Silly Little Country

Hat Tip to PEF

This video is ancient and I may have blogged it but it was lovely to find the Progressive Economics Forum post it. So enjoy. I am more of an Austrian (for personal reasons too!) but it is clearly enjoyable by all!

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:20 PM 0 comments

Class

In the best sense.
Tim Worstall points to it in the Chilean rescue effort.

But that is what “officer class” means and as this story shows us, that elusive quality is to be found in mensch of every nationality, race and class.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 6:05 AM 0 comments

Best Day of TV Ever?

I think so and it is partly because it was so unintentional (and it is not ever).
Seeing the Chilean miners emerge one-by-one every 45 minutes or so has been so satisfying that I have had no urge to switch over to what I would normally watch. I have flipped around among various news stations but they are also all locked on the rescue effort.
Each appearance of a new miner has its new delights; these guys are so tough, and so happy when they emerge, that the pleasure of watching them emerge and re-connect is deeply satisfying. It is hard to fight back tears.
I'm in my early '60s so I have seen a lot of history on television. The Kennedy assassination day was major, as was the railway trip of Bobby Kennedy's body. I was institutionally otherwise engaged on 9/11 so missed much of that coverage until about 3 pm Eastern.
But this last day is unforgettable and delightful in ways none of those events were because:
a) the story is meted out at a really nice rhythm
b) the key players, the miners, are just ordinary working-class Joes
c) nobody is in this game for any reason other than just trying to help someone else
d) the reunifications are just flat out SO delightful.
I can think of many other things - in a poorer world, these guys could never have been rescued - this is the world our aggressive environmentalists want - just let 'em die underground!
Whoever was behind this rescue was really impressive. I liked Steve Sailer's comment this morning

Take your time and do it right.

And throw several approaches at it to see which one pays off first.
I loved the fist-pumping from one of the early emergees, getting the crowd to chant and cheer. Imagine what would have gone in your head after the initial mine collapse; who among them could have thought we above ground would care so much?
I do find this unique in my lifetime and spectacular. Maybe it can teach the rest of Latin America how to run a country.
Perhaps that is hoping far too much.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 4:14 PM 0 comments

The Foreclosure Cock-Up Growing in the US

BNN is Canada's Business News network; on the show 'SquuezePlay' Yves Smith gives an excellent exposition of the questionable procedures behind the wave of suspensions of foreclosures going on right now. This makes the housing market even more of a mess, and clearly delays getting the housing market back to any sort of reasonable state.
You can watch it and learn here.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 6:11 AM 0 comments

It Would be Amazing to be in Chile Today

...as the rescue workers extract the miners from their long underground captivity. I will bet the whole country is glued to TV screens, and they must feel proud of the apparent success of the major effort launched to save their compatriots.
I'm watching it and am delighted! Even the occasional inanity in the coverage cannot reduce the delight in the response as each miner is released to a family member and to thanking the rescue workers.
What a great little species to expend so much in effort and resources to save these guys.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:39 AM 1 comments

The First Day of School is Tough on All my Kids

... especially the one I married.
Having watched in retirement essentially all episodes of all normally syndicated shows, I am now working through more recent efforts.
I had read a lot about 'Modern Family', with so many positive reviews. And I am now watching Season 1 (and will likely watch this second one live, though that would ruin the syndication fun in the future).
It takes a lot of setup, but the first day of school episode was lovely, 6 episodes into the first season.
I bet they have set up a LOT more payoff.

Labels: Modern Family

posted by Alan Adamson @ 2:13 PM 0 comments

Kathy Shaidle Parties

Over the 'progressives' who ain't that so much in one key area.
She brings back amazing memories, and I love the 'Firing Line' discussion; both women are articulate and sensible in my view, and it brought back major memories.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 1:30 PM 0 comments

Nobel Peace Prize

Rarely do I feel 'Hooray', with the typical anti-Americanism of picking the usual suspects. But Hooray!
h/y Tyler Cowen He cites and I simply repeat:

Protection of Private Property. We should establish and protect the right to private property and promote an economic system of free and fair markets. We should do away with government monopolies in commerce and industry and guarantee the freedom to start new enterprises. We should establish a Committee on State-Owned Property, reporting to the national legislature, that will monitor the transfer of state-owned enterprises to private ownership in a fair, competitive, and orderly manner. We should institute a land reform that promotes private ownership of land, guarantees the right to buy and sell land, and allows the true value of private property to be adequately reflected in the market.

Amen!

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:21 AM 1 comments

More on Blondes

Tyler Cowen has the latest on Lithuanians cashing in their chips.
As for me, a staff of short dark-haired Central Europeans would be more of a draw.
I am a bit surprised Westfalians are not exploiting this same feature, but maybe they have more useful things to do.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:17 AM 0 comments

Yarn Bombing - People are so Great

h/t Tim Worstall
Anarchy has its small benefits.

"Kooky and eccentric" is also a good description of Magda Sayeg, the Texas woman credited with starting the yarn bombing movement. Sayeg was managing a clothes shop in 2005 when she was struck by the ugliness of its steel-and-concrete surroundings. Overwhelmed by "a selfish desire to add colour to my world", she knitted her shop a door handle. Then she knitted a sheath for the stop-sign pole across the road. "People got out of their cars and took photos in front of it," she recalls. Seduced by these positive reactions, she began splattering bits of knitting across the world: over parking meters in Brooklyn, over a bus in Mexico, most recently over the gun carried by an 8m-high statue of a soldier in Bali, neutering its violence.

Texas. That fits beautifully, though her reach is worldwide.
And then comes the downfall.

This might explain the increasing desire of councils and art institutions to commission yarn bombers to create official works of art. In August, Belfast was comprehensively yarn bombed at the instigation of Craft Northern Ireland, a government-backed organisation supporting the craft industry. Sayeg has been invited by cities across the US to liven up their public spaces, and O'Farrell is finding it increasingly difficult to separate her guerilla activities from the teaching and charity events she is engaged in as part of her day job, managing the knitting community, Stitch London.

Great! Let's get the David Millers and the "arts institutions" engaged to ruin a perfectly sensible activity.
S^&t.; Oh well, another good idea gone seriously bad.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:05 AM 0 comments

Duesseldorf Flughafen

Tall blonde women everywhere! I have not seen the like since SillyWife and I connected through Schiphol a few years ago.
I wonder what might explain this.
(Disclosure: My preference has long been shorter and somewhat darker-haired women, but it remains impressive.)

posted by Alan Adamson @ 4:30 AM 0 comments

Norm's Beach Boy List

Norm reports on the outcome of his Beach Boy survey.
I did not vote and I feel a bit sheepish. The main reason is that I never took The Beach Boys seriously back in the days. But yes, now that I like Lady Gaga, and then listen to the Wilsons and crew, I realize Wow!!
And of course this was all pop music in my time, especially living in California (woo-hoo - California Girls!). But did I recognize at the time how special and wonderful it was?
No Way!
Did the Central Europeans of the late 18th century realize the magic they were getting from Mozart? To a degree but what degree? Beethoven?
And as Steve Sailer rightly asks, what about Shakespeare?

posted by Alan Adamson @ 2:09 AM 0 comments

One Point to Victor Davis Hanson

He is right in one key area, and I suspect, as a result, many of his others.

Are not those with Spanish surnames per se often considered minorities for university purposes, regardless of national origin, ethnic background, or citizenship?

As a grad student, not at Stanford, but at Berkeley, I took a job as a special tutor, paid for by the state, to minority students in need of help. I wound up with three students, an Asian-American and an African-American, who both needed help. The third student had a Spanish surname; he was the son of the Argentine Ambassador to the US. He needed neither the tutoring nor the subsidy for it. It was absurd.
As Hanson rightly says:

My examples were not cheap, toxic, or despicable, but drawn from my own experience with higher education over some 40 years as both student and professor, in which tragically the university often discriminated against students of all races and heritages by applying fossilized racial categories that have no place in 21st-century America.

He deserves the last word in his defense against some silly bint who writes for the Stanford Daily:

But as a classicist and historian, I do not need lectures from the Stanford Daily about scholarship. As someone with a long familial relationship with Stanford dating back over 65 years, I do not need reminders about Stanford tradition and decorum. As someone who lives at the heart of illegal immigration from Mexico in Selma, California, with a racially diverse extended family, I do not need lectures about campus notions of racial insensitivity.
Just as Hoover is connected with Stanford University, so Stanford University is affiliated as well with the Hoover Institution; each conducts itself with logical argumentation rather than easy invective like “trash.” A university newspaper that so easily casts charges of racism and wishes to silence the views of others is obligated to demonstrate why and how its allegations are true. The Daily did neither.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 1:13 AM 0 comments

Limitless Capacity for Self-Delusion

I reckoned without the limitless capacity for self-delusion of British academe.

Nick Cohen presents a depressing picture of something we also see in Canada, a left once again in love with totalitarians. What makes it depressing is that it even infects my own family.

The London Times found that one cleric who had lectured the UCL Islamic Society was on record as saying of the Jews (inevitably): "They're all the same. They've monopolised everything: the Holocaust, God, money, interest, usury, the world economy, the media, political institutions… they monopolised tyranny and oppression as well." Alongside the racism came the concomitant sexism, homophobia and hatred of the western world. Channel 4, for instance, had caught another visiting imam on camera saying that the testimony of women was worth half that of a man. As for gays, he added: "Do you practise homosexuality with men? Take that homosexual man and throw him off the mountain."
You might have thought that in light of the above, academics would have wanted to protect their students. In particular, they should have wanted to protect Muslim students from going the way of Abdulmutallab.

Well, YOU might have thought that, but I no longer can. The current academic left is shamelessly engaged with the monsters that are Islamists. And not just the academic left - recall that our NDP leader enthusiastically attended a George Galloway presentation a few years ago.

He described how a friend of his, "an eminent scientist", strolled in to take a look at an art exhibition organised by the UCL Islamic Society. "'Was he a believer?' asked an obviously Muslim student. 'No,' replied my friend, 'he didn't believe in any god, as it happened.' 'Then,' the young man confidently informed him, 'we shall have to execute you.' My friend laughed it off after lodging a mild complaint. It could, of course, have been Abdulmutallab who made the threat."
I am willing to bet that the laughter of the eminent scientist was of the tinny and nervous variety. I will wager further that equally tinny and nervous laughs are being heard on campuses across Britain.

Moral cowards and slime everwhere.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 1:04 AM 1 comments

Puckish Germans Back at Puckishness!

In my hotel parking lot, Paderborn suburb of Schloss Neuhaus.

In the front yard of a house in the Paderborn suburb of Schloss Neuhaus.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 12:34 PM 0 comments

Reasons for the Blog Name - David Chen Version - documentation of nonsense

I will outsource this documentation of nonsense to Kelly McPartland.

For those of you not familiar with the case, here’s a capsule summary: Chen runs a small grocery store called the Lucky Moose Food Mart in Toronto’s Chinatown. In May 2009 a local thief, who had shoplifted some plants earlier in the day, returned to the store. Chen recognized him, gave chase, and — with some help — bundled him into the back of a van while police were called. Rather than thank him for his civic-mindedness, the cops charged Chen with assault and unlawful confinement while the thief got a reduced sentence after agreeing to testify against him.

The thief cuts a deal against the guy who, in my view, sensibly, trapped the prick.
As Kelly says:

Gee, Ontario justice system, we sure are impressed that you decided to enlist this guy to go after an honest shopkeeper who tried to stop the guy from stealing from him. Boy do we support the idea that David Chen should be made an example of, because otherwise honest people might think they had a right to protect themselves from people like Bennett. And we can’t have that.

This is not just silly; it is shameful. How did we get here?

posted by Alan Adamson @ 3:02 AM 1 comments

This Will Slow My Shopping A Little

At least Campbell's will label their halal-certified Products.

In the coming months, all our Halal-certified products will have the ISNA logo directly on their labels, so you can easily identify them at your grocery store.

Phew! Thanks, Campbell; I am serious. All I have to do is never buy one of their products with the ISNA label.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 11:35 AM 0 comments

Mad Men S04E11

Wow - Don Draper's attempted recovery from his descent sure looks like a dead cat bounce!  And what a loser Roger is!  That is two partners in SCDP.  Lane is away, and Bert simply waxes philosophical.  Lane, the only hope in this descent into hell for the firm, is overseas.  (Probably with bigger problems.)  Only Pete seems halfway sensible.  And as for much of it I liked what Tom and Lorenzo said:

There's a reason the female characters are so strong and well written on this show. It's because the men are all total shits.

Peggy is soaring - and she is back in that great pleated skirt, as well as a nice sort of polka-dot top.
Weiner has a lot to achieve in the last two episodes this season to bring the show back to some good sense, I think. Much of this episode seemed silly to me.
And was Don's "Would you like a bite?" to Megan a reflection of her teeth for the last ten minutes or a reflection of the Dr.'s constant willingness to go out for a meal?
Key point: Don in dead cat bounce a couple of episodes ago. Heading down again.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 2:45 PM 2 comments