Monday, October 4. 2010
 Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
Thoreau
The Left is unhinged by the Tea Party partly because they’ve never seen you before. And this isn’t limited to Leftists who are presently, you know, alive.
He makes a good point about the "de-closeting" of Conservatives. Until the last decade, they have mostly been living in the shadows. Now they are out and they are proud.
 Royal Navy Field Gun Competition
Dylan meets Obama. Sort-of.
Megan: Where your tax dollars go
Vid: Al Gore Confronted in Tampa about Global Warming Again!!
Stuxnet update
Bill Maher Calls Republicans 'A Deadly Enemy'. Lost his sense of reality.
Prager: If You Are Not a Leftist, Why Are You Voting Democrat?
The great divide in America. In our experience, one cannot even discuss across that divide nowadays.
Those marchers aren't into America. Angry haters? Or just paid to show up? But I am sure the Commies showed up under their own steam. Who are these people?
We took a stroll with friends on the High Line yesterday, after seeing Batsheva at the Joyce.
This new walkway sure is a popular item. It's an old elevated railroad line which ran down to the meat-packing district. It's been converted to a walkway with private donations, and it is not complete yet - it will run uptown all the way to the Javits convention center.
Part of its appeal, I think, is that you can really see the sweep of the city up here, instead of just sidewalks and storefronts. You can see the architecture - industrial and otherwise. Views of the Hudson, and a good distant view of the Statue of Liberty out in the harbor.
If you don't care for heights, the Greenway is another popular walking, running, and people-watching route. The staid East Side of Manhattan is lifeless, these days.
More pics below the fold -
Continue reading "A walk on the West Side - The High Line"
Sunday, October 3. 2010
From Heather McDonald's Windy City Silence - The truth behind the city’s youth-crime spree remains unspoken:
The studied silence in Chicago about the massive reality that underlies that city’s youth-violence epidemic—black family breakdown—is so complete as to border on perverse.
I used to have a Browning 28 ga Featherweight. It was truly light. In fact, a little too light in weight for my accuracy or lack thereof. However, it was a pleasure to carry for 6 hours in the woods.
At some point, I turned it in to buy something else in s/s, but I wish I had that 28 now for grouse and especially Woodcock.
Many claim that a 28 patterns better than any other gauge. I wonder whether any of our readers ever hunt with a 28.
Obama's Top Ten Broken Promises.
However, we continue to believe that he and his folks are very pleased with what they have done thus far.
Luke 17:5-10
17:5 The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!"
17:6 The Lord replied, "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.
17:7 "Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, 'Come here at once and take your place at the table'?
17:8 Would you not rather say to him, 'Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink'?
17:9 Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded?
17:10 So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, 'We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'"
Saturday, October 2. 2010
No serious person takes analogies as accurate. Politicians and journalists are often not serious people, seeking self-serving soundbites and sensationalism over careful knowledge of the facts.
This lure is attractive for those who trot out the US experience in Vietnam, particularly the 1968 Tet Offensive, to advocate hopelessness for our and target countries’ battles against insurgents. US misreporting of the wholesale defeat of communist forces – losing 45,000 of the 84,000 attackers – and feckless US policymakers failing to carry-through, serves as the template current foes rely upon.
Among many examples provided by Robbins:
Osama bin Laden wrote to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, “It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its share may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for battles.”
So author James Robbins, in This Time We Win: Revisiting The Tet Offensive, takes 301 pages plus copious footnotes to “unlink the power of analogy from the terrorist arsenal,” by detailing every aspect of Tet ’68 and its aftermath.
This ground has been well-plowed before.
It’s not new news that the US media was grossly biased and inept in its reporting of Tet ’68.
Continue reading "Review: This Time We Win (Or Do We?). Tet Revisited"
 Regular readers know what a geology buff I am, although I do not post about it very much. My view is that you do not know what the heck you are looking at when you step outdoors unless you know some basic geology.
I was recently reminded about John McPhee's Annals of This Former World.
The book is a treat, but much better appreciated if you know basic Geo.
(As my friends know, my kids are all given my list of what they are required to study in college - or as AP high school courses - if I am to pay for their education. Intro Geology is on my list. Maybe I should post my Dad's Required Courses one of these days. It might stimulate some fun discussion here. Being a Yankee, I am cheap and hate to waste money on transient nonsense du jour. One reason I love Columbia and the U of Chicago is because they dare have an opinion about what kids need to know from the wisdom of past generations.)
What's new about a black market in sperm? Human sperm has been cheerfully donated or sold for a few hundred thousand years, hasn't it? Best way to deliver it is in person, but lawsuits are the problem. I expect at least a nice dinner- and maybe a show - in exchange for my sperm donation. My stuff is in high demand because I am tall, dark, handsome, and smart, I like to have fun, and my sperm injector works fairly well most of the time except when I am nervous.
P. J. O'Rourke: The Virtue of Sharing
Noonan: The Twister of 2010. Riehl says it's not a twister - it's climate change. I think it's "too late."
Caring: Global Work Party Day on 10/10/2010: come up with your own event. Pretend that you "make a difference." It's easy and fun, it makes you feel good, and you might get a date out of it.
Somebody is buying something: Another Record Week for Intermodal Rail Traffic
Krauthammer: Why Is He Sending Them? President Obama lacks the will to fight in Afghanistan. For the Left, America's only enemies are American Conservatives.
Via Insty, The Khmer Rouge: They Did It Because They Were Communists
Maybe the TARP wasn't such a bad idea: AIG plans asset sale to repay bailout
Hennessey says the Prez gets it re the housing mess
Reason: School Money Math Never Adds Up Quite Right
Business 101 — outsourcing. The government forces it on us, if we want to stay in business.
Norwegian Publisher Cancels Biography of Muhammed. We term that "chickenshit." Plenty of interesting bios of Jesus have been written, and nobody minds. Jesus was the original rebel against PC.
A prediction that the O will make a left turn. He does want to be "transformational." He is a true believer. He will never adjust to reality.
Insty via Reb: THE HORROR: “Is there anything more frightening than seas of grandmothers waving American flags and singing ‘patriotic’ songs? I don’t think so.” Patriotic grannies really scare me.
Greta Destroys Lib Hack Gloria Allred: “Gloria, This Is Almost Delusional”
From Wkly Std: The Obamacare Follies - Don’t let Obamacare reach its third birthday:
Obamacare is less popular than it was on the day it was born, and it wasn’t popular then, either. Practically the only Democrats who mention the law in campaign ads are those who brag about voting against it. Large numbers of Americans, including a majority of independents, would like to see the law repealed. No wonder the pro-repeal GOP maintains an edge in the congressional generic ballot. As much as the public continues to distrust Republicans, it understands that the first step in undoing this harmful law is giving John Boehner the speaker’s gavel.
Children Selecting Books in a Library
With beasts and gods, above, the wall is bright.
The child's head, bent to the book-colored shelves,
Is slow and sidelong and food-gathering,
Moving in blind grace ... yet from the mural, Care
The grey-eyed one, fishing the morning mist,
Seizes the baby hero by the hair
And whispers, in the tongue of gods and children,
Words of a doom as ecumenical as dawn
But blanched like dawn, with dew.
The children's cries
Are to men the cries of crickets, dense with warmth
-- But dip a finger into Fafnir, taste it,
And all their words are plain as chance and pain.
Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogres
Because their lives are: the capricious infinite
That, like parents, no one has yet escaped
Except by luck or magic; and since strength
And wit are useless, be kind or stupid, wait
Some power's gratitude, the tide of things.
Read meanwhile ... hunt among the shelves, as dogs do, grasses,
And find one cure for Everychild's diseases
Beginning: Once upon a time there was
A wolf that fed, a mouse that warned, a bear that rode
A boy. Us men, alas! wolves, mice, bears bore.
And yet wolves, mice, bears, children, gods and men
In slow perambulation up and down the shelves
Of the universe are seeking ... who knows except themselves?
What some escape to, some escape: if we find Swann's
Way better than our own, and trudge on at the back
Of the north wind to -- to -- somewhere east
Of the sun, west of the moon, it is because we live
By trading another's sorrow for our own; another's
Impossibilities, still unbelieved in, for our own ...
"I am myself still?" For a little while, forget:
The world's selves cure that short disease, myself,
And we see bending to us, dewy-eyed, the great
CHANGE, dear to all things not to themselves endeared.
Jarrell, a poet of lost innocence, also wrote one of the wittiest books in modern times, Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy
Should be, but are not. Long-time readers know that is part of a bay on Lake Winnipegosis, with the duck boats ready to go.
Friday, October 1. 2010
For those who have seen the stories in the major media that fail to delve about California Republican governor nominee Meg Whitman's illegal alien housekeeper, California politics watcher Eric Hogue asks the questions the media ignores in this orchestrated smear.
From VDH's From the Unbelievable to the Passé:
Statism versus free markets is about as easy to understand as the difference between Singapore and Greece, and yet here we go again. This weird suicidal statist impulse seems for Obama to trump almost every other consideration: he may well destroy the Democratic Party for a decade just when it was recovering; he has so terrified private enterprise that trillions of dollars in capital are simply sitting out his first two years, waiting for the end of his congressional majorities, and hence his agenda to implode.
All this goes on as Obama sees the EU running away from precisely what he wishes to implement, while at home a high-tax, high-entitlement, redistributive economy like California has managed to destroy the most richly endowed human and natural landscape — agriculture, tourism, high-tech, oil and gas, Hollywood, Napa Valley, Silicon Valley — in the nation. And yet here we continue down into the abyss.
In just three months, on January 1, 2011, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves.
On January 1, 2011, here’s what happens... (read it to the end, so you see all three waves)...
Continue reading "Your looming tax disaster"
Falconers have mini-cameras mounted on Peregrine Falcons in their wide-open habitats, and on Goshawks in their woodland habitats. h/t Never yet melted
With Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, at neoneo. What a movie!
Update: Darn - MGM blocked the clips. Never mind. Too bad. If you are a youngster and have never seen it, see it. Funniest movie ever made.
Powerline:
I would argue that we have carried out a laboratory experiment, and have conclusively proved that more money is not the cure for whatever ails the education system.
Everybody knows that it's not about money. Lots of factors, but that's the least of them.
To me, this graph demonstrates the remarkable success of the teachers' unions in creating a gigantic black hole.
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Urban