Unca Darrell

MAY 18 / The top-ten graduates at . . .

Unca Darrell — Sat, 18 May 2013 04:03:39 -0500

. . . Kingwood High School and Kingwood Park High School have this in common: . . .

. . . the gender balance. Two boys, eight girls.

This is the new normal in our demasculinized culture.

Look at your own local high schools. In most cases, you will see the same thing.

In college now, it's three young women for every two boys. In graduate schools, the gender balance is about even, but it's tipping quickly in the same direction.

What's going on? Why are boys and young men dropping out of the responsibilities of manhood, including education, achievement, and marriage?

This new gender regime may also help explain why young single women, not finding (or accepting) a permanent male in their lives, engage the welfare state as soulmate for themselves and caregiver for their children.

This handsome guy in the White House, he cares.

Our experiment in hacking God's operating system for gender -- however we're doing it -- will not end well.

MAY 17 / Super-size the smelling salts

Unca Darrell — Fri, 17 May 2013 00:21:00 -0500

THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE editorial board will get the vapors when it reads this about the newspaper's least-favorite Houstonian: "Michael Berry Show Expanding Out of Houston," Wednesday's feature in "Talkers" magazine. Alternate headline: "Self-Syndication is Berry, Berry Good."

"Talkers" is the trade publication that covers the radio talk-show bidness.

Here's the teaser:

The Michael Berry Show: This ain't your paw-paw's talk radio.

Mr. Berry, the twice-daily local yakker at KTRH, is now in ten markets and ranks 67th on Talker's "Heavy 100," the publication's list of the most influential talk shows.

This is well south of Limbaugh territory, but not all that far from Geraldo Rivera (WABC, New York, 62nd) and Terry Gross (NPR, 64th) and well ahead of, say, Rev. Al Sharpton (Syndication One, 90th).

And the direction is up, up, up. Mr. Berry's rank is a "meteoric 28-notch jump from No. 95" last year, the magazine says.

The article (by Mike Kinosian, managing editor and West Coast bureau chief), gives no real flavor of the sizzling southern-fried political incorrectness that characterizes Mr. Berry's show, but it still offers a good introduction to the brash talk-show host and the business plan for his program.

Some snips:

Southern by nature, Berry hunts, fishes, and is proud of his drawl. . . . "There is a fascination about all things southern, including cuisine and music. I do not try to hide where I am coming from or who I am. Audiences get a sense of authenticity from the fact that I am a redneck at heart."

* * *

Typically up by 5:30 am, Berry prepares his 8:00 am -- 11:00 am KTRH broadcast that airs later on KEX [Portland, Oregon] . . . . Comedy bits are produced every day and he admits that, "Some are hits and some are stupid."

After a full day of business meetings and parental chores, he is usually back at KTRH by 4:15 pm readying his second show of the day, a two-hour broadcast, that is fed to his other affiliates.

Common thread regarding the station roster -- San Antonio's WOAI, Nashville's WLAC, Birmingham's WERC, Albany, New York's WGY, Baton Rouge's WJBO, Beaumont, Texas' KLVI, and Waco, Texas' KWTX -- is that all are Clear Channel-owned talk properties. The other affiliate, Atlanta's WGST, will pick up Berry's 5:00 pm -- 7:00 pm show when the station returns to talk next month. . . .

Dinner with his wife of 21 years and their two sons they adopted from Ethiopia . . . .

Yes, that's a sentence fragment. I cut the quotation there to let his family arrangement sink in. The testimony of his life has a certain eloquence, no?

The Chronicle crowd -- wrapped tightly in white guilt and possessed of a mighty sense of moral superiority -- might regard view Mr. Berry's adoptions as having a certain irony. The truth is that how he lives is entirely consistent with what he says.

Read it yourself.

MAY 16 / Barack Hussein Obama: Alinskyite rope-a-doper

Unca Darrell — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:40:59 -0500

THE ENTERPRISE formerly known as ACORN once ran the election-fraud division of the progressive project, the ultimate goal of which is to fundamentally transform America. In different iterations, it still does.

The crudest forms of election fraud -- such as signing up fictional voters, then casting their ballots by mail -- are sometimes found out. Whereupon the organization wrings its hands, declares that it never authorized such a despicable thing, and fires someone.

Next election, the same players do the same thing.

So it is . . .

. . . with President Obama and the IRS scandal. He's shocked, shocked, I say, that someone in his government would do such a despicable thing. Naturally, someone must be fired.

It's all a charade. Democratic senators insisted that the IRS withhold lawful tax advantages* from political adversaries. The IRS complied. Mr. Obama and his fellow travelers pocketed the political benefits.

Today's scandal is a natural and expected consequence, to be managed in the usual way: by faux outrage, the firing of an IRS executive who is leaving office anyway, and the pretense of cooperating with a congressional investigation.

* * *

*Alternatively, the advantages are not lawful. In which case one's outrage should be directed at the IRS, not for withholding the advantages from conservatives but for approving them such such alacrity for leftist organizations.

MAY 16 / Unca D is back in-country after . . .

Unca Darrell — Thu, 16 May 2013 07:17:18 -0500

. . . a delightful stint in Sicily, following my dad's footsteps through one of the eleven countries he visited in World War II. His tour guide was George S. Patton, Jr., who permitted little time for sightseeing. Lady Di and I have made up for it. Pictures are being posted here, with many more to come.

I would display some here, but my miserable blog platform, Typepad, cannot upload through Explorer 10.

MAY 8 / Houston Chronicle, case study

Unca Darrell — Wed, 08 May 2013 02:00:00 -0500

WHY ARE the opinion pages of big-city American newspapers almost universally liberal? This question inspired a round of journalistic navel-gazing at reason.com (libertarian) and thedailybeast.com (the zombie that once was Newsweek). Our own Houston Chronicle, which seemingly prefers death to the dishonor of having even one genuine traditionalist and conservative on the local opinion payroll, popped up as . . .

. . . a case study.

The exciting event was "Why Big Cities Make Media Liberal -- and Why the Koch Brothers Can't Do Anything About It" by Garance Franke-Ruta at atlantic. com.

The main reason [that newspapers are seen as liberal] is that all major U.S. newspapers are based in cities. Cities in America are in the main run by Democrats, because they are populated, by and large, with Democrats, and very often also surrounded by Democratic suburbs.

Ms. Franke-Ruta's theory is a species of economic and political determinism and may have some merit. Most big-city newspapers today are run by reporters and editors who, in the main, share a common and rigid set of progressive values and beliefs. It's an ideological monoculture, much like the one found in university faculty lounges. But her theory doesn't fully answer why this is so or why the traditional values of journalism "without fear or favor" don't at least set off cognitive dissonance when something like the Tea Party comes along and no one at the paper has the least idea what it is about.

Matt Welch offers the Chronicle as a case study. The point of his riff is that the newspaper is not, contrary to the Franke-Ruta thesis, a reflection of the local business or political culture, that economic and political determinism do not explain the newspaper's mainly progressive editorial views.

[Let's] take as a test the largest city in America you might describe as right-of-center: Houston. Fourth-biggest daily, 7th city ranked on the largest-dailies list, politically mixed but a whole lotta conservatism headquartered and represented. Famously hostile to zoning, friendly to business. Are those politics reflected at the Houston Chronicle?

My exposure to the paper is very limited (and very positive, for what it's worth), but I don't recall any particularly conservative or libertarian point of view, or reputation thereof.

The reason he cannot recall such views, of course, is that they do not exist. The last true conservative on the editorial board retired some years ago, then died. The newspaper will replace him, it seems, only when anthropogenic global warming turns to anthropogenic global cooling and hell freezes over.

. . . . [The] Chronicle was a strongly conservative newspaper as recently as the 1950s, before a more progressive breed of journalist began gaining a foothold in the 1960s. Crucially, the transformation from right to left, from crassly political to high-mindedly "fair," went hand-in-hand with the newspaper [read the newspaper's] benefiting from and engaging in newspaper consolidation. It was the classic deal between mostly liberal newsrooms and mostly conservative boardrooms: Close down the competition and use the profits to professionalize the news divisions, instilling a more liberal ethos while embracing the advertising-friendly pose of objectivity. Then sit back and enjoy the 20 percent profit margins for four decades.

[Though] the controversial and self-interested Houston Endowment ran the place through the late 1980s -- like the "Great Eye of Sauron," according to [the Texas Observer] -- it was also increasingly going up against in-house journalistic values that cared more (according to [the Observer]) about "women's rights, poverty, and the mistreatment and neglect of ethnic populations, immigrants and refugees."

The paper has belonged to the similarly evolved Hearst Corporation for going on three decades, euthanizing the last of the competition in 1995. I am happy to be corrected in the comments, but if the Houston Chronicle is even half as friendly to conservative and libertarian viewpoints as the residents in its coverage area, I will sing a Backstreet Boys song in a Yao Ming jersey.

(Matt Welch, "Are Big City Newspapers Inevitably Liberal Due to Market Forces?" reason.com, April 26, 2013)

Megan McArdle, formerly of the Atlantic, now situate like Noah in the belly of the Daily Beast, picks up the theme with this question: "Could there be a conservative LA Times?" She offers the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal as proof that conservative newspapers can exist in big cities. In fact, she says, most big-city newspapers used to be conservative.

But the media consolidation of the 1950s, when the rise [of] television and radio drove most cities down to a single daily, actually gave newspapers considerable freedom to ignore the preferences of their readership. Not entirely; in most places you could not endorse the student riots, or communism.

Whatever may be true about "most places," our locals have gone so far as once praising the Occupy movement, which drinks from the same poisonous springs as the student rioters did.

But you could afford to drift to the left of your readership as long as you maintained an agreeable tone about it. What were the readers going to do about it? Go without a newspaper?

Yes, actually, though larger forces than principled abstention better explain the decline of news readership.

By drifting left, arguably, newspapers opened up competitive space for explicitly conservative forms like talk radio.

Which is why Rush Limbaugh is so effective and so wealthy. And why it's funny to see the Chronicle bash local talker Michael Berry, who takes sharp delight in skewering liberal pieties about, well, pretty much everything, starting with white guilt.

As his reach grows through syndication, he probably touches more people every hour than the Chronicle editors reach in a year. It's bad form for the Clever Ones to object to someone else's courting the demographics that the newspaper abandoned at the altar so very long ago: traditionalists, conservatives, rednecks, me, you.

Mr. Limbaugh openily and easily mocks Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and her ilk. I suspect the Chronicle editors mock her too, privately, behind the closed doors of their stately mansions. She's an idiot. Everybody knows it, including the editors. Yet, paralyzed by white guilt and the bigotry of low expectations, they utter not a whisper of criticism, ever. Each election day, she wins yet again from her gerrymandered district with the Chronicle's blessing and endorsement.

Ms. McArdle's essay prompted this comment from "dcrawford," a Houston reader:

I stopped the Houston Chronicle over 10 years ago for one reason: they couldn't limit their liberalism to the political page. Every sport article, every business article, every fashion article bashed Bush. The final straw is when they published an editorial bashing Mayor Brown for refusing to take $50M from the government for public housing. He rightfully pointed out that to use the money would result in a very much larger budget blow-out for maintenance. I quit them the next day.

It's the leakage of their nonsense into every portion of the newspaper that has killed liberal newspapers. [Who] wants to read some tenuous link to Iraq in a story about the Astros?

Without much prompting, I often hear similar stories from conservative friends in my tribe of old folks. They just got sick of being belittled for believing what they believe.

* * *

Thanks to an alert Unca D reader in Austin for pointing me to the McArdle article. I'd mention his name, but the link came in a private email.

MAY 6 / Living Water International

Unca Darrell — Mon, 06 May 2013 00:09:00 -0500

PROVIDING A CUP of clean water in Jesus' name. What could be better?

Last year the Houston-based charity started started paying local coordinators to continue the work of LWI after American volunteers drill a well and move on. A December fundraising letter from Mike Mantel, president, tells this story:

I think of Samuel Ojok, who is a sustainability coordinator for Living Water Uganda. In war-torn northern Uganda, Sam lost two sisters to cholera, then watched his aunt tie of the same terrible illness.

Today Sam dedicates his life to ensuring other Ugandans don't endure that pain. Under his direction, some of the world's poorest communities are proudly sustaining their wells with their own money. Churches and schools are helping transform these communities through hygiene and sanitation educatoin, teaching about Jesus, and proclaiming the love of God.

Give to this charity online or at Living Water International, Post Office Box 35496, Houston, Texas 77235-5496.

Then hug your kids and do something fun.

Here's the Better Business Bureau's "Wise Giving" report on LWI.

MAY 4 / Lapidary sentences

Unca Darrell — Sat, 04 May 2013 08:55:00 -0500

FROM AN ESSAY on how ripped today's male movie stars are:

It wasn't always this way. The silent-movie star Rudolph Valentino had the body of . . .

. . . a philosophy grad student coming off a two-week flu. . . .

In the 1960s, when Steve McQueen, Gregory Peck or Kirk Douglas popped off his stop, we saw a man whose workout routine consisted of a few jumping jacks by the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, then walking to the gift shop for cigarettes.

(Rob Lazebnik, "Hollywood's New Arms Race," wsj.com, April 27, 2013)

MAY 2 / A new book about Texas by someone who . . .

Unca Darrell — Thu, 02 May 2013 09:09:00 -0500

. . . gets Texas.

Erica Greider supplies a fresh view of the nation's second most populous sate in "Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn From the Strange Genius of Texas." An editor at Texas Monthly, the author explains the state's much-heralded record of economic growth and does her best to strip away some of . . .

. . . the fear and loathing that Texas' [read Texas's] political culture inspires elsewhere in America. "Texas is, despite its rhetorical flare-ups, a pragmatic and largely reasonable state," she asserts. It's also a highly successful one: The Lone Star State created half of America's net new jobs between June 2009 and June 2011, and the state's population jumped 20% between 2000 and 2010 -- twice California's rate and 10 times that of New York.

"Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right" mixes equal parts history, political reporting, back-of-the-envelope economics and cultural commentary. . . .

. . .

Some, including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, have argued that Texas' [Texas's] cheapness is some kind of vice, pointing to its lower median wages as evidence that the state's economic formula is neither desirable nor replicable. Yet this misses the point: Adjusted for living costs, incomes in Texas are higher than in California. And in any event, it's grossly paternalistic to condemn workers and firms for outcompeting those in other states.

Indeed, the critiques of Texas leveled by the likes of Ms. [Gail] Collins and Mr. Krugman smack of a familiar snobbery: that of the European who charges America with having too much braggadocio, too much God and too much capitalism. But the movement of feet doesn't lie. Just as it is the United States, not Europe, that is the first-choice destination of immigrants around the world, so too is Texas a land of opportunity for Americans and foreigners alike. All those new jobs and all that migration are a sign that perhaps Texas is doing something right.

(Charles Dameron, "The Land of Opportunity," wsj.com, May 2, 2013)

Who doesn't get Texas? The Houston Chronicle editorial board. The outright snottiness toward Texas ("laughingstock") has been toned down recently, but not the spirit behind it. This is a newpaper that runs Paul Krugman, as if he were were worth reading. The only thing the editors like about the state's robust in-migration is that the Hispanic cohort of the new Texans may one day restore Democrats to power in Texas so they can turn Texas into the state they most dearly love, California.

APRIL 27 / Donald Kagan and declinism

Unca Darrell — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 08:54:10 -0500

UNIVERSITIES, [Donald Kagan] proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance . . .

. . . of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the way traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values." He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy" of our culture." By "our" he means Western.

This might once have been called incitement. In 1990, as dean of Yale College, Mr. Kagan argued for the centrality of the study of Western civilization in an "infamous" (his phrase) address to incoming freshmen. A storm followed. he was called a racist -- or as the campus daily more politely editorialized, a peddler of "European cultural arrogance."

. . . . The PC wars of the 1990s feel dated. Maybe, as one undergrad told me after the lecture, "the pendulum has started to swing back" toward traditional values in eduction.

Mr. Kagan offers another explanation. "You can't have a fight," he says one recent day in his office, "because you don't have two sides. The other side won."

. . . .

Thucdides identified man's potential for folly and greatness. Mr. Kagan these days tends toward the darker view. He sees threats coming from Iran and in Asia, yet no leadership serious about taking them up. The public is too ignorant and irresponsible to care. . . .

The Kagan thesis is bleak but not fatalistic. The fight to shape free citizens in schools, through the media and in the public square goes on.

"There is no hope for anything if you don't have a population that buys into" a strong and free society, he says. "That can only be taught. It doesn't come in nature."

(Matthiew Kaminski, "'Democracy May Have Had Its Day,'" wsj.com, April 27, 2013)

"Through the media" in that last sentence is the heart of Unca D's critique of the Houston Chronicle editorial board, which is on the wrong side of the cultural shift that Mr. Kagan identifies. There, as it Yale, "you don't have two sides."

APRIL 24 / Welcome to (disdain for) America

Unca Darrell — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 07:47:17 -0500

OUR OLD PAL Nick Anderson, like all progressives, is a gun-control absolutist. His latest contribution appears today. The point he makes is predictable and, in its essence, wrong. But it is done with good craft, effectively, and within the rules of the cartooning game, fairly and squarely.

His headline, though, is a sad bit of work. It opens a window to the sarcastic-to-the-point-of-hateful progressive attitude toward our sweet land. "Welcome . . .

. . . to America," it says.

His point is that America is stupid, America is murderous, America's Constitution is unworthy of respect, America is . . . oh, you fill in the blank.

Welcome to America, sucker. Good luck surviving our constitution and the rubes who revere it.

He believes this stuff. So do most progressives. So does the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle, as a whole. So does the president of the United States -- hence his project to fundamentally transform our dear country.

Mr. Anderson a volunteer in the army that fights for this transformation. So is his miserable newspaper, which offers not one local columnist or editorial writer who regularly and unapologetically takes the other side of the proposition.

How could two evil young men in Boston come to hate America so desperately?

Well, why not? The American elite, while considerably less willing to kill (unless you're an infant in a womb), doesn't much like the place either.

The greatest danger to America is not pressure cookers in the hands of jihadists or, for that matter, rifles and pistols in the hands of American citizens. It's clever people like Mr. Anderson and the other Occupiers on the Chronicle editorial board who, like the two evil young bombers, have never been assimilated into traditional American life, who believe the highest form of patiotism is bitter mockery.

APRIL 22 / Kristol on civiliation and barbarism

Unca Darrell — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:19:15 -0500

THE TWENTIETH century didn't lack for barbarians. Indeed, modern barbarism proved more dangerous than . . .

. . . the old-fashioned kind. As Churchill put it in his great House of Commons speech on June 18, 1940, after the fall of France, rallying Britain against the National Socialist tyranny in Germany: "But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."

Of course, Churchill and Britain -- joined by the United States and the Soviet Union -- prevailed. We averted a new dark age.

But we didn't enter a new age of enlightenment. The Soviet threat replaced the Nazi one. The barbarism of Mao and Pol Pot matched the worst of what had gone before. And the end of the Cold War didn't mean an end to the assulats on civilization -- foremost among them the attacks of 9/11.

The boms on Patriots' Day in Boston brought a fresh reminder, if any were needed, that there are still those who would send us into a new dark age. And the trial of murderer-abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia reminds us that other barbarous things are being done in our midst. So there are still, in this enlightened and progressive 21st century, barbarians at the gates -- and, sadly, within the gates.

. . . .

In the 19th century, liberals like John Stuart Mill could write of civilization and barbarism. In the last half of the 20th century, as liberalism degenerated, it fell to conservatives like Reagan and Thatcher to call the evil empire by its proper name, and to stand up to it. Do we in the 21st century have what it takes to confront and defeat today's barbarians?

(William Kristol, "Civilization and Barbarism," Weekly Standard, issue of April 19, 2013)

Do we have what it takes?

No.

Barbarians such as William Ayers and fellow travelers such as the New York Times, the Houston Chronicle editorial board, universities that hire unrepentant terrorists and excise Western Civilization from the curriculum, public schools with curricula designed by experts who love mythical polar bears more than they love America, elites who seek every day in every way to weaken the beneficent influence of Christianity, a president out to fundamentally transform the best county in history into something else -- they have informally conspired to lay a blanket of malodorous relativism over the moral sensibilities of traditional America.

Who are we to say these murderous brothers are barbarians and that the perverted ideology that inspired them is barbaric?

APRIL 16 / Why did the Boston bomber use pressure cookers?

Unca Darrell — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:39:39 -0500

HERE'S MY guess:

. . . as crude cannon barrels to focus or aim the blasts and ball bearings in one direction.

APRIL 15 / They didn't use the word "ratchet," but . . .

Unca Darrell — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:04:00 -0500

. . . that's what they were talking about, way back then.

The fact was that in this country, we had gone very much further toward socialism than most democratic countries in Europe -- in the extent of the public sector, with the nationalized industries, and the amount of control, and to some extent the attitudes. We had to turn back. In other words, the center is always the midway between two points, and the whole of the political debate had gone to the left. . .

. . . so the center had moved to the left and I think we are well on the way to pulling it back toward the center. But one wishes to go further. . . . (Margaret Thatcher, Interview, Wall Street Journal, March 31, 1983, reprinted at wsj.com, April 9, 2013 (emphasis added))

Here is why the British experience is important to all of us. For over a generation we have been assaulted -- castrated is probably closer to the right word -- by the notion that socialism is the wave of the future. That explanation is given us, sometimes patiently, sometimes impatiently, in those accents of ineluctability that tend to drown out dissent. It is a statement that has indulged those little oscillations between social democracy and Christian democracy in Europe. Tory and Labor in Great Britain, Republican and Democratic in the United States. But it has always been possible for the leftward party to say about the rightward party that its platform is roughly identical to the platform of the leftward part one or two elections back. There is no doubting the truth of the observation. Roosevelt would have considered the Republican Party platform of Richard Nixon as radical beyond the dreams of his brain-trusters. (William F. Buckley, 1979, reprinted by Jonah Goldberg, "1979 Was the Year," nationalreview.com, April 10, 2013 (emphasis added))

While we're at it, how about this from Peggy Noonan?

[Government has] always grown! It's as if something inexorable in our political reality -- with those who think in liberal terms dominating the establishment, the media, the academy -- has always tilted the starting point in negotiations away for 18 inches [on a figurative 36-inch yardstick], and always toward liberalism, toward the 36-inch point.

Democrats on the Hill or in the White House try to pull it up to 30, Republicans try to pull it back to 25. A deal is struck at 28. Washington Republicans call it victory: "Hey, it coulda been 29!" But regular conservative-minded or Republican voters see yet another loss. They could live with 18. They'd like eight. Instead it's 28.

For conservatives on the ground, it has often felt as if Democrats (and moderate Republicans) were always saying, "We should spend a trillion dollars," and the Republican Party would respond, "No, too costly. How about $700 billion?" Conservatives on the ground are thinking, "How about nothing? How about we don't spend more money but finally start cutting[?"]

(Peggy Noonan, "Why It's Time for the Tea Party," Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2010)

Unca D once put it this way:

Unca D has often made these same points, but less well. My figure of speech is a ratchet -- a machine that moves things in one direction. Pump the handle up, nothing happens; pump it down, the car rises. Up, down, up, down. Pretty soon you have lifted a three-ton automobile off the ground.

My larger point is that American politics consistently ratchets things in only one direction, to the left. That is not entirely true, of course. Occasionally we see small shifts back to the right, accompanied by wailing from the left about how we're going back to the Depression, Jim Crow, and women barefoot and pregnant.

The ratchet clicks away, even as we speak, ineluctable as always. On spending, the Houston Chronicle and other Texas progressives yak endlessly about the need to expand Medicaid in this state. The arguments are moral (People who are almost poor deserve to have their doctors' bills paid by someone else, just like real poor people) and financial (Free money!).

"Free money!" refers to the teaser rate -- the feds will pay the whole thing for two years -- and ignores the costs that loom over the horizon, especially as the feds sink into de facto bankruptcy. Medicaid expansion is designed to ratchet welfare spending up, never to go down again once people are hooked.

Ratchet, ratchet, ratchet.

Meanwhile the ratchet is also being fitted to jack up taxes. President Barack Hussein Obama proposes to raid IRAs of $3 million and up. It won't happen anytime soon, of course. Too many people remember how politicians told them taxes on IRAs would be deferred until the money was withdrawn.

But most of these people will die in the next two or three decades. Then the chirrun whose lives have been ruined by this present generation's unwisdom -- for example, by enlarging Medicaid without having the money to pay for it -- will gladly loot the old folks' saving accounts to keep the fiscal merry-go-round spinning.

Progressivism is a long con. Mr. Obama is America's grifter-in-chief. The Houston Chronicle is one of his media shills. Americans who save, invest, innovate, work, and take care of themselves and their families are their marks.

A tax on IRAs is now in play and, sadly, as ineluctable as every other dumb and morally dubious policy of modern progressivism.

Ratchet, ratchet, ratchet.

BUMPED / APRIL 5 / Unca D is going on sabbatical for . . .

Unca Darrell — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 08:30:00 -0500

. . . a family project. I may post occasionally over the next couple of months, but you're excused from checking back until early or mid-June. Meanwhile, a couple of parting shots:

The Chronicle editors, still wrong about most things, are at least continuing the trend of treating American civic and religious holidays with decency and respect, a welcome change from years of indifference and trendy and decadent antagonism. Latest example: Easter.

The newspaper today plumped for legalized gambling for the Alabama-Coushatta tribe near Livingston. It's a horrible idea, both for the alleged beneficiaries and for their fellow Texans. The Chronicle usually opposes government-sponsored and -licensed gambling. Making an exception for a favored ethnic group that is organized in a pre-modern state, cultural, and social form -- a tribe -- says much that is unflattering about progressives: about their propensity for putting racial groups in boxes and keeping them there, bound in by preferences; about their weak attachment to traditional principles of how to organize a society (not as tribes), run an economy (not through rent-seeking), and get ahead in life (not through the moral corruption of gambling; not through the gift from the Big Chief in Washington of a license to pillage one's neighbors); and about their own corrosive white guilt.

When my family project is over, I'll share details . . . if they're worth sharing.

Ciao.

APRIL 9 / Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

Unca Darrell — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:04:47 -0500

HOUSTON CHRONICLE cartoonist Nick Anderson today celebrates the death of Margaret Thatcher with an image of her as a particularly ugly harridan, berating God at a desk in heaven. "What kind of socialist dystopia are you running here, kind sir?"

God, miserable, head in hands, hides under the desk: "I think I've died and gone to hell."

The message is . . .

. . . that she was a complainer, an ideologue, a shrew.

It's true enough that Lady Thatcher stared down, talked down, and beat down an impressive list of rogues, miscreants, and evil-doers, most of them men. Among them:

Socialist British politicians who had installed a 98 percent top income-tax rate on "unearned income" (commonly known as investment income).

Trade unions -- garbagemen, hospital workers, ambulance drivers, truck driver, railwaymen, gravediggers* -- all bent on strangling the greatness out of Britain to preserve make-work union jobs and to extort ever-higher wages.

Time-serving government bureaucrats who ran the moribund nationalized economy.

Argentine dictators.

Totalitarians in general, communists in particular, the Soviet Union even more particularly.

What Mr. Anderson has done is add God Himself to the end of that queue -- yet another victim of the Iron Lady's tongue -- which says something quite remarkable about his incapacity for moral discernment.

The implicit theological underpinning of this cartoon is that the Iron Lady's earthly victims were on the side of the angels, God's representatives on earth. God is just the latest Good Guy to get The Treatment.

The truth that is necessary for good humor is absent here. Mrs. Thatcher was daughter of a Methodist lay minister. She well understood the distinction between heaven and earth.

The socialist dystopias of which she complained were products of ignorant, fallen flesh-and-blood men who professed to believe, against all evidence, that they could create heaven on earth. (Our president, for what it is worth, once foolishly said the same thing.) All it would take are the familiar nostrums: a bit more in taxes, a bit more in spending, a few more laws and regulations.

When their enterprises failed, as they always did and always will -- sooner or later, as Lady Thatcher memorably said, socialists always run out of other people's money -- the commonweal was always left worse off, not better.

Mr. Anderson's cartoon is typical of the worldwide left's bitter and mean-spirited farewell to Mrs. Thatcher. They hated her, and hate her still, because she bested them at their own game, intellectually and politically, and because she succeeded in the world of affairs.

The great and glorious left's only response to this consequential woman is to mock and belittle her in death. Mr. Anderson's sad variation is to depict her as an uppity woman who did not know her place.

To the whole miserable tribe: Have you left no sense of decency?

* * *

The list is borrowed from today's WSJ editorial, which ends thusly:

Thatcher came to power when Britain and the West were in every kind of crisis: social, economic, moral and strategic. Along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, she showed the world the way out. She believed in the inherent right of free men to craft their own destinies, and in the capacity of free nations to resist and overcome every kind of tyranny and injustice.

These were the right beliefs then as now. She was the right woman at the right time.

APRIL 3 / We're No. 14! We're No. 14!

Unca Darrell — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 03:17:00 -0500

TEXAS PRIDES itself on being a freedom-loving state, and at 14th in rank its citizens have something to be proud of. However, its policies are sometimes not as consistent with individual liberty as . . .

. . . the rhetoric of its officials and citizens would suggest. Like many other southern states, Texas performs better on economic freedom than personal freedom. Yet despite its reputation as a low-regulation state, it is only average for regulatory policy -- while it is above average for fiscal policy.

Texas enjoys one of the lowest tax burdens in the country. It also does better than average on state spending, fiscal decentralization, and government employment relative to the private sector. However, state and local debt is high (with most of the problem arising at the local level).

Texas is first in the country in terms of labor market freedom. It is a right-to-work state and remains the only state not to require employers to contribute to workers' compensation coverage. Indeed, it has excellent workers' compensation laws overall. While Texas has only light community rating and no individual rate review, it has imposed mandated coverages on health insurance that add significantly to the cost of insurance premiums (it is two standard deviations above the mean on them). Texas led on telecom and cable deregulation. It has also passed eminent domain reform and performs well on land-use regulation. The state's liability system is below average, however.

Texas's personal freedom rank is mediocre. The state's asset forfeiture and gaming laws are about average. Alcohol is less regulated than in most other states, and beer, wine, and liquor taxes are low. Gun control is better than average, thought the state falls short on open-carry laws. Private and home schools are almost com-pletely unregulated. Texas has average cigarette taxes but slightly less restrictive smoking bans than many other states. Texas also has relatively light restrictions on motorist freedoms; it does not authorize sobriety checkpoints or have helmet laws. However, the Lone Star State fares quite poorly on a number of policies in the personal freedom dimension that drag down its rating. Texas's marijuana laws are quite harsh -- nearly a standard deviation worse than average. One bright spot is that low-level marijuana cultivation is only a misdemeanor. It is also one of the worst stories in terms of freedom from victimless crimes, including drug arrests. Just bringing the crime-rate-adjusted incarceration rate to the national mean would have put Texas at 11th overall, but this is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Policy Recommendations

Tighten standards for local government debt issuance. In particular, increase transparency concerning local debt burdens until it is consistent with the recommendations of the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts and ban local governments from using capital appreciation bonds.

Improve the liability system by switching from elected to appointed judges.

Mimic liberal states like Vermont and Washington and allow open carry of handguns without a permit.

(William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens, "Freedom in the 50 States," Mercatus Center, George Mason University, 2013)

God bless'em for doing this work, but the index is a good reminder of why Americans choose not to be governed by libertarians.

Appoint judges? Clear the prisons? Legalize drugs? No, no, and no.

APRIL 2 / Complexity . . .

Unca Darrell — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:17:00 -0500

. . . smothers us, confuses us, and robs us. So opines a nice essay on the "crisis of complexity" in Saturday's Wall Street Journal's "Review."

In 1980, the typical credit card contract was about 400 words long. Today, many are . . .

. . . 20,000 words. "Fine print" complexity costs us money in the form of hidden fees (about $900 per year for the average consumer . . .), denied claims and unanticipated charges ($2 billion in one year for landline phone customers . . .).

Who has 90 minutes to read 20,000 words or the time to select a Medicare Part D prescription plan . . . ? Ponder the fact that a dermatologist must sign his name to forms almost 30,000 times a year, according to a 2008 article in the Southern Medical Journal. We are on autopilot -- blindly signing, agreeing, working and spending.

(Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn, The Saturday Essay: "When Simplicity Is the Solution," "Review," wsj.com, March 29, 2013)

But the problem is far worse than the authors admit, at least for complexity engendered directly and indirectly by laws, regulations, and court decisions.

Government-inspired complexity is no accidental by-product of traditional self-government. It is deliberate policy in the only useful sense of the word deliberate: that legislative, executive, and judicial lawmakers know (or reasonably should know) that what they are doing will add to the complexity of life, and they do it anyway. In this sense, they intend to do it.

Do you file your own federal income-tax returns? If you have even a modestly interesting life, financially speaking, there's not one chance in a million that you know all the relevant laws and regulations and even less chance that you will comply with them all. You can only rely on paid professionals or tax-preparation software, and in many cases they get it wrong too. This complexity often makes you a lawbreaker (you did not accurately report or fully pay) or a sap (you overpaid). Too often, the alternative -- getting things exactly right -- is less likely than either of the other two possibilities.

Knowing and complying with Obamacare (about 2,700 pages) and Dodd-Frank (about 2,300 pages) are even more problematic, and that's before considering the tens of thousands of pages of regulations pouring out of the agencies.

These complexities feed the growth of bureaucracies, to administer them, and standing armies of attorneys and accountants to guide individuals and companies through the compliance mazes. Some laws and regulations are necessary and useful, of course, but it must be said: no bureaucrat, attorney, or accountant produces anything of value; even in the best cases, they are economic leeches, living off the productive work of their hosts.

I see this happening, as you do (if you are honest), but I am not up to the task of fully describing the cost, the waste, the horror of it all. One commonly used estimate is that compliance costs something like $1.75 trillion a year.

My point here is that the essayists, Mr. Siegel and Ms. Etzkorn, are Pollyannas. They propose to overcome complexity with three tools: empathy, distillation, clarification.

While these palliatives may ease the pain of the cancer of government-inspired complexity, they will never cure it. Indeed, they cannot cure it. Not when the parasitic governing class depends for its power and wealth on complicating our lives with ever more laws, regulations, executive orders, and precedent-setting court decisions.

APRIL 1 / The power of scouting

Unca Darrell — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:04:00 -0500

TO SUPPORT the time-honored, character-building, civilization-enhancing, manly values of scouting, send a check to Boy Scouts of America, Sam Houston Area Council, 2225 North Loop West, Houston, Texas 77008.

MARCH 31 / "He is not here: . . .

Unca Darrell — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 00:05:00 -0500

. . . for he is risen, as he said." (Matthew 28:6a (KJV))

* * *

We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father; from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end. (Niceno-Constantinople Creed, 381)

* * *

Christ is the eternal Son of God. In His incarnation as Jesus Christ he was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. Jesus perfectly revealed and did the will of God, taking upon Himself the demands and necessities of human nature and identifying Himself completely with mankind yet without sin. He honored the divine law by His personal obedience, and in His death on the cross He made provision for the redemption of men from sin. He was raised from the dead with glorified body and appeared to His disciples as the person who was with them before His crucifixion. He ascended into heaven and is now exalted at the right hand of God where He is the One Mediator, partaking of the nature of God and of man, and in whose Person is effected the reconciliation between God and man. He will return in power and glory to judge the world and to consummate His redemptive mission. He now dwells in all believers as the living and ever present Lord. (Baptist Faith & Message, 1963)

MARCH 29 / "For God so loved . . .

Unca Darrell — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 14:05:11 -0500

. . . the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16 (KJV))

* * *

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteous of God in him. (2 Corinthians 5:21 (KJV))