“The core problem underneath all of this, when you whittle it down, is that we simply are not getting enough growth in the developed world economies to pay our way out of all the debts that those economies have built up by making promises that are undeliverable to public sector workers.”

Hat tip to John Derbyshire.

Just tape bread and other left-overs acquired in dumpsters to the outside of your clothing and lie down in the evening in the suburbs. Ignore the fleas.

Hat tip to Vice via Vanderleun.

Background.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

The Telegraph has a news item proving that the unelected elite bureaucracy does as excellent a job at supervising food standards as it does managing the European financial system.

Brussels bureaucrats were ridiculed yesterday after banning drink manufacturers from claiming that water can prevent dehydration.

EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.

Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.

Last night, critics claimed the EU was at odds with both science and common sense. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: “This is stupidity writ large.

“The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water and trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.

“If ever there were an episode which demonstrates the folly of the great European project then this is it.”

European Parliament, Strasbourg, 16 November 2011, Nigel Farage tells the European Parliament that the Euro is a failure and that the members he is addressing have no democratic legitimacy.

James Taranto deconstructs the Occupy protest movement and concludes that the movement’s lack of rational goals and legitimate grievances is symptomatic of the position of the left in general. The left wants attention, the left wants to make a noise, but the left hasn’t actually got anything to say. Taranto asks: “[W]ith the exception of same-sex marriage, can you think of a single new idea that has come out of the left since Lyndon Johnson was president?”

“They paused to scream at the walls of a Citibank branch.”

To our mind, that sentence more than anything we’ve read encapsulates the spirit of Obamaville. It originally appeared in a San Francisco Chronicle story about an incident in which “dozens of college students” invaded a Bank of America Branch, “pitching a tent and chanting ‘shame, shame’ until they were arrested.” (The original Web version of the story is available here.)

What do we want? Uh . . .

On the way to B of A, they paused at Citi to scream at the walls. These are college students, acting like 2-year-olds throwing a tantrum. What does that tell you about their critical thinking skills–and about the standards of American higher education? The likes of the New York Times expect us to take such incoherent spasms of rage seriously as a political “movement.” What does that tell us about the standards of the liberal media?

Read the whole thing.

The Inimitable Iowahawk has updated the 1963 Alan Sherman song to meet current needs and conditions.

Hello Faddah
Hello Mama
I’m Occupying
Camp Obama
I’m protesting
Wall Street grabbings
And trying to avoid the hobo stabbings

On my iPhone
With my last tweet
I down-twinkled
Jews on Wall Street
Please don’t worry
About psychosis
‘Cause my Guy Fawkes mask repels tuberculosis

We are saving
This whole nation
With some squad car
Defecation
We went marching
in Zucotti
And got applauded by the Nazi Party

There’s a raping
Every day now
Some are straight and
Some are gay now
Latest outbreak
Dysentery
In the food tent over by the Ben & Jerry’s

Taaaake me home
Oh Dad and Mama
Taaaake me home
From Camp Obama
Don’t leave me
Out in the plaza scent
Made by
The 99 percent

Cosign loans
Oh Dad and Mama
Don’t make groans
Oh Dad and Mama
‘Cause Van Jones
Assures me that it’s cool
For me
To go to graduate schooooool

Just a minute
Dad and Mama
Got a message
From Obama
He doesn’t like the
way we’re livin’
So our student loans are hereby all forgiven

No more worries
No more bothers
All thanks to our
Founding fathers
Our dear leaders
won’t let me fail
Dear Mom and Dad please disregard this email

The Obama Administration.

Conrad Black observes the liberal media redirecting its fire from Herman Cain in the direction of Newt Gingrich, and shrugs indifferently. It is already obvious to any intelligent observer (like Mr. Black) that Barack Obama (absent divine intervention) has no real hope of being re-elected and that the election of 2012 is destined to be a genuinely transformative election, sweeping all of the consequences of the election of 2008 onto the ash-pile of history.

For me to achieve a degree of optimism from this procession of accident-prone Republican candidates might seem aberrant or a worrisome sign of cabin fever, but it isn’t. The grace of revelation came in two mighty flashes of celestial light, a few seconds apart, thunder to follow closer to next November. Whatever obloquy may be rained down on the well-tended topknots of the Republican hopefuls, it will not excuse or reelect the administration described by one commentator a few weeks ago as “the worst since before the invention of electricity.”

This administration will have produced $5 trillion of deficits, which will have the economic consequences of a 500 percent increase in the money supply in four years, without any serious effort to suggest how it is going to close the spigot, much less repay any of the accumulated debt. Only someone more familiar than I with the most fantastic realms of fiction could find adequately recondite metaphors for this level of fiscal irresponsibility. There has not been a hint of entitlement reform; no interest in a reforming budget or in changing the actuarial assumptions or vesting conditions of Social Security; no comprehensive analysis of municipal, county, or state debt, as Harrisburg, Pa., and Jefferson County, Ala. ($3 billion) went down in the last two weeks like tenpins; nor an effort to tackle the $1 trillion student-loan debt bomb. The administration continues its glazed pall of official prevarication in a reassuring monotone.

There has been no serious effort even to make the 10 percent token reduction in the projected decade of deficits required by the outcome of the debt-ceiling fiasco. The president clings to his arithmetic of the 99 percent and cozies up to the infantilists of Occupy Wall Street (even as he continues his dalliance with the stragglers among his limousine-borne Wall Street groupies). And Treasury Secretary Geithner, having been struck dumb like Zechariah in the temple for the last two years, recovered his voice to exhort the impecunious Europeans to join America in the St. Vitus’s Dance of spending confected trillions of virtual electronic dollars/euros. …

At least Herbert Hoover acknowledged that a depression was in progress, and Jimmy Carter spoke of a malaise (of which his presence in the White House was the principal symptom). The president and other administration spokesmen seem supremely confident that all they have to do to retain immersion rights in the public trough for another four years is hammer the piñata about the 99 percent and incant the name of the preceding president.

As long as there is an alternative that can speak and tie up its shoelaces in the morning, I do not believe that this administration can be reelected. It is so unrelievedly incompetent that its fecklessness is more a matter of sadness and embarrassment than of the rage that engulfed George W. Bush. This, I surmise, is why the liberal establishment, the Times editorial writers and columnists, the Hollywood groupies, the rich fundraisers, don’t detect that the ship is sinking, and still squeal with delight as the Republican challengers fail to generate more than tentative or reluctant enthusiasm. But they are reading the wrong dials; there will be a Republican nominee. The country will not reelect this mockery of an administration, and whoever the Republican is will be elected and inaugurated, even if he has operated an open-air dog kennel on the wings of an airborne aircraft while groping relays of stewardesses.

And the other illuminated revelation, which came swiftly after the first: The voters will not only be disposing of a failed administration; they will be approving the Republican platform, which will call for radical tax simplification and reduction, entitlement reform, serious health-care reform, real spending reductions, incentives to increased domestic oil production and natural-gas use, and an absolute commitment to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear military power.

It will be a drastic reform program that will signal that the United States is awakening like Brünnhilde, however unlikely the Siegfried, finally resuming world leadership, acting on its budget and current-account deficits, and behaving like a Great Power and a textbook case in self-government for the first time since President Bush Senior. The effect of the change will be electrifying. …

The new president may have an imperfect CV and too-perfect hair; Speaker Boehner may surpass Mr. Obama’s historic favorite, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh, in his proclivity to burst publicly into tears; the White House may be as boring and banal as it was under George W. Bush (though that is unlikely, especially in syntactical matters); but America will lead in policy terms, if not in the personality of its leader. Problems will be addressed and the mere anarchy of abdication compounded by smug official sophistry will no longer be loosed upon the world. Mr. Churchill’s bust may come back to the Oval Office, and FDR’s address at D-Day, including the godly references that the Bureau of Land Management feels disrupt the spirit “of the elegant memorial,” may yet be displayed there. The night will end and glorious will be the dawn, in Washington. I have seen the future, and in it, people work.

Read the whole thing.

Karen and I recently had the opportunity to view on Turner Classic Movies a curious, low budget old movie, “Love, Honor and Behave” (1938), lacking entirely a memorable big name cast, but specifically focused on the subject of Yalie-ness, on the distinctive old-fashioned Yale ethos.

The plot.

The marriage of old-time Yale man Dan Painter (Thomas Mitchell) to the stately and quite attractive Sally Painter (Barbara O’Neil, best known for playing the role of Scarlett O’Hara’s mother in “Gone With the Wind”, one year later, at age 28!) breaks up over a brief indiscretion. Sally remarries Doctor MacConaghey, taking away Dan’s son, Ted Painter (Wayne Morris).

Sally insists on raising Ted, contrary to his father’s wishes, as the paradigmatic good loser. Losing gracefully and graciously is her idea of being a gentleman. She refuses to send Ted to Andover (Dan’s old preparatory school), enrolling him in a different (possibly fictional) preparatory school in New Haven which I’d never heard of, because she believes Andover would make him too manly, too ruthlessly aggressive, and competitive. She won’t even allow Ted to play football like his father, bringing him up instead to be a tennis player.

Ted, at least, is permitted by mom to go to Yale. During his son’s senior year, Dan Painter is horrified as he watches Ted, playing for Yale, deliberately throw a tennis match against a Harvard rival because he believes the referee had previously made an erroneous call in his favor. Dan believes you ought to play by the rules, but you have to play to win. Intentionally losing is decidedly not proper manly behavior, not the Yale way.

The unhappy consequences of Ted’s upbringing by his mother continue even after graduation. Ted does rebel against mom, refusing to go to Medical School (in order to follow in his stepfather’s footsteps), but instead getting into the soap business in New Rochelle with a classmate. Ted also marries his childhood sweetheart Barbara Blake (Priscilla Lane) contrary to mom’s intentions and designs. But mother’s character formation lessons in uncompetitive self-effacement and non-aggression take their inevitable toll. The soap business goes under, and Ted cannot make Barbara happy.

When Ted’s business fails, Dan refuses to give Ted a job in his own business on grounds of principle (Dan is not only a Yalie, he talks exactly like an Ayn Rand character), and Ted is reduced to settling for menial work as a construction laborer for $3 a day.

Having had his problems trying to make a living during the Depression, Ted has been too busy working to entertain Barbara satisfactorily. Since he’s not available to take her out, and too passive to lay down the law, Barbara begins stepping out on Ted with a former rival. Finally, the worm turns, the deep-blue hereditary Yale blood (even without Andover’s influence) boils over, and Ted initiates a knock-down, drag-out fight with Barbara, ending in his giving her a good spanking. He also rises to the occasion and knocks down his rival with a good punch in the nose, and then throws him physically out of the house.

Dan Painter (conveniently on-hand to see the whole thing) is absolutely delighted. He now knows that his son has learned his lesson: that a man has to fight for things in this world, for success in business, even for his woman, just as he needs to be determined to achieve victory in athletic contests. Ted is now a properly competitive Yale man, just like his father.

LHB is certainly not a great film, not even a good film, but it is extremely interesting as a period piece and a case of watermark evidence of national-level recognition of a specific culture and personality associated with Yale way back then.

I was at Yale 30 years later, much had changed in America and at Yale, but I would say that even 30 years later, the “no excuses, just succeed” ethos had definitely survived in a number of undergraduate organizations right up into my day.

By now, Dan Painter’s hearty and unabashed, manly competitiveness must be thickly encrusted with layers of political correctness grown all over it like barnacles but I wonder if the same thing in essence, today unglorified, unacknowledged and unavowed, does not yet still survive at dear old Yale.

The fragment of leather on the broken bronze buckle was carbon-dated to 600 A.D.

A University of Colorado Bouilder archeology team excavating a 1000-year-old Inupiat Eskimo house at Cape Espenberg on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula found a partial bronze artifact resembling a buckle, which is apparently even older.

Bronze-casting is a technology not known ever to have existed in any New World culture, so the artifact was presumably made in Asia and reached Alaska by some unknown early system of trade.

Some News Agency report.

University of Colorado press release.

Hat tip to Reid Farmer.

November 15, 2011 – CBO Director Doug Elmendorf admitted to Senator Sessions that in the long run the stimulus will shrink the economy. He testified at a Senate Budget Committee hearing that the stimulus will indeed “be a drag on GDP” over the next ten years.