Friday, March 12. 2010
 Pic: Average student at Dr. Mercury's Computer School For Unwed Mothers upon discovering that a program she's just installed has added YET ANOTHER entry to the damb context menu!
P.S. I sure wish I had a lip ring. :(
On a Windows system, the 'context menu' is what pops out when you click on an icon with the right mouse button. Unfortunately, programs like installing their own entries on the context menu and things can get a bit cluttered after a while.
The solution is to use a simple program called ShellExView to remove the unwanted entries.
A download site is here. No need to install, just unzip and copy the folder to a permanent home. Then open the ShellExView folder, grab hold of the program's icon and d-r-a-g it over to the Start Menu and drop it in for future access.
Fire up the program and look for the company or program name on the left. Right-click on it and select 'Disable'. Go find an icon, right-click on it and see if the entry has been removed. If not, look for another entry by the same company or program. It should be there somewhere.
Number and Percent of Nonpayers At Record High; More Tax Filers Now See IRS as a Source of Income.
Remember when being called a "taxpayer" was equivalent to being called a "solid citizen"? This trend is not good for America.
The issue of salt seemed to link with our post on Woodrow Wilson and all of our routine posts about Brit Nanny-Fascism.
Just skim this Tierney piece on the salt "controvery" in the NYT. "Advocates" are promoting their dire data, and the other side is promoting their own - or debunking that of the advocates. (Reminiscent of global warming - and salt, like CO2, is essential to life on earth.)
My point, though, is that the assumption seems to be that if excess salt intake is bad for some small minority, then the government should regulate it. That's the technocratic, government-by-expert thing we have been seeing lately.
Is there anything the scientific technocrat busybodies don't want to control in my life?
Where is individual choice, individual responsibility, and freedom in the equation? Whence a government's power to determine the salt in my food?
At Commentary, an excellent review of the politics: Health Care: A Two-Decade Blunder.
 Founder of the American Red Cross Nursing Service. It's her birthday.
She said she didn't do it because she was moved by suffering, but because she liked the work.
I prefer people who do fine things because they want to, not because of pious self-congratulatory virtue or grandiose notions of changing the world.
Tough shooting, but good fun. Let's find out whether our readers can shoot.
To those for whom the intellect alone has force, such a witness has little or no force. It bewilders and exasperates them. It challenges them to suppose that there is something greater about man than his ability to add and subtract. It submits that that something is the soul. Plain men understood the witness easily. It speaks directly to their condition. For it is peculiarly the Christian witness. They still hear it, whenever it truly reaches their ears, the ring of those glad tidings that once stirred mankind with an immense hope. For it frees them from the trap of irreversible Fate at the point at which it whispers to them that each soul is individually responsible to God, that it has only to assert that responsibility, and out of man’s weakness will come strength, out of his corruption incorruption, out of his evil good, and out of what is false invulnerable truth.
 Your recycling ends up in landfills
Temperature records gleaned from clamshells reveal accuracy of Norse sagas.
More on the foolishness of photovoltaics
Junk Science Bombshell: NASA & Media Knew About Bogus Climate Data 3 Years Ago
Arab Emirates: No Jews, please
Obama Justice Department Shut Down Federal ACORN Investigation According to Documents Obtained by Judicial Watch
Credit Default Swaps Under Fire
EU monitoring "hate" sites, hoping to ban them
Lots of good posts at Moonbattery
From SDA:
When the mother of a five year old girl received a letter detailing a litany of health risks her daughter would face in the future because her body mass index was one-percent outside the recommended limit, mom was appalled, and its no wonder: take a look at the child in question. Actually, take a close look, because she might be following you: various local Councils recruit "environment volunteers" as young as seven to report people for offenses ranging from littering to making too much noise to putting out their trash on the wrong day. The little recruits "are given information packs about how to collect evidence....which could later be used in criminal prosecutions."
In an essay titled Nanny State Britain is Killing Common Sense, Dr. Eamonn Butler writes:
"The organisers of a Christmas party in Embsay village hall were told they needed a full risk assessment, and nut allergy warnings on the mince pies. Schools have banned playground football. Clowns in Zippo's circus couldn't use trumpets in a three-minute sketch because they'd need a music licence. Manchester taxi drivers cancelled their annual outing for needy kids because each cab would need a risk assessment, each child would have to be accompanied by an adult, and each adult would need a six-week criminal record check." (emph. mine)
Thursday, March 11. 2010
 Greetings, NCIS fans.
Of the TV show, that is. The real NCIS appears to be inhabited by a bunch of boring, everyday government types. As referred to, say, a recalcitrant boss who mutters about ten words a week, a Hollywood-handsome field agent, an MIT dweeb turned battle-hardened warrior, an ex-Mossad assassin who can kill you sixteen different ways with a paper clip... and a Goth forensics expert with a great pair of thighs.
So we've got that going for us.
Pic: In a valiant effort to atone for the grievous sexism portrayed in last week's NCIS post of a hot, seriously-stacked Director Jenny, the fabled Dr. Mercury dares to break new blogground by being man enough to post a picture of a young, bare-chested Mark Harmon. Appreciate it while it lasts, ladies. Events like this aren't called 'firsts' for nothin'.
Below the fold is something I can almost guarantee you've never seen on the Web before.
Or heard, to be precise.
Continue reading "NCIS: And now for something totally different..."
 It's about time people began piling on the arrogantly naive goo-goo prissy academic Woodrow Wilson. See George Will today:
Wilson was the first president to criticize the Founding Fathers. He faulted them for designing a government too susceptible to factions that impede disinterested experts from getting on with government undistracted.
Undistracted by the people, that is. Like the EU. Also, from Jonah at NRO - quoted there:
Wilson, once a professor of political science, said that the Princeton he led as its president was dedicated to unbiased expertise, and he thought government could be "reduced to science." Progressives are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens.
God save us Americans from such disinterested expert mandarins. We are the mandarins, and they are our servants! Makes me wonder who came up with the wacky notion of political "science"?
Here's some real Political Science:
 The magical biological and psychological chemical attractions to which we humans are heir is one of the more complicating, exciting, bewildering, and painful parts of life. Desire.
Sexual and romantic tension between two people is powerful stuff indeed. Without it, there would be very little music.
The French, like the cave-men did, routinely give in and just get the thing over and done with. Magic gives way to reality fast, in relationships that last longer than a few hours or weeks.
I wonder how our readers deal with this part of life, but I am not trying to collect Lenten confessions...
A snippet from 1965, Remember Me When the Candlelights are Gleaming (with Joanie), a wonderful Ernest Tubb tune. You can see that Albert Grossman just loves what he has found in Bob.
How many songs does Dylan know?
It takes a high school drop-out to fix what a college grad breaks.
Motto of the flight line crew, h/t, reader
Salt wars? What next?
Maybe broccoli. I read that it is carcinogenic - especially if it is "organic". Everything causes cancer.
Don't let the opposition define you. Am. Thinker
Wednesday, March 10. 2010
Robert Iger, CEO of Walt Disney Company since 2005, plays hard to get what he wants.
Case #1: Not Child Friendly
The New York Times reports today that under pressure from Disney The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood was evicted from the Judge Baker childrens mental health center in Boston that housed and sponsored it for a decade. The Harvard Medical School professor who oversaw the Campaign, psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, also co-wrote books with Bill Cosby.
The campaign had for years fought Disney’s marketing of the Baby Einstein videos — short videos filled with colors, nature pictures, music and puppets — as educational; it contended that there was no evidence that babies learned anything. Indeed, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time for children under 2.
After the campaign filed a Federal Trade Commission complaint, Disney dropped the word “educational” from its marketing. But that was not enough for campaign officials. They forwarded their research to lawyers who threatened a class-action suit, prompting Disney to offer refunds of $15.99 for up to four Baby Einstein DVDs per household.
Barely two weeks after the story of the refunds appeared, Dr. Poussaint said, he and Dr. Linn were called before the Baker center’s executive board.
Dr. Poussaint wrote the board:
“You told me that the mission of C.C.F.C. — to protect children from harmful exploitation by corporate marketers — is not in line with the Judge Baker mission. Indeed, we were told that we could no longer criticize any corporations, even if they were exploiting children.”…
“It’s really chilling, that any corporation, and particularly one marketing itself as child friendly, would lean on a children’s center,” said Dr. Lynn, a psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School. “And it’s heartbreaking that a children’s center would cave in.”
Case #2: Democrat Friendly Exceeds Shareholder Friendly
Disney CEO Robert Iger is known for his support and funding of Democrat politicians and causes. For example, his 2009 political contributions counted by Open Secrets include $25,000 each to the Democratic Senatorial and Congressional Campaign Committees, a $1000 to Walt Disney World’s Florida-home Republican governor and US Senate primary contender Charlie Crist, then another $14,600 to Democrat Senators.
Iger and Disney have refused to respond to why Disney refuses to sell the distribution rights or to re-air its subsidiary ABC-TV’s docudrama The Path To 9/11. The National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project, a Disney shareholder, has been speaking out at Disney shareholder meetings, including today’s, “warning Disney shareholders that CEO Robert Iger's progressive political bias puts investors at risk.”
"Iger's rejection of several offers to sell the distribution rights of the ABC-TV docudrama, The Path to 9/11, is a sign that his personal political views are affecting business decisions," said Free Enterprise Project director Dr. Tom Borelli, who has raised the issue personally with Iger at past shareholder meetings.
Big Hollywood offered more background.
A $30+ million project that aired without sponsors on two September nights in 2006, The Path to 9/11 dramatized the historical thread that connected the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Islamic attacks on American interests throughout the ‘90s, and the terrorism of that fateful morning in 2001.
Prior to its premiere, the producers at ABC were so proud of the impending project that they had high hopes of airing Path every 9/11 anniversary and showing it in schools across this country as an engaging educational tool – until an accusation of “conservative bias” (horrors!) on the part of the filmmakers quickly spun into liberal hysteria that the project was actually a “well-honed propaganda operation” on the part of a secretive, right-wing network-within-a-network….
Clinton administration alumni, fearing the miniseries would highlight their flaccid response to the growing threat of Islamic extremism and tarnish their political legacy, pulled out all the stops to suppress it. The show very nearly wasn’t aired at all – Robert Iger and Disney were pressured by the Senate Democratic leadership, led by Harry Reid – it hasn’t aired since, and today you cannot even obtain it on DVD.
And why not? Disney President and CEO Robert Iger explains without elaboration that it’s a “business decision.” Oh, well then, case closed. Not only does he refuse to re-air The Path to 9/11 or release a DVD, but he has no intention of even selling the DVD rights to another company. I’m no financial wizard, but I can recognize that, as business decisions go, willfully taking a $30+ million bath on your product when there is a vast audience hungry for it and distributors making offers, is not one of the more lucrative marketing strategies I’ve ever heard of.
Case #3: Lining Own Pockets at Others' Expense
Disney is a leading member of the US travel association’s lobby group, Discover America, that spent millions of dollars to pass its Travel Promotion Act, that was finally recently approved by the Congress and signed by President Obama. It will charge a $10 fee to travelers to the US that will go into a fund to promote tourism to the US. I was on the trail of its misrepresentations, starting in 2007. Tim Carney, muckraker at the Washington Examiner, joined in. Then, in February 2008, Jeff Birnbaum at the Washington Post wrote a 6,746 word expose Mickey Goes To Washington: Lobbyists for America’s richest mouse set out to persuade Congress to scare up $200 million to promote U.S. tourist destinations. In my summary post, which links to my earlier posts on this money-grab by the $1-trillion US tourism industry, I wrote:
The points I’ve been driving home are all there: The statistics Discover America ignores about the strong recovery of post-9/11 international tourism; The cynical marketing by Geoff Freeman, Discover America’s PR specialist; The “inside-beltway” lobbying that swells our federal expenditures and enriches lobbyists and Congressional staff’s future job prospects.
Exposed, the bill stalled until the Democrat Congressional sweep of 2008.
Foreign visitors will surely be thrilled by the added fee. Disney and its travel industry cohorts certainly are at getting others to pay for its own self-promotion efforts.
Isn't that how it works when you go to Disney Land?
We recently posted a link to a homey discussion about how God speaks to us. But here's Gagdad Bob:
God's speech (happily) shatters all human containers for the same reason that a three dimensional sphere shatters a piece of paper.
Male or female? A test to see how you think. h/t, Attack Machine. (Somebody send this to Larry Summers...)
While you take the test, here's this:
:
Back before they had these
they had these:
 White House invents organic Easter eggs. It's about time. Chickens never could figure it out how to produce organic eggs. Sunny-side up or over easy with those recycled wooden government eggs?
Detroit Farms? Makes sense to me.
Cool Baltic shipwrecks. Would love to see the ancient ones.
The NYT as partisan hypocritical hacks, # 3487. h/t, Tiger
Dartmouth's Rob Portman looking good in Ohio
California's College Dreamers - When will students figure out the politicians have sold them out?
Obama Is Late to the Party
Does Government Have To Do Everything? Darn good question. Simple answer: No. We The People aren't morons. In fact, we're the Boss. We create the money that they spend.
Pathetic: Climategate: George Monbiot despairs of the AGW cause – 'There goes my life's work' . Yes, burned up in global warming.
White Trash Barbie. h/t, Vandy
Bob Dylan: Jewish Messiah? Sorry. Just one darn good songwriter and song and dance man.
Fish photo via theo
I hear the Redwings and Grackles croaking and gurgling in the morning, on their way to their breeding marshes further north. The White-Throated Sparrows have begun with their spring song, and, at the same time, I see that my Juncos have left for their breeding grounds on the tundra. The White-Throateds will be leaving now too. See ya next winter, God willing, little fellows.
Redwings:
"I suspect that nationalism became unfashionable not because of Germany, but because it interfered with the spread of communism."
AVI. Germany was sort-of racially imperialistic, not nationalistic in the usual sense. Like Jihad, had they a modern army. We here at Maggie's prefer nationalism, federalism, and localism. Whatever is closest to the real people who pay the tax bills. No "New World Order," thank you. We fear centralism because we know those statist folks are crafty but aren't wise, and that they have their own interests in mind. Our Florentine hero Niccolo understood all that very well.
Shamefully stolen from our pal Surber:
See Dick Morris: The Democrats' Pickett's Charge. And there is more: Obama pushes senators for climate bill. My solution? Add Thorazine to the water in the the Capitol.
"There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime."
Sign over Squadron Ops Desk at Davis-Montham AFB, AZ. Lots more here.
America's great export: Rocket science finance, layers of abstractions and computer modeling, and shadow banking. One quote:
What is shadow banking? It is one of a handful of terms — structured finance is a more technical one, ghostly economics a more evocative one — used to describe the infrastructure of debt finance that provided the conduits for capital from around the world to flow into the American housing sector. It is best understood as a technological innovation amalgamating computing power and probabilistic modeling to vastly expand the various world markets in debt securities. The late journalist Mark Pittman, in an authoritative 2008 report for Bloomberg, called it “the biggest U.S. export business of the twenty-first century”...
Related, how our government does rocket science finance - minus the rocket science.
Tuesday, March 9. 2010
 Image: The American air is getting cleaner.
Gun-free zones: Shooting fish in a barrel
Brit governments putting microchips in garbage cans. h/t. How do the people put up with that crap? Well, The Englishman doesn't.
Stimulants increase learning and learning speed. h/t Insty. Every college kid knows that.
Poll: Young Adults Turn Toward GOP. Change!
Diane Ravitch discouraged by education reform. Schools should be entirely run by and for localities, not by the Feds and not by the unions. That's how reform can happen. The famous Albert Shanker quote: "When schoolkids get union cards is when we'll worry about their interests." Something like that.
Effects of CO2 are logarithmic, not linear. That's High School math. Is it part of the computer models?
Feminists: College gals should drink, Yes means No, and campus rape definitions. I thought the feminists said all hetero sex was rape.
Don't hold your breath for The New World Order
Bucknell: You cannot debate the 2009 Dem stimulus package. Too controversial for college?
 Florida, sugar, government and the Everglades: The corporate State
Not predicted by the models: South Pole cooling, ice increasing
Doc:
...if I am ever told I have to see every patient who wants to see me and the government determines both the appropriate treatment and the fee I can charge, I will retire and find another way to make a living. (Maybe I will be so disturbed by the changes in my profession that I would need to go on Disability?)
WHT?
This exciting new project is aimed at increasing public awareness of the links between climate change, poverty and child rights, and engaging ...
Good grief. Those are some crazy links!
The Census: "My race is human"
Doug Hoffman is back! He'll win.
John says the O is an ignoramus about insurance costs. Maybe he is, or maybe it simply does not serve the narrative to mention the reality that if coverages are mandated, costs increase.
Evil, evil Drudge. Do not look at his site!
Are we allowed to have two per day? Previous one was from Lenin, this from Nancy Pelosi on health care:
“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
Vladimir Lenin: “Socialized Medicine is the Keystone to the Arch of the Socialist State.”
Of course it is. With it, they control your very life. For your own good. I mean, for the "Greater Good," or for "Society." Whoever they are. Never met them.
 Joseph Schumpeter ominously speculated that as capitalism succeeded, democracies in time would come to expect its end (wealth) but reject its means (free-market competition). He worried that because of the inequality and creative destruction it brings, capitalism would provoke a kind of adverse reaction. A popular call would arise for government to plan market outcomes according to some utopian view of society's good, and this democratically guided central planning would inevitably slow economic growth. Schumpeter predicted, in turn, that if economic expansion faltered, individual liberty would be directly imperiled or quietly ceded by citizens resigned to having their diminished economic position protected by the state.
We hear more voices these days yearning for a benevolent autocracy, including the creepy Thomas Friedman. The whole terrific essay, Can Democracy Survive Capitalism?, at Claremont Review.
Photo: Kim Jong-il, beloved, benevolent, altruistic autocrat who understands everything and who only cares about what is best for his people
 Alas, the man's name does a disservice to the brilliant Florentine Renaissance political scientist and student of human nature that he was.
However, I did not know that he wrote comedy on the side. Another Renaissance Man, as it were.
I like his face: shrewd and discerning, but ready to laugh.
"Princes and governments are far more dangerous than the other elements within society.”
- Niccolo Machiavelli
The Dems and the O are always about talking and negotiating endlessly with other countries, and never drawing a line. But with their fellow Americans, 'The time for talk is over.'
Thus an accommodating attitude towards enemies, and a warlike attitude towards Americans.
It suppose that is change.
"It's not that some people need more sleep than others, it's that some people sleep faster than others."
Peter DeVries
 Cover image via Jonah
You like him; how can you tell if a guy likes you back? h/t Linkiest
Harvard Law Prof Bill Stuntz Talks of His Impending Death, Faith
No Tweeting: Last year, a San Francisco Superior Court judge dismissed 600 potential jurors after several acknowledged going online to research the criminal case before them
Pinkerton:
Sen. Lautenberg voted for the Senate proposal that would have denied him the free choice that probably saved his life.
Euroland: Coming Soon: Gravity to be Legislated!
3 good reheated ones at Thompson
Twit is legend in his own mind: Friedman Aflame - The Times columnist’s mind melts fact and reason into nonsense. Can we say "narratives"?
Gore: Organized Campaign Behind Climate Skeptics. Yes, and Maggie's Farm is the well-funded HQ of the cabal.
Believes in NBC-driven media: NBC’s Chuck Todd Blasts “Drudge Driven Journalism”
Surber's Good v. Evil
Riehl: The Traveling ObamaCare Salvation Show
You know what America needs now? A brutal political battle over amnesty
Geert Wilders speaks in London
Green jobs scam
Via Q&O:
Mr Obama benefited in his campaign from an idiotic level of idolatry, in which most of the media participated with an astonishing suspension of cynicism.
Indeed.
Rep opposes school choice for his constituents. Does he oppose school choice for the Obama girls?
"He says he opposes an increase in charter schools, even though many of his constituents seem to want more of them, because he believes they have allowed the mayor and the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, to abdicate their responsibility to improve Harlem’s regular elementary schools, which have shrunk as more parents have chosen charters."
Steyn on the Oscars:
It was fun when Marlon Brando had his award picked up by Sachem Littlefeather, Apache Indian and President of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee, protesting about the treatment of Indians by Hollywood. It was even better when she turned out to be Maria Cruz, struggling actress and Miss American Vampire of 1970. It was touching, in 1977, when Debby Boone sang `You Light Up My Life’ backed by a chorus of 11 children from the John Tracy Clinic for the Deaf interpreting the lyric in sign language. It was even more poignant when it subsequently emerged that they were just regular Equity kids pretending to be deaf and that the signing was complete gibberish. Ah, happy days.
Monday, March 8. 2010
A not uncommon, non-migratory yardbird in New England. Info here. This male Cardinal from my place today:
Two posts about Marxism on Maggie's in two days! That's a record. And now for a third:
The Left in the Western World, such as it is, remains Marxist at core. I have read and studied Marx, as has Mead. They have some worthwhile and interesting insights into psychology, sociology, and human nature.
The problem is their reductionism. The rare people in the modern world with fresh new insights - eg Freud, Marx and Engels, Adam Smith, Burke, etc. often find their notions reduced to simplistic, reductionistic equations which they might not have anticipated.
Re Marx and Engels, every human is, in part, Homo economicus. But only in part. Humans are also Homo spirito, Homo ludens, Homo conflictus, Homo everything. That's why freedom is so important, if we accept our Western idea of the uniqueness and, almost, sanctity (not almost, if one has religion) of the individual.
At Chicago Boyz, Seizing the Opportunity to Destroy Western Civilization. A quote:
Narrative reduces personal experience to a linear progression where cause and effect seem to have a purposeful order. These narratives can then be shared with others, leading to the best definition of history ever: history is a fable agreed upon. Most personal narratives will never be the equivalent of the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Gibbon; or even the fables of Aesop, La Fontaine, or Orwell. Most are simply humble habitual ways of thinking. As habits of thought, such narratives largely control how you react to unfolding events, whether it’s pricking your finger or waging a world war.
Photo: Killer Whales killing Sea Lions just for the fun of it.
Euphemisms are about creating an illusion of a nursery school pretty pony and rainbow view of the world in which evil does not exist, in which we can all get along if only we wanted to, and in which we can all be anything we want, if only we would label things properly.
Rabid Jihadists and criminals become "the oppressed," kids who cannot read well become "learning disabled," klutzes become "hand-eye coordination impaired," the socially-awkward become "Asperger's," global warming becomes "climate change," housing developments in swamps become "Riverview Estates" - and Killer Whales become cuddly "Orcas" (so as not to offend their delicate sensibilities, no doubt).
Euphemisms are a form of propaganda (see The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook: Updated! New Entries!) designed to kill reality.
"Imagine," indeed.
Please post your favorite euphemistic reality-killers in the comments.
 From a commenter on our Communist Manifesto post:
Quite a few years ago I was at a company management training class at which we had a Marxist professor as an invited speaker. He explained to us that our political views were determined merely by our economic self-interest.
I raised my hand and suggested to him that maybe the political views of the academic class are partly determined by their economic and status self-interest.
He had clearly never thought of such a thing, and was a little upset. Some of the other attendees thought I had been rude to a guest by raising the question...
A companion piece, from another brilliant commenter here:
A while back I was chatting with a psychiatrist acquaintance about some topic or event I've since forgotten when he said, "From each according to ability: to each according to need".
My standard and automatic response to that statement (which I hadn't heard anyone actually spout in MANY years) is, "Is there any better way to get people to minimize their abilities and maximize their needs?"
 It's a classic, often misquoted as Wimpy saying "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today." However, that may have been from a different Popeye episode.
It's Here. I love it.
(This was clearly before credit cards were widespread.)
 For the guys and gals over there -
Toon via Moonbattery
Mark Steyn: Obamacare worth the price to Democrats. Steyn gets it. It's worth any price.
America puts off the pain to have some jam today. And, CBO: $1T yearly deficits for at least the next 10 years
The Tides Foundation: Bagman for the Left
Feeling a "bit off" today? Who doesn't? Crystal meth is good for that feeling.
No mention that a "minority" made that noose. But exactly in what way is academia "tolerant"? Higher ed strikes me as the most intolerant place in America.
Tiger:
Barack Obama has called an "entrepreneurship summit" with the Muslim world. Naturally, I have a question: What could Barack Obama or anybody in his administration teach about entrepreneurship? Years from now, when the Muslim world has gone another generation without a single useful invention, will they look back at this "summit" and regard it as another evil western deception? Of course, they will have only themselves to blame insofar as the invitation promises advice from "social entrepreneurs," Orwellian slang for "transnational community organizer."
The Golden State's Me Generation - In the midst of the Great Recession California students protest in favor of themselves. Worth reading just for the quote from the Prof.
Reason: Busting the Well-Endowed - It's time to cut federal funding for the arts
Sunday, March 7. 2010
The Washington Post’s editors took Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to task in February 2009 when she downplayed speaking out about human rights abuses during her trip to China. She'd said: "We have to continue to press them. But our pressing on those issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis." The Chinese were delighted. The Washington Post editors pointed out that the US speaking out hasn’t interfered in the past when there are mutual goals, “But Ms. Clinton's statement will have an effect: It will demoralize thousands of democracy advocates in China, and it will cause many others around the world to wonder about the character of the new U.S. administration.”
Last December, Hillary Clinton clarified. In an address at Georgetown University:
Under the first element of the agenda, Clinton said the United States would be working to hold everyone accountable for human rights in their countries. In order to “reinforce our moral authority,” she said, the U.S. will lead by example by way of reporting figures for human trafficking that occur within its borders for the first time.
Clinton said that while holding other accountable could entail public denunciations of a country’s leaders, “other times our negotiations would take place behind closed doors,” such as with China and Russia.
The second element, “principled pragmatism,” also applies to China and Russia especially, she said. The administration can deplore the murders of Russian journalists and violation of minority rights in China, but “the assumption that we must either pursue democratic rights or [national strategy] is wrong.”
The third element involved partnering with and supporting groups like NGOs which share U.S. goals, and the fourth involved highlighting success stories and rejecting the notion that some situations cannot be remedied.
Tomorrow, Monday, Sec. Clinton has the opportunity to effect her third element.
The Wall Street Journal editorial highlights Friend and Faux on Human Rights:
Some of the world’s most courageous champions of human rights will convene today, Monday, March 8, in Geneva, seat of the United Nations’s Human Rights Council [where gross human rights violator Iran is up for possible election to the UN Human Rights Council]. But don’t expect the Council itself to welcome these distinguished visitors.
The Geneva Summit -- organized by groups such as U.N. Watch and Freedom House, and chaired by Poland’s Lech Walesa and the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel -- will bring together political dissidents from China, Iran and Burma, rights activists for the Tibetan and Uighur peoples, a survivor of the North Korean gulag, plus a former Sudanese slave named Simon Deng who plans to speak about “the gross human-rights abuses by radical jihadists and the Islamic government in Khartoum.…
In 1975, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that it was time “that the American spokesman came to be feared in international forums for the truths he might tell.” In Geneva today, the real truth tellers will be meeting down the block from the Council’s chambers. It would be nice to see the U.S. ambassador show up.
The world’s oppressed await.
The Azimut Magellano. A 74' blue-water boat, but you can park her with a joystick and make tight, high-speed turns like a speedboat.
There is a market for such wondrous craft but, for better or worse, it ain't me.
Doing mine this afternoon. Last chance, and easy to do if your August pruning was correct.
I tend to think we still live in a Greco-Roman civilization. This from George Mason Prof Steven Davies:
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Proof that Maggie's is a Centrist website: 