A Public Service

A Public Service:

Obviously, the critics of the rhetoric on the right are better-founded than I knew. This is the kind of reckless, irresponsible... er, wait, no.

Actually, this is from season one. They're now on season three, which would make this a couple years old. We had a totally different President then.

Nothing bad here! This was just edgy, push-the-envelope comics who represent the clever, creative parts of our great nation. It's a mark of the rich intellectual nature of our society that we can accept satire that punches back against the powerful and their interests.

Bthun's Collection:

As promised in the comments below, here are some photos of a portion of bthun's collection.





He writes:

Howdy Grim,

I managed to dig up a few of my favorite all purpose blade. At least the ones I use most often.

I also found the Japanese bayonet. A type 30, straight quillon, with the Mukden Arsenal ( Manchuria ) marking.

The ceremonial sword is not that nice, nor has it ever taken an edge. I have no idea from whence in came. Only that it was in mom and dads, house and I found it while sorting out their estate. Unfortunately the two Arisaka Rifles, a type 38 and a type 99 that dad brought home and gave to me were sold by one of my brothers while I was in the Navy. Whatcha gonna do?

I’m still looking for my oldest knife, the barlow. I packed it away to keep it intact and now I can’t seem to remember where I put it. As they say, of all the things I miss, the thing I miss the most is my mind…

Anyway, in spite of the coughing and an old camera, I managed to capture a few of my blades. And in the spirit of iddy biddy caliber stuff, I pulled out my little Buckmark Pro Target plinker.

Thank you for sharing it with us. I'll be happy to post other reader's favorite blades if they'd like to email me photos and commentary.

Hee Haw

Infidelity:

In honor of the ongoing debate at Cassandra's house, a medley:



Hang out to the end for some Johnny Cash.

UPDATE: Here's Johnny Cash and June Carter doing the same number.



It's funny to see these two singers, both of them highly talented, hamming it up like this. Hee Haw was fun because it was about mocking the biased image of what Southerners were like. Everyone knew that Johnny Cash was a poet and a masterful performer. Part of the fun was seeing him act like a stereotype, showing how ridiculous the stereotype really was.

UPDATE: OK, two more:



That one reminds me of a non-Hee Haw piece, by the "Mouth of the South" himself.

No John Donovan

Shooting Off Your Back Porch:

Well, I'm no John Donovan: the man has a much finer collection than I've imagined, and much more experience employing it. Still, it looks like he was having fun, and I admire a man who knows how to have a good time.

I did do a bit of such shooting today, albeit with a much less impressive weapon. Shooting off the back deck is a good way to enjoy the autumn air even when you have the kind of downpour we had all day today. Here's my target:

Be Ready

Be Ready:

Mickey Kaus has a good thought.

If there are well over a million students in charter schools now, and the federal government is pushing them to grow like Topsy, at what point does a vicious circle set in, with public schools losing their even moderately motivated students, causing them to decline even further, causing even more students to leave, etc.? Not that this public school death spiral would be such a bad thing. We should just be prepared for it. The way we should have been prepared for GM.

We should be preparing for the collapse of our public institutions, not just the schools, because they are indeed on an unsustainable course quite parallel to GM's. We already can't afford the Federal Pensions, Medicare, and Social Security promises made; and yet we've got this wonderful idea to add some sort of universal health-care, funded by yet-more taxes and regulations.

The truth is that 'if a man shall not work, neither shall he eat' -- not because he should not eat, or because we don't want him to eat, but because somebody has to pay his freight. If it's not him, it might be his children; or it might be his wife; or it might be someone he helped out when he was younger. It won't be "society," though, because they won't love him enough to make serious sacrifices for him, forever.

Population booms can allow a society to mask that for a while, as the Baby Boomer period allowed us to mask it here, by dividing the extra freight among enough people that the sacrifices aren't so heavy. Yet they were serious, even when they were so divided.

The Social Security system remained essentially unchanged from its enactment until 1956. However, beginning in 1956 Social Security began an almost steady evolution as more and more benefits were added, beginning with the addition of Disability Insurance benefits. In 1958, benefits were extended to dependents of disabled workers. In 1967, disability benefits were extended to widows and widowers. The 1972 amendments provided for automatic cost-of-living benefits.

In 1965, Congress enacted the Medicare program, providing for the medical needs of persons aged 65 or older, regardless of income. The 1965 Social Security Amendments also created the Medicaid programs, which provides medical assistance for persons with low incomes and resources.

Of course, the expansions of Social Security and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid required additional tax revenues, and thus the basic payroll tax was repeatedly increased over the years. Between 1949 and 1962 the payroll tax rate climbed steadily from its initial rate of 2 percent to 6 percent. The expansions in 1965 led to further rate increases, with the combined payroll tax rate climbing to 12.3 percent in 1980. Thus, in 31 years the maximum Social Security tax burden rose from a mere $60 in 1949 to $3,175 in 1980.

Despite the increased payroll tax burden, the benefit expansions Congress enacted in previous years led the Social Security program to an acute funding crises in the early 1980s. Eventually, Congress legislated some minor programmatic changes in Social Security benefits, along with an increase in the payroll tax rate to 15.3 percent by 1990. Between 1980 and 1990, the maximum Social Security payroll tax burden more than doubled to $7,849.

Due to the economic crisis of the moment, we've almost reached the point at which the illusion cannot be maintained. It will not be long before there is no way to pretend anymore. Your family may take care of you, but your government will not: though they may perhaps beggar your family so much that they can't take care of you either.

Poker

Poker and the President:

Apparently President Obama and I have one thing in common: he plays poker. I have to admit that I find the fact surprising, as he doesn't seem the type to enjoy it. What are the high-stakes gambles of his presidency so far? The places where he went 'all in' on a hand that he knew was likely to win, but couldn't be 100% certain of winning?

Then again, the reason he played poker was apparently not for the fun of it, but for the social benefits:

As a writer, professor, and community organizer, Obama was greeted coolly by some of his fellow legislators when he arrived in Springfield in 1998 to take a seat in the Illinois Senate. How was this ink-stained, poshly educated greenhorn supposed to get along with Chicago ward heelers and conservative downstate farmers? By playing poker with them, of course.

In that case, the gambling was only an illusion of risk. What he was really after, he couldn't lose.

The rest of the article is more interesting than that idle speculation. It's about poker as a kind of national game for America.

Geneticists have shown that there is literally such a thing as American DNA, not surprising when nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. We therefore carry an immigrant-specific genotype, a genetic marker expressing itself—in some environments, at least—as energetic risk-taking and competitive self-promotion. Even when famine, warfare, or another calamity strikes, most people stay in their homeland. The self-selecting group that migrates, seldom more than 2 percent, is disproportionally inclined to take chances. They also have above-average intelligence and are quicker decision makers. Something about their dopamine-receptor systems, the neural pathway associated with a taste for novelty and risk, sets them apart from those who stay put.

While the factors involved are numerous and complex, the migratory syndrome has been deftly summarized by the journalist Emily Bazelon: "It's not about where you come from, it's that you came at all." The migratory gene must have been even more dominant among those Americans who first moved west across the Appalachians, up and down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, then out to California during the gold rush. Their urge to strike it rich, often at the risk of their lives, made poker more appealing than point-based trick-taking games like whist, bridge, or cribbage.

The national card game still combines Puritan values—self-control, diligence, the slow accumulation of savings—with what might be called the open-market cowboy's desire to get very rich very quickly.

I'm not sure how much 'cowboys' are about getting rich quickly; there are fewer better roads to a long life of hard work than trying to raise beef in America. Further, the settling of the majority of the West was not quite the same kind of 'chosen migration' as the settling of America in general. Most of the settlers of the mountain West were displaced Southerners following the Civil War. The point still holds, since they were themselves the descendants of those who chose to come to America, and push into and past the Appalachians; however, the reason so many of them went West was that the South's economy was destroyed by the war and its ruinous aftermath. Home couldn't support them anymore.

Indeed, necessity drove most of them in the first place: the big waves of immigration from Scotland were enforced by the clearances, which we were discussing the other day. The big waves from Ireland, mid-century, were enforced by the famine. A lot of these 'natural gamblers' started the game with little to lose.

Yet they did well, and very well, before the Puritans caught up with them and set up all these rules and regulations. Try starting a business now, and see how much chance you've got. ("Yes, you can start a business. There are 4,000 pages of regulations you'll have to obey, most of them with attendant fines and/or prison time; and you'll need to provide health insurance for your workers, including for at least six months after they leave your company under COBRA; and you'll need to pay them not less than minimum wage, which we'll negotiate for you in advance; and, of course, there will be stiff taxes on any earnings you manage, in order to ensure that we provide for those you're not employing; and...")

A little more poker in the national spirit would be good.

Swords for Peace

Swordfighters for Peace:

It's not so outrageous. After all, the Prince of Peace said, "[I]f you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one."

Crows Fly Backwards

Crows Fly Backwards:

...to keep the dust out of their eyes.



Unfortunately, this is a terrible version of this song, which is otherwise delightful. You can hear a good version on Pandora (h/t for that to Cass, who introduced me to it years ago). It's worth the pain of digging around for it.

Rush to Heap

Rush to Heap:

I have never seen a man for whom so many rushed to heap honors at his feet. In readings of history, I can think of only one parallel, which is when the children of imperial lineages would receive high honors simply for having been born the child of a great man. Few of them amounted to much, and that with a lifetime's training and experience, because the greatness for which they were honored was not their own.

"Rather than recognizing concrete achievement, the 2009 prize appeared intended to support initiatives that have yet to bear fruit..."

Indeed, neither fruit nor seed, nor first leaf, nor early shoot.

McQ

Photo of the Year:

At BlackFive, via McQ.

UK Writer Loves Kilts

Another Way:

Apropos of our last discussion on modern women and manly men, a former British ambassador responds to a troll. The subject of the dispute is whether or not the British government was willing to obtain CIA evidence obtained using what the ambassador considers to be torture -- a fairly serious matter all the way around, from the question of what constitutes torture to the question of whether the government of the UK was willing to be complict in it. So, of course, it drew a serious response.

Precisely 38 minutes after I posted a blog entry pointing to definite proof of Jack Straw's complicity in torture, one Helen Wright added this comment, which I thought deserved a wider audience:

Apparently you enjoy sex with a kilt on and like to smack womens arses while singing Scottish songs. You are a man of questionable morals and brough shame on our country. Crawl back under your rock, you slimeball.

I am shocked. You mean there's another way to have sex?

Obviously, it is possible to dispense with the kilt. Not necessary, of course -- that's one of the beauties of the kilt.

By the way, the Stone Mountain Scottish Highland Games are the weekend after next. If any of you mean to be there, let me know.

Mystery Solved

Mystery Solved?

You know why we're having a financial crisis now -- Social Security, Medicare, Federal pensions? Why Europe is falling apart? It's because people stopped having kids. Birth rates have fallen across the Western world.

Why? A new study says: because the pill doesn't just block fertility: it makes women want something other than a real man. Even when women are wanting children, the altered hormones have turned them aside from the natural markers that would point to a strong man of great virility. Birth control was the problem all along.

If that is right, two lessons:

Lesson one: Mess with your hormones at peril.

Lesson two: The Church was right again.

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck:

This guy is something else.

I've only watched one episode of his work, so I don't know that much about him. He is not what we've come to expect from the media, or the world. "They were talking at people, they weren't listening. They don't understand that people actually care about things -- can actually believe in things. Can be genuine, can weep for their country, can love something so much that they're willing to set everything aside for that: that the country and the Constitution mean something deeply to a lot of people."

The guy is dangerous.

"Dangerous!" cried Gandalf. "And so am I, very dangerous... and Aragorn is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli son of Glóin, for you are dangerous yourself[.]

"Dangerous" is not a negative quality. Dangerous merely means that you are serious, that there are things you will not let go. The question is whether you are benevolent, or malevolent.

That key is being turned. And I fear an event. I fear a Reichstag moment, God forbid, another 9/11, something that will turn this thing on: power will be seized and voices will be silenced. God help us all.

Q: And if it happens, what should Americans do to fight it?

Read the Constitution. Act Constitutionally. Protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

But that is no more than my oath. Indeed, many of us have sworn that oath. What will matter most is how we interpret the Constitution, and how we define its enemies.

Blue Stonehenge

Blue Stonehenge:

Earthquakes seem to come regularly, these days:

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of what they believe was a second Stonehenge located a little more than a mile away from the world-famous prehistoric monument.

The new find on the west bank of the river Avon has been called "Bluestonehenge", after the colour of the 25 Welsh stones of which it was once made up.

Excavations at the site have suggested there was once a stone circle 10 metres in diameter and surrounded by a henge – a ditch with an external bank, according to the project director, Professor Mike Parker Pearson, of the University of Sheffield.

The stones at the site were removed thousands of years ago but the sizes of the holes in which they stood indicate that this was a circle of bluestones, brought from the Preseli mountains of Wales, 150 miles away.

The standing stones marked the end of the avenue that leads from the river Avon to Stonehenge, a 1¾-mile long processional route constructed at the end of the Stone Age....

"I think we have found incontrovertible proof that the river was very important to the people who used Stonehenge. I believe that the river formed a conduit between the living and the dead and this is the point where you leave the realm of the living at the river and enter the one of the dead at Stonehenge."

That's the big question. What did they believe, and so strongly that they found a way to transport megaliths hundreds of miles to erect in these monuments? What a gift it would be to know.

For My Sister

For My Sister:

...who has been spending a lot of time out Jackson way:

Bomb the Moon

Boom:

NASA prepares to bomb the moon.

Close, but no cigar, boys.

Free Speech

Free Speech:

The administration has declared against free speech at the UN:

The new resolution, championed by the Obama administration, has a number of disturbing elements. It emphasizes that "the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities . . ." which include taking action against anything meeting the description of "negative racial and religious stereotyping." It also purports to "recognize . . . the moral and social responsibilities of the media" and supports "the media's elaboration of voluntary codes of professional ethical conduct" in relation to "combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance."

Quite a statement, given the regularity with which the President's critics are said to be racist. The media is hereby charged with a "responsibility" to produce a "voluntary code" to "[combat] racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance."

Oh, bloggers' free speech will now also be regulated. This first entry into the field is mild, just the camel's nose probing its way into the tent.

Those actions by the Obama administration are almost certainly unrelated. This is not a conspiracy to undermine free speech. It's just the result of a commonly-felt hostility to it among the kind of people that Obama appears to appoint to important positions. There may also be some top-down pressure in certain cases, but I doubt it's being done in a coordinated way. It's just a reflection of who he is, and what kind of people he employs to do his work.

Things Have Changed

Things Have Changed Back Home:

A story from Forsyth County, Georgia, where I grew up:

An effort to crack down on prostitution in Forsyth County’s massage parlors has resulted in the arrests of three women, including one who faced the same charge last year.

The Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office charged Mi Suk Yang, 47, of Marietta and Kil Cha Hurst, 65, of Jonesboro with prostitution on Wednesday....

There were probably prostitutes in the old days, but I don't recall having heard of any such arrests. Everybody knew each other then, before the explosion of the Atlanta suburbs caused the county I knew to cease to exist. Apparently prostitution arrests are now a regular thing.

(H/t FARK, who was amused by the lady's name. In general, it's always depressing to see your hometown mentioned in FARK.)

Mack the Knife

Mack the Knife:

My taste doesn't run to jazz, but I still enjoy Mark Steyn's writings on the history of 20th century music. The story of 'Mack the Knife' is unusually interesting even by his standard. Apparently the original was a 1728 London opera...

A Good Article

A Good Article:

National Affairs has a short, comprehensive look at the problems facing America's middle class. Indeed, the problems listed are a good definition of "middle class," one of the most difficult to understand concepts in American politics. If you share these problems, being neither too wretched to participate in the troubled institutions, nor too rich to have to worry about them, you're somewhere in the broad middle class.

It's a good frame for discussing the business before us: the collapse of Federal entitlements, the collapse of employer-provided entitlements, the demographic dangers, and so forth. In a seven-page article, there isn't much by way of solutions, but the sketches do offer some helpful advice: for example, that the worst way to deal with the entitlement crisis is with new taxes, but rather to use the government to encourage fertility rates and ease the raising of children.