately concerning things like whether or not our children and grandchildren have jobs, and whether or not we live in a state of liberty or tyranny.

This is why I believe this year’s most important publication is [...] Christopher Snowdon’s The Spirit Level Delusion.
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The reason that Snowdon’s book is so important is because the book it comprehensively debunks – Richard Wilson’s and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level – is so dangerous. I’ll let Snowdon himself explain why:

Apologists for Marxism have made myriad excuses for their ideology’s failure to provide the same standard of living and liberty as was enjoyed in capitalist nations. Until recently, few have been so brazen as to claim that lowering living standards and curtailing freedom were the intended consequences, let alone that people would be happier with less of either. In that sense, books like "The Spirit Level" represent a departure for the left. Limiting choice, reducing wealth and lowering aspirations are now openly advocated as desirable ends in themselves.

Indeed, The Spirit Level is in many ways the liberal-Left’s equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone: the magical artefact which makes their noxious ideology of envy and control seem somehow decent and caring. After all, if the creation of “equality” can be scientifically proven to be the noblest political goal, then no end of taxing and regulating and busybodying and meddling can suddenly be justified.

I’m grateful to Snowdon not just for demonstrating through careful analysis how embarrassingly flawed The Spirit Level is, but also for introducing me to two fascinating quotations from the 19th century French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw it all coming as long ago as the 1840s. A distorted definition of equality, De Tocqueville argued, would one day lead to despotism. Liberties would not be lost overnight but would fade away incrementally:

The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

Delingpole is a Brit but most sane Americans already know that De Tocqueville was one smart Frenchman who understood the USA better than most foreigners.

Actually our liberties are not just fading away incrementally. They have been deliberately, steadily and stealthily eroded by Fabians for 150 years. The Fabians believe that communism will be more effectively introduced not through violent revolution but by "the inevitability of gradualism" which is the motto of the Fabian Society.

Map of the day

American English Dialects.

I'm a HoBo

So says Jonah Goldberg:

[T]he sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning.

Nowhere is this more evident — and perhaps exaggerated — than in popular culture. Watch ABC’s Modern Family. The sitcom is supposed to be “subversive” in part because it features a gay couple with an adopted daughter from Asia. And you can see why both liberal proponents and conservative opponents of gay marriage see it that way. But imagine you hate the institution of marriage and then watch Modern Family’s hardworking bourgeois gay couple through those eyes. What’s being subverted? Traditional marriage, or some bohemian identity-politics fantasy of homosexuality?
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Personally, I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both). I do not think that the arguments against gay marriage are all grounded in bigotry, and I find some of the arguments persuasive. But I also find it cruel and absurd to tell gays that living the free-love lifestyle is abominable while at the same time telling them that their committed relationships are illegitimate too.

Many of my conservative friends — who oppose both civil unions and gay marriage and object to rampant promiscuity — often act as if there’s some grand alternative lifestyle for gays. But there isn’t. And given that open homosexuality is simply a fact of life, the rise of the HoBos — the homosexual bourgeoisie — strikes me as good news.

Today's conversation with a leftist

Commie: "I view organized religion as the single most destructive force ever unleashed onto humankind..."

Me: I realize that not everyone's as careful with words and ideas as I am but what a silly Marxist cliche. That's the leftist/revisionist version of history. I'm totally allergic to all organized religion, churches, popes, priests and dogmas but I know that, without organized religion throughout history, we would not have Shakespeare, Mozart, individual sovereignty, freedom of conscience, private property, the Declaration, the Constitution, the whole of Western civilization - or indeed Marx. I regard Marxism (and all the other leftist dogmas and cults that sprang from that) as "the single most destructive force ever unleashed onto humankind".

Libertarianism - anarchy vs minarchy

Christopher Beam in the New York magazine:

Libertarianism is a long, clunky word for a simple, elegant idea: that government should do as little as possible. In Libertarianism: A Primer, Cato Institute executive vice president David Boaz defines it as “the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.” Like any political philosophy, libertarianism contains a thousand substrains, ranging from anarchists who want to destroy the state to picket-fence conservatives who just want to put power in local hands. The traditional libertarian line is that government should be responsible for a standing army, local security, and a courts system, and that’s it — a system called minarchy.
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Libertarianism gets caricatured as the weird, Magic-card-collecting, twelve-sided-die-wielding outcast of American political philosophy. Yet there’s no idea more fundamental to our country’s history. Every political group claims the Founders as its own, but libertarians have more purchase than most. The American Revolution was a libertarian movement, rejecting overweening government power. The Constitution was a libertarian document that limited the role of the state to society’s most basic needs, like a legislature to pass laws, a court system to interpret them, and a military to protect them. (Though some Founders, like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, wanted to centralize power.) All the government-run trappings that came after—the Fed, highways, public schools, a $1.5 trillion-a-year entitlement system— were arguably departures from our country’s hard libertarian core.
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Libertarianism is far from synonymous with the tea party, but the tea party is the closest thing to a mass libertarian movement in recent memory. Tea-partyers surveyed by Cato split down the middle between social conservatives and social liberals, making half of them traditional Republicans and half libertarians. But the fact that the tea party organizes around fiscal issues alone—smaller government, lower taxes—gives the movement libertarian cred. Its members speak the language, too, waving Gadsden flags, quoting Hayek, and carrying signs that say WHO IS JOHN GALT?—a reference to the hero of the Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged.

While Beam is sympathetic to libertarian minarchy, he condemns libertarian anarchy:

At best, libertarianism means pursuing your own self-interest, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. At worst, as in Ayn Rand’s teachings, it’s an explicit celebration of narcissism. “Man’s first duty is to himself,” says the young architect Howard Roark in his climactic speech in The Fountainhead. “His moral obligation is to do what he wishes.” Roark utters these words after dynamiting his own project, since his vision for the structure had been altered without his permission. The message: Never compromise. If you don’t get your way, blow things up. And there’s the problem. If everyone refused to compromise his vision, there would be no cooperation. There would be no collective responsibility. The result wouldn’t be a city on a hill. It would be a port town in Somalia. In a world of scarce resources, everyone pursuing their own self-interest would yield not Atlas Shrugged but Lord of the Flies. And even if you did somehow achieve Libertopia, you’d be surrounded by assholes.

Radley Balko at Reason didn't much like it:

[T]he first two-thirds of the article is mostly a quick and dirty introduction to or primer on libertarianism and the movement surrounding it, with Beam largely playing a neutral storyteller, interviewer, and interpreter.

It's in the last third of the article there's a noticeable and disruptive shift in tone. After establishing a certain trust with the reader that casts himself in the role of a mostly neutral observer and chronicler of this libertarian uprising, Beam then stops describing libertarianism, and starts critiquing it himself.

But Balko is one of those "purist" libertarians whose often anarchical ideas give libertarians a bad name. The Constitution is quite sufficiently libertarian and cannot be improved upon. Our Founders did not have an unrealistically rosy view of humanity but they were not misanthropes like Ayn Rand and her cultists.

I agree with Daniel Hannan most of the time

Daniel Hannan is the Conservative member of the European parliament for South East England. I was not surprised by his two latest blog posts.

The Fabian Society [ed.: communist incrementalists] has commissioned a survey of British attitudes to the EU:

On his blog, the amiable Sunder Katwala summarises the findings as follows: “The British public are sceptical of the EU as an idea, yet rather in favour of having more of it in practice”.

What? According to the survey, 45 per cent of us say EU membership has been bad for Britain, as against 22 per cent who say it has been good – a finding in line with recent polls. In what sense, then, do we want “more of it in practice”?

And I also agree with Hannan that the King James's Bible is the greatest work of translation ever:

I can’t be the only English-speaker who suspects, deep down, that the Almighty expressed Himself in the language of the Authorised Version. Even now, I do a double-take when I listen to a biblical passage in another tongue.
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[T]he Authorised Version, along with the Prayer Book, has shaped our everyday idiom. As Bruce Anderson writes in the current Spectator ("Confession of an atheist"), few Anglophone atheists can remain indifferent to the cadences of those two works: “‘Dearly beloved’ is one of the loveliest phrases in the language, as is ‘with my body I thee worship’ and many others from the Anglican liturgy.”

The King James is the only version of the Bible that I actually enjoy reading.

Massenet’s Werther

Last week I read this at The Corner:

The worst thing about the pagan festival known as “Christmas” — It’s the music. Music everywhere, blaring at you from radios, public buildings, shopping malls. Not just “Jingle Bells” but “White Christmas,” “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and the whole damn Nutcracker ballet. If I hear the “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” one more time I’m going to enlist the entire post-DADT army to put her in the ground once and for all.
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But if you’re seeking something a little different this Noel, put on Massenet’s Werther. If you already know it, you’ll know why I’m recommending it. If you don’t, please read on.

Werther, based on the famous Goethe novel that had disappointed swains killing themselves all over central Europe in the late 18th century, ends with the suicide of the title character on Christmas Eve, while young children joyously celebrate the coming of the Savior just outside the death chamber. But wait — it gets better! In this, his greatest opera, the normally mediocre Massenet surpassed himself with a score of such radiant beauty that it continues to puzzle me why this opera (like Puccini’s La Rondine, another guilty pleasure) is not more beloved.

Let posterity sort that out. For now, sit back with a fine glass of cordial and allow some of the most passionate love music ever composed wash over you. As for the plot, it’s hard to get too agitated about Werther and his sorrows: he’s a callow Everyfool who falls in love with the wrong woman (in this case, because she’s engaged to another) and can’t figure a way out short of using a gun on himself; had he just waited it out, he’d have found another Charlotte somewhere along the road to Weimar.

I'm an opera nut but can take or leave most French opera. I had never seen or heard Massenet's Werther so, reading that it was "the most passionate love music ever composed", I decided to rent the DVD from Netflix. The only version that they had was a 1984 movie of the opera filmed in Prague. We watched it tonight.

Massenet's music truly is some of "the most passionate love music ever composed" and the movie is brilliant and Prague is beautiful. But Goethe's story is utter crap and no amount of wonderful music can detract one from wishing almost from the very beginning that the opera's "hero" will soon kill himself and put us out of the misery of watching another narcissistic wanker wail and whine. It's typical post-French Revolution Rousseauian "romantic" nonsense about damaged people; you know the kind of "heroes" that leftists love so much.

I prefer good old capitalist music like “Jingle Bells," “White Christmas” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” any day.

The difference between an American fall and a English autumn

An English autumn puts the US fall in the shade:

This has been a strange discombobulating autumn for a family settling back into English life after nearly a decade in the US. We were beginning to feel confident once again with the hallmarks of Englishness, the price of petrol, the sense of irony, the mists and mellow fruitfulness. Dad was learning not to inform listeners to the Today programme that it was “a quarter of eight!” All was going swimmingly. Until we were knocked off balance by the trees.

Fall colours (“colors” to be accurate) are one of the great joys of American life.
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America can be pretty ugly. The gas stations, the tattoo parlours, the $29-a-night motels, the pawn shops, the gun shops, the car showrooms, the nail bars. The tat! And then turn a corner and your jaw will drop. A panorama of the mundane (glamorous in its own right if you don’t have to live in it but ugly beyond doubt) gives way to America’s greatest asset: its space and natural beauty.

The colours of the American autumn, the coppers, the yellows, the deep reds and purples, stretch in some states for as far as the eye can see. America has always, right from the beginning, been a land of trees.

As the American historian James Harmon McElroy put it: “So luxuriant was the growth of the ten-thousand-year-old forest that covered all but a few scattered portions of it – a forest that had developed after the retreat of the last Ice Age in North America – that mariners coming from Europe… were greeted while still at sea, far from the sight of land, by the mingled scent of sun-warmed resins from millions of pines and cedars and fragrance of myriad flowering shrubs and trees.”

McElroy has suggested that the taming of the forest and the wilderness has been the principle event in the history of the American people; everything else has flowed from this struggle to preserve nature but conquer it as well.

You'll have to read the rest to find out the difference between an American fall and a British autumn.

Don't "Feed the birds - tuppence a bag"

Mary Poppins sang "Feed the birds - tuppence a bag" but it's really best not to feed the birds:

Scientists have discovered that the growing trend of providing wild birds with food such as sunflower seeds and fat balls is changing their behaviour.

As well as causing songbirds to delay the dawn chorus by 20 minutes, or skip it altogether, the extra food could have a major impact on male mating chances.

"Dawn singing is used to show off to females and keep away competitors, so delaying or skipping song at dawn may have detrimental effects on male chances of paternity," says Dr Valentin Amrhein of the Zoological Institute at the University of Basel, Switzerland, who led the study.

"Our advice is to keep feeding birds in gardens during the winter when it can save lives, but stop feeding by the end of March to avoid the breeding season."

Does that mean that we can still keep feeding our native hummingbirds which come down from the mountains to the coast in winter but must starve the Mexicans who hang out here in summer?

Daily duh! Obama is an idiot

Ace linked to an article, Obama Destined to Be a Footnote in Presidential History, and then commented:

Candidates and parties sell themselves partly on ideology and party on simple competency. Ideology convinces some, but not a majority; to get to the majority, a pitch of competency grabs those who aren't sold on ideology but aren't dead-set against the candidate's ideology.

Liberals run harder on this message of competency than conservatives do, partly because the media sells this for them so ably, but also because they need to make up more votes this way. Maybe 40% of the country is conservative, and so a conservative candidate has to convince just 10% more to get his 50%; but only about 20-25% of the country is liberal, so a liberal candidate has to sell a lot more people on the idea that it's not his ideas, his ideology, that really matters, but just his general competency. His intelligence, mostly, and judgment.

The liberal media sells liberal candidates as brilliant and even-tempered and "sophisticated" and "nuanced" of thought; all of these are non-ideological attributes which appeal to most, whatever one's politics. And they need to do this, as only about 25% of the country can be persuaded to come along on the basic liberal message of higher taxes, more spending, more government power to dictate the affairs of men, and less freedom.

Meanwhile, Republican candidates get the opposite treatment from the media. I've noted before that every single Republican candidate is claimed by the media to be:

1. Stupid

2. Evil

3. Crazy

4. Out-of-touch

...and pretty much you can categorize every Republican office-seeker since Eisenhower (Out of touch) in this way. Nixon: Evil and Crazy; Reagan: Stupid and Crazy and possibly Evil; Bush I: Out of touch; Bush II: Stupid, Crazy, Out of Touch and Evil.

Just as the liberal media needs to pad a liberal candidate's vote-share by selling them on the non-ideological virtues of their candidates, so too do they need to deduct as many possible voters from a conservatives by selling them on the non-ideological negatives of those candidates.

So the public bought into Obama, to the tune of 53%, not on his ideology, mostly, but on just how super-duper smart he was. He would bring to the job not ideological positions, but general problem-solving tools. Without having to force the public to choose this ideology or that, he would just fix things, not because he believed in a specific theory of politics but because he was just that good.

Two years into his hopefully four year term, it's apparent to anyone who's not a fucking idiot that Obama doesn't have a fucking clue what the fuck he's doing. Far from being the Mr. Fix It, he's Mr. Fuck It Up Worse.

I forgive Ace his potty mouth because he is an astute observer of politics.

What we owe the audacious Athenians

From The Original Birth of Freedom:

Over the centuries, there have appeared two great conceptions of freedom. The first vision, which one can call “epic freedom,” is freedom as Hegel or Marx understood it.
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Epic freedom is the assumption of a cosmic mastery, more and more aware of itself. Crises become mere historical stages on the way to the final achievement of human emancipation.

The other position, very different, regards crises as intrinsic to freedom. This more modest conception can be called “tragic freedom.” It is liberty understood in doubt and anxiety about the fate of man. Tragic freedom works in uncertainty, sailing toward no glorious destiny. Man is free, yes—free to learn from his mistakes. Or not. Socrates, who exemplifies this second view, ceaselessly puts freedom to the test; he questions it, explores it, experiments with it. His famous daimon, his interior voice or intimate conscience, is a negative spirit, one that offers only interdictions. Recall that the majority of the Socratic dialogues end in aporia, at an impasse; they do not lead anywhere. They must be perceived as exercises of free thought, not as stages on the way to a human epiphany.

For the Greeks, there was no way around the permanent crisis that constitutes the existence of a free human being.
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To discover one’s freedom is to recognize a capacity for self-intoxication and self-deception, and thus to condemn oneself to doubt. This experience of freedom is primary for a current of modern philosophy, just as it was for the thinkers of antiquity. Descartes, in this sense Socrates’s son, called it “a freedom, by which we can refrain from admitting to a place in our belief aught that is not manifestly certain and undoubted, and thus guard against ever being deceived.”
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Historically, Judeo-Christianity has been a liberating force—Judaism constituted a formidable obstacle to the Roman Empire and its mad project of a world-state, while Christianity was a salutary ideology of emancipation for persecuted Romans. But conceptually, the Greeks anticipated everything to do with freedom.

The Greeks’ tragic view of freedom even established principles with which to resist the worst.

The essay is long but worth reading.

Color-consciousness among "people of color"

Primarashni Gower:

I was a fourth-generation Indian teenager living in Pietermaritzburg. My maternal great-grandfather ran away from home in south India and made his way to South Africa for a better life. Being from Tamil Nadu, he was dark-skinned with the surname Moodley. My mother married a dark- skinned man of a Tamil-speaking background with the surname Pillay.

In my Pietermaritzburg community, intermarriages between the different groups of Indians were covertly problematic. Some groups considered themselves superior to others. Even among the Tamils there were those who believed that they were superior to others within the cultural group. So, although there was apartheid in the bigger scheme of things and Indians lived in their own suburbs, there were subtle prejudices within the groups based on class and colour.

For a large part of my life, I was exposed to conversations around "darkness" and "fairness". As a young adult, I asked an elderly relative: "How was the wedding?"

The response was: "The food was divine. There was such a big crowd. The bride wore a stunning yellow sari because she was marrying a Naidoo boy. Only problem, she was dark. Shame, what to do?"

Some male family members were made to break off relationships with dark-skinned girls as it was an embarrassment. And when babies were born, a common question was: "Is the baby fair?"
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Perhaps those family members who were obsessed with looking "fair" took their cue from India, which has an identity crisis. It is a country of wannabes where people want to be fair-skinned. "Fairness" is openly promoted through massive billboards on which movie celebrities advertise skin lighteners. This obviously encourages dark-skinned people to reject the colour they were born into. What does this do to their self-esteem and pysche?

Coupled with this, India has its own form of prejudice. If you are born Hindu, you automatically slot into the caste system. Those just below this form of social stratification are the untouchables or Dalits, who are branded impure from birth. In the past 50 years caste discrimination has been illegal and the government has made large strides in uplifting this 200-million strong group.

But discrimination is rife, particularly in the rural areas, where Dalits (who are deemed modern-day slaves) cannot attend the same schools as higher castes, drink from the same well or attend the same temple. They do the most menial of work and, if they try to purchase property or object to their women being raped and abused, they face violent attacks from the higher castes. This form of racism occurs in a country deeply immersed in religion. Will the higher castes be forgiven by their gods for their oppressive behaviour?
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But what is most annoying is that some of the light-skinned Indian nationals I encounter don't bother to engage with me, despite my attempts to talk to them. Some look at me as though I'm trash, despite the fact that I was born in this country, my country. Is it my dark skin (which I am rather attached to) that is getting in the way of things? If they perceive me as an untouchable, how do they view and treat black South Africans?
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Despite this country's serious crime problems, I am South African, loving cosmopolitan Johannesburg and comfortable in my chocolate- brown skin.

I am grateful to my gutsy fore-fathers and mothers for coming to this country.
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But I am relieved that the educated younger generations of Indians in South Africa do not seem to share their parents' and grandparents' prejudices towards dark-skinned people. Some of these young people seem to have transcended the colour issue. There is hope for the future.

I only wonder when the untouchables in India will be treated with dignity and respect, because they are human too - in all their different shades of brown.

Christmas for dog-lovers

The second one is from The Most Awkward Family Christmas Photos.

Christmas in the "two Americas"

The nudist vegetarians greens:






















And a more traditional trailer trash Walmart shot:





















From The Most Awkward Family Christmas Photos.

I am the Alpha and Omega

The Libera song, I am the Day, below is actually a version of Stratovarius' song "I am the Alpha and Omega":

I am the earth and sky
I am the low and high
I am the snowflake in the winter evening
I am the birth and death
I am your final breath
I am the one that gave you life and freedom
Choosing your own way

Everything you've ever known
Every seed that you have sown
Came from me i made you
My creation is supreme
This is all my perfect dream
No mistakes in God's great perfect cosmic play

I am the Alpha I am the Omega
I am the beginning and the end of time
I am the Alpha I am the Omega
My whole creation stands before me tonight

I am the dark and light
I am the day and night
I am the mirage
I am the echo
I am the fear and anger
I am a familiar stranger
I am the shadow i m a star that guides you
till the end of time.

The words (obviously based on the Bible) are beautiful but I prefer Libera's music and won't even bother to post Stratovarius' original.

Final Libera

Salva Me



I am The Day

Libera again

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night



God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

Astronomer says the Star of Bethlehem was Jupiter

John J. Miller:

If the Star of Bethlehem were to appear in the sky tonight, you probably wouldn't even notice it. It wasn't a blazing comet, an exploding supernova, or any of the other spectacular celestial events people in search of a natural explanation have proposed. Instead, says astronomer Michael Molnar, it was the planet Jupiter appearing in the sign of Aries and rising in the east on the morning of April 17, 6 B.C.

If that doesn't sound like a big deal, it's because you're thinking like someone who lives in the 21st century. Two millennia ago, it would have sparked the imaginations of expert stargazers — and signaled the birth of a king.
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The account describing the Star of Bethlehem is contained wholly within the Gospel of Matthew — the other gospels don't mention it at all — lending credence to the idea that the star didn't light up the night sky like a 4th of July fireworks display. A close reading of the Bible suggests that nobody saw the star but the wise men, which may be a way of saying that only the wise men had the astrological knowledge necessary for interpreting the events of April 17 the way they did.

Many Biblical scholars believe the birth of Jesus probably occurred between 8 B.C. and 4 B.C. The event Molnar describes took place in 6 B.C. — "right smack dab in the middle," he says.

Molnar describes his ideas in detail in his 1999 book, The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi. It was written mainly for scholars, but intelligent and interested lay readers won't have trouble following his arguments. It may be impossible to know whether Molnar has provided a correct interpretation, but it is possible to believe he has offered a very good one.

So Christmas should be celebrated on April 17th and it's really already 2016 AD. Does that mean that we can just skip the 2012 election? That would be nice.

Tax reform I can believe in

George Will:

Many parents have heard FICA Screams. Indignant children, holding in trembling hands their first paychecks, demand to know what FICA is and why it is feasting on their pay.

FICA (the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax) is government compassion, expressed numerically: It is the welfare state; it funds Social Security and Medicare. Sometimes it makes young people into conservatives.

Dave Camp was 14, working for his father's garage in central Michigan, when he made the acquaintance of FICA. Now 57 and about to begin his 11th term in Congress, he will chair the House Ways and Means Committee, where he will try to implement the implications of his complaint that "the tax code is 10 times longer than the Bible, without the good news."
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Many conservatives, including Camp, believe that although most Americans should be paying lower taxes, more Americans should be paying taxes. The fact that 46.7 million earners pay no income tax creates moral hazard - incentives for perverse behavior: Free-riding people have scant incentive to restrain the growth of government they are not paying for with income taxes.

"I believe," Camp says, "you've got to have some responsibility for the government you have." People have co-payments under Medicare, and everyone should similarly have some "skin in the game" under the income tax system.

In addition to the one-third of the 143 million tax returns filed by individual earners for 2007 that showed no tax liability, additional millions of households have incomes low enough to exempt them from filing tax returns. The bottom two quintiles of earners have negative income tax liabilities - they receive cash payments from the government via refundable tax credits.

Precisely. It's one of the few Will columns I've read in full lately. It's good.

Libera with Aled Jones

Once In Royal David's City (with Aled Jones)



O Little Town Of Bethlehem (with Aled Jones)

The Great College Degree Scam.

Richard Vedder:

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) has unearthed what I think is the single most scandalous statistic in higher education. It reveals many current problems and ones that will grow enormously as policymakers mindlessly push enrollment expansion amidst what must become greater public-sector resource limits.

Here it is: approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation’s stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor’s degree or more.

Via Maetenloch at Ace who comments:

So basically all the money that many college students (and their parents) have paid/borrowed for a college degree was wasted. They paid $60,000+ just to qualify for essentially high school entry-level jobs.

Sadly many of the college grads I've considered hiring actually believe they are educated and entitled to special treatment but they're only half-baked and it's not easy to train someone who already thinks they know it all. Many are quite unemployable. And with the way the economy is going, PhDs will soon be picking lettuce because the illegal aliens will have returned to Mexico.

More Libera for Christmas

O Come All Ye Faithful



Gaudete

DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR

For my Andy - his favorite carol sung by Libera with Aled Jones (who used to sing with the boys' choir when he was younger.)

Merry Christmas - from Libera

Our local golden oldies radio station started to include Christmas songs a few weeks ago; a mixture of secular Christmas pop songs, traditional carols and a few other religious songs. Tonight, just as I got home and was pulling into the driveway, they played a choral version of Pachelbel's Canon with a boys' choir. I parked, cranked up the volume and opened the truck door so that Chas and Andy could hear too. We all stood in the rain listening to angels singing.

Chas wondered if the boys' choir was Libera (which he had only just discovered last night.) I had no idea who or what Libera was. So I Googled "Libera":

Libera is a non-profit all-boy vocal group directed by Robert Prizeman. Their name comes from their signature song "Libera," which is based on the Libera Me portion of the Requiem Mass. "Libera" is the Latin word for "free". Most of the boys in Libera come from the parish choir of St. Philip's, Norbury, in South London. The albums, tours and TV appearances the boys do as Libera are in addition to their regular singing as part of the full choir of men and boys at parish choral services.

According to a Songs of Praise TV special that aired January 25, 2009, the choir has approximately forty boys between the ages of seven and sixteen. This includes new boys who are not yet ready to fully participate in albums or tours. Nineteen boys participated in their 2008 US tour. Twenty four boys sang for the album New Dawn. The boys come from a variety of backgrounds in the London area, attending many different schools, including local state schools, church schools and performing arts schools. Libera recruits boys from any religious denomination and even those with no religious affiliations. Most boys join between the ages of seven and ten, however older boys may join if they have the appropriate singing abilities.

The Anglican parish of St. Philip's, Norbury has a long choral tradition.

Most of my absolute favorite sacred music is Anglican and I guess that I'm an "Anglican" at heart. Of course nowadays "Anglican" can mean that you can believe anything you want from traditional Christianity (minus the papism) to Buddhist agnosticism or even New Age Hippie Hindu pantheism. But, beneath the ecumenism, there is an unspoken (and nowadays often deliberately ignored and denigrated) belief that Western civilization is based on Christian tradition. In other words: it's a religion that suits me to a T.

Anyway - back to Libera.

Libera's website.

The "Official Libera YouTube Channel".

They really do sound like angels to me - and you know that they've all been well scrubbed and even smell nice.

Here they sing the Sanctus set to the tune of Pachelbel's Canon:



Here the little angels sing Silent Night:



Maybe it's because I'm not a real Christian; but I love American secular Christmas pop songs. I'm one of those weird people who enjoy the "crass commercialism" of our modern secular Christmas and thank Christianity for the Enlightenment and the Reformation and their step-children: freedom of religion, individual sovereignty, private property and capitalism.

The Christmas Song:



But for real music, there's no beating classical Christian sacred music. Libera sings the Adoramus:



Don't be surprised if I post a few more Libera videos this week as I get more into the Christmas spirit.

Fear-based HIV prevention

I have not read whether fear-based anti-smoking or anti-drug ads work or not. I do know that I find the anti-pot ads hilariously hyperbolic and dishonest because I tried most drugs in the Sixties and pot is a herb not a drug and it is definitely less dangerous than booze. And pot is not THE "gateway drug" for kids. Cigarettes are and cigarettes are much more dangerous and addictive than pot.

Michael Specter applauds this anti-HIV ad:

This [ad] has sent a number of H.I.V. activists into a frenzy—and many have demanded that the city pull the ad. Why? For the same reason that Larry Kramer, who founded both Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the New York-based H.I.V.-advocacy group, and ACT UP, was ostracized in the early days of the epidemic: unpleasant truths are never welcome. ... Nasty messages are unpleasant and they don’t always work. But they do work sometimes, and there is research to suggest in cases like this, where it has become easy to shrug off the truth, harsh reminders are particularly effective. (You can find a series of exchanges that stakes out the positions of each side in great detail here.)

Michael Petrelis is skeptical of fear-based HIV prevention effort. To me this ad simply tells it like it is.

Hiccups

An explanation?

The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis down. We descendants of these animals were left with vestiges of their history, including the hiccup. In hiccupping, we use ancient muscles to quickly close the glottis while sucking in (albeit air, not water). Hiccups no longer serve a function, but they persist without causing us harm—aside from frustration and occasional embarrassment. One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away.

Insult or compliment?

I prefer commies to "apolitical" people

Yes, I am very political and do not like people who pretend that they aren't.

This is what I said to someone today who claimed to be "apolitical":

I've been political ever since I was put in jail at the age of 20 in South Africa because I opposed apartheid.

I just don't jive with apolitical people. It's a cop out and usually translates into a lack of conviction and commitment.

Saying that you're "apolitical" to me means that you are an irresponsible libertine and/or sneaky left-wing passive-aggressive left-wing shill.

It's goose for Christmas

When we get bored with chicken, we switch to duck and, by this time of the year, I've had enough turkey to last me till next Thanksgiving. So it's goose for Christmas. Yes, it's very fatty but goose-fat is the perfect medium for frying eggs - tastier than lard.

Guarding your Christmas goose from a fox:

Christmas is coming and Lauren and Ray, the Daily Telegraph geese, have been looking decidedly nervous of late. No, they have not anthropomorphically detected my intentions – they will be killed next week – rather, the source of their disquiet is a wily fox who has been trying to get into the goose house for the past few weeks and beat me to my Christmas dinner.

The first sign was a tunnel under the fence (I now fill it in daily and he digs it out again nightly) and one morning I discovered he had actually found a rotten board on the shed and worked a golf-ball sized hole in it. It must have taken hours and terrified the occupants. I screwed another plank over the top of the rotten board – and the next day discovered he had somehow managed to work the replacement plank loose. I screwed it in again with about 12 screws, and it has remained in situ.

I have spent much of the past month fretting about this fox, because, the closer we get to Christmas, the harder it will be for me to accept losing one or both of my glorious geese to Reynard the fox.

It’s been tricky with the early nights. As anyone who has ever attempted to combine having a job with keeping chickens can attest, being at home at 4:30pm every day for three months is hard to achieve, even for a feckless writer like me. And you can’t just miss a day and hope for the best. As my friend Anto, a proper farmer, warned me, foxes are patient enemies. They will check your chicken house every night as they make their rounds – and the day you forget to close it up is the day that they will reap the rewards for their persistence.

Last week, wrong-footed by the cold snap, I completely forgot to lock up Lauren, Ray and the eight chickens, with whom they share their spacious and well-appointed accommodation, until about 6pm. As every poultry-fancier worth their layers pellets knows, the prime time for a fox to strike is in the hour or so after the sun sets, so I threw on my wellies and raced down to the end of the garden. I heard the squawking before I got there, and the fox must have heard me too, because he was gone by the time I arrived and I never even saw him. He did, however, leave behind an ominous pile of feathers – white, goose-like feathers – glistening in the moonlight outside the chicken house.

It was with a heavy heart, therefore, that I turned on the pathetic torch on my mobile phone and surveyed the shed. The chickens had calmed down and were perched back on their roost as if nothing had happened. I counted them quickly and all eight of them were there. Of the geese, however, there was not a sign.

I actually felt close to tears. All that hard work gone to waste because of one silly slip-up! I also felt bad that the geese had probably died non-humanely as a result of my negligence. I stepped backwards outside the shed and was so busy cursing foxes that I actually fell over Lauren and Ray, who hissed at me furiously. They clearly had the good sense to leave the hen house when the fox had entered it. I knew geese were way smarter than chickens.

It was a horribly close shave, though, and that evening, in a flash of inspiration, I Googled “light- sensitive chicken house door”, which brought me to the web page of mail order specialists chicken-house.co.uk in Wales. Here, for the enormous sum of £120 (I long ago gave up the pretence that amateur poultry rearing was anything other than an out-and-out luxury) I ordered a photo-sensitive pop-hole door for my goose house. It arrived two days later and my father-in-law generously helped me mount it between snow blizzards.

It consists of a small unit covered in transparent plastic, housing a little motor which is attached to a light sensor. At sun-up, it winds up a length of string pulling a special lightweight aluminium door behind it, and when it gets dark – or has a bucket placed over it during tests by unbelievers like me – it unwinds, with an eerie Space Odyssey-esque hum, thereby lowering the door and protecting your flock (domestic birds tend to go into their sleeping quarters of their own accord just before it gets dark).

Despite the bucket tests, however, I still don’t trust it – so every evening at 4:45pm guess where you can find me? That’s right – shivering in the cold by the chicken house, watching and waiting for the automatic door to lower. After all, you can’t be too careful where foxes and Christmas dinner are concerned.

We do have foxes but our biggest problem is raccoons killing our chickens and ducks.

Blake Edwards dead at 88

Blake Edwards was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on July 26 1922:

He then got what he described as his “big break” with the naval comedy Operation Petticoat (1959), starring Cary Grant as the commander of a pink submarine.

Shooting was fraught because Grant wanted artistic control over the film. Typical of the many arguments between star and director was a row over which direction the submarine should be sailing in one shot. “Cary had this idea that the audience would get confused if they saw it going the other way,” Edwards recalled, “I told him I didn’t think so because it was the only submarine in the damn film which was painted pink.”

Despite the quarrels Operation Petticoat was among Universal’s most successful ever films, and Edwards found himself in the enviable position of being able to choose his next project. He immediately started work on Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

The film, based on Truman Capote’s short story, was a hit both for Edwards and for his leading lady, Audrey Hepburn. Now considered a classic, it set him on a roll of winners, which began with Experiment in Terror (1962), a black-and-white thriller set in San Francisco, which marked a distinct change of direction for Edwards but won over critics, who had pigeonholed him as an adept hand at comedies and little else.

Days of Wine and Roses (1963), about a couple’s descent into alcoholism starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, saw his star rise yet further, with both principals nominated for Academy Awards.

In 1964, however, Edwards returned to comedy, with the first of the franchise for which he would be best remembered. The Pink Panther introduced the bumbling Inspector Clouseau to the world and proved such a box office draw that Edwards made a sequel, A Shot in the Dark, which was released just six months later.
...
Edwards agreed to produce and direct the spy thriller Darling Lili in 1969.

Darling Lili became notorious as one of the greatest financial disasters in film history. Edwards nearly doubled the original budget and shooting was beset by problems, not the least of which was the studio’s insistence on making it a musical because it starred Julie Andrews, who had become Edwards’s wife earlier that year.
...
He started work on 10, starring Dudley Moore as a man sexually obsessed with a young woman he sees on a beach, and Bo Derek as the object of his desire. “This is the sort of classical Hollywood comedy that will still look good in 30 years,” noted one critic, and it duly proved a big winner with audiences.

Such was its success that, in 1981, Edwards was invited to return to Paramount, the studio which had tried to sue him just a decade earlier, to make S.O.B., a satirical portrait of Hollywood and its denizens.

Although praised by the critics as a “savage satire”, S.O.B was better known to the public as the film in which Julie Andrews bared her breasts.

It did moderately well at the box office and Edwards followed it with Victor/Victoria (1982), also starring Andrews, which told the story of a singer masquerading as a female impersonator in order to find work.
...
He is survived by his wife, by two children from his first marriage, and by the two children he and Julie Andrews adopted together.

Operation Petticoat, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Days of Wine and Roses, The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark were all excellent. Darling Lili and Victor/Victoria were so-so. I haven't seen S.O.B, 10 or Experiment in Terror. I think I'll get them from Netflix.

Ron Wyden has cancer

Daniel Foster:

Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) released the following statement announcing his diagnosis with prostate cancer, and surgery scheduled for Dec. 20:

After my annual physical in late November, I was diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer. After reviewing all the options with multiple physicians, I decided to take a proactive approach and have surgery, which will be performed December 20 at Johns Hopkins Hospital by Dr. Alan Partin.

Thanks to routine screening, this was diagnosed very early and I expect a full and speedy recovery.

I scheduled the surgery for the Monday before Christmas anticipating that the Senate would have recessed by that time and that there would be no disruption to my work in Oregon or Washington. However, it now appears that I will be missing votes tomorrow and possibly next week while I prepare and undergo this procedure. I expect to be back to work full-time when the Senate reconvenes in January.

...
We wish Senator Wyden a speedy recovery and a permanent remission. As icky as it makes me feel to do so, I must also point out that Wyden will likely miss votes on New START, DADT repeal, and perhaps even the omnibus.

I also wish Wyden a "speedy recovery and a permanent remission" but I don't feel at all "icky" that he can't vote on all that Democratic crap.

The senior senator from Oregon:

Ronald Lee "Ron" Wyden (born May 3, 1949) is the U.S. Senator for Oregon, serving since 1996, and a member of the Democratic Party. He previously served in the United States House of Representatives from 1981 to 1996.

Wyden was born Ronald Lee Wyden in Wichita, Kansas, the son of Edith (née Rosenow) and Peter H. Wyden (1923-1998), both of whom were Jewish and had fled Nazi Germany a few years earlier. Wyden grew up in Palo Alto, California, where he was a basketball star for Palo Alto High School. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara on a basketball scholarship, and later transferred to Stanford University, where he received his B.A. in 1971. He received a J.D. degree from the University of Oregon School of Law in 1974.

While teaching gerontology at several Oregon universities, Wyden founded the Oregon chapter of the Gray Panthers; he led that organization from 1974 to 1980. Wyden is also the former director of the Oregon Legal Services Center for Elderly, a nonprofit law service.
...
Wyden has stated personal opposition to physician assisted suicide, but has also stated a commitment to defending the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, which was twice passed by voter referendum. Wyden successfully blocked Senate attempts to pass legislation interfering with the Act by threatening a filibuster. Wyden has also consistently voted against limitations on the use of the death penalty.

In 2009 Wyden sponsored the Healthy Americans Act, an act that would institute a national system of universal health care through market based private insurance. Despite a voting record in favor of public health care, Wyden was attacked by union interests for advocating replacement of the employer tax exclusion with a tax deduction that would apply to all Americans (not just those who enjoy the good employer benefits provided to many union members.)
...
Wyden has opposed most restrictions on abortion. He has voted against proposals to ban partial birth abortions, outlaw abortions on military bases, parental notification for minors who seek an abortion, and laws that prohibit minors from crossing state lines to obtain abortions. He has been rated 100% by the pro-choice NARAL. Wyden has been an advocate of gun control. He voted against limiting lawsuits against gun manufacturers and has voted in favor of increasing background checks.
...
Wyden is critical of the estate tax, which he feels is inefficient, and has voted repeatedly to abolish it. He co-authored the Internet Tax Nondiscrimination Act, which bans internet taxes in the United States. He has also voted with Republicans to lower the capital gains tax, to encourage the study of the flat tax, and to require a 3/5 majority to raise taxes. However, Wyden voted against the Bush tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003. He has also voted against the balanced-budget amendment.

Wyden supports lower corporate taxes and was generally supportive of the draft proposal for deficit reduction that was released by the chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in November 2010.

During the global Financial crisis of 2007-2010, Wyden voted against the financial bailouts backed by the Bush administration.

Wyden's a devout leftist but he's mixed bag and at least somewhat serious not a completely insincere two-faced fake and blithering idiot like the junior senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley.

The cheapskate next door?

Couldn't have said it better myself.

From Stephen Budiansky's Liberal Curmudgeon Blog:

Far be it from me to defend the capitalist system, but can't environmental organizations recognize that economic activity counts for something?

Invariably whenever the subject of carbon emissions, energy use, or other instances of mankind's global "footprint" arises, the standard environmentalist narrative is all about how big the average American's shoe size is.
...
But as I've written elsewhere, when you actually analyze (pdf with more detail) the effect of modern technology on things like growing food, you find that impact per person stays constant — or even declines — as individual affluence grows. The amount of land used to grow food in America, for example, has remained virtually unchanged in a hundred years despite a tripling of population and a large increase in the consumption of high-quality protein (meat, e.g.). In other industries, technological improvements likewise allow for greater production with less input of energy or other raw materials.

The Washington Post the other day ran a front-page story on carbon emissions featuring a large graph comparing the United States, China, and India; it showed both total emissions and emissions per capita over the last 50 years, and the most recent data (from 2007) looked like this:















The message, as usual, was that although China has surpassed the U.S. in total carbon emissions, the U.S. generates much more per person.

But what the Post, and environmental groups, never seem to look at is the impact per unit of economic production. The United States manufactures a lot of things the world needs and buys (food, airplanes, lumber, chemicals; in fact, the U.S. is still the largest manufacturer in the world, something most people don't seem to know) and it does so at vastly greater energy efficiencies than do less developed countries.

Here's the same data as above but adding a comparison of carbon emissions per dollar of GDP generated:















...
Of course to concede that technology is often good for the environment runs against the Calvinistic, anti-materialistic strain of the environmental movement — a strain that goes back to John Muir and Henry Thoreau at least — and which tends to view the planet's ills as at heart a matter of personal guilt to be expiated through renunciation and penance.
...
Per capita comparisons are fine if you want to emphasize the idea that energy use is a personal sin and that industry and commerce either don't exist or are an evil in themselves, chargeable to our individual burden of sins by virtue of our citizenship in a country that is successful at these things. But a more sensible way of looking at it is that energy use is an unavoidable fact of existence — and so should be made in a way that produces the greatest buck for the bang.

Stephen Budiansky is a meat-eating, gun-owning, military-history writing liberal.

Some facts about the evil rich

Star Parker:

Thomas Stanley and William Danko wrote a book called "The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy".

They produced a portrait of who America's millionaires are and show that by and large these are quiet, understated, self-reliant Americans who are committed to hard work, education and family.

Their portrait shows that 80 percent of our millionaires are first-generation affluent, that less than half received a cent in inheritance funds, and only 19 percent get any income from a trust fund or estate.

Most Americans -- 80 percent -- are not self employed. But of those that are, two-thirds are our millionaires.

Seventy-five percent of these self-employed millionaires are entrepreneurs and the remaining quarter are self-employed professionals like doctors and accountants.

These are overwhelmingly self-made individuals, founders and proprietors of prosaic businesses like "welding contractors, auctioneers, rice farmers, owners of mobile-home parks, pest controllers, coin and stamp dealers and paving contractors."

Sure, we have high-profile billionaires in America. But most of America's millionaires, those whose income is in the $250,000 and above category whose taxes Weiner wants to raise, are our nation's bread-and-butter entrepreneurs and small-business owners.

Are We Too Dependent on Rich Taxpayers?

California’s budget crisis has highlighted one of the most important tax issues of our time: a growing dependence on wealthy taxpayers for government revenue.

In a column in yesterday’s Sacramento Bee, Dan Walters cited the need to reduce “the corrosive dependence on income taxes from a handful of wealthy people by broadening the tax base.”

This follows repeated reports from the California state controller stating that the state’s budget problems stem in large part from the state’s addiction to capital gains taxes and income taxes paid by the wealthiest Californians.

In 2005, the richest 13.5% of California taxpayers (or those earning more than $100,000) paid 83% of all income taxes. Capital gains from the top 5% of taxpayers accounted for $100 billion out of the $111 billion in total capital gains reported.

“Those revenues rise and fall dramatically with the stock market, resulting in California’s unstable and volatile revenue stream,” the state Controller wrote.
...
What governments need to do (aside from structural cost cuts, of course) is recognize the boom-and-bust nature of today’s wealthy and save money during the booms so they can spend during the busts. That way they can smooth out the inevitable tax swings.

But that’s probably asking the impossible.

Even more impossible than expecting governments to spend only the revenue raised from stable income taxes is expecting everyone to pay at least a minimum tax equal to the value of the services they receive from government. That's too much like common sense and common sense and socialism don't go together.

A review of "Silent Spring"

David Zetland:

Holy cow. What a well-written book. I can totally understand how Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) jump-started the modern environmental movement.

The 300 page book starts and ends with hopeful fables of a healthy environment full of vibrant flora and fauna. The middle 15 chapters document, in painful detail, the damage that synthetic chemicals inflict on life. The book is famous for exposing the dangers of DDT (and aldrin and heptachlor), but I was shocked and angered by the bigger problem: All knowing bureaucrats over-applying chemicals in places that do not need them, to fight bugs that may not be present, without a clue of the collateral damage that they are causing.

Yes, we're talking about the USDA (and various government "landscaping" bureaucracies).

I took a few notes while reading the book...[USDA incompetence made me want to throw the book across the room at this point. I feel the same about corn ethanol. I bet politicians were involved...]
...
A big thought: Most farmers will tell you that they minimize the volume of chemicals (and fertilizer) that they apply to their land, because they do not want to waste money and time on over-application. It's thus important (and sad) to note that the biggest abusers of chemicals in Silent Spring are bureaucrats whose jobs dictate that they should "do something" with other people's money (OPM!) and homeowners who do not understand the dangers of the chemicals they use and who think that "some is good, so more is better" when applying them to their yards.

Freezing weather fails to bring cold reality home to the global warming posse in Cancun

Christopher Booker:

It is probably fair to say that, in the real world, the need to fight runaway global warming was not at the top of most people’s agenda last week. The Central England Temperature record, the oldest in the world, showed the fortnight covering the end of November and start of December as the coldest ever since the daily record began in 1772. North of the border, Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, had to call in the Army as much of his country ground to a halt in up to three feet of snow.

None of this, however, remotely concerned the warmists, who were in fuller cry than ever. In the Mexican resort of Cancun (where, for six days running, local temperatures also fell to their lowest, for the date, since records began 100 years ago) Lord Stern, that high priest of the international warmist establishment, proposed that Britain should raise an extra £15 billion a year in “green taxes”, on petrol, flights and domestic energy, to punish people with a “high-emission lifestyle” for the damage they do to the environment. Ten per cent of this, said Lord Stern, could go to the new Green Climate Fund (agreed late on Friday, to a standing ovation) to help poorer countries develop “low carbon economies” by building wind turbines and solar panels, while the rest could be kept by the British Government as an “incentive”.

If the Watermelons were truly serious about pollution and not wealth redistribution, they would punish the poorer countries who have not yet developed “low carbon economies”.

Did Cleopatra pee standing up?

From a review of Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff:

Goddess at birth, queen at 18, by 21 she had weathered a civil war and had a son with Julius Caesar; at 29 she bore Mark Antony twins; by 35 she had acquired an eastern Mediterranean empire including Cyprus, Libya, Lebanon, Syria and coastal Turkey; aged 39, after defeat by Octavian – the future Caesar Augustus, creator of Imperial Rome – she committed one of the most famous suicides in history, which may or may not have involved an asp.

She probably murdered her two younger brothers; a troublesome, plotting sister was executed by Mark Antony.
...
Cleopatra was Greek, not Egyptian, a product of a highly cultured, learned – if savage – dynasty, the Ptolemies, who had been bequeathed Egypt by Alexander the Great. The family took on the iconography of the pharaohs, along with the custom of marrying one’s siblings. They also developed a bad habit of murdering each other.

They made Alexandria the most cultured and sophisticated city of classical antiquity. Schiff conjures a vivid picture of this “miracle of a city… forged of a frantic accretion of cultures”. She points out that Cleopatra was the beneficiary of a hybrid Egypto-Grecian society that allowed women a far more independent public role than the silent, child-bearing matrons of Rome had (Herodotus said that in Egypt the women urinated standing up).

She was also the richest woman in the world, making Egypt a magnet for Rome and its ambitious generals. Schiff reminds us that Cleopatra spent the last two years of Caesar’s life in Rome as his mistress.

There her hairstyle (dozens of small plaits caught up into a bun) spawned a fashion, while her lover introduced a series of Egyptian-inspired reforms, bringing in the 12-month, 365-day Egyptian calendar, setting up the first public library, and commissioning the first census, all three of which Rome later exported to its colonies. Western culture arguably owes a vast debt to Cleopatra.
...
Even the most critical Roman accounts acknowledge her force.

Naturally they put this down to magic and sex. Even Horace’s poem “Nunc est bibendum”, which celebrated Cleopatra’s death, described her with reluctant admiration as “a woman who wouldn’t be humbled”. Plutarch admitted it wasn’t her beauty that won people over, but her intelligence, her charm, her conversation and her beautiful voice. Medieval Arab scholars described her as a great intellectual and alchemist, and Shakespeare wrote his most grown-up female role for her.

Balls!

Ladies, please do not read this post.

Letting It All Hang Out:

[T]he German company sacfree (lower-case "s" for some reason) sent me a trial pair of its innovative undergarment, which covers your banana while exposing your kiwis. A hilariously mistranslated press release accompanied the, uh, package:

"The world-wide first testicle-free men's underwear -- a fantastic, comfortable, free feeling and a new sexy look. ... And so it works: sacfree® protects and supports the penis in a bag-like pouch. Till here sacfree® feels like a classic slip. For the testicle sacfree® offers pure space. Through an opening the sac can hangs out completely free. ... With its open kind sacfree® makes for a fresh breeze. A comfortable and manly healthy characteristic... [A]bove all, people who works vocationally much in sitting will appreciate the new sacfree® freedom."

The first thing you'll notice when you don sacfree is that your sac is free. That's the whole point, obviously, but it's weird. Your manhood is tucked away, but your boys drop through a hole at the bottom and just ... like ... flop around.
...
The sacfree press release promised: "With sacfree® there is something more to see for her ... A new attraction for touching." So back in our bedroom after dinner, I removed my shirt. "Oooooooh," she cooed. I unfastened my belt. "Mmmmmmm," she purred. I dropped my drawers.

"Your ... your balls ...?" she gawked at my crotchless boxers with a combination of bafflement and horror.

"Yes," I nodded confidently. "My balls."

She reached for the TV remote instead of my (semi-concealed, semi-showcased) male anatomy. "Put your pants back on," she instructed. "Those look ridiculous."

"You don't have 'a new attraction for touching?'" I asked, heartbroken.
...
Tragically, it seems that sacfree is no longer for sale. At some point between 2005 and 2010, its website was reduced to a logo and nothing else, and company representatives did not respond to an email about its continued existence. Only 500 pairs of sacfree were initially produced, and it doesn't appear that more are in the pipeline. You can't even find the goddamn things on eBay ... not like you'd want them used anyway.
...
Europeans are strange.

There's a very obvious reason that sacfree® only sold 500 pairs and why they went out of business: men wear underpants to keep their balls from being squashed between their thunder thighs.

Now the product that I am marketing is called tubefree®. They only cost $50 a pair and they keep your balls in a bag where they belong but...

Why I don't believe in "Satan"

The photo of Obama below made me think of evil.

To me Satan and Santa are both fairy tales for kids. Blaming evil on a "devil" is nonsense. We all have free will and can choose good or evil. Sadly there really are evil people. Happily there are also lots of good people. And we all know which side will eventually win which is why the evil people are so filled with fear, anger and hatred. They know that they will never triumph.

You better believe in hope....or else!

The face of modern Marxism - just the same as the old anti-freedom authoritarianism, totalitarianism, communism, fascism, nazism, statism etc etc etc.

The snow in the UK

An email from my son who lives in England:

I came home from work yesterday to find about a ton of snow had fallen from our roof and was blocking the door, so I had to shovel it away for an hour. It's not snowing much now, but the temperature's so low that it's not thawing either. So we have layers of compacted snow and ice covering everything.

Frozen snow is a problem on rooftops. It's sliding forward en masse and teetering precariously over the edges of roofs. Three foot icicles like the frozen jaws of death poised to devour - or at least impale - unwary residents. A girl in Scotland was seriously injured in the spine by falling snow from a rooftop.

The streets are piled high with what looks like dirty white rubble. There's nowhere to put all this stuff! People are wandering the streets with shovels, pushing strangers' cars out of icy basins created by discarded snow and ice. Discarded! Like we had a use for it in the first place. There are stirrings of tentative communal feeling, but I doubt that in a real catastrophe that would last long. Even in the Blitz, petty crime, rape and danger lurked in blacked out streets and alleyways.

The M8 between Glasgow and Edinburgh is closed - people were trapped in their cars overnight. Our car won't start, it's so cold. I think the plugs are iced up. But the mail has started to arrive again, finally.

Needless to say, we are no longer dreaming of a white Christmas.

Don't you just love global warming?

RFID credit cards

This is mostly a city problem or wherever there are crowds. That's why I don't like cities or crowds. I also learned as soon as I moved to a city never to carry my wallet in my back pocket. But this could become a real problem. I'll make sure never to get a RFID (radio frequency ID) card.

Video here.

A looming problem?

To identify VISA contactless cards, look for the wavelike symbol pictured here.

If Newt runs, I'm definitely voting for Sarah

Newt and his latest wife, Callista, for whom he became a Catholic. I guess she made sure that he converted so that he couldn't divorce her when she gets cancer.

Why the Terrorists Can Never Win

From The Federalist Paupers:

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.

But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

These numbers are part of why those of us who grew up in rural parts of the country simply don’t comprehend the gun-grabbing impulses of some. Every single year, millions of Americans carry high power rifles into the woods and more or less do as they please – some shoot at deer, some just drink a lot – and it is a complete non-story. The number of people injured and killed by these guns will pale in comparison to those injured and killed in driving accidents during the same time period.

But however well or badly we handle our guns, woe will befall he who thinks he can conquer America.
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For millenia, philosophers have pondered how one can maintain a well-armed population that can fend off all attackers, while simultaneously maintaining ordered governance. In America, we’ve fulfilled this dream, and we’ve done it so well and so effortlessly that no one seems to have noticed.

Yesterday we went to our local gun-show and bought two more guns to add to our arsenal.

"What Don't Ask Don't Tell Protects"

Brendan Tapley on what motivates Don't Ask Don't Tell's supporters:

As recently as 100 years ago, men talked about their love for each other freely. In fact, the desire for intimate fraternity was considered more than just normal for a male life; it was believed to be essential. Men acted on this desire without fearing prejudice or ridicule. Here's a fairly common example from the 1830s, taken from the journal of Albert Dodd, a Yale student, about his friend John:

I regard him, I esteem, I love him more than all the rest… it is not friendship merely which I feel for him, or it is friendship of the strongest kind. It is heart-felt, a manly, a pure, deep, and fervent love.

As open homosexuality emerged, however, it became masculinity's foil, its antithesis. Men grew skittish about wanting to express sentiments like Dodd's or participate in environments where fraternization was now equated with gayness. And so men stopped acting on their fraternal impulses, in spite of the fact that they did not go away. In fact, quite the opposite happened: The fear of being gay, effeminate, the anti-male—take your pick—has created a more intense, if repressed, longing in men to find and experience those rare environments where men can be close to other men without "forfeiting" their masculinity.
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Ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell threatens this because in bringing even a hint of homosexuality into this community, a man must once more lead that paranoid, self-conscious existence. He must worry—whether he tells another guy he loves him or snaps a towel at him—that either could break the code of 21st-century maleness, which says a man can't make such gestures or have such intentions. The prospect of losing a fortress as happily time-warped as the military is terrifying to men because it means the hunger strike for real male bonding, not its sitcom version, must go on.

Men can't, or won't, say any of this. We won't point out that our version of manhood is more conservative than the one a hundred years before. Or that today's manhood unfairly forces men to go without a full half of human intimacy. And not just any intimacy, but a pivotal kind: an intimacy that affirms one's manhood by the only group who can—other men.

We can't put the worms of the "gay lifestyle" back in the can but one of the reasons that I have nothing to do with gays or their "community" is because their constant sexualization of man-to-man love has cheapened it to the point where many homosexual men have little or no respect for each other.

They emasculate those men to whom they are not sexually attracted by calling them "sisters" and by giving them female nicknames to differentiate them from the men to whom they are attracted. And they cheapen the men to whom they are attracted by referring to them as "hunks" or other disrespectful terms.

Gays idolize "masculinity" but have sacrificed their manliness.

As Quentin Crisp said: "Homosexual men want to be loved by real men. Of course real men will never love a queer so queers are doomed to be never loved."

PS This is my first installment of a piece that I'm currently working on critical of the "gay lifestyle" which was recently inspired by Jack Malebranche's book, Androphilia: A Manifesto.

Sarah Palin is "country dumb"

The Armed Liberal Joe Katzman:

Just finished watching the TV show Sarah Palin's Alaska. Stunned at the political brilliance of the concept.

Ray Charles used to use a phrase "country dumb". Which actually meant a country boy (like Ray) smart enough to play to city prejudices when convenient, so they'd underestimate him and end up handing him ground-breaking contracts. He was. They did.

Sarah Palin is "country dumb"...

I still don't think she'd be a good idea as a GOP Presidential candidate. Beginning with the fact that you're taking your best salesperson and making them a manager. If they're a good manager, you're still screwed because you just lost your best salesperson. If they're mediocre or worse, you're screwed twice.
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No wonder so many on the Left are scared of her, and hate her.

Mike Potemra on Palin:

Reading between the lines of what conservative-movement people are saying and writing, there is a great deal of worry about the prospect of a Palin nomination. I would summarize the GOP political writers’ consensus as follows: She must never be criticized, and she must never be nominated.
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I think the only way Palin will not be the GOP nominee is if she finds a safe, face-saving way to exit the race before the primaries. Some of her supporters may well be working on it: Here is an op-ed, non-ironically titled “Is Sarah Palin Too Good to Be President?” The author says:

Simply, the confines of the presidency may prove too narrow for a name that scales new heights (or, to some, plumbs new depths) in ubiquity and provocation. . . . The iconic images of Sarah the moose-hunter and fisher-woman (many courtesy of her hit TLC show Sarah Palin’s Alaska) and Sarah the tireless, principled and so gosh-darned unpolished campaigner and pundit do not mesh with the duties of the policy wonk in chief, navigating the political terrain, working within the constraints of a one-industry town and facing retirement and decline after a four or eight year apex of public service.