HAPPY NEW YEAR to all the Insta-Readers out there. May your 2013 be magnificent.
Archive for 2012
December 31, 2012
ROD DREHER: It’s Different With Kids. Which is why the country is changing now that fewer and fewer people have them.
TRAFFIC AT THE SANTA MONICA CIVIC CENTER: Dear Mr. Fantasy.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Stylish Man’s Guide To Concealed Carry.
If, of course, the gun store has any guns left.
MC5: Kick Out The Jams. Another version here.
JUST WAIT UNTIL OBAMACARE HAS FULLY KICKED IN: Where Have All The Primary Care Doctors Gone? It’s all about incentives: “General practitioners work as many hours as, or more, than their subspecialty colleagues. Yet they have among the lowest reimbursement rates. They also shoulder disproportionate responsibility for the bureaucratic aspects of patient care, spending more time and money obtaining treatment authorization from insurance companies, navigating insurers’ ever changing drug formularies and filling out health and disability forms.” Well, I’m sure the paperwork will improve under ObamaCare, right? . . . .
MY USA TODAY COLUMN FOR TOMORROW ON WASHINGTON AND INEQUALITY: In a town that has more people per square mile talking about income inequality than probably any other — you also find really striking examples of, well, income inequality.
ROGER KIMBALL: Lefts tend to be dour people with no laughter in their hearts. “Why do they tend to be dour people with no laughter in their hearts? Because they regard life as a zero-sum game. . . . It’s a curious thing. Leftists are supposed to be the caring, sharing part of the political fraternity. In point of historical fact, it is an easy thing to demonstrate that their caring has always been more a rhetorical than an actual strategy and that their sharing has been accomplished overwhelmingly with other people’s goods. That said, however, there is still the fact that Leftists are hailed by their enablers as the non-crabby politicians, the people who come into office promising two things: More and Free. How odd it is, then, that they should also be the folks who harbor an unshakeable belief that the universe is a stingy, scarcity driven machine whose iron law is that if A does well, B must do poorly.”
SIGNS AND PORTENTS: Massive comet will shine brighter than the moon, say astronomers.
STAYING INDEPENDENT IN OLD AGE, with a little help. This area seems ripe for a mix of technical and social progress.
BYRON YORK: Obama’s ‘messianism’ makes economy a secondary concern. Obama always comes first.
So we’ve clearly got hubris well established. It only remains to be seen what form nemesis will take. (Related item here.)
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ON HILLARY’S BRAIN: “The illness has kept her out of the public view since Dec. 7, and has started to raise a host of questions as her team keeps typically tightlipped about the details: Where is the clot located? How severe is her condition? How soon will she recover? And, as Democrats are privately if not publicly speculating, how might her illness affect a decision about running for president in 2016? . . . Not that Democrats are willing to talk openly about the political implications of a long illness, choosing to keep any discussions about her condition behind closed doors. Publicly, Democrats reject the notion that a blood clot could hinder her political prospects.”
UPDATE: A reader emails that it’s lucky Hillary is a Democrat. If she were a Republican, we’d be hearing jokes like “Good news: They X-rayed Hillary’s brain and didn’t find anything!”
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JAMES TARANTO: Long Walks, Short Piers: The media’s attacks on the Second Amendment–and on the First. “It must be hard living in a country whose very constitution you loathe. Piers Morgan is lucky in that he is a foreign national and has the option to self-deport. Perhaps as a humanitarian gesture Britain’s Parliament could enact a law offering asylum to Americans who attest that they wish to give up on the Constitution. It would also be a way of tweaking the rebellious former colonies, but we doubt anybody would mind.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Turn Your Laptop Into A Spectrometer.
CALL THEIR DISTRICT OFFICES: Are Congressional Republicans Getting Ready To Cave On Gun Control? “Any Republicans entertaining ideas of going along with any Democrat ban should realize that they’re being played by the Democrats and the media, again. . . . Republicans should realize that caving in to the Democrats’ ban demand amounts to party suicide. By that point they have have already caved on tax hikes and may have taken part in slashing our national defense. If they also cave on the Second Amendment, what’s left for them to stand on?”
UPDATE: Reader Ray Conatser writes: “I have heard some talk that passage of new gun control would be a good thing for the Republicans, as it would lead to a repeat of the 1994 midterm elections. I am of the mind that it will only cause more voters that should rightly be in the GOP column to disengage. Reference the voters that stayed home instead of voting for Romney. If the Republicans don’t want to spend another 30 years wandering in the desert on a national level, they need to stand for something other than tax cuts. Maybe they could start with individual liberty and protecting the rights of law abiding Americans.” Yes, it would be a good way to jumpstart a third party, which might be the end of the GOP.
ANOTHER UPDATE: On, 1994, a reader emails: “What happened in 1994? The voters *punished those who had voted against gun rights*. So if the House votes against gun rights, what can we expect to happen? I mean, really, what are these people thinking?”
MORE: Another reader writes:
The Republicans need to understand if they allow something like a mag ban (or worse) to come to a vote, they are dead as a party. This will either make the Tea Party a real third party or cause massive defection to the Libertarian Party.
We know they control the Judicary Committee and they can easily keep anything of this nature bottled-up indefinitely. IN FACT, WE EXPECT THEM TO DO EXACTLY THAT!!! Protecting the Second Amendment is all they have to distinguish themselves right now and if they throw it away, they will pay a terrible price for that disloyalty.
I agree. With control of the House they can’t do a lot to score, but they can be the goalie. If not, what’s the point?
AN ANSWER TO THE FERMI PARADOX: Humans May Be The First Generation of Advanced Life In The Milky Way.
That would actually be good, since if aliens exist, they probably want to destroy us.
I recommend this piece by Gregg Easterbrook. Key bit:
James Trefil, of George Mason University, has cautioned that if evolution functions approximately the same way on other worlds that it has functioned here — conferring survival upon the fittest — advanced extraterrestrials might still be aggressive, territorial, and quick to reach for the sword. In that case, counting on poor alien marksmanship might not be prudent. Even if a message arrived from a great distance, we might for defensive reasons be compelled to assume that the senders knew something about the speed-of-light barrier that we didn’t, and withhold our reply.
The most disquieting aspect of natural selection as observed on Earth is that it channels intellect to predators. Most bright animals are carnivores: stalking requires tactics, pattern recognition, and, for social animals, coordinated action, all incubators of brainpower. Though the martial heritage of mankind has been exaggerated in popular fiction (there’s no proof, for example, that our Cro Magnon ancestors waged war against the vanished Neanderthals), it’s reasonably certain that the forebears of modern Homo sapiens were hunters, and it’s definite that man has been savage during the historical era. This isn’t much of a testimonial to “intelligence.”
Well, not as tending to nonviolence. On alien invasions generally, a good fictional treatment is in Greg Bear’s The Forge Of God, For the more technically-inclined, there’s Ernst Fasan’s Relations With Extraterrestrial Intelligences, or some chapters in McDougal, Lasswell, and Vlasic’s Law and Public Order In Space. Kind of old, but still good. A more recent popular treatment that’s worth your time is Ben Bova and Byron Preiss’s Are We Alone in the Cosmos? The Search for Alien Contact in the New Millenium.
if aliens just don’t like us, there’s no need to invade. They could send a half-pound of deadly nanodevices on a stealthed probe. We probably wouldn’t even recognize what was happening as an alien attack.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Single-molecule motor sits on a single-atom ball bearing.
GLAD TO BE OF HELP: Reader Shari Hastings emailed last night:
Just made your chicken recipe for our Sunday dinner today. Was very easy to make and deee-lish! I used potatoes, yams, sweet potatoes and onions. Great flavor and enough left over chicken for chicken salad sandwiches for the work week (only 2 of us). The dogs got the skin. They thought it was deee-lish, too.
It’s easy and yummy. Leave out the potatoes and sweet potatoes and it can be pretty low-carb, too. Here’s the recipe again, if you want to try it.
REMINDER: Asparagus Can Prevent Hangovers. But, really, try not to drink so much that it matters.
AMUSING CUSTOMER REVIEWS for the Playmobil Security Checkpoint.