Scandinavian names

I have always liked the sound of Scandinavian names.  They seem somehow impressive and important.  There is plenty of Norse ancestry among the English so maybe it is something to do with that.  Here are four Scandinavian names you might know.  Tell me what you think of them:  Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad.

They are of course the names of the ABBA band members, now rather elderly people.  I have always rather wondered why I have never heard criticism of ABBA from feminists.  Both "Mamma Mia" and "Waterloo" recount how a woman is captivated by a man that she cannot give up  -- surely the reverse of the feminist gospel. And in "Money, Money", the female singer aspires to marry a rich man!  And "Dancing Queen" is a simple little ballad about a teenager who loves dancing.  Again not quite a feminist priority.  So at least the best known ABBA songs seem quite conservative to me.

Something to remind you below.  Don't ogle the beautiful blonde Agnetha too much.







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An Air Force of wimps?

Why don't they just fire all the men and make it an all-woman force?

The Air Force more than other military services has jumped enthusiastically on the Obama administration’s campaign to socially engineer the military through politically correct programs and policies.

A case in point comes to Inside the Ring in an email from the U.S. Transportation Command, known as Transcom, an Air Force-dominated command. The email revealed that the command is holding “self-awareness” seminars for troops aimed at boosting their “emotional intelligence quotient,” or EQ.

The effort is not sitting well with some of the more warrior-oriented Air Force members who are concerned that the service is being transformed into a military version of Federal Express or UPS. One officer joked: “This is still the armed forces of the United States, is it not? Lord help us.”

According to the email, EQ seminars are part of Transcom’s strategy “to develop customer-focused professionals.”

“Each and every one of us is vital in transforming the command for the future, supporting those who count on us to deliver whatever they need on time, every time,” it says. “In order to maintain and retain great customer relationships, the EQ workshops help establish the necessary tools to do this and more.”

For those seeking better social skills, one upcoming EQ seminar, No. 401, is set for April 18 on “social awareness,” further described as: “Look outward to learn about and appreciate others. Pay attention to your surroundings.”

“EQ 401 explores body language, timing, greeting people by name and other skills to apply to your daily interactions,” the email says.

On April 25, the command will hold EQ 201 on self-awareness.

“An emotional journey, this seminar helps uncover the true essence of you,” the email says. “Facilitators provide a gateway to the inner truth and future path of your personal road map to your own emotional intelligence.”

Those interested were urged to contact Transcom’s Change Management Team.

Transcom spokesman Maj. Matthew Gregory said the EQ program is about communication and “trying to figure out what our customer needs.”

A former Pentagon official said that if Transcom is taking its people away from mission activities for this type of politically correct training, “the command is over strength and can afford cost-saving personnel cuts at this critical time.”

Other signs of political correctness included the Air Force’s removal in 2011 of a sign at storied Nellis Air Force Base that read “Home of the Fighter Pilot.”

The banner was removed over concerns it wasn’t “inclusive” and may have harmed the feelings of nonfighter pilots.

Also, late last year, the Air Combat Command went on one of the military’s more extensive searches to seize inappropriate materials of a sexual nature. The squadron-by-squadron shakedown came after a female sergeant filed a complaint alleging rampant harassment by superiors.

By mid-January, the command reported finding 17,790 offensive items 6,700 of which were of a personal nature stored on government computers.

“Of the remaining items,” the command said, “the majority of items were potentially offensive pictures, posters, calendars, magazines or graffiti located in common areas, offices and latrines. Identified items were documented and either removed or destroyed.”

SOURCE

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Snob Rule

America’s ruling class appears to believe that its mission is to subjugate and bring to heel those outside the club – which means you and me. This motley crew – who would never be caught dead jamming to something as déclassé as Mötley Crüe – has always held the rest of the country in contempt. But now that contempt is the basis of policy, and this simply cannot continue.

Big trucks. Country music. Any music not on vinyl. These are just some of the rest of America’s failings. The people who built the country, who fought for it, who unashamedly stand when the Flag is carried past …these people, are an embarrassment and their voices must be silenced so as not to interfere in the glorious works of the ruling class.

Understand that the ruling class is not simply composed of liberal Democrats, though the values (or lack of same) of these Socialist Lite movers and shakers predominate. The NYC-DC conservanerd contingent – the fussy David Frums and David Brooks – are equally horrified by the values, beliefs and preferences of Americans outside their area codes. We even see “conservative” politicians enlist too. You stay in Washington or New York or Los Angeles long enough and the pressure grows to allow yourself to be assimilated, to start looking down on other Americans.

These are the kinds of people who think they get a say in the size of my soft drink because they know what’s good for me. They’re somehow more concerned with my health than I am. They’re smarter than me. They’re smarter than you. They’re smarter than everyone who doesn’t think, feel and believe exactly like them. And, well, we’re just too dumb to live our lives without their benevolent dictates.

This notion sprouts in the insular communities of affluent, over-educated urban dwellers. It grows in the big name universities that tell their students they are the elite – and then releases them back into the world with a degree, yet somehow dumber than when they walked in. And it is encouraged by a media that confuses having access to an electronic podium with having mental and moral virtue.

The same people who brought us Solyndra think we should heed their demands for more power to combat non-existent global warning. The same people who brought us $16 trillion in debt think we should fork over more money to them. The same people who brought us 50 million Americans on food stamps think we should defer to their better judgment about how to run society.

These people have no right to lecture anyone on anything. They have an unbroken track record of failure.

Yet they do lecture, and worse, they legislate with the same smarmy condescension. Just about every issue today is best examined through the prism of pompous jerks trying to tell the rest of us how to live. At the center of all of them is the same vindictive drive to dominate regular Americans, to attack and mock our values, to break our spirit and will to resist.

Didn’t we have a revolution about this kind of nonsense a couple of hundred years ago? Thank God the patriots of the Revolution bitterly clung to their guns and their religion or we’d be as far down the sewer pipe as Britain.

They are less interested in effective policy than in effective persecution. These clowns know their gun-banning campaign won’t stop either the rare psycho shooting spree or the tragic, everyday nightmare of the inner cities’ gang-fueled bloodbath. But these policies aren’t intended for criminals; they are intended for us, to show us who is boss, to acclimate us to the concept that our fundamental rights are up for review, and that we better behave or they will be totally withdrawn.

It’s couched in a sort of Bizarro World morality where up is down, right is wrong. They tell us that if you want to keep your guns, you want children to die. This includes those of us who wore the uniform of this country or of a first responder agency and put our lives on the line to protect children while the ruling class posers sipped lattes, giggled at Jon Stewart’s mugging, and experimented with metrosexuality.

Why won’t the liberals talk about mental health, guarding schools or, heaven forbid, the carnage in the inner cities that their cronies have controlled for decades? Because resolving those issues won’t hurt us. Their goal isn’t to stop the violence – if they cared about violence you would be as able to walk down the streets of Detroit or Washington or any other big liberal city as you are the heavily guarded enclaves of the ruling class. Their goal is to beat us down, to break us, to leave us disarmed, docile and disheartened.

It’s more than just contempt. They hate us.

They hate our bourgeois values, like faith, family and patriotism. They hate how we don’t acknowledge their mental and moral superiority. Most of all, they hate our unwillingness to yield to their commands.

That’s why the policies we support are never merely unwise but are always portrayed as evidence of our unrepentant evil. Unhappy about illegal aliens flowing over the border? No, that couldn’t possibly be because of the social chaos illegals cause – not that the establishment would know anything about that. No, their only experience with illegal immigration is cheap labor cleaning their mansions and watching their kids. They aren’t ranchers in Arizona who get murdered by the guys bringing the liberals’ drugs north. They aren’t priced out of the manual labor market by folks who will work for under minimum wage under the table. They aren’t getting rear-ended by some illegal without car insurance.

No, it’s gotta be that we’re horrible racists. That’s the only possible answer.

The new liberal love affair with militant atheism is another manifestation of the same phenomenon. Just a few years ago, it would be considered unbelievably rude to disrespect someone’s religion in public – and it still is, at least to those of us who weren’t figuratively raised by wolves. But now trashing religion, particularly that of devout Christians and Jews, is a cottage industry. Of course, religions that respond to criticism with beheadings are mysteriously exempt.

You see this manifest in policies like the Obamacare mandates where the liberals seem to be going out of their way to ensure that believers are forced to pay homage to the great god Government and violate their consciences. What reasonable, rational motive exists to force people who do not share the liberals’ views of contraception to subsidize policies that they consider evil?

None, of course. Even Sandra Fluke could afford the few bucks a month to get her pills at her local Wal-Mart. Maybe that’s the rub – maybe the idea that a special snowflake like Ms. Fluke might be forced to mingle with the unclean masses is the real problem.

Now Washington state is suing some flower shop whose owner has religious objections to decorating a gay wedding. Apparently, Seattle is so bereft of orchid peddlers that it must force its citizens to violate their most sacred spiritual beliefs by privileging flower arrangements over faith.

Such floral fascism isn’t wise policy. It’s vindictiveness written into the law.

This is wrong and un-American. It’s also leading to divisions within the nation that we have not seen in generations. Liberals used to talk about “tolerance,” but as with “civil rights” their enthusiasm for it faded when their power grew. Tolerance means not messing with others who choose to live their lives differently. But now tolerance has given way to persecution.

The growing stridency of the liberal establishment keeps pushing and pushing, forcing regular Americans back. But eventually, they will force the rest of us back against the wall, and that’s when things will get ugly. They have a choice for our society – do we splinter or do we come together? If they want the latter, the first step is to stop being snobs.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

How much “civilization” does your tax money buy?: "Tax Day, April 15, is traditionally the time of year when liberals trot out that old Oliver Wendell Holmes chestnut: 'Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.' But what kind of 'civilization' are we paying for?" [And how much do we need to pay?]

Who’s afraid of natural rights?:  "Among philosophers the idea of natural rights is not very popular. And that is putting it mildly. But the grounds for this resistance are not clear to me. Sometimes people object to natural rights for reasons reminiscent of Bentham and Burke. Rights, they say, must be precise. They must be specified concretely. But we cannot rationally determine what natural rights we have or what they entitle us to. Therefore, there are no natural rights. I find the objection puzzling."

Privatize the TVA:  "Perhaps President Obama has been reading about Margaret Thatcher’s policy successes. He is apparently considering selling off the federal government’s Tennessee Valley Authority. This is a great idea. As this story notes, it would allow the struggling electric utility more flexibility in dealing with the many challenges it faces. While Democrats are often more socialistic on economic policy than Republicans ... This time around, Democratic President Obama may run into opposition from socialistic Republicans."

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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How Thatcher changed this Soviet man's heart and mind

By Oleg Atbashian

It wasn't just Margaret Thatcher's steadfast economic and foreign policies that helped to defeat the Evil Empire and to bring down the Iron Curtain. She also changed hearts and minds — and this author, who grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, has a personal story to tell.

As many Soviet kids did in the 1970s and 1980s, I occasionally tuned my shortwave radio to Voice of America or the BBC Russian Service, hoping to hear their alternative take on world events and, if I was lucky, get the latest rock-music updates. One of the functions of the Iron Curtain was to keep us, the "builders of communism," blissfully unaware of the outside world. All our news had to be processed by the state-run media filter and approved by the formidable censorship apparatus.

In contrast, foreign Russian-language radio broadcasts, courtesy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, gave us unfiltered news and commentary. These programs were to the Soviets then what Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are for many Americans today — a gasp of fresh air for some, enemy propaganda for others, and an object of demonization for the official state-run media.

Produced mostly by ex-Soviet exiles, these broadcasts never failed to satisfy my curiosity. The problem was that our government was mercilessly jamming their signal. I learned that this radio jamming was more costly than the actual broadcasting, but no expense was spared to maintain our ideological purity, paid for by our own tax rubles. Oh well, at least we knew the Motherland cared.

At times the broadcast quality was almost undecipherable: imagine trying to watch a movie while your neighbor mows his lawn. The noise occasionally trails off to the other end of the property, but mostly it hovers below your window, and you know that the lines you missed had to be the best.

A few times my friends and I tried to tape these programs simultaneously in our homes, so that later we could combine salvageable parts from two or more reels. That resulted in a much clearer compilation. We mostly did this for rock and roll programs, but political commentary would get into the mix as well — and it was just as fresh and exciting.

If we had ever been caught, we could have been easily expelled from our state-run schools (paid for by our tax rubles) and become marked for life as "politically unreliable." But we were too young and too reckless to think about it.

Whenever tuning to Voice of America or the BBC Russian Service produced nothing but the made-in-the-USSR rattling chatter, I would switch to English broadcasts. These were coming through clearly, mostly because the government couldn't jam every single frequency. They also helped me with my English studies.

Apart from music tapes, radio was my only source of authentic spoken English. The Iron Curtain made sure that even if a real English-speaking person were to visit my Ukrainian city, he or she would be supervised at all times by authorized personnel. Similarly, foreign travel for the "builders of communism" was out of the question: even if we could make it past the border alive, we would have no means to move around, since almost all of our earned income went to the government so it could provide us with our basic needs — such as, ensuring our ideological purity by jamming radio broadcasts for our own good.


   This vintage Soviet "Radiola" looks exactly like the one described in my story. It was once owned by my parents and had the most beautiful, organic sound. The wooden frame may well have been made at some old-fashioned piano factory. It made every jazz band sound like Glenn Miller. This is how I also heard Thatcher's voice for the first time, while trying to listen to the so-called "enemy voices."

One night — it had to be late 1982, when Margaret Thatcher was running for her first re-election — my shortwave radio caught a BBC broadcast of the Iron Lady's campaign speech.

To be sure, all my prior knowledge about Margaret Thatcher was limited to her unflattering portrayal in the official Soviet media. She busted the unions, privatized the economy, and was a sworn enemy of the USSR and socialism in general. In fact, the very moniker — the Iron Lady — was given to her by the Soviet Army newspaper Red Star in 1976, before she even became prime minister. Later I also learned that she readily took it on as her own, telling parliamentary constituents a week later that she was proud to wear a "Red Star" evening gown and to serve as "the Iron Lady of the Western world."

Listening to Thatcher speak confirmed everything the Soviet media was reporting about her, and more. In a deep, powerful voice, she accused her socialist opponents of destroying the British economy through nationalization and presented the proof of how privatizing it again was bringing the economy back to life. The free markets worked as expected, making Britain strong again. The diseased socialist welfare state had to go, to be replaced by a healthy competitive society.

To the average consumer of the Soviet state-run media, that didn't make any sense. When exactly had Britain become a socialist welfare state? That part never passed the Soviet media filter. Our media had made it explicitly clear that all Western nations, especially Britain and the United States, were officially governed by the ideology of anti-communism and unfettered capitalism. Their ruling classes had established the ultimate police states in order to protect the sanctity of private property — a criminal misconception which allowed the few rich, cigar-smoking, top-hat-wearing fat cats to brutally exploit the powerless masses.

So if everything had always been in private hands, what exactly did Thatcher privatize? And where did the free, cradle-to-grave government services come from?

Gradually, the news sank in: if Britain was indeed a socialist state, then everything we were told about the outside world was a lie. And not just any lie — it was an inconceivably monstrous, colossal lie, which our Communist Party and the media thoroughly maintained, apparently, to prevent us from asking these logical questions: if the Brits also had free, cradle-to-grave entitlements like we did, then why were we still fighting the Cold War? And what was the purpose of the Iron Curtain? Was it to stop us from collectively surrendering to the Brits, so that their socialist government could establish the same welfare state on our territory — only with more freedom and prosperity minus the Communist Party?

The next logical question would be this: if Great Britain wasn't yet as socialist as the Soviet Union, then didn't it mean that whatever freedom, prosperity, and working economy it had left were directly related to having less socialism? And if less socialism meant a freer, more productive, and more prosperous nation, then wouldn't it be beneficial to have as little socialism as possible? Or perhaps — here's a scary thought — to just get rid of socialism altogether?

And wasn't it exactly what Margaret Thatcher was doing as a prime minister?

What started with me listening out of curiosity ended up with a sudden realization that she was right on all points. I instantly became Thatcher's fan. The experience was inspiring. I remember how on the following day in school I described that speech to my friends, argued the prime minister's points, and even attempted a voice impression, emphasizing the confident manner in which the Iron Lady spoke. Never before had I heard a speaker so full of conviction.

I then began to suspect that all the unorthodox things the Soviet reporters attributed to Ronald Reagan — his radical positions on the economy and fighting the Cold War — might be true as well. The same reporters earlier described Jimmy Carter as an evil imperialist warmonger, so I initially doubted their coverage of Reagan. What government official would ever advocate for a smaller government? It seemed too fantastic to be true. But this time the media got it right — which, by my newly discovered standards, made Reagan a good man and a wise leader. It's those whom the Soviet media praised that were the real trouble.

After I moved to the United States years later, I also discovered Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises. But Thatcher was one of the earliest prominent guideposts in my intellectual journey, for which I am forever grateful.

Unlike the current U.S. president, Thatcher didn't have a well-oiled propagandistic social media organization in the style of OFA. Nor did the "progressive" world media advance and reverberate her message; that free service is reserved for the political left only. For Thatcher, it was quite the opposite.

And yet she exerted great influence over people. She did it merely by being who she was: informed, unwavering in the face of adversity, brave in defending the truth, and confident in her belief that the free markets are a force for good, while socialism is a force for evil. A few Western leaders may have agreed with her in private, but they didn't have the courage to say it openly in the twisted moral climate brought on their countries by the false promise of socialism.

What Thatcher showed to these men is that when one has no fear of speaking the truth and possesses enough moral conviction to push back, miracles happen. Britain's resurrection as an economic powerhouse was one of them.

Her message came through despite all the hostile efforts to jam it around the world, shattering not just the Western establishment's media filters, but the Iron Curtain itself.

It still resonates; if only today's leaders could listen.

SOURCE

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The Great Grab Has Begun

An American Cyprus on the way

President Obama recently released his 2014 budget and, of course, everyone focused on the aspect of spending.  In fact, it was almost like the magician who diverts your attention to their right hand while the trick is being set-up with their left hand.

Much to the credit of the mainstream media, they found the little item — capping IRAs — on page-18 of the budget, which is a very good source of revenue with an estimated $9 billion over the next decade.

Yet, unfortunately, the media has once again missed the important point.  It’s not just IRAs, but also 401Ks, Roth IRAs, and perhaps even deferred compensation, municipal bonds, insurance policies, and annuities that will all be affected as evidenced by this excerpt from Obama’s budget: “Limit an individual’s total balance across tax-preferred accounts.”  This statement is so broad that it fully opens the door for governmental interpretation.

The mass media also focused on the fact that the cap was $3 million.  Yet, once again, this is not exactly the case.  The actual budget declares to “limit an individual’s total balance.....to an amount sufficient to finance an annuity of not more than $205,000 per year.”  Given the current artificially low interest rates, the number needed in order to achieve such a cash flow is $3 million.

However, if interest rates rise, as most of the world assumes will happen eventually, then the $3 million instantly becomes a lot less.  And if hyperinflation hits, that $3 million could hypothetically be reduced to a mere pittance.  (It’s all relative.)

The final unanswered question (and even unasked question) is as follows: If it is determined (sounds like a new official government department is needed — Obama job creation) that your lifetime savings of IRAs, 401Ks, Roth IRAs, municipal bonds, and even annuities, are all collectively over the government’s maximum amount, what happens?  Are you required to liquidate and pay taxes?  Or, does the government simply say, “Sorry, yours is mine, we need it, have a nice day.”

Didn’t the government say the exact same thing on April 5, 1933, the day FDR seized Americans’ gold?  At that time, at least the gold holder received something in return, approximately $20 per ounce.

Yet, only a few weeks later, those same previous gold owners watched as gold was revalued at $35 per ounce — an approximate 50% haircut.  Of course, the mass media accepts all of this, from 1933 to the present-day, as simply the government’s comprehensive understanding of the exact needs of the individual citizen.  It starts with taxes and ends with seizure.  But, of course, according to the mainstream media, it can’t happen here because we’re not that island country known as Cyprus — not yet, anyway.

SOURCE

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The Obama budget

Charles Krauthammer

The cards laid down by the White House are quite unimpressive. The 2014 budget is tax-and-spend as usual. The actual deficit reduction over a decade is a minuscule $0.6 trillion — out of a total spending of $46.5 trillion. And every penny of this tiny reduction comes from tax hikes. Nothing from spending cuts, which all end up getting spent elsewhere.

Moreover, where’s the compromise? The Obama budget calls for not only more spending than the GOP’s, but more than the Democratic Senate’s as well. For just fiscal 2014, it even contains $160 billion more spending, and $128 billion more deficit, than if the budget — that Obama purports to be cutting — were left untouched!

True, President Obama has finally put on the table, in writing, an entitlement reform. This is good. But the spin, mindlessly echoed in the mainstream media, that this is some cosmic breakthrough is comical.

First, the proposal — “chained CPI,” a change in the way inflation is measured — is very small. It reduces Social Security by a quarter of a penny on the dollar — a $2,000 check reduced by a five-dollar bill.

Second, the change is merely technical. The White House itself admits that the result is simply a more accurate measure of inflation. It’s not really cutting anything. It merely eliminates an unintended overpayment.

Finally, the president made it clear that he doesn’t like this reform at all. It’s merely a gift to Republicans. This is odd. Why should a technical correction be a political favor to anyone? Is getting things right not a favor to the nation?

What the budget is crying out for is some entitlement reform that goes beyond the bare-minimum CPI revision that just about every deficit commission of the last 15 years has recommended as an obvious gimme. The other obvious reform is to raise the retirement/eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to match longevity. These programs were meant to protect the elderly from destitution, not to subsidize almost one-third the adult life of every baby boomer.

Given the president’s distaste for even chained CPI, it’s hard to see him ever agreeing to a major reform on the retirement age. Nonetheless, the proposition deserves testing — through a major GOP concession on revenue.

By way of tax reform. The landmark 1986 Reagan-Tip O’Neill tax reform was revenue neutral. It closed tax loopholes and devoted the money to reduce tax rates. As I suggested last month, the GOP should offer Obama a major concession: a 50 percent solution in which only half the loophole money goes to reduce tax rates. The rest goes to the Treasury, to be spent or saved as Congress decides.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Sidebar

I have added quite a few entries to the sidebar here in recent weeks.  Those who have time to browse might find some new thoughts  that they like.

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A Tale of ‘Government Investment’

As amateurs, the Wright brothers beat the taxpayer-funded brain trust in the race to flight

It was the early 20th century. America was in a race with the powers of the world to invent the first airplane. Much was at stake. Our leaders feared that the Germans, the British, and, if you can suspend your disbelief, the French might beat us to the punch, giving the winning country a huge advantage militarily and economically.

Who better to win the race for us, thought our leaders, than the best and brightest minds the government could buy? They chose Samuel Langley. You don’t know him, but in his day, Langley was a big deal. He had a big brain and lots of credentials. A renowned scientist and a professor of astronomy, he wrote books about aviation and was the head of the Smithsonian.

It was the kind of decision that well-intentioned bureaucrats would make throughout the century — and still make today. Give taxpayer money to the smartest guys in the room, the ones with lots of degrees. They’ll innovate and do good for us.

Langley did have some success with unmanned flight, using a catapult-like system to propel his machines into the air. On the basis of that limited success, the Department of War gave him $50,000 for two experiments, and he extracted a decent sum from the Smithsonian, too. That was real money back then. Today, bureaucrats wouldn’t stop to pick up $50,000 if it were lying on the street.

What did the citizens of the United States get for that “investment,” the kind we are making today in green energy? It was the Great Aerodrome, and on October 7, 1903, the aircraft developed by Langley’s team of experts was launched from a catapult on a houseboat in the Potomac River.

The crowds lined up, as did the press. As the aircraft accelerated and reached full speed, it was hurtled along a catapult toward a launch. A few scant seconds of sudden acceleration were followed by a sudden and shocking plunge into river. “It fell like a ton of mortar,” a reporter wrote.

The plane that couldn’t fly and the man flying it were somehow salvaged, and preparations were made for another flight. The project needed some tweaks, the experts told the world. On December 8, Langley and his team of brainiacs tried it again. This time, the airplane got caught up in the launching mechanism and dropped into the river.

Langley’s machine should have been called the Not So Great Aerodrome; it never got airborne. The media had a field day. “The Boston Herald suggested that Professor Langley ought to give up airplanes and try submarines,” Burt Folsom notes in a lecture in Hillsdale College’s series of online courses, “American Heritage.” The Brooklyn Eagle led its story with this quote from a now-forgotten congressman: “You tell Langley for me that the only thing he ever made fly was government money.”

The War Department, in its final report on the Langley project, concluded: “We are still far from the ultimate goal, and it would seem as if years of constant work and study by experts, together with the expenditure of thousands of dollars, would still be necessary before we can hope to produce an apparatus of practical utility on these lines.” Isn’t that just the kind of arrogance you’d expect from government bureaucrats? If their best minds can’t do it with our money, no one can.

On December 17, 1903, only nine days after Langley’s second failed experiment, two Ohio men did what the War Department, Langley, the Smithsonian, and all of that government investment could not. With $2,000 of their own money and little fanfare, the Wright brothers launched the first powered heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard. From dunes four miles south of Kitty Hawk, N.C., the Wrights’ Flyer flew for 59 seconds, traveled 852 feet, and ushered in the era of modern aviation.

How did the Wright brothers succeed where Langley had failed?  Langley and his band of experts were working on the wrong problem and thought more money would solve it. James Tobin in his book To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and The Great Race for Flight (2004) explained that they saw flight as a problem of power; the Wrights, as a problem of balance. That difference in perspective led to the development of two machines along very different paths: Langley’s, straight into the water and oblivion; the Wright brothers’, straight to the sky, and into history.

From the beginning of their work in aeronautics, the Wright brothers focused on developing a reliable method of pilot control. Their breakthrough was their conception of what is now called three-axis control, which enabled the pilot to steer the aircraft effectively and maintain its balance. This method became a standard in the industry and remains standard on fixed-wing aircraft.

How did they see what others couldn’t? By chance or fate, the Wright brothers had mechanical skills perfectly suited to their success in aviation, and insight that came from their years of experience in their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. They understood that an unstable vehicle such as a flying machine could be controlled and balanced with practice. These were advantages that the government lacked, as did some of their fiercest competitors in the private sector, including Alexander Graham Bell.

That’s the thing about genius: It springs from the unlikeliest places.

The Wright brothers were also freed from the subsidy-induced waste that hinders many government-funded projects. Indeed, the limits on their financial resources actually helped them. They were compelled to spend wisely what little they had. As Milton Friedman once observed, few people spend other people’s money as carefully as they spend their own.

Since the Wright brothers couldn’t absorb the costs of repeated flight tests, they developed a wind tunnel to test aerodynamic designs. This saved them not only money but time. From those simulations they amassed data that they used to hone their aircraft designs. It proved easier to fix a problem on paper than to do what Langley did: rebuild planes that had no chance of flying.

Another (often overlooked) reason that using their own money gave the Wright brothers a competitive advantage: control. Indeed, they turned down investors, appreciating that when grantors give money, they usually attach conditions. All too often the course of development is altered to cater to the grantor’s expectations, even if they are dead wrong or just plain silly. Who dares bite the hand that feeds him? Many of the experiments the Wright brothers carried out might never have been green-lighted by a corporate or government bureaucracy.

Repeatedly, hobbyists and tinkerers beat big government and big companies when it comes to innovation. Small beats big, and people with less money and scantier resources come up with products and inventions that change industries — and the world. It was a young Bill Gates who challenged IBM’s lucrative mainframe business; the same holds true of the creators of Apple, Google, and Facebook.

As with so many great innovations in our own time, powered flight in America was propelled by amateurs. The Wright brothers found themselves in the flying business, writes Tobin, “in the sheer spirit of play, of hobbyists.”

Yet another advantage that they enjoyed was that they were interested in making a profit. To the inventor of the first manned flight would come riches, while the bicycle business, which had been a good one for them, was undergoing a consolidation. Profit margins were shrinking. The brothers eyed manned flight as a future source of profit.

Langley, on the other hand, was attempting to advance the public good. While men who, like Langley, make their living in academia and from government funding often mock the profit motive, it’s the world’s best-known mechanism for unleashing people’s capabilities for productivity, which lead to innovations and products that contribute to the public good.

Though the Wrights beat Langley and the Smithsonian, the race didn’t end there. Powerful interests vied for the patent to this revolutionary invention and, more important, for the credit for it. With Smithsonian approval, a well-known aviation expert modified Langley’s Aerodrome and in 1914 made some short flights designed to bypass the Wright brothers’ patent application and to vindicate the Smithsonian and its fearless leader, Samuel Langley.

That’s right. The Smithsonian’s brain trust couldn’t beat the bicycle-shop owners fair and square, so they used their power to steal the credit. And then they used their bully pulpit to rewrite history. In 1914, America’s most esteemed historical museum cooked the books and displayed the Smithsonian-funded Langley Aerodrome in its museum as the first manned aircraft heavier than air and capable of flight.

Orville Wright, who outlived his brother Wilbur, accused the Smithsonian of falsifying the historical record. So upset was he that he sent the 1903 Kitty Hawk Flyer, the plane that made aviation history, to a science museum in . . . London.

But truth is a stubborn thing. And in 1942, after much embarrassment, the Smithsonian recanted its false claims about the Aerodrome. The British museum returned the Wright brothers’ historic Flyer to America, and the Smithsonian put it on display in their Arts and Industries Building on December 17, 1948, 45 years to the day after the aircraft’s only flights. A grand government deception was at last foiled by facts and fate.

SOURCE

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The totalitarianism of universal background checks

Finally, some sanity, and from a somewhat unexpected source. The ACLU is concerned about the civil liberties implications of the new Harry Reid Senate bill to establish so-called “universal background checks” for firearms purchases. The organization has tended toward silence on gun rights, but at least now it recognizes aspects of the problem with this terrible proposal.

Ever since Sandy Hook, the Obama administration and its progressive choir have demanded a new Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). Now it looks like that plan is toast. California Senator Dianne Feinstein blames gun owners and the NRA, and in a sense we should have expected all along that this proposal would get nowhere. Such a ban would mostly target “semi-automatic” rifles—which, despite all the hysterics, simply refers to any standard rifle that fires one round each time the trigger is pulled—that happen to have esthetic elements like the pistol grip that do not in fact add to the weapons’ lethality. This is the nonsensical standard used to ban some classes of weapons instrumentally identical to the ones banned in 1994.

The first AWB devastated the Democrats politically, and probably contributed as much as anything to the Republicans’ crushing victory in the 1994 congressional elections after forty years in the legislative minority. It also hurt Al Gore in his run against George W. Bush in 2000. The ban generally prohibited ordinary but scary looking rifles, which are used in about two percent of violent crimes committed with firearms. The law did not apply to, say, most of the weapons used at the Columbine school massacre in 1999. But it did interfere with Americans’ basic right to own what we can fairly call the modern version of the musket. Millions of Americans own such weapons like the AR-15, the most popular rifle and one targeted by the Democrats’ proposal for a new, robust AWB. These weapons are used for hunting, sport, and self-defense. They are not, despite all the misinformation to the contrary, repeating, military-style rifles.

In any event, the unpopularity of an AWB always doomed this proposal, especially under a Democratic president as distrusted on the right as Obama. The Republicans have the House and too many Democrats in the Senate are loyal to their gun-owning constituents.

So this whole time, the real threat to our firearms freedom has been these less debated, peripheral proposals—proposals that strip people the state deems “mentally ill” of the right to bear arms, proposals that violate the civil rights of released convicts, proposals to increase penalties for violations of current law, and, as disturbing as anything, proposals to institute “universal background checks.”

The gun restrictionists have pointed to polls showing more than 90% approval of such background checks, including among a vast majority of conservatives, Republicans, and gunowners. Liberty is always attacked on the margins, and most Americans don’t go to gun shows and so don’t see the big deal. Surely the state should know who is armed. Surely we don’t want people buying and selling guns freely.

But, in fact, universal background checks are arguably even more tyrannical than banning whole classes of weapons. Why should the government know who is armed? Why shouldn’t people be allowed to freely buy and sell private property without government permission? Half of Americans see background checks as the first step toward full registration then confiscation. Many fear that the new law would create records of these deals that would not immediately be destroyed, which could form databases or enable government in further nefarious purposes. The progressives have tended to regard any of these worries as paranoia, but it looks like the ACLU is now among the paranoid.

There is no need to discuss pure hypotheticals. There have been gun confiscations in the United States. After the Civil War, officials conducted confiscations to disarm American Indians and blacks became the target in the Jim Crow South. Confiscations followed Hurricane Katrina, along with the rest of the government’s martial law response.

Since many gun controllers openly say they want a total ban of certain kinds of firearms, or all firearms, why wouldn’t gunowners fear that registration will lead to confiscation? The U.S. president promised that he would not take away Americans’ rifles, then went ahead and proceeded to propose to do just that. Add all of this to the database growth, the warrantless wiretapping, the domestic surveillance drones, the frightening executive power grabs concerning detention, interrogation, and executions, and the overall militarization of policing that has unfolded thanks to the wars on drugs and terror

Of course, it should go without saying that when it comes to criminal enterprise, universal background checks are unenforceable. In a country with as many guns as there are people, criminals and the state will always get the weapons they want. Firearms are easier to manufacture than many illegal drugs, and we see how well the state has stamped those out. The rapid developments in 3-D printing makes it even crazier that we’d still be talking about gun control as anything but a threat to the liberty of the law abiding.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Every mass shooting over last 20 years has one thing in common … and it’s not guns:  "Nearly every mass shooting incident in the last twenty years, and multiple other instances of suicide and isolated shootings all share one thing in common, and its not the weapons used. The overwhelming evidence points to the signal largest common factor in all of these incidents is the fact that all of the perpetrators were either actively taking powerful psychotropic drugs or had been at some point in the immediate past before they committed their crimes." [Ban psychiatric drugs?]

The coming healthcare cuts for seniors and the disabled:  "Senior citizens are major losers in health reform. More than half the cost of the reform will be paid for by $523 billion of cuts in Medicare spending over the next ten years. Although there are some new benefits for seniors (mainly new drug coverage), the costs exceed the benefits by a factor of more than ten to one."

Screwing the troops:  "The delay and endless often senseless paperwork involved in getting anything is so great that it is easier for disabled vets just to do without or pay for it themselves one way or another. Remember, we are not talking welfare queens or entitlement parasites. These are guys badly hurt in Washington’s wars, brains scrambled by IEDs, legs still somewhere in Afghanistan. The vet’s only hope is to have smart, tenacious representation, preferably by a lawyer. Few have this. What it comes to is that, in practice, the benefits that are supposed to exist do not. This saves a lot of money. It doesn’t help the vet."

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Another spurt of Leftist hate

Leftist hate towards conservatives is so common that I doubt that admirers of Lady Thatcher are much surprised or moved by the antics of young British Leftists in recent days.  Their antics certainly need no explanation.  Hate and abuse is what they do.  It is so common it has become meaningless as information about anything in particular  -- but a warning about what they would do if they could

Many time-honoured social conventions have been discarded in recent times in our headlong rush to demonstrate how modern and relaxed we have all become, but we still, more or less, stick to the maxim of “not speaking ill of the dead”. At least not in the immediate aftermath of their demise, when their families’ grief is still raw.

Yet news of the passing of the frail 87-year-old Baroness Thatcher, so confused that she had to be reminded almost daily that her husband was dead, was greeted with street parties in Brixton, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow. In south London, the scene of rioting in 1981 during her first term in office, the letters on the billboard outside a cinema were rearranged by masked vandals to read “Margaret Thatchers dead LOL [Laugh Out Loud]”. In Glasgow’s George Square, revellers drank champagne, wore party hats and sang, “Ding, dong, the witch is dead”. In Leeds, they shared a celebration cake. In Liverpool they gathered for a “death party”, and in Bristol joined forces under the banner, “May she never RIP”.

Cold comfort, then, for her children, neither of them saints, but still human beings trying to absorb the loss of their mother. We all have a mother, so we should all have enough empathy to imagine a little of what they are feeling. But apparently not.

Of course, Margaret Thatcher, as a three times prime minister whose economic, political and social legacy remains alive and hotly disputed to this day, wasn’t any old mother. And so some, mainly on the political fringes, appear to regard her as such a hate figure that the normal rules of engagement don’t apply.

The most mainstream voice to be heard in this mob was that of Radio 4 regular Mark Steel, who tweeted: “what a terrible shame – that it wasn’t 87 years earlier.” In the chorus was Socialist Worker – circulation under 8,000 and admittedly probably not on order at Mark or Carol Thatcher’s newsagents – with a front-page mock-up of her tombstone and the word “Rejoice” in capital letters. (The editor was too busy yesterday to take a call asking for an explanation of the image.)

And there too, inevitably, was George Galloway MP, never one to mince words when he might make headlines, with: “May she burn in the hellfires.” It is, as far as I can remember, the first time a recently deceased figure has been pushed so publicly and unceremoniously into the medieval pit since the death in 2002 of the Moors Murderess, Myra Hindley.

So has a line been crossed? There is an argument that says that, in life, Margaret Thatcher relished controversy, so why should we think she would object in death? As countless retired cabinet ministers, one-time opponents and commentators have remarked, she enjoyed a fight, adopted a presidential style that dispensed with distinctions between herself and her policies, wasn’t above flamboyantly rubbishing even close colleagues (notably Geoffrey Howe, albeit with disastrous consequences), and, in the words of her biographer the late Hugo Young, “cared little if people liked her”. Presumably in death she will care even less.

SOURCE

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Snarks from the American Left too

The legendary British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died, and the national media tried to pay their respects, not only for breaking Britain's "glass ceiling" with a "bruising" political style, but for transforming Britain and helping wind down the Cold War.

Still, Thatcher was a conservative and one of Ronald Reagan's staunchest friends in the world, so you can be sure these journalists were Thatcher-bashers when she was in power. Some of them were American anchors and reporters.

Let's start with a few quotes from long after she left 10 Downing Street. On Nov. 19, 1999, NBC reporter Jim Avila brought the liberal contempt in a story on a sex scandal in higher education: "Hillsdale College is supposed to be different: a liberal arts college where liberals are unwanted, where Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are regarded as heroic deep thinkers, prayer is encouraged and morality is taught alongside grammar."

That knock on "heroic deep thinkers" shows that Avila wrote the story before he showed up at Hillsdale. Reagan and Thatcher were great leaders and certainly great combatants in the war on ideas. But Hillsdale teaches Locke and Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville. One wonders if TV reporters have heard of those philosophers before they mock conservative "deep thinkers." Obviously, if a Fox News reporter mocked college students viewing Obama and Bill Clinton as "heroic deep thinkers," they would be dismissed as street rabble who'd never opened a book.

In 2000, Time magazine and CBS News picked the most important people of the 20th century. On CBS on Christmas Eve, Bryant Gumbel and Dan Rather took turns suggesting Thatcher wasn't worthy. Gumbel began: "On the women's front, Eleanor Roosevelt is obviously a given. Do we agree with the Margaret Thatcher pick?" Rather replied: "I don't, to be perfectly honest."

Gumbel agreed: "I don't either." Rather demeaned her: "My guess, Margaret Thatcher is there, as much as any reason, because she is a woman."

I'm not making this up. Eleanor Roosevelt, best known as a First Lady and then as an esteemed lecturer of liberal nonsense, is to Gumbel and Rather "obviously a given" on the world stage, while Margaret Thatcher is a mere footnote, only worth mentioning because she was a woman. Neither took exception with the other American woman on the list of the century's leaders: radical leftist Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

During Thatcher's time in power, as she boldly argued for less socialism at home and less communism across Europe, American reporters often brought the same dismissive rhetoric to their Thatcher stories that they did to their Reagan stories. On May 3, 1989, NBC reporter Arthur Kent asserted, "Thatcher has ruthlessly applied her conservative solutions." NBC didn't report that Obama "ruthlessly applied his liberal solutions" when he forced Obamacare down America's throat in 2010.

On that same night, a foolish ABC reporter named John Laurence made Thatcher sound like a despot: "Mrs. Thatcher has proved to be an Iron Lady at home and abroad. ... And in the process, she converted 10 Downing Street into what's been described as an elective dictatorship."

That's what the Left says when conservatives win repeated landslides.

This tilt may have been established in part because when Mrs. Thatcher sat down for interviews with the American networks, she brought her usual firm approach. In her memoir "Reporting Live," CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl tells of interviewing Thatcher in the depths of Iran-Contra, pushing the prime minister to admit Reagan as a liar, feeling that she was "demolished" by Thatcher "seeming to question my love of country."

"What are you doing your level best to put the worst foot forward? Why? America is a great country," Thatcher insisted. "I beg of you, you should have as much faith in America as I have."

Stahl told of receiving bags full of negative mail. Thatcher was originally livid at Stahl's quite-typical battering, but changed her mind when the letters came in, like one telling Stahl "We applauded when Mrs. Thatcher chopped you into bits."

Our media devoted many more hours of weepy airtime to Princess Diana in 1997 than the spare minutes they'll offer in Thatcher's memory. They have already treated her as faded and forgotten. In 2009, when Michelle Obama came to London, NBC turned to an "expert" named Helen Kirwan-Taylor, who proclaimed Mrs. Obama is "absolutely terrifying for the British, because the British like their women subdued and doe-eyed, modest and soft-spoken, I mean, Princess Di. And here comes this woman who's in your face. Everything about her says 'I'm confident. I know what I want. I can do anything.'"

This quote can only be disseminated by people who know this is Thatcher-ignoring nonsense. Liberals claim to love strong women, but not when those women are conservatives.

SOURCE

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Are Right-wingers nicer than Left-wingers?

I don't mean in a Nazis vs Communists, Hitler vs Stalin, way. I mean in a moderate way: Conservative activists vs Labour activists, you might say.

It's difficult to imagine Conservative activists behaving like the people who celebrated Margaret Thatcher's death in Glasgow and Brixton. That's partly because it's hard to think of any Left-wing leader who had as powerful an effect on the country as she did.

But, still, between them, Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan – with quite a lot of help from Edward Heath – led to a disastrous decline in British fortunes in the 1970s, as opposed to the Thatcher economic turnaround. But their deaths barely raised a whimper, let alone a distasteful celebration. Some Right-wingers will, presumably, feel a little private inner glow at the death of a properly wicked dictator, like Fidel Castro; but it's difficult to imagine them taking to the streets to celebrate with such public gusto.

Why is this? Part of the reason is that conservatives accept the unfairnesses and shortcomings of the world as an inevitable reflection of the human condition. In their understanding that public spending cannot be infinite, that there must be some realistic restraint on altruistic impulses, they are often thought to be ruthless and heartless.

That supposed heartlessness is, more often than not, pragmatism. Margaret Thatcher didn't actively want to put lots of miners out of work, as those who celebrated her death might think. What she saw, in an utterly pragmatic way, was that there was no economic sense in propping up a failing industry – she didn't close down the mines; she refused to go on subsidising them. If they had been making money, they would still be open today.

The knowledge that their pragmatic, economic good sense is often perceived as being heartless often makes conservatives rather diffident, self-effacing and apologetic – all nice characteristics (although, it must be said, Margaret Thatcher, for all her personal kindness and decency, didn't have these particular qualities in abundance).

It's the other way round on the Left. Because you are always advocating milk and honey for the oppressed – even if that milk and honey is economically unaffordable or impossible to get hold of – you are protected by a forcefield of advertised niceness. With your public goodness established, you can then allow yourself all the personal bile in the world – by, say, opening a bottle of champagne on the death of a frail, 87-year-old woman.

Which is better? Public niceness and personal nastiness, or public pragmatism and personal niceness?

SOURCE

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Take My Child...Please



A few years ago, Hillary wrote a book titled "It Takes a Village."  That was a palatable notion. The family had the primary responsibility, but there was also community environmental impact as well.  Hillary's observation was mostly reasonable, acceptable, and very politically correct.

But the gradual morphing of the Liberal Progressive message is suddenly obvious.  MSNBC's  Melissa Harris-Perry said...

    "...break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities."

Where in the world would parents get the "private idea" that that child was actually theirs?  How old fashioned and backward thinking!

What is more bothersome is that the notion, the "private idea", is easily dismissed by the single parent, especially when they are encouraged to do so by the likes of Melissa Harris-Perry. The child is of the community they are told, and hence becomes the community's responsibility.  The notion is welcomed.  Maybe the mother and the child are both somehow victims too.  We await Melissa Harris-Perry to tell us.

From the New York Times..

    "73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites."

And when the unwed woman gets pregnant, we are led to believe that it was due to a shortfall in women's healthcare, i.e. the availability of contraceptive products, that is the real culprit.  So the community is responsible for providing "women's healthcare", i.e. contraception....but the community is also responsible for the child born out of wedlock.

Right Sandra Fluke?

There is also the troubling disconnect between the "pro choice" camp and the "communal child" camp.  "It is my body", but it will be "your child".  The choice is mine alone,  but the child "belong(s) to the whole community". Asking a liberal to logically square these positions is futile.

As the child grows, the notion that "how they do in school is solely up to the teacher" is a natural extrapolation of the communal concept.  And what else?  Where they are and what they do in their spare time is also more of a community issue then a familial one.

If the child ends up in a "flash mob" certainly this is not poor decision making or an underperformance of parenting but a failure of the community.

Is there a clearer depiction of the liberal left's attitude on individual responsibility?

How convenient and how easily received and embraced is this notion that your mistake is now 'our' mistake.  Spread the wealth and spread the responsibilities, or more appropriately the irresponsibilities.

Notice the precise word selection.  The "private idea" is a bad idea...kind of like "private industry". "Private" is suggested a bad word. "Communal" and "collective" are offered as good words. Communal...communism.  Collective responsibility....collectives.  These terms are right out of the Marx-Engels dictionary.

These ideas, these concepts of shedding and then spreading responsibility are easily sold to a certain stratum of our population.  It is born, pardon the analogy, in the same womb as "victimhood".

But the grand subliminal suggestion is that because the child is of the community, and the community is reliant upon the Federal Government, we can now read, "It takes a government" to raise a child.  That is the actual mantra. Forward.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Will Cyprus trigger inflation?

Now that bank deposits have been revealed as unsafe, will people rush to spend their money before they lose it?  China has been on a worldwide buying spree for a few years now.  They don't trust the value of all those greenbacks they hold and want to exchange them for more tangible things.  Maybe they know something.

When people and institutions stop spending -- as has happened in recent years -- economists call it "a collapse in the velocity of circulation of money".  But if people suddenly do the opposite and start to spend up big time that will bid up the prices of everything -- which will also bring about destruction of the value of savings.  So you can only win by getting in early -- JR

The balance sheet of the bank in which you deposit/lend your hard-earned savings should always be a matter of keen interest to you.  Any scheme that supposedly de-risks deposits without truly reflecting the cost of removing such risks is just allowing them to accumulate to unsustainable levels - with predictable consequences as we have seen in Cyprus.

I do believe some good will come of the events in Cyprus.  Middle class savers have had their eyes opened and are now being forced to pay attention to:

1) bank balance sheets - deposit insurance schemes are a global fiction which, in part, have allowed modern banks to become the highly leveraged, opaque, risk agglomerating machines that they are;

2) alternatives to bank deposits as capital preservation tools with consequences for the velocity of money and inflation; and

3) the risk of outright wealth confiscation and sudden capital controls as the new in extremis method of financing bankrupt states.

There has been much discussion about the collapse of the velocity of money since 2008.  Despite certain reservations that the concept of the velocity of money may be simply an accounting identity with no real existence outside of economics textbooks, there has certainly been an increased preference on the part of the middle class to hold money balances with the idea that deposits at banks, although they generate meagre returns, will not generate nominal losses.

That fiction is being stripped away.  Middle class wealth is the only the source of funds to bail out the insolvent state and financial sectors and what remains of that capital is largely held in bank deposits and pension plans.  To date, it has been sufficient to "appropriate" this wealth slowly via negative real interest rates, but as events move progressively more swiftly in the bankrupt developed world, the well proven gradual process appears to be failing to yield the requisite funds - hence the transition to bail-ins and outright deposit confiscation.  A steady 5-6% a year real interest rate tax is not sufficient when 30% or more is required overnight.

Where such confiscations are imposed, capital controls will not be far behind in order to prevent any remaining middle class wealth from fleeing, worsening state and financial sector solvency further and depriving the political class of future emergency funds.   Will the next stage of the developed world financial crisis witness confiscatory bail-in schemes followed by severe clampdowns on all ways to get capital to safe harbours?

This leads me to my point on the velocity of money.  If bank deposits are finally revealed to be vastly more risky than the 1-2% nominal interest rates they provide and capital flight is going to be progressively more difficult, then perhaps we are about to see an increase in the velocity of money, whereby middle class capital rotates into real assets outside of the financial system - passive, un-leveraged hard asset investments with reliable cash generating capacity where possible.

Think of the growing interest in investing in farmland and other productive assets as examples.  Time will tell, but we may look back on the events in Cyprus as the catalyst for an upswing in headline rates of inflation - at least in real assets. Ask yourself if a physical gold holding is now really more risky than a European bank deposit and the consequences this may have on nominal real asset prices?

SOURCE

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In Tribute To The Iron Lady: The 25 Greatest Quotes From Margaret Thatcher



If we had more leaders with Margaret Thatcher's heart, courage and wisdom, this would be a different, better world.  As you read these quotes from one of the towering figures of the 20th century, you'll see why.

25) "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t."

24) "I too have a certain idea of America. Moreover, I would not feel entitled to say that of any other country, except my own. This is not just sentiment, though I always feel ten years younger – despite the jet-lag – when I set foot on American soil: there is something so positive, generous, and open about the people – and everything actually works. I also feel, though, that I have in a sense a share of America."

23) "They’ve got the usual Socialist disease — they’ve run out of other people’s money."

22) "My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police."

21) "If you want to cut your own throat, don’t come to me for a bandage."

20) "Constitutions have to be written on hearts, not just paper."

19) "I never hugged him, I bombed him." -- Thatcher on dictator, Muammar Gaddafi

18) "I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left."

17) "It is always important in matters of high politics to know what you do not know. Those who think that they know, but are mistaken, and act upon their mistakes, are the most dangerous people to have in charge."

16) "I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!' or 'I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!' 'I am homeless, the Government must house me!' and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first… There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate."

15) "The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom."

14) "A man may climb Everest for himself, but at the summit he plants his country's flag."

13) "Whether it is in the United States or in mainland Europe, written constitutions have one great weakness. That is that they contain the potential to have judges take decisions which should properly be made by democratically elected politicians."

12) "The defence budget is one of the very few elements of public expenditure that can truly be described as essential. This point was well-made by a robust Labour Defence Minister, Denis (Now Lord) Healey, many years ago: ‘Once we have cut expenditure to the extent where our security is imperiled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.’"

11) "...The larger the slice taken by government, the smaller the cake available for everyone."

10) "Whether manufactured by black, white, brown or yellow hands, a widget remains a widget – and it will be bought anywhere if the price and quality are right. The market is a more powerful and more reliable liberating force than government can ever be."

9) "To be free is better than to be unfree – always. Any politician who suggests the opposite should be treated as suspect."

8) "During my lifetime most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one fashion or other, from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it."

7) "There is much to be said for trying to improve some disadvantaged people’s lot. There is nothing to be said for trying to create heaven on earth."

6) "Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag."

5) "It is one of the great weaknesses of reasonable men and women that they imagine that projects which fly in the face of commonsense are not serious or being seriously undertaken."

4) "...Conservatives have excellent credentials to speak about human rights. By our efforts, and with precious little help from self-styled liberals, we were largely responsible for securing liberty for a substantial share of the world’s population and defending it for most of the rest."

3) "Oh, but you know, you do not achieve anything without trouble, ever."

2) "Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it."

1) "Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story."

SOURCE

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'Proportional' Response?

Thomas Sowell

Since when has it been considered smart to tell your enemies what your plans are?

Yet there on the front page of the April 8th New York Times was a story about how unnamed "American officials" were planning a "proportional" response to any North Korean attack. This was spelled in an example: If the North Koreans "shell a South Korean island that had military installations" then the South Koreans would retaliate with "a barrage of artillery of similar intensity."

Whatever the merits or demerits of such a plan, what conceivable purpose can be served by telling the North Koreans in advance that they need fear nothing beyond a tit for tat? All that does is lower the prospective cost of aggression.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, should we have simply gone over and bombed a harbor in Japan? Does anyone think that this response would have stopped Japanese aggression? Or stop other nations from taking shots at the United States, when the price was a lot lower than facing massive retaliation?

Back before the clever new notion of "proportional" response became the vogue, our response to Pearl Harbor was ultimately Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And Japan has not attacked or even threatened anybody since then. Nor has any war broken out anywhere that is at all comparable with World War II.

Which policy is better? There was a time when we followed the ancient adage "By their fruits ye shall know them." The track record of massive retaliation easily beats that of the more sophisticated-sounding proportional response.

Back in ancient times, when Carthage attacked Rome, the Romans did not respond "proportionally." They wiped Carthage off the face of the earth. That may have had something to do with the centuries of what was called the Pax Romano -- the Roman peace.

When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, the British simply sent troops to take the islands back -- despite American efforts to dissuade Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from doing even that.

For more than a century since the British settled in the Falkland Islands, Argentina had not dared to invade them. Why?

Because, until recent times, an Argentine attack on a British settlement would be risking not only a British counterattack there, but the danger of a major British attack on Argentina itself. That could mean leaving Buenos Aires in ruins.

Today, Argentina's government is again making threatening noises about the Falkland Islands. Why not? The most the Argentines have to fear is a "proportional" response to aggression -- and the Obama administration has already urged "negotiations" instead of even that. When threats are rewarded, why not make threats, when there are few dangers to fear?

Can you think of any war prior to Iraq and Afghanistan where the United States announced to the world when it planned to pull its troops out? What has this accomplished? "By their fruits ye shall know them." What have been the fruits?

First of all, this constant talk in Washington about not only pulling out, but announcing in advance what their pullout timetable was, meant that Iraqi political leaders knew that a powerful Iran was on their border permanently, while Washington was a long way away and intended to stay away.

Should we be surprised that the Iraqi government has increasingly come to pay more attention to what Iran wants than to what Washington wants? Once more, vast numbers of American lives have been sacrificed winning victories on the battlefield that the politicians in Washington then frittered away and turned into defeat politically.

What about other countries around the world who are watching what the American government is doing? Many have to decide whether they want to cooperate with the United States, and risk the wrath of our enemies, or cooperate with our enemies and risk nothing.

There is no need to respond to a North Korean artillery barrage by wiping North Korea off the map. But there is also no need to reassure the North Koreans in advance that we won't.

What announcing the doctrine of "proportional" response does is lower the price of aggression. Why would we want to do that?

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Moral Foundations of Society

In November 1994, Lady Thatcher delivered the concluding lecture in Hillsdale Center for Constructive Alternatives seminar, "God and Man: Perspectives on Christianity in the 20th Century" before an audience of 2,500 students, faculty, and guests. In an edited version of that lecture, she examines how the Judeo-Christian tradition has provided the moral foundations of America and other nations in the West and contrasts their experience with that of the former Soviet Union.

The Moral Foundations of the American Founding

History has taught us that freedom cannot long survive unless it is based on moral foundations. The American founding bears ample witness to this fact. America has become the most powerful nation in history, yet she uses her power not for territorial expansion but to perpetuate freedom and justice throughout the world.

For over two centuries, Americans have held fast to their belief in freedom for all men-a belief that springs from their spiritual heritage. John Adams, second president of the United States, wrote in 1789, "Our Constitution was designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." That was an astonishing thing to say, but it was true.

What kind of people built America and thus prompted Adams to make such a statement? Sadly, too many people, especially young people, have a hard time answering that question. They know little of their own history (This is also true in Great Britain.) But America's is a very distinguished history, nonetheless, and it has important lessons to teach us regarding the necessity of moral foundations.

John Winthrop, who led the Great Migration to America in the early 17th century and who helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared, "We shall be as a City upon a Hill." On the voyage to the New World, he told the members of his company that they must rise to their responsibilities and learn to live as God intended men should live: in charity, love, and cooperation with one another. Most of the early founders affirmed the colonists were infused with the same spirit, and they tried to live in accord with a Biblical ethic. They felt they weren't able to do so in Great Britain or elsewhere in Europe. Some of them were Protestant, and some were Catholic; it didn't matter. What mattered was that they did not feel they had the liberty to worship freely and, therefore, to live freely, at home. With enormous courage, the first American colonists set out on a perilous journey to an unknown land-without government subsidies and not in order to amass fortunes but to fulfill their faith.

Christianity is based on the belief in a single God as evolved from Judaism. Most important of all, the faith of America's founders affirmed the sanctity of each individual. Every human life-man or woman, child or adult, commoner or aristocrat, rich or poor-was equal in the eyes of the Lord. It also affirmed the responsibility of each individual.

This was not a faith that allowed people to do whatever they wished, regardless of the consequences. The Ten Commandments, the injunction of Moses ("Look after your neighbor as yourself"), the Sermon on the Mount, and the Golden Rule made Americans feel precious-and also accountable-for the way in which they used their God-given talents. Thus they shared a deep sense of obligation to one another. And, as the years passed, they not only formed strong communities but devised laws that would protect individual freedom-laws that would eventually be enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Freedom with Responsibility

Great Britain, which shares much of her history in common with America, has also derived strength from its moral foundations, especially since the 18th century when freedom gradually began to spread throughout her socie!y Many people were greatly influenced by the sermons of John Wesley (1703-1791), who took the Biblical ethic to the people in a way which the institutional church itself had not done previously.

But we in the West must also recognize our debt to other cultures. In the pre-Christian era, for example, the ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had much to contribute to our understanding of such concepts as truth, goodness, and virtue. They knew full well that responsibility was the price of freedom. Yet it is doubtful whether truth, goodness, and virtue founded on reason alone would have endured in the same way as they did in the West, where they were based upon a Biblical ethic.

Sir Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote tellingly of the collapse of Athens, which was the birthplace of democracy. He judged that, in the end, more than they wanted freedom, the Athenians wanted security. Yet they lost everything-security, comfort, and freedom. This was because they wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them. The freedom they were seeking was freedom from responsibility. It is no wonder, then, that they ceased to be free. In the modern world, we should recall the Athenians' dire fate whenever we confront demands for increased state paternalism.

To cite a more recent lesson in the importance of moral foundations, we should listen to Czech President Vaclav Havel, who suffered grievously for speaking up for freedom when his nation was still under the thumb of communism. He has observed, "In everyone there is some longing for humanity's rightful dignity, for moral integrity, and for a sense that transcends the world of existence." His words suggest that in spite of all the dread terrors of communism, it could not crush the religious fervor of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

So long as freedom, that is, freedom with responsibility, is grounded in morality and religion, it will last far longer than the kind that is grounded only in abstract, philosophical notions. Of course, many foes of morality and religion have attempted to argue that new scientific discoveries make belief in God obsolete, but what they actually demonstrate is the remarkable and unique nature of man and the universe. It is hard not to believe that these gifts were given by a divine Creator, who alone can unlock the secrets of existence.

Societies Without Moral Foundations

The most important problems we have to tackle today are problems, ultimately, having to do with the moral foundations of society There are people who eagerly accept their own freedom but do not respect the freedom of others-they, like the Athenians, want freedom from responsibility. But if they accept freedom for themselves, they must respect the freedom of others. If they expect to go about their business unhindered and to be protected from violence, they must not hinder the business of or do violence to others.

They would do well to look at what has happened in societies without moral foundations. Accepting no laws but the laws of force, these societies have been ruled by totalitarian ideologies like Nazism, fascism, and communism, which do not spring from the general populace, but are imposed on it by intellectual elites.

It was two members of such an elite, Marx and Lenin, who conceived of "dialectical materialism," the basic doctrine of communism. It robs people of all freedom-from freedom of worship to freedom of ownership. Marx and Lenin desired to substitute their will not only for all individual will but for God's will. They wanted to plan everything; in short, they wanted to become gods. Theirs was a breathtakingly arrogant creed, and it denied above all else the sanctity of human life.

The 19th century French economist and philosopher Frederic Bastiat once warned against this creed. He questioned those who, "though they are made of the same human clay as the rest of us, think they can take away all our freedoms and exercise them on our behalf." He would have been appalled but not surprised that the communists of the 20th century took away the freedom of millions of individuals, starting with the freedom to worship. The communists viewed religion as "the opiate of the people." They seized Bibles as well as all other private property at gun point and murdered at least 10 million souls in the process.

Thus 20th century Russia entered into the greatest experiment in government and atheism the world had ever seen, just as America several centuries earlier had entered into the world's greatest experiment in freedom and faith.

Communism denied all that the Judeo-Christian tradition taught about individual worth, human dignity, and moral responsibility. It was not surprising that it collapsed after a relatively brief existence. It could not survive more than a few generations because it denied human nature, which is fundamentally moral and spiritual. (It is true that no one predicted the collapse would come so quickly and so easily. In retrospect, we know that this was due in large measure to the firmness of President Ronald Reagan who said, in effect, to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, "Do not try to beat us militarily, and do not think that you can extend your creed to the rest of the world by force.")

The West began to fight the mora! battle against communism in earnest in the 1980s, and it was our resolve-combined with the spiritual strength of the people suffering under the system who finally said, "Enough!"-that helped restore freedom in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union-the freedom to worship, speak, associate, vote, establish political parties, start businesses, own property, and much more. If communism had been a creed with moral foundations, it might have survived, but it was not, and it simply could not sustain itself in a world that had such shining examples of freedom, namely, America and Great Britain.

The Moral Foundations of Capitalism

It is important to understand that the moral foundations of a society do not extend only to its political system; they must extend to its economic system as well. America's commitment to capitalism is unquestionably the best example of this principle. Capitalism is not, contrary to what those on the Left have tried to argue, an amoral system based on selfishness, greed, and exploitation. It is a moral system based on a Biblical ethic. There is no other comparable system that has raised the standard of living of millions of people, created vast new wealth and resources, or inspired so many beneficial innovations and technologies.

The wonderful thing about capitalism is that it does not discriminate against the poor, as has been so often charged; indeed, it is the only economic system that raises the poor out of poverty. Capitalism also allows nations that are not rich in natural resources to prosper. If resources were the key to wealth, the richest country in the world would be Russia, because it has abundant supplies of everything from oil, gas, platinum, gold, silver, aluminum, and copper to timber, water, wildlife, and fertile soil.

Why isn't Russia the wealthiest country in the world? Why aren't other resource-rich countries in the Third World at the top of the list? It is because their governments deny citizens the liberty to use their God-given talents. Man's greatest resource is himself, but he must be free to use that resource.

In his recent encyclical, Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul I1 addressed this issue. He wrote that the collapse of communism is not merely to be considered as a "technical problem." It is a consequence of the violation of human rights. He specifically referred to such human rights as the right to private initiative, to own property, and to act in the marketplace. Remember the "Parable of the Talents" in the New Testament? Christ exhorts us to be the best we can be by developing our skills and abilities, by succeeding in all our tasks and endeavors. What better description can there be of capitalism? In creating new products, new services, and new jobs, we create a vibrant community of work. And that community of work serves as the basis of peace and good will among all men.

The Pope also acknowledged that capitalism encourages important virtues, like diligence, industriousness, prudence, reliability, fidelity, conscientiousness, and a tendency to save in order to invest in the future. It is not material goods but all of these great virtues, exhibited by individuals working together, that constitute what we call the "marketplace."

The Moral Foundations of the Law

Freedom, whether it is the freedom of the marketplace or any other kind, must exist within the framework of law. 0thenvise it means only freedom for the strong to oppress the weak. Whenever I visit the former Soviet Union, I stress this point with students, scholars, politicians, and businessmen-in short, with everyone I meet. Over and over again, I repeat: Freedom must be informed by the principle of justice in order to make it work between people. A system of laws based on solid moral foundations must regulate the entire life of a nation.

But this is an extremely difficult point to get across to people with little or no experience with laws except those based on force. The concept of justice is entirely foreign to communism. So, too, is the concept of equality. For over seventy years, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had no system of common law. There were only the arbitrary and often contradictory dictates of the Communist Party. There was no independent judiciary There was no such thing as truth in the communist system.

And what is freedom without truth? I have been a scientist, a lawyer, and a politician, and from my own experience I can testify that it is nothing. The third century Roman jurist Julius Paulus said, "What is right is not derived from the rule, but the rule arises from our knowledge of what is right." In other words, the law is founded on what we believe to be true and just. It has moral foundations. Once again, it is important to note that the free societies of America and Great Britain derive such foundations from a Biblical ethic.

The Moral Foundations of Democracy

Democracy is never mentioned in the Bible. When people are gathered together, whether as families, communities or nations, their purpose is not to ascertain the will of the majority, but the will of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, I am an enthusiast of democracy because it is about more than the will of the majority. If it were only about the will of the majority, it would be the right of the majority to oppress the minority. The American Declaration of Independence and Constitution make it clear that this is not the case. There are certain rights which are human rights and which no government can displace. And when it comes to how you Americans exercise your rights under democracy, your hearts seem to be touched by something greater than yourselves. Your role in democracy does not end when you cast your vote in an election. It applies daily; the standards and values that are the moral foundations of society are also the foundations of your lives.

Democracy is essential to preserving freedom. As Lord Acton reminded us, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." If no individual can be trusted with power indefinitely, it is even more true that no government can be. It has to be checked, and the best way of doing so is through the will of the majority, bearing in mind that this will can never be a substitute for individual human rights.

I am often asked whether I think there will be a single international democracy, known as a "new world order." Though many of us may yearn for one, I do not believe it will ever arrive. We are misleading ourselves about human nature when we say, "Surely we're too civilized, too reasonable, ever to go to war again," or, "We can rely on our governments to get together and reconcile our differences." Tyrants are not moved by idealism. They are moved by naked ambition. Idealism did not stop Hitler; it did not stop Stalin. Our best hope as sovereign nations is to maintain strong defenses. Indeed, that has been one of the most important moral as well as geopolitical lessons of the 20th century. Dictators are encouraged by weakness; they are stopped by strength. By strength, of course, I do not merely mean military might but the resolve to use that might against evil.

The West did show sufficient resolve against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. But we failed bitterly in Bosnia. In this case, instead of showing resolve, we preferred "diplomacy" and "consensus." As a result, a quarter of a million people were massacred. This was a horror that I, for one, never expected to see again in my lifetime. But it happened. Who knows what tragedies the future holds if we do not learn from the repeated lessons of histoy? The price of freedom is still, and always will be, eternal vigilance.

Free societies demand more care and devotion than any others. They are, moreover, the only societies with moral foundations, and those foundations are evident in their political, economic, legal, cultural, and, most importantly, spiritual life.

We who are living in the West today are fortunate. Freedom has been bequeathed to us. We have not had to carve it out of nothing; we have not had to pay for it with our lives. Others before us have done so. But it would be a grave mistake to think that freedom requires nothing of us. Each of us has to earn freedom anew in order to possess it. We do so not just for our own sake, but for the sake of our children, so that they may build a better future that will sustain over the wider world the responsibilities and blessings of freedom.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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