An interesting article by Roger Kimball picked up via Instapundit. Here is the money quote:

Why do they tend to be dour people with no laughter in their hearts? Because they regard life as a zero-sum game. . . . Leftists are supposed to be the caring, sharing part of the political fraternity. In point of historical fact, it is an easy thing to demonstrate that their caring has always been more a rhetorical than an actual strategy and that their sharing has been accomplished overwhelmingly with other people’s goods. That said, however, there is still the fact that Leftists are hailed by their enablers as the non-crabby politicians, the people who come into office promising two things: More and Free.

The New Yorker has published the 100 best lists ever.

A letter read on air by Rush Limbaugh after the shootings in Connecticut:

I have not watched a second of news on the school shooting over the weekend, mainly because seeing the reporting makes me cry and unable to do much else. But I’m tuned in enough to know that once again the American leftist culture is forcing us to collectively look at the wrong reasons for the problem, and as such, we will never be able to come to grips with it, much less find a solution. What do all of the public shootings in the last years have in common? They were all done by young white males who were from upper middle-class families. The problem is not guns. That’s the easy shiny thing that the liberals flash in front of us so that we don’t look at their failed political agenda.

The problem in America today is how we have treated white boys for the last decades, and it all has at its root the unrelenting liberal political agenda. Boys have been pushed out of two of the most important activities: school and sports. In an all-out effort to convince girls they can do anything a boy can, schools have ignored the natural needs and learning traits of boys and forced them to learn like girls. Fewer boys are going to college, in part because they’re being pushed out by a feminist agenda in education. We have rushed to dilute the energetic aggressive aspects of the male species by drugging them as children and chickifying them at every turn.

We allowed our young boys to play violent murdering video games. These types of games are the same ones the military uses to train soldiers. But they are being played by very, very young kids in dark rooms all over the country. You want to ban something, ban those. We have overlooked the devastating effects on all children of not having a father in the house. And we have ignored and not helped boys with their mental illness. We’ve hyperventilated endlessly over girls and their eating disorders, image issues, self-esteem, sex, blah, blah, blah, but we have most totally ignored the mental challenges that boys face.

Interesting, don’t you think? It’s an e-mail from a female listener to the EIB Network.

This is from The New York Times of all things:

This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency.

And why ever would he admit something like that? Here’s why:

THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.

Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.

He says “poor and desperate”. I say “lazy and deceitful”. But what’s the diff? Each kid is worth $8400 a year and then out they go to shift for themselves by getting married, starting up their own little welfare farms and voting for the Democrats at every election. He’s looking for a solution but it would just never occur to him that reducing welfare payments might be an important part of a useful strategy.

An article by Christina Hoff Summers, You Can Give a Boy a Doll, but You Can’t Make Him Play With It. It’s all daft but you can read the rest if this interests you:

Is it discriminatory and degrading for toy catalogs to show girls playing with tea sets and boys with Nerf guns? A Swedish regulatory group says yes. The Reklamombudsmannen (RO) has reprimanded Top-Toy, a licensee of Toys’R’Us and one of the largest toy companies in Northern Europe, for its “outdated” advertisements and has pressured it to mend its ‘narrow-minded’ ways. After receiving ‘training and guidance’ from RO equity experts, Top-Toy introduced gender neutrality in its 2012 Christmas catalogue. The catalog shows little boys playing with a Barbie Dream House and girls with guns and gory action figures. As its marketing director explains, ‘For several years, we have found that the gender debate has grown so strong in the Swedish market that we have had to adjust.’

The article is quite sane so it’s safe to read. But while the article is sane, you do have to wonder about the people she is writing about.

Started on 23 September and here we are, only 10 December, and up to my 200th. This remains just for me and just for fun but I now do get upwards of 24 hits a day but still have only one reliable reader – hi again, Joshi. And I can see that I have veered away from politics since I have had not just too much of it, but the sense of doom and save yourself while you can, is how I feel after the American election. I have, interestingly to me, rekindled my interest in the women’s movement of which I was a participant back in the 1960s and 70s. But like all forms of leftism, I have abandoned the modern versions which has transformed from “do not discriminate against women” to become “you must discriminate in favour of women”. Women are, of course, big supporters of this new form of feminism since they think they are the net beneficiaries but this is so only in some ways. If your aim is as a women is to get married, settle down and not only have children but raise them yourself but within the marriage, it is now a very hostile world and you will not be supported by the official women’s movement. And with the dual income family having driven house prices so far upwards, almost no one can do it any longer unless they are very wealthy. Meanwhile, politics is moving farther to the left with the clueless media along with the majority of the population unable to recognise for what they are President Alinsky in the United States or Prime Minister Rosa Luxembourg here in Australia. The one bright spot for me is, of course, John Papola’s Macro Follies which I will post again just for fun. It really is based on the text of my Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution which John read and bless his heart, even understood.

It’s just a shame no one knows where the ideas for this video came from. But as I used to say, you can do anything if you don’t want the credit. Unfortunately, this time I do want the credit but what can you do. It’s fun anyway and maybe Elgar will publish my essays. Provisional title: Macro Follies: Essays on Say’s Law and Keynes. Meanwhile I must finish my Defending the History of Economic Thought this week.

Just noticed: I hadn’t posted Macro Follies already. This is the first time. How funny is that!

Just just noticed: I actually had put the video up but it was so many posts ago, if even only four days ago, that I didn’t go back far enough to find it. How really funny is that!!