Sunday, September 7. 2008
This church was built around 1860 after the previous one burned down. It sits on top of a hill overlooking the harbor, and rings ship's bells instead of landlubber time. As you can maybe see, the pews are all curved so as to face the front. The stained glass, relatively unusual for a Congo church, depict nautical scenes from the Bible. One of them depicts the Mayflower.  
Where did that famous list of sins come from? Wiki has the info about them. After all these years, it's still a good list. Pride, of course, is the mother of all sin because it puts self and worldly interests above God.
Saturday, September 6. 2008
 This must be a bug. It can't be intentional.
Thanks, MSM: Kristol. Also, Why They Hate Her. Related: Hey, Oprah - you're missing some killer ratings. The Palin smears: all lies, but they are putting them out there anyway Economists like McCain's health policies. (Don't you love that "health" euphemism." What is meant is sickness.) Pelosi endorses Palin. Sort-of. Climate change reveals climate change. Hmmm. Little Brother? Brits reward kids for snooping on adults. They have gone insane. Abortion cultists target Palin A plea for calm in the immigration debate A glimpse of the new Repubs. David Brooks Fighting fire with fire: Obama is a Muslim From Obama's crisis at Pajamas: In his selection of Gov. Palin, McCain has exposed what was perhaps Obama’s greatest weakness, namely how the Obama project has really been a last-ditch attempt by Democrats to extend the miserable life of the New Deal/Great Society Democratic Party — the very bloated big government model they have pushed with the past three candidates: Al Gore, John Kerry, and now Barack Obama. Can anyone really tell the difference between these political triplets? Make no mistake; Democrats are frantic now that the man behind the curtain has been revealed. Despite their shameless attempt to mask their plans behind identity politics, the Obama campaign has always been about big government liberalism, labor union dinosaurs, and K Street fat-cat lobbyists — Washington politics as usual. America saw this with his vice-presidential pick, Joe Biden.
Image: People Magazine cover has caption added by an unhappy Hillary supporter, via My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
A reader sent this in as a suggestion in response to my search for a new grill-smoker: 
 Looks like we have some hurricane residue headed our way. I am always happy to see that up here - a little visitor from Africa and the tropics. Some left-over Gustav or whatever today, and Hannah on her way up here.
So it looks like a stormy-weather working weekend. Insty picked up a Joyner piece, Rich Work More than "Working Class." No kidding. I guess I qualify as rich although you wouldn't know it: I have only one house, no time-share Citation, and not enough dough to retire at my current manner of living (nor would I want to, because I like being useful). The quoted NYT piece in the above link begins: What’s different from [Max] Weber’s era is that it is now the rich who are the most stressed out and the most likely to be working the most. Perhaps for the first time since we’ve kept track of such things, higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do. Since 1980, the number of men in the bottom fifth of the income ladder who work long hours (over 49 hours per week) has dropped by half, according to a study by the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano. But among the top fifth of earners, long weeks have increased by 80 percent. This is a stunning moment in economic history: At one time we worked hard so that someday we (or our children) wouldn’t have to. Today, the more we earn, the more we work, since the opportunity cost of not working is all the greater (and since the higher we go, the more relatively deprived we feel).
Read the whole thing. I work about 55 billable hrs/week - sometimes 60+, except during July and August when things slow down and clients aren't around much. Thank God we barristers aren't unionized. Unlike the Euroweenies and the socialists, we Americans like to work. Not everybody admits it, but we do. BTW, read Dr. Bliss' piece below about Seduction, if you missed it (scroll down). Interesting.
 We'll Go No More A'roving
So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest. Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.
Friday, September 5. 2008
 Fight with me. Jules
Is your computer a zombie? Hey, Prof. Change my grade. This reminds me of the old one: "I don't have my homework because my dog ate my brain." Time to re-deploy out of Chicago? Higher death count than the Middle East. Andrew Jackson: a real-estate lawyer who was laughed at by the Eastern elites. HACNS1 is an interesting gene Cute as heck: Piper fixes baby brother's hair Can you taste anything with your eyes closed? The Brits don't get Palin. Their loss. They need a Palin, or another Maggie. American men love Palin. A moving speech. Classical USC censors Koran, removes Jew-killing hadiths. Obama sending the gals out to protect him. That's what metros do. Obama worried? Plays race card again. But he already played that card. Can you play the same card twice? Right Wing Prof wants you to see this short video: Palin on Omama and the surge. McCain's viewership topped Obama's - without styrofoam pillars! Hmmm. Typical lefty: Charlie Rangel forgot to pay his taxes for 20 years. Just like Ted Kennedy, with his wealth offshore. Or Soros, for that matter. It's amazing how much Lefties love their $. Obama today: “And I know that the temptation is to say, ‘You know what? …The guy hasn’t been there that long in Washington.,’ You know, ‘he’s got funny name,’ You know, ‘we’re not sure about him,’” Obama continued. “And that’s what the Republicans, when they say, ‘This isn’t about issues, it’s about personalities,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘We’re going to try to scare people about Barack. So we’re going to say that you know, maybe he’s got Muslim connections or we’re going to say that, you know, he hangs out with radicals or he’s not patriotic.’
Well said, Barack. Now you are running against yourself. From Roger today, about the Boston phone book, a quote: The liberal consensus has tenure. I mean, it is thoroughly institutionalized, and not only in academia. It has metastasized throughout elite culture. It’s what you are likely to uphold if you were graduated from an Ivy League college, went to law school, or work for The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc. It explains the little frisson Chris Matthews felt travelling up his leg as Obama spoke last winter. It also explains the incredulous, spluttering rage that Sarah Palin has provoked in purlieus of liberal self-satisfaction. I call it “Palin Hysteria Syndrome.” Just this morning, for example, I received this email from an acquaintance (I preserve the original orthography and diction: he is a careful writer as a rule, but clearly his emotion got the better of him here): i read you blog posting on Sarah Palin. Quite a suprise. Never would I have thought you suceptible to trailer trash. More suprising were the comments about Palin’s “executive experience” and being governor of the country’s “largest state.” Once upon a time, those were the sort of sphistries against which you waged glorious battle. The strange bedfellows induced by politics are not integrity and compromise.
“Trailer trash,” eh? Clearly, as Victor Davis Hanson put it yesterday, “Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia” are acting “as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.” “Cruise missile” is good: it suggests the unexpectedness and deadly accuracy of the blow. But I like to think that Boston phone book–or maybe it’s the Juneau phone book–is finally getting some of its own back. Bill Buckley would be pleased.
On my site, I have a post about my adventures with Hurricane Charley. It opens with this:
First, let us establish my credentials. Do I have the right to opine on hurricanes? A fair and legitimate question.
I used to live in Lakeland, Florida. Granted, Lakeland's not very big, and most people wouldn't be able to locate it on a Florida map.
It is, however, relatively easy to find, depending upon just which type of Florida map you use. Using the following map, simply follow the dotted lines:
Any other questions about my hurricane credentials?
Well, times have certainly changed. A year ago I bought a boat to live aboard and moved (floated, actually) down to the Florida Keys and the Tropical Island Paradise™ of Key Largo.
Granted, Key Largo's not very big, and most people wouldn't be able to locate it on a Florida map.
It is, however, relatively easy to find, depending upon just which type of Florida map you use. Using the following map, simply follow the dotted line:
 (The idea for this post grew out of a conversation with a colleague, who thought that Obama - and occasionally other politicians - successfully apply these techniques. She suspects that Obama has read Greene's best-seller because of his stated awareness of the effectiveness of his mirroring role, but that's not my motive for this post.)
Robert Greene's book, The Art of Seduction, is the sort-of sequel to his The 48 Laws of Power. Greene is a student of the dark arts. Both books are applicable to politics, business, relationships, and daily life - especially by those with sociopathic inclinations. However, reading these books can help one understand how some people approach their lives. (This has nothing at all to do with Freud's seduction theory, by the way.) The game, or art, of seduction is, at its core, not mainly about physical sex. It is not about earnest courtship, nor is it plain old trying to get laid. In its most artful form, sex doesn't occur (although it is indeed generally difficult for guys to refuse an appealing offer). The art of seduction is a game of deception and subtle psychological manipulation. Here's a bit from Ovid on "Promise and Deceive" from The Art of Love: Don’t be shy of promising: promises entice girls:
add any gods you like as witness to what you swear.
Jupiter on high laughs at lovers’ perjuries,
and orders Aeolus’s winds to carry them into the void.
Jupiter used to swear by the Styx, falsely, to Juno:
now he looks favourably on his own example.
Gods are useful: as they’re useful, let’s think they’re there:
take wine and incense to the ancient altars:
indifferent calm and it’s like, apathy, don’t chain them:
live innocently: the divine is close at hand:
pay what you owe, hold dutifully to agreements:
commit no fraud: let your hands be free from blood.
Delude only women, if you’re wise, with impunity:
where truth’s more to be guarded against than fraud.
Deceive deceivers: for the most part an impious tribe:
let them fall themselves into the traps they’ve set.
As I understand it, the art of seduction in its most evolved form involves becoming a mirror to an innocent or vulnerable female, to engage her narcissism. The mirror is the seducer's tool. The innocent fills in the blank with her own hopes and dreams and fantasies. She cannot know that she - or part of her her unconscious self - is being mirrored: the trick is to engage her into entering an exciting false reality consisting mostly of her own projections and fantasies, and the seducer dances to that music. That mirror becomes the stage for her narcissistic, grandiose, and regressive self. This game is slick, slimy, and rather evil, but it can work.
When the game is played in its purest form there is no consummation: the seducer disappears in victory, leaving the innocent in despair, holding nothing but a cracked mirror. If the seducer falls in love with his mirrored creation, as in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, the seducer has failed in his game by entering the looking glass world rather than remaining a disengaged puppeteer. The chosen victim must be either innocent or vulnerable in some way, because a sophisticated victim might very well be playing her own game - and beat you at it. The art of seduction, when done "right," is about the enactment of a subtly homoerotic dynamic wherein the seducer guy reflects back an image of the female as she wants to be, or as she regressively is. Thus the best seducers can be those men with "sensitive," "feminine" sides - "metrosexuals," or even the sexually ambivalent, because they are the best at reflecting the feminine. The classic writings on the art of seduction, besides Ovid, must include Les Liasons Dangereuses, written in 1782 by Pierre LaClos, to which the expression "revenge is a dish best served cold" has been often erroneously attributed. They must also include Soren Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer. That review begins: His preparatory remarks follow Ovid, the most famous of his literary precursors, when Johannes writes, "the fishing is always best in troubled waters. When a young miss is agitated, one can successfully risk much that otherwise would miscarry." One could also see thematic parallels between this and Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons', although it is uncertain Kierkegaard had opportunity to read that work. He also strikes a major theme of Ovid's Amores' when he writes, "A rendezvous is usually regarded by lovers as the most beautiful moment."
There are even internet communities that teach and practice the seductive arts. Here's one such site. A cursory view of their sites makes the accurate point that success in seduction has nothing to do with a fellow's appearance or background - just his skill at the game. However, for these people online, unlike the classic form of the game, consummation seems to be the trophy. Scoring, but not stupid drunk scoring - deftly engaging the lady emotionally first with the "bold move" carefully planned and timed. Greene's book goes through the essential tactics of the art, which he lists as the following: Choose your victim well
Create a false sense of security
Send mixed signals
Appear to be an object of desire - create triangles
Create a need by stirring anxiety and discontent
Master the art of insinuation
Enter their spirit
Create temptation
Keep them in suspense
Use the demonic power of words to sow confusion
Pay attention to detail
Poeticize your presence
Disarm through strategic weakness and vulnerability
Confuse desire and reality - the perfect illusion
Isolate your victim
Prove yourself
Effect a regression
Stir up the transgressive and the taboo - they are exciting
Use spiritual lures
Mix pleasure with pain
Give them space to fall - the pursuer is pursued
Use physical lures
Master the art of the bold move
and
Beware the aftereffects...
Image: Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror, 1932.
 If I’d had a crystal ball a few years ago, I might have asked a few more questions when Sarah decided to join the PTA. It wouldn’t have mattered, though; when my wife starts talking about reform, corruption and making government work for the people, it’s just best to get out of the way.
Todd Palin, Sept. 4, 2008 I’ve been an imperfect servant of my country for many years. But I have been her servant first, last and always. And I’ve never lived a day, in good times or bad, that I didn’t thank God for the privilege. John McCain, Sept 4, 2008 I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency; for its faith in the wisdom, justice and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again. I wasn't my own man anymore. I was my country's. John McCain, Sept 4, 2008
HuffPo has a Palin family shooting gallery. Where does this hate come from? It seems unhealthy. I don't hate Obama, I just don't want him to be our President. Toon below is from Atlas - 
Obama's relationship with al-Mansour. Birds of a feather...
Michelle has McCain's speech. Yes, he promises change. Rich Lowry's advice for McCain. I heard that many were moved by what he had to say. McCain is obviously no flashy orator, but how did he do in getting his message across?
Thursday, September 4. 2008
 Neilsen: Obama's speech 38 million viewers. Palin's speech 37 million. Wow.
The right side of the internets sure is enthused about Sarah. More at Dirty Harry's. Polls show people believe reporters want to damage her. People aren't stupid. She shoots...she scores! John Fund Gloria Steinem hates her feminist sister Palin. Is the only correct way to be a "liberated woman" to be a screeching angry victimized lesbian abortion-loving man-hating bitch? Or is it a wonderful thing that women can chose to be and do what they want? Repub ticket is a lawyer-free zone. That's refreshing. VDH discusses Quote from Henninger: I asked a number of women this week to account for Sarah Palin's sudden appeal. Here are the common threads.
The angry woman-as-victim drives them nuts. They hate victimology. As one woman said, "The point is that across the ages women have been doing pretty much what Sarah Palin has been doing: bearing children, feeding families, bringing in an income, working to improve their communities."
Another woman said, "Her story reflects a more normal reality" of active women; "the harder you work, the luckier you get." Hillary Clinton still plays the victim card. Sarah Palin gives off no victim vibes. These women mentioned her grit, determination and character.
They also said the Roe v. Wade litmus test has become too knee-jerk. Simply writing off Sarah Palin as "pro-life" caricatures pregnancy and motherhood.
Off-topic: Sad news about The NY Sun. I love that paper.
 Are all bird-watchers filthy perverts?
Photo: Skinny-dipping male Wood Duck as observed through a sneaky telephoto lens.
It's on sale here.  If readers have any better ideas (where the shipping wouldn't be $1000), let me know. Did I tell the story here about how the squirrels chewed through the propane hose on my old grill during the winter, and the unfortunate result when I opened the valve and tried to light the grill? Needless to say, that is an ex-grill.
An encapsulation of what I saw over a 12-hour period last Friday.
First off, I gots me some street cred on this Palin thing:
comment, Maggie's Farm, July 16, on who should be VP
Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, no question. There's your neocon vote and there's your Hillary vote. At the slow-but-steady rate Obama is sinking, come November it'd be a landslide. Like the MSM, people are just dying to leave the issue of race behind. People would be positively giddy as they focused on gender again, but this time with an authentically personable figure, rather than the shrill Mrs. Clinton or the stiff, tightly-hairbunned Mrs. McCain.
As I said to Bird Dog the other day, while that's certainly not the first blog comment to recommend Palin for VP, it might be the first to dare use the words "Palin" and landslide in the same paragraph. I suggest in this article that this overt optimism might yet be justified. As such, I thought some of you might be interested in the observations I made this past Friday. It was a historic day on a couple of levels, and, as I'll show, Governor Palin was more than just a 'smart' pick. I doubt the McCain camp, itself, knows how truly inspired it was. And while the bloggers did superb work getting the info out, I think they were a little too busy to see the bigger picture and what really happened that eventful day. Let's start with landslide.
Continue reading "From Sparks To Flame"
My focus group (of one - my wife) sees something special in Sarah Palin, besides her humor, good cheer, and optimism. She said "She is the candidate for the heartland of America. No... for the heart of America. She's not the candidate for New York City or Cambridge or San Francisco, where the elites don't know anybody who ever started up a gas station or a dry cleaner." Of course, my wife is just a small town Connecticut Wellesley ex-PTA rube.
 How do you think Sarah did? Many Dems were impressed.
Tape of it on previous post today. (That t-shirt is available via here) As Lifson said yesterday: The same sort of swells who laugh at Sarah Palin as trailer trash categorized Ronald Reagan as an amiable dunce when in a charitable mood, spelled his name Ray-Gun, and felt ashamed to have a graduate of Eureka College, not some Ivy League campus, representing America on the world stage.
Ronald Reagan never let the contempt of the cultural, literary and journalistic elites bother him. He simply spoke over their heads directly to the American people. And changed the world. In Sarah Palin, we may well have a figure able to do the same.
The Left and the Dems have merged. Strange how that happened. Bill Clinton just stood there with his finger in the dike. NYC drives away its middle class; Houston doesn't. Glaeser in City Journal The Guide to Top U.S. Colleges for Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith From Coyote: "I have written on a number of occasions that I thought it odd that the left (and women's groups in particular) don't see a contradiction between their support for government health care and their long-held abortion beliefs that people should be free of government coercion when it comes to decisions about their body and their health." Read the sad story from the NHS. Solar panels: check the numbers before buying Is 3-D printing on the way? Totally cool. How's your sex life? Quiz. Women often pick men who look like Dad Brit bien pensants sacrifice their kids on altar of "common good" A quote from a home-schooler, at Pajamas: We believe everything you need to know about parenting can be gleaned from Little House on the Prairie. Growing up in wildly dysfunctional households, we both learned that you can do much worse than the Ingalls family. We decided when we got married that our home would be better than what we knew as children. The foundation is love, order, and relentless application of rules like: Eat all your vegetables, and Mind your manners, and Don’t push your brother’s head into the toilet.
Private tuition hits $50,000/year Tiger notes the news that AGW causes cooling. Athlete's foot, too. E.D. Hill, FOX fox and mother of 8, wrote a book about being a parent. Will the Hadron Collider kill us all? I sure hope not. That would be a bummer. Dick Morris: Attacks on Palin certain to backfire. Related: A Lib is ashamed of these attacks. Related: Joe Biden says Palin is qualified for the job. Related: It's a deep rot in the press. Related: Press infallibility Related: Note subtle propaganda in photos below (h/t, Dust My Broom): 
Here. This sounds like The American Party to me.
Wednesday, September 3. 2008
From 1964, Sylvie Vartan, Petula Clark, and Francoise Hardy do a medley of hits. How ya like that 60s production style? Best: Francoise at 2:20 on the tape singing a bit of Je n'Attends Plus Personne. Pop gets no better than that:
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