Tuesday, September 11. 2007
 "You haven't earned the right to be war-weary." Willisms. Indeed. The only people suffering in this war are the soldiers and their families, and it's part of their dangerous profession to do so for the rest of us. It is not "suffering" to hear the news in our comfortable seats as we dine on our chips, salsa, beer and Twinkies.
The politicization of this "small war" is a damn shame, and simply gives hope to those who want to destroy a free Iraq. Like it or not, we will be there for a long time and as soon as the bad guys realize that, some of the scumbags will find something better to do - like getting married and getting a job and trying life as sane, honest, peaceable citizens. Heck, we are still in Korea, and nobody complains about that except me. Furthermore, I was a skeptic about invading Iraq and figured Bush Sr. had some very good reasons to hold back (and he did). Am I a "moron dead-ender"? I don't think so. Some things are difficult: consider curing cancer, getting rid of cockroaches from a NYC apartment, eliminating crime, weeding the garden, removing corruption from New Jersey politics, killing terrorists one at a time - but it doesn't mean you don't work at them. "Can do." Moslem Jihadists are the cockroaches of the world today, and they are going to be with us for a long time because they believe they are pleasing their god by killing infidels. If some of them want to die in Iraq, fine by me. Related to above: Attack Machine considers "Copperheads Redux." Belgium: Bring back the Duchy of Burgundy. EU Referendum Time Magazine regrets the invention of the automobile, forgets how their magazine gets delivered. Blair Obstruction of justice? Gov. Eliot Spitzer's "black car meetings." You want a burger, and the burger wants to be eaten. Consenting adults, right? LA may limit fast food in some neighborhoods. As Coyote notes, this is mini-fascism. How are the Polar Bears faring? Small Dead Cute Baby Seals The worst school in America. Front Page Is there anything good about men? An essay/speech by Prof. Roy Baumeister to the American Psychological Assoc. (h/t, Minding the Campus) One quote: Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards. I’m not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures aren’t moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups.
Image is from the Harrison Hot Springs Sand Sculpture Tournament of Champions. What kind of cool sand to they have there?
Monday, September 10. 2007
 Mass without a priest? I did not know that the Prof was a converted Roman Catholic. The Eucharist requires a priest in Catholicism.
Is Fred a lightweight? Reason Here we go again: Is Shakespeare Shakespeare? More on those "uninsured millions." Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid. Luskin consludes: Which brings us to the ultimate question: Does it make any sense to destroy a health care system that 5 out of 100 people do not have adequate access to?
A computer program to translate hieroglyphics and cuneiform. h/t, cool links from Flares. A fine meditation on Mother Theresa's "dark night of the soul." Anchoress Socialism: Is the debate over? Solim at Volokh. I thought it was done. When "carrying" was normal: Charlotte Bronte's dad, and related handgun topics.
Sunday, September 9. 2007
 Peter Breughel and kids' games: Yesterday and today. Cool.
A nice visit to Baskin-Robbins. Alphecca. Word to the wise: Do not point a weapon at anybody - even at a friendly Baskin-Robbins ice-cream scooper. The Golden Bears: Football and the soul of Berkeley. Suddenly I find myself liking college football. Why I left South Africa. Kim du Toit Hispanic immigrants account for all increases in US poverty. Coyote Have you noticed how Christian preachers, outside church, always mention God but never Jesus in public prayer? They pretend there is a generic god, to be polite. Here's what happens if they don't. h/t, News for Christians A sovereignty that no-one has taken by arms since 1066 will be handed over. EU Referendum. My opinion? Insane. Speaking of which - "Get your own damn army." Why is the USA still defending Europe? Or South Korea, for that matter? Time for them to grow up. The Inca mummy on display. More nukes is good news. Willisms. It's as close to a free lunch as this world offers. Dartmouth update: "The First Shoe Drops," at Powerline. Bad news for the Indian Uprising: the Indians have stone-age weapons, and the bad guys have cannon. Photo: One of Theo's gals to remind us that it is getting time to get the guns out. Hunting season is just around the corner.
Saturday, September 8. 2007
 What is missing, and what is wrong on this agenda? A prominent Brit leftist on what a nation is for. The Left is totalitarian at its core, regardless of what our friend Uncle Norm says. He is surely not, as an individual - but the movement is.
Federer beats Roddick, and other US Open updates from the NY Sun Re Madeleine L'Engle: Our brief post did not mention to what extent she was a Christ-inspired author and a long-time presence at St. John the Divine in NYC. I heard an interview with her recently. Very impressive lady. Brit mosques are becoming a metastatic cancer in Brit society. More on the Deobandi sect at Dino. Psychologists are overwhelmingly Dems. Driscoll. I have no idea what that means. Osama and the Dems: Perfect Together. Ace. Bin Laden can tell useful idiots when he sees them, and, despite his apparently minimal knowledge of the Vietnam era, he picked up one useful fact: get the surrenderist Left as allies by humoring and flattering them. Photo Editor note: We were recently introduced to this old-time Italian summer squash, (which goes by many names including Zucchetta and Serpent of Sicily) which I am told grows like crazy and resists bugs. There is an old joke: If you park your car in a suburban neighborhood in August, be sure to lock it. If you don't, someone will put zucchini in it. Same goes for this squash.
Friday, September 7. 2007
 The US government has the Bin Laden tape. Sounds like people are hoping he looks ill. Too many chicks and too much booze and blow down in the fleshpots of Dubai? Too many hours of Beer Pong with Mullah Omar and the hos and goats?
"Until Proven Innocent." The new book about the Duke disgrace, with comments. Never Yet melted. Horrors! Military recruiters in NYC schools! Rhymes with Right. Which is the greater evil in NYC: The military, the Boy Scouts, or Christians? All are evil counter-revolutionaries. Fallujah, Revisited. INDC Journal Al Gore caught with his pants down. Drudge. What a phony. I'm supposed to think he's worried? All he wants is attention. A day at the range, Theo Style What are you having for dinner? I am now smoking a pork butt with some locally-grown Black Cherry wood for some friends. Beer and an Oregon Pinot Noir, home-made cole slaw, tomato salad from the garden, and some Italian-style potato salad (garlic, parsley, white vinegar and olive oil). Western North Carolina-style sauce for the pulled pork, on cheap burger rolls. Splurged on a bottle of Dewars, too. For dessert, vanilla ice cream with powder-ground good coffee sprinkled on top, then a splash of Scotch over it: believe it or not, I am told that's Italian too. Go figure. Finally adding to Blogroll: Dissident Frogman (recently returned to the internet swamp) and Oxford Medievalist (A Jules talent discovery who we forgot to add a while ago)
We were alive during one of the handful of milestones of human history. Sippican What does 1+1=2 mean? Evangelical Outpost NY Sun opinion: Fred Thompson can win. Medical care in the US is already half-socialized. TCS (h/t, Insty)
Thursday, September 6. 2007
Luciano Pavarotti: RIP. We have YouTubed him recently, so will not do it today - everyone else is anyway. We'll miss the big guy. And about Fred: Let's see how he does. He surely is a likeable, seemingly-straight-forward fellow. Greenies: Airplanes for us, man-driven treadle pumps for you. Moonbattery. Related: Global warming and ocean saltiness. Did you grow up poor in America? You probably did if you are over 35, by today's definitions. I did, and I am under 35. Never thought I was poor, though: plenty of food, plenty of sports, and plenty of books. Duke, Ham, and PC: SISU, the Queen of the Segueway (if that is how it is spelled). Will the NAACP ever resume working to lift up and inspire their constituents? Viking wonders. So do I. Ethanol for cars: One more strike against that dumb idea: It's depleting water supplies.
It was interesting to see the various major linkers to that (surprisingly) controversial piece on Multiculturalism and Arabs we posted the other day because I had only been vaguely aware of one of the sites, and unaware of the others.  The most productive of blog visitors was reddit. That link- collector gets huge traffic, judging by the number of visit they sent over here: over 15 thousand. No comparison with what FARK can send, but powerful still.
We had thousands of visitors via linkswarm, another link-aggregator which seems to have a vast and loyal readership. We also had thousands from a site which our pure and chaste selves had never seen - Ernie's House of Whoopass. Ernie provides general links plus hard-core p*rn links which make visiting Theo feel like going to church. This photo is the most modest image I could find at Ernie's place. Also on the list is This Modern World, which posed an interesting, if sarcastic, contrast between the essay and the famous The America I Have Seen, by Sayyid Qutd (who I believe was the inspiration for Al Quaida and The Moslem Brotherhood). Clicked, an MSNBC blog, was late to the party but provided a few thousand visitors. Will Femia links stuff he finds interesting. A good gig. There have even been many hundreds of visitors via dirty.ru, a Russian blog (in Cyrillic). Cool. We hope we have gleaned a few new Maggie's fans from this spike in visitors. I do know that we made a lot of folks angry.
Wednesday, September 5. 2007
 More Brit health fascism: Dust my Broom, whence the image on the right. Our question at hand is whether they would plan to refuse treatment to those with lung cancer, AIDS, weight-related diabetes, sports injuries, elective abortions, and addictions -- all behavior-related problems.
Looking back at the journalistic malpractice of Katrina. Driscoll The EU is worried about the collective. Hey, I thought the Commies lost the Cold War. Maybe the fall of the hostile foreign Commies provided space for the home grown ones? Excellent review of current state of casualties in Iraq, at Back Talk. h/t Gateway, who has further comments. The purported reason you won't be seeing The Path to 9-11. Fear. George Soros: Enforcer and terrorist of Democrats Immigration and poverty stats: Opinion Journal. The real cause of global warming: Israel
Is America losing its work ethic? Am Thinker Why I quit teaching. Pajamas Surrender. How societies commit suicide. Dalrymple in City Journal. I missed that one. Stuff like this keeps happening. One nation, under therapy. SC&A on ambulance-chasing trauma counselors. Sounds like a scam to me. Similarly, from Dr. X: Are our kids over-diagnosed and over-medicated yet? Emotional. Some big-time emotional reaction to our Multiculturalism link about Middle-Eastern culture. A simple essay from Rants and Raves from a year ago - some reaction! Our apologies to R&R - we didn't know where the essay was from until late in the day. Creeps me out. The proposed Brit DNA registry - and for tourists too? Gender and the workplace. Econlog. Statistically, men work harder and longer.
Tuesday, September 4. 2007
 I am sure that the Maggie's Farm gang is relieved that I am back from vacation, so they can ease up on the links. It has been boats, boats and more boats. Plus a year's worth of beer, lobster, cod, clams and oysters in one week: I eat little else when I am on the coast, starting with cod-cakes for breakfast. It's the best: one day ketchup on them, the next day tartar sauce: cannot decide which I prefer.
Fish-cakes, broiled cod, fried cod, baked cod with Portuguese sauce...now I sound like Ishmael on Nantucket, where the milk tasted like codfish from the fishheads the cows ate. Time to come home to the woods and to dig back into work. I don't mind that at all. Variety is the key, or the tartar sauce, to something. I enjoyed that Yankee Attitude post from Barrister. Right on! Bush stopped by Anbar yesterday. Right thing to do. Should the government rescue fools? Attack machine Sweden has unlimited charter schools. Interesting. Even lefty Cameron is thinking. Worstall. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien: Asst Village Idiot Let's play "Who's The Victim?" One Cosmos More fun kicking Calderon around. RWNH Is anti-Americanism through in Europe? Neoneo Have you read Cato #6 lately? h/t, Dumb Still Looks Free. Or Federal Farmer or Agrippa? "Gun addiction" fears in Australia. Alphecca. Another disease I didn't know I had along with ADD, Asperger's, Beer Deficiency Disorder, and a few others. Charter Schools blooming in New Orleans. CSM The NYT just won't quit with the Haditha non-story. Democracy Project. After all, if the USA is not really the Evil Empire, they would have to re-think their entire view of the world - and that would be a hassle.
Monday, September 3. 2007
Photo above: That is not our Dr. Joy Bliss. That must be Theo's assistant, hard at work. I think he gets the photos and she does the thinking. Death of a Phony: Arthur Miller. I never did quite get what was so great about him. Preachy, condescending - and humorless. Chosing the right college. Another view, via Dr. Helen When war was the answer. George Will at RCP. Unfortunately, war is often the answer. Remembering 9-11. Captain Ed. No holiday, please. Official grieving is disgusting grandstanding, and a holiday would be just one more day when government employees do not work, and everybody else does. If anybody doesn't know who the enemy is by now, they never will. How Shakespeare taught me to read financial news. Bowyer at TCS. Poverty in America. This might be a re-post, but it makes it very clear. Nobody is going hungry, or lacking in the crap on TV. Sweden: Truth about communism will confuse people. Moonbattery. At least they admit it. Switzerland wants to keep their country Swiss. h/t, Insty via reader. Yes, it sure does sound racially-tinged, but is that what it is really about, or is it about preserving their culture? From Leno (h/t, Conspiracy): Speaking at a forum organized by Lance Armstrong on cancer research, Hillary Clinton told Chris Matthews if she is elected president, she will declare war on cancer, and then she will support the war on cancer for two years, and then she will be against it for a year, and then she will back out of it all together.
Porn on the web: Some data in our comments - scroll past those lawyer jokes to comment by Pat Jones Calderon: "Mexico does not end at our borders." What? Is he demanding Lebensraum? Every once in a while, the totalitarian impulse, the grandiosity, and the contempt for people which underlies nanny-statism and socialism is spoken out loud. Was it Bill or Hillary who commented "What if people don't spend their money the right way?" John Edwards proposes telling people when to go to the doctor. Arthur St. Germaine: A Maine kid and his Guadalcanal memories. Scroll down to the final comment by Buddy
Sunday, September 2. 2007
 A pasta strike in Italy? The problem, once again, is biofuel.
Who is Mr. Hsu?, with good links, at RWNH Sen. Craig is no hypocrite. I agree. Powerline. Related, a men's room update, from Cramer. And, the good news, Jim Risch. The Rykestrasse Synagogue - the largest in Germany - reopens, restored Thank God for the intellectuals. They will save us from ourselves. Blair, with links Long overdue: A Crystal Gail Mangum Chair of Women's Studies at Duke Leftism, a "fear of seeming," and the Left's contempt for working people. Thompson New Orleans is doomed, says geologist. Duh. Photo: Pinella and Wagner, from Will's caption contests.
Saturday, September 1. 2007
Are adults acting more like teenagers? Diana West interviewed. h/t, Driscoll Justice going after Hsu. Good to hear it. Captain Ed. Something fishy. What Bernanke says. Dino Koreans lash out at those missionaries. Gateway Oh - almost forgot. Skip past the pie and the Jooo-Amish conspiracy and read the Right Wing Prof today. He has some good posts.
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