We weren’t hunting ourselves, but the Old Dominion Hunt was meeting nearby and they put one to ground at our place, very near the house. I managed to trap my own dogs in the house, grabbed a camera, and went out and took a few snapshots.
Old Dominion huntsman Gerald Keal sounds his horn to reassemble the pack after Charles James has gone to ground in our woods yesterday. click on picture for larger image. Picture will enlarge again with one more click.
Congratulating the Old Dominion Hounds on a job well done.
Huntsman, pack, and whip begin moving off west.
The field follows Gerald and the hounds off into the woods. To the west, you see Fogg Mountain and the Blue Ridge.
The feature humor item you’ll be seeing everywhere this holiday season is about a drastic shortage of butter in Norway occurring just as the Christmas season is at hand.
The journalists are telling us that the scarcity is the result of recent high Norwegian butter consumption resulting from a fashionable low-carb, high-fat diet on top of reduced production caused by a shortage of hay due to an unusually rainy summer growing season.
Profiteers are reported trying to charge as much as 350 euros ($465) for a 500-gram (1.1 lb. or 1 lb and 1.6 oz) packet of butter.
Ho, ho! Isn’t it funny?
None of the features on this news item I have found, however, notes that no butter shortage exists elsewhere in Europe or in the United States. But the AFP story offers a clue:
Last Friday, customs officers stopped a Russian at the Norwegian-Swedish border and seized 90 kilos (198 pounds) of butter stashed in his car.
The butter shortage obviously is not result, in a modern world, of a local dairy feed shortage, or of local supplies being exhausted by unusual demand. With rising demand and consumers willing to pay higher prices, the supply would be being met by enterprising Russians trying to make a kroner, if government were not standing in the way.
It is obvious that some kind of Norwegian limits on butter importation, doubtless in place to protect Norwegian dairy farmers, prevents legal access to supplies from abroad.
Norway’s holiday problem isn’t really about diet fads or rainy summers. It’s about government doing what government likes to do: delivering favors to special interests at the expense of society as a whole.
lynnux notes that government regulation establishes the rules by which banks operate and even creates their opportunities for profits, but these vital economic realities come into being in the first place through the agency of politicians, people like Barney Frank, whose expertise (such as it is), and interests and concerns have no connection to economic realities or markets.
Politicians seem such busy-beavers today, “doing things†“for†us. Why such whirling dervishes, generating laws in bulk? In its broadest outlines, law is mostly static. Politicians seek to appear to the public to be men of action “doing something.†This leads them to make too many economic and personal choices that they are not supposed to be making “for†us at all, picking winners and losers. It is now to the point where, famously, they no longer even read the laws they promulgate upon the body politic. Their process is finger in the wind (test the zeitgeist for what buzz evokes positives), then claim to be acting in name of the democratic will of the people—who, like banks to regulators, can later be blamed, should anything go wrong. As a republic, not a direct democracy, our representatives are supposed to be doing the right thing, in their best judgment. We rely on their decency, wisdom, and intelligence and vision for the long term. They have no way of knowing anything about their constituency anyway, because to pollsters, people only express self-interest, not the public interest. The public interest can only be assessed at a remove, which is the representative’s job. Pollsters get whatever they fish for. Responders also like to echo conventional wisdom. Implementing conventional wisdom is not politicians’ job. …
Politicians wrapped in soundbites simply may not be qualified to make all the rules they seek to impose on us in their show of “caring†for us. This, I think, is what Richard Posner is getting at when he speaks of The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy. We need systems engineers today who really do understand the system. Politicians are mostly not this, but marketing specialists. They dissolve always into futile calls for infinitely ethical global governmental forces (themselves) to abolish investment uncertainty in a complicated utopian merger with perfect empirical risk analysis, forgetting that the past is no divining rod of the future (nor of truth. …
The law is being asked to make business judgments law simply should not be making at all. Law is static. Markets are not. The market will adjust to any fixed rule, changing the “new normal.†Positive feedback loops (“positive†does not imply good) can ensue, at many unexpected levels. The media’s celebrity focus on political figure summiteering, however, follows an old trope, of suggesting to the public that our pseudo-gods and deities, through law, can command markets. These heroes then arrogantly begin to believe their press releases and to act accordingly.
Lawyers often go to law school precisely because they don’t like math or statistics. The type can quite easily ignore economic reality as they proceed to plug old forms and numbers into new contexts.
La Peregrina 16th century natural pearl; diamond bail early 19th century; natural pearl, diamond, ruby and cultured pearl necklace by Cartier 1972, formerly the property of Phillip II of Spain and his Spanish successors 1500s-1808, Joseph Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, the Duke and Duchess of Abercorn, and Elizabeth Taylor.
Tomorrow night, at Rockefeller Center, Christie’s will be selling as the 12th lot of the Collection of Legendary Jewels Belonging to Elizabeth Taylor, the “La Peregrina” Pearl, one of the oldest and best-documented historical jewels.
La Peregrina, possibly the most valuable pearl in the world and certainly one of the absolutely largest (more than 50 carats) natural pear-shaped pearls ever recorded, was found near the island of Santa Margarita in the Gulf of Panama by an African slave sometime in the early to mid-16th century.
The story is that the pearl came from an oyster so small that its finder nearly did not bother to open it.
The Governor of Panama, Don Pedro de Temez, acquired the treasure and rewarded the slave with his freedom for finding it.
Temez presented the enormous pearl to King Phillip II of Spain who gave it to Mary I of England at the time of their marriage in 1554, but it returned to the possession of the Spanish crown after her death in 1558. It was one of the favorite and best-known pieces of the Spanish crown jewels, and is visible in portrait after portrait of Queen Consorts.
After Richard Burton bought it for $37,000 at a Sotheby’s sale and presented it to Taylor as a Valentine’s Day present, it fell into the jaws of one of the actress’s Lhasa Apsos. 2:33 video
The probable sales price, despite the economic times, will confirm just what a good investment Burton made.
Newt Gingrich was criticized at Saturday’s debate by Ron Paul and Mitt Romney for making an unfashionable, non-politically-correct historical observation about the Palestinian claim to nationhood. Both of Gingrich’s rivals scolded the former Speaker for unnecessarily inflaming the situation by stating a truth our adversaries do not like to hear.
Gingrich responded by observing that Ronald Reagan has gone down in history for doing exactly the same thing.
Rafal Heydel-Makoo forwarded on Facebook this morning a very apt video of Margaret Thatcher, another great leader of the past, indulging in the kind of candor which is so frowned upon by conventional, mediocre politicians. “They’re a weak lot in Europe… Weak. Feeble.” says Thatcher with unconcealed contempt.
Is Obama’s Intellect Stunted by Epistemic Closure?
This occurred to me due to Obama’s claim that paying people not to work creates more jobs than actually creating jobs.
It is a thoroughly stupid and ignorant statement. Even as a weak bit of political spin, it verges, apologies for the word but I mean it, on being mentally retarded.
A year or two ago one of those guys who’s supposedly a libertarian but seems to make his rent attacking conservatives posited that the right suffers from “epistemic closure,” a mis-named term which he claimed to mean “closed off to information or experience inconsistent with one’s prior views.”
A tasteless and unnecessary neologism for the very old idea of a Community-Based Reality, a group which decides what reality is according to a group. Contrary information will not be permitted to interfere with the Community-Based Reality the group is deciding upon; they reason backwards from their conclusions to decide what the Facts are which prove those pre-supposed conclusions.
Not a particularly new idea. But he made up a (poor) neologism for it, and attacked the right, so of course he got lots of links and probably a few invitations to MSNBC.
Using this terminology: Is Obama’s mind epistemically closed?
Obama is supposedly a learned man. We are told he is a rara avis, in Chris Buckley’s dribblings, a true intellectual.
When was the last time Obama actually learned something about the world?
Did he, as the book’s title might have it, Learn Everything He Needed To Know By Second Semester Sophomore Year?
Ace’s rhetorical question is really more than just a witty backhand to a political adversary. It points to the real explanation for Barack Obama’s astonishingly ineffectual response to the country’s economic crisis and his own accelerating political disaster.
Obama is doing nothing useful for either the country, or his own political cause, simply because he is at a loss intellectually. Obama is, as Ace contends, nothing more or less than a conventional left-wing member of the elite establishment. He went to Harvard Law. He was appointed to lecture on Constitutional Law at the Law School of the University of Chicago. He and the other best people believe in a certain worldview, providing continual new occasions for advocacy by people like themselves for governmental intervention and for expansions of governmental authority.
Out there, you have the selfish, imperfect, unregulated and unimproved world which will automatically supply all the resources required by enlightened technocratic experts, equipped with the finest credentials from the most prestigious institutions, to intervene, regulate, reform, manage, and supervise that world’s operation and progress toward ever greater well being, equity, and perfection.
In the worldview of the best people, there is no alternative theory, there is no legitimate counter-hypothesis to suggest that government cannot do anything it wants, to contend that there are limits to taxation or intervention, to suppose that the general consensus of the elect could possibly be wrong, to warn that the calculative powers of human reason cannot make the economy do anything trained economists desire.
Obama, the experts and the best people, the consensus of the elect cannot be wrong. If they were wrong, how could they possibly be occupying the powerful and prestigious positions that they do? If they were wrong, why would the mainstream media be so vigorously championing their cause? It just isn’t possible that people so successful, people at the top of American society, can as a group be so wrong.
One just needs to communicate the proper arguments for raising taxes on the rich a little more loudly, and in words of fewer syllables perhaps. Eventually, Americans will understand that Barack Obama, Paul Krugman, and the democrats have been right about everything all along.
Naive as this sounds, the truth is that that is exactly what they think.
Ron Paul admits Gingrich told the truth but argues for timidity. Romney agrees and names-drops the Israeli PM to buttress his personal authority. Gingrich sticks by his guns, notes that Ronald Reagan provoked important changes in the world by defying similar demands for more diplomatic statements and declares that he’s a Reaganite. Gingrich wins.
I wouldn’t in a million years want to nominate a GOP candidate with Ron Paul’s views on foreign policy and treatment of illegal combatants, and sensible people have to realize that you can’t actually abolish the Department of the Interior until you sell all the National Parks and Indian Reservations first. But otherwise I kind of like this Ron Paul ad. It’s spirited.
A clause added to the Defense Authorization spending bill repealing Section 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in order to decriminalize homosexual relations has provoked considerable controversy.
It turned out that Section 125 stated that any servicemember who “engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same sex or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy.” Offenders would face court-martial for any violations.
Legalizing homosexual relations thus seemed to imply that bestiality would have to be legalized as well, and organizations from the Family Research Council to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals exploded in indignation.
The Pentagon tried assuring Congress that bestiality would remain unlawful because it is impossible to conceive of a circumstance in which such an act “would not be conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline or service-discrediting.” Though they obviously overlooked the fact that plenty of people would be happy to argue that homosexual acts are bound to be just as prejudicial to good order and discipline, and discrediting to the service in the eyes of many Americans.
The Republican-controlled House has yet to endorse the Senate bill, and negotiators are discussing the differences in each house’s version of the Defense bill.
