Sunday, May 20. 2007
 This morning, in lovely Georgetown with unseasonably cool and comfortable weather for that swamp (figuratively and literally) of a city, Washington, DC.
The first Roman Catholic church in DC, built in 1789. I did not intend to cut off the steeple in my photo. The building is now renovated as The Chapel of St. Ignatius Loyola as part of Holy Trinity Parish, which now has a new sanctuary on the corner of N St. built in 1851. The parish was started by Archbishop Carroll, who was also the founder of Georgetown University. We cannot underestimate the role of the Jesuits in this nation's history. My graduating child, who is Protestant, of a more-or-less evangelical flavor, told me that Georgetown holds an outdoor Mass in front of Healy any time something wonderful, or anything disturbing (including things like not winning in basketball) happens. As an approach to both the grim and the joyful vicissitudes of life, I find that wonderful and rational. Go Hoyas!
The Earthquake. Acts 16: 16-34 16One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. 17While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” 18She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour. 19But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. 20When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews 21and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” 22The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. 23After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. 24Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks. 25About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. 26Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. 27When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. 28But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” 29The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. 30Then he brought them outside and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” 31They answered, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” 32They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. 33At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. 34He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.
Saturday, May 19. 2007
There are certain persons - politicians - who have come to believe that they understand how all the activities of everybody in the world happen, and how these actions interact, and believe that they can direct this interaction better that the individuals themselves can acting in their own sphere of knowledge and interest. There are two big problems with this approach, generally: First, you have no idea what you're talking about. About much of anything. You've never really worked a day in your life. You have only the faintest idea about how the average person gets by in this world. Polite persons are silent when they are ignorant. What does that make you? Second, even if your knowledge, such as it is, is able to inform your decisions about what we're all supposed to be doing, We can't all stand still while you figure out all the forms we've got to fill out. I know you love standing in line. Check that -- you adore having us all standing in lines you get to cut to the front of. And you adore filling out forms. Check that; you just love having us fill out forms you get to weigh and shred, after extracting the check. And you just wet yourself in glee thinking about endless talking about what to do, rather than the endless doing required of we benighted souls if we're going to get three hots and a cot until we get the bed with a lid. All bad managers don't like anything unauthorized to happen. That's why the worst managers, the communists, wrote it down for you: If you're not directed to do it, it's illegal. Got that? They just did wholesale what all politicians do retail: pass laws all day long. Sooner or later, everything will be "decided" either way. So what you get is productive people standing around while the boss, serene in the idea that they're smarter'n everybody else, figures out what we all should be doing. This is how you get Jimmy Carter making out the schedule for the White House tennis court when he's supposed to be, oh, I don't know, responding to the attack on the sovereign US territory that our embassies represent or something equally important. I'm getting around to that. Hold on a second, I'm on the other line. Anyone who's ever been in a socialist country, never mind a communist one, has read or heard the breathless announcements: Funds are just being released for this now! The Bureau of Reliquary, Fill Dirt, Rice Weevil Eradication and Toiletries is announcing their Five Year Plan for this crater! We're all supposed to run in place while the Implementation of the Overarching Arrangement of the Synod of Blueprints of the Delegation of Design of the System Subcommittee of Schemes working with the Council of Convocations Delegation to the Body of the Congress of Lickspittle and Nepotism figger out where we all fit in their universe- you know, the one their faux socialist professors banged into their pointy little heads. EU, or Eeeeuuuww -- not a dime's bit of difference. The paint's peeling off the "Coming Soon" sign from age, generally, if the goverment's involved heavily. It takes a year to get a building permit, minimum, in the town I live in. The house gets built in ninety days, by the people being ordered around by the those folks that need a year to make up their minds if you deserve that roof over your head. So how am I going to prove it? How am I going to prove that Al Gore doesn't know how to run an Ice Cream Parlor, never mind a country --never mind a whole planet? How am I going to prove that someone that can't find billing records when they appear to be the most important thing in the world is unlikely to be of use running the entire healthcare industry, where laying your hands on records in a timely fashion seems kind of important to the persons involved, as they point the physicians towards the correct limb to remove and so forth? Easy. I can prove people are busy doing things all the time you wouldn't expect, or anticipate, and no matter how kooky and weird they might be, you can't predict which will pan out. Let's go to the Patent Office. At the Patent Office, everybody's equal; just right it down and we'll see what pans out. Item 1: Bird Diaper Item 2: Spaceship Warp Drive So tell me, all you smartie pants; which one will pan out? Damned if I know. But I know one thing; if I left it up to you, you'd choose wrong, spectacularly wrong, nine times out of ten.
A re-post from May, 2006  Japanese Wisteria blooms in May in New England.
It's a sentimental Victorian plant that is perfect for shading pergolas, arbors and porches. Once established, it grows like a weed, up to 10' per summer. It takes work to keep it under control. Robins love to nest in their tangles: I have a pair of robins nesting in mine right now, so I cannot trim it until the babies leave the nest. Like many exotic, introduced plants, it can be very invasive and aggressive: eliminating wild stands of wisteria is a tough job. I grow sweet-smelling Autumn Clematis up my Wisteria vines, so the vine serves double duty. Autumn Clematis is another one of those strong vines that grow like crazy, with amazing September perfume.
Last year's Game Dinner menu. Yum yum. The Connetquot River. Trout fishing on Long Island. Unique. Must a man be willing to die? Worm of the Week: Our friend, Mr. Earthworm
| I heard a fly buzz when I died; | | | The stillness round my form | | | Was like the stillness in the air | | | Between the heaves of storm. | | | | | The eyes beside had wrung them dry, | | | And breaths were gathering sure | | | For that last onset, when the king | | | Be witnessed in his power. | | | | | I willed my keepsakes, signed away | | | What portion of me I | | | Could make assignable,—and then | | | There interposed a fly, | | | | | With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, | | | Between the light and me; | | | And then the windows failed, and then | | | I could not see to see. |
Friday, May 18. 2007
 Harold Brodkey, from The State of Grace in a collection of short stories, First Love and Other Sorrows:
I had read too many books by Englishmen and New Englanders to want to know anything but graceful things and erudite things and the look of white frame houses on green lawns. I could always console myself by thinking my brains would make me famous (brains were good for something, weren't they?), but then my children would have good childhoods - not me. I was irrevocably deprived, and it was the irrevocableness that hurt, that finally drove me away from any sensible adjustment to life to the position that dreams had to come true or there was no sense in living at all. If dreams came true, then I would have my childhood in one form or another, someday. ... I was fierce and solitary and acrid, marching off the little mile from school, past the post office, all yellow brick and chrome, and my two locust trees, and there was no one who loved me first. I could see a hundred cravennesses in the people I knew, a thousand flaws, a million weaknesses. If I had to love first, I would love only perfection. Of course, I could help heal the people I knew if I loved them. No, I said to myself, why should I give them everything when they give me nothing?
Image: Brodkey, drawn for The New Yorker in 1995.
It is now widely believed that essentially all 6000 world languages evolved, by geographical separation, from one proto-language. (This theory tends to undermine Chomsky's claim to fame for theorizing an internal hard-wired grammar - Chomsky's sole interesting idea, in my opinion.) However, languages are dropping like flies, as the planet shrinks. McWhorter in the NYSun argues that this is a good thing, but he hopes hobbyists will keep the old ways alive. Will the universal language be English? I hope so. It's a pretty good language, but Italian is far more musical, and I'd be happy to have an excuse to learn it. Would no longer need a translated libretto for the operas I love.
 Carbon for me but not for thee. The hypocrisy - nay, deception - abounding amongst the carbon fanatics causes me to doubt whether they really believe anything of what they say. Perfect example, at Samizdata. I guess gummint carbon doesn't count. Gaia apparently loves Government Carbon.
Here's my pledge: When politicians, bureaucrats, and Greenies quit flying and driving, and quit generating tree-murdering piles of paper upon which are written unintelligible rules for me, I will reconsider their sincerity. I'll never forget my Greenie friend who preached thus to me in my cozy red-neck bar one snowy night this winter in the Massachusetts Berkshires: "I have to drive to get to work, but you could ride a bike because you're closer." My reply: "They will have to pry my F-150 out of my cold dead hands." Yes, she had driven to Rudy's Bar and Grill too, in her Camry, and somehow made it home without a DUI. I don't approve of wasting precious ethanol as a fuel, but I do believe in that old "in vino veritas." My friend is very moral and sanctimonious, but she does like to drink stuff with ethanol in it. She prefers Wild Turkey (which is entirely organic), but she isn't too picky about guys. Photo: Is that my friend? Or is it Gaia herself, in human form? I forget.
The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life. Muhammed Ali, who I still remember as Cassius Clay
Good news for Dartmouth. At Powerline, Mr. Smith goes to Hanover.
David Thompson disputes Geras and Bauman on socialist assumptions. A quote: I doubt anyone here disapproves of social safety nets of some kind, or resents help being offered to people in distress and positions of severe misfortune. The question is how much help is to be offered and on what basis. But given the role of individual judgment in how a person’s life plays out, questions necessarily follow. Lots of questions. How, one wonders, does a community “insure” its individual members against all manner of “misfortune”? How are people to be insulated from, and compensated for, what are often consequences of their own choices and priorities? How much control is to be exerted and how many freedoms curtailed - including the freedoms of those suffering misfortune? What, exactly, are the intimate practicalities of this vision?
Yes, we certainly are in favor of social nets - but as nets, not as things which are to be an approved way of life except for the most disabled. Due to human nature, socialism only works half-well within familes, where there is a combination of authority and love bonds. Even kibbutzes fall apart over money and effort issues. Whole thoughtful piece here.
By Dorothy Fields / Jimmy McHugh, and famously sung by Billie Holiday Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worry on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street
Can't you hear a pitter-pat
And that happy tune is your step
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street
I used to walk in the shade
With those blues on parade
But now I'm not afraid
This rover crossed over
If I'd never have a cent
I'd be rich as Rockefeller
Going to set my feet
On the sunny side of the street Excellent youtube of the song as sung by Marie Bryant - good photography. Woops - youtube cancelled that one. Here's Cyndi Lauper. There is a Harvard study of life success and health. A quote: Early wealth and privilege did not predict life success and health of the study subjects nearly as well as the original investigators thought it would. What did separate successful subjects from failures was their level of maturity and their optimism.
The assertion that "Character is destiny" is attributed to Heraclitus, around 500 BC. Read the whole thing.
Lightning strikes the Empire State Building on May 15. Photo from The Daily Mail. 
Thursday, May 17. 2007
Bush Sr., that is. A 1992 YouTube. (h/t, Gateway.) Ain't politics funny?
 Rudy Giuliani might not be your favorite candidate, but he is an impressive, likeable, and engaging communicator. Watch. It is quite amazing that the Repubs have such a deep bench. Lots of folks I'd happily vote for, and no-one is ever perfect. Rudy is not my candidate, but I'd vote for him without complaint.
Climate momentum shifting. Summary of scientists who have switched sides in the debate. (h/t, Jawa) Black-on-white crime just doesn't fit the narrative. LaShawn. More from Cramer. Another grim milestone. Dust my Broom. The ongoing lying of the pols about illegal immigration proposals. Rick at RWNH. But Kesler is not quite so negative about it. Widgets, drive-bys, and bots. Nasty things from websites. BBC The Hollywood blacklists. Mark Steyn via Driscoll. Probably like you, I was taught that the blacklists were one more reason that America was a bad country. Wrong. These guys were traitorous, hated America, and allied themselves with Russia via the Communist Party. Nothing was wrong with pointing that out. Al Gore threatens the free press. I missed this scary quote from Anchoress' piece: “I think if it is important to look at the pressures that made it more likely than not that mainstream journalists in the United States would convey a wholly inaccurate conclusion about the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced.”
Sheesh. Al, check in with your doctor, and check your porphyrin levels. It looks like a set-up for a lawsuit to me. Protein. To what extent should religious accommodations be made in schools and the workplace? No more blunts. Vaporizers are the thing, dude. Like healthy, man. Behind the DC gun lawsuit. Alphecca. What ever happened to Magic Johnson? Classical Values
I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck. PJ O'Rourke
A quote from Michael Novak's piece on the subject at First Things: More and more often on Catholic campuses, left-wing Catholics are hiding their own ideological preferences behind the mantra “Catholic social thought.” To listen to them, you would think that the Catholic social ethic has four main emphatic tenets and five great silences. The four emphases are: (1) pacifism and nonviolence; (2) legal limits on the income of the rich; (3) the extension of the social welfare state for the poorest 12 percent of the American population (about forty million people), until all are lifted by government grants above the poverty line; and (4) the elimination of the death penalty in the thirty-some states that still allow it. Merely on the terrain of social ethics, this creed is notable for (a) its silence about ending abortion (forty-eight million since 1973); (b) its silence about federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and cloning; (c) its silence about the fourfold increase in violent crime since 1965—committed disproportionately against the poor; (d) its silence about the sixfold increase in father-abandoned families (chiefly among the poor); and (e) its silence about the horrific oppression of Muslim peoples around the world, including the daily assaults on their dignity by secret police, and the normal, regular abuse of their individual rights. We might call these the five silences. But there are others, too.
Read the whole thing.
Wednesday, May 16. 2007
 Whales evolved from dogs. PBS Video. That explains a lot. We love dogs.
The new Puritans. A new moral code, but just as annoyingly controlling as the old Puritans. Betsy on this piece by Ferguson at Weekly Standard We don't know what it is, but there is a heck of a lot of it. Dark matter Not your ordinary small luxury cruise ship. The Atmosphere, at Forbes Cleared by DNA after 20 years in jail. A terrible story. Europe's demographic collapse. Quote from a piece by Sensing: There is no longer a single country in Europe where people are having enough children to replace themselves when they die. Italy recently became the first nation in history where there are more people over the age of 60 than there are under the age of 20. This year [1998 - DS] Germany, Greece and Spain will probably all cross the same eerie divide. [link]
The greedy geezers of the AARP. Conspiracy to keep you poor and stupid quotes a letter written to AARP: "Even though senior citizens are the wealthiest demographic group, your organization is forever finding new reasons to take trillions of dollars from working people to give to your constituents, so they can go on cruises while working families are struggling to pay the rent."
A harsh piece by Bernard Lewis quoted at Insty. One quote: During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?" . . .
 A quote from our pal Coyote:
In Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom tells the story of a question he used to ask his classes vis a vis income inequality. He would ask something like "Would you vote for a law that reduced income inequality but at the same time reduced total wealth, such that the poor might get a larger slice of a smaller pie, and might even be worse off on an absolute basis afterwards." Apparently, he would get solid majorities for "yes" and in fact I have been in classes where this same question was asked and at least 40% said "yes." This is a situation a bit similar to the one above, but without it being personal. In other words, no one has explicitly hosed you, they have just done better. I hope you can see the parallel. Large numbers of people are willing to pay (or equivalently make less money) to reduce the earnings of people who are wealthy and/or successful. They are even more willing to do so if they think that they have been treated unfairly. Which is why you see so many politicians and media outlets working so hard right now to convince the middle class that current income distribution patterns are somehow "unfair." Politicians are pandering to this base human emotion, the desire to spitefully bring someone else down (in the case of income equality laws, someone the person has likely never even met or transacted with) even if it makes oneself worse off. I can understand why Pete Best might harbor a grudge against the Beatles. But why do so many Americans harbor a grudge against people they have never met, just because they make more money?
Last I heard, Envy was a deadly sin. Whole piece here. Comment from The Barrister: Coyote gets right to the point. America is not about making money. It's about having free choices to do what you want, and, as Bird Dog said yesterday, being adult enough to live with the consequences of one's choices. If you want to pursue wealth, great. If you want to pursue other things, great. All I ever wanted to pursue was a bit of modest comfort, work, friends, a relationship with God, and a happy family, and I feel blessed to have found those things. I love to make money (doesn't everybody?), but it has never been my main objective. However, I do hate being held up as an object of angry envy by pandering politicians just because my life plan worked. I had a basic life plan, and I just followed it. It was not rocket science. To maintain my plan, I will need to keep working - if I live - until I am 75 or more. No problem. I am happy to do that, as was my Dad, my Grandpa, and my great-grandpa, who died at 86 in the fields with his hands on the plow on his farm in CT just up the road from here. That farm was lost, to the family's perpetual resentment, to cover estate taxes and is now covered with absurd mini-mansions on 1/2 acre lots and has a street called Azalea Drive. Great Grandpa would be rolling in his grave if he saw that on the land that is soaked with generations of family sweat. And, if he ever saw an azalea (which I doubt, up here in those days), I am sure that he would have considered it a vulgar display. Even today, where I live, the wealthy happily drive rusty old cars, Yankee-style.
How is that pronounced? Mar -vel. OK. A travelogue by our hero, PJ O'Rourke, at Forbes. (h/t, Theo)
 Old Cape Cod fireplaces. Sippican has photos of several. I stole the photo on the right from him. It's in Truro. Hope he doesn't get mad.
Why I am a nationalist. Tangled Web Manhattan residential real estate up 23% in the past 12 months. Average sale price? 1 million. That is mainly apartments, of course. Prices also up in the boroughs. Average sale price outside Manhattan: $411,000. Moderate drinking and heart disease. NYT Science News How cool is Fred Thompson? Quick video on Michael Moore Bottom-scraping fishing trawlers plow and destroy the ocean bottom. To what extent is addiction-proneness genetic? Live Science Video Is France ready for Sarkozy? LLosa at TCS thinks not: In a recent article in the Times of London, Parris wrote that for all their impatience with economic stagnation, unemployment, social ghettos burning in the suburbs and the proliferation of violent youth groups, the French are not ready to make the "emotional leap'' necessary to reform a system under which people are used to relying on the government rather than on their own efforts for their welfare. "I don't sniff in the wind in la France profonde (though I begin to in urban Paris) that palpable sense of having reached the end of a road," Parris wrote. "The changes France needs to embrace will be convulsive. The pain will be intense. ... We British found that when Thatcherism arrived. But even at the low point of Thatcher's first term ... you almost never heard anyone suggest a return to what had gone before. There was a sense, in 1979, that we had burnt a bridge behind us, and had wanted to.''
Whole thing here.
Tuesday, May 15. 2007
 A disturbing brief video memory of Communism. Thompson. Thank God police-state-enforced socialism is in the past...or is it?
Fear not - the bold, brave, cantankerous, gnarly farm hands of Maggie's Farm are manning the barricades against those who want to "do us good" whether we want it or not. Do not do good to me. I am a moderately intelligent adult who is capable of making decisions and choices, for better or worse. My ancestors came here so people would leave them alone. Leave me alone, because I have the Yankee American attitude: I do not trust experts, and I am willing to live with my own mistakes without asking anything from anyone. Self-reliance, no matter how tough it can be at times. Reliance on God is good, but reliance on government is for the birds.
Our friend and Aliyah Diary author has been truant for quite a while. Too busy writing books and patrolling Jerusalem by bicycle, armed - but he sent this in yesterday:  For the 40th anniversary celebration, a few moments from the ceremonies at the Kenneset building in front of Chagal's mosaic.
Eliaz Cohen's Yeru-shalem has been set to music and was sung beautifully; a play on words - everyone "yeru" (throws, shoots) peace, (Shalem) at Yerushalem.
Yehuda Amichai, whose widow was there, wrote: "Yerushalem is God's Venice." Films of Amichai walking up the steps through the old city or Mahane Yehuda.
And Shuli Natan, before singing Naomi Shemer's Yershalaim Zahav, said that Teddy Kolek, before he died last year, asked Shuli Natan to sing Naomi Shemer's song in his memory. So she did. And so did everyone, everyone - Knesset members, Yithak Navon, Supreme Court justice.
And an Ethiopian singer sang a song of return to Jerusalem both in Amharic and Hebrew. As she sang, night-time movies of the first Operation Solomon, flying Ethiopian Jews to Israel was shown. Some were flown in the cargo section of a plane. And no complaints.
As I watched the films of the recapture of Jerusalem in 1967, the soldiers slamming into walls before peering over to shoot, men climbing out from under tanks to run across the narrow streets that I now walk, I thought of one of my soldiers, whose father, Chanan Porat, was one of these soldiers.
Altogether, I wish I could transmit how moving this was.
Weds., I go on a hike to see some of the critical battle sites.
Editor's Note: One of these days, we will post an excerpt from one of Nathan's books (linked above), which mainly consists of in-depth interviews with Israeli citizen-soldiers from elite combat units.
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