Sunday, May 21. 2006
 Lab rescues child from drowning. Not hysterical enviros: Can the world's marine fishery be saved? Sisu tells us about Garlic Mustard - yes, I have that weed all over the place. Fortunately, it is easy to yank out. Will show you my invasive weed soon - much more evil than Garlic Mustard. Another good one from our friend Sisu: Time Magazine admits its "advocacy." Is journalism dead? Going home: Mexico has the world's 9th largest economy, and it is a tropical paradise. Why not go home, asks VDARE "If Cheney were a Dem, he'd be a folk hero to gays and lesbians." That's what Gay Patriot says, and he is right. Republophobia is a disease. Evangelical Christians: numbers at Harvard on the increase. Probably everywhere else, too. It's about time - and Harvard did have its beginnings as a Congregational divinity school, after all. Moslem gang rape growing rapidly in Europe. They like white girls, for this purpose. If they tried it on Moslem girls, they'd be killed by the families the next day. But, with white girls, they know they can get away with it. If you don't wear a burkha, you're a ho, in multicultural Euristan. At Atlas. DaVinci Code Again: Michael Novak quote, from here: I think I have never for two-and-a-half hours felt so surrounded by decadence and hostility toward Christ. Yet I must admit that the film was glitzy with the art of the makers of thrillers. One could never be sure when one scene, then another, then another, then another, would be cut short by a murderous lunge, a shot ricocheting around a closed space, a door slamming, a car screeching. From one shock to another, one's stomach absorbed punch after punch.
Afterwards, I sure felt like a strong double bourbon. And I felt eager to forget as soon as I can the sheer malicious hatred that swirls up from this film.
I am thinking "Do I need this stuff in my head?" Which is how I felt after ten minutes of "Goodfellas." The wrold provides so much ugliness, we always have to wonder, and decide, how much we chose to add to the net ugliness stored in our brains. I guess I tend towards the "truth and beauty" end of the spectrum, but like everyone I am not immune to the siren call of ugliness, evil, and depravity. I decided to take a pass: the rest of the family can go today - they love movies and they love Ron Howard. Image: The family church in Alford, MA
 Psalm 33
1Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous. Praise befits the upright.
2Praise the Lord with the lyre; make melody to him with the harp of ten strings.
3Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts.
4For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness.
5He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.
6By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.
7He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle; he put the deeps in storehouses.
8Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.
9For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.
10The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples.
11The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations.
12Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.
13The Lord looks down from heaven; he sees all humankind.
14From where he sits enthroned he watches all the inhabitants of the earth—
15he who fashions the hearts of them all, and observes all their deeds.
16A king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.
17The war horse is a vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save.
18Truly the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love,
19to deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.
20Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help and shield.
21Our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name.
22Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us, even as we hope in you.
Saturday, May 20. 2006
May 1 2006: Yom Ha Zikaron/Atzma’ut “Where is he wounded? You don’t know if the aim is a place on his body or a place on this Land. A bullet sometimes passes through the man’s body and wounds his Land’s earth.” ---- Yehuda Amichai A Jewish way to “celebrate” Independence: start with a day of mourning. Jewish holidays start with darkness, start the night before, to remind us that “in the beginning was darkness and waste.” But Independence Day here starts with a double darkness: not only the darkness of the night before, but also the darker entire night and day before to remember all those fallen since the State’s founding. I was encouraged, or perhaps warned unintentionally, not to miss the Yom Ha Zikaron (Day of Memory) ceremony in Ra’anana. Tel Aviv’s is more impressive perhaps: in Rabin Square every major singer, artist, alights the stage, sings one song and leaves. There is respect for the day: no protest speeches, no signs waving. But, little Ra’anana a town of some 60, 000, fills its Yad Le Banim square (Hand/Memory of the Sons’) with some 15, 000. On television, starting at 8 p.m. and for the next twenty-four hours precisely, runs the name of every person killed in the State. I had been asked to stay in the States a few days longer to work as an expert witness for the Court. I said, impossible. I did not say, that I would not miss my first Independence Day, as I had missed my first elections. I just said, impossible, and the Court backed down, worked out a schedule so that I could finish work late last week.
For me, Independence Day is the most important Jewish Holiday: holier than Yom Kippur, with only less food and ceremony than Pesach. I could not miss this.
I had not understand the weight of the preceding Yom Ha Zikaron. Precise was the timing. A very unJewish precision. The ceremony starts precisely at eight. I, a bit stunned with jet lag, get phone calls from Michelle Green, most of which I do not hear, until I call and she says that Ira is also returning from the states, will take Ben and Avital, two of their teen children, to the ceremony; Michelle is staying home with eight-year old Mayan. their oldest, Ben, will be recognizing the ceremony with his army unit. Thoughtless as I am, I bring my laptop, figuring that I will arrive a few minutes early, work in the wireless cafe across the street, then join. Streets are blocked off. The main street is blocked for some distance. The Kfar Saba fire engine parked across the square. Police direct traffic; soldiers abound, even those seen only in shadows. Ira phones me as I am approaching, around 745, to say that they have saved a seat for me on the side, near the stage, but obscuredc by a video screen. He comments that the previous mayor left much of the seats facing the stage open for the public; reserved only a few for the elite; this mayor seems to have more people demanding reserve seating, so we are relegated to the wings. Wings are enough for me, as I find tears pressing through much of the ceremony. The cafe is dark. All cafes, restaurants are closed. It is like Yom Kippur here in Ra’anana: main street empty of traffic, filled with people; stores dark, shuttered. And at eight, precisely at eight, all stand, air raid sirens begin simultaneously. They halt serially, as if distant echoes of each other. I sit between Ben --who has just received notice that he is being recruited for the air force, whose brother is in Nachshon -- and bleary-eyed Ira. I think during this ceremony, how, when Ira arrived to Israel, on his first Yom Ha Zikaron, a boy from Ra’anana is killed -- Daniel Greener, a name too close to his eldest son’s. I think during the ceremony of how war reverses the natural course of mankind: instead of sons and daughters burying parents, the opposite occurs. I can’t recollect if this is Heroditus who made this observation. I don’t know if I should congratulate Ben on his news, or admonish him never to be listed in this ceremony. I want to tell Ira that Daniel should always return home safely. I think how this country is guarded by such very young and prematurely aged soldiers .
Continue reading "Guest Author: Aliyah Diary #16"
Try it. Bressingham Gardens. All of our places should look like this, but Maggie's Farm sure does not: 
May 20 - a good day for yard work. Everyone needs a nice wheelbarrow like this one. Read our piece on how wheelbarrows work, here. Fake but accurate? This story turns out to be apocryphal, but it sure was believable: Iran will require that Jews be identifiable by their clothing. Illegal immigrants - good slide show from the border. Becoming a Legal citizen - it's a big deal. NYT Tom Friedman's 6-month time frame. I guess many of us have seen it the same way. FAIR Ned Lamont - Connecticut's own John Murtha. Funny piece on his Kos commercial at RWN. Ned is a great guy, but he's way wrong on this one. Those darn basic Christian tenements. We listen to actors? From Cannes, via My Vast ...: “If we have offended any Christians I would ask them to forgive us, which seems to be one of the main tenements in the New Testament,” actor Paul Bettany, who plays Silas in the film, said with a smile during an interview with CNN’s Brooke Anderson at Cannes Tuesday.
Why doesn't the RC Church demand that Mexico improve conditions for its people? All they do is demand things for illegals, and ignore Mexico. Any reason? Sensible Mom has an opinion. Phin welcomes a permanent underclass of manual laborers. Well...., Round-up is good stuff, safe, and useful. So says Synthstuff. Glad to hear it. The University of New Jersey at Durham. Never knew it was called that. Talking out of school, and the next "Prep"? A new book, based on Horace Mann. Whole piece at NY Sun: As a graduate of the Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts, Mr. Trees is no stranger to the world of the wealthy. He also received a degree from Princeton and a doctorate in history from the University of Virginia. The onslaught of tell-all books about the children who reside in the city's wealthiest zip codes and the people who educate them has some schools now talking about asking teachers to sign nondisclosure forms.
Milberg Weiss gets hit, hard. Couldn't happen to nicer people. Cap'n Ed. More on the Big Airplane: From the final edition of Airline News Weekly, an article on the first A380 landing at London Heathrow: “Although modifications are required at airports for handling the A380, Airbus believes that by 2010, 66 airports worldwide will be ready for the aircraft. “At Heathrow, around Ł450m ($845m) was spent in upgrading existing facilities to accommodate the A380, with Ł105m ($197m) spent on the new Pier 6 which can handle up to four A380s and 2,200 passengers simultaneously. The current runways and taxiways have also been modified including the construction of new taxiways and upgraded runway lighting.”
Does anyone want to guess how much money the US might want to spend to help Airbus succeed? Boeing projects that long-term airline passenger demand will grow at a compound rate of 4.8% through 2024, and air cargo to grow at a 6.2% rate. Airbus substantially agrees, and concluded that a much larger airplane must be built to serve that growth, and thus the A380, which they hope that 66 airports will each spend the necessary $850 million to support. At a conference Boeing sponsored in New York on May 9, Boeing stated that since 1985, the air travel growth rate has been 5.8% a year, but that the average seats per airplane has grown only 2% over the entire period. Since 1990, the average airplane size has actually decreased. As Boeing says, “Airlines have met air travel growth with higher frequencies and more nonstops.” [linking more city pairs]. For example, Boeing points out that in 2004, US-China air travel linked 17 city pairs with 313 flights per week. Their forecast is that by 2024, 58 city pairs will have nonstop service with 860 flights a week. Even inside China itself, there were 170 city pairs linked in 1990, growing to 605 in 2000 and to 706 in 2005, and during that period the average airplane size dropped from 157 seats in 1990 to 154 seats in 2005. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner series with 242-280 seats and a 8,000 nautical mile range will be able to link any US or EU city with any Chinese city. To get to Atlanta from Wuhan, you will be able to fly nonstop; it will not be necessary to fly to Beijing and be shoveled into an A380 with 554 other passengers and then clear customs and immigration in LA with those same 554 travelers before staggering onto the final leg to Atlanta. This is a multi-billion dollar bet by each manufacturer – which side would you bet on?
Friday, May 19. 2006
 North America's Northern Harrier, aka Harrier, aka Marsh Hawk, is one of my favorite birds, because he dwells in my favorite sorts of places. I am happy wherever the Harrier is happy.
He likes vast marshes and fields, where he tilts around very low, hunting small birds and rodents. He is never in the woods. Many a duck hunter has had one silently swing over their duck blind, six feet over your head, and reflexively raised the gun before making the ID. Never shoot one: forget illegal - it's plain wrong. For fun, you can draw them in by making a squeaking sound - like owls, they can hear well. And while you are busy fooling with the Marsh Hawk, no doubt a flock of Bluebills will pass over your decoys while you are distracted - it never fails. The males and females are very different in coloration, but the white rump, and the behavior, are the easy diagnostic points. With draining of marshes, and the reduction of farmlands in the East, their numbers are down. But in Britain, the essentially identical bird was almost extinct, but now happily making a comeback. More about the Northern Harrier here at CLO. I still call them Marsh Hawks. Photo courtesy of P. LaTourette.
 This an excerpt from a piece at Classical Values:(my bold print)
From Evan Coyne Maloney (link via Pajamas Media) I have found a perfect example of real life imitating satire, quoted verbatim from the Seattle public school system's Definitions of Racism: Cultural Racism:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers. It would be downright hilarious if it wasn't the official definition of racism at a taxpayer-financed public school.
Yeah, that darn white future time orientation. Who needs it, anyway? It is just so white bread. I always felt worrying about tomorrow was just a waste of time, but I didn't realize that it was because I am white. May I safely assume that if I "think brown" that I don't have to do my homework? Hey - the gummint will take care of me, right? Or my girlfriends or my Momma? Somebody? And may I say that I am deeply offended by this stereotyping of whites. My white girlfriend is never on time. Maybe she is "brown" under her skin? Mr. Free Market had this: "Is there a word in Italian for manana?" "Yes there is, but it doesn't have quite the same sense of urgency." But Italians aren't "brown," are they? Or are they? Maybe the Sicillians are a little bit brown, being so close to Africa...and the Neapolitans somewhat less so...What gives? Is this a black thing, or a brown thing, or a Mediterranean thing? No wrist watches? No sundials? I guess I just don't get it, and I never will. I am so sick of this BS. Can't we just take people as individuals? Woops - wrong - I guess that's not the "collective ideology." My apologies to Mao's sacred corpse: for a moment there, I must have imagined that I was a person and not a minor fragment of a collective. Shame on me - as usual...but it's not my fault - my nasty skin color did it to me, and my skin doesn't "think collective". Skin pigmentation determines your thoughts - I must never forget that important, simple fact. From now on, I will let my skin do my thinking for me. C'mon skin - think hard and deep and true! And, by the way, Roll over, Beethoven.
Hey, people! It's just the entertainment biz. Big bucks, and just for fun. From a Bainbridge piece at TCS: Jesus Christ as Poache  d Egg. A quote: ...the International Herald Tribune reports, Brown has managed to convince many readers that DVC is "largely true." Indeed, as the IHT also reported, it is precisely the truth claims that attracted the attention of Sony executives: "The amazing thing about this book is it's provocative: Is it all true? Isn't it true?" Perhaps no one has ever captured the basic problem with the truth claims made on behalf of DVC and its ilk better than C.S. Lewis, who observed in Mere Christianity that: "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
All Dan Brown, Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, and that whole crew have accomplished is getting richer by saying that "really foolish thing."
Bainbridge's whole piece here.
See the clip of the new Airbus A380? World's largest plane. How the heck does this thing take off? Norm, on how the Left needs to straighten itself out. Russia tries to deal with declining birth rate. Frankencotton. NYT Science Times Japan will fingerprint all entering foreigners. Remember: Japan permits NO immigration. Period. Senate determines English to be our national language. Aw, man - now I have to learn English? I hate languages.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact. William Shakespeare
Thursday, May 18. 2006
"All the tired horses in the sun
How'm I supposed to get any ridin' done? Hmm." How'm I supposed to get any writin' done is more like it. This was a dry spell for Bob's muse. "All The Tired Horses," from 1970's willfully self-destructive - yet listenable - Self Portrait, an album whose origin and purpose is a story in itself. No live versions of the song exist, unsurprisingly.
Polipundit took the trouble to check on Mel Martinez' campaign platform on immigration. Guess what? Martinez deleted that item from his website, but PP found it cached! You can't fool Mother Internets. Woops. And today, the Senate decides that illegals should have retroactive Social Security, even if they used fake SS numbers. Michelle. Huh? Are these guys nuts?...or are they buying votes? Methinks the latter. Plus she has info on NC permitting illegals to vote. What a country...if it is a country anymore.
Canada is de-registering long guns and shotguns. Good for them. Isn't sanity a fine thing? Those of us who like to hunt in Canada will appreciate that, but I bet Canadian shooters will appreciate it even more. I have no doubt that their billion-dollar attempted gun registration system was designed to lead to total disarmament eventually, because it wouldn't help much with the bad guys - what bad guy would commit a crime with a legal gun? Cap'n Ed has more on the subject. And more at Canada's Small Dead Animals. Image: A favorite Maggie's Farm hunting location, in central Manitoba, last O ctober.
Quote from a piece on Britain from Atlas: There has been over the past 20 to 30 years an evisceration of British National identity and values which has created a cultural and moral vaccum being exploited by Radical Islamism which has come to fill that vacuum.
 Everyone is familiar with this very common fallacy, most often used in politics and informal debate but rarely in formal disputation because it is so transparent.
When you use a straw man fallacy, you argue off the point, or with a distorted, exagggerated or extreme version of your adversary. Thus one creates an easy target to demolish. It is so quick and easy to do, it is often used on TV. It is well to always bear in mind that fallacies are used to manipulate and to trick the minds of the listener or reader. As a rule of thumb, one can assume that they are rarely used out of ignorance or by mistake. Example: "I am opposed to a border fence because America needs low-wage workers." That is an example of arguing off the point, making it seem as if someone is opposed to access to unskilled labor. Example: "We should let Iran develop nukes because other countries have them, like Israel and France, so why shouldn't they have them?" That is another off-the-point argument - it does not explain why Iran in particular should have nukes. Example: "Bush wants to be a dictator because he wants to listen to my phone calls." That is a classic straw man - that is a case of reacting to an invented position. Example: "The NRA wants hundreds of children and teens to be killed annually." That's another classic straw man, akin to "The swimming pool companies want hundreds of kids to drown annually," or "The ladder manufacturers want hundreds of guys to break bones annually." As in the last two examples, straw man fallacies often use demonization fallacies, a subset of straw man arguments. Demonization has some effectiveness in argument, since we all know that evil does exist in the world, and we are always happy to be able to locate evil outside of ourselves. Thus the typical election year theme: "The Republicans want to starve women and children, take away your Social Security, pollute your air, and ruin your life."
Time to plan your August cruise. Medium or small ships are the best places, because you can never forget that you are at sea. We are very fond of the Holland-America Line, and have been for fifty years. For all of their trips I have taken, my favorite remains the old NY to Southampton route. Chilly, foggy, and old-fashioned. No need for a fancy suite: being on the ship is the thing. Make that historic crossing before you grow too old to enjoy it. Forget the food: you can see whales, petrels, shearwaters, giant ocean swells, the rare passing ship, mist rolling in and, if you're lucky, a good North Atlantic storm that will stir the soul and spirit (and stomach). Walking a few miles around the Promenade Deck at 6 AM in the cool North Atlantic mist, on a jerkin' boat, is a very fine thing to do. Image below: MS Statendam 
Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years. William F. Buckley, Jr.
Wednesday, May 17. 2006
Fence passed Senate - so it's a sure thing.....But where will we get the Mexicans to build it?
A little simple truth-telling from the Newt-man: Nobody who's not involved in terrorism should be at risk. Nobody who's making normal phone calls should be at risk. But the idea that we're going to say to the United States government, for libertarian reasons, "We'd rather lose a city than have you gather data," I think is totally out of touch with the danger of the modern world.
Extended comments on the subject from Gingrich at American Future.
Who's afraid of economic growth? Daniel Ben-Ami has written what I believe is a very important essay on Spiked on the anti-growth and limited-growth movement which is so much in evidence amongs environmentalists, the intelligentsia, and the leftist-minded these days. My own main problem with the anti-growth movement is that it contains, I believe, a latent fascism. There is an assumption that someone other than me ought to determine how I chose to live my life, and that they (the anti-growth folks) are the ones to do it. From his intro: The aim of this essay is to examine how cynicism about growth has become a central element of contemporary anti-humanism. It will examine the indirect forms that growth scepticism takes while pointing out its link to environmentalism. It will then consider how anti-growth thinking has moved from being an elite middle-class phenomenon to an idea widely held throughout society. A key factor in this shift was the capitulation of the left to environmentalist and anti-growth thinking from the 1970s onwards. The slowdown in economic growth over the same period, which in turn helped undermine the legitimacy of the market, was also important.
another: ...mainstream politicians and thinkers have maintained a formal attachment to economic growth despite any reservations they may express. A direct attack on growth would be almost unthinkable. If they argued explicitly for a levelling off of living standards, let alone their decline, it is hard to see how they could maintain popular support. This tension - between formal support for growth while expressing doubts about its benefits - is particularly worth exploring. It provides an opening for a restatement of the need for economic growth as part of a broader development of a new humanism.
Please read the whole thing. It is excellent brain food.
They say that when you owe a bank $100,000, the banker controls you, but when you owe a bank $100,000,000, you control the bankers. That's my analogy for illegal immigration: The government does fine with the acceptable trickle of welcome legal immigrants, but the hurricane of illegals makes them collapse.
We should sign up for the Day by Day cartoon strip, but so many other folks have it...here's today's: 
 Tony Snow: I saw a clip of his first day with the press yesterday. Tears welled up in his eyes when asked about his colon cancer for which he was treated last year, and he could not speak. Finally he said "It was the best thing that ever happened to me." After composing himself, he quipped "I guess that was my Ed Muskie moment." Tony is one hell of a fine gent. Gen. Pace's commencement address at The Citadel: Wow. Makes you want to enlist right now. Laura's site - for the audio, scroll down on "Need to know." 2 1/2-hour long Da Vinci Code leaves critics cold: Reuters. They say it drags, and lacks both suspense and romance. London color-blind traffic camera-computers accused of racism. Those computers need a racial sensitivity training program, preferably beginning in nursery school. From Jay Leno (via Laura on the radio last nite): "Who says we can't deport 12 million people?... Mexico did." World's largest archive of Nazi files to be opened to historians. Video. Conspiracy nuts and paranoid schizophrenics love this stuff. The Annual Get-together for the Roswell UFO MYSTERY. Unequal justice at Duke: VDARE points out the similarities with Tom Wolfe's novels in the Duke fiasco, and notes the following Just in the last week, three prominent minority football players have been arrested on felony charges.  | Defensive back Ricky Manning Jr. celebrated his new $21 million contract from the Chicago Bears by getting nabbed for assault with a deadly weapon in a Denny's on a laptop computer-using stranger whose nerdishness seems to have offended him. |
| Utah St. quarterback Jerod Walker was arrested on charges of raping a coed. |
| So was USC quarterback Mark Sanchez. (Playing quarterback for the USC Trojans, this decade's top team, is perhaps the most glamorous position in all of college sports—two of the last four Heisman Trophy winners have been USC quarterbacks, Matt Leinart in 2004 and Carson Palmer in 2002.) |
Yet none of these cases have received a fraction of the attention that the Duke Lacrosse team has garnered—even though football is the most popular sport in America and lacrosse is close to the most unpopular.
Read the whole piece (h/t, LaShawn)
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions. G.K. Chesterton
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