Good morning.

1. So, the PDO, important for you or not?
2. Talking taxes.
3. Well, there you go!
4. Noting the liberal movement to co-opt language via re-definition. Sometimes I also have wondered how people who suffer from actual phobias think about calling policy disagreements phobias. 
5. That’s right, I still don’t think cops are dangerous to people (in any special way). People are dangerous to people. 
6. Mr Jagger.
7. On Mr Strass-Kahn.
8. So … still want to rush post haste out of Iraq and Afghanistan?
9. On that topic … 
10. Takeover bid quantities.
11. Heh.
12. A Tea Party sign. If you have a problem with that sentiment you haven’t been watching anything in the beltway for two decades or more.
13. My car has been banned 🙁

Well, for those of you can’t help but keep reading and reading and reading … some reading for the 4th.

1. I haven’t but perused this, but Kass&Kass have a wonderful anthology on Marriage (Wing to Wing) and now they have a new one on what it means to be American. The same thing occurs with the marriage book, liberals are (often? typically?) allergic to reading books or anthologies collected by a someone who is thought conservative. And clearly this is a conservative tome, after all that’s why you have a Veteran’s day speech included by that arch-conservative John Kerry.
2. One of my favorite US historians to read is David Hackett Fisher, two book by him should be on everyone’s shelf, Washington’s Crossing and Albion’s Seed.
3. Mr Olson (no relation to my knowledge) points to Chesterton on Patriotism.
4. A repeated theme over the years on patriotism on this blog is that for myself, I think the patriotic feelings we have for country are best described by the first chapters of the book of Ruth chapter 1.

Good day.

1. Well, that kind of overconfidence is something I don’t have to worry about.
2. Kinda shadenfroody … Let’s see it take $250k just to jump regulatory burdens in CA to open a hamburger joint, companies that want to startup building cars go to 3 wheels to avoid the high costs of regulation (see Aptera), and so on. All Democrat inspired regulatory burdens that are mostly useless, expensive and hampering real progress. But go ahead, get pissed if it applies to your pet projects. 
3. Manufacturing and myths.
4. That health mandate ruling, an objective (non ideological) description.
5. I don’t get Engaget’s bias here. This is the umpteenth Android tablet they’ve noted “on parity in price” with this and that … but forgetting to mention it’s $100 more than the Asus Transformer? Why the omission? It a anti-Taiwan bias?
6. Speaking of ID and evolution.
7. History as a Lawyer is different than not (a lawyer). Specifically a non-Lawyer looks at the Jackson legacy quite differently.
8. Is that a good example for young girls with big dreams or big girls with young dreams?
9. A reminder for our summer project … liberty and independence is not conceived as the maximization of choice but of communion in love.
10. The unsung consequences (which no liberal will admit even afterwards) to Mr Walker’s school budget union fight.
11. More unsung, the unnoticed consequences of that 4th circuit Obamacare-as-Constitional ruling.

Traveling tonight, which might mean links tomorrow will be in the evening. 

1. Lazy lawmakers. Who’d of thought such a thing could be possible? Washington not attending diligently to their primary job (making good law)? 
2. Google and search bias.
3. Commenting on a stupid move made by Mr Obama.
4. No that’s a real non-news story (or should I more accurately coin it a news story for which news reporters are only audience). What “spotlight?”
5. Cost and life. I’d say no. And the question might be what price you would find reasonable. My gut response is a few hundred bucks.
6. Putting the “no soldiers in harms way means it isn’t war” in context.
7. Why not in the US? Answer: regulations.
8. “Are you a flake?” … here and here.
9. Here’s the thing on the recent Afghan move from FP, “It’s clear that Obama and his advisors approach these decisions as politicians, not strategists.” That’s always a bad move in war. Here’s one who concurs.
10. This is not unrelated.
11. Speaking of war, cinema?
12. LOL.
13. What makes a man.
14. Talking CO₂.

Good morning

1. One of Orthodoxy’s key words, fullness.
2. Not-sold-here, thanks to our regulatory barriers.
3. I have difficulty imagining a good reason to get something like this.
4. Slightly cute. Or is the word precious?
5. Morning glory.
6. Boy or girl.
7. Hegel and a Pope.
8. The mythical socialists (HT).
9. What passes for the new government mandated tobacco ads in another venue.
10. Browser wars.
11. Ngrams … and a follow-up.

Good morning.

1. American exceptionalism, looking back.
2. Big pharam and Madison ave.
3. Mr Obama and the Afghan shift.
4. What, kind sir, does “marry” mean anyhow?
5. Orthodoxy and going against grain.
6. Perhaps at the next Obama press conference or campaign stop, someone can ask him to defend this.
7. That’s because those young people are raised by older people who by and large are also … True story. A few weeks ago when my parents visited, my mother claimed to have never heard of William the Conqueror or the significance of the date 1066. I’m still not sure I believe her.
8. About those required graphics on cigarettes. 
9. Fuel cell news.
10. What is racism? 

Good day.

1. Cassandra was right.
2. Double? But, hey, I hear all those “responsible” Democrats don’t want to cut spending after all. What does that word “responsible” mean anyhow?
3. Unexpected. Surprised. Why do we keep hearing this term from our economic so-called experts. Does snake oil ring a bell?
4. Decisively put.
5. Short eyes?
6. A trillion?
7. Looking forward to that Turing-ish test.
8. The future of photo-journalism?
9. Here’s your local not-very-scary Tea Party. (HT)
10. Gay rights victory in Wisconsin. Although I’d think it’s mostly a women’s rights thing.
11. Speaking of gay rights, … is all the liberal wagging about gay rights just about this dog?

I’m kind an outsider on the Evolution ID debate and don’t follow it closely, because I don’t think evolution is anywhere near as important a science/issue as it is made out to be, e.g., it is not a cornerstone by or lens through which the how’s and why’s of biological data need to be seen. From my point of view (and a view oddly enough shared by at least one NOVA program) is that the ID critique of the evolutionary model proposed by the genetic error/adaptive selection model is one of time. The ID critique from that point of view is that the changes seen should take longer than they have absent other mechanisms. The standard GE/AS models have no substantial riposte to that because neither side has a predictive methodology. Questions like: Given an isolated flightless population what is the expectation value for the duration you’d have to wait before flight would be developed by that population? Or, Given a isolated population with no light, what are the expectaion values for the time for loss of all sight organs and functions? Or Given a isolated population with an excess of right handed sugars, what is the time to develop digestion of the same? Neither ID nor GE/AS has any clue/method for calculating an answer to that. 

In that mode, it seems that an interesting tack for experimentation on that would be to develop data points. Stress populations and figure out how long it would take the population to develop a response. That is develop data points and methods to begin building a heuristic model to answer the above questions. It seems to me that small table top populations of organisms could be created which in the main have very fast generational times and consequently the possibilities for adapative responses. This could in turn give some data points for developing descriptive formula for which a theory which describes them might be hung.

This (feels?) like a theme/meme I’ve run into many times. Quoting from here:

There is much to be said about shame, but I struggle with the search for antidotes.  Those who make us feel shame are also most likely to chide us for suffering from it.  Part of Shelley’s point is that at the least, misrecognition of shame is to be avoided.  And some of the sources she identifies in her comment are the product of the wrong ideals; for example, receiving government assistance is a source of shame in a culture in which people with lucky and uneventful lives hold up extreme individualism and self-sufficiency as an ideal for everyone, while fancying they live up to this ideal.

Focus on the italicized (italics mine) sentence. Surely those who feel themselves not in the group of those “making us feel shame” are the ones who will be empathetically trying to assist those feeling said shame to get past, get over, and not feel that shame. Which in turn concentrates attention on that shame … making it felt. It might be just as likely that those who notice, empathise and try to rid us of our shame just plain make it worse … and possibly are even more prevalent than those who would “chide us” for it.

And who “makes anyone” feel shame? Shame, it seems to me, comes from a shared recognition of a failure to hold to a communal standard? No individual can make a shared understanding occur or create a communal standard. Only an extreme individualist might hold this as the fault of an individual. Right?

Better late than never, eh? Actually, I started this in the morning (after traveling last night … I didn’t leave enough to make it to the job site with breakfast + shower + link collect and report). 

1. Art forgetting beauty.
2. Feel safer now?
3. Not a land shark.
4. A suggestion that malfeasance (or incompetence) was a strategy.
5. Streeeettttchsh the chicken.
6. I’m with the blogger on this, you run into a parked car, it’s your own damn fault.
7. Uncertainty and hiring. Ya think?
8. A homily for our times.
9. Or … if you have a modern viewpoint on the worth of a vow taken.
10. Some liberals claim that they hold the “reality position” due to the fact that the putative experts are mostly liberal … but when those experts keep making claims like this … well, reality bites.
11. Art and autism.
12. It’d be nice if our government said it too … and heck not just talked the talk, but y’now walked the walk. 
13. If you find offense in that picture, you need take a sanity check.
14. A link to a good post, and Krugman keeps his ideological blinders on.
15. Attacking the straw man.
16. Someday, yes, someday I’m going to be able to read past the first five sentences of one of Eli’s acerbic attacks and not run into something he says that isn’t flipping idiotic. Let me try to be specific, “Twice he describes something as “attractive,” surely an odd choice given that he means to discuss something fundamentally moral and not just a matter of mere taste.” Hello, there are whole schools of ethics which equate the beauty and the good and furthermore find that ethics boils down to choosing the good (or beautiful) and that what constitutes beauty is not “just a matter of taste” it depends on asthetics and a theory of the same, which has no a priori dependence on taste.

Good morning.

1. Of West and East (rites).
2. Even if the supposition that if we’re just using dones it isn’t war … is it even true?
3. One of the big reasons liberals and conservatives can’t talk. Liberals slam the door before the conversation starts, see?
4. Politics and shark-jumping. My guess is that liberals would point to the Clinton impeachment. I’d point at the Bork/Thomas hearings as the point at which liberal serious engagement in politics and with those on the other side of the aisle left the building.
5. Academic fudging.
6. Public/private schools for the children of politicians.
7. Selecting for dumb.
8. Chrisitanity, salvation and the individual.
9. Flip flops and the President? Say it ain’t so!
10. A media member attempts to insult Ms Palin, fails.
11. I read that story … probably 35+ years ago.
12. Is it naive to think that this would end the struggle and now just move the boundary of said same struggle.
13. Dangerous things for kids.
14. Abortion and choice … and consequences.

Good morning.

1. Quibbles over some terms.
2. Movements on Malta.
3. US decline.
4. Southern Baptists go to hell … in a topical sense.
5. Links to the whole saga here.
6. The Administration’s war powers response. It strikes me that there’s a double edged thing going on here. In the 80s, if I recall, war powers arguments were used by the Dems against Reagan in several contexts (Nicaragua?) which the GOP supported (and likely Mr Obama at the time opposed). So, for the left, why oppose that and not this and conversely for the right the similar argument holds.
7. Oh, and here’s a pointed rebuttal to the point that the Libyan action isn’t one of war. 
8. Van Gough interprets Tolkein.
9. Jesus as that great insane moralizer. Wait … what!?
10. He may have legal recourse … but that doesn’t mean he should avail himself of it. Should you avail yourself of laws you think are wrong but which are in your favor. 
11. Pah. The ultimate goal of “bike culture” was aptly stated by Freddy Mercury … “Get on your bike an ride!” And that’s the beginning and end of it.
12. I’m not an Apple fan … but here’s a defense against the lastest salvo against them.
13. Empathy, a typical Democrat meme, turned against our not-clearly-empathic President.
14. Rape and war, kind of like the “it’s for the children” tax and spend refrain.

And no, this is meant not bo be a definitive answer for y’all. However, recently the Weekend Fisher has written a short post comparing it to losing face. 

Recently in a Dogmatic theology class a quote from, if I recall, one of the Cappadoccian fathers had offered that your sin “like” a veil being drawn between you and God. People in the class reacted positively, as if this was interesting and insightful way of stating it. However, this was for me problematic, because my understanding was that sin was basically defined pretty much in that way. So the question might be why is that an interesting observation if it is also basically the definition for sin. A week later, our instructor came back with a definition for sin that she managed to find, which was that sin is “taking your attention away from God.” 

So, for y’all what is your working definition for what is this thing called sin? 

Good morning.

1. Capture and regulation by the dynamic duo, here and here.
2. Why do “history related gaffes weigh heavily” on these and similar gaffes by, say, the President? 
3. This reminds me of a homily by Isaac the Syrian which praised the passions (which are usually put in a negative light).
4. Visiting with our rusty philosophe. First,  uhm, what is “1”? It’s a little more complicated than you suspect. One good exercise at an attempt to construct the Integers is found here, but don’t pretend it’s cut and dried or corresponding to your naive notions. And here, the little assertion (on which so much contends) that sexual acts are not intrinsically moral but “depend on context”. Whether killing a person is ethical depends on context. However, killing even if you determine it was ethical remains a moral act. So too with sex. It is intrinsically moral.
5. The Lebonese reaction to the discovery of the idenity of “Gay Girl”.
6. So, what does tending cows mean? Besides that the person using that phrase has never worked with cows.
7. More Democrat stupidity, proving mostly that the Democrat elite at least have been relatively untouched by the recession.
8. 99% perspiration.
9. A categorization of Frank-Dodd for the books.
10. Remember when Obamacare was market driven?

I didn’t really follow the career and recent campaign of Ms Bachmann closely, it was not local and didn’t run across my radar. What I did garner was that the left, lumps her with Ms Palin, as a female unequipped and/or completely unsuited for public office. For a mild example, see this post. The left will claim that their outrage is not based on the fact that both are female, in the public eye, and do not (!) support abortion on demand. 

Both of these women had somewhat similar trajectories into politics. Both were mothers who got involved in their school board to right things they found wrong. In Ms Palin’s case, she found corruption and chasing the same (often against her own party) led to a seat in the governors mansion. Ms Bachmann, saw one of her children doing “coloring circles” in high school algebra and was outraged. More on her trajectory here, please read this and this … we’ll wait here. OK. You’re back? For both of these women, if they happened to be not against abortion, and were firmly on the left, then their narrative that brought them to the political stage would be championed as prime examples of how the best of mixing motherhood and public service. But … instead they are targets of outrage and venom from that same source. So ….

Here’s my question to the left, what’s your beef in particular with Ms Bachmann? Why is she seen by you as “completely unsuited” for office?