Girl of the Day - Lois Maxwell

It may have been just my taste, but I suspect it was shared by many.   When I watched the early Bond films, I always thought Bond should have romanced Miss Moneypenny, the assistant to M back at the office, rather than the various blonde bombshells (Ursula Andress, etc.) that littered the movies.   The actress was Lois Maxwell, who was born today in 1927.   Here she is in costume as Moneypenny:

And here she is a little earlier, as a younger actress:

The New Pope and the New Evangelization

George Weigel has penned the article I've been waiting for about the selection of the new Pope in today's WSJ:

The ambient public culture of the West will demand that the new pope embrace some form of Catholic Lite. But that counsel of cultural conformism will have to reckon with two hard facts: Wherever Catholic Lite has been embraced in the past 40 years, as in Western Europe, the church has withered and is now dying. The liveliest parts of the Catholic world, within the United States and elsewhere, are those that have embraced the Catholic symphony of truth in full. In responding to demands that he change the unchangeable, however, the new pope will have to demonstrate that every time the Catholic Church says "No" to something—such as abortion or same-sex marriage—that "No" is based on a prior "Yes" to the truths about human dignity the church learns from the Gospel and from reason.

And that suggests a final challenge for Gregory XVII, Leo XIV, John XXIV, Clement XV, or whoever the new pope turns out to be: He must help an increasingly deracinated world—in which there may be your truth and my truth, but nothing recognizable as the truth—rediscover the linkage between faith and reason, between Jerusalem and Athens, two of the pillars of Western civilization. When those two pillars crumble, the third pillar—Rome, the Western commitment to the rule of law—crumbles as well. And the result is what Benedict XVI aptly styled the dictatorship of relativism.

What kind of man can meet these challenges? A radically converted Christian disciple who believes that Jesus Christ really is the answer to the question that is every human life. An experienced pastor with the courage to be Catholic and the winsomeness to make robust orthodoxy exciting. A leader who is not afraid to straighten out the disastrous condition of the Roman Curia, so that the Vatican bureaucracy becomes an instrument of the New Evangelization, not an impediment to it.

The shoes of the fisherman are large shoes to fill.

Just so.   I particularly like the note of the new Pope having the "courage to be Catholic."  

Girl of the Day - Sue Peterson

You can use your own judgment, but I think this year's SI swimsuit issue has jumped the shark into soft-core pornography.   Perhaps it's been that way for some time, but this one (particularly the idiotic "body paint" photos) seems to go even farther.   Anyway, it made me feel dirty, so I'm swearing off.

Anyway, Sue Peterson was the cover girl for the 1965 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.   Were we a better country in 1965?   Maybe not in all ways, but certainly we were much less saturated with sex and pornographic imagery, and perhaps it's not accidental that we also now have massive social problems with underachievement by young men, family breakdown, fatherless children, etc.

Peggy Noonan on the Selection of the Next Pope

I think she hits the right notes here:

We will be hearing a great deal of speculation the coming weeks. We should keep in mind that it doesn’t matter all that much what insiders say about who might have an inside track....   The outcome will be determined more by questions like these:   Who is the most ardent, loving and truth-minded among us? Who, in that group, has been able to do things?   What is the mood of the cardinals as they begin to think and ponder? What assumptions do they hold about what the world most needs?   What specific and pressing need of the church—the re-evangelization of Europe and the West, growing tensions with Islam, the need to dramatically reach the world’s young, the need to make the church new again, to have it understood as a revolutionary force again—is in their view predominant? And which cardinal’s gifts, character, talents and history most closely match that need?. ...   What will the Holy Spirit do? In what direction will the Holy Spirit lead them? That is the most important question of all.

Again, the College of Cardinals comes at the decision from perspectives that are very, very different from the perspectives of the liberals at the New York Times.   They won't be moved by who is the most telegenic, or politically correct, or most progressive.   They will select a priest touched by the Holy Spirit and moved to bring the light and truth of Christ to the world.  

President Obama's Minimum Wage Proposal = Fewer Jobs for Poor Black Kids

Sorry, if that headline is too blunt.   But this is one of my pet peeves.   The Democrats always talk about "science" whenever they want to tax us for using carbon or spend our money on green energy boondoggles.   But the science of economics is something they find it easy to ignore.

This is basic stuff.   If you raise the price of something where there is a constant supply, you'll get lower demand for it.   If you raise the price of hiring an unskilled worker by raising the minimum wage, you'll get fewer employers who will hire them.   Instead, in a global market, they will choose to do their manufacturing and assembly tasks overseas, where they don't have to pay the minimum wage.

So, when President Obama says last night in his State of the Union address that he wants to raise the minimum wage to $9.00, that may sound nice, but the economic reality is that it will mean fewer people employed in minimum wage jobs.

Who are those people who will be out of work?   Primarily the young, the poor, the urban, the minority.

But don't take my word for it.   Here's the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Minimum wage workers tend to be young. Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly-paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the Federal minimum wage or less. Among employed teenagers paid by the hour, about 23 percent earned the minimum wage or less, compared with about 3 percent of workers age 25 and over.

Now, what effect does the current minimum wage have on employment of young people?  The last time it was increased was in 2007, when a series of step increases brought from the prior $5.15 an hour it to its current level of $7.25 an hour.   (That was an increase of nearly 40%; Obama's proposal would be a nearly 25% increase on top of that!)   Here's what happened to employment of African-Americans under age 25:

Is there an economist anywhere in America or the world who will stake their professional reputation on the proposition that raising the minimum wage from $5.15 five-and-a-half years ago to $9.00 (if Obama's proposal goes through) would not have a crushing effect on employment of unskilled black kids?   I doubt it.   It's only the ideologues of the Left who somehow think they can rewrite the laws of economics.   They'll certainly feel good about themselves, as they sit on the beach in Hawaii, or as they drop their own children off at Sidwell Friends in DC.   But the kids of Detroit, Chicago, East St. Louis, the barrios of LA and Miami, the Bronx... they'll be back on the street.

Lest We Forget (George W. Bush)

Michael Gerson provides a useful antidote to the knee-jerk bashing of George W. Bush, a true gentleman and a true Christian:

Even among the few, odd, nerdy children who want to be speechwriters when they grow up (I was one), none dream of writing a State of the Union address. These tend to be long and shapeless affairs, lumpy with random policy, carried along by strained applause lines, dated before they are transcribed.

There are a few exceptions: Lyndon Johnson announcing a War on Poverty; Bill Clinton, as a scandal unfolded, undismayed in the lion’s den. And then there were these sentences in the 2003 address 10 years ago: “Tonight I propose the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” said President George W. Bush, “a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa. This comprehensive plan will prevent 7 million new AIDS infections, treat at least 2 million people with life-extending drugs and provide humane care for millions of people suffering from AIDS and for children orphaned by AIDS.”

In retrospect, the words were not particularly memorable. But the moment was remarkable. An initiative of this scale and ambition — the largest effort to fight a single disease in history — was utterly unexpected. Bush’s strongest political supporters had not demanded it. His strongest critics, at least for a time, remained suspicious. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) existed entirely because of a willing leader, a creative policy team, a smattering of activists and a vast, bleeding need....

On the 10th anniversary of PEPFAR, what lessons does it offer? Some of them relate narrowly to development. Scale and boldness matter. A collection of pilot projects is invariably run from the outside. National scale-ups require the creation of supply and management systems and encourage the sort of professionalism that can permeate a health system and beyond.

PEPFAR offers some political philosophic lessons. Liberals had to get accustomed to measured outcomes and accountability. Conservatives had to abandon an indiscriminate cynicism about the capabilities of the state. I remember once citing PEPFAR’s achievements to a conservative leader as one example of successful governmental action. He responded dismissively, “But other than that?” Other than saving a few million lives on a distant continent from a cold start in less than a decade?

There is also a potent lesson here about America. My first professor of international relations assured me that altruism is always a ruse in the affairs of nations — nothing more than the pursuit of interest in the camouflage of morality. I now know — personally know — this is untrue. The Irish historian William Lecky once claimed, “The unwearied, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.” Nothing human is “perfectly virtuous,” but PEPFAR is an addition to his list.

America is a flawed and fallible nation. It is also the nation that does things such as this. During the 20th century, in government meetings, in Berlin, Beijing and Moscow, leaders made decisions that resulted in the deaths of millions of innocent people. I watched a leader make the decision to save the lives of millions of innocent people. Ten years later, it is still the noblest thing I have ever seen.

Do any of the libs in the media and academia and, frankly, just our general popular culture, who routinely deride George W. Bush ever stop to think that his actions as President have probably saved millions if not tens of millions of poor black Africans?   Yet Republicans are greedy and racist, huh?

The Idiocy of Liberal Commentators Regarding the Pope

Others have noticed this, including Hugh Hewitt, but the major left-wing organs of journalism, including most prominently, the New York Times, are idiots whenever they try to speak about the Catholic Church.   The front page article in the Times today on the selection of the new Pope is a case in point -- sadly, it appears to have been reprinted across America, including on the front page of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.   But it's gibberish:

The resignation sets up a struggle between the staunchest conservatives, in Benedict’s mold, who advocate a smaller church of more fervent believers, and those who believe that the church can broaden its appeal in small but significant ways, like allowing divorced Catholics who remarry without an annulment to receive communion or loosening restrictions on condom use in an effort to prevent AIDS. There are no plausible candidates who would move on issues like ending celibacy for priests, or the ordination of women.

The problem is a fundamental one -- it's hard to believe the writers of this article on religion are themselves religious.   If they are, it is secondary, and not primary to their personalities.   They think of politics first, and disregard faith.
Put more bluntly, the time horizon of politics is short:  a tweet, a blog entry, a news cycle, an election cycle, the issues of the day, or the issues of a generation.   Thus:  divorce, condoms, AIDs, celibacy, feminism.  

To a real Catholic, the relevant time horizon is eternity.   Thus:  Christ, the soul, forgiveness of sins, redemption.

Look, the Church is a 2000 year-old institution.   Its goals have nothing to do with the ephemera of whether liberals in New York in 2013 think there should be women priests, or think that the Church should "loosen up" on contraception, or think that the Church's doctrine on homosexuality is mean.   The Church doesn't care that the faith is dwindling in the West, if it is, because the Church's time horizon extends back before the "West" came into being, and extends long after the "West" will cease to be.   The Church wants to bring souls to the eternal Truth.   It isn't going to choose a Pope who will change the Truth to fit the times.   Or the Times.  

George Weigel on Pope Benedict's Resignation

From NBC yesterday:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Weigel is undoubtedly right.   Pope Benedict, feeling in good conscience that he needed to abdicate the papacy, chose to do so at a time just before Lent, and with plenty of time before Easter for the College of Cardinals to enter its conclave and elect a new Pope.   Lent is a time for prayerful reflection, and I am certain that Pope Benedict expected and desired that the Church writ large, meaning believing Catholics around the world, would use this Lent and his abdication to refocus their prayers on the future of the Church.   I am certain too that he expects a particularly joyous Holy Week and Easter as Catholics greet a new Pope, who immediately will become the new focal point and driver of the Church's evangelization.

Kierkegaard's Clown

There will inevitably be shameless conspiracy theories about Pope Benedict's decision to step down.   Here's one from the village idiot, Piers Morgan.   But I can't help thinking that the easiest explanation is also the best -- he's 85, and he's tired.   Tired physically, surely, but tired also mentally from the long struggle throughout his adult life with the gradual decline of Christian Europe.   Did he feel, after all, like the clown at the beginning of his early book, Introduction to Christianity:

A great, beautiful man and priest.   I am certain that his love of Christ and his certainty in his faith made him happy.   But I am also sure that the ignorant turning away of Europe from its source in Christianity must have been frustrating, like the clown's frustration at being unable to get across his warning to the villagers that a fire was coming to burn their homes.   He wants to tell them the truth, he pleads to tell them the truth, he begs them to hear the truth.   Yet they cannot hear him.   Their prejudices -- the arrogance of modernity, that we think we know everything already -- stop their ears.  



The Next Pope

Fr. John Sirico, writing in NRO, adds a cautionary note to the speculation that will dominate over the next few weeks:

Anyone who tells you there is a “front-runner” simply does not know what he is talking about. The ripening period for “papabili” to emerge has just begun, though were I forced to identify one or two possibilities, I would look at the Canadian cardinal Marc Ouellet (head of the Congregation of Bishops), or Cardinal Angelo Scola, archbishop of Milan (the Italians very much want the papacy back), or even Cardinal George Pell from Australia. If we are hoping for an American, of course, the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan would be great.

Father Sirico, interestingly, is the brother of Tony Sirico, who played Paulie Walnuts on The Sopranos.   That's right, this guy:

Pitchers and Catchers Report (more from Jupiter)

Oh, man, does this look like fun!

Pitchers and Catchers Report!

Best four words in the English language.  

Here's Trevor Rosenthal, bringing the gas:

Viva la Papa!

From the Regular Son:

I have been lucky to have in my most formative years as a Catholic been able to witness two truly great and magnanimous Popes. I believe Benedict made the right decision but I fear that this may set a precedent: that resignation is always advisable in the late years of a deteriorating Pontiff. This is not just a job: it is a supreme and holy office. The Holy Father has been appointed by Heaven to lead the earthly Church.

Still, Viva la Papa!

Girl of the Day - SI Cover (Kate Upton)

It may just be me, but this may be the moment where Kate Upton jumps the shark -- i.e., goes from beautiful young girl to somewhat nasty too-big-breasted national punch  line.   Too bad.   She actually seems like a pretty cool girl.

Anyway, this is apparently the SI swimsuit issue cover:

Girl of the Day - The Duchess of Duke Street (Gemma Jones)

We've just started watching the late 1970s BBC series The Duchess of Duke Street, which I had never heard of, but which looks to be very good -- sort of like Upstairs, Downstairs, but with a single main central character, Louisa Leyton, played by Gemma Jones.

Girl of the Day - Kathryn Grayson

Maybe the best pure singer of the early 1950s heyday of the movie musical, opera-trained Kathryn Grayson starred in two big hits:  Showboat and Kiss Me Kate.   She was born today in 1922, and died at 88 in 2010.

Here's a big number from Showboat, with Grayson showing off her pipes:

It's Not Brain Surgery... Or Is It?

Dr. Ben Carson, director of pediatric neuro-surgery at Johns Hopkins, schooled President Obama at this year's White House prayer breakfast, as reported in the WSJ.   Of particular note is his discussion of a Biblically-sanctioned flat tax:

"What we need to do is come up with something simple. And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe, God, and he's given us a system. It's called a tithe.

"We don't necessarily have to do 10% but it's the principle. He didn't say if your crops fail, don't give me any tithe or if you have a bumper crop, give me triple tithe. So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion, you put in a billion. You make $10 you put in one. Of course you've got to get rid of the loopholes. Some people say, 'Well that's not fair because it doesn't hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made 10.' Where does it say you've got to hurt the guy? He just put a billion dollars in the pot. We don't need to hurt him. It's that kind of thinking that has resulted in 602 banks in the Cayman Islands. That money needs to be back here building our infrastructure and creating jobs."

Awesome.   Watch the whole thing:

What Difference Does It Make?

Outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified today under oath that, on the night of 9/11/12 when four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya, were killed in Benghazi, he had no calls with President Obama.   Not one.   Not checking in.   Not a quick call to see how things are going.   Nothing.

As Hillary Clinton might say, what difference does having a Commander in Chief make?

***

Oh, and by the way.   The day before 9/11/12, the Washington Post had an article citing records showing Obama had skipped most of his intelligence briefings.  

It's our fault.   We elected him.   And then we re-elected him.

A silly people.

Girl of the Day - Counting Down to SI Swimsuit Issue (Nina Agdal)

It's only a few days since the Super Bowl, and already we're looking forward at TRGB to the next big sporting event on the horizon.... the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. 

And, since it's snowing like a banshee here in lovely southeastern Wisconsin, a little bit of sunshine would go a long way.   So, without further ado.... Nina Agdal:

Rumor has it she's going to be the cover girl for 2013.  

Goebbels at the New York Times

Are the major newspapers in America, the New York Times and the Washington Post, nothing more than propaganda wings of the left-liberal Obama Administration?   It sure looks that way.   Can anyone really argue that a story like this about Obama's targeted assassination program wouldn't have been published for "national security" reasons during the Bush Administration?   Come on.   They would have rushed it into print with double-wide headlines:

US news organisations are facing accusations of complicity after it emerged that they bowed to pressure from the Obama administration not to disclose the existence of a secret drone base in Saudi Arabia despite knowing about it for a year.

Amid renewed scrutiny over the Obama administration's secrecy over its targeted killing programme, media analysts and national security experts said the revelation that some newspapers had co-operated over the drone base had reopened the debate over the balance between freedom of information and national security.

On Tuesday, following Monday's disclosure by NBC of a leaked Justice Department white paper on the case for its controversial targeted killing programme, the Washington Post revealed it had previously refrained from publishing the base's location at the behest of the Obama administration over national security concerns.

The New York Times followed with its own story on the drone programme on Wednesday, and an op-ed explaining why it felt the time to publish was now.

One expert described the initial decision not to publish the base's location as "shameful and craven".
Dr Jack Lule, a professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, said that the national security implications did not merit holding on to the story.

"The decision not to publish is a shameful one. The national security standard has to be very high, perhaps imminent danger," he said. "The fact that we are even having a conversation about whether it was a national security issue should have sent alarm bells off to the editors. I think the real reason was that the administration did not want to embarrass the Saudis – and for the US news media to be complicit in that is craven."

Girl of the Day - Jamie Lynn Sigler

I've just finished watching the six seasons of The Sopranos.   So much of the show revolves around Tony Sopranos' desires to have a "normal" American family life, despite the fact that the lifestyle is funded by his criminal activities as Don of the northern New Jersey Mafia.   A lot of that tension, in turn, comes from the character of his daughter, who has seemed to escape that life by going to Columbia and then law school and becoming educated and employable in the straight world.   And a lot of the ultimate tragedy of the show is that Tony, a sociopath who often justifies his murderous Mafia life by rationalizing that it's for his family (much like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, although Tony never thinks he himself is going to be able to become legitimate), ends up in the last scene (although famously we don't really see this on camera) being shot in the head sitting in a booth in a diner with his wife and son, just as his daughter, Meadow, walks in the door.   He hears the bell over the door ring, looks up, and the screen goes blank for ten seconds.   We are left to imagine the horror he has inflicted on the family he claimed he was protecting.

Anyway, Meadow Soprano is played by Jamie Lynn Sigler.

Unintended Consequences

The two words you need to repeat like a mantra every time a liberal proposes a policy are:

Unintended consequences.

The unintended consequences of Obamacare for instance -- a titanic policy change enacted largely because of demagoguery about the sad plight of the "uninsured" and people with "preexisting conditions" -- include the ironic outcome that, starting in 2014, healthy people have a huge economic incentive to remain uninsured, because they can never be denied for preexisting conditions whenever they get sick.   So bank your premiums while you can, Americans, stay healthy, put the cash in the bank, and then go get your insurance when you're sick.   Of course, that means the collapse of the private health insurance market, since insurance pools don't work if healthy people don't pay premiums for care they don't use to subsidize care for sick people.  

Here's another one:

San Francisco has been discouraging plastic bags since 2007, saying that it takes too much oil to make them and that used bags pollute waterways and kill marine animals. In 2012, it strengthened its law. Several West Coast cities, including Seattle and Los Angeles, have also adopted bans for environmental reasons. The government of Washington, D.C., imposes a 5 cent plastic-bag tax. (Advocates prefer to call it a “fee” because taxes are unpopular.) Environmental groups and celebrity activists, including Eva Longoria and Julia Louis- Dreyfus, support these laws.

The plastic-bag industry, predictably, wants to throw them away. It says that the making of plastic bags supplies a livelihood to 30,000 hard-working, law-abiding, patriotic Americans, many of whom have adorable children to support. It cites a 2007 report by San Francisco’s Environment Department that said plastic bags from retail establishments, the target of the ban, accounted for only 0.6 percent of litter.

Most alarmingly, the industry has highlighted news reports linking reusable shopping bags to the spread of disease. Like this one, from the Los Angeles Times last May: “A reusable grocery bag left in a hotel bathroom caused an outbreak of norovirus-induced diarrhea and nausea that struck nine of 13 members of a girls’ soccer team in October, Oregon researchers reported Wednesday.”

Warning of disease may seem like an over-the-top scare tactic, but research suggests there’s more than anecdote behind this industry talking point. In a 2011 study, four researchers examined reusable bags in California and Arizona and found that 51 percent of them contained coliform bacteria. The problem appears to be the habits of the reusers. Seventy-five percent said they keep meat and vegetables in the same bag. When bags were stored in hot car trunks for two hours, the bacteria grew tenfold.

That study also found, happily, that washing the bags eliminated 99.9 percent of the bacteria. It undercut even that good news, though, by finding that 97 percent of people reported that they never wash their bags.

Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright, who are law professors at the University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University, respectively, have done a more recent study on the public-health impact of plastic-bag bans. They find that emergency-room admissions related to E. coli infections increased in San Francisco after the ban. (Nearby counties did not show this increase.) And this effect showed up as soon as the ban was implemented. (“There is a clear discontinuity at the time of adoption.”) The San Francisco ban was also associated with increases in salmonella and other bacterial infections. Similar effects were found in other California towns that adopted such laws.

Klick and Wright estimate that the San Francisco ban results in a 46 percent increase in deaths from foodborne illnesses, or 5.5 more of them each year. They then run through a cost-benefit analysis employing the same estimate of the value of a human life that the Environmental Protection Agency uses when evaluating regulations that are supposed to save lives. They conclude that the anti-plastic-bag policies can’t pass the test -- and that’s before counting the higher health-care costs they generate.

I've seen stories like this before, and they are persuasive.  I've advised the Regular Wife to use plastic bags.  

There's a reason why so much of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) deal with Jewish laws concerning food preparation and cleanliness.   Human beings have struggled to keep from being infected since they've become a civilization.   But environmentalists think they know better.   Or, they are willing to sacrifice human lives on the altar of their one true faith... in Gaia.   Unintended consequences be damned.

Occam's Razor and Global Warming

Powerline has a post up linking to what seems to my mind an important article on the global warming debate.   Here are paragraphs that jumped out at me:

William of Occam (1285-1347) was an English Franciscan monk and philosopher to whom is attributed the saying ‘Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate’, which translates as ‘Plurality should not be posited without necessity.’ This is a succinct statement of the principle of simplicity, or parsimony, that was first developed by Aristotle and which has today come to underlie all scientific endeavour.


The phrase ‘Occam’s Razor’ is now generally used as shorthand to represent the fundamental scientific assumption of simplicity. To explain any given set of observations of the natural world, scientific method proceeds by erecting, first, the simplest possible explanation (hypothesis) that can explain the known facts.

This simple explanation, termed the null hypothesis, then becomes the assumed interpretation until additional facts emerge that require modification of the initial hypothesis, or perhaps even invalidate it altogether.

Given the great natural variability exhibited by climate records, and the failure to date to compartmentalize or identify a human signal within them, the proper null hypothesis – because it is the simplest consistent with the known facts – is that global climate changes are presumed to be natural, unless and until specific evidence is forthcoming for human causation.

It is one of the more extraordinary facts about the IPCC that the research studies it favours mostly proceed using an (unjustified) inversion of the null hypothesis – namely that global climate changes are presumed to be due to human-related carbon dioxide emissions, unless and until specific evidence indicates otherwise.

Why would scientists essentially pervert science itself by ignoring these basic tenets of science?   Why would they seek human causation for global climate change, when the simplest answer -- that weather changes because we live in a dynamic, and not static, natural world -- remains plausible and persuasive?

The answer is also subject to Occam's Razor.   Why do people take irrational positions and hold them despite new evidence (such as the fact that there has been no measurable warming over the past 15 years)?

Hate.   Leftists hate capitalism, they hate industry, they hate machinery, they hate cars and roads, they hate suburbia, they hate SUVs, they hate mean rich people.   Hate and fear... they are Luddites, afraid of change, longing for an Edenic world.  

And, make no mistake, Greens are camouflaged Reds, and always have been.

Downton Abbey Jumps the Shark Redux

I've had criticisms of Downton Abbey on the blog before.   Beginning in the second season, I thought they went too melodramatic, in a silly way.   The episode with the Ouija board was the final straw, but other story lines -- Bates' imprisonment, the Matthew is wounded in the war and can't walk, but then can, and can't make love, but then presumably can story -- all seemed to me to be too easy, too pat.   I'd seen those scenes before a hundred times.   They could have written themselves.

And perhaps that was the real problem.   The scenes weren't being written by real writers, but by what appeared to be automatons.   We've got a beautiful setting and we've picked a time frame and we've got a list of upstairs and downstairs British characters.   Mix them all up in the Masterpiece Theatre Super Deluxe Sunday Night Drama machine, press a button and out squirts a punch-pressed, same-old, same-old festival of cliches.  

This season it may be even worse, starting with killing off the youngest daughter, Sybil, in childbirth.   Here's how stupid that was.

First, it killed off easily the best-looking and sexiest of the three daughters of the family.   Played by Jessica Brown Findlay, Sybil was also the sweetest and most appealing of the three daughters.   What could possess them to kill her off?

I mean seriously, wouldn't you want to have this face around on your TV show?

Second, putting the decorative aspects aside, the only reason to use the death of Sybil dramatically is to create divisions between Lord and Lady Grantham.   The problem with that is simple.

They are easily the most boring characters on the show.   Particularly Lord Grantham, as played by Hugh Bonneville.   He's a guy who inherited the estate, was able to save it only by marrying a wealthy American, proceeded to blow all of her money, now has lucked out and had his daughter Mary find a husband, Matthew, who happens to have inherited money from his former fiancee's father (none of which makes sense either), and now is apparently trying to blow that through mismanagement.   Why would anyone put up with this incompetent old coot?   And, if so, why should we care about his character?   Answer:  we don't.   So why do the writers focus on him?  

What they should have done, what the show is really about, is to focus on the conflict between the sedentary, conservative, landed gentry, whose lifestyle is the epitome of a "dying business model," versus the younger, middle-class, business types (like Matthew and, if they had been thinking straight, Branson), who start making "new money" in the Roaring 20s.   That would have been interesting.   Now, we just have a soap opera where someone has to die every few episodes to keep the machine running.



Filly (and Colt) of the Day

Anheuser-Busch did the right thing with their contest to name the baby Clydesdale.   The winning name was "Hope."   But they also decided to name another baby Clydesdale:

Most popular Clydesdale ever?   In St. Louis, undoubtedly.

Evangelical Catholicism and Chreasters

Kathryn Jean Lopez in NRO talks with George Weigel today about his new book, Evangelical Catholicism.   Here's a snippet of the interview that caught my eye:

LOPEZ: Is an evangelical Catholicism realistic when “the Catholic vote” and so much of what we see from Catholics today has very little to do with the surrender to revealed faith you suggest the world needs?

WEIGEL: Well, let’s begin by noting for the umpteenth time that there isn’t any such thing as “the Catholic vote.” There are voters who self-identify as Catholics, but their degree of Catholic commitment and practice varies widely, and their voting patterns tend to mirror their commitments. Regular, weekly-Mass-attending Catholics skew heavily Republican; once-a-year Catholics skew heavily Democratic; and the scale slides in between — the once-a-month Catholic is more likely to vote Republican than the once-a-quarter Catholic. So it really makes no sense to talk about a “Catholic vote,” any more than it makes sense to talk about a “gender-gap” in our electoral politics. The “gap” in the latter is between married women and single women; the “gap” among Catholics is between practicing Catholics and occasional Catholics.

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years.   Whenever the MSM polls Catholics, they include in the definition people who simply aren't Catholics in any meaningful way.   They don't believe in the authority of the Pope.   They don't believe in the Church's position on life or sexuality or marriage.   They don't attend Mass.   They don't pray.   They don't send their children to Catholic schools.   They don't agree with the Church's position on gay marriage or homosexuality.   They don't believe in the Church's position on priests and nuns being celibate.   They are what we like to call "Chreasters"... people who go to a Catholic Church on Christmas and Easter with their families out of some vague sense of obligation, but who actually don't believe in Christ or His Church.

So when the MSM makes a statement like 45% of American Catholics are pro-choice, my response is always... no, 0% of actual believing, practicing Catholics are pro-choice, because, if they were actual believing, practicing Catholics, they would be pro-Life, period.

Bush's Jobless Recovery... Oh, Wait!

Along the same vein, why don't the headlines blare the fact that Obama's recovery has been the weakest in the post-WW II era?   Victor Davis Hanson addresses the essential absurdity of news coverage that varies depending on who's in the White House:

We live in an age of falsity, in which words have lost their meanings and concepts are reinvented as the situation demands. The United States is in a jobless recovery — even if that phrase largely disappeared from the American lexicon about 2004. Good news somehow must follow from a rising unemployment rate, which itself underrepresents the actual percentage of Americans long out of work.

At the same time, we are supposed to be relieved that we are in a contracting expansion, where fewer goods and services are proof of a resilient economy. In our debt-ridden revival, borrowing $1 trillion each year is evidence that we don’t have a spending problem.

If an unemployment rate of 7.9 percent and the economy shrinking by 0.01 percent a year — with a fifth consecutive $1 trillion annual deficit — are indicators of recovery, what would the old 5 percent unemployment, 4 percent growth in GDP, and $300 billion annual deficits mean? Or do the meaning of words and the nature of “facts” depend on who is in the White House at the time, or rather on whether the president is trying to make us more equal or to enrich the 1 percent?

Read the whole thing.

Bush Secret Memo Authorizing Government Murdering Americans

That's what the NYT headline would read if the story in today's paper was about George W. Bush rather than about the Obama administration.   There would be calls for impeachment, Congressional hearings, criminal charges, special prosecutors.   Maybe there still will be.   But I doubt it.

Here's the story, entitled somewhat blandly "Memo Cites Legal Basis for Killing U.S. Citizens in al Qaeda":

Obama administration lawyers have asserted that it would be lawful to kill a United States citizen if “an informed, high-level official” of the government decided that the target was a ranking figure in Al Qaeda who posed “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States” and if his capture was not feasible, according to a 16-page document made public on Monday.

The unsigned and undated Justice Department “white paper,” obtained by NBC News, is the most detailed analysis yet to come into public view regarding the Obama legal team’s views about the lawfulness of killing, without a trial, an American citizen who executive branch officials decide is an operational leader of Al Qaeda or one of its allies.

If you go to the actual document, the key argument is, as you might suspect, that such killing is justified, despite the Constitutional right to due process (i.e., you can't be deprived of life without due process), because they balance the individual's right against unlawful deprivation of life against the interest of the state in national defense against imminent attack:

I'm not saying I don't agree with this reasoning.  I'm also not saying that it's not a good legal argument.   I'm just saying that this is the exact kind of argument and reasoning that the Left refused to grant credibility to throughout the eight years of Bush's Presidency.   Instead they called him a murderer and a torturer and a war criminal and a Nazi.

Tax Fairness

President Obama today was cited in various places as having called for "additional revenue" from "closing loopholes," and used as his demogogic mantra that wealthy people should not pay lower tax rates than "bus drivers or cops" because they have "accountants and lawyers."

Here's a news flash:   They don't.   The top quintile of taxpayers pays a higher federal tax rate than the fourth quintile, which pays more than the third, which pays more than the second, which pays more than the first.   The system already is progressive, and steeply so.   Here's a great chart from the Tax Policy Center showing the combined effect of income taxes, payroll taxes, and corporate taxes:

I'll vouch for this... I'll admit that I'm safely in the top quintile, and I pay at a rate right in between the top of the blue bar on the right and the top of the brown bar on the right... i.e., a little bit lower than the people way at the top, but higher than nearly everyone else.

So, you libs, if you want to argue that our tax code ought to be more progressive, fine.   Make that argument.   But don't lie and argue as if it isn't already steeply progressive.  

Boys and Girls Are Different

As every even marginally intelligent adult realizes.  

But not our school system, which continues to expect boys to behave like girls -- be neat, tidy, organized, quiet, attentive, meek, passive, rule followers -- instead of the sloppy and disorganized (but creative), loud and bored (because they have more nervous energy), aggressive (because... well, just because they're boys), rule-breakers and mischief-makers.   Christina Hoff Sommers, who has been writing about the "war on boys" for years, reports from the frontlines in the NYT over the weekend:

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college. Why? A study coming out this week in The Journal of Human Resources gives an important answer. Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.

The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted.

The scholars attributed this “misalignment” to differences in “noncognitive skills”: attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently. As most parents know, girls tend to develop these skills earlier and more naturally than boys.

No previous study, to my knowledge, has demonstrated that the well-known gender gap in school grades begins so early and is almost entirely attributable to differences in behavior. The researchers found that teachers rated boys as less proficient even when the boys did just as well as the girls on tests of reading, math and science. (The teachers did not know the test scores in advance.) If the teachers had not accounted for classroom behavior, the boys’ grades, like the girls’, would have matched their test scores.

As our schools have become more feelings-centered, risk-averse, collaboration-oriented and sedentary, they have moved further and further from boys’ characteristic sensibilities.

I've seen this first-hand in our own family.   The Regular Son was essentially targeted by women teachers in his parochial school because he was... well, loud, aggressive, bored, creative, funny, and, yes, sometimes angry.   He was also the smartest kid in the school, and everyone knew it.   But he didn't get the best grades, and the teachers didn't like teaching him, and the result was a debacle that is only now resolving itself as he is an honors student in a (not by accident) all-boys high school.  

I'll give you an example.   For years the female teachers would criticize him for drawing in class instead of paying attention to whatever it was he was supposed to be doing.   As a kid he drew all the time -- he went through a dinosaur phase, then a cheetah phase, then a phase where all he drew were World War II fighters.   The teachers hated it.

Now he's 15 and does this sort of thing in his spare time instead of playing video games:

Wouldn't a good school with good teachers support and encourage excellence and, to use a precise word, obsession, in young men?  It's the obsessions of young men that become the great achievements in human civilization, not just in art, but in science and business too.   But our school system seems designed to try to squash them instead.  

A marginally competent plaintiffs lawyer could probably create a class-action lawsuit focusing on the discrimination against boys in schools across America.