The Blue Grotto

No One Sets Out To Be A Smooth Jazz Musician

July 25, 2007

Look, I'm not going to lie to you. Nobody ever just woke up one morning and thought, "Of all the things possible in the vastness that is life, what I'd really like to do is play smooth jazz 250 nights a year." It just doesn't work that way.

It's not something you can plan for—it's all circumstance, I swear: You want to play music for a living. You bust your ass paying your dues in tiny clubs with six people in the audience. You think about all the talented jazz musicians out there who can't make ends meet and you start to worry. The next thing you know, your agent has you filling out forms to legally change your name from Mel Jablonsky to Michael Langello, and it's seeming like a good idea. Then suddenly you're 40 years old and you open up your dresser drawer to find nothing but linen pants.

But it starts so innocently. When you sign up for band in the fifth grade, you're upset to learn that the only instrument left is the alto sax, but you decide to make the best of it. You tell yourself, "This sounds kind of cool, I guess, sort of." What you could never know is that at that moment you have taken the first step down the long path toward a highly lucrative spot in heavy rotation on every smooth jazz radio station in every dentist's office in the country.

So you land a couple gigs at a hotel lobby sitting in for a buddy of yours, just to pay the rent. So what? Then you start picking up hours doing session work because you just found out your wife is pregnant. Big deal. Eventually, you're standing on the deck of some record executive's yacht saying, "I'd like you to meet my very good friend, Chuck Mangione." How did this ever happen? 

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining. Smooth jazz has been very, very, very good to me. But I can't exactly say I spent 80 hours a week practicing at Juilliard only to play watered-down instrumental versions of innocuous pop songs to audiences composed primarily of over-30 middle-class moms and their husbands. On the other hand, it does bring in $6,000 to $14,000 a night, and, no, Juilliard was not free. I mean, honestly, if one day you're just sitting around sipping coffee on your back deck and you get a call from Windham Hill Records, what are you going to do, not take it? There's worse things that could happen.

Obviously, no one ever thought they'd get their chops playing with Miles Davis only so they could one day support Kenny G on the European leg of a world tour, but life is funny that way. Thousands of half-decisions add up over time. Eventually, you grow up a little and give up your dream of an experimental hardcore rock-jazz trio called "Orbit." You realize life is a series of compromises. You think, "Come on, what's wrong with a pleasant blend of jazz and soul that people might enjoy listening to at home, possibly for a night of romance? That never killed nobody."

Then you wake up from a daydream to find yourself sitting on top of a piano on a beach in the Caribbean, wearing a loose-fitting white shirt, with photographers all around you, and you don't have any idea how you got there. For a moment you're terrified, and then it all comes flooding back: the new album, the road trips, the lunch meetings, the Grammy for best children's album. And then, well, then you're just left with yourself.

But the truth is, I'm fine with the fact that 52 years of professional jazz experience boils down to a few secretaries typing a little faster when my song comes on the radio. Really. The one thing I can't get over is when people at my shows yell out requests for "Yah Mo Be There." That's Michael McDonald, for Christ's sake, and I happen to know even he hates that song. It's eating him alive to have to crank that one out night after night. But c'est la vie. You just give the booking agent your direct-deposit routing number, and you soldier on.

I promise you, there was never a single, defining moment when I realized there was a huge market of people out there who only own four records, and convinced myself that, dammit, mine could be one of those four. Why would I? Fact is, I can't think of even one musician currently on the circuit who intentionally chose to go into smooth jazz, except maybe David Sanborn. But even he got to play some rock and free jazz earlier in his career and get it out of his system. 

But like I said, I'm not complaining. Nobody held a gun to my head when I recorded that album with George Benson last year. That was all me. Two and a half hours in the studio turned into a much-needed kitchen renovation and a new Prius. And it makes people happy.

After all, that's what it's all about, isn't it? Right? Isn't it?

Free Markets in a Nutshell

     Here's a good excerpt from a July 18th Walt Williams column:

"First, let's establish a working definition of free markets; it's really simple. Free markets are simply millions upon millions of individual decision-makers, engaged in peaceable, voluntary exchange pursuing what they see in their best interests. People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What's more, they believe they've been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others. . . .

Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people's plans by the powerful elite. For example, I might plan to purchase a car, a shirt or apples from a foreign producer because I see it in my best interest. The powerful elite might supersede my plan, through import tariffs and quotas, because they think I should make the purchases from a domestic producer."

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How About This Baby Moose?

"Bad Ideas Have Consequences" Series (Minimum Wage Subcategory)

Minimum Wage, Jobless Kids

July 3, 2007  (Wall Street Journal)

Congress recently raised the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour by 2009, in the name of helping low-income families escape poverty. But a sobering new report from the New York City-based Center for an Urban Future shows how minimum-wage laws are already hurting the unskilled and inexperienced.

The "Summer Help" study assesses New York City's publicly funded Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), which each year matches tens of thousands of young people between the ages of 14 and 21 with employers ranging from the local library to investment banks. New York's teen employment rate is 16.9%, the lowest of any big city and half of the 34.6% national average. The program provides these young people with a valuable introduction to the labor market, not to mention some spending money and less idle time to make mischief.

Today, however, the New York program serves 20% fewer young adults than it did in 1999, and last year it turned away 30,000 mostly black and Latino applicants. The report cites minimum wage-increases in the Empire State -- one of 30 states that mandates a minimum higher than the federal floor -- as a factor in the program's decline.

"The higher state minimum wage that went into effect in 2005," writes author David Jason Fischer, "added to the challenge of funding SYEP by increasing the cost per participant, making it difficult to keep SYEP enrollment levels the same without year-over-year budget increases or additional administrative cuts." New York's minimum wage increased once again this year to $7.15 from $6.75, adding another $3.5 million in costs.

The harm from minimum-wage laws is well-documented, and even government job programs aren't immune. As an antipoverty measure, these laws are inefficient because most people who are poor already earn more than the minimum, and most who do earn the minimum aren't living in poverty. They are retirees, homemakers, part-time workers, and teenagers in the Big Apple -- fewer of whom will have summer jobs in the future thanks to the higher minimum wage.

"Good Boy!" Pic of the Day

     Here's a remarkably good boy.  He's staying alert so he can assist his master to the best of his ability!

Is the Goal to Get More Tax Revenue from the Rich, or to Punish Them?

     Here's the latest column for the "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts" file.  It exposes not only the incredibly stupid zero-sum thinking of the Left, but also its obsession with punishing the success of the successful over maximizing prosperity.

     Read the part about the Mellon tax cuts of the 1920s and then tell me you're for higher marginal tax rates.  Then I'll ask you how you're enjoying whatever you're smoking.   

     Here's a photo of your average Liberal comtemplating tax policy (my apologies to Bob Marley, by far my favorite musical artist):

Wanna Raise Taxes on the Rich?

Reduce the marginal tax burden on success

By John Tamny

In an excellent column featuring just a few of the many silly predictions made by mainstream economic thinkers of days past, Forbes’s Rich Karlgaard noted the back-cover description of MIT economist Lester Thurow’s 1980 book, The Zero-Sum Society: “the American economy will not solve its most trenchant problems — inflation, slow economic growth, the environment — until the political economy can support, in theory and in practice, the idea that certain members of society will have to bear the brunt of taxation and other government-sponsored economic actions.”

Just as the U.S. was about to begin an almost uninterrupted economic expansion that continues to this day, by way of marginal tax cuts that stimulated the growth that licked inflation, Thurow proposed an economic plan that would have set growth back, reduced money demand, and made environmental projects less pressing (as they would have been difficult to introduce amidst sub-par growth). However, while his assumptions were proven wildly incorrect, economic history in a strange way has proven him right for the wrong reasons.

What Thurow misunderstood was a basic truth showing that the best way to raise taxes on the rich, or to get the rich to foot more of the federal government’s spending, is to reduce the marginal tax burden on their success. In short, you raise taxes by cutting the marginal rate of taxation, not by increasing it.

Ahead of the Mellon tax cuts of the 1920s, a New York Times editorial put it this way: Treasury Secretary Mellon “wants in reality to get more money out of [the rich] than they are now paying. But he proposes to do it by making their rate of taxation lower.”

The next few years greatly vindicated the assumptions made by the editorialists at the New York Times. While the percentage of federal taxes paid by earners in the $100,000-plus category was 28 percent in 1921, by 1928, when the top rate was 25 percent, the $100,000-and-over earners accounted for 61 percent of all federal tax receipts.  Conversely, those who earned $10,000 and less saw their share of the federal tax burden decline from 22.5 percent to 4.5 percent. As the late Warren Brookes pointed out, the Mellon tax cuts that set the stage for the Roaring ’20s were “the most ‘progressive’ in history.”

Moving to the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson pushed through tax cuts proposed by President Kennedy that lowered the top tax burden from 90 to 70 percent. Walter Heller (chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under Kennedy) later admitted that the lower rate on top-earners similarly proved progressive when it came to the “rich” increasing their contribution to federal revenues.

When Thurow’s book debuted, the top tax rate was 70 percent and the top 1 percent of earners delivered 15 percent of federal revenues. Fast forward twenty-seven years: With the top rate at 35 percent, the top 1 percent provide 34 percent of federal income-tax receipts.

The simple reality behind wealth creation is that it occurs when society’s most productive members are left to innovate as freely as possible from governmental roadblocks to growth. With tax rates well down from their 20th century highs, there are far greater incentives today to attempt new ideas that lead to new products and higher paying jobs. On the inflation front, products and jobs, at the core, are money demand — which means growth-stimulating tax cuts are the single best antidote to inflationary pressures.

Thurow, alas, was wrong all over. However, he should be given his due for noting that improvements to society will only occur in an economic environment where the “rich” are paying far more than their fair share. It simply comes down to how they pay it. For one, high incomes rarely reveal themselves when the penalty for doing so is excessive expropriation. And the idea of increasing the tax revenues supplied by America’s rich is incomplete absent the basic understanding that marginal tax cuts are the best way of achieving this goal.

— John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets.

Oscar the Cat

     Thanks to Alana for submitting this excellent AP Newswire story to the Grotto.  I just hope Oscar isn't standing at the foot of my bed anytime soon.

     My favorite excerpt:  "Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof."

     Here's Oscar:

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Oscar the Cat Predicts Patients' Deaths

By RAY HENRY, Associated Press Writer

Thu Jul 26

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," said Dr. David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," said Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.

The 2-year-old feline was adopted as a kitten and grew up in a third-floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The facility treats people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and other illnesses.

After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.

Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," he said.

Oscar is better at predicting death than the people who work there, said Dr. Joan Teno of Brown University, who treats patients at the nursing home and is an expert on care for the terminally ill

She was convinced of Oscar's talent when he made his 13th correct call. While observing one patient, Teno said she noticed the woman wasn't eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish tinge, signs that often mean death is near.

Oscar wouldn't stay inside the room though, so Teno thought his streak was broken. Instead, it turned out the doctor's prediction was roughly 10 hours too early. Sure enough, during the patient's final two hours, nurses told Teno that Oscar joined the woman at her bedside.

Doctors say most of the people who get a visit from the sweet-faced, gray-and-white cat are so ill they probably don't know he's there, so patients aren't aware he's a harbinger of death. Most families are grateful for the advanced warning, although one wanted Oscar out of the room while a family member died. When Oscar is put outside, he paces and meows his displeasure.

No one's certain if Oscar's behavior is scientifically significant or points to a cause. Teno wonders if the cat notices telltale scents or reads something into the behavior of the nurses who raised him.

Nicholas Dodman, who directs an animal behavioral clinic at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and has read Dosa's article, said the only way to know is to carefully document how Oscar divides his time between the living and dying.

If Oscar really is a furry grim reaper, it's also possible his behavior could be driven by self-centered pleasures like a heated blanket placed on a dying person, Dodman said.

Nursing home staffers aren't concerned with explaining Oscar, so long as he gives families a better chance at saying goodbye to the dying.

Oscar recently received a wall plaque publicly commending his "compassionate hospice care."

Oops. . .

Condoleezza Rice Drives Halfway To Airport Before Realizing She Forgot Interpreter

March 6, 2007

WASHINGTON, DC—Just 15 minutes away from Dulles International Airport yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reportedly shouted to herself, muttered an expletive under her breath, and made a sharp U-turn across four lanes of highway when she realized she had left her interpreter at home, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte confirmed.

"Secretary Rice has had a lot on her mind recently, and even though she left her interpreter out in an obvious place the night before her important visit to the Mideast, well, sometimes these things happen," said Negroponte, who claimed that frustrating mistakes occur among high-ranking officials more than one would think. "Good thing her toll-booth collector had a thick Pakistani accent."

Rice, reportedly driving at speeds exceeding 100 mph, called an assistant when she was 10 minutes away from her house and ordered him to have the interpreter ready as soon as she pulled into the driveway.

New Yorker Cartoon of the Day

Egalitarian Hand-Wringing (for the "Politics of Envy" File)

     Here's a good column by Arthur Brooks (you'll remember him as the guy who wrote the book people were talking about last Christmas that showed through extensive research how much more conservatives give to charity than liberals). 

     It addresses the Left's obsession with equality of outcome over equality of opportunity.  He even trots out research showing that a majority of people would rather make $50,000 a year against their neighbor's $25,000 than make $100,000 while others make $200,000. 

     Democratic candidates and Liberal income-redistribution enthusiasts have obviously read this research, too.

    All that aside, his point is that a world in which there's no hope for absolute advancement is the one in which people are more concerned with their relative wealth, and that economic mobility, not equality, can be connected to happiness.

     Here's an appropriate photo:

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The Left's "Inequality" Obsession

By Arthur C. Brooks

July 19, 2007 (Wall Street Journal)

The U.S. is a rich nation getting richer. According to Census figures, the average inflation-adjusted income in the top quintile of American earners increased 22% between 1993 and 2003. Incomes in the middle quintile rose 17% on average, while the incomes in the bottom quintile increased 13%. Over the 30 years prior to 2003, top-quintile earners saw their real incomes increase by two-thirds, versus a quarter for those in the middle quintile and a fifth among the bottom earners.

Reason to celebrate? Not according to those worried that the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer. The National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey (GSS) indicates that in 1973, the average family in the top quintile earned about 10 times what the average bottom-quintile family earned. Today that difference has grown to almost 15 times greater. Thus Sen. Barack Obama complains that "the average CEO now earns more in one day than an average worker earns in an entire year." John Edwards has famously spoken of the "two Americas," while Sen. Hillary Clinton characterizes today's economy as "trickle-down economics without the trickle." She declares that a progressive era is at hand because of "rising inequality and rising pessimism in our work force."

The general view among liberals is that economic inequality is socially undesirable because it makes people miserable; they propose to solve the problem through redistributive policies such as higher income taxes. As a scholar working in the field of public policy, I have long witnessed egalitarian hand-wringing about the alleged connection between inequality and unhappiness. What first made me doubt this prevailing view was that when I questioned actual human beings about it, few expressed any shock and outrage at the enormous incomes of software moguls and CEOs. They tended rather to hope that their kids might become the next Bill Gates.

And in fact, the evidence reveals that it is not economic inequality that frustrates Americans. Rather, it is a perceived lack of opportunity. To focus our policies on inequality, instead of opportunity, is to make a serious error -- one that will worsen the very problem we seek to solve and make us generally unhappier.

The egalitarian argument against inequality starts with the claim that income is all relative: Above a basic subsistence level, they say, we care more about our financial position relative to others than about our absolute income. Experimental studies are often cited that appear to bear this idea out.

In one such study, two-thirds of subjects said that they would be happier at a company where they earned $33,000 while their colleagues earned $30,000 than at one where they earned $35,000 while their colleagues earned $38,000. In another experiment, 56% of participants chose a hypothetical job paying $50,000 per year while everyone else earned $25,000, rather than a job paying $100,000 per year while others made $200,000. Thus, the thinking goes, the very fact that some people have less than others leads to unhappiness, even without deprivation.

Moreover, the redistribution of income taxed at higher and higher levels, according to egalitarians, does not really hurt the rich, because they tend to use their "excess" incomes to purchase what they do not "need," such as luxury cars and outlandishly large houses. Some go even further, arguing that we should tax the economically successful explicitly to discourage them from working, since their work will only make them richer and thus sadden the less successful. Says British economist Richard Layard, "If we make taxes commensurate to the damage that an individual does to others when he earns more" -- the damage to others' happiness, that is -- "then he will only work harder if there is a true net benefit to society as a whole. It is efficient to discourage work effort that makes society worse off."

But the egalitarians misinterpret the experimental evidence. The studies cited above don't necessarily tell us that people would be happier in a world of total equality. Rather, they indicate that if there is no apparent prospect for getting ahead themselves (as there indeed was not in the experiment), people will focus instead on having more than others -- even to the point of neglecting their financial interests.

There is a fundamental reason to doubt the link between economic inequality and unhappiness. If the egalitarians are right, then average happiness levels should be falling. They aren't.

The GSS shows that in 1972, 30% of the population said that they were "very happy" with their lives; in 1982, 31%; in 1993, 32%; and in 2004, 31%. In other words, no significant change in reported happiness occurred -- even as income inequality has increased significantly.

The data do tell us that economic mobility -- not equality -- is associated with happiness. The GSS asked respondents, "The way things are in America, people like me and my family have a good chance of improving our standard of living -- do you agree or disagree?" The two-thirds of the population who agreed were 44% more likely than the others to say they were "very happy," 40% less likely to say that they felt "no good at all" at times, and 20% less likely to say that they felt like failures. In other words, those who don't believe in economic mobility -- for themselves or for others -- are not as happy as those who do.

Perhaps in a world where there is no opportunity for advancement, an important concern is how one's income measures up to others. In the real world where people believe there is opportunity, however, one's own income potential matters a great deal more than what others are earning. Some studies even find that the happiness of workers rises as the incomes of others climb relative to their own, because they see the incomes of others as evidence of what they themselves can achieve.

Believing in mobility, then, helps make people happy. Is this belief a delusion? Does economic mobility actually exist in America today? It does.

The U.S. Census Bureau, the Urban Institute and the Federal Reserve have all pointed out that, as a general rule, about a fifth of the people in the lowest income quintile will climb to a higher quintile within a year, and that about half will rise within a decade. True, a significant proportion of people will fall over the same period. But the studies nevertheless put paid to the claim that economic mobility is in any way unusual. Millions and millions of poor Americans climb out of the ranks of poverty every year.

Those who don't rise will probably not become happier if we redistribute more income. Indeed, the effect may be just the opposite. Redistributionist policies tend to reduce incentives to create wealth, which means less economic growth and fewer jobs, and less charitable giving -- all to the detriment of those lower on the income scale. But more important, redistribution can, as the American welfare system has shown, turn beneficiaries into demoralized long-term dependents.

An accurate and constructive vision of America sees a land of both inequality and opportunity, in which hard work and perseverance are the keys to jumping from the ranks of the have-nots to those of the haves. This vision promotes policies focused not on wiping out economic inequality, but rather on enhancing economic mobility. These policies include improving educational opportunities, addressing cultural impediments to success, enhancing the fluidity of labor markets, searching for ways to include all citizens in America's investing revolution, and protecting the climate for entrepreneurship.

To focus our policies on opportunity, instead of equality, will address Americans' real concern, and make us happier to boot.

Mr. Brooks is a professor of public administration at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Administration and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted from a forthcoming article in City Journal.

Word of the Day: Lubricious

Lubricious

Pronunciation:  \lü-ˈbri-shəs\

Variant(s):  or lu·bri·cous \ˈlü-bri-kəs\

Function:  adjective

Etymology:  Medieval Latin lubricus, from Latin, slippery, easily led astray

Date:  1535

1: marked by wantonness : lecherous; also : salacious

2[Latin lubricus] : having a smooth or slippery quality <a lubricious skin>

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     "Mr. Turveydrop’s lubricious manner resulted in a loss of confidence on the part of the entire committee. They thought him oily, really."

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     Jeff Goldblum in Igby Goes Down is a good example of a super-lubricious movie character:

Freedom and Prosperity: Nothing To Do with Bureaucrats Managing Society. . .

Part I: To Kick Off Terry and Monique's Dazzling Wedding in East Hampton Last Weekend, the Browns Hosted a Spectacular Rehearsal Dinner.

Rehearsing with great focus:

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The gals looking relaxed but elegant:

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This looks like some sort of catalog shoot:

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Terry with the babes:

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Coleman looking lost:

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Lindsey, Todd, and Todd:

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Todd rehearsing:

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Lisa, Pen, Susan, and Nick:

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The Churches (the David and Victoria Beckham of Southampton):

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The Sweets with newest Sweet, Graham:

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The Wagners pose for a rare photo:

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Drew, Coleman, and Freddy discussing their favorite romantic comedies:

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Lindsey and Joanie talking about Fred and Drew:

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Penny and Mary Beth:

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M.B., Me, Pen, and Melissa:

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Lisa, Me, and Penny:

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Posing with mother of the groom Janet:

Part II: The Day of the Wedding, The Russells Hosted a Postcard-Perfect Beach Day by Their House.

Monique, the beautiful and stylish bride:

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Mo and Terry in front of the Russells' house in East Hampton, home of the giant hedge:

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Freddy, Mo, Terry, and Lindsey:

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Lindsey, Lisa, and Terry:

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Freddy:

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Patrick and Esme:

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Lytle and Seitz:

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Allison and Drew:

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Johnnie and Penny:

 

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The Lytles with Terry and Kopp:

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Penny and Shawn:

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Drew and Joanie:

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L.T. and Pen:

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Penny with the Chairman of the Blue Grotto Editorial Board:

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L.T., Alex, and Lindsey:

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Self with L.T.:

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Christopher, Buck, and Jen:

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Where the beautiful people hang out:

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Long-distance paparazzi shot:

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Penny, Me, Terry, and Letti:

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Freddy, Lindsey, and L.T.:

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Buck and Pen walking back from a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue shoot:

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Luke (aka Pukas McLoser), Josh, and Buck:

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The bride and groom approaching the water:

Part III: Getting Ready for the Ceremony on the Beach!

Almost ready:

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The groom:

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Lenny, father of the groom!

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Charles, Dr. Jones, and Jay:

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Wags, Ter, and Charles:

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Lenny, Terry, Jimmy, and George:

Part IV: The Reception and Afterparty!

L.T., Joanie, and Drew:

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Merrilee, Kiliaen, and Coleman:

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Sally, Barry, and Charcy:

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Jay, George, and Charles:

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Mo and Terry with the lovely bridesmaids:

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Jay and Coleman:

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Mo with Susan and Stephanie:

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Alana, Matt, and Graham (aka Jim Carrey):

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R., L., and Lorenz:

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Doug, Katie, and Terry:

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Esme and Baker:

 

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Lytle, Pen, and Nick:

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Amo and Coleman hanging out with all their friends:

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Yours Truly and Suz:

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R. and Mary Alice:

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Me, Suz, and Graham:

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Bakes serving as bodyguard to Suz as she acts out Personality #7, Middle Eastern celebrity (with Mary Alice looking on):

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Sally and Charcy:

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Letti and Melissa:

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Josh, Barry, Esme, Bakes, Jay, and ML:

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Suz and Val:

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Falvey clutching his new Man Purse:

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And Wags with his Man Purse:

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Falvey, Lorenz, and Samie:

Here Are a Couple of Pics from My Goddaughter Lila's Christening at St. Andrew's Dune Church in Southampton on Sunday

Proud parents Coleman and Claudia flank Lila and me, and godmother Vanessa is to Claudia's left:

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Lila and me:

Blue Grotto Original Doodle of the Day

     After the excellent long weekend in East Hampton for Terry and Mo's wedding, I eagerly looked forward to last night's yoga class as a way to gently ease back into a healthy lifestyle.  It was a little bit hard to relax and focus on deep breathing after this free-spirited gentleman set up right behind me:

   

Earthquake Sets Japan Back To 2147

July 23, 2007

TOKYO — Japanese government officials confirmed Monday that the damage wrought on Japan's national infrastructure by the July 16th earthquake—particularly on the country's protective force field, quantum teleportation system, zero-point fusion energy broadcasting grid, and psychodynamic communications network—was severe enough to set the technologically advanced island nation back approximately 300 years to a primitive mid-22nd-century state of existence.

"Japan finds itself in crisis, with our society and culture temporarily reverting to a pre-cyberunification era," said Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, communicating non-telekinetically for the first time in his nearly 150 years of post-cryogenic life. "Though many citizens have been limited to algorithm-based emotion detection, neutron baths, speed limits below the speed of light, and other barbaric inconveniences for over a week now, I promise we will pull through."

Enlarge Image  

Officer Hideo Shimura (left) and his cloned selves attempt to free quake victims trapped under rubble.

Abe rejected persistent calls to simply reboot the damaged nation, saying that such a measure could result in the loss of vital data, such as Niigata Prefecture and sections of Mount Fuji.

The quake, which was centered in the bluefin tuna–cloning fields near the northwest city of Kashiwazaki, measured bb460.c22/k, or the rough equivalent of 6.8 on the less sophisticated Western Richter scale. It resulted in the first confirmed human or human-hybrid fatality in Japan in over 60 years, and more than 700 injuries. Citizens' protective exoskeletons reportedly remained operational through the first wave of seismic activity and three of the four aftershocks. According to first responders, injured exoskeletons were hastily repaired with antiquated third-generation nanotechnology, while subatomic robots were released into the bloodstream to fix any irregularity they could recognize.

"The earthquake destroyed our connection with the Trinity Flow, the frequency that harmonizes the...you would say, I think, 'computer'?...with the daemonetic implants in our citizens' overbrains," scientist Hiroshi Ishiguro-Prime of the TechnoDiet told Western reporters.

Teleportation of food and water remains at a standstill as technicians in Kobe continue to fix the extensive damage to the eight-million-yottabyte mainframe computer, a four-by-three-inch quantum femtoprocessor responsible for accessing and fulfilling the thoughts and desires of all Japanese.

Enlarge Image  

Quake victims wander the streets in search of synthetic water and a neural implant charging station.

The United States' offer of $20 million and a shipment of steel, tractors, forklifts, and cranes was politely declined.

The prime minister said that the greatest effort would be exerted on rebuilding the Procross Buster Quasigravitic Lensing Frame, the motive force behind Japan's automated network of roads, aerobuildings, and levitation canals. The total cost of the project, the prime minister speculated, is somewhere in the ë70 trillion range, a majority of which will be underwritten by Nippon Tertius, a transubsidiary civilization in the Haltropic galaxy.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people throughout Japan continue to live in desperate circumstances. Those whose metahabitats were destroyed in the quake are being issued replacements, though citizens are expected to grow them themselves. Kyoto resident Aiko Shunji criticized the homes' reconfiguring walls and blink-controlled climate as "relics of the past" that are "barely suitable for humans, let alone for members of Japan's Glorious and Peaceful Ninth Recension."

"The older generations can talk all they want about the virtues of eating meals in pill form and taking the moving sidewalk instead of the wormhole, but this is just plain deprivation, and it sucks," Shunji, 92, said. "It doesn't help that recovery efforts have been so slow. Why is it taking so long for officials to reconnect something as basic as the Neural Net?"

Abe reassured citizens that the disaster was merely a temporary setback.

"It should only be a matter of days before the Asahi Ultima Crisis chronotriggered reversion engine is once more online," Abe said. "Citizens of Japan, I promise you: Once our folded-space-time technology is again functional, this whole earthquake will never have happened."

New Yorker Cartoon of the Day

How Many of the Eighth-Graders You Know Would Ace This Exam?

     If you've ever read The Blue Grotto, you are well aware that nothing makes the Editor want to hold his own head underwater until his body goes completely limp like the touchy-feely trend in education that believes that if we coddle schoolchildren, let them set their own educational agenda based upon what gives them the most near term satisfaction, and never, ever put them in a situation where the stresses and struggles of competing academically (or athletically for that matter) might possibly dent their fragile self esteem. 

     When you read the statistics on the percentages of Americans know who the vice president is or who can name even a handful of the state capitals, it should make you want to laugh and then immediately cry.  When these idiots emerge from the warm and fuzzy Feel-Good Bubble and enter the real world, their lives will be turned upside down and they'll all have to end up working at McDonald's.

     Here's an 1895 eighth grade final exam from the public school in Salina, Kansas.  It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina , KS, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.  The kids were given five hours to complete the exam.

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8th GRADE FINAL EXAM

Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.

2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no Modifications.

3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.

4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of lie, lay and run

5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.

6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.

7. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.

2. A wagon box is 2 ft deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?

3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs ., what is it worth at 50 cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?

4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000 What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?

5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.

6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent

7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per meter?

8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.

9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?

10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U. S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

1. Give the epochs into which U. S. History is divided.

2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.

3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.

4. Show the territorial growth of the United States .

5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas .

6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.

7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?

8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour)

1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, and syllabication?

2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?

3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, sub vocals, diphthong, cognate letters, and linguals?

4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.

5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.

6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.

7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup

8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.

9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.

10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)

1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?

2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?

3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?

4. Describe the mountains of North America.

5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia , Odessa, Denver, Manitoba , Hecla, Yukon, St.Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall & Orinoco.

6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.

7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.

8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?

9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.

10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

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Off to East Hampton This Weekend for the Wedding of Terry and Monique:

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New Yorkeer Cartoon of the Day

Dog Quote / Pic of the Day!

"When the man waked up he said,

What is Wild Dog doing here?

And the woman said,

His name is not Wild Dog anymore,

but the First Friend,

because he will be our friend

for always and always and always."

Rudyard Kipling

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     Here's a picture of the great statue of Balto in Central Park:

Sculptor: Frederick George Richard Roth
1872-1944 • USA

Balto, a favorite statue of children in Central
Park has one of the most facinating stories.
In January 1925 Nome, Alaska had a
terrible outbreak of diphtheria. The only
source of anti-toxin serum was Anchorage
which was 1000 miles away. Ice bound,
the city was effectively cut off from the
precious medication.
A train from Anchorage was able to reach
the city of Nenana which was still 667
miles away from Nome.
The only way to deliver the serum was
over the treacherous ice bound tundra
and the only means to this end was with
a musher and a dogsled team.
In blizzard conditions 20 teams with over
200 dogs traveled along the Iditarod mail
route in minus 50 degree temperatures
at roughly 6 miles an hour.
The world followed the events of this trek
to Nome over their radios and in newspaper
accounts.
It was, however, the last musher, Gunnar
Kasson and his lead dog Balto, a black and
white Alaskan malamute who captured the
world's imagination by racing onward to
the stricken city in a record breaking
five days and seven hours.
Just a few days after the arrival of the
serum the epidemic that claimed five lives
was over. This was a gift of life to the 300
people who were exposed to the disease.
Located next to the Willowdell Arch and
mounted on top of a small rock outcropping,
this harnessed dog with a panting tongue
appeals to children who love to climb up
and sit on his back while their parents take
their photos. Years of stroking and caressing
have created a glowing sheen on his ears,
nose, body and tail. A bas-relief plaque on
the stone below shows the seven sled dogs
on their historic run with the inscribed
words “Endurance Fidelity Intelligence.”

Lost Gondolier in Middle of Adriatic Sea

More Amazing Julian Beever Sidewalk Art!

     Thanks to Grotto friend Ian G. for these!

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Everything's fake, including the hose and water!

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"The Dogs of Resentment"

     I guess I'd be as sour, crabby, jittery and unhappy as most liberals if I had been hoodwinked into buying into an outlook as off the mark as the "zero-sum" view of the world.

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Zero-Sum Fallacies

Rich Karlgaard - 7/23/07 (from Forbes.com)

The mood in America regarding stocks and the econ-omy turned palpably sour this summer. Blackstone's IPO let loose the dogs of resentment. Republicans and Democrats raced to the nearest microphone to express outrage. Chuck Grassley (R--Iowa) accused Blackstone of "screwing the middle-income taxpayer" because the firm paid the capital gains tax rate on sweat-equity profits, as entitled by the federal tax code. What's new about that? Every private equity and venture capital firm in the U.S. has paid that rate since 1978, when it was lowered from 49% to 28%.

That's why the rate was lowered, Chuck! To stimulate innovation!

Has private money screwed America? Not at all. During the 1979--2007 period risk capital flowed into virgin fields and America recovered its entrepreneurial chops. Think of Apple, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, Cisco, Palm, Yahoo and Google. All started little and have grown mighty. All were backed by private money, "screwing the middle-income taxpayer."

I wish Senator Grassley would give it a rest. He won't, of course. Politicians can't help themselves. They live in a world defined by limits. There is only one President and 100 senators and 435 congressmen. One blowhard's win is another blowhard's loss in the lowlands east of the Potomac. Thus Blackstone's rewards, according to Grassley, can only hurt the rest of us. In late June Congressman Sander Levin (D--Mich.) took the zero-sum fallacy further when he introduced a bill that would end the 15% cap gains tax preference for most private partnerships: private equity, hedge funds, venture capital firms, real estate partnerships and oil and gas deals.

Wrong Then, Wrong Now

Politicians aren't the only ones with flattened vision. At the dawn of the U.S. economic boom in 1980 MIT economist Lester C. Thurow looked backward into the dark night. He called his sad new book The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic Change. Here is a description on Amazon:

"Interpreting macroeconomics as a zero-sum game, Thurow proposes that the American economy will not solve its most trenchant problems--inflation, slow economic growth, the environment--until the political economy can support, in theory and in practice, the idea that certain members of society will have to bear the brunt of taxation and other government-sponsored economic actions."

That yawner of a 58-word sentence gives you the flavor of the book. Nevertheless, the famed Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith called Zero-Sum Society "an extraordinarily good and lucid examination of current economic difficulties." Galbraith was wrong about prose and prophecy. It was a horrible book and a crimped way of looking at economics and the human spirit. President Ronald Reagan neglected to read it. One assumes the founders and backers of Apple, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, Cisco, Palm, Yahoo and Google passed on it, too.

Zero-sum implies no net progress in human affairs. The facts scream otherwise. Global production in 2006 amounted to $66 trillion, or $10,200 per person. Two hundred years ago per capita income was about $300. Five thousand years ago it was equivalent to $200. For the mass of mankind there was no detectable economic progress for 4,800 years. Then came the Industrial Revolution with its hockey-stick curve in income and life span.

Yet the zero-sum myth lives on. Like a retrovirus it burrows and hides and waits. In 1968 it popped up in the form of a bestselling book by Paul R. Ehrlich entitled The Population Bomb. As investor Gary Alexander recounted in a recent speech: "[Ehrlich] opened famously by saying, 'The battle to feed [all of] humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.' Writing in Ramparts magazine, Ehrlich went even further, 'Millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles … the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979 … the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980, due to cancer epidemics.' Hepatitis and dysentery would sweep America by 1980 and nearly all of us would wear gas masks. Over 65 million Americans would starve in the 1980s, leaving only 22.6 million starved Americans alive in 1990."

Then, to Ehrlich's apparent dismay, the inventive human spirit intervened.

While Ehrlich was gnashing his teeth, Alexander writes, "Dr. Norman Borlaug was launching the Green Revolution, which has managed to feed billions more people on moderately more arable soil than in the 1960s. Instead of starving against our will, millions of us are trying to starve voluntarily--by dieting. Food is far cheaper, relative to the overall growth of the cost of living, than in the 1960s. From 1977 to 1994 food costs fell 77% in real terms."

Undeniable progress. Yet the zero-sum virus lives! You can find it today lurking inside these political canards: Energy is running out. Earth is burning up. Immigrants take American jobs. Imports wreck American industries. Taxes must go up to balance the budget. Americans spend too much on health care. Nor is corporate management immune to zero-sum thinking. Consider these oft-heard sayings: Our market is mature. We'll have to add services to boost margin. We'll have to merge with Company X to grow revenue. Let's build a patent wall. Let's sue, sue, sue.

What do you think? Send your favorite zero-sum fallacies to [email protected].

Read Rich Karlgaard's daily blog at http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules or visit his home page at www.karlgaard.com

John Edwards Vows To End All Bad Things By 2011

July 16, 2007

AMES, IA — In an effort to jump-start a presidential campaign that still has not broken into the top Democratic tier, former Sen. John Edwards made his most ambitious policy announcement yet at a campaign event in Iowa Monday: a promise to eliminate all unpleasant, disagreeable, or otherwise bad things from all aspects of American life by the end of his second year in office.

Enlarge Image  

In Iowa, Edwards speaks with conviction about his lifelong distaste for bad things.

"Many bad things are not just bad—they're terrible," said a beaming Edwards, whose "Only the Good Things" proposal builds upon previous efforts to end poverty, outlaw startlingly loud noises, and offer tax breaks to those who smile frequently. "Other candidates have plans that would reduce some of the bad things, but I want all of them gone completely."

According to Edwards, his plan is composed of three steps. Everyday bad things, such as curse words and splinters, would be eradicated during his first six months in office. Next, very bad things, including child abduction, soil erosion, and resurgent diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, would be ended by the the end of 2009. Finally, extremely bad things—plights such as genocide, species extinction, and virtually every form of cancer—would take a full two years to wipe out.

"Racism will soon be a thing of the past," Edwards said. "Same goes for being picked last for playground athletics, AIDS, robbery, not having enough spending money, and murder. Because these things are bad and not good, I promise they will be eliminated."

Other bad things the 2004 vice-presidential nominee vowed to end include the housing crisis, skinned knees, frowns, steep staircases, jailbreaks, water that is too cold to swim in, pain, traffic, being tired in the morning, sprained ankles, hunger, not having enough energy at night, teen pregnancy, cases of the blahs, thunder, the high cost of admission to events, type 2 diabetes, games of tic-tac-toe with no clear winner, the lack of parking in urban areas, forgetting birthdays, child prostitution, and confusion.

"Imagine a world free of procrastination, class disparity, and itchiness," Edwards said. "It will only be possible if we try."

Edwards told the gathered audience that the second half of his presidential term would be devoted to a $125 billion effort to supplant the abolished bad things with good things, such as flowers, the laughter of children, butterflies, sunny days, financial stability, Skittles, and medicine.

Though some Democrats are applauding the positivity of Edwards' pro-good agenda, critics say that the wealthy former trial lawyer is, at best, paying lip service to the issue.

"This is certainly a step in the right direction, but it's not enough," Daily Kos contributor BitchingPoints wrote hours after Edwards' announcement. "Where in Mr. Edwards' list of bad things does it mention poisonous snakes, nasty red wine stains on rugs, trolls, and noisy neighbors? Edwards has left the door wide open for a rival candidate to outflank him on his own issue by introducing a comprehensive plan that fills these gaping holes."

Republican front-runner Rudolph Giuliani attacked Edwards Tuesday for labeling things as bad when they may actually turn out to be good in the long run.

"Is 'shooting' always a bad thing?" Giuliani said. "I think such a position would undercut not only our soldiers in Iraq, but also law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line every day, not to mention our basic Second Amendment rights."

Added Giuliani: "On a personal note, I rather like cloudy days, and I don't want to live in a world where they don't exist."

Man Calls 911 to Save Him from Police

     Thanks to CFC IV for flagging this priceless report:

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Man Calls 911 to Save Him from Police

Cops had surrounded Fla. resident after they got word of a bar disturbance

The Associated Press

16, 2007

LARGO, Fla. - A 38-year-old man was arrested after he called 911 and told a dispatcher he was surrounded by police officers and needed help, authorities said.

Police officers met Dana Farrell Shelton after being called to investigate a disturbance at a bar on Sunday but had found no problems and told him to move along.

Shelton, who officers said appeared intoxicated, then called 911 to report he was "surrounded by Largo police," according to an arrest affidavit.

"Our officers were standing there scratching their heads. He called, standing there in their presence," Largo Sgt. Melanie Holley said. "It's one of our 'truth is stranger than fiction' cases."

Shelton was charged with misdemeanor misuse of 911. The charge carries maximum penalties of one year in jail and $1,000 in fines.

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

New Yorker Cartoon of the Day (for all of you commuters)

Word of the Day: Pilgarlic

     Thanks to Amo for submitting this excellent word!  I asked both Amo and my father to supply sample sentences, and both delivered!

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Pilgarlic

Pronunciation: pil-'gär-lik
Function: noun
Etymology: pilled garlic
1 a : a bald head b : a bald-headed man
2 : a man looked upon with humorous contempt or mock pity

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Amo's example:  "Howie Mandel is the creepiest of pilgarlics whose success continues to baffle me and whose pointy pate persists in rankling me."

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My father's example:  "Oh yes, we used to see poor, bald Elmer van Tassel every Monday night at the opera. He'd arrive alone, sit alone, pace up and down alone at the intermissions, then leave alone, poor pilgarlic. Such a forlorn figure."

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Howie Mandel, pilgarlic:

Malthusian Blindspot: Humanity's Bottomless Capacity for Innovation

"And both right and left will agree that the rule of law - including fair courts and government transparency - is the single most important contributor to a nation's wealth."

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The Wealth Between Our Ears
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, July 4, 2007

What if humanity disappeared tomorrow?

According to Alan Weisman, author of "The World Without Us," in an interview with Scientific American, nature would reclaim the planet awfully quickly. In the event of an ecumenical rapture or a "12 Monkeys"-style plague, Manhattan's suppressed underground rivers would quickly reclaim the Big Apple's core, mosquitoes would thrive, feral cats would rule the roost, and the Statue of Liberty would wait for an enraged Charlton Heston who, like Godot, would never arrive.

Weisman isn't concerned with what might eradicate humanity; he's just interested in what the world would be like without us. People have long been fascinated by such ideas. There's even an environmental fringe group called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, dedicated to the dream of Earth returned to the pastoral bliss of the noble savage, hold the noble savages.

More typical, however, is the fixation on imagining the world emptied not of everybody but of everybody else. That was the plan of several James Bond villains, countless sci-fi writers and more than a few eugenicists who fantasized about starting from scratch with just a handful of humans.

The seductiveness of such daydreaming stems from a view of humans as a burden rather than a boon. It was the British economist Thomas Malthus more than anyone else who introduced the phobia that humanity reproduced itself at unsustainable rates. That thinking led to such apocalyptic egghead porn as Paul R. Ehrlich's 1968 treatise, "The Population Bomb," in which the biologist predicted that 65 million Americans would die amid global starvation in the 1980s. In case you missed it, that didn't happen.

The blind spot in the Malthusian vision is humanity's bottomless capacity for innovation. The "green revolution," for example, largely eliminated food scarcity.

In other words, our wealth is really all in our heads. Literally.

In the United States, for example, less than a fifth of our wealth exists as material stuff like minerals, crops and factories. In Switzerland, cuckoo clocks, ski chalets, cheese, Rolex watches, timber and every other tangible asset amount to a mere 16 percent of that country's wealth. The rest is captured by the expertise, culture, laws and traditions of the Swiss themselves.

These numbers come from Kirk Hamilton, a World Bank environmental economist and lead author of a new study, "Where is the Wealth of Nations?" (available at worldbank.org). In a fascinating interview in Reason magazine, Hamilton explains how, when measured properly, "natural capital" (croplands, oil, etc.) and "produced capital" (factories, iPods, roads, etc.) are the smallest slices of the economic pie. What Hamilton calls "intangible capital," which includes the rule of law, education and the like, is by far the biggest slice. The entire planet's "natural capital accounts for 5 percent of total wealth, produced capital 18 percent and intangible capital 77 percent.

This makes some intuitive sense. We'd all rather be the man who knows how to fish than the man given a fish. Or think of it this way: The Malthusian thinks only about hardware, when the money is in software and design. China makes America's iPods; America collects the profits.

Also, the richer a country gets, the less it needs to live off its natural resources. Therefore, it becomes cheaper - and more popular - to protect the environment. This has been the trend in Europe and America, and hopefully it will be around the world.

This sea change in economic thinking doesn't cut easily along the left-right political axis, and its implications could be profound. "Root-causes" liberals can find a great deal of satisfaction in the emphasis "Where is the Wealth of Nations?" places on education. According to Hamilton, education explains about 36 percent of a country's intangible wealth. Conservatives can find solace in the importance of property rights and, moreover, in the confirmation that not all cultures are equal - at least when measured on their ability to produce and sustain wealth. And both right and left will agree that the rule of law - including fair courts and government transparency - is the single most important contributor to a nation's wealth.

A potential lesson for the World Bank may be that building roads, dams and factories in the Third World is a fool's errand until those nations have the intangible capital required to maintain such things. The Marshall Plan's success in rebuilding Europe after World War II stemmed not from the U.S. footing the bill for concrete and bulldozers but from the intangible capital locked in the hearts and minds of everyday Europeans.

In an odd way, I think this complements Weisman's depiction of a post-human future. The greatest symbols of our civilization - from skyscrapers to libraries - not only count for a mere fraction of our wealth, they would turn to dust and rubble if we disappeared. The hardware is nothing; the software, everything. All that civilization is and can become exists within us. If we forget that, we forget literally everything.



Copyright © 2006 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

When Fiction Is Stranger than Truth. . . Because It's Not Really Fiction!

     A few months ago I was scanning the New Releases shelves at Borders in the Time Warner Center in New York and this book caught my eye:

     It's an account by a South Africa-based reporter for The Economist about a failed 2004 coup attempt against the corrupt and tyrannical dictatorship of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny West African country rich with offshore oil reserves (I actually remember reading in the newspaper about the planeload of mercenaries being busted on the tarmac in Zimbabwe). 

     The inside flap mentioned that the plotters were inspired by Frederick Forsyth's 1974 bestseller, The Dogs of War, a "fictional" account of a coup against a tiny West African country, orchestrated by a greedy British mining executive and a top-notch mercenary for access to massive platinum deposits:

     I thought I'd better read The Dogs of War first, so I did.  It's an amazing book, but not exactly what you might expect.  It is not an action-packed thriller.  There are only a few pages of action at the very end.  It reads more like a stunningly detailed daily diary or manual on how to orchestrate a coup from soup to nuts.  Every single telegram and meeting dealing with opening bank accounts, setting up dummy corporations, facilitating arms buys and smuggling, and researching military strategy is accounted for in detail in the book.  It's eerie how real it seems.

     Then the penny dropped, and I did a little bit of Googling on Frederick Forsyth.  Seems that he was involved in a failed 1973 coup attempt of the very same Equatorial Guinea.  He apparently sat down afterwards and said to himself, "Well, that didn't work, so I might as well whip off a bestselling piece of 'fiction" and sell that!"

     His book is great.  I would advise you to skip The Wonga Coup, though.  It's a really boring grind, like a series of disappointing newspaper articles that you hope will be exciting but aren't.

     Here's the 2006 Times of London article about the Forsyth connection:

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From The Sunday Times

June 11, 2006

Forsyth: My Real Life Dogs of War Coup

Maurice Chittenden

FREDERICK FORSYTH, the bestselling author, has admitted being involved in a plot to overthrow an African government in a coup almost identical to the storyline of his novel The Dogs Of War.

The writer gave money to mercenaries in an aborted attempt to topple the leader of Equatorial Guinea more than 30 years before Sir Mark Thatcher, son of the former prime minister, was accused of backing a similar plot.

Forsyth, 67, said last week: “I don’t know whether I thought of it first and the mercenaries thought, ‘Wow, what a great idea’, or we were sitting around a table and they mentioned it first.”

The novelist, who also wrote The Day Of The Jackal, posed as a South African arms dealer to attend a meeting of gunrunners in Germany. He fled when his cover was blown.

Forsyth’s role in the aborted coup was first uncovered by The Sunday Times Insight team in 1978 from the diaries of a mercenary who had committed suicide during a siege in east London after he had shot a policeman. But the author denied it.

In The Dogs of War, a British tycoon hires a band of mercenaries to seize control of the fictitious African country of Zangora after the discovery of a £10 billion mountain of platinum. They land from a former naval attack craft called the Albatross and storm the dictator’s palace.

In real life, a soldier of fortune named Alexander Gay, who had fought in Congo and Biafra, chartered the Albatross in 1973 and loaded it with mercenaries to sail to the island of Fernando Po from which Francisco Macias ran Equatorial Guinea as president for life.

The plot was foiled by a Special Branch informant in Gibraltar. The boat and its invasion force were seized by Spanish police in the Canary Islands after a tip-off from the British embassy in Madrid.

“I took part in the plot in as much as I was chewing the fat and shooting the breeze with the others involved,” Forsyth said. “But as far as I was concerned any money I gave was for information and I pulled out before the plan was put into practice.

“Aerial photos of Fernando Po were brought to my flat. But I was not on the boat and did not know it had set sail. Luckily they never reached the island or they would have been slaughtered.”

Forsyth’s role is confirmed in a new book, The Wonga Coup, by Adam Roberts, former Southern Africa correspondent of The Economist, which focuses on the 2004 attempt by mercenaries to seize control of Equatorial Guinea.

While researching his book, Roberts found a previously classified Foreign Office cable in the National Archives that described the 1973 coup attempt.

Recognising the similarity with The Dogs of War, Roberts challenged Forsyth, who told him: “I originally postulated a question to myself. Would it be possible for a group of paid and bought-for mercenaries to topple a republic? I looked around and saw Fernando Po, and every story about the country was gruesome . . . I decided it could be done. If you stormed the palace . . . probably by sunrise you could take over, provided you have a substitute African president and announced it was an internal coup d’état.

“I began to explore the world of black market arms . . . I penetrated under subterfuge, using a South African name, and developed my theme.”

He said last week: “My true identity became known when one of the arms dealers, sitting in the back of his limousine at traffic lights, saw my photograph in a bookstore window in Hamburg promoting the German version of The Jackal.

“Someone called me and advised me to get out of town. I was half-dressed but grabbed my passport, left everything else and jumped on a moving train which dumped me in Amsterdam.”

Enough of the "Immorality" of Scrutinizing the New Deal.

Compelling article, especially the parts about WWII and the Cold War. . .

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The Real Deal

By Amity Shlaes

The Wall Street Journal

June 25, 2007

The late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a true liberal -- a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, "is why we love it so."

Yet concerning Schlesinger's own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something that ought to be postponed for another era -- or so we learned long ago. Indeed, to take a skeptical look at the New Deal as a whole has been considered downright immoral.

 

The real question about the 1930s is not whether it is wrong to scrutinize the New Deal. Rather, the question is why it has taken us all so long. Roosevelt did famously well by one measure, the political poll. He flunked by two other meters that we today know are critically important: the unemployment rate and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt spoke of a primary goal: "to put people to work." Unemployment stood at 20% in 1937, five years into the New Deal. As for the Dow, it did not come back to its 1929 level until the 1950s. International factors and monetary errors cannot entirely account for these abysmal showings.

When I went back to study those years for a book, I realized two things. The first was that the picture we received growing up was distorted in a number of important regards. The second was that the old argument about the immorality of scrutinizing the New Deal was counterproductive.

The premier line in the standard history is that Herbert Hoover was a right-winger whose laissez-faire politics helped convert the 1929 Crash into the Great Depression. But a review of the new president's actions reveals him to be a control freak, an interventionist in spite of himself. Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which worsened a global downturn, even though he had long lived in London and understood better than almost anyone the interconnectedness of markets. He also bullied companies into maintaining high wages and keeping employees on their payrolls when they could ill afford to do so. Perhaps worst of all, he berated the stock market as a speculative sinner even though he knew better. For example, Hoover opposed shorting as a practice, a policy that frightened markets at an especially vulnerable time.

The second standard understanding is that the Brain Trusters were moderate people who drew from American history when they wrote the New Deal. If their philosophies were left wing, then that aspect ought to be treated parenthetically, the attitude was. But the leftishness of the Brain Trust was not parenthetical. It was central.

In the summer of 1927, a group of future New Dealers, mostly junior professors or minor union officials, were received by Stalin for a full six hours when they traveled on a junket to the Soviet Union. Both Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy influenced the New Deal enormously. The Brain Trusters were not, for the most part, fascists or communists. They were thoughtful people who wrote in the New Republic. But their ideas were wrong. Their intense romanticization of the concept of the economy of scale ignored the small man. One of the New Dealers from the old Soviet trip, Rex Tugwell, even created his very own version of Animal Farm in Casa Grande, Ariz. As in the Orwell book, the farmers revolted.

The third familiar story line in the received wisdom about the New Deal is that, while it may not have been perfect, it did inspire the American people and tide them over. Here the emphasis is wrong. Roosevelt's radio voice may have inspired -- yes. But the New Deal hurt the economy, and that mattered more. At some points Roosevelt seemed to understand the need to counter deflation. But his method for doing so generated a whole new set of uncertainties. Roosevelt personally experimented with the currency -- one day, in bed, he raised the gold price by 21 cents. When Henry Morgenthau, who would shortly become Treasury Secretary, asked him why, Roosevelt said that "it's a lucky number, because it's three times seven." Morgenthau wrote later: "If anybody ever knew how we set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would be frightened."

The centerpiece of the New Deal, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), was perverse. The premises of its codes were ones anyone would reject outright today -- the concept that price cutting caused deflation, for example. Everyone, even Roosevelt's own agonized advisers, understood this. The poet Ogden Nash wrote a poem that captured the inanity -- its title was "One from One Leaves Two":

Mumblety-pumbledy my red cow
She's cooperating now
At first she didn't understand
That milk production must be
planned
She didn't understand at first
She had to either plan or burst

A think tank produced a report of 900 pages in 1935 concluding the NRA "on the whole retarded recovery" (that think tank was the Brookings Institution). Some of the great heroes of the period were the Schechter brothers, kosher butchers who fought the NRA all the way to the Supreme Court and won. Their case was not only jurisprudential but also based on common sense -- management from above was killing recovery. The Schechter case is as important to history, as, say, the Gideon case that Anthony Lewis wrote about in his great book about the right to counsel, "Gideon's Trumpet." Where is the "Gideon's Trumpet" for free marketeers?

The fourth rule we learned is that Roosevelt's call to "bold, persistent experimentation" was, on balance, good. But this conviction ignores the cost of uncertainty, as the economic historian Robert Higgs first pointed out. Today we know that unknown unknowns are inherently destabilizing. Roosevelt, a man of impulses, changed policies routinely. He moved from supporting big business to attacking it to supporting it again, many times in his presidency.

On some days, as Anne O'Hare McCormick, a Maureen Dowd of her time, wrote during FDR's second term, Roosevelt was the personification of "the Dutch householder who carefully totes up his accounts every month and who is really annoyed, now that he is bent on balancing the budget, when Congress can't stop spending." Other days he was a big spender.

Uncertainty caused markets to freeze in fear; so did investment -- the old New Yorker cartoons of the plutocrats in the salon were true. Yet Roosevelt counterattacked by compiling lists of the wealthy to prosecute -- his administration prosecuted the Alan Greenspan of the day, Andrew Mellon, until Mellon died. Roosevelt's administration pushed a plan for an undistributed profits tax to eat the essence out of companies. Policies like this caused the most unnecessary part of the Depression: the Depression within the Depression of the late 1930s.

The final line in the traditional story is that Roosevelt's government offices were somehow better than their private sector counterparts -- when it came to utilities, for example, we learned that only the federal government could electrify backward rural areas. This is a false memory, for there was a company that already planned to light up the South, Commonwealth and Southern. David Lilienthal of the Tennessee Valley Authority set out to gut it, and succeeded. But the battle over electric power was also, literally, a power struggle between coequals, not a contest between a good policeman and a sinning company.

The most useful economic philosophy for understanding what went on is not Keynesianism. It is the public choice theory of James Buchanan and others, which says that government is a competitor that will annihilate what comes in its path.

So why has it taken so long to revisit this period? The first reason is that the Great Depression was a disaster. From the Crash to the Dust Bowl and the floods, it all felt like a permanent Katrina, and Americans suspended disbelief. But the reality was that the depression did not mean permanent Katrina -- indeed, we see now that that downturn was the exception in the century, not the rule.

The next reason we hesitate is World War II. War always trumps economics. New Deal critics were right on the economy, but they were wrong in their estimations of Hitler. To write sympathetically about the Liberty Leaguers is seen, even today, as siding with the appeasers. The incredible rightness of FDR's war policy obscures the flaws in his prior actions.

The Cold War also played a role in delaying examination of the 1930s. Nearly all writers today -- whether they write policy or history -- make a point to avoid being classed with Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. But that fear of being labeled as a red-baiter prevented the necessary discussion of the counterproductive policy of the 1930s.

In the Cold War, there was also the assumption that Europe certainly, or even the U.S., might conceivably go communist. The premise therefore was that safety nets -- from Social Security in the U.S. to codetermination in German boardrooms -- were necessary to prevent such an event. Bismarck's social democracy and Roosevelt's New Deal were therefore glorified as justified.

In the past half-century, we have learned that much of our capital comes from the private sector, not the public sector, and that most of our growth inheres in the private sector. After the 1980s and 1990s we know that markets can do much of the work that Roosevelt believed only government capital could do.

My own sense is that there is a final reason we have all paused at the New Deal -- a generational one. To insult the New Deal is to insult the Social Security that we, our parents, or grandparents receive. The Baby Boomers have a reputation as being selfish. But their reverence in regard to Social Security, not to mention Medicare Part D, is overly unselfish, and comes out of misplaced filial piety. Younger Baby Boomers and the generations after them will doubtless pay higher taxes because of our current unwillingness to criticize entitlements. Americans owe them as much as we owe senior citizens.

After all, the argument of markets has its own powerful morality. It is immoral to cause unemployment by pretending that a big government policy is morally necessary. When Andrew Mellon and Calvin Coolidge put through their tax cuts in the 1920s, they made the efficiency argument that supply-siders make today: lower rates could yield, they posited, higher revenues. But they also had a moral argument: high taxes were wrong, confiscatory and illiberal, in the classical sense. You can acknowledge this without being a Roosevelt-hater.

Schlesinger, who so often contributed to these pages, has already issued the invitation. It is more than time that the rest of us took him up on his offer.

Miss Shlaes, a Bloomberg columnist and visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is author of the just-published "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (HarperCollins), from which this is adapted.

"These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For. . . ."

     I was shuffling up to the counter of the old-school Manchester post office at lunchtime today and noticed that amongst the new stamp issuances honoring little-known inventors and water fowl, they were offering a batch of Star Wars stamps!  I had to get them.  The whole collection is great, but to own a stamp featuring Yoda is something to tell the grandchildren about:

   

COLUMN OF THE WEEK: "For Each Course on Rap Music or Black Feminism, One on King Lear or Latin is Lost."

     This column by the dazzlingly smart Victor David Hanson whacks the nail squarely on the head.  It definitely hits home with me, as I was totally screwed at Exeter by a collection of "cutting edge" teachers who assigned book after book on critical, pressing topics like the plight of oppressed pygmie lesbians while jettisoning Shakespeare and other building blocks of Western literature and civilization.

     In the zero-sum game of Exeter's curriculum, I lost and nobody won.

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[This one's so good that I've underlined passages for the super-busy Grotto reader base.]

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Everyone Deserves a Good Soup Lady. . . .

     Noticing that my diet generally alternates between Nick's Roast Beef and bowls of cereal, my cousin Pam hooked me into a very exclusive club a couple months ago.  She managed to get me onto the delivery route for a North Shore soup lady. 

     Here's how it works:  On Mondays, a voice on the phone announces "Good morning, Charles, it's the Soup Nazi.  This week I'm making XXX and YYY."  I then say, "Sounds great!  I'll take two pints of each!"

     Then, on Thursday mornings, I tape an envelope to my back door with some $$$ in it.  She lets herself in and deposits the week's selections directly into my fridge.  If I'm traveling, she puts them in the freezer. 

     As I've discussed with some of you, these soups are so good that sometimes I just want to splash them all over my living room walls (Spots on the Wall, by Hu Flung Du!) rather than eat them, for fear of having my stomach spontaneously explode with an overload of delight! 

     Here's a list of the selections I've been on the receiving end of so far:

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Spinach, Asagio Cheese

Potato, Corn, Bacon

Tuscan Meatball, Orzo, Spinach

Crab Mulligatawny

Tomato, Cheese

Cuban Black Bean, Sausage

Asparagus Leek

Carrot Ginger

Shanghai Shrimp w/ Dumplings

Ratatouille

Tuscan Bean w/ Pancetta

Chicken Mulligatawny

Beet, Carrot, Parsnip

Gazpacho

Morrocan Lentil

Cauliflower, Leek, Carrot

Southwestern Turkey Chili

Vegetable Couscous

Chilled Tomato, Orange, Basil, Leek

Spicy Red Pepper, Chicken, Saffron Rice

Petite Pois w/ Leek, Fennel

Vichyssoise

Puree of Cauliflower, Leek

Madras Chick Pea, R. Lentil, Coc. Milk

New Yorker Cartoon of the Day

New Wool Blanket Tears Commune Apart

February 27, 2006

CARIBOU, ME — Residents of the recently disbanded intentional-living community Harmony's Path said Monday that disputes concerning the shared use of a homemade wool blanket caused the utopian society's rapid undoing.

"We wanted to create a community of peace and social justice based on the elimination of personal property," charter member Michael Schoenkamp said. "However, some of us—particularly those who refused to obey the 'charter members have the blanket at night due to the cold' rule— lost their way. Sadly, those greedy few were able to rend our community asunder."

Enlarge Image  

Harmony’s Path residents in happier times, before the arrival of the wool blanket.

Based in a hexagonal wood cabin in the isolated backwoods of Maine, the commune's 14 adult and three child members sustained themselves for more than two years by selling almond butter and hammocks at local farmers' markets, and were able to plant and maintain a large vegetable garden and apple orchard until the blanket came between them.

According to Schoenkamp, the blanket, which was woven over the course of several weeks from the shorn fleece of their pet lamb "Walden," initially symbolized the strength and unity of the community that worked together to make it.

"I began to see a little selfishness when we were boiling the cornflowers to dye the blanket," resident Will Fiorentini said. "Kevin [Uhlenbeck], who comes from a very strong paternalistic, Calvinist background, said something about wanting to keep the blanket in his work area, since its creation was his idea."

The commune members decided to vote on where to keep the blanket. The vote, which took place last Saturday, marked the first time in the commune's history that a gathering resulted in shouting.

"Everyone got really upset when John [Abberton] proposed that the blanket be circulated room-to-room in alphabetical order," Fiorentini said. "Actually, I think Paul [Buckner] supported the proposal, but he wasn't allowed to speak, as no one remembered him contributing all that much to the blanket."

Monica Little, a staunch feminist and one of only two adult female Harmony's Path residents, suggested that the comforter should be given to the women.

"I believed the women should have the blanket, not to satisfy the sexist idea that we are frail and deserve preferential treatment, but to correct the imbalance of centuries of patriarchal privilege," Little said.

After many prolonged sessions, commune members drew up a blanket rota that charted the blanket's distribution and gave Dylan Farger first turn with it.

"I had hoped things would return to normal the next morning," resident Mitchell Redding said. "Unfortunately, Dylan showed up and began insisting how he should get to keep the blanket an extra night 'because it wasn't cold enough' the night before."

Redding added, "I always had a feeling it was a mistake to let a traditional Marxist into our egalitarian, nondenominational community."

Despite priding itself on accepting individuals of diverse backgrounds, the commune was once again in conflict on the third night, when Desmond Wright, a lifelong naturist with a clothing-optional lifestyle, was refused his turn with the blanket when other members expressed concern that he would "sweat all over it."

It was when the blanket went missing that commune members held the first ever Emergency Measures Task Force And Tribunal. After what one member described as a "kangaroo court," the "confused and frightened" 64-year-old resident Frank Horwell falsely confessed to having stolen the blanket, which was later found bunched up in the bulk grain bin.

According to Horwell, Phillip Gresham, who oversees the community's garden, used the collective's meager savings to purchase a non-organic, mass-manufactured Polarfleece blanket of his own at a local store.

"That money was supposed to go into installing a new water-purification system in the coming months," resident Amy Bauer said. "We had never had to oust a member of the commune before, but there was little choice left after Phillip refused to share that synthetic monstrosity with the rest of us."

The final blow to the society's cohesion came Sunday morning.

Thomas "Lodestone" Sloane, the commune's founder, who for days had reportedly grown detached and been overheard mumbling, "One must be sacrificed so that the rest may endure," awoke at dawn and walked coatless in below-zero temperatures to the commune's barn. Members discovered him hours later.

"He was just sitting there, covered in blood, gently rocking the decapitated lamb in his arms," Bauer said.

Stephen Mangum, whose blanket turn had finally come the night before, remembers wrapping the shivering and unresponsive Sloane in the blanket that morning. Mangum then packed his bag and took a bus back to his Connecticut hometown, with other residents following suit.

"Perhaps we were more like-minded in our values and beliefs than we ever realized," Mangum said. "The way we allowed a simple material possession to come between us, utterly destroying any hope of fulfilling our idealistic goal, was, if nothing else, truly harmonious."

A Few Quotes of the Day from Today's Thomas Sowell Column. . .

"Does anybody seriously believe that "hate speech" prohibitions will be applied to Muslims demonizing Jews, to blacks demonizing whites, or to women demonizing men?"

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"The same people who think it was wonderful that the Warren Court forbad government to assign children to schools on the basis of race think it is terrible that the current Supreme Court has recently stopped local governments from assigning children to schools on the basis of race."

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"Many people who have never run one business for one day are nevertheless confident that they know corporate CEOs are not worth as much as they are paid."

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In America, We Get to Write the Scripts of Our Own Lives.

What's So Great About America
By Dinesh D'Souza

Monday, July 2, 2007

In recent years, we’ve heard a great deal about “why they hate us” and about why America is so bad. What the critiques often miss is what is good and even great about America. As an immigrant who grew up in Mumbai, India, I believe that the patriotism of Americans would be strengthened if people had a better understanding of why this country is unique.

In my book What’s So Great About America, I ask: Why do millions of immigrants seek every year to come to America? Why is the idea of America so fascinating and attractive to people—especially young people—around the world?

Critics of America, both at home and abroad, have an easy explanation for why the American idea is so captivating and why immigrants want to come here. The reason, they say, is that America represents “the bitch goddess of success.” In this view, immigrants flock to the United States for the sole purpose of getting rich. The critics hope to demean America by associating it with greed and selfishness. Their explanation, however, is so partial that it amounts to a distortion. It misses the deepest source of America’s appeal.

There is enough truth in the critics’ account to give it a surface plausibility. Certainly America offers a degree of mobility and opportunity unavailable elsewhere, not even in Europe. Even more significant, America gives a better life to the ordinary guy than does any other country. Let’s be honest: rich people live well everywhere. America’s greatness is that it has extended the benefits of affluence, traditionally available to the very few, to a large segment in society. We live in a nation where “poor” people have TV sets and microwave ovens, where construction workers cheerfully spend $4 on a nonfat latte, where maids drive very nice cars, where plumbers take their families on vacation to the Caribbean. Recently I asked an acquaintance in Bombay why he has been trying so hard to relocate to America. He replied, “I really want to move to a country where the poor people are fat.”

The typical immigrant, who is used to the dilapidated infrastructure, mind-numbing inefficiency, and multi-layered corruption of Third World countries, arrives in America to discover, to his wonder and delight, that everything works: the roads are clean and paper-smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up the telephone you get a dial tone, you can even buy things from the store and then take them back. The American supermarket is a thing to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, 50 different types of cereal, innumerable flavors of ice cream. The place is full of unappreciated inventions: quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, cordless phones, disposable diapers, and roll-on luggage.

So, yes, in material terms America offers the newcomer a better life. Still, the material allure of America does not capture the deepest source of its appeal. Consider how my own life would have been different had I never come to America. I was raised in a middle-class family in Mumbai. I didn’t have luxuries, but I didn’t lack necessities. Materially my life is better in the United States, but the real difference lies elsewhere.

Had I stayed in India, I would probably live my entire existence within a five-mile radius of where I was born. I would undoubtedly have married a woman of my identical caste and religious and socioeconomic background. I would have faced relentless pressure to become an engineer, like my father, or a doctor, like my grandfather. My socialization would have been entirely within my own ethnic community. I would have had a whole set of opinions that could be predicted in advance.

Because I came to America, though, I have seen my life break free of these traditional confines. In college I became interested in literature and politics, and resolved to make a career as a writer, which is something you can do in America, and cannot easily do in India. I married a woman of English, Scottish, French, and German ancestry.

Eventually I found myself working in the White House, even though I was not an American citizen. I cannot imagine another country allowing a non-citizen to work in the inner citadel of its government.

In most of the world, even today, your identity and your fate are largely handed to you. In America, by contrast, you get to write the script of your own life. What to be, where to live, who to love, who to marry, what to believe, what religion to practice—these are all decisions that, in America, we make for ourselves. Here we are the architects of our own fate.

The “self-directed life” is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of the United States. Young people throughout the world find irresistible the prospect of being in the driver’s seat of their own destiny. So, too, the immigrant discovers that America permits him to break free of the constraints that have held him captive, so that the future becomes a landscape of his own choosing.


Copyright © 2006 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Dinesh D'Souza's new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 has just been published by Doubleday. D’Souza is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Blue Grotto Fashion Do's and Don'ts: Auto Category

     This one is so far into "Don't" territory that it's almost a "Do!"  I snapped this photo on Shelter Island a few weekends ago.  I suspect it's the summer island car of Chip and Carrie E.:

 

And Liberals Accuse Conservatives of Being Fascists? Say What?

     CFC IV flagged this latest textbook example of liberals' relentless, implacable, vindictive campaign to run the lives of everyone they can get their grimy little fingers on!  Store this in the Politics of Envy file:

[Note:  This is just the beginning of the article; it's much longer]

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Cutting CO2 or a Sneak Attack on Porsche, Ferrari?

By Doron Levin

July 10 (Bloomberg) -- If one of the more extreme responses to global warming comes true, driving a sports car anywhere but on a racetrack might be relegated to history's dustbin.

Fast, powerful cars within a few years may be outlawed in Europe, an idea that has been raised ostensibly because Ferraris and Porsches produce too much carbon dioxide. For those who abhor sports cars as vulgar symbols of affluence (along with vacation homes, furs and fancy jewelry), such a ban could be a two-fer: Saving the planet while cutting economic inequality.

Who are these people anyway who decide on behalf of everyone what car is proper to drive? In the U.S. they're members of Congress, which is considering fuel-efficiency standards that will affect vehicle size. In Europe, it's the ministers and parliamentarians of the European Union, which wants to limit how much CO2 cars can emit as a proxy for a fuel- consumption standard.

Chris Davies, a British member of the European Parliament, is proposing one of the most-extreme measures -- a prohibition on any car that goes faster than 162 kilometers (101 miles) an hour, a speed that everything from the humble Honda Civic on up can exceed. He ridiculed fast cars as ``boys' toys.''

The proposed ban would take effect in 2013. Davies told the Guardian newspaper that ``cars designed to go at stupid speeds have to be built to withstand the effects of a crash at those speeds. They are heavier than necessary, less fuel-efficient and produce too many emissions.''

His last point is telling, even though there are many reasons why cars are heavier, including safety measures such as air bags and steel-reinforced crumple zones.

Focused on Cars

The idea is to limit CO2, a so-called greenhouse gas blamed for causing the earth's temperature to rise.

But the debate isn't just about how much carbon dioxide to allow into the atmosphere and whether the amount actually matters. It's also about disdain some hold for the size or speed of the cars others drive.

``Automobiles always seem to be the focus, even though they only consume 15 percent or 20 percent of energy,'' said Csaba Csere, editor of Car & Driver magazine. If politicians really cared about the atmosphere they might concentrate first on power plants or factories, he said.

The folks against sports cars in Europe and big sport utility vehicles in the U.S. often are same ones who hate McMansion-sized homes, corporate jets, jumbo freezers, yachts, 60-inch flat-screens TVs, overnight-delivery services and other trappings of Western-style wealth and energy use.

Do people demonize these goods because they can't afford them? Or because they think others shouldn't have them? Proposals to limit carbon dioxide often sound like basic opposition to prosperity and rising living standards. . . .

(Doron Levin is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Doron Levin in Southfield, Michigan, at [email protected]

Last Updated: July 10, 2007 00:01 EDT

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     As a bonus for Grotto readers, I present here a picture of an excellent Porsche 911 Turbo!

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July 6th Engagement Party for Terry and Monique in Maaahblehead. . .

     The Fitzgeralds had a lovely party for Terry and Mo.  Here are some pics:

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Jay, Wags, Terry, Jessie, George, Lindsey, Me, Letti:

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Jay, Wags, Terry, Jessie, Melissa, George:

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Mo and Buck:

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Jessie demonstrating Coco Crisp's batting stance:

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Melissa:

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Hugo, Margaret, and Graham:

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Jay, Wags, Terry, Jessie:

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Terry, Jessie, Melissa, George:

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Lenny:

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Jessie's had enough:

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Letti, Connie, and Graham:

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Wags is thinking, "I've heard this story a hundred times!"

We Went to Fenway on the 5th to Watch the Red Sox Clobber the Devil Rays 15-4.

     Coco Crisp hit a grand slam in the first inning, Josh Beckett struck out nine and got win number twelve, and the Sox got 21 hits.

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Mo:

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Georges D. and Jessie:

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Katy and Terry:

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Georges and Michelle:

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Several Sox scoring:

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Pearly, Jay, and George:

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Mo and Katy:

The Sweets Had a Cookout on the Evening of the 4th:

Playing Baci Ball in the back yard:

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Tim making an excellent toss:

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Jessie using unusual, but effective, form:

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George throws the Baci Ball as Terry, George D., Tim, and Derek look on:

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George and Millie (with Wykoff lurking in the background):

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Ryan in the middle of a guitar solo:

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Wykoff, Terry, Wendy, and CJ:

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Letti and Katy:

 

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Ryan and Melissa:

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Holly, Mo, and Terry:

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Wykoff and Terry:

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Shep and Wykoff:

Scenes from the Manchester 4th of July Parade. . .

     My house is right off of the parade route here in Manchester, so I had people over for Bloody Marys and Mimosas on my deck.

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Terry, Mo, Darcey, Peyton, and Mackenzie:

 

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Jay and Hugo:

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Adam, Darcey, Terry, and Margaret (with Graham):

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I'm preparing Mimosas with Terry:

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Ryan, Wendy, and Spencer:

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John W. and Darcey:

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The Sweets and Yours Truly:

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Mo, Lenny, and Darcey:

 

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George and I:

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George and Carol with Ryan (who thinks the fire engines are a little loud. . .):

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Jessie and Laura:

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Michelle, Darcey, Mo, Terry:

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Here I am with Ryan and Ter:

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Lindsey and I:

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This dude looks like he unicycled all the way from Venice Beach, CA:

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A well-trained  militia:

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I've always wanted one of these:

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Standard "Whale with Parrot on Back" Float:

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A Very Good Boy enjoying the parade:

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A giant bull:

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These guys have the right idea:

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Janet, Me, Mo:

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Terry, Jay, Ed, Michelle, Me:

Happy 4th of July!

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Good Boy Pics of the Day

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