…doesn’t seem to be working out so well:

While the United States has the highest per-person percentage of gun ownership in the world, according to Reuters, the Philippines has a much lower gun-ownership ratio. There are a mere 4.7 guns for every 100 Filipinos and there are 3.9 million privately licensed firearms in the Philippines. In the United States, there are 88.8 guns per 100 people and 270 million in the country, reports GunPolicy.org, a web site hosted by the Sydney School of Public Health at the University of Sydney.

Despite those numbers, the Philippines has a much higher gun-related homicide rate than the United States.

According to the most recently available data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, there were 8.9 homicides per 100,000 people in the Pacific island archipelago in 2003, while in the United States there were 3.3 homicides per 100,000 people.

Illegal gun ownership and gun trade in the Philippines are also problems.

Filipinos are required by law to be licensed to possess a firearm, and civilians are restricted to a single pistol and either a rifle or shotgun. Even so, there are an estimated 160,750 illegal guns in the Philippines, according to GunPolicy.org, which did not have comparable U.S. data available.

Tighter gun restrictions actually encourage illegal gun trade, Reuters notes. “With legal access denied, Filipinos simply turn to the many illegal gunsmiths who ply their trade in back alleys and on the edge of rice fields despite government crackdowns.” In addition, gun laws are not vigorously enforced, and availability is as easy as visiting a gun shop in a Manila shopping mall.

Several years ago I read the first third of Allan Bloom’s great work The Closing of the American Mind. The other day I picked it up where I had left off, and was struck simultaneously by how relevant it still is and how much worse things have gotten since 1987, when it was first published.

The subtitle is “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” We are seeing the ripening fruits of those efforts—which I can’t really call “failed,” because I believe they were deliberate on the part of at least some of the academics Bloom deplores.

Bloom himself was no conservative, although his book was embraced by conservatives and hated by most liberals (despite getting a good initial review in the NY Times). It was deeply critical of the collapse of the great universities of this country to the sway of PC thinking and cultural relativism, and mourned what we have lost along the way. Bloom was a champion of teaching the great works of Western literature, and was criticized as a booster of dead old white men (sound familiar?)

Pick up his book and read almost any page and you will find something to savor and to contemplate—very much food for thought. For example, here’s where I left off and started up again [emphasis mine]:

I believe that the most interesting students are those…who are still young, even look young for their age, who think there is much to look forward to and much they must yet grow up to, fresh and naive, excited by the mysteries to which they have not yet been fully initiated. There are some who are men and women at the age of sixteen, who have nothing more to learn about the erotic. They are adult in the sense that they will no longer change very much. They may become competent specialists, but they are flat-souled. The world is for them what it presents itself to the senses to be; it is unadorned by imagination and devoid of ideals. This flat soul is what the sexual wisdom of our time conspires to make universal.

Bloom died just a few years later, in 1992, of AIDS. I mention this to underscore the complexity of human life. His final book, dictated from his hospital bed while very ill, was on Love and Friendship.

There is little question that Bloom had a gift for friendship, if his good friend Saul Bellow is any guide. Bellow’s highly-praised work Ravelstein is a fictionalized ode to his great friendship with Bloom, who was the template for the title character. The book (which I have not yet read) deals with Bloom/Ravelstein’s homosexuality, which was news to most of the public at the time, but the novel is mostly a testament to Bloom himself. In Bellow’s words:

“Allan inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air… People only want the factual truth. Well, the truth is that Allan was a very superior person, great-souled. When critics proclaim the death of the novel, I sometimes think they are really saying that there are no significant people to write about.” But “Allan was certainly one.”

Bloom’s book defies easy characterization. It is not a conservative screed, although it is sometimes regarded as one. It’s a book whose every page—perhaps every sentence—contains something that makes the reader think more deeply about the largest questions of life. Isn’t that what a liberal (in the older sense of the world) education is for?

Is “huge Amazonian” redundant?

Not when it’s a pun.

I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to every single person who ordered from Amazon through my portal for the holidays. It’s a way of sendng me a lovely present, while giving gifts to others (or even yourself) at no extra cost whatsoever. A win-win situation.

And now that the holidays are over, it’s still possible to order Amazon products through neo-neocon, although I probably won’t be doing as much reminding about it.

Those who study and/or write about overweight and health are reeling from the news that it seems to be a wee bit healthier to be a wee bit overweight.

They’re spinning it for all they’re worth, trying to explain the results away. But the results are not isolated; many other large studies have found similar trends.

Being grossly obese is not healthy. But being thin appears to be not all that good for a person, either—at least, if you take the group as a whole.

The thing is, we are individuals, and therefore these results don’t really tell us much about our own situation. I know I tend to feel better at a slightly lower weight, and when I don’t eat tons of heavy, rich food. I also feel better when I do some exercise on a daily basis. So I try to go by that, knowing there are no guarantees of anything.

It seems to me that the biggest besetting sin of medical researchers, doctors, and diet gurus on the topic of weight is that they pretend to know much more than they do. People are so different in this regard there are no universal (and certainly no easy) answers, although we’re always searching for them.

Another thing to remember is that a lot of people have become invested in the idea that we must counter an epidemic of obesity, preferably through the mechanism of governmental intervention (they’re the same people who think the government should intervene in almost everything). But how many people are involved in this “epidemic”?:

Whatever factors explain these mortality rates, it is increasingly clear that the definition of obesity as problem, let alone an “epidemic” requiring government intervention, hinges on official standards with little basis in reality. If the share of American adults whose weight poses a life-threatening danger is closer to 6 percent (the share classified as extremely obese) than to 69 percent (the share deemed “overweight”), that makes a huge difference, whether or not you think trying to move those numbers is an appropriate function of government.

And then, of course, there’s vanity. Don’t sell vanity short. Unless we go back to some older (and more zaftig) standard of beauty, most people will want to be thinner because they think it makes them look better.

…will this be blamed on Republicans, Obama, Democrats, all three, Bush, or the Jews?

…have Barney Frank to kick around some more.

Being a member of Congress must be addictive.

Seven million? Chump change.

Here’s what Fernandez has to say about that Seidman op-ed (the one I previously wrote about here):

The United States was founded on an extraordinary wager upon the nature of the human spirit; predicated on the belief that men valued life and liberty above all; that in order to preserve their individual awareness in order to pursue happiness they would take risks. But let’s face the truth, as Seidel [sic] says, people don’t want the anxiety of liberty. The Founders lost the bet. “Perhaps the dream of a country ruled by ‘We the people’ is impossibly utopian.”

Maybe it was. Maybe the Founding Fathers were wrong after all to imagine that men craved freedom. In reality what men craved was Kings; whether in person or in parliament made no difference, for so long as it was some agency to which they could hand over all responsibility for their daily lives. And in exchange they would receive food in the Hall or its modern equivalent, the Mall, till it ran out. Free food till Grendel comes to Heorot — their sole concern being how near or far to the raised table and fire they were in the interim. If Seidel’s [sic] right that’s all there is to history: a kind of temporary gaiety with one ear open to the approaching sounds of the night. That’s all it will ever be.

Which brings me once more to a quotation from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I first encountered it long ago in high school, when we were assigned to read the Grand Inquisitor chapter from that book (something I find hard to believe; do public high schools require such reading today?).

It made a very deep impression on me back then. Although I don’t think I understood it all that well, it seemed very important. Fortunately or unfortunately, I understand it better today, and it still seems very important:

Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

…in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy:

The Milky Way contains at least 100 billion planets, or enough to have one for each of its stars, and many of them are likely to be capable of supporting conditions favorable to life, according to a new estimate from scientists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California (Caltech).

That specific figure of 100 billion planets has been suggested by earlier, separate studies, but the new analysis corroborates the earlier numbers and may even add to them…

“There’s room for these numbers to really grow,” said Jonathan Swift, a Caltech astronomer who is the lead author on a paper on the new findings, in a phone interview…

…[O]verall, the chances of life on such planets are good, because they and their parent stars are likely to be much older and longer-lasting than Earth’s Sun, between two and 10 billion years. That’s because they sip less fuel over time.

So in the future, when Earth’s Sun begins to run out of fuel after another 4 billion years, any intelligent life still on the planet would do well to migrate to a system like Kepler 32.

“This star will be there when the last Sun-like stars die,” [co-author of the study] Johnson concluded.

Note that the lead author of the Caltech study is named Jonathan Swift. As for the earlier, literary Swift, see this:

Swift made reference to the moons of Mars about 150 years before their actual discovery by Asaph Hall, detailing reasonably accurate descriptions of their orbits, in the 19th chapter of [Gulliver's Travels] (that is, in Part 3, Chapter 3)…

Voltaire was presumably influenced by Swift: his 1750 short story Micromégas, about an alien visitor to Earth, also refers to two moons of Mars.

Swift crater, a crater on Mars’s moon Deimos, is named after Jonathan Swift.

[ADDENDUM: This seems related.]

In my recent stroll down the memory lane of Dance Crazes of My Youth, I came across this one, known as the Mashed Potato.

Which started a long time ago.

I never could do this particular dance. Maybe the problem was the turned-in stance; as a ballet dancer, that posture was especially hard for me. And looking at it again, it still seems really difficult:

Dances were awfully bouncy back then, weren’t they?

If you want to read at length about the latest in the fiscal cliff negotiations and legislation, go to Memeorandum and get cracking.

But here’s my shorter two cents:

After doing a lot of reading on the right side of the blogosphere, in articles and especially comments sections, I get the impression that a lot of conservatives are hopping mad that the Republicans in Congress voted to raise taxes for those who make over 450/400K (that is, those conservatives who hadn’t already deserted the GOP prior to the vote). I agree that it’s incredibly frustrating that Boehner et. al. didn’t see fit to do something stronger and more conservative, just as a statement, knowing that it would be defeated in the Senate.

But as I (and others) have written before, the defeat in the 2012 election—not just Obama’s victory, but the failure to do better in the Senate—sealed the Republicans’ fate and took away a great deal of their negotiating power. This doesn’t mean that Boehner is not at fault; he is, most particularly for setting up this situation in the first place during negotiations last year.

But it’s important to note that, in the political sense, this bill may remove at least some of the tried-and-true “Republicans won’t cooperate” argument. They did.

John Hinderaker looks on the bright side:

But what happens now that Obama has gotten his way? It will soon become apparent that the fiscal cliff deal, including precisely the tax increases that Obama has been demanding for four years, makes hardly a dent in the deficit. At best, it will reduce the deficit by five or six percent. We will continue to run up deficits of close to $1 trillion a year, and the national debt will continue to grow, as Obama has always intended. This fact can’t be hidden; it will be reported. Journalists who have pulled their punches in the past because they wanted Obama to be re-elected will now begin to ask, what are we going to do about the deficit and the debt? At some point, perhaps sooner rather than later, interest rates will begin to rise, at which point the debt issue will become a crisis. And Republicans will say: we told you so.

That’s too optimistic for me. For example, I can’t even imagine that Hinderaker is correct about the MSM.

The most important negotiations are still to come, the ones where Obama refuses any cuts except in defense, and the Republicans either go belly-up or belly-partway-up.

And as this article points out, the current bill will have the effect of raising payroll taxes for middle class Americans:

But lawmakers’ decision not to reverse a scheduled increase in the payroll tax that finances Social Security, while widely expected, still means that about 77 percent of households will pay a larger share of income to the federal government this year, according to the center’s analysis.

The tax this year will increase by two percentage points, to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent, on all earned income up to $113,700.

Indeed, for most lower- and middle-income households, the payroll tax increase will most likely equal or exceed the value of the income tax savings. A household earning $50,000 in 2013, roughly the national median, will avoid paying about $1,000 more in income taxes — but pay about $1,000 more in payroll taxes.

I don’t even pretend to know what effect this will have on the American public, except to say I think that, although “widely expected,” most people don’t follow politics that closely and therefore this aspect of the bill will still be a surprise. As to who will be blamed for it, I’m not at all sure. Previous experience says it would be the Republicans—that’s Obama’s and the left’s and the MSM’s specialty. But something in my gut says that the American public might just give this one bipartisan credit/blame. Congress in general hasn’t exactly ingratiated itself with voters in recent years.

[ADDENDUM: Many more links here from Instapundit on why this isn't necessarily such a bad deal for the Republicans.]

Quite a few people have recommended this Victor Davis Hanson article about some of the problems we’re likely to be dealing with in the coming year. One of the points Hanson makes is that the true face of the left is increasingly being revealed in articles such as the Seidman critique of the Constitution (which I discussed at length yesterday, here).

Hanson writes:

These are the most foreboding times in my 59 years. The reelection of Barack Obama has released a surge of rare honesty among the Left about its intentions, coupled with a sense of triumphalism that the country is now on board for still greater redistributionist change.

I agree.

One of the many negative results of the 2012 election has been the sense, among so many on both left and right, that so-called progressivism has won the battle in this country—perhaps permanently, but at any rate for a very long time.

Let’s not argue right now over whether this perception is correct or not; we’ve certainly done plenty of that before. But perhaps we can agree that the belief, right or wrong, is one of the prime movers of this coming-out-of-the-leftist-closet trend that seems to be occurring for so many op-ed writers. It’s not just the heady victory of the moment that’s motivating them, it’s their conviction that it’s clear sailing from here on that empowers the left to openly up the ante and signal their next steps in establishing and capitalizing on their hegemony. No need to hide anymore when there’s nothing the right can do about it.

In some ways the anti-white-man rhetoric that has become standard and acceptable lately is the worst sign of all. If the term “hate speech” has a meaning, it most definitely would apply to a great deal of what has been said recently about that despised group. Those who are first to shriek “racism” and “sexism” when criticism is launched against a group defined as oppressed (blacks, women) are turning the tables and dissing white men with impunity. It is both hypocritical and vile, and especially offensive when cloaked in the sanctimony of those on the left who believe they occupy the moral high ground (that would be everyone on the left).

A goodly portion of the preening triumphalism that has followed in the wake of the 2012 election involves just this kind of hatred: towards white men, the rich, Republicans, Christians, gun owners. There’s a lot of talk about how the demographics have permanently changed in this country, and perhaps that’s correct—and now the tables are being turned, with glee. It’s been a long time since the expression of real racism against black people (as opposed to imaginary and/or astroturf-generated racism) was acceptable in this country. But it’s now completely acceptable against white men, and this is an exceedingly ominous sign.