Here's an idea for a little game to play during Obama's acceptance speech:
"The rules are, every time Obama says the word "change," you take a shot. And every time he says the word "hope," you take a double shot."
As Glenn Reynolds commented "Sounds like fun, but I've only got one liver. And I'm still using it."
The mayor of Clayton, CA, Gregg Manning, sent police officers to close down a vegetable stand operated by two young children because it didn't comply with city ordinances. Not only that but the city council, after receiving a petition to re-open the stand, produced a 19 page report that basically said "Follow the rules like everyone else."
Now, I understand the need for certain societal rules and in many cases I am a firm supporter of those rules. But when the power of the state (or in this case a city of 11,000 souls) reaches this invasive a level it might be time to consider reining that power in.
These two sisters were getting a real life experience in capitalism by selling the extra produce from their family's garden. Now they're getting an up-close look at what happens when regulation out runs common sense.
Perhaps their parents should consider teaching them a valuable civics lesson in civil disobedience.
"For a long time, we were pretty dumb. Humans did little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," he said. Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened — our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion.
To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, Khaitovich and colleagues examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism.
The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich, carefully adding that definitive claims of causation are premature.
The research is detailed in the August 2008 issue of Genome Biology.
The extra calories may not have come from more food, but rather from the emergence of pre-historic "Iron Chefs;" the first hearths also arose about 200,000 years ago.
In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.
Instead of growing even larger (which would have made birth even more problematic), the human brain most likely used the additional calories to grease the wheels of its internal functioning."
If Obama thinks it's bad now; just wait. Americans love a self-absorbed, pompous ass. We generally end up grabbing the nearest lead pipe and working them over like a pinata.
To paraphrase Lewis Black, "We have a problem with authority".
You know these are dark days for the Republic when Paris Hilton has a more effective energy policy than the two leading presidential candidates.
"Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain carbohydrates, amino acids, or other essential nutrients. Everything fails by irrelevant standards."
- Thomas Sowell
"A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?"
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises, Thursday, June 8, 1978
“Such is the debt of free spirits to Solzhenitsyn that we owe it to him at least to consider anything he asks us to consider.”
- William F. Buckley
M'Lady, the young squire and I picked wild blackberries this morning. We have a pie in the oven and one waiting to go in as I type. Hopefully, our blackberries will bear fruit next year so we won't have to go wading through the thorny wild bushes again. And our blackberries are thornless!
Update:
M'Lady and I have taken a few days off to enjoy the high summer weather. Inevitably, we spend time in the garden and that means weeding, of which I am not fond.
"I do not have "weeds" in my garden; I am merely maintaining a high level of biodiversity."
- Country Squire
From Vox Day:
1. Make an untrue statement, preferably on the subject of something about which you know nothing.
2. Express astonishment that your source could possibly be inaccurate.
3. Demand what motivation your source would have to lie.
4. Assert that the other party’s inability to articulate this motivation is tantamount to proof that your source is not lying.
5. Question the motivation of the contrary source.
6. Argue that all sources are equal and that therefore the contrary source is irrelevant.
7. Change the subject.
Alternatively …
1. Make an untrue statement.
2. Deny that you said what you said.
3. Deny that the other party understood what you said.
4. Deny that the words you used mean what the other party claims they mean.
5. Redefine your definition and hope the other person forgets the previous one. Repeat as needed.
6. Assert that since definitions are irrelevant and subjective, the other person is mean-spirited, racist, sexist, intolerant and obsessive.
7. Change the subject.
From Jonah Goldberg:
It’s an old story. Loving parents provide a generous environment for their offspring. Kids are given not only ample food, clothing and shelter, but the emotional necessities as well: encouragement, discipline, self-reliance, the ability to work with others and on their own. And yet, in due course, the kids rebel. Some even say their parents never loved them, that they were unfair, indifferent, cruel. Often, such protests are sparked by parents’ refusal to be even more generous. I want a car, demands the child. Work for it, insist the parents. Why do you hate me? asks the ingrate.
Of course, being an old story doesn’t make it a universal one. But the dynamic is universally understood.
We’ve all witnessed the tendency to take a boon for granted. Being accustomed to a provision naturally leads the human heart to consider that provision an entitlement. Hence the not-infrequent lawsuits from prison inmates cruelly denied their rights to cable TV or apple brown betty for desert.
And so it goes, I think, with capitalism generally.
Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.
People ask, “Why is there poverty in the world?” It’s a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil. As individuals and as a species, we are born naked and penniless, bereft of skills or possessions. Likewise, in his civilizational infancy man was poor, in every sense. He lived in ignorance, filth, hunger, and pain, and he died very young, either by violence or disease.
The interesting question isn’t “Why is there poverty?” It’s “Why is there wealth?” Or: “Why is there prosperity here but not there?”
At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.
For generations, many thought prosperity was material stuff: factories and forests, gold mines and gross tons of concrete poured. But we now know that these things are merely the fringe benefits of wealth. Stalin built his factories, Mao paved over the peasants. But all that truly prospered was misery and alienation.
A recent World Bank study found that a nation’s wealth resides in its “intangible capital” — its laws, institutions, skills, smarts and cultural assumptions. “Natural capital” (minerals, croplands, etc.) and “produced capital” (factories, roads, and so on) account for less than a quarter of the planet’s wealth. In America, intangible capital — the stuff in our heads, our hearts, and our books — accounts for 82 percent of our wealth.
Any number of countries in Africa are vastly richer in baubles and soil than Switzerland. But they are poor because they are impoverished in what they value.
In large measure our wealth isn’t the product of capitalism, it is capitalism.
And yet we hate it. Leaving religion out of it, no idea has given more to humanity. The average working-class person today is richer, in real terms, than the average prince or potentate of 300 years ago. His food is better, his life longer, his health better, his menu of entertainments vastly more diverse, his toilette infinitely more civilized. And yet we constantly hear how cruel capitalism is while this collectivism or that is more loving because, unlike capitalism, collectivism is about the group, not the individual.
These complaints grow loudest at times like this: when the loom of capitalism momentarily stutters in spinning its gold. Suddenly, the people ask: What have you done for me lately? Politicians croon about how we need to give in to Causes Larger than Ourselves and peck about like hungry chickens for a New Way to replace dying capitalism.
This is the patient leaping to embrace the disease and reject the cure. Recessions are fewer and weaker thanks in part to trade, yet whenever recessions appear on the horizon, politicians dive into their protectionist bunkers. Not surprising that this week we saw the demise of the Doha round of trade negotiations, and this campaign season we’ve heard the thunder of anti-trade rhetoric move ever closer.
This is the irony of capitalism. It is not zero-sum, but it feels like it is. Capitalism coordinates humanity toward peaceful, productive cooperation, but it feels alienating. Collectivism does the opposite, at least when dreamed up on paper. The communes and collectives imploded in inefficiency, drowned in blood. The kibbutz lives on only as a tourist attraction, a baseball fantasy camp for nostalgic socialists. Meanwhile, billions have ridden capitalism out of poverty.
And yet the children of capitalism still whine.
