Sunday, February 8. 2009
 Suffolk Rabbit Pie. Yum. A tasty Medieval dinner. My supermarket has frozen rabbit. (But I thought Rabbit Joints aka rabbet joints were a cabinetmaking deal.) I guess they mean thigh and leg. I assume you remove the bones before putting it in the pie, but they aren't clear on that.
Rabbit with Garlic. Wow.
VDH takes a look at what's going on, and he is not pleased. He touches most of the bases.
Related, Melanie Phillips on America, What Have You done?
Related: Rick Moran looks at the future of Conservatism. It's depressing, but I think he is wrong.
Saturday, February 7. 2009
 No, not batteries. It's about broadcasting electric power. This is cool. (h/t, No Pasaran)
This derives from the work of physicist Nikola Tesla.
But how long before kooks, cranks and paranoid psychotics claim that the electromagnetism is giving them health problems? Well, all they need are nice tin foil hats to keep them safe. Like the basic household one I am modeling in the photo.
This is a quiz for people who know everything! I found out in a hurry that I didn't. These are not trick questions. They are straight questions with straight answers
1. Name the one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends.
2. What famous North American landmark is constantly moving backward?
3. Of all vegetables, only two can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons. All other vegetables must be replanted every year. What are the only two perennial vegetables?
4. What fruit has its seeds on the outside?
5. In many liquor stores, you can buy pear brandy, with a real pear inside the bottle. The pear is whole and ripe, and the bottle is genuine; it hasn't been cut in any way. How did the pear get inside the bottle?
6. Only three words in standard English begin with the letters ' dw' and they are all common words. Name two of them.
7. There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar . Can you name at least half of them?
8. Name the only vegetable or fruit that is never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form except fresh.
9. Name 6 or more things that you can wear on your feet beginning with the letter 'S.'
Answers below -
Continue reading "A quiz for those who know everything"
Nothing like a full-sized carpet to pull a room together. I found this antique 14X22' Kerman on eBay. It's just the thing for my double-wide. They want $120,000 for it, which seems quite reasonable for the size, the condition, and the age. The link and details here.
I did buy this very appealing semi-antique 9X12 Tabriz this week on eBay. Geometric and more shroomy-hallucinatory than the usual Tabriz. $230. How's that for a cost-effective way to bring beauty into one's house? I've seen old rugs like this go for $2-4000+ at auctions, and I really enjoy the look of this one. I don't mind if rugs are a bit worn. New rugs look terrible to me.
And here's one I really like. It is an antique 5X8 Caucasian Kuba. The seller claims it's 1890 but I am always a skeptic with the ages of rugs. The yellow looks unnaturally bright to me, but what do I know?
From Bruce Kesler -
Easier than figuring out what women really want is what Americans really want from their government: a free ride. Whenever lofty goals are polled, majorities speak in favor. Whenever asked whether they are willing to pay for the goals themselves or personally participate in furthering those goals, majorities say no.
A recent poll of attitudes toward charities shows 70% expressing deep caring for the environment, relieving poverty and improving schools. But, less than 20% have personally done anything to aid these causes in the past year, and on most such causes the personal effort drops to 10%.
An analysis in 2008 of several surveys of contributions to charities led liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff to chastise “Bleeding Heart Tightwads,” for liberals contributing far less than conservatives, financially and of their time.
The latest polls, for example from Rasmussen and CBs of the so-called stimulus package in Congress shows majorities skeptical that it will deliver stimulus, and favoring tax cuts over spending. Americans believe they are better qualified to decide what to do with their earnings than Washington’s legislators and bureaucrats, especially when so much of the stimulus bill is deemed wasteful, unnecessary, and unproductive of economic growth.
In every popular vote for government-provided healthcare, the majority has said no as the extra and excess costs become evident and the loss of quality, choice and access become clear. Nonetheless, the stimulus bill contains many provisions that will move the US toward government-run healthcare.
President Obama and his party may have won a winning margin of about 5% of the popular vote, which is hardly a mandate for such dramatic changes and charges to our population and future generations mired in $1-trillion more impoverishing debts.
 Prof. Sutherland makes the point that folks like Shakespeare and Milton were seeking neither fame nor personal glory. All Shakespeare wanted was to make enough money to retire as a country gentleman as his father had been before coming onto hard times. He would be astonished to learn that people read still his plays and sonnets - and that they read them as "literature," much less that they are read at all. Plays were the movies of their time. They were not written to be read. And John Milton, a successful London businessman, sought only to glorify God - and to play some politics - through his writing hobby.
Talent will out. It bursts out, when it exists. Will threw these famous lines into a pensive, melancholy soliloquy into the mouth of a minor role (Jaques) in a comedy (As You Like It).
Interesting note from a piece on the Globe Theater: "Above the main entrance of the Globe was a crest displaying Hercules bearing the globe on his shoulders together with the motto "Totus mundus agit histrionem" (the whole world is a playhouse)." Also, theaters had no toilet facilities. Good grief.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Image: The Globe Theater
Heading up to ski at Mt. Snow this morning. It's an excellent mountain when it's not crowded - and it's close. It's the best of the southern VT mountains, unless you count Killington. I'll try to get there when the lifts open. New skis and boots. Wahoo.
Dem John Cole on the "stimulus" porkfest (h/t Outside the Beltway's Obama attacks Repubs for partisanship)
You know, putting aside the stupidity of the Republicans, I would really like it if  the Democrats would make the god damned case for this bill. There is another report up from the CBO (allegedly) that this will be more damaging in the long haul than doing nothing.
It would be nice if the Democrats would sell this bill and explain why it is good, rather than Obama just coming out and warning about catastrophe every now and then. I dealt with eight years of fear-mongering about terrorism, I don’t need it regarding the economy. I recognize our economy is a disaster, and I will support the bill heartily if you give me a reason and make your case. They simply haven’t done that, and part of my ambivalence is I am tired of doing stupid things just to be “doing something.”
Explain why this is a good bill. I double dog dare you. And if you can’t or won’t, explain why I shouldn’t be siding with the GOP in opposition, despite how crazy they are.
A family is a lousy analogy for gummint. AVI
 Ace on the Fairness Doctrine:
...if conservative talk radio 'overwhelms people's opinions' (as Stabenow says), how exactly did the Democrats manage to take control of the Executive and Legislative branches of government?
Somebody should write a book about this kind of illiberal thinking. Maybe they could call is "Liberal Fascism" or something like that.
From EU Referendum:
UN Sec Gen Ban Ki-Moon: "Deserts are spreading. Water scarcity is increasing. Tropical forests are shrinking. Our once prolific fisheries are in danger of collapse," he intones. "Failure to combat climate change will increase poverty and hardship. It will destabilise economies, breed insecurity in many countries and undermine our goals for sustainable development."
All this, of course, is bullshit.
Why Warren Buffet has been buying US equities. He works with a 10-year time horizon. h/t, Mankiw
Most wanted Nazi found. He died.
Nat Hentoff to Cato Institute. That's interesting.
Poll: Stimulus will do harm. Related: Let's give these idiots more of our money to spend, and our kids' future incomes too - which is really what it will be. I agree with this:
Hey! How about tax cuts for people who create jobs?
How about tax cuts for all working people?
How about not insisting on open ballots for unions?
How about tax cuts for everyone, across the board?
How about a suspension of ALL taxes for a year?
How about staying the hell out of the public sector?
How about not nationalizing everything that isn't moving?
How about scrapping this porkorama and starting over?
How about doing what is best for Americans instead of what is best for the Democrat Party?
Related: From Krauthammer on the Fierce Urgency of Pork:
The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.
After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.
I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.
Upper photo: Mt. Snow. Lower photo: Theo's girlfriend.
Friday, February 6. 2009
 Superb essay by Yuval Levin at Commentary, h/t to many including Powerline and Insty. It's a Best Essay because it goes far beyond the immediate topic and taps into deeper political undercurrents. One quote:
The sense of potential that accompanied Palin’s introduction, and the feeling that she might really reverse the momentum of the campaign, were not illusory. For two weeks or so, the polls moved markedly in McCain’s direction, as it seemed that his running mate was something genuinely new in American politics: a lower-middle-class woman who spoke the language of the country’s ordinary voters and had a profound personal understanding of the hopes and worries of a vast swath of the public. She really did seize the attention of swing voters, as McCain’s team had hoped she might. Her convention speech, her interviews, and her debate performance drew unprecedented audiences.
But having finally gotten voters to listen, neither Palin nor McCain could think of anything to say to them. Palin’s reformism, like McCain’s, was essentially an attitude devoid of substance. Both Republican candidates told us they hated corruption and would cut excess and waste. But separately and together, they offered no overarching vision of America, no consistent view of the role of government, no clear description of what a free society should look like, and no coherent policy ideas that might actually address the concerns of American families and offer solutions to the serious problems of the moment. Palin’s populism was not her weakness, but her strength. Her weakness was that she failed to tie her populism to anything deeper. A successful conservative reformism has to draw on cultural populism, but it has also to draw on a worldview, on ideas about society and government, and on a policy agenda. This would make it more intellectual, but not necessarily less populist.
Read the whole insightful thing. Link above.
NYPD boat passing by Roosevelt Island, formerly known as Welfare Island, and formerly known as Blackwell's Island, and in future probably to be known as Obama Island:
Nice racks:
Around 71 st, East River. FDR Drive on left, East River, Roosevelt Island on right. Bridge in distance is the Triboro, which the City Council has attempted to rename the RFK Bridge. Why? I have no idea.
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
Alexis de Toqueville (h/t, Viking)
We see how quickly government intrudes into enterprise when "their" dollars are involved. Their intrusions are, naturally, political rather than rational. Note the usually calm, restrained, and reflective Jim Cramer comparing Obama to Lenin re Obama's call for "no profits."
Here's Reagan in 1961 on government control of medicine (h/t, Axis of Right):
Psychoanalysis has known for 100 years that our conscious minds aren't in charge most of the time, and writers and grandmothers have known it forever. Indeed, we humans flatter ourselves when we imagine that they are.
For one example, Overcoming Bias discusses how social cues guide our decision making beneath our conscious awareness:
...the MIT group has identified a handful of common social signals that predict the outcomes of sales pitches, the success of bluffing in poker, even subjective judgements of trust. These signals include the `activity level', effectively the fraction of time the person speaks; their `engagement' or how much a person drives the conversation; and `mirroring', which occurs when one participant subconsciously copies another's prosody and gesture. ...
Humans lived in social groups long before language evolved, and the language function presumably exists on top of a more archaic brain system for non-linguistic social signalling. ... Apes, chimpanzees and other primates - our close evolutionary cousins - lack anything like our facility for language, yet still lead sophisticated social lives through displays of power, meaningful noises and facial expressions.
The post correctly concludes:
Our conscious minds are more PR folks than CEOs of our total minds. We are much better at explaining than predicting ourselves. So the first step to wisdom is to realize how little we know about why we do what we do, or why we think what we think.
That's exactly what we've been saying for years. A quote from John Tomlinson in the Flint Journal:
If you're wondering why North America is starting to resemble nuclear winter, then you missed the news.
At December's U.N. Global Warming conference in Poznan, Poland, 650 of the world's top climatologists stood up and said man-made global warming is a media generated myth without basis. Said climatologist Dr. David Gee, Chairman of the International Geological Congress, "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?"
I asked myself, why would such obviously smart guy say such a ridiculous thing? But it turns out he's right.
The earth's temperature peaked in 1998. It's been falling ever since; it dropped dramatically in 2007 and got worse in 2008, when temperatures touched 1980 levels.
Read the whole thing. Link above.
 The Left does not want you listening to Rush's ideas. I guess dissent is no longer "the highest form of patriotism." How can we all come together if we disagree about things?
I do not have the time to listen to Rush often these days, but I get a kick out of him when I do. He's a fine entertainer.
George Reisman corrects the record and concludes his piece thus:
Serous Leftists, i.e., those who want to establish and maintain actual government ownership or control over the economic system are all implicitly totalitarians. On the one hand, they want to take total control over people’s lives under the pretext of improving and enriching their lives. But their policies are so bad, cause so much destruction and human suffering, that the potential is created for an explosive outburst of hatred and vengeance against them once the public draws the logically inescapable conclusion that it is they and their policies who are responsible. To stay in power and keep socialism in existence, they have to prevent this from happening by crushing all possibility of dissent.
Limbaugh is a major thorn in the side of the Left. They need to remove him, because his criticisms serve to slow their advance and might even help to stop them in their tracks.
That’s why I’m for Limbaugh and I too hope Obama fails at every turn in his efforts to expand the powers of government.
Me too.
“It’s not global warming any more, it’s climate change. That gets them back in the game. These people are pretty flexible ...”
An Australian union leader, via Tim Blair
"The White House believes that if you owe taxes you should pay them." Robert Gibbs, White House spokesman. Gee, d'ya think? "Believes"? I always thought it was a legal issue, not a moral issue. From NRO on the Sec of Labor's tax problems. Yes, yet another one.
 Nanny claims people love nanny. Englishman
Mayor Daley: Chicago's stimulus pork is secret
Sweden lifts nuclear power ban. For the wrong reasons.
Obama to release Cole bombing suspect. What am I missing here?
Via Insty:
Roosevelt: We have nothing to fear, but fear itself!
Obama: Be afraid. Very afraid!!
Heh.
Related: fear tactics at Tangled. Also Sen Graham: Scaring people isn't leadership
Related: The CBO doesn't like the stimulus
Related: Obama's no-confidence game
Related: Stimulus bill will ban religion on campuses
Related, from Jules:
It is clear now that your president, on the verge of bollixing his first major initiative … aside from the ones about letting jihadis go and making kissy face with mullahs, also some environmental nonsense, your money for abortions in other countries, and a bunch of tax cheats for high office and, there’s probably more but I’m having trouble keeping track … needs you, the American people, to weigh in. Judging by the polls, that might not work out too well. I hope he stuck this thing on YouTube and Twittered it and didn’t just leave it in the Washington Post, because I think a lot of the people who read it there, to judge by the polls, are going to be among those who aren’t buying it and the president is going to need the vital support of those people who still think being “cool” is a qualification for leadership of the free world.
Most corrupt White House in history? Surber. Related: 25% of Obama picks have tax problems.
Dems still have their plan to squelch talk radio. No mention of "fairness" on TV. Just radio.
Is a uterus a social construct? Thompson
Judge Bork on Martinis
What's the logic failure in this Obama statement? (My view is that if they see Obama as a dhimmi, it will encourage them.)
Thursday, February 5. 2009
Spent today in NYC, around New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, (now known as New York Hospital and Weill Medical College, thanks to the Citigroup genius Sandy Weill Or is it properly New York Presbyterian Hospital - now that Presbyterian and NYH merged?). It was cold as hell.
That's Sotheby's building in front with the flags, and New York Hospital beginning just to the right of it.
A couple more below the fold -
Continue reading "NYC today: Photos"
AVI saved me the trouble of doing a post on "whom." It's one of those words, like "shall," with which the youngsters, who were not taught grammar, have trouble.
I agree that "whom" does sound a bit stiff when it doesn't directly follow a preposition, as in the casual "Whom shall I deliver it to?" Over time, the line between formal, genteel English, and informal English, is disappearing.
You still can't say "To who..." though. Makes you sound like a hoot owl.
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