Ah yes, we’re learning ever more about the wonders of the health care reform bill. Now it’s college students’ health insurance policies that are imperiled.
Sweet.
That sleepy “sl”
I was talking to a friend the other day and the word “scurry” came up, as in “we’ve got to scurry out of here.” I joked that a better word would be “skedaddle,” and maybe even “scoot” or “scram.”
And then I realized that all these words start with the same phoneme, the “sk”sound. That led to thinking of others in the same category: scat, scramble, scamper, skitter, scutter.
It’s probably no coincidence; the “sk” sound has a quick and percussive quality. Sometimes the sound of a word fits its meaning and sometimes it doesn’t, but these certainly seem to.
And then there’s “sl,” very different from “sk.” Its sound is lazy, loose, slow, and it engenders sleepy, slurred, sluggish, slothful, sleepy, and slumber.
And now I must skedaddle, or be accused of slacking off!
Boehner calls for firing of Obama’s economic team
Boehner is grandstanding here, IMHO.
Not gonna happen—although if they had any integrity, they would have voluntarily resigned long ago.
And even if it did happen—who would replace them? I can’t imagine it would be an improvement. No, the fish rots from the head.
Maine and New Hampshire diverge
Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man—a book about the Great Depression—applies herself to the economic differences between Maine and New Hampshire today.
As a New Englander, I know these two states (and Vermont and Massachusetts and Connecticut and Rhode Island) fairly well. Outsiders may consider all these states somewhat similar (they’ve got lakes! they’ve got pretty autumn leaves! they’ve got village greens!), but they are not. New Hampshire has the distinction of being less liberal than the others; it’s more or less purple right now, with the others being blue (or perhaps even indigo).
But right after WWII, Maine and New Hampshire were very similar to each other in demographics and fiscal policies, with Maine slightly ahead in some respects. Then they diverged, as Shlaes points out (based on a study by J. Scott Moody of Public Choice Analytics):
At the end of World War II, Maine boasted a bigger economy and a bigger population than New Hampshire. In some other respects the two states were similar. They were both in New England, and both were struggling with the death of old industries such as textiles. In 1946, per capita income was $9,610 and $9,768 for Maine and New Hampshire, respectively…
Back in 1946, only 16.6 percent of what Maine residents earned or collected came from a government, federal, state or local. For New Hampshire, that rate was 18.4 percent. Neither state had an income tax or a sales tax. Then the divergence started.
Then Maine began to tax its citizens much more heavily than New Hampshire did, so much so that now Maine residents’ tax burden ranks 6th nationally to New Hampshire’s 49th, and more residents rely on public sector income. It shows in the results: New Hampshire is doing significantly better than Maine economically, as just about every sentient being in New England is aware.
[NOTE: No doubt someone, somewhere, will try to say these differences are due to factors other than economic policies such as taxation. And it may even be true for all I know; life does not lend itself to absolute certainty in such matters, because the variables are numerous and cannot be controlled. But the argument that Moody and Shlaes advance that fiscal policies made a big difference seems fairly compelling to me.]
Richard Fernandez on the professional left
Brilliant, as usual:
The professional structure of the Left eventually creates a common organizational culture. One of the reasons that the Left does so well working with foreign intelligence agencies, Islamic extremists and even criminal syndicates and crooked unions is that they architectured like them. The Left has a version of every process a conspiratorial organization possesses. From rites of initiation ”” which may consist in the case of menial, repetitive tasks like selling the Daily Worker at a streetcorner to ”˜making their bones’ the Left has a conveyor belt geared towards controlling admission into a cherished inner sanctum. It is a process that appeals naturally to snobs…
Because the Left partakes in the internal structures of power they are not going away soon; certainly not in 2010 or 2012. The Left is baked into the system…The disquiet created by the information revolution stems from the fact that it has allowed the “amateurs” to briefly glimpse the professionals at work, perhaps for the first time in their lives…
America was conceived as an experiment in creating a land run for amateurs. The Founding Fathers appear to have taken the view that the Towers of Power would always be with us, but attempted to keep them low. They tried craft a society in which the power of elites would limited, with no established religions; no runaway central authority; hedged with prohibitions on government. It was an attempt to enshrine amateurism as a means of pre-empting the establishment of Byzantine structures that would eventually encrust the majority will with their own agendas. One of the reasons for the reaction against President Obama’s agenda is the perception that the elites are about to succeed, perhaps forever; that the experiment of July 4, 1776 is at an end…
…[A]ll true revolutions are attempts to assert the primacy of the ordinary and of the individual over the powers and principalities of the world. In practice most revolution is not about the wretched of the earth overthrowing their masters. It is about the ordinary man trying to keep from being told what to do by self-appointed and highly paid busybodies. It is a struggle that will probably continue to the end of the human race between those with the will to rule; and on the other hand those who simply wish to to be left alone. The most revolutionary thing in the world is to try to live your life as you want to.
How low can Obama go?
But not low enough, IMHO. Not near low enough.
Then again, there’s this report from The Anchoress:
One of my husband’s friends–”“hated Bush, loved Obama and defended him vociferously for the first year, less passionately the second”“–told him over lunch this week that he’s done with Obama and “I never thought I’d say this but I miss Bush. We knew that he said what he meant, even if we didn’t want to hear it. We knew who he was, even if we didn’t like him. And we never had to wonder whether he liked us. He always did.”
Encouraging.
The real “metastasized anti-Semitism”
Daisy Kahn, one of the developers of the 9/11 mosque, had this to say in an interview yesterday:
Khan said she believed the project would be built.
“Of course, it has to go ahead,” she said. “There’s so much at stake.”
Asked if America was “Islamophobic,” Khan responded that it’s like “metastasized anti-Semitism.”
“It’s not even Islamophobia, it’s beyond Islamophobia ”” it’s hate of Muslims,” she said. “And we are deeply concerned.”
That’s an interesting phrase I’ve never heard before—“metastasized anti-Semitism.” A metastasis is, of course, the spread of a cancer from one part of the body (the primary cancer site) to another (secondary) site. The hallmark of a metastasis is that, in the new site, the cancer cells histologically resemble those at the old site and are identifiable as such.
Arabic and Hebrew are both part of the linguistic group known as Semitic, so if the term “Semite” is used in the linguistic sense, it refers to both groups. But the word “anti-Semitism” refers solely to anti-Jewish beliefs and actions, and always has:
It was coined in 1879 by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in a pamphlet called, “The Victory of Germandom over Jewry”. Using ideas of race and nationalism, Marr argued that Jews had become the first major power in the West. He accused them of being liberals, a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879 Marr founded the “League for Anti-Semitism”.
This has not usually stopped Muslim Arabs and their liberal/left defenders in recent years from playing a form of anti-Semitic victimhood as their trump card, as Kahn has done. In fact, even on this blog, when the term “anti-Semitism” is mentioned I often draw visitors who comment that, since Arabs are Semites themselves, they therefore cannot be called anti-Semitic.
But of course they can, when they exhibit vicious hatred of Jews as a group, rather than mere disapproval of Israel’s policies. And, curiously enough, if you’re looking for a good fit, the term “metastasized anti-Semitism” can best be applied to anti-Jewish hatred in the Muslim Arab world.
In fact, there’s an entire scholarly book about it, written by Bernard Lewis and entitled Semites and Anti-Semites. If anti-Semitism is a German phrase coined by a German spreading anti-Jewish sentiment, and anti-Semitism reached its zenith (so far, anyway) as practiced by the Nazis before and during World War II, then its true metastasis, its direct spread from the original site to a more distant one, occurred between Nazi Germany and Arab Muslim nations during that time:
[Lewis] argues that the role of Jews in the classical Islamic world was noteworthy mainly for its unimportance.
Anti-Semitism entered Moslem culture only with the growth of European influence in the Middle East, a process that began 150 years ago. Along with guns, medicine-and the opera, the Moslems imported anti-Semitism, and it flourished. Perhaps the most startling part of Semites and Anti-Semites (Norton, 283 pages, $18.95) is the chapter that demonstrates the widespread admiration in the Middle East for Hitler and the Nazis. The Palestinian leader, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, met Hitler in Berlin in 1941 and later joined the Nazi effort; Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser turned into a major haven for Nazis; and Anwar Sadat worked closely with German agents during World War II. This admiration remains alive: As recently as 1982, the newspaper of Egypt’s Liberal Party referred to Hitler as “that great man.”
But it was the Arab armies’ frequent military defeats at the hands of Israel that created the real need for anti-Semitism. Seeking a way to explain the Jews’ unexpected success, many Arabs turned to the great body of anti-Semitic literature developed in Europe for just such purposes. The results have been spectacular: Israelis and Jews everywhere have become satanic figures in the Arabic media. These are not fringe writings, either; as Mr. Lewis observes, “Classical anti-Semitism is an essential part of Arab intellectual life at the present time-almost as much as happened in Nazi Germany.” In 1970, emotions reached such a pitch that one of the world’s most outstandingly anti-Semitic tracts, a document forged by the czars’ secret police in the 1890s and titled the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, turned up on the best-seller list in Lebanon.
The standard themes of European anti-Semitism first appeared in Iraq and Egypt, then became prominent in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iran. As a group, these countries “have become the main center of international anti-Semitism, from which anti-Semitic literature and other propaganda is distributed all over the world.” Just as the scourge of anti-Semitism died out in its European homeland, ironically, it was reborn in the Middle East.
The book review I just quoted was written in 1986. Since then, unfortunately, we’ve learned that reports of the death of anti-Semitism in Europe have been greatly exaggerated; although, fortunately, Nazism as a mass movement seems to be no more. And it is ironic indeed that the torch of anti-Semitism has been successfully passed from the dying Nazi movement to Arab and Muslim lands, where it has flourished—and, yes, metastasized.
Dr. Sanity…
…is back.
In Michigan: “people switch sides”
Part of the lively discussion recently on this thread and then this one centered on the plight of Michigan Democrats who are disillusioned with what their party’s done for them lately, and who are thinking of switching to (gasp!) the Republican side in 2010.
Are they just shallow opportunists who are selling their votes to the highest bidder, as some contend? Or are they in the process of a more fundamental change, or at least the beginning of that process? Or perhaps a little bit of both?
For some it may be the first explanation, for others the second, and I have no way of knowing the proportions of voters who belong to each group. But the phenomenon seems very real, and if the following video is any indication, it’s becoming more widespread—even among African-American voters in the depressed Michigan towns suffering from 40% unemployment these days:
[Hat tip: Hot Air.]
Fun with statistics
In the course of this article describing a research study on marriage, fidelity, wages, and divorce, Tracy Corrigan makes the following observation:
Munsch found that during a six-year period, an average of 3.8 per cent of male partners and 1.4 per cent of female partners admitted to cheating in any given year. So either men cheat mainly with single women, or women are economical with the truth.
The reality, given the level of divorce rates, is probably that both are prone to fibbing: in fact, I can’t help feeling that it goes with the territory. In every survey, in every country, men claim to have more ”“ often many more ”“ sexual encounters than women.
In Britain, that’s an average of 12.7 heterosexual partners over a lifetime, compared with just 6.5 for women. Except that it is logistically impossible for the average man to have more partners than the average woman.
Perhaps Corrigan is correct and people are lying. But it is hardly logistically impossible for the average man to have more partners than the average woman, with just a few people doing the lying.
I’m not even sure it’s improbable, although it might be. Corrigan is assuming a one-on-one encounter pattern. But it is certainly possible—and perhaps even likely—that a lot of the unfaithful men, or sexually active men in general, are having sex with the same women, who are each having sex with a lot of men.
In other words, there might be a pool of what we used to call loose women (not to mention the professionals known as prostitutes), who are each sleeping around with a lot of men. This may be logistically difficult, but hardly impossible. In fact, it’s the sort of thing that used to be standard in my high school long ago, and perhaps in yours—many of the sexually active boys were actually sexually active with a fairly small number of girls.
Is it really so hard to imagine that something somewhat similar might still be going on re infidelity, and could account for a certain amount of the general disparity? After all, we have adventuresses such as Christina Saunders, who aspired—and succeeded, if we are to take her word for it—in achieving a belt-notching history of sexual conquests that would make Casanova stand up and take notice (of course, who was actually the conqueror and who the conqueree is a disputable question).
If more women than men are inclined to be sexually sedate in terms of numbers, and yet there is a certain subset of women who are exceedingly active like Christina (after all, compared to men, women are physiologically capable—at least in theory—of bouncing back rather more quickly), then it all seems quite mathematically possible—that is, if that subset of extremely active women are inclined to underestimate their numbers of sexual encounters (unlike Christina, who seems to have kept count). That’s all that would be necessary for the averages to exhibit the observed skew.
Then again, maybe everybody’s lying.
[NOTE: I fully expect that readers more well-versed in math and statistics than I am may find a flaw in my argument. Go right ahead.]
Okay Julia, wassup…
…with the dress?
I kind of really really really want to know what you were thinking. Because to get away with a dress like that (which may not even be possible) a person must be very young and a model and kind of avant-garde looking and even then I don’t think it would ever, ever, ever work. The print alone adds a thousand pounds.
The Decline and Fall of California
Joel Kotkin details the rise, and then the perplexing decline and fall, of the great state of California.
It turns out that Californians were the barbarians at their own gates; it was an act of self-destruction, fueled by the unforeseen (but should-have-been-foreseen) consequences of a change in the nature of “progressive” policies in the state:
During the second half of the 20th century, the state shifted from an older progressivism, which emphasized infrastructure investment and business growth, to a newer version, which views the private sector much the way the Huns viewed a city ”“ as something to be sacked and plundered. The result is two separate California realities: a lucrative one for the wealthy and for government workers, who are largely insulated from economic decline; and a grim one for the private-sector middle and working classes, who are fleeing the state.
I remember seeing the transformation myself. I lived in California for one year during the mid-70s, but from 1970 until quite recently I spent quite a bit of time there visiting friends and relatives.
Read the whole thing—and reflect on the fact that Jerry Brown is running for, and might even win, the governorship of California.