Wellington Energy came over today to install the smart meter for PG&E. A lot of libertarians and others have been critical about the smart meter's implementation. I'm not too happy about it either, even though I don't own a home.


Podcast of Barbara Simpson's show on Smart Meters

mp3 of Barbara Simpson interviewing Bishop Cordileone.

Winslow T. Wheeler, More Pentagon Spending

The 2007 CD from the Institute. I have their first CD; I'm not so interested in this one -- more of the Solesmes interpretation.

Alt site.

JMG, The Costs of Community

Glance back through American history from colonial times to the present and you'll discover that the one consistently effective strategy for citizens who seek to change the direction of their society is to organize. When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America not long after the Revolution, one of the things he found most remarkable about the new republic was the way that ordinary citizens who wanted to bring change to their society did it by organizing societies, lodges, movements, political parties, or any other kind of citizen's group you care to name. The same thing has been true ever since; glance back along any wave of change in American life and you'll find an organized group of citizens behind it.

It's popular to insist these days that such organizations can't possibly muster the clout needed to overwhelm, say, the power of big corporations. History says otherwise. In the 1880s, for example, corporations had even more unrestricted power in the United States than they do now, and the railroad corporations were the richest and most powerful of the lot. The Grange, an organization of farmers, took on the improbable task of breaking railroad monopolies that were forcing farm families into poverty by keeping the cost of shipping farm produce to urban markets artificially high. The short version? The Grange achieved total victory, and the railroad corporations lost the monopoly status that made their fortunes.

The key to understanding the power of citizens' organizations is that representative democracy doesn't respond to the will of individuals; it responds to pressure exerted by groups. Those who organize to put pressure on the system generally get at least some of what they want, and the longer and harder they push, the more of it they get. Those who don't organize, by their lack of organization, make themselves irrelevant to the political process.

From VFR:

According to The New Yorker, before Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to be a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, he had boiled down the possible nominees to a short list of four women. On that short list was … Janet Napolitano. (“Number Nine,” by Lauren Collins, The New Yorker, January 11.)

4 women. Does anyone doubt that the AA president is a committed AA idealogue?

Yahoo: Mozart Effect Helps Premature Babies Get Stronger

The Israeli researchers plan to test out different kinds of music soon. One team member suggested that rap music might evoke the same response as Mozart, since it has a similar pulsating and repetitive frequency.

Rap = Mozart!?

Children take part in a winter camp program at a Confucian school in Jeongeup, North Jeolla Province on Tuesday. /Yonhap

AsiaNews: Card Shönborn: Medjugorje, Lourdes, a school of everyday faith
From December 28 to 31, the archbishop of Vienna visited the place where the Virgin Mary appeared in 1981. In an interview with Tagesblatt, he explains the meaning of the apparitions. Without prejudging the final assessment of the Church, he asks everyone to look at the positive fruits of prayer and love that flow from Medjugorje.

Cardinal Schoenborn is an enigma to me.

101 Ways to Save Money on Healthcare (via Dr. Helen)

NLM: Books by Joseph Braun SJ Available Online

VFR: Self defense in one's own home illegal in the Dead Isle

The Telegraph article:

Miss Klass, a model for Marks & Spencer and a former singer with the pop group Hear'Say, was in her kitchen in the early hours of Friday when she saw two teenagers behaving suspiciously in her garden.

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away.

Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon"--even in her own home--was illegal.

She could have told them that she wasn't offended by the knife. Or that it wasn't an offensive weapon, it was a defensive weapon. The police probably wouldn't have taken it well. The U.K. is going down the tubes.

The Myth of Muslim Conquest
By PATRICK HAENNI and SAMI AMGHAR

What of the demographic war?

Jason Peters, Prime Wisdom

Joe Carter links to this piece by Anne Trubek: Handwriting Is History

NLM: The Life, Work and Ambitions of Abbé Franck Quoëx, 1967-2007

First Things: Cicero Superstar by Mary Ann Glendon

Lost in the White House
By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

The practice of our politics is so broken today, but what pains me worse is that we have gone a long ways toward no longer even possessing the capability of imagining better alternatives. Good Americans – of generous intentions, thoughtful analysis and progressive dispositions – are losing the capacity to imagine genuine alternatives to an American politics which offers the choice between right, far right and hysterical right, all of them differing only in the shading of the patina they spray over their common oligarchical core. No presidents could possibly better serve the interests of the plutocracy than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (indeed, finding any sort of meaningful dividing line between the White House and Wall Street is an increasingly difficult task). And yet those on the right in America foam at the mouth in their rage at these communist infiltrators, while some progressives foolishly believe that Obama is trying his darndest to be a good lad, against a tough situation he’s inherited.

Obama's State of the Union won't preempt season premiere of 'Lost' after all

Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicologyby Elisabeth Le Guin

SFCV: Boccherini, That Chamber Music Renegade

Steve Sailer, Up in the Air: Reitman, Clooney Disappoint

Guess I'm passing on this one.

AICN: Sarah Palin Signs With Fox News!!

There are plenty of articles talking about this -- it should cement anyone's low opinion oF Fox News. She does strike me as being... someone who likes attention.

I got food poisoning from what is probably the worst Asian buffet in the area (Pacific Buffet in Fremont) -- I spent most of yesterday in bed, with no appetite for food (that still hasn't really come back). I also couldn't find the desire to blog or to read blogs. Not such a bad thing.

See the comments by Dr. Fleming and others to his Church and State A.

Andrew Bacevich, No Exit

Peter Hitchens, A Response to Conservative Home and its contributors

As it happens, I stopped being a Marxist when Mr Vaizey was seven years old. Let me put it another way. I have been a non-Marxist, and an active opponent of Marxism, for far longer than Mr Vaizey has been a grown-up. Since then I have spent much of my time experiencing at first hand and close quarters things far too few Tories know anything about at all - the British Labour and Trades Union movement, the Eastern European nations under Communism, and the USSR itself, where I lived with my family. I have also lived in the USA, and continue to travel widely as a foreign reporter, most recently in China, Japan, Burma, South Africa, Iran and North Korea. I know in detail why I am not and could never again be any kind of socialist, let alone a Marxist or Trotskyist. Any time Mr Vaizey wishes to discuss this suggestion with me, I am ready to do so, preferably in front of an audience.

But one thing I will say. The goals which revolutionary Marxists of my generation sought – a radical reordering of the relations between the sexes, a weakening of the married family, a general moral, cultural and social revolution, the destruction of the taboos against abortion, illegitimacy and divorce, egalitarian education, the abolition of frontiers and of nation states, the end of restrictions on immigration and the withering away of national borders, the sociological approach to crime as opposed to the belief that wrongdoing was an act of free will that deserved punishment, the infiltration of the media, the schools and universities by radical and revolutionary ideas about history and society, the dismantling of the canon of literature and of conservative attitudes towards history, the general denigration of the British Empire, the demolition of the idea that education was a passing on of accepted knowledge, and so of the idea that teachers are figures of authority - are now the policies of the establishment and so the policies of the Modern Conservative party - despite occasional sops - of the sort listed by Tim - offered to conservative thinkers.

My fellow-revolutionaries – from whom I broke and who hate me like poison as a traitor to my generation - entered the media, the law, the education system and the civil service in their thousands when the sixties ended, intent on pursuing these aims. And as Gerry Adams used to say of the IRA ‘They haven’t gone away, you know’. The number of ex-Communists and ex-Trotskyists at the very top of the Labour Party - who unlike me will not discuss their political pasts and also unlike me try to hide them - is extraordinarily large. These are for the most part not Old Labour socialists of the Clause Four trade union and nationalisation sort, but 'modern' enthusiasts for 'New Labour', which has many intellectual links with the current known as Euro-Communism , which used to coalesce round such publications as 'Marxism Today' and then migrated into the think tanks which swarmed around Mr Blair, and now swarm round Mr Cameron, who has pretty much accepted the Blair revolution as the price of establishment and BBC approval. See what I'm suggesting here?

Maynard Keynes once commented that politicians were generally the unconscious slaves of some defunct economist. They are also – especially Tories who know nothing of the Left - slaves of defunct social and political thinkers.

From the Kloska Family Blog: Please pray for Prof. Ralph McInerny

Twitch: Final Trailer for CONFUCIUS