Random education items
1. George Leef at the ed branch of NRO says:

If you're serious about helping poorer people, get rid of policies that impede them (such as occupational licensing and other laws that hinder business enterprise), policies that raise prices artificially (dairy price supports, e.g.), and policies that slow economic growth generally (economic growth being the greatest friend poor people have ever had), but don't stick them in college classrooms.

Couldn't say it better.

I've discussed this before, but I'd add in brief form:

Break down the threats of litigation and discrimination laws, which steer employers toward college degrees as the only safe mode of selection. Let employers judge people by whatever criteria they find appropriate, and the value of a degree will decline rapidly. More people will end up in jobs that suit them.

Cut outsourcing, imports and immigration, which cheapen the lower-skilled end of the population. Bring back industry and skilled labor.

= = = = =

2. Radio talker Michael Savage recently started a firestorm by stating accurately that the vast majority of diagnosed autism is fraudulent.

News stories universally describe his accurate statement as "outrageous comments", without any of the usual hedges like "some critics say", which tells you instantly that his statement is accurate.

Anyone who has followed the progress of Special Education since 1970 has seen the same series of events in the broader categories of "Learning Disabilities" and "ADHD".

Basic logic: When you see an official change in the diagnostic criteria for a disorder, followed immediately by a vast expansion in the number of diagnosed cases of this disorder, you don't need to look for any fancy explanations. You don't need to ask if pollution or mercury or anything else is responsible for the increase in diagnosed cases.

This should be ridiculously obvious, but it apparently isn't.

Even if there is a real increase in the number of disconnected kids, there are several clear causes. First, television with its enforcement of the 6-second attention span. Second, the limitation of ordinary interactions -- and especially disciplinary interactions -- between parents and kids, teachers and kids, random adults and kids, caused by other media firestorms.

A recent study about reading fiction may indicate another cause. In short, people who read a lot of good fiction have more empathy, more ability to understand the expressions and intentions of others. This is specifically limited to reading printed fiction, as opposed to watching stories on TV. Interestingly, the effect is immediate as well as cumulative. In the study, students were divided into two groups. One group read an account of an incident in the style of a news article. The other group read an account of the same incident in good novelistic style. The passages were matched for vocabulary and length. Immediately after the reading, the students who read the novel-like account performed better on a task of interpreting facial expressions!

3. Steve Sailer, who manages to write more new and solid food for thought than anyone else, recently tossed off a brief comment that needs to be considered deeply by anyone in the realm of education and training.

Sailer observed that professional training is growing longer at an alarming rate. Doctors, engineers, and professors in serious fields, often start their actual careers at age 35.

This is well known.

Sailer's unique insight: Intelligence reaches its peak around age 24. The most original contributions to music, philosophy, medicine and science are generally made around that age. As we force professionals to spend their best years in various stages of training, we are purely wasting their talent. It's no wonder our scientific contributions are declining!
  ¶ 3:13 PM

  No bark
One piece of good news today: the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is actually clamping down on oil speculators. It has filed a suit against one group of traders based in Holland and Britain. The suit is not large, but it will certainly put a nice chill on other thieves, who can expect more legal action.

This isn't secret; it's reported in lots of online sources. But I've tried in vain to find it mentioned anywhere on TV or radio. Even the 'business channels' haven't carried it -- or at least not often enough that I could catch it while wandering the channels.

So why are these dogs so quiet? By normal logic, you'd expect the R brand to crow about this, as evidence that the Bush administration is working seriously to bring down falsely inflated oil prices. I'm not on the R team any more, but I do heartily cheer the action and congratulate the administration on showing some goat glands at last!

And by normal logic you'd expect the D brand to shout about this, because it proves their contention that the inflation was largely caused by speculators.

In other words, this should be a "win-win" for everyone who claims to be concerned about the ordinary American consumer.

Why the silence then? I'm genuinely puzzled. Perhaps both "sides" are deeply indebted to the whole speculator class (not just Soros), and aren't allowed to say anything negative about their owners. Or perhaps it's more complicated than that, but I usually prefer simple conspiracies.
  ¶ 11:05 AM

  Horse joke
Yesterday my own stupidity reminded me of the old Moron joke about two horses, now generally told as a blonde joke.

Here is an even newer version of the joke.

= = = = =

George Soros bought two toy politicians and decided to run them both for President.

He needed to distinguish them in some way, so he could target the advertising and the talking-point-heads for each "party" in a way that didn't look too obviously predictable.

So he started watching his two purchases.

One of them said "We should not torture enemy prisoners!" and George Soros decided this would be a good way to separate them. But then the other purchase also said "We should not torture enemy prisoners!" and Soros was lost again.

Soros noticed one of his new toys was campaigning in hostile countries while ignoring the United States. He said "Aha! Here's a distinguishing point!" But then the other toy also campaigned in hostile countries while ignoring the United States.

Soros observed that one toy was fond of saying "We should not build walls to keep out immigrants! We should welcome everyone!" and he marked this down as a good distinguishing point. But then the other toy said "We must tear down the walls that divide Christians, Muslims and Jews!" and Soros was again befuddled.

Soros heard one toy saying "Global warming is real! We must destroy the American economy and spend many trillions of dollars in order to slow down Global Warming!" And Soros thought "Well, finally a distinction that I can use." But then the other toy also said "Global Warming is a desperate crisis! We must destroy the American economy and spend many trillions of dollars to slow it down!" And Soros was lost again.

Finally Soros figured it out! He finally had a way to distinguish his new toys! What was it? The black one is younger than the white one!
  ¶ 10:37 AM

  Time for a reprint.
The main blogger at Gates of Vienna, who focuses on countering Mohammedan influence in Europe, seems to be softening.

When you consider terrorist groups like the Taliban or “the youths” of banlieues like Clichy-sous-Bois, it can be difficult to come up with a real solution to the problem of those who are willing to defy the social mores of the place in which they live…simply to assert that it is they who are in control. Attempts to resolve the crises these groups present have so far proved futile.

Please don’t tell me we should “kill them all and let God sort it out.” That is a solution without any resolution. For one thing, it invalidates our own moral code. For another, such draconian measures simply feed the fire. Individuals can be subdued and obliterated, but there are always others, even angrier and more feral, to take their place.

No. The only way to eradicate a serious Fascist infestation is to "kill them all", or at least a sizable chunk of the infected population.

Polistra discussed this at length last year, and I'm going to reprint most of it now.

= = = = =

Polistra likes to learn from dogs, our perpetual teachers of civilization. Dogs get straight to the end. When the goal is truly important, a dog will take a straight line to reach it, regardless of obstacles. When there's a horse that needs herding, a border collie will leap through barbed wire to reach it. When there's a snake menacing a family member, a chihuahua will jump in front of it and take the bite.

Conservatives like to criticize leftists by saying "Marxists believe the end justifies the means." This statement is factually true but woefully incomplete. "End justifies means" is not a characteristic of Marxism; it's a trademark of Marxists because MARXISTS ARE SERIOUS ABOUT THEIR ENDS AND NON-MARXISTS ARE NOT SERIOUS ABOUT OUR ENDS. That's the difference.

Worst of all, non-Marxists generally get so tangled up in discussing and implementing the methods [e.g. insuring that judges have the last word even when we know the judges are enemy agents; following the Geneva Convention even though it was specifically meant to discourage terrorism, not to assist terrorists] that they forget about the ends entirely. Leftists are only too happy to assist our entrance into this briar patch, as when they get Nixon, Bush or AG Gonzalez immersed in discussions of that grand old question "What did you know and when did you know it?" This generates all sorts of defenses and research, and accomplishes precisely nothing except to move the enemy closer to his goal.

As said before, the experiments of history have already been performed. We have the data. We know how to convince a fierce and determined enemy to stop. Oddly enough, the proper method is democratic in a way, though it has nothing at all to do with elections. Fact is, any successful tyrant rules with the enthusiastic consent of a majority of his people. When that consent disappears, his regime collapses, though not always immediately. We accomplished this collapse in 1945, after three years of killing soldiers and generals had failed to remove the people's consent for Hitler and Tojo. What finally did the trick? Killing huge numbers of civilians, with no regard for the traditions and laws of fighting. Churchill and Roosevelt violated all the rules of civilization for several months, used totally evil methods and means for a short time, because they were certain of their own good ends. They knew that Britain and its allies were the permanent carriers of humane civilization, they had tried all lesser methods without success, and they also knew that decency and goodness would leave this earth for a very long time if the Krauts and Nips continued their enthusiastic consent for imperial fascism.

We will have to do the same thing sooner or later in the current war, because we are the people who learn from dogs, and Mohammedans are the people who refuse to learn from dogs. If we continue to agonize about the Christian purity of our methods, we will simply die and there will be nobody left in the world to carry and defend Christianity.
  ¶ 4:08 AM

  Scared me
About a half hour ago (maybe 2:10 AM) I was awakened by something ... after gaining consciousness I identified the sound as a series of knocks or taps on the house next door. A few seconds later, I heard three taps on my own house. Possibly on the front door, but didn't quite sound like knocking. Perhaps somebody is going around the neighborhood checking doors.

Reported it to the police. Since nothing untoward has occurred since then, I probably should go back to sleep, but that ain't gonna happen.

Might as well start the coffee, stay up and get some work done.

This neighborhood is getting less safe. A somewhat similar incident occurred in May.

= = = = =

Update: It appears that the sounds were made by a city water meter reader! I went out in daylight to examine the location where the sounds had come from. The little black water-sensor box was open. In this context, the tapping sounds are familiar. But when you're awakened at 2 AM, your first thought is emphatically not "Oh, that's just the meter reader."
  ¶ 2:40 AM

  Stupid me
I've been wondering why the window air conditioner sometimes emits a smell similar to the adhesive on ductape, or the adhesive on Scotch tape. Today I figured out the deep dark mystery. It's because I placed ductape around the edges of the outlet.

Apparently the ductape had become such a habitual part of the air conditioner that I stopped thinking of it as an entity which might possibly send the smell of ductape into the room when you blow air across it. You might reasonably expect ductape to smell like ductape, but this outline had apparently ceased to be ductape in my idiotic perceptual system.

(Reminds me of the old moron joke, more recently translated to a blonde joke, about the two horses.)

The remaining mystery is why Sears built an air conditioner with an air outlet that can't be turned upward, thus requiring an outline of ductape to force the outlet into a useful position. That mystery I can't solve.
  ¶ 1:20 PM

  Self-explanatory sentence in Berlin
I've tried to pay as little attention as possible to the Terrible Two running for President. In a sane country with a functional constitution, neither would have been allowed to continue in the Senate after showing daily evidence of loyalty to other countries. Both are deeply concerned with the welfare of Mexico, Colombia, Arabia, and Germany; neither gives a gnat's turd for the welfare of this unfortunate unbordered territory north of Mexico.

Against my better judgment, I ended up listening to Imam Obama's Berlin speech this morning.

One sentence is sufficient:

"We must tear down the walls that divide Christians, Muslims and Jews."

That one sentence, all by itself, should remove him from candidacy.

In the middle of a war, we must tear down the walls that divide us from the enemy who attacked us, the enemy who continues to work in a thousand ways to bring us down?

This is, of course, identical to Sultan Bush's philosophy, and thus also to Manchurian Candidate McCain's philosophy. No walls, no protection against enemies.

Meanwhile, the "news" networks, in the few seconds they can spare from celebrity trivia, continue to "explode the myth" that Imam Obama is Mohammedan.

Again, all you need to know:

1. He was raised as a Mohammedan.

2. If he had truly converted to Christianity, there would be official fatwas demanding his death. (The mullahs don't waste fatwas on an average Ahmed who turns apostate, but they are thorough and conscientious when important men convert to Christianity.)

3. Therefore, he has not truly converted.
  ¶ 10:42 AM

  Polistra's dream, 4
Part 4 of Polistra's Dream.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 first.


Ponca, June 1939.
Fran and Polistra are leaving the Arcade and driving to the lake.......



Polistra: Model T!

Fran: Yup, lots of T's still chugging along. Nowadays they're just an obstacle. Can't go faster than 40, and burn more oil than gas.

Pol: I've been thinking about Henry Ford lately. He didn't invent the car, of course, but he did invent one big idea that America has forgotten in 2008.

Fran: Mass production?

Pol: Well, he brought that to perfection, but really Henry's most important idea, the one we've forgotten in my time, is self-sufficiency.

Fran: Hmm? You'll have to explain that.

Pol: I expect it's so natural to you that it doesn't even seem like a concept. Henry Ford decided to pay his workers a living wage so that they could buy his cars, and buy other things. When the workers came from southern poverty, he trained their wives to be good housekeepers and helped educate their kids, so that their families could move up out of poverty and behave like good modern citizens. He also made sure that his company could produce everything it needed, from the raw iron for engines, to the trees for the wood bodies, to the cows for the leather seats, all the way through to the fully manufactured car. Keeping everything within the family, so to speak. That's what started America toward prosperity.

Fran: Come to think of it, that's how Mr Marland operated too. I was probably a little too hard on him the other day when I held him up as an example of ostentatious rich men. Compared to Mr Wentz he's --- I guess you'd say he's not public-minded. But Mr Marland did a lot for his employees, in the same way that Ford did. He paid them better than anyone else for the same skills, and gave them good working conditions, food and recreation. What made Ponca so prosperous and beautiful was not just the mansions he built for his own pleasure, but the houses that his refinery workers were able to buy, and the clothes that their wives could buy, and then the stores to supply the wives, and on down the line.

Pol: That whole idea has been lost. Some companies still pay well, but the self-sufficiency, the closed circle, is long gone. In the name of "freedom", department stores have been allowed to buy the cheapest possible stuff from poor countries, which puts American factories out of business. Many companies hire illegal immigrants....

Fran: Wetbacks?

Pol: Yes, wetbacks. We're not allowed to say that word. And workers smuggled in from Oriental countries. They're pretty nearly slaves, but the government winks and nods to satisfy the robber barons. An illegal immigrant can't complain about low wages and bad conditions. Worst of all, cheap phone service and cheap shipping by airplane has made it possible to run entire factories in dictatorial countries like China and Burma, where the employees are sometimes literally slaves.

Fran: Oh dear. And we went through all that trouble in Lincoln's War, all that destruction of lives and land, supposedly to end slavery. To eliminate the temptation to use unpaid labor. Pretty slick trick, I must say. Can't have slaves here, so let businessmen keep slaves outside the country. Yes, I can see why you had to get out of there. Or out of then, as the case may be.

Pol: As you say, it's a natural temptation. Businesses always want to lower their costs and increase their profits. We made it entirely too easy to use other countries where costs are lower, which means that entirely too much money is going elsewhere instead of going to American workers or other American businesses.

Fran: But what happened to Henry's big idea? I mean, it's a valid idea, so breaking the circle must lead to bankruptcy? Or did some kind of magic change prevent it?

Pol: No magic. We're heading straight down to bankruptcy. The big companies don't care, because they're so completely scattered among various nations that their American operations have become albatrosses. Magic is a good word, though. Plenty of "smoke and mirrors" to distract the people, and even to distract executives who might have known better if they'd stopped to think. Everyone was focused on stock prices, and companies decided that their single solitary goal was to increase their stock price. They stopped issuing dividends, so there wasn't even a visible measurement of real profit. Companies did whatever it took to increase the stock price, which distracted them from the more basic parts of business. They didn't care if money circulated within America to make Americans more prosperous, as long as the almighty share price kept going up and up and up.

Sorry, I got carried away.

Fran: I understand. Helps to talk about it. Not that I can do anything to stop it, since we're just inside a cartoon here.



Fran: That's Jimmy, my newsboy. Hey Jimmy! You look sort of down in the mouth. What's wrong?

Jimmy: Hi, Miss Fran. Yes ma'am. I built this fine little soapbox car but I'm not having much fun with it. I pull and pull and pull, and then I never get a chance to sit and coast.

Fran: Yeah, this part of town is flat all right. Meet my friend Polistra, who's visiting for a while.

Jimmy: Hello, Miss Lister. Glad to meet you, ma'am.

Pol: Say, I've got an idea. Let me get out of the car ...




Pol: Self-sufficiency!

Jimmy: Wheeeee!

= = = = =
Continued in Part 5 here.

Labels: the broken circle

  ¶ 11:05 PM

  Nuff said
"The fundamental business of the country, that is production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis."

- Herbert Hoover, October 25th, 1929

================

"During the past year you have carried the credit system of the nation safely through a most difficult crisis. In this success you have demonstrated not alone the soundness of the credit system, but also the capacity of the bankers in emergency."

- Herbert Hoover, Oct 1930

================

"But again, it's a safe banking system, a sound banking system. Our regulators are on top of it. This is a very manageable situation."

- Henry Paulson, July 2008
  ¶ 7:05 AM

  Idiot astronomers
From this news story:

A dwarf planet orbiting beyond Neptune has been designated the third plutoid in the solar system and given the name Makemake, the International Astronomical Union said on Saturday. ... The red methane-covered dwarf planet formerly known as 2005 FY9 or "Easterbunny" is named after a Polynesian creator of humanity and god of fertility.

Well, good. Wonderful. Ducky. But the job isn't complete!!! As long as we're going to rename things in savage pidgin style to honor multicultural and unpronounceable gods, let's do it up brown!!!

Saturn: now called "Flavor Flav"

Uranus: now called "MichaelJacksonMichaelJackson"

Neptune: now called "GreenpeaceWarriorGreenpeaceWarrior"

Jupiter: now called "KoyaanisqatsiKoyaanisqatsi"

Mars: now called "GandhiGandhi"

Earth: now called, of course, "ThePlanetThePlanet"

Venus: now called "AllisonLapperAllisonLapper" [not a famous figure, but look her up and you'll find she fits the criterion perfectly.]

Mercury: doesn't need renaming, because mercury is contained in Compact Fluorescent Bulbs, and thus already Multiculturally Holy.

Sun: now called ... oops, we are required to omit the sun from all calculations and assumptions, so it doesn't need a name at all. It doesn't exist. It is an UnSun. Everything that happens to ThePlanetThePlanet results from the manifold sins of Western Civilization.
  ¶ 8:14 AM

  Monckton and the Two Minutes Hate
Via NRO: the Physics branch of the Gaia Megachurch has played a classic Stalinist trick. Orwell defined it perfectly: Let dissidents speak "freely", while surrounding their speech with a context of dirt, discredit, and dementia. In 1984, dissident Emmanuel Goldstein gets his chance to speak for two minutes every week, surrounded by signals that he is a crazy Jew who wants to destroy you and prevert your vital bodily fluids.

The Physics branch of the Gaia megachurch has allowed Lord Monckton to publish a paper which systematically destroys every scrap of the "facts", logic, mathematics, and philosophy of the Global Warmers, but they place the following Two Minutes Hate title on top of his paper, thus signaling their fellow Gaia zealots to hiss, cuss, and throw eggs at Monckton during his speech:




I've read through the paper, trying to keep up with the math ... not very successfully. Still, the graphs tell the story nicely. The most dramatic one is the "tropical hotspot", which is an especially sharp warming at a certain altitude in the atmosphere near the equator. All the IPCC models predict this hot spot arising from anthropogenic warming, as opposed to solar or volcanic warming. The actual facts show no heating at this altitude and latitude. Instead, the actual data most closely resembles the pattern that should arise solely from volcanic emissions.

Monckton's concluding paragraph is worth reading on its own. It's a long series of "even ifs", disassembling the "facts" and logic of the Warmers step by step.
  ¶ 12:48 PM

  When the lights go on again 2
Related to the Oklahoma Classical Era that I've been discussing in Polistra's Dream. Because this happened in Tulsa in 1941, I couldn't quite jam it into the narrative. Nonetheless, it's a great story with an up-to-date Classical Revival at the end:

It was boomtime Tulsa, the summer of 1941. Close to war, patriotism was at a fevered pitch and so was the oil business. The International Petroleum Exposition held here was a major international event, and to the big boys in the petroleum industry, oil really could be personified as a "goddess." A symbolic figure holding aloft a flame was what they wanted, and Marjorie Morrow Anderson had a face and shape for it. ... "I wanted to take art lessons, and decided if I got the job posing I'd use the money to pay for them," she said. She was working two other jobs at the time. She was born on Bruner Hill in a house with no indoor plumbing, she said. She knew what it was like to grow up hungry, and she always had to earn her own way. Having known poverty, she didn't like it.

So she posed for sculptor Clarence Allen, who created a small version of the"Goddess of Oil", intended to be a 40-foot-tall centerpiece for the Exposition. But Pearl Harbor interrupted the effort.

Now a Tulsa organization is trying to build the full statue at long last.

Tulsa was once called "America's most beautiful city," and the "Paris of the Midwest." The oil barons wanted to use their new wealth to create a city that could stand shoulder to shoulder with the great cities of the U.S. and Europe. ... Downtown was a beautiful, walkable, urban village where people could work, live, go to school, and play. Some even envisioned our city as being like Florence: a center for the arts and culture. ...

Yet now, a promising new wind stirs the air. Carried on this new wind is a familiar sound. The sound of people wanting spaces where they can live, work, shop and play within a beautiful shared environment. People are pushing for Tulsa to be great again. ... The "Goddess of Oil" is not only a testament to a cherished vision from the past, but also reflects a newborn appreciation of that vision today.

The full story is here.

PS: Marjorie Morrow Anderson achieved her dream and became a successful artist. Samples of her beautiful work are here.

PS 2: It appears that Anderson died just last week. I was looking for more samples of her art and ran into an obituary, dated July 10.

The world has lost an excellent artist.
  ¶ 7:20 PM

  Revealing
C-span was showing a discussion among top political operatives about this year's Congressional election. The brand-D operative was talking about those new hawkish Western Dems that I find impressive. He said those candidates were the third or fourth choices from the Party's viewpoint. After the losses of '02 and '04, the horizon looked dim to the "real candidates", the lifetime brand-D politicos with long state-level experience and good fund-raising connections. So the "real candidates" refused to run in '06, leaving the party to scrape the barrel. And what did they find? They found some Real Americans instead of the usual Real Party Hacks. (Apologies to Geico for the phrasing.)

You'd think the brand-R operatives would have found this instructive. You'd think they would say "Hmm... maybe we should lop off our first-tier choices and scrape the barrel to find some uncorrupted candidates, some candidates who don't resemble Duke Cunningham, Conrad Burns and Larry Craig." Nope, from the inside-the-system viewpoint, these new hawkish Dems didn't win because the voters liked them; these fresh candidates won because their records were so short that the brand-R operatives couldn't dig up any dirt on them.

Tells you all you need to know about party operatives. The concept of Representing The Voters is alien and incomprehensible to them, in the same way that a Religious Christmas Card is Martian to Barbara Walters. Party operatives are blackmailers, and the only thing they understand is extortion.
  ¶ 6:48 PM

  Obey the courts? Ha!
I haven't been paying much attention to firearms lately. This caught my attention. Dick Heller is the man who brought the lawsuit against the city gov't of DC to overturn its ban on all guns. The Supremes amazingly agreed with the Constitution last week, probably by accident, and ordered the ban rescinded.

So Dick Heller wanted to take advantage of his victory, because the whole point was to own a tool of self-defense. He was among the first in line to register his gun, now that his court case reached victory.

And the city gov't of DC REFUSED HIM AGAIN.

They will get away with it. Why? Because they are black. Simple as that.

Back in the '50s and '60s, any white mayor or governor who disobeyed an order to forcibly integrate his schools was slammed to the ground by the National Guard.

In this case the Feds won't even issue a piece of paper asking DC to explain its actions. I guaran-goddamn-tee it. The DC gov't is black, therefore anything they do is automatically permitted and protected.
  ¶ 6:31 AM

  When the lights go on again
This was a favorite song during WW2. Especially poignant in England, where the Krauts were bombing constantly. Blackout conditions, to make targets harder to locate at night, were universal in England and common in the US. Houses and schools had blackout shades, streetlights were dark, car headlights were partly covered. Here in Spokane when the grand Davenport Hotel was reincarnated a few years ago, the skylights were still painted black after 60 years.

The most common rendition of the song is by Dame Vera Lynn. I find her voice a bit too Wagnerian, so I was delighted to find a different and specifically American version of the song as an "Easter egg" bonus inside one of the Eyes Aloft episodes.

I've separated out the song, which includes a prayer, for convenient listening.

Listen.

"When the lights go on again" is dramatically appropriate for our current war. In this context it's a shout of defiance against the Mohammedan / Green alliance, which would have Europe and America surrender to both spiritual and electrical darkness.

NO! NO! NO!

Let there be light!

Christian light, nuclear-powered light, hydro-powered light!
  ¶ 1:52 PM

  Are they catching on?
It's good in a way to see the media and government starting to acknowledge that our economy is no longer "Row Buss", and even stating that we should be putting money into infrastructure.

Ahem. Some of us understood this point three years ago, and didn't need any special insider knowledge to reach the correct conclusions. And candidates like Huckabee and Hunter were trying to tell the truth during the primary campaign, only to be shouted down, hissed down, and literally deleted by the Republican machine and talking-point-heads.

Vindication is nice, but it would have been much nicer, and much better for the survival of the country, if the truth-telling candidates had been given a fair chance.
  ¶ 7:28 AM

  Polistra's dream, 3
Part 3 of Polistra's Dream.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

June 1939, Ponca City.


Fran: Come on!

Polistra: Just a minute ...

Fran: We need to get on the lake before the mosquitos take control.

Pol: Hold your horses; cartoon girls need more time for vanity.

Fran: Why cartoon girls especially?

Pol: Haven't you noticed that cartoon characters are ageless?

Fran: Yes... Orphan Annie has been 12 forever. By the way, is she still around in your time?

Pol: No, Annie died in 1968. She was made of honesty and common sense, and when those qualities began to wither in America, she couldn't hold. I miss her. But she stayed the same age to the end, like all of us 'toons. Thing is, it takes a lot of work to stay the same age.


Fran: Oh. I guess that makes sense.... somehow.

Pol: Okay, I'm ready now.


Pol: Pretty fancy apartment hotel, this Arcade.

Fran: Yes, and a pretty important place. Mrs. Annie Rhodes built the middle part of the hotel up in Newkirk around 1910, then took it apart and rebuilt it here when Ponca started to boom. She added the Spanish outer parts later.


Pol: Cute car!

Fran: I love it. Brand new, bought on the installment plan. Six hundred dollars, and worth every bit.

Pol: Six hundred a month?

Fran: No, you silly. Six hundred altogether. Is six hundred a month typical in your time?

Pol: Yes, but wages have inflated too, so it's not as bad as it sounds. What kind of car?

Fran: American Bantam. The company started out making a British Austin, and gradually Americanized it.

Pol: I've heard of the Bantam. It sort of turned into a little military car called the Jeep, that became famous in the war that's coming up shortly. The Jeep basically replaced the horse for the Army.


Pol: You were telling about Mrs Rhodes and the hotel. Is she still in charge?

Fran: Yes, but Lew Wentz owns the place now. He was just another one of those wildcatters who came to Ponca to drill. He showed up here, broke and full of vinegar. Mrs Rhodes decided he had something special, so she grubstaked him and boarded him until he struck a gusher.

Pol: So he bought her out and built himself a mansion?

Fran: Nope, that was E. W. Marland who built the mansions and the monuments to his mistress. He also came here poor and got started by Mrs Rhodes. Marland built Continental, then went broke after the J. P. Morgan interests bought him out. Mr Wentz owns the Arcade and still lives on the third floor. He's a quiet man, bachelor, doesn't like showing off. He puts his money into parks and recreation for Ponca's poor folks and kids. Gives the WPA a real run for its money, though it's building here too. I don't know if any other town of this size has so much beauty and so many services available for everyone.

Pol: Interesting comparison. Two rags-to-riches men who started in the same place at the same time, and chose to use their riches differently.

Fran: What do you have in 2008? Lots of Lew Wentzes or lots of Marlands?

Pol: All Marlands. All ostentation, constantly rubbing their unattainable riches in the face of the ordinary folks.

Fran: It was like that in '29. Then after the crash even the Marland types began to realize the danger of the "Let 'em eat cake" approach to life. I don't think they understand words like unbecoming or inappropriate but they do understand survival.

Continued in Part 4.
  ¶ 11:38 PM

  Impressive Schweitzer
Listening to the National Governors Conf on C-Span. Most of the govs, both R and D, seem to think that our main problem is the need for more Carbon Sequestration, and more federal money for education. The audience wildly applauded these bizarre claims each time.

These governors should be hauled off in shackles, tried and hanged for treason. Well, no trial is needed because they have already publicly confessed to serving the interests of Russia and China over the interests of America.

The single shining exception (among the speakers in this conference anyway) is Montana gov Brian Schweitzer. He's one of those new hawkish western Dems, as Polistra has discussed before.

Schweitzer gave a brief speech, saying (very approximately transcribed):

"As governor of Montana, I connect closely with Canada. Three Canadian provinces border on Montana, and I work with them and observe how they do things. In Canada the provinces have more autonomy than American states. They have the kind of sovereignty that our states formerly had, and because of their autonomy, they do things better than we do. They have better health care, better education, and better resource management. We desperately need to learn from this example. American governors need to say No and Hell No to federal requirements when they prevent us from doing our proper job."

The audience was silent.
  ¶ 9:13 AM

  The few
"These really are good times but only a few know it." --- Henry Ford, 1931

"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession. We've sort of become a nation of whiners." --- Phil Gramm, 2008

By 1931 the people had stopped listening to the few who "knew" that these were good times.

I don't think we've quite reached that point in '08, but we're pretty damn close.
  ¶ 7:48 PM

  Fiery Spokane
A surprise windstorm slapped eastern Washington yesterday. Started a number of fires across the state, including one in the eastern suburbs of Spokane. At this point it's mostly controlled, after destroying a square mile of land and a dozen expensive houses.

The fire started at 5 PM, exploded into danger at 5:30. By 9:30 PM Gov Gregoire had flown into town to coordinate the emergency effort with state agencies. As I've noted before, she is a solid executive and an absolute champion in emergencies.

In a sane country, a highly competent governor like Gregoire would be the automatic brand-D candidate for President. Since this is not a sane country, we're stuck with incompetent treasonous Senators on both sides of the "election".

KREM TV has excellent videos, including one eerie shot of broken natural-gas lines forming torches that mark the location of flattened houses.
  ¶ 9:31 AM

  Правительство обладает всеми детьми. 2
The state owns all children.

Especially egregious example in Coeur d'Alene right now. A mother was trying to keep her toddler from darting into traffic while watching a July 4th parade. She apparently swatted the kid once. Eight Nazi assholes immediately complained to the nearest stormtrooper, who immediately ticketed the mother for "injury to a child".

The police chief said "We had no choice. Just think of what could have happened if we hadn't intervened." Yes, a mother might have trained her child to stay out of traffic. A mother might have helped her child to grow up into a responsible adult. We can't let that happen, can we? Much better to let kids be squashed by cars than to let those quaint prehistoric Parent Units exert any authority.


Grrrrrrrrrrr.

Story here.
  ¶ 7:34 AM

  YIMBY
More Oklahoma-related rambling....

Google Street View is a fun toy ... though it's rather spotty, it happens to cover several of the cities where I've lived.




I was surprised to find this house on SE 15th in OKC still looking good. I rented this house in 1972, during my brief and dismal hippie-era marriage.

Note the uniquely Oklahoman decoration in the back yard! It was noisy but somehow reassuring, because it meant the property was important to the landlord.

It was an excellent house: modern, two bedrooms, stone siding, attached garage, partial basement. A park across the street, groceries and other stores in easy walking distance. At that time I was earning about $3000 a year, and I could rent this nice house, maintain a car, and support a wife and baby. No room for major extras, but we were able to eat in restaurants occasionally and travel occasionally.

Using the official inflation figures, $3000 would multiply to about $25000 in today's dollars. Would $25K support a similar lifestyle now?

Not a chance.
  ¶ 1:52 PM

  Eyes Aloft
Polistra has often bemoaned Sultan Bush's peculiar refusal to involve citizens in the war effort, and described how FDR did it.

The Ground Observer Corps, also called the Air Warning Service, kept 150,000 unpaid volunteers busy watching for Jap planes near the coasts.

A new addition to the Old-time Radio section at Archive.org is a full season of Eyes Aloft, produced in Hollywood for the benefit of the Ground Observer Corps in the West. The programs were high quality mixtures of drama, comedy, and information, clearly meant to recruit more volunteers for GOC and to uphold the morale and training of existing volunteers.

But wait, you say ... we don't need all those live eyes now, because we have radar and other electronic warning systems.

Yes, and those systems failed completely on 9/11. NORAD did nothing, FAA did less than nothing. If we had a well-organized set of eyes aimed at mosques and at Mohammedans, we might be able to prevent the next attack.

Of course there's no real point in proposing any of this. Sultan Bush is not on our side.
  ¶ 7:06 AM

  Move over, Frank
Look at this. And track forward to look at the interior as well.

I'm ashamed to confess that I lived in Oklahoma for many years, in OKC for a year, and never heard of this chapel, nor heard of its architect, Duane Conner. The photographer of this set is Conner's granddaughter, presenting a gift to future generations by documenting his work.

Note that the fantastic windows were designed by returning WW2 vets attending Central State University on the GI bill!
  ¶ 9:01 PM

  Amazing fact
While perusing the web for old Oklahoma pictures to use in the next installment of Polistra's Dream, I bumped into Urban Tulsa, a wonderful weekly online paper. It's written from a viewpoint somewhere between New Urbanist and Crunchy Con, if I understand those labels correctly. Editor Michael Bates is trying to steer Tulsa away from cold atomized urbanity and back toward the front-porch comfort of the '30s.

The paper features a variety of articles beyond narrowly Tulsan subjects. One in particular caught my eye. Written by David Deming, a geophysicist at OU, it's a concise attack on the Global Warming hoax. Most of the info is familiar, but this one fact wasn't familiar to me:

Immobilized by a dysfunctional ideology, we sit on vast, undeveloped petroleum resources. In the western U.S. alone, there are three trillion barrels of petroleum in oil shale. At current consumption rates, this is enough oil to provide 100 percent of our domestic oil needs for 300 years. The technology exists to bring this fuel to market for $30 a barrel in an environmentally benign manner.

Let's say it again, slowly.

100 percent of our domestic oil needs for 300 years.

The technology exists to bring this oil to market for $30 a barrel.
  ¶ 7:28 PM

  Starting to appreciate Patty Murray!
Never thought I'd say that.

The national Republicans and their talking-pointheads, including Rush, are still missing a tremendous change in the opposite party. The change may be primarily centered here in the West, not easily visible in New York or Florida. Nonetheless, it's dramatic. On this side of the country, all the new Dems in Congress are hawkish and pro-American. Even the older ones, previously 100% leftish and anti-American, are picking up the new way of thinking.

I discussed the change in more detail here.

Latest example: the "new GI Bill", co-sponsored and heavily pushed by Patty Murray, formerly Osama's best girlfriend. This bill proposes to give returning vets a solid set of benefits, a concrete reward for their service. While Republicans continually repeat "Thank you for your service", the Dems are offering to provide real recompense, just as we gave WW2 vets a real recompense.

People notice these things. When one party works actively and effectively to support American defense contractors and American veterans, while the other party works actively and effectively to donate America to the enemy, people notice. People don't especially care if the parties have traded places (which they certainly have!) ... and people don't care if this change is called a "flip-flop". People only notice which party is serving American interests RIGHT NOW.

At this moment the Dems are working hardest to serve American interests, so at this moment the Dems actually deserve our support.
  ¶ 10:35 AM

  Obama's birth
Picked up on this a bit late, because I've been working on graphics stuff. Looks like a repetition of the Dan Rather National Guard story, where bloggers with expert knowledge spot a forgery.

What puzzles me: The date or place of birth wouldn't have been a reason to discard or forge a certificate. I seriously doubt that Barack's mother had a prophetic vision of her baby's destiny as President, and even if she did, the whole "natural-born" thing is fairly arcane. Most people wouldn't list it among the top ten criteria for a President.

Given that the mother and grandparents were hard-line Soviet supporters, which I've discussed before, it seems more likely that the hapless Kenyan student Barack Sr was simply a convenient placeholder. I'd guess that the real father was a prominent black Communist of less exotic origin, who had a reputation to maintain. In those days, even among Bolsheviks, illegitimacy was a serious stain.

Just for a random example, Barack Jr looks a lot like Julian Bond.
  ¶ 11:28 AM

  Definitions
The textbook definition of socialism is "Ownership of the means of production by government."

A poor definition, because it doesn't strike the major distinction between socialist and capitalist systems, and doesn't evoke the main problem with socialist systems. The main problem: they treat all humans as identical machines. Socialist systems can do this quite easily without claiming ownership of industry.

Nevertheless, people still use such definitions.

All right, so how would we define the American system under Sultan Bush?

"Ownership of the means of production by governments of enemy nations that attacked us."

Does that count as socialism?

No, it counts as abject defeat and surrender.

Arabia started this war. We have never lifted a finger against Arabia; instead we are supinely allowing Arabia to buy our companies, highways, and properties. China has been running a warlike economic campaign against us for 20 years. We have done nothing to fight back; instead we are supinely allowing China to buy our defense contractors, ports, and highways.

Is there a similar example in history? Sure. Eastern Europe under Soviet occupation.
  ¶ 7:33 AM

  Polistra's dream, 2
Continued from Part 1.

June 1939, Ponca City.



Fran: Goat glands!

Pol: Aaah, you mean this isn't bacon?

Fran: No, no, no, goat glands is what I was trying to think of. Your Global Warming cult reminds me of Doctor Brinkley's Goat Glands.

Pol: Doctor Brinkley?

Fran: John R. Brinkley. He's a medical quack, a classic snake-oil seller with a modern twist. He started out in Milford, not far from your home in Manhattan. His big thing is transplanting the, ah, male pieces from goats into the, um, relevant area of men. He makes them think that their ... strength ... will be greatly improved, because I suppose goats represent Natural Virility or something.

Pol: Okay, but how does...

Fran: Brinkley's idea is that you can improve yourself by using the virtues of the lower animals and nature. Mere human virtues aren't enough. Goats are better.

Pol: Aha! Now I see.

Fran: Brinkley built one of the first full-fledged radio stations to advertise his various ... therapies. In an odd way he probably did more for radio than lots of legitimate folks, because he needed to fill time between his sales talks, and he needed lots of power. So he added music and other chat programs, and his engineers developed better transmitters and antennas. He also managed to bribe various congressmen and regulators, or maybe his audience was so large and enthusiastic that the regulators couldn't bring themselves to oppose it. Finally the Radio Commission found its own, um, glands and forced him to move the transmitter over into Mexico where he could run as much power as he wanted. He's still going strong in Del Rio or Juarez or one of those places.

Pol: Yes, but there's still a big difference. Here in '39 the majority of people understand that Brinkley is a fraud. You said the Radio Commission did finally enforce the law against him. Nobody is trying to declare anti-Brinkley people insane. But in 2008 the Global Warming fraud has taken control of nearly everything. Scientists, churches, governments, schools, all the radio and television networks. The anti-fraud forces have a voice, and a fair amount of money on their side, but they are the independent operators, the disreputable ones who are in danger of being shut down at any moment.



Fran: Oh, that's just sad. If ignorance is going to win in the end ... why do I bother writing?

Continued in Part 3 here.

  ¶ 8:56 AM

  Polistra's dream, 1
June 2008, at the Mill.

Polistra was heartbroken to see her home town of Manhattan smashed by a tornado. She is certain that nothing will improve. All factions of the American power structure are frozen in absolute gibbering insanity, utterly incapable of taking the most obvious steps in any positive direction. We have surrendered to Sheikh Osama, surrendered to Reckless Desire and Ruthless Greed, surrendered to every imaginable variety of falsehood and fraud, to every false god known to history, and to some never before imagined.


She prays for relief.


Huh?

= = = = =


June 1939, Ponca City, the Arcade Hotel.



Fran is a free-lance magazine writer. Tonight she's working on a draft while half-listening to Information Please.



What's this? Radio overheating? Can't be. It's a nearly new Philco.



Huh?



Howdy. You're surprised, aren't you? This is going to take some explaining...

And Polistra proceeds to explain the situation ... that she's a cartoon character from 2008 who dreamed her way back to 1939. Since Fran is a writer, she has sufficient imagination to encompass the idea.




Fran asks Polistra the inevitable questions.

Fran: Well, what great advances has America made since '39? Cured cancer?

Pol: No. We have lots of fancy machines and drugs, but except for childhood leukemia, which we can definitely cure, we haven't improved the survival rate in general. You could even say that the fancy machines make things worse, because people know about the cancer earlier.

Fran: That's dismal. Well, cured infantile paralysis?

Pol: Yes, in 1954.

Fran: Cured the common cold?

Pol: No.

Fran: Have you controlled weather? Built domed cities?

Pol: No. In fact we have decided to make no progress in that area. We haven't gone beyond cloud-seeding, and even though we know it works, we won't allow ourselves to do it.

Fran: Eradicated poverty?

Pol: No. The New Deal started a long-running escape from poverty, especially among Southern sharecroppers of both colors. Our entry into the war in '41, which you can probably foresee without my help, expanded that change dramatically. The poor folks moved into industrial jobs, and incomes rose steadily from '39 until 1970. Lots of other things were also improving during those years: science, education, invention. It all came to a screeching halt around 1970. What happened at that point was basically a bloodless takeover by a form of Communism, which we aren't allowed to discuss openly. It's complicated and crazy, and I doubt that I can explain it to you without driving you crazy too.

Fran: Murrr-derrrr! Well, how about fast trains? Super streetcars?

Pol: No. American trains are much slower, less efficient and less luxurious in 2008. They still carry freight well enough, but passenger trains are dilapidated junk, pretty much restricted to serving a few big cities badly. Most people travel long distances by airplane, and that system is starting to fall apart too. Streetcars are mostly gone, though again a few big cities still have good bus and subway systems. In most cities, you're out of luck if you can't drive or can't afford a car. Cars have improved a lot, for what it's worth: they're safer, more efficient, more comfortable. Most of them are made in Japan now, and General Motors is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Fran: Not to interrupt, but you look like you could use a smoke.

Pol: Yes, and thanks for your insight. Smoking is on the way out in '08, but it isn't quite illegal yet.




Fran: Well, how about colonies on Mars?

Pol: Ha. We flew to the Moon in 1969, but then the Communist ideology took over and we haven't advanced the cause since.

Fran: Are you running the country on hydropower?

Pol: No. We're still using the dams the WPA built, which I'm grateful for, even if nobody else is ... plus a handful built later in the 1950s. Worst of all, we are actually getting rid of some dams to satisfy the utterly insane theory that's at the heart of this crazy Communism.

Fran: Getting rid of dams? Why in the everloving name of God would you want to waste all that work and deprive the country of free energy??? Well, I don't mean you, because you obviously know it's wrong, but the people in your time?

Pol: Oh lord, you're not going to believe this. You've somehow understood my time-traveling, but you won't be able to absorb this.

Fran: Try me.

Pol: They want to eliminate the dams because they think the fish are more important than the people.

Fran: That's crazy all right.

Pol: It's a primitive religion, something like the old Incas or Mayas, whatever those South American savages were called. This religion considers the earth to be a goddess, and ultimately wants to sacrifice all people to the goddess. Most of our politicians and most of our churches and educators have signed on to the belief, and they treat anyone who disbelieves as crazy.

Fran: Weirder and weirder. Does this savage cult have churches?

Pol: Doesn't need any. All the main churches preach it, though I'm pretty sure the regular believers don't know where it's taking them.

= = = =

Continued here..........
  ¶ 7:41 AM

  Utterly missed the point
This somehow marks the final bottoming-out of our bizarrely trivial political discussion. After Rush had spent most of his show repeating over and over and over and over again that Obama is diabolical, even risking a mutiny by Snerdley who clearly didn't approve of the word-game, he took a call from an older black woman (Miriam?) who was trying to steer him back toward substantial subjects. The woman complained that Rush (and the other side as well) are spending all their time on trivial junk like asking X to condemn statement Y by spokesman Z. She said that Americans are "hurting", and we need to be asking the candidates what they will do as President instead of quibbling about who failed to condemn the lack of condemnation of the failure to say "How dare you".

Rush then dismissed Miriam as "speaking female talk".

No. Exactly not. Diametrically not.

In fact Rush is doing the female thing: endless quoting of quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes of quotes, endless complaints about the tone of statements and complaints about the tone of other complaints about the tone of statements.

Miriam was attempting to bring the discussion back into male territory: WHAT WILL THE DAMNED CANDIDATES DO?
  ¶ 11:29 AM

  Every now and then, Justice.


Polistra is enjoying the exquisitely deserved downfall of a master criminal and thief.

Richard "Dickie" Scruggs, who became one of the wealthiest civil lawsuit attorneys in the country by taking on tobacco, asbestos and insurance companies, was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for conspiring to bribe a judge.

Scruggs was indicted in November along with his son and a law partner after an associate wore a wire for the FBI and secretly recorded conversations about the bribe plan. Prosecutors said he wanted a favorable ruling in a dispute over $26.5 million in legal fees from a mass settlement of Hurricane Katrina insurance cases.

Prosecutors are looking into another alleged bribery conspiracy in which Scruggs is accused of trying to influence a different judge in a dispute over legal fees from asbestos cases. Scruggs' former defense attorney has pleaded guilty in that case and is cooperating with investigators.

Scruggs gained fame in the 1990s by using a corporate insider against tobacco companies in lawsuits that resulted in a $206 billion settlement.

Scruggs' former defense attorney, Joey Langston of Booneville, has pleaded guilty to trying to influence Hinds County Judge Bobby DeLaughter in the asbestos fee case by promising that Scruggs could help DeLaughter get appointed to the federal bench with the help of U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, Scruggs' brother-in-law.

The mastermind of the biggest single theft in history is finally behind bars!

= = = = =

Afterthought: I haven't heard any brand-D politicians crowing about the Trent Lott connection, which by all rights should be prime material for their "culture of corruption" line. Wonder why? Oh, yes, I see... anti-tobacco lawyers can never be described as corrupt because they are Heroes of the Left, Celebrated in Song and Story and On The Silver Screen. In fact, several of the Silver Screen people involved with the movie "The Insider", a Stalinist propaganda pic that lionizes Scruggs, testified in his favor at this trial. Bravo to the judge in this case for ignoring their fame and fortune.

= = = = =

And another piece of justice, though less complete: after 7 years of false accusation which never quite reached the point of charges and trial, Stephen Hatfill finally got a monetary recompense. Unfortunately, Sultan Bush's regime didn't admit any wrongdoing, and didn't state explicitly that Hatfill is off the hook. Kafka is still alive and well.

For me, this anthrax business was the first hint that the Bush regime was not truly fighting a war. There was definite evidence that Atta and his cadre had been experimenting with anthrax; the accompanying letters were unquestionably written by a foreign hand; there was no evidence at all connecting Hatfill to the letters. Despite all that, the Bush regime landed on Hatfill and stayed on him for several years, based apparently on a highly dubious accusation from a female former colleague. I had to conclude that the Bush regime was more interested in protecting Atta [or perhaps protecting a double agent connected to Atta, or covering up a blown sting] than in making war against the ideology and nations who sent Atta.
  ¶ 7:32 PM

  Bravo Rice!
Credit where credit is due. Today's announcement of "nuclear transparency" from North Korea is a decisive landmark in the only positive piece of the Bush legacy.

I'm not particularly excited by the dismantling of the nuclear reactor; could well be a Potemkin display. Nevertheless, it marks another public step toward returning North Korea to the civilized world, and a public step away from belligerency. It will be much harder for Dear Leader Kim to backslide now.

It's frustrating to see our commentators responding in lockstep form to this event based solely on team loyalty and blind ideology. This success proves nothing about Bush's childlike faith in the power of democracy to cure all ills; it certainly doesn't prove that Iraq will eventually go the same way.

It does prove that people who are capable of mastering civilization will do so when given the chance, and it proves that Rice's campaign of carrots and sticks, applied in concert with Japan, South Korea and China, is working.

Plain fact: Koreans and Arabs are different.

We have fifty years of dramatic empirical proof that Koreans love capitalism and democracy. South Korea does a better job of both than we do.

We also have 1000 years of proof that Arabs are totally immune to the charms of both capitalism and democracy. The Bush method, applied to Arabs, will achieve nothing but American bankruptcy.

Unfortunately, because we have been corrupted by fifty years of Leninism, we are not allowed to discuss this obvious empirical difference openly, and we are not allowed to draw the obvious conclusion, because the only way to reach this conclusion requires the use of ethnic and racial categories.
  ¶ 1:52 PM

  Death of theories?
From Wired Mag, pointed via Duckwall...

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

...

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required.

= = = = =

Point of the article: we don't need hypotheses any more. We don't need to operate on the basis of judgment and ever-improving conclusions. We can just boil down the data to a conclusion if we have enough data and a good stove.

Google's method certainly works for advertising, where your goal is simply to reach the maximum number of eyeballs. This is basically the way ants operate. Send out millions of feelers, follow the path where more of the returning feelers bear food in their jaws. Google sends out ads to a variety of sites, counts the ads that return with clicks in their jaws, follows the smell toward sites with similar wording. Because placing each ad is nearly costless, the ant-like process is harmless. Nobody dies when an ad goes unread.

= = = = =

I'm torn between two responses.

On one side, the prevailing sin of this era is our tendency to follow fantastically stupid and genocidal theories like Global Warming to their inevitable conclusions without even looking at the damned data. And the effects of such stupidity are far from costless. Millions of actual human beings are dying from the effects of Green theories: prohibition of DDT, breaching dams, fear of genetically-modified crops, switching crops from food to ethanol, keeping malarial wetlands in place, doubling the cost of energy, etc.

If blind mechanical analysis of the actual data could kill bad theories and eliminate reliance on purely imaginary models and simulations, it would be a godsend.

On the other side, total reliance on numerical analysis kills the most important basis of Western civilization: each human being is tremendously valuable and deserving of dignity, unless and until a human proves by his actions that he is unstoppably destructive.

Modern totalitarians from Hitler to Mao have used numbers and science quite competently to destroy the basis of civilization, to break the undefinable bonds of family and neighborhood.

Numbers don't care how they're used. If the goal is to maximize a politician's power, blind numerical democracy will get you there. Place enough news stories and polls in the media to drive the voters toward the correct choice, then wait for the ballots to return with power in their jaws. Karl Rove and Dick Morris have perfected the method.

However! Good empirical thinking requires more than theories, more than raw data. It requires judgment and discrimination, and it requires freedom to use and discuss your judgment and discrimination. You have to ask yourself and ask others whether a proposed action will advance the cause of civilization, and you must be able to state the goals and qualities of civilization clearly and openly. Our Communist masters have made this method suspicious in some areas of life and absolutely illegal in other areas.

So we are pinned between the ant-like juggernaut of lethal a-priori theories that cannot be questioned or invalidated by mere numbers, and the ant-like Google tricks of the electoral engineers. The middle course, the human course of examined judgment is gone, probably irretrievable.
  ¶ 7:48 AM

  Extremely important point
From the Euro writer Fjordman:

Is capitalism always a force for freedom? It is easy for “conservatives” to think so, but is it always true?

...

I am particularly concerned over the recent attempts by various Western corporations to appease Islamic demands for sharia censorship. Both regarding the Danish cartoons and the Wilders movie in Holland, business interests have been among the most prominent in denouncing these attempts to defend Western freedoms because they care only about their market shares and not about the wider issues.

When we also know that many companies support mass immigration because they want easy access to cheap labor, including Muslim immigration, this means that they contribute to Islamization, at home and abroad. Can we then say that capitalism is always a force for freedom? I think not. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”

In America the immigration problem, though equally symptomatic of feral capitalism, doesn't involve Arabs or Mohammedans to any great extent.

Our problem is more direct: We have made Arabia so rich that Arabia is quickly buying us out. Worst of all, Arabia is buying influence in universities and buying partial control of media. Our "conservative" media and commentators follow Sultan Bush down the line. They never criticize Arabia, never connect the perfectly obvious dots between the governments on the Arabian peninsula and the "tiny minority of extremist folks" who started this war. We are stuck with a completely misdirected war, a never-ending expenditure of money and lives toward a completely pointless and completely futile goal.

It's hard to draw a WW2 equivalent, because stupidity and corruption, though obviously part of the permanent human condition, were not in total control of our government back then. I'll try anyway: Imagine millions of American soldiers dying in Ethiopia to remove it from Italian control and turn it toward democracy, while Japan bombs and marches through California, Oregon and Washington unopposed.
  ¶ 9:23 AM

  Unfathomable stupidity
At the same time when the brand-R parrots are squawking loudly about brand-D threats to nationalize the oil industry, a major brand-R leader, probable VP choice for McCain, has just nationalized the sugar industry.

Governor Crist [of Florida] announced a $1.75 billion deal to buy the U.S. Sugar Corporation, including 187,000 acres of farmland that once sat in the northern Everglades. If the deal goes through, it will extinguish a powerful 77-year-old company with 1,700 employees and deep roots in South Florida's coal-black organic soil. ...

Environmentalists hope that eventually, the area will become storage reservoirs, treatment marshes and perhaps even a flowway reconnecting the lake to the Glades. This could help recreate the original north-to-south movement of the "River of Grass", and eliminate damaging pulses of excess water into coastal estuaries. That would be good news for panthers and gators, dolphins and herons, ghost orchids and royal palms.

Yessir, just what we need at this point. Save the ghost orchid, kill the people. Lose one more industry to foreigners, especially a crop that could be used for biofuel. Take a tremendous amount of land into government hands where it will be mishandled. Guaranteed result: More wildfires, worse flooding, less tax revenue for Florida, more emergency expenses for Florida, shortages in other sugar-producing crops, higher prices for everything.

Unfathomable. Unspeakable. Purely Communist by the strictest definition.

Of course, Manchurian Candidate McCain will love it. Fits his platform perfectly. Sell the country to China and Cuba. Eliminate production, eliminate business, eliminate resources. Turn us into a third-world dependency. That's MC McCain for you.
  ¶ 9:05 AM

  McCain's battery prize
The brand-R talking pointheads are knocking Manchurian Candidate McCain's idea of a prize for the best development of a long-running battery for electric cars. They are saying - correctly - that incoming money isn't really the missing element. Also correctly, that such a battery would be unquestionably profitable without a prize. But MC McCain and his critics are all missing the main obstacle to invention: litigation.

A truly meaningful and helpful offer would be the following: We will set up a special panel, outside the patent system, to check out inventions. You submit your invention, with proper proof that it works, and we will take the best three submissions through the patent process without cost, with full confidentiality, and with permanent immunity from lawsuits by Patent Trolls. This setup would genuinely level the playing field.
  ¶ 3:42 PM

  Madame Polisztra saw it coming.......
I wrote on June 3:

Team-based thinking leads to a certain understandable blindness, but it rarely goes this far. Dennis Miller was discussing style vs substance this morning, and one caller said:

"Hey, why don't the Republicans get better talking points? Why don't they say, for instance, You want higher gas prices, vote Democrat. You want lower gas prices, vote Republican."

Um, perhaps they don't say that because everyone in the country knows that the wild rise in gas prices has occurred under Republicans. Even brand-R politicians aren't quite stupid enough to try a slogan that runs so obviously against experience ... No, I take it back. They are stupid enough. I fully expect to see this slogan in tomorrow's talking-point memo now that it's been suggested.

Well, it took 20 days instead of 2 days, but it happened. This morning Rush is parroting over and over again "You want high gas prices? Vote for Obama."

This will work on the brand-R team members, but the team members don't need a slogan anyway.
  ¶ 11:29 AM

  An interesting 'debate'


Here is a highly revealing discussion on the subject of electing judges. The moderator managed to avoid talking points and bring out an important opposition between two types of politics.

On the left is William Baker, a retired state judge who is pushing some kind of weird Ethics Commission. In the middle is Erin Shannon, an attractive and highly articulate spokesman for a trade group representing builders. On the right is the moderator John Postman, a columnist at the Seattle Times, I think.

Baker advanced the delusional civics-class notion that judges are non-political and perfectly impartial technicians who shouldn't be elected, or if we must have the "necessary sin" of election, their election should somehow happen without campaigning. He couldn't explain how to run an election without campaigning, but he knew that was the only ethical way to proceed.

Erin Shannon knocked down every one of his arguments with clear and comprehensible facts. She showed repeatedly how her trade group had campaigned for judges who support the state constitution and opposed judges who oppose the state constitution, and told the story of other states that had eliminated election only to find that appointed judges were vastly more corrupt.

Her most important point: Aside from corruption, appointed judges lose track of the real-world consequences of their decisions. They are free to follow various pointillist theories and abstractions, free to float away from the plain purpose of constitutions and laws. Elected judges must face the people who are affected or killed by bad theories. The people don't understand the theories, but they do understand the difference between good and evil, the difference between normal people and criminals.

Baker finally realized that he was defeated and began referring to Shannon in a passive impersonal way, looking only at the moderator, treating Shannon as a document in a filing cabinet which must be carefully censored for public consumption. She continued to speak to him person-to-person, and he became more and more uncomfortable.

It's the first time I've seen a pro-constitution debater defeat a Communist so decisively and plainly. National pro-constitution groups would do well to hire Shannon for TV appearances.

Labels: Ethics

  ¶ 7:05 AM

  American?
Back in 1970 or so, I read a probably apocryphal story about British stoicism. A London reporter pursuing a crime story happened to drive through a small town and found it flooded to a depth of two or three feet. He noticed the people were going about their business in an adapted "normal" way, living on the second floor of their houses, wearing boots, and even pushing baby strollers along the top of retaining walls to keep them dry. Since his newspaper hadn't published or even heard anything about this flood, he asked the locals when and how it had happened. Turns out a dam had burst a month before, but nobody had reported it to newspapers or to authorities. Why not? The locals simply assumed the government had its reasons for allowing the flood, and would fix the problem when it was appropriate.

When I first read this story, I marveled at the fatalism. No American would simply assume that Nature was going to have her way, no American would simply assume that the government would get around to fixing something in its own sweet time.

That was before the environmental religion, before the complete takeover by Communists, and before the ascension of George W. Gore. Now, of course, Nature rules supreme. We are not allowed to build dams, not allowed to seed clouds, not allowed to use our own goddamn resources. We are supposed to take inflation and shortages and permanent loss of industry as IRREVERSIBLE Acts of God. We must tolerate and pay for the "religious" claptrap of the Mohammedan savages who are attacking us, and we must allow our government to run Inquisitions and military raids against Christians.

Now the British fatalism doesn't seem strange at all.
  ¶ 7:35 AM

  About damn time.
Polistra has been hammering for a year on the plain fact that Sultan Bush could do something about oil drilling on his own, by executive order, instead of playing endless idiotic word games with Congress.

Glenn Beck is finally pushing the point, very effectively.

About damn time.
  ¶ 3:24 PM

  A perfect read
Christopher Roach at the Taki's Magazine blog has put together a concise statement of every point Polistra has been trying to make here over the last two years. Roach starts from the same premise: As a nation, America's job is to defend Western Civilization and America's own people. Reasoning purely from this goal, without contamination by any ideology, Roach concludes that we should skip morality, skip the Golden Rule, avoid Wilsonian notions, fight hard and fast when necessary, fight covertly and nastily when necessary.

The comments responding to Roach are equally interesting in a dismal way.... a few show evidence of understanding the point, but most are predictable "recorded messages" from various ideologies.
  ¶ 2:13 PM

  Basic error
As we discuss oil prices, speculators, and regulation of trading, we're missing one basic and broad point.

Conservatives and especially Libertarians suffer from a conflation of "the President" and "the Executive branch". I heard this in its purest form in the recent Libertarian Party convention, where one nominee said he would do as little as possible when elected.

This conflation leads directly to tyranny.

The problem starts with human nature. Why do people seek jobs as bureaucrats? Because they enjoy wielding power. They are addicted to the joy of watching others march to their orders, and addicted to the even greater joy of exempting Favored Ones from the same orders.

When the President "does as little as possible", when he pays little attention to the bureaucrats, this doesn't leave more room for the States and People to exercise their natural rights, as the Conservative stupidly believes. It only leaves more room for the Executive Branch to run amok. The bureaucrat's natural addiction to power is then free to operate without limitation or punishment. Agencies will come down hard on people or companies who displease them for whatever reason, and will grant special privileges to the highest bidder.

We saw this dramatically under Bush Senior, when BATF went completely rogue, starting the Randy Weaver massacre and the Waco massacre. We're seeing it again under Bush Junior. Katrina was the perfect example. FEMA was completely rogue, taking none of the actions it was supposed to take, and preventing effective organizations from taking the proper actions to help New Orleans.

Small government is not necessarily a good thing, and a small president on top of a big government is a terrible thing.

Hillary should have hammered on this point loudly and frequently, but for some unknown reason she didn't. Under Bill, most bureaucrats were held in check, held accountable, encouraged to do their proper job in order to make the government look good. The rogue BATF officials were fired, and FEMA worked reasonably well.
  ¶ 11:19 AM

  More warmth!


Today, June 10, the day with the earliest sunrise of the year, Spokane is getting heavy snow. Temp is 37 degrees.

This may turn out to be a "year without a summer" in this part of the country.

Yessir, just like Manchurian Candidate McCain tells us, global warming is fully underway, and we need to bring our already suffering economy to a screeching halt to prevent further burning. Or rather, we need to bring our economy to a halt so George Soros and his fellow Satanic speculators can make even more money money money money money money money money money money money money money money by shorting the dollar.

= = = = =

Local weathercasters are calling this month "Juneuary", a nice coinage. They're also saying today's temp is a record low for the date, beating out the previous low in 1973.

= = = = =

Hmm. 1973. Reminds me of an entry from last year:

= = = = =

A passage from the WPA Guide to Kansas, written in 1938 as the Dust Bowl was still going strong.

Recent years of almost unprecedented drought have led to the often expressed belief that the climate of Kansas is changing. Geologists and meteorologists, however, point out that weather runs in cycles, the most pronounced being about a third of a century in length. Conditions during a cycle are easily mistaken by laymen for permanent changes. Despite year by year fluctuations in temperature and precipitation, recorded evidence shows that general climatic conditions remain unchanged.

The scientists of 1938 had knowledge, logic and common sense. They understood the principle of the wheel or the wave: what goes around comes around. Today's "scientists" have lost that basic understanding. Like a newborn babe, they see something going up and they assume it's going up forever.

And the third of a century has continued with fair precision. 1938 was a year of floods and droughts, including a terrible flood in Los Angeles and a hurricane that flattened Providence, RI with a HUNDRED-FOOT-TALL surge. Add 35 and you get 1973, another year of floods, supercells and tornados. Add 34 to that, and you get 2007.

Well, what do you know. Those old benighted scientists just might be right. Things do run in cycles. Amazing.

Satire aside, I'm desperately frightened to see our "keepers of knowledge" dragging us down into a Dark Age. It took several centuries for the learning of Greece and Rome to fade into raw superstition; our Communist masters have accomplished the same level of destruction in a few decades.
  ¶ 7:13 AM

  Couple of good reads
Linking, mainly for my own future reference, a couple of wonderful articles that make the same point.

Roger Scruton writes about the connection between modernist 'Bauhaus' architecture and Communism, and the failure of both... contrasted with plain old vernacular villages, which have always succeeded despite elite hatred. Provides a partial answer to a question that Polistra found puzzling.

Krier has pursued a career in architecture, but he is also a philosopher and social thinker who believes that architectural modernism is not just ugly but also based in profound mistakes about the nature of human society. As he put it in a recent interview: “Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of a monumental scale. Architectural and urbanist modernism belong—like communism—to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. . . . Modernism’s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e., unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions.”

= = = = =

And David Warren writes about the abstract 'Bauhaus' mind of the leftist, which blindly follows authorities and theories untethered to common sense. Echoes and expands on several of Polistra's previous thoughts.

To put this plainly: as the evidence for continuous “man-made” global warming disappears, belief subsides among Republicans. But among Democrats it increases, radically. Democrats respond better to words, and the repetition of them. For the one thing that has increased hugely, in the last decade, is the propaganda for “global warming.”

I have myself observed this distinction between the Right and Left sides of mainstream electorates in most other Western countries: the Right tends to believe in facts, the Left to believe in “theories”; and as we advance through post-modern irrationalism, those theories become battier and battier.

...

This has become a signal threat to democracy. For where we once had broad agreement on facts, and relatively mild disagreements on what should be done about them, we now have one-half of the electorate drifting off into Cloud Cuckooland.

  ¶ 2:43 PM

  McCorruption on parade
The Wash state Republican convention was here in Spokane last week. Manchurian Candidate McCain's forces ruled with an iron hand, using all sorts of parliamentary tricks to ruthlessly hammer down any conservative or nationalist ideas that dared to pop up.

For full online coverage go to TVW, where you'll see a box containing the various segments. If you're reading this later after the box goes away, here are the five segments.

It was clear that a majority of the county delegates were strongly unhappy with Manchurian Candidate McCain. There was a constant near-mutinous tone of protest, and even a walkout at one point, which didn't seem to bother the General Secretary of the state Party; he simply forged ahead.

This is, of course, the same state party that stopped counting caucus votes when it looked like the votes might favor Huckabee. Not that counting them would have mattered in the long run, since we now know that Huckabee wasn't really a candidate but only a sort of gadget or contraption designed by Manchurian Candidate McCain to eliminate Romney from the race.

Lenin owns us all.
  ¶ 8:15 AM

  No more termites.
The Orkin man came this morning. With remarkable efficiency and speed, he cleared out a foot of open space next to the house and soaked it with poison, then soaked the ground under the house. Expensive, but the results are guaranteed.

One less thing to worry about. The existing damage is done, but there won't be any more damage from now on.
  ¶ 7:33 PM

  Haq Attaq mistrial
Naveed Haq, the enemy soldier who shot him up some Jews in Seattle a couple of years ago, was tried under ordinary criminal rules. The jury deadlocked on the question of insanity, and the trial ended up inconclusive.

This doesn't mean that Enemy Soldier Haq will go free; the defense already pled or stipulated that he did in fact shoot him up some Jews.

Still, as I said before, and as I shouldn't have even needed to say in a sane country, Haq IS AN ENEMY SOLDIER AND SHOULD HAVE BEEN TREATED AS SUCH. Enemy soldiers don't get to tie up juries for weeks in pointless psychiatric testimony. Judged by peacetime standards, the mindset of any enthusiastic soldier would count as insane: following orders, and in the absence of orders, following his beliefs and training, with the goal of killing as many people as possible. That's exactly what Haq was doing. The absence of an immediate commander didn't prevent us from executing Kraut and Jap spies in WW2, and the absence of a commander shouldn't prevent us from executing Mohammedan agents like Haq.

Story here.

= = = = =

Afterthought: Has anyone considered the "Golden Rule" aspects of this? If we are treating enemy soldiers as insane, couldn't some hostile country like Germany decide to treat American soldiers as insane, and lock them up in a concentration camp "for their own protection?" Not that I buy the Golden Rule approach to war and foreign policy, but Comrade McCain and Comrade Obama do.

Another: I wonder if the underlying problem here is the intentional misunderstanding of Mohammed, as propagated by enemy agencies like CAIR and Sultan Bush.

Within the tenets of Christ, a believer who says that God tells him to kill Jews, or that the Bible tells him to kill Jews, is actually insane because the New Testament says the opposite. Jesus and his apostles consistently advise believers to convert Jews and other infidels: convert by persuasion, gentleness, example, and love. You can't possibly use any part of the New Testament as advice to kill infidels. If you do, you're certainly not a Christian and can be validly considered insane.

Within the tenets of Mohammed, a believer who says that Allah tells him to kill infidels and Jews is not insane because that's exactly what the Koran advises.

Because Sultan Bush has cleverly rigged this war to avoid religious questions, and because Sultan Bush has intentionally told us lies about the beliefs and desires of serious Mohammedans, this jury had no real choice. Under these false pretenses, the question of insanity was worth considering.
  ¶ 6:59 AM

  Well, poop
Finally called the Orkin man, and he took a close look at the ant situation. Turns out the ants are termites.

I wish I had figured this out earlier. There are plenty of information pages about ants and termites online, and one look at the pages could have told me instantly that these critters are termites.

When I first moved here, people told me that termites were nearly nonexistent in this part of the country. This false notion led me to ignore the possibility. They looked like ants, so I assumed they were ants.
  ¶ 5:01 PM

  Madame Polisztra is happy


Madame Polisztra sees an interesting possibility when Obama is elected. It's clear that the Republican organization is no longer a functional party. By embracing unbelievable incompetence, unimaginable stupidity, and unfathomable filth and corruption, the R club has simply surrendered its right to exist. Rational voters have no reason to select the R brand.

This gives us a Federal situation akin to the traditional Southern state, where two or three factions contend within the Democrat party. And we do have, for the first time since 1972, a formal opposition between recognizable factions. The new Western Dems like Jon Tester represent the FDR line: pro-American, pro-production, pro-union, hawkish. Obama represents the McGovern line: anti-American, anti-production, pro-China, dovish. Hillary began this election in an ambiguous position, but started to win (alas, too late) when she aligned with the FDR faction.

Here's the important part: The FDR faction crosses party lines. Tester and Hillary 2.0 sound nearly identical to Dana Rohrabacher and Duncan Hunter. The FDR faction of Republicans has been powerless during Sultan Bush's regime, for reasons that even the omniclairvoyant Madame Polisztra can't understand. Why should a sane man be loyal to insanity? It is a mystery.

With Sultan Bush out of the picture (thank God) and with President Obama belonging to the opposite party and the opposite faction, Madame P sees a strong alliance building between the Tester types and the Rohrabacher types. This was already seen on occasion, such as the wonderful teaming of Marcy Kaptur and Duncan Hunter. With a President who belongs to the opposite party and the opposite side, this pro-American and pro-working-class alliance will have a chance to grow more powerful, and may end up becoming a second party to replace the decomposing corpse of the Republican club.

= = = = =

More seriously, I'd love to see Hillary run on her own. With the two major parties each offering their worst possible candidate, both promising bankruptcy and enslavement to China and Arabia, there's a real opening, a real market, for a third candidate who promises to protect THIS country and to rebuild THIS country's industrial base.
  ¶ 8:18 PM

  Sometimes you wonder
Team-based thinking leads to a certain understandable blindness, but it rarely goes this far. Dennis Miller was discussing style vs substance this morning, and one caller said:

"Hey, why don't the Republicans get better talking points? Why don't they say, for instance, You want higher gas prices, vote Democrat. You want lower gas prices, vote Republican."

Um, perhaps they don't say that because everyone in the country knows that the wild rise in gas prices has occurred under Republicans. Even brand-R politicians aren't quite stupid enough to try a slogan that runs so obviously against experience ... No, I take it back. They are stupid enough. I fully expect to see this slogan in tomorrow's talking-point memo now that it's been suggested.
  ¶ 8:49 AM

  Zillow epiphany
Couple days ago the annual county property-tax assessment came in the mail. According to this assessment my house is worth $65K. I found this to be surprisingly high, and considered lodging a protest with the assessor, as in "Look at this! Do you really think this hovel is worth more than $30K?" But then I used Zillow.com to compare some roughly equivalent houses, and found several priced in the $60K range. So maybe it's a valid range. This raised the possibility of selling, and moving back to Kansas or Oklahoma, where that amount of money would buy a better house.

More importantly, I noticed that one of my house's "sisters" was among the current listings. This "sister" is the best of a half-dozen cottages around the neighborhood that were clearly built from the same plan during WW2. Probably a prefab, built quickly to take advantage of wartime industrial workers. Each house has been remodeled differently over the years, but the original part remains recognizable.

I've been noticing this pretty sister for a long time, and wondering what it looked like on the inside. The online listing includes a set of photos which answer the question nicely.

Seeing the same rooms with the same basic moldings, but an entirely remodeled kitchen and bathroom, was eerie and dreamy. Gave me an epiphany of sorts: this is what my house could look like.
  ¶ 3:44 PM