Science

Western Diet Link to ADHD, Australian Study Finds

Science Turns Authoritarian

Rabbits grow their own joint replacements in study -- Go Rabbits!

Why "science" has a problem

Anatomy of a Microburst

Is a stiff hamstring more susceptible to a strain?

Three (possible) sections in the News Whip(s): World News, National News, and Heartland News (Heartland being defined as my home territory--from Kansas City north to South Dakota).

As I described in the previous post,, the Ruling Class is composed of people who simply think it is their right (if not their duty) to tell other people how to run their lives, and the People Class is composed of people who just want to get on with their own lives and don't have that urge to tell other people what to do. These Whips document the various activities of the Ruling Class.

And they're very, very, very active, unfortunately.

This Whip category pertains to what I call the People Class--my name for the "Country Class" as identified by retired Boston University professor Angelo M. Codevilla in his influential essay America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution.

This would be the "us" as opposed to the "them" of the Ruling Class. The difference is that people in the People Class don't want to run anyone else's life--they just want to be free to run their own lives to the best of their abilities. The people in the Ruling Class think that they're qualified to tell the rest of us how to run their lives--up to and including demanding that the People Class give money to the Ruling Class because they're somehow "owed" some kind of reparations to make things more "fair." So yes, the Angry Poor are, in fact, part of the Ruling Class, not of the People Class, in that they think they have the right to order other people to provide for their "needs."

This is the fundamental political issue of our time--despite what the journalists and "opnion-makers" (but I repeat myself) in the Ruling Class would have you believe.

The issue IS the Ruling Class, and more specifically, how long the People Class will continue to put up with their increasingly shrill and unreasonable demands.

I'm going to a new Whip format here for a while. Back to categories, with perhaps a lead comment/rant/editorial on things that really get me going. Today, that's nothing much. But, onward, to the Whip!

Wolfe’s lost road: Discovering an author’s personal essay on J.R.R. Tolkien

Wolfe’s (essay) says that The Lord of the Rings taught him that right and wrong can be absolutes, and that absolute moral equivalency is another piece of Mordor. In addition, it taught him that “progress” is not necessarily progressive, and with change comes inevitable loss.

The difference between knowledge and wisdom is also a feature of Tolkien's greatest work. The "progressives" confuse knowledge with wisdom. This is their great weakness. They believe that intricate and complicated concepts must be correct, because they're hard to understand. Conservatives believe that intricate and complicated concepts are best judged with deep suspicion, and that the basic truths are actually quite simple to comprehend. The "right thing to do" is often difficult to actually do, by we imperfect humans in this imperfect world, but it is often quite simple to understand.

Five Minutes With Andrew Breitbart

Q: Anything else folks should know about this or about Andrew Breitbart?

A: Believe it or not, one of my primary motives on this planet is to stop this racism, and to stop the Democratic Party's use of race that divides us intentionally. Google me and Clarence Thomas. I went from left to right because I watched this tactic happen to him and I aligned myself with black conservatives. Free thinkers recognize the Democratic Party will do or say anything to instill fear into black Democratic voters. . . . Shirley Sherrod in that video said those who disagree with Obamacare are coming from a racist point of view. That is a troubling racist sentiment.

And this is the greatest tragedy--the greatest crime--that the neo-feudalist left has committed against this country with the Sherrod affair--and with so many other instances of rabidly shouting "RAAAAACIST!" as a craven political tactic to shut up and shut down opposing voices. The dirty secret is that the festering pus of lingering racism in the United States is flowing from the left--from the "progressives"--from the very same neo-feudalists who organize intellectual lynch mobs against anyone who really, really took to heart Martin Luther King's words about judging people on the content of their character.

What the neo-feudalist "progressives" do to the "national conversation on race" is obscene. They're the ones who should be shouted down--not the brave few on the Right like Breitbart who stand up to the neo-feudalists.

This is gonna be a long one . . . stuff has been piling up . . .

‘JournoList’ E-mails Show Media Plotting to Kill Stories about Reverend Jeremiah Wright: Daily Caller -- Almost all national journalists for the "mainstream" media are lying to you. On purpose. With reasons they think are good and proper. But the fact remains that they daily--hourly lie to you, in order to advance what they think is the "correct agenda." After all, these people went into journalism to "make a difference in the world." If they have to lie and deceive in order to do it, well, the ends justify the means, don't they?

Video: “Same As It Ever Was”


And, if you're missing the parody, here's the original:

Yeah, it's weird. That's kinda the point.

"My God, what have I done?"

The Aristocracy Of The Left -- They want nothing more or less than to re-establish a kind of feudalism--with them as the lords and masters, and you and me as the peasants. That's the game. That's why they're so upset at the Tea Parties. They see it as simply a revolt of the peasants. At some point, they will put it down--probably with the traditional tactics used throughout history with unruly serfs and peasants--all the while loudly claiming that it's all the peasant's fault, and we had it coming, for daring to challenge our "betters." Unless, that is, the peasants can manage to "storm the castle" via the ballot box in the next couple of national elections. If not, it will be a future of either resignation to feudalism, or revolution. Seems to me like voting the bums out is by far the preferable strategy and outcome for everybody concerned--even for the neo-feudalists themselves, who in that scenario will not be at any risk of being lined up against a wall should they actually provoke a popular revolution which and succeeds in overthrowing them in the USA (which is, as always, the "last hope of Man on Earth.")

Everybody's got skin in this game. It's all a matter of understanding what the game actually is.

TARP audit claims Obama admin destroyed “tens of thousands” of jobs in dealer closures -- But, see, this is a good thing, because all of those car dealership employees were probably rich Republican fat-cats who had it coming for being racists, anyway . . .

The Next Great Wave -- Featuring this, which brings into sharp focus the fact that the "progressive" agenda is now, in the 21st Century, actually quite backward-looking. You might almost say . . . "conservative" . . .

The Progressive ideology much of the western world has labored under for a century or so is a product of the industrial revolution. It will die and be replaced by something else as the technological revolution sweeps all before it. Political wonks live in the sort of bubble where they give primacy to politics over everything else, little understanding that politics grow from more basic factors, and those factors are currently being rearranged, rebuilt, newly created or destroyed by forces far more powerful than politics or ideology. Even the oldest ideology of all - religion - sways and teeters in the face of the oncoming storms.

The fact is, if you hold "progressive" political views, you're not anywhere near the cutting edge of political thought. In fact, what you believe is largely a return--not a return to the Progressive days of the late 19th and early 20th century, the days of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but a return to a kind of feudalism last ascendent in European culture after the fall of Rome. Let's call it neo-feudalism. Consider the society of the early European Middle Ages, where those few who, by wisdom and intellect are chosen as the Wise (that would be them) lead the many, the poor, the ignorant. That would be you. The last time around, the few, wise people represented the Catholic Church. Now, they represent "progressive, compassionate policies." But in operation, there is very little difference. The rulers, and the ruled. It is this system against which the American Revolution was a decisive--if momentary--defeat, and ever since, the rulers have been seeking another path to unlimited power. They think they've found it. Are they right?

If you really want a better life for the poor, but are voting for Democrats, you are on the wrong side. Period.

The truth on domestic violence just isn’t sexy enough -- Including this gem of a final paragraph, which could well apply to most "issues of the day" raised by Old Media:

Why do these myths persist? Because they make great copy and because there is something mesmerizing about a statistic that freezes journalistic brains, especially when the statistics bolster common cultural biases or trends. And one especially pejorative but persisting cultural trend is the impunity with which all men can be demonized. The moral of these hoaxes is to view statistics that paint a negative picture of unusually high numbers of men with deep suspicion.

Emphasis mine. What you hear from the Old Media is, more often than not, a carefully selected subset of what happened, presented in an astonishingly slanted, biased way to favor one set of policy prescriptions (generally "progressive") and breathlessly presented with a desperate "the sky is falling!" breathlessness. (Sometimes it's not even necessary for something to happen--it's enough for somebody, somewhere to say that something happened--like for instance Congressmen being verbally abused or intentionally spit on, on the Capitol Steps) . . .

Want Economic Stimulus? Don’t Build a Sports Stadium! -- It's hard to decide what's the bigger scam: public 'light rail' mass transit, new stadiums, health care "reform," "stimulus," or "green industries." Each of them has just about as much objective scientific support behind them--i.e. very, very little--to suggest that they will actually do what their proponents say they will do. All represent the triumph of Hoping Real Hard over actual reality.

Two words shoot all of these down when these Good Ideas come into contact with the Real World: Opportunity Cost.

Lack of jobs increasingly blamed on uncertainty created by Obama’s policies

Rasmussen: Investor confidence hits 2010 low -- Nobody--especially smaller businesses--are going to do much of anything until they have an idea how much more the Democrats are going to try to hurt them via taxes and regulations. Which may mean no significant recovery until Palin defeats Obama in November, 2012.

Video: New Black Panther Party President Admits Voter Intimidation -- Evidence:


Racists. And not with five A's, either. The real thing, this time. Imagine a white supremicist movement leader standing up and talking like this. Try to imagine it. Then try to imaging that guy and his organization NOT getting the legal cluebat upside the head.

Are You an "Internal" or an "External?" And Which is Mitch Daniels? -- Is this like being an "innie" or an "outie?" I'm an internal, I guess. And an innie, thank you very much.

La Nina to form in July as storm, drought fears flare -- What do we need to make the Great Depression II? Stupid government economic policies causing economic bubbles? Check! Even stupider government policies delaying the economic recovery? Check! A return of the Dust Bowl? On the way? Gee. All we'll need to get out of this is a world war. Oh, wait, the government debt is already where it was at the END of World War II. Oopsie. Hey, here's an idea! Let's RAISE TAXES! Yeah, that always improves the lives of regular people. Heck, they'd rather have all that free time than have to waste time at a job anyway! It's like we're doing them a favor by making it impossible for them to find a job! Yeah, that's the ticket!

Green Economics and the Void of Desire

Consider the purchasing and investment decisions of our three hundred million citizens as a widely dispersed intelligence of tremendous complexity. Resources are allocated through a vast number of individual decisions, made with impressive speed. Each citizen becomes one element of a mighty network. It is capable of intuition, as sophisticated communications allow consumers to react to trends and opportunities in a cascade of email, website postings, phone calls, and casual conversation. It is creative, because it’s not restrained by ideology or central directives. People adopt new technologies with astounding speed. With apologies to Alvin Toffler, the only “future shock” nowadays is felt by manufacturers, as the best high-tech products go from the expensive indulgences of trendy nerds to household items in a matter of months.

Obama-style command economics are a far more primitive form of intelligence. They are directed by small groups of people wearing ideological blinders. Politically unacceptable alternatives are ruled nonexistent. Command economies move with glacial speed, receiving corrective input only once every couple of years at the ballot box. They are wasteful, as vast resources are allocated to pay off valuable constituencies, or absorbed by a useless political class through graft.

Emphasis in original. The simple fact remains that the "progressive" agenda is, in actuality, profoundly regressive, essentially taking us back to a primitive, Dark Ages view of human beings and their relationship to government--a relationship of subjects and rulers--of serfs and lords (and guess which one you're going to be?). It wipes out hundreds of years of long, slow progress towards increasing individual rights, returning us to a neo-feudal--almost tribal--situation where the rights you have come from the group you belong to, instead of being inherent in you by virtue of simply being a human.

Like in so many other things, the very word that the authoritarians use to describe themselves, "progressive," is itself a blatant lie. It is, in fact, The Big Lie. Again. They are not "progressive." They are not "liberal." They are the exact opposite of progressive and liberal.

Health care, welfare, the environment--all are not ends in themselves for the "progressives." They are, for "progressives," noble-sounding rhetorical tools which they cheerfully, cynically use to pry your individual, inherent rights away from you.

You have a choice: do it the "progressive's" way, or go the way of freedom. The goals of the "progressives" and the true liberals may be the same--a better life for everybody. But the true liberals know how to get there--increase the freedom, liberty, individual power, and personal responsibility of every single human being. The "progressives" are flailing in the dark. The Dark Ages dark.

Choose the light. Choose freedom. Choose liberty.

Iowa Federal Court Finds Sheriff Denied Concealed Carry Because of Applicant’s Political Activity, Orders Sheriff to Take a First Amendment Class -- Actually, all law enforcement personnel--and actually, all government employees at any level--should be required to pass an extensive (week-long?) training session and test on the original intent of the United States Constitution and the federal system of government. Taking elected office should be contingent on passing that course with an "A."

I'm serious about that.

How can you have people in your government who don't understand the fundamental concepts of your government? Current experience proves that you can't.

Featured today:

The Care of Time

The destruction of private enterprise and its substitution by government spending creates the danger that too many people will find there’s nothing left but to stay on the needle. Only when it the needle absolutely positively bone dry; bent, corroded and blood encrusted will the alternative be considered. In the meantime there is the terrible momentum of promises, the fatal attraction of hope and change. Will there be enough reserve buoyancy to surface? Or will the Ship of State, like some gigantic version of Illinois, keep racing for the depths?

I've seen the needle, and the damage done.

America, and the world, needs an intervention, I think. Perhaps at this point a divine one is required.

America As Job -- In keeping with this sudden turn to religious references . . . Job as in "the patience of," not as Bite-Me Biden's four letter word. I'm really not a particularly religious person. But then, religious people do not offend me, either. In fact, I'm more often comforted by the existence of serious, thoughtful religious people than intimidated or threatened by them. Radical Islamists excepted, of course.

In a silent way

Readers who get their news from the the mainstream media are remarkably ill informed. Much of what they "know" isn't true and much of what they don't know is important.

If what you know comes from ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, or MSNBC, PBS, NPR, or other leftist-dominated media outlets, then you are dreadfully poorly informed. This is simply fact. Get used to it.

And yes, I occasionally listen to outlets like the BBC as well as ABC and the other outlets above. I just don't believe that they report events and issues fully and fairly, because I'm also reliably informed by many other sources. Of course, I spend an average of probably three or four hours a day actively learning what's going on in the world and studying world history to learn how we came to be where we are now. Most people don't have that kind of time to do that.

This is a bit of an "argument from authority" I guess, but I do spend time trying to understand what's going on, and why. I'm not content to simply believe what anyone wants me to believe. I'm a firm believer in what Ronald Reagan said: Trust, but verify. And all too often when I try to verify the accuracy of the news and opinion of Old Media outlets, I find that they are inaccurate at best, disingenuously misleading all too often, and actively deceitful (with what they report, and much more often by what they don't report) with depressing regularity. And so I have concluded that what they say can not be trusted.

(Actually, not the real finale . . . just the articles I bookmarked through sometime on July 4th itself. Yeah, I'm playing catchup again.)

Meltdown: Democrats Teetering On The Edge Of Political Abyss -- If "saying it makes it so" like the Democrats believe, then I'm going to go hoarse using this as a mantra . . .

Obama Has Killed Recovery -- "Progressive" policies and Keynesian economics simply don't work--not without a large, robust economy, internationally (that has traditionally been the USA) or a large, robust, resiliant private sector (domestically) to suck the life out of. When the golden goose of free enterprise can't lay enough golden eggs to pay for the welfare state and Keynesian economic ignorance, then things fall apart--like what happened in the 1930's. Like what is likely to happen in the 2010's, unless the Democratic agenda is not only stopped but decisively reversed, across the board.

Baghdad and Kabul? No – The Most Dangerous Place in the World is Between the Teachers Unions and the Public Trough -- I'm not so sure we wouldn't be better off simply abolishing any direct funding of education by government, and just give people vouchers to use for whatever educational needs they have. It wouldn't be a totally free market (after all, those vouchers would still be government scrip of a sort) but I think it needs to be seriously considered as an alternative to the state-capture of education in this country. Separate Education And State! Free The Schools!

Elena Kagan: Well, That Looks Like My Handwriting On That Memo, But Gee I Don't Know What You're Talking About -- And with this, I come to the point where I do not believe I would trust this woman to walk my dog, let alone be a justice of the Supreme Court . . .

Sen. Coburn: Kagan 'Ignorant' of Constitutional Principles; 'I Wouldn't Rule Out a Filibuster' -- Actually, the Republicans' actually going ahead, finding some cojones, and shutting Washington down for the rest of the year would probably set off an economic boom all by itself . . .

Weather vs. Climate

The two most important boundary conditions (inputs) to seasonal forecasts are sea surface temperatures and soil moisture. No one has shown any skill at modeling either of those, so no surprise that The Met Office Seasonal forecasts were consistently wrong.

Note that the word "skill" in this context is a term of art, with a specific, technical meaning--the easiest way of understanding the term as used in statistical modeling is that a model that has "skill" if it can provably and repeatably predicting whatever it happens to be modeling better a prediction based on than random chance--i.e. flipping a coin. Models that have skill have some usefulness in understanding what may happen. Models with no skill have no value--other than, perhaps, as political totems.

And Justice For All

The salient thing about J. Christian Adams’s accusation that the Obama administration deliberately let off the New Black Panther Party after it engaged in voter intimidation is that, if true, it constitutes a pure exercise in the abuse of power. The other wrongs it represents — the perversion of the electoral process, the violation of civil rights — are secondary. The most serious allegation in the whole affair is that the certain officials countenanced a crime because they wanted to. The most concentrated expression of tyranny is malice in the service of caprice.

If Obama knew that this investigation got quashed--let alone ordering its suppression--I personally think it rises to the level of an impeachable offense. It's that serious.

Resolved: America Ought To Be Free!

Barack Obama Is Making Me Laugh

So I listened to his speech on immigration and chuckled as he lectured us, yet again, on what America is — as if he had a clue about what America is. His contempt for us is so palpable. As if he had any respect for what makes America great – free speech, individual rights, entrepreneurship, and privacy rights. As if he had a clue as to why legal immigrants come here — to escape tyrants and would-be tyrants like him.

Wile E. Obama, Genius.

Basic economic ignorance -- The left has talked themselves into believing that up is down, black is white, ignorance is strength, and foolishness is deep wisdom. They have detached themselves from reality and are floating freely in a delusion of their own creation.

More Anti-Christian Propaganda From ‘Law & Order’ -- Tired agitprop from aging leftist "creative geniuses." Illustrative of how the left has detached themselves from reality.

The Anti-Educational Effects of Public Schools -- Privatize all the "public" schools--including the universities. Abolish and make illegal andy and all government money transfers of any kind to any educational institution--subsidy, grant, salary, anything. Give every person--man, woman, child--an education voucher, the value of which is determined by the sum total of all "education" spending by government, divided by the number of legal inhabitants of the country. Put the money in named, numbered accounts for the exclusive use of the individual legal inhabitant.

Let people decide where--or if--to spend their money for education--and that education can be standard academic training, learning a trade or craft, or they can use it to fund another person's education, or fund research, if they choose not to use the money themselves.

We need to break out of the old ways of thinking. They are no longer adequate to the challenges of today. The old, 18th-century model of primary, secondary, and higher education is no longer serving us well. We need something new.

Let's invent it.

Sarah Palin: The Tea Party Hawk -- For the record, I think the USA should be armed to the teeth, bristling with weapons that can reach out and touch anyone, any time, anywhere in the world. My favored foreign policy is: deal straight and fairly with us, and we'll do the same with you. If not, understand that:
a) we are a nation made up of a bunch of mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know types who you REALLY do not want to piss off, and
b) no, really, REALLY, you do not want to piss us off, or we will hurt you very, very, very badly.

This foreign policy will, it is true and unfortunate, require the occasional loud, messy destruction of people who have successfully pissed us off (by, say, flying commercial airplanes into skyscrapers, or sawing off our journalists' heads, or kidnapping our citizens and holding them on trumped up "spying" charges--or possibly even sinking one of our most valuable trading partner's warships, or highly placed "elected" officials who consistently threaten the genocide of an entire religion, to which many of our citizens belong--things like that). This destruction will occur with our complete understanding that there will be some unfortunate collateral destruction of anyone else, guilty or innocent, who happens to be close enough to those who have pissed us off to be caught within the blast radius. What can you say? The real world is a bee-atch. This is quite cold-bloodedly intended to convince those innocent people near the guilty parties to give them up to us expeditiously to avoid any such regrettable collateral unpleasantness. (It is also, not coincidentally, almost exactly the observed foreign policy of, say, Russia--except for the "deal straight and fairly with us" part, which Russia seems to forget all to often.)