I need to thank Rosie when I get home

for all her help this morning. My wife had to get up and head out early today for work and I had to get the kids up and out alone.

I was up late typing up some papers, so I was having a heck of a time getting out of bed. Rosie saw that and got Lena up and dressed and made sure she went potty. Hopefully, they both ate something. I had a glass of milk, but I just realized I didn't check into whether they had anything.

Anyway, I couldn't have done it without her, and I'm grateful. I'm afraid I was mostly gruff and grumpy at the time. She did a good thing and deserves something special for it.

David Broza

is the greatest genius of our age.

OK, he's got serious competition from Tiger Woods. But I, personally, get more joy from music and this guy puts an extraordinary amount of joy into his music and gets back what he puts in. Maybe more.

Is it bourgeois to be passionate about great jazz? Maybe not, but Broza transcends labels and styles and classes with his jazz. He stands on the shoulders of giants, no doubt. But he's on top.

He was born in Haifa, Israel, son of the first folk singer to sing in Hebrew, met many world famous musicians who made pilgrimages to the Holy Land and came to see her, then they moved to Spain, where he learned their styles and songs, and America, where he learned our jazz and rock-n-roll.

You can see it all in the PBS special: David Broza at Masada: The Sunrise Concert. I'm especially enamored of the Israeli singer (I'll probably misspell this) Kelee; a gorgeous woman with a magnificent voice. And the Jamaican water drum player, Sujya(?), who beat with his hand on a Kerr jar that he dipped in a tub of water, to marvelous musical results. And the Hebrew/Arabic duet he did with a Palastinian band leader who so joyfully sang with David and the child chorus their song of peace and love. Though I understood not a word, I raised my hands to heaven during that song. From their lips to God's ear.

What they showed on PBS had one flaw: it was only one hour. I could have stood another three or four.

Awesome!

My daughter's just like me.

I guess this goes here. I try to do things about my bourgeois lifestyle here. I know I promised to do a better review of the new production of My Fair Lady today, but I've been rather busy since I made that promise. It rates every positive thing that can be said about it, I kept finding myself grinning during the performance - it may well be the best musical ever, and these guys really do it brilliantly.

Maybe that's as much as I need to say. But back to my daughter:

We're talkin' the older one. Tonight we were talking about her homework project, somehow the subject turned to geology and she ran up to get a library book she checked out today to show me what the MOHS scale is. That's the same rock hardness scale I learned in junior high, but I didn't know the name. Apparently there's another scale for minerals that I wasn't aware of. I should have asked about that.

I tested her personality at INFP, which is pretty similar to my INTP, but I keep in mind that I'm not a professional, and I have to wonder if that personality type might be more common among children. It strikes me as an immature way to think to me, but then all you bastards look childish to me. You're all getting worked up over some insignificant BS.

The thing about INTPs is that we're as close to Spock as humanity has to offer. We think like him, but we keep finding ourselves freaking out over some damn thing.

Here's a homely topic

My four year old daughter just took care of the whole pooping issue all by herself. It fell to me to check her work, and it appears that she did everything perfectly.

I exclaimed, "You're a Big Girl now!"

You can understand my excitement, I'm sure. Hangin' around poop...well, that's not where I want to be. Poop is yucky.

But, it occurred to me to wonder, what are the other major signs (or whatever) of growth?

I'd especially be interested in what milestone I should work to pass next.

So, the Giants won

And, since my last post, that applies to both the NFC Championships against my Packers and the Superbowl.

And, guess what? I'm one of the guys who dissed them both times. They look like a team that can't handle what they're going to go up against until the game ends. I mean, how can a team that barely eaks out a win in every game keep that up through the Superbowl, where they faced the best offense anybody's ever seen?!

[Here's a great recap.]

Answer: the Giants' defense is better than any we've ever seen. They make great offenses look like amateurs.

If they can do that to the Patriots, it makes me feel a helluva lot better about my Packers. In fact, since the Pack took them into overtime, it makes me think that "we" [yeah, like I had a hand in it somehow] might have beaten the Patriots. Favre seemed to be pretty well protected in the NFC Championship game. The Giants' D were all over Tom Brady.

If only there weren't this other team out there.

Hey! It's absolutely THE Cinderella Story that every American kid dreams about when he's out in the yard tossing a football to himself. With 2 minutes and 30-something seconds to go in the game, the Giants get the ball back deep in their own territory and Eli Manning engineers an 83-yard drive - in the face of fierce opposition - with two major completions to David Tyree...well, I guess the NFL frowns on unauthorized published descriptions of their games, but it ended with an easy-looking TD completion to Burress with just over 30 seconds left.

It would have taken a miracle for Brady to pull it out at that point. Brady tried his best to provide that miracle, and nobody would have put it past him, but the Giants' D wasn't allowing any miracles yesterday.

[OMG! You didn't see that screw-up, did you? If you did, well, I confused Tyree with Moss in the last two drives. ACH!]

I tend to notice things like blocking and pass protection when I'm watching games, and both defenses were tearing the O-lines up, so when I see a defensive struggle it takes a while for me to figure out what went wrong. It looked like incompetence... but I was focussing on the wrong side of the ball.

"TERENCE, this is stupid stuff..."

is the first line of my favorite poem of all time. It's by A.E. Housman, and I think he put it at the end of his collection (linked to the title above), A Shropshire Lad, because he saw it as I do - as a kind of dessert after eating the meat and vegetables of the rest of the book. Unfortunately, it's Baked Alaska following plain (but healthful) fare.

It's difficult to say anything about Housman's poetry in general, or A Shropshire Lad in particular, that he doesn't say himself in "Terence." Although, one thing he doesn't say, in any of his writings, is that the darkness of them may have been the result of the fact that he was a gay man in Victorian and Edwardian England. And abstinance didn't make him as happy as he could have been.

"Terence" is Housman's justification of the dark subjects he usually wrote about. And even knowing that - how uninspiring it sounds - I love it because it's such a personal story, with a clear moral (though without sacrificing the story, or forcing the rhyme-scheme) and a wonderful ancient history lesson to boot.

The thing's kind of a mini-epic - and it's funny, informative and sobering.

I...OMG! The Packers are playing today!!

OK! The game's tied 14-14! You can say I haven't missed anything.

Snowin' hard at Lambeau Field! Awesome.

Fumble...the Pack's got it!

I'm not gonna do a play by play ... Favre lobs a TD!
.......

Oh, isn't that fun? Blogger just wiped out my brilliant description of Favre's escape from the sackers and the shovel pass for first and goal that set up an easy three yard run for touchdown.

The Pack has now tied the team record for first half points in the playoffs with 28.

Seattle scored a Field Goal. Score now 28-17.
.........
OK, after all that crap, the score is now 42-20. A new Packers record for post-season points.

The Packers finally have to punt. Crap!
.......
Special Secret Double Delux Bistro Burger!

Wait to buy it until the owner gets back in charge.
......
Nobody's able to move the ball in this weather.
........
Seattle pulls a couple running plays and the game's over!

Favre 173 yards, 3 TDs. And my daughter was impressed by the announcer's mention of the snowball.

What I saw of the Oklahoma ice storm

On the way down to my Uncle Bill's funeral I ran into freezing drizzle, starting south of Des Moines. The defroster, while it was heating the cab to about 100°, couldn't keep the ice off the windshield. I had to slow way down to give it a chance to keep up. When I got down to 35 mph, and had stopped for the third time to scrape it clear (and Liina said, "I gotta go potty!"), I decided we'd just take a motel for the night.

So we stopped at the Super 8 in Bethany, Missouri. I had seriously considered stopping at The Sundowner Motel in Cameron, because it was the first motel I ever stayed in, and I was almost overcome by nostalgia for it. But, finally, I was convinced that the temperature was going to continue to drop faster than I could head south, so I'd never get ahead of the weather...another thing that worried me, was that somebody with more of an angle to their windshield, and, therefore, less trouble seeing through it, would be driving overconfidently and rear-end me...and "I gotta go potty" was the last straw.

The next morning the drizzle continued, but with warmer temps, the defroster could keep up. The roads were always okay - their ice treatment, Iowa's and Missouri's seems to be very effective, though, even so, I had to be careful to stay in the ruts as I neared Carthage, Mo.

So that was the experience that told me not to try to drive home on Tuesday.

Here are the pix I took Sunday, after things had been sitting for several hours in warmer weather.

All right, that's nothing like my Mom's pix of the Ferris coming through the Duluth Entrance about the same time of year after a storm in the mid-70's (or my buddy Dutch's mom's pix of his dad's boat, the McCurdy, which came in right behind the Ferris - both of 'em looked like they were made of icicles).

I want to reiterate, this is the worst that Muskogee saw. Tulsa and Oklahoma City got the full brunt of the big storm. (Though Muskogee was hit by one equally as bad last year, though more localized.) I took these pix of my Mom's yard on Sunday:

Sorry about the scrap lumber. It wouldn't be there if it were my place. And it wasn't when Mom was ambulatory, either. I need to spend some time there next summer. I need to go down there with my list of things to do.

Here's the front yard:


Muskogee wasn't hit at all by the big storm, thank God.

My boss wasn't sounding very sympathetic when I call and told her that I wasn't going to drive up through it. Though, when I talked to her today, she told me that, after she talked to me she listened to the news and found out that it was, indeed, a big deal. As I hinted, I wouldn't have thought of it as much of a deal, myself, if I hadn't tried to drive through a minor precursor of it a couple days before.

Packers 34, Vikings 0

Awesome!

I want to know how San Diego did, though. I was thinking that, after the Vikes womped them last week, the Packers were in for some $#!# this week. But nope. The Vikes absolutely rolled over and let Favre and the boys have their way with them. Of course, I had to watch every minute of it. Hadda make sure they'd hold the shut-out. They tried to give up a TD toward the end of the fourth, but Bollinger decided to toss the capper to our guy.

Here's what else we've been up to this weekend:




I bagged up about half that pile.

One more?

Hazlitt's One Lesson

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Nine-tenths of the economic fallacies that are working such dreadful harm in the world today are the result of ignoring this lesson. Those fallacies all stem from one of two central fallacies, or both: that of looking only at the immediate consequences of an act or proposal, and that of looking at the consequences only for a particular group to the neglect of other groups.

It is true, of course, that the opposite error is possible. In considering a policy we ought not to concentrate only on its long-run results to the community as a whole. This is the error often made by the classical economists. It resulted in a certain callousness toward the fate of groups that were immediately hurt by policies or developments which proved to be beneficial on net balance and in the long run.

But comparatively few people today make this error; and those few consist mainly of professional economists. The most frequent fallacy by far today, the fallacy that emerges again and again in nearly every conversation that touches on economic affairs, the error of a thousand political speeches, the central sophism of the "new" economics, is to concentrate on the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole.

The "new" economists flatter themselves that this is a great, almost a revolutionary advance over the methods of the "classical" or "orthodox" economists, because the former take into consideration short-run effects which the latter often ignored. But in themselves ignoring or slighting the long-run effects, they are making the far more serious error. They overlook the woods in their precise and minute examination of particular trees. Their methods and conclusions are often profoundly reactionary. They are sometimes surprised to find themselves in accord with 17th-century mercantilism. They fall, in fact, into all the ancient errors (or would, if they were not so inconsistent) that the classical economists, we had hoped, had once for all got rid of.

It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths. It is often complained that demagogues can be more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it. But the basic reason for this ought not to be mysterious. The reason is that the demagogues and bad economists are presenting half-truths. They are speaking only of the immediate effect of a proposed policy or its effect upon a single group. As far as they go they may often be right. In these cases the answer consists in showing that the proposed policy would also have longer and less desirable effects, or that it could benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The answer consists in supplementing and correcting the half-truth with the other half. But to consider all the chief effects of a proposed course on everybody often requires a long, complicated, and dull chain of reasoning. Most of the audience finds this chain of reasoning difficult to follow and soon becomes bored and inattentive. The bad economists rationalize this intellectual debility and laziness by assuring the audience that it need not even attempt to follow the reasoning or judge it on its merits because it is only "classicism" or "laissez faire" or "capitalist apologetics" or whatever other term of abuse may happen to strike them as effective.

Aliina said, "I really like you, Daddy!"

Well! I had to answer, "I really like you, 'Liina!"

So she raised me, "I love you, Daddy!"

I called, "I love you, 'Liina!"

She laid her cards on the table, "We love each other!"
We had to split the pot.

At least, I think I got my fair share. Did she ask me to do something? I'm sure I did it! What do you need, dear?

Happy Birthday Jon, Denise and Heather!

All those people were in my classroom in, I think, first, fourth and fifth grades. Denise was in the grade ahead, so we had to have a combined class for that to work.

Denise, my cousin, is the oldest, you would think, "obviously," but Jon is a full year older than Heather. I don't know why they let Heather into our class - I suppose, because she could already read, or something - but she fit in just fine. Somehow or other, by fifth grade, we were all part of a clique, along with Bonnie, Tim and, sometimes, Jane.

It's funny, but I don't remember any of us being particularly introverted back in those days. I know I had episodes of wallowing in self-pity, but only a couple.

Ugh! Trying to write in spare moments doesn't work. I'll get back to ya.

A few words on my latest readings

I've been reading the Jack Reacher stories by Lee Child. Action/Mystery stories. Good stuff. Keep ya up all night. Reacher, the almost larger than life hero, is a "liberal" but his sense of justice is spot on and he acts directly, but wisely.

I read Aladdin and the Magic Lamp to Rosie. Quite a bit different from the Disney movie. Sindbad the Sailor was in the same book. It too is quite different from the movie Sinbad the Sailor that I saw in a seedy theater once.

Rosie gave up on Oliver Twist as hopeless. It's certainly not a laugh a minute, like The Pickwick Papers. We also read Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception. Next is Robert Silverberg's Gilgamesh The King. Be gettin' to that in a minute.

Now I'm reading That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, after having read Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra - all on The Probligo's recommendation. Very enlightening stuff: pretty deep theology, delivered entertainingly. Since I'm not done with the last book of the series, I'm still not sure where there's a vision of a utopia that I'd actually want to aim for in them.

And I'm also working on The Betrayal of the American Right, by Murray Rothbard and Freedomnomics, by John Lott. I'll get links for those after I put the kids to bed.

The White Man's Burden

by Rudyard Kipling.

Like it or not, you should know it.

Take up the White man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild --
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden --
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times mad plain.
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden --
The savage wars of peace --
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden --
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper --
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!

Take up the White man's burden --
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard --
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: --
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
"Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden --
Ye dare not stoop to less --
Nor call too loud on freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden --
Have done with childish days --
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Seems to me that, as Kipling presents the matter here, the value gained is insufficient to justify the price paid.

Not to mention the assumption that White Men should be doing these things.

This fellow has other thoughts on the matter.

Well, I ran 18.6 miles yesterday.

I didn't exactly burn up the roads (and trails). Took me 3 hours and 39 minutes. I was stopped by traffic a number of times, I stopped at a convenience store for 5 or so minutes to buy an energy drink (I wonder what the lady thought of me dripping all over the place, or if she got it that it wasn't all rainwater), and a couple times I just needed to stop and reset, I was draggin' my ass so bad.

By the way, 18.6 miles is a full 30K. The important thing was to go the distance. Once again, I ran the first half too fast and couldn't maintain the pace after that. When I checked it out on MapMyRun I found out I had my mental mile-markers in the wrong places.

Ah, well. Same route next weekend, plus another 1.4 miles.

I got this important bit of trivia from ETR

"[T]he largest lake on an island in a lake on an island is Crater Lake on Vulcano Island in Lake Taal on the island of Luzon in the Philippines."

I can't figure out where to put the link to a picture of all that, so I'll put it here.

And, since it's a volcano, it's not unlikely that there may one day be an island in that lake too.

Post #100! I have to celebrate family values.

Here's my daughter as the Grinch:

We're going to have to make sure she pays attention in Sunday School.

She's getting taller:


Finally I caught her twice in a row when she wasn't smiling. She's a very smiley girl. But I'm not going to try to prove it right now. Usually I post a pic of the older girl's dance recital this time of year. Well, I expended all my photographic efforts videoing the thing this year, but here's a picture of the aftermath:


So those are the loves of my life. Minus the gal who isn't interested in being made famous via the Blogosphere.

Here's something I want to remember

The brain and the memory work awesomely fast; they also work best for comparatively short periods of time. The more you can do during that time, the more likely you are to retain it. Time and again, our experience shows that it is not necessarily the people who take the longest over a task who do it best, but those who approach it with energy, enjoyment and a brisk clarity of purpose.

Brain Train: Studying for Success, by Richard Palmer. I'm reading it free on Questia. He's defending speed reading. Hopefully he'll tell me how to do it pretty soon. I don't have all day.

Name That Tune!

A work in progress:

Physiocrats are posers as libertar-EE-ans
Objectivists hate us 'cuz we let in cretins
Conservatives hate us too for the same thing
Liberals think we're all of the Right Wing

Once you get the hang of it, feel free to try to lend a hand.

Have a quote or two from Randolph Bourne:

Under the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, any person knowing about a man’s unlawful detention may apply for a writ ordering the jailer to “have at the Royal Courts of Justice the body of” the prisoner.

Whoops! That's a good quote, but it comes from Habeas Corpus to the Rescue, a rather gripping account of the salvation of a Polish defector to Britain in 1956, by Alexander T. Jordan, British journalist. Emphasis mine.

Here's a paragraph of Bourne's The State:

Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man’s emotions. What it has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.

[Bourne died in the flu pandemic of 1918; he starts talking about WWI in the next paragraph.]

Here is the opening salvo of The War and The Intellectuals:

To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world's people. And the intellectuals are not content with confirming our belligerent posture. They are now complacently asserting that it was they who effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim perceptions of the American democratic masses. A war made deliberately by the intellectuals! A calm moral verdict, arrived at after a penetrating study of inexorable facts! Sluggish masses, too remote from the world-conflict to be stirred, too lacking in intellect to perceive their danger! An alert intellectual class, saving the people in spite of themselves, biding their time with Fabian strategy until the nation could be moved into war without serious resistance! An intellectual class, gently guiding a nation through sheer force of ideas into what the other nations entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist madness! A war free from any taint of self-seeking, a war that will secure the triumph of democracy and internationalize the world! This is the picture which the more self-conscious intellectuals have formed of themselves, and which they are slowly impressing upon a population which is being led no man knows whither by an indubitably intellectualized President. And they are right, in that the war certainly did not spring from either the ideals or the prejudices, from the national ambitions or hysterias, of the American people, however acquiescent the masses prove to be, and however clearly the intellectuals prove their putative intuition.

And, from A War Diary:

The kind of war which we are conducting is an enterprise which the American government does not have to carry on with the hearty cooperation of the American people but only with their acquiescence. And that acquiescence seems sufficient to float an indefinitely protracted war for vague or even largely uncomprehended and unaccepted purposes. Our resources in men and materials are vast enough to organize the war-technique without enlisting more than a fraction of the people's conscious energy. Many men will not like being sucked into the actual fighting organism, but as the war goes on they will be sucked in as individuals and they will yield. There is likely to be no element in the country with the effective will to help them resist. They are not likely to resist of themselves concertedly. They will be licked grudgingly into military shape, and their lack of enthusiasm will in no way unfit them for use in the hecatombs necessary for the military decision upon which Allied political wisdom still apparently insists. It is unlikely that enough men will be taken from the potentially revolting classes seriously to embitter their spirit. Losses in the well-to-do classes will be sustained by a sense of duty and of reputable sacrifice. From the point of view of the worker, it will make little difference whether his work contributes to annihilation overseas or to construction at home. Temporarily, his condition is better if it contributes to the former. We of the middle classes will be progressively poorer than we should otherwise have been. Our lives will be slowly drained by clumsily levied taxes and the robberies of imperfectly controlled private enterprises. But this will not cause us to revolt. There are not likely to be enough hungry stomachs to make a revolution. The materials seem generally absent from the country, and as long as a government wants to use the war-technique in its realization of great ideas, it can count serenely on the human resources of the country, regardless of popular mandate or understanding.

Oh, I forgot to mention that all these links came from Foundation for Economic Education President Sheldon Richman's article Illiberal Means, Illiberal Ends, now also linked in the title bar here. Read that. And when you've finished that, read the Ralph Raico pdf that he links.