We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Democratic political candidates can skip this weekend's July 4th parades. A new Harvard University study finds that July 4th parades energize only Republicans, turn kids into Republicans, and help to boost the GOP turnout of adults on Election Day. "Fourth of July celebrations in the United States shape the nation's political landscape by forming beliefs and increasing participation, primarily in favor of the Republican Party," said the report from Harvard. "The political right has been more successful in appropriating American patriotism and its symbols during the 20th century."
The friend who sent this clipping to me comments:
That those subject to celebration of the country's successes and positive points tend to then become more appreciative of the country (this is called patriotism) is shocking only to dyed-in-the-wool academics of the leftist slant....The line that the political right has been more successful in "appropriating American patriotism" can be stated in another way. The policies and publicity of many Democrat leaders has been more effective in showing them to not value the nation and its heritage as others do. But nobody at Harvard would say it that way.
Here. When you train and enable adults to be children, they will act like it. Just like in Wisconsin. Many will revert to childhood if they can get away with it. Those made of sterner stuff will not.
They are marching and berserking for "socialism." They don't realize they already have it, along with the typical Socialist terminal case of the Gimmes.
Euroland people need to grow up and accept the reality that life is difficult and challenging, and that no adult is entitled to anything. You are supposed to man up, in life. Or woman up, as the case may be. Reagan would have fired them all for shirking their duties to the public who hired them and who pays their wages from their own toil, and rightly so.
If you want to be a serf, expect to be treated like one.
This isn't a particularly exciting post, just a follow-up.
A few years ago I wrote The Sound of Many Faucets Running, a look at the new dollar coins. Coins last much longer than bills, y'see, therefore using much less energy to replace, thereby saving the planet from catastrophic meltdown.
While my post was fairly routine, I have to admit that if we had to switch from dollar bills to coins, I thought my idea bordered on the brilliant.
In the basement of a Baltimore vault the size of a soccer field, 1 billion dollar coins are just sitting there. Thanks, Congress.
And the planet thanks you!
Actually, there appears to be a bit of gray area as to why they tried to foist these on us in the first place. From the original article:
The U.S. Mint is spending about $12 million on a pilot project to promote the presidential dollar coin by appealing to Americans' duty to protect the environment while saving the government money.
But now it's:
NPR’s Planet Money reporters recently investigated the $1 presidential coin program, which was a Congressional effort to get more $1 coins into circulation while also trying to be educational.
That's right, folks. They're educational. We're doing it for the children!
And, of course, it would be downright criminal not to include the Shoshone woman who help guide Lewis & Clark on their expedition:
At the same time, the legislation mandated that a certain number of Sacagawea coins be made in conjunction with the presidential coins, which has now amounted to one Sacagawea for every four presidents.
Spokespersons for the Mohave, Navaho, Pima, Yuma, Washo, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Cree, Crow, Dakota, Osage, Seminole, Comanche, Wichita and Apache tribes could not be reached for comment.
At the moment, the program is still moving forward, and NPR projects that by the time it’s finished, 2 billion coins could be sitting in the Fed’s vaults. Next up for minting is our 19th president, Rutherford B. Hayes.
Those are female Diamondback Terrapins living in Jamaica Bay in New York City, looking for nesting sites. Good to know that they are still thriving there. Somebody built a cement runway on their historic nesting site.
Maggie's Farm will stick with our antique look - for now. You can scroll down quite a long ways here, and we only put things on a continuation page when they exceed our ordinary format.
Greece is already bankrupt, financially, morally, and spiritually. But, as Donald Trump once said, if you owe a bank a half million bucks, they own you - but if you owe them 300 million bucks, you own them. Something like that.
Children will starve, Granny will die, etc. As Lizards says:
Now it's B.O.'s turn to schrai gevalt, just as sister J. did in the ancient times. But J. had a perfectly legitimate reason to act like that: She was five years old.
The American people continue to have little patience for politicians who shamelessly try to siphon off more and more of the public’s hard-earned money to fund grandiose, top-down schemes that inevitably reward powerful interest groups instead of bolstering the economy as a whole.
..this new claim is that really there is only one clause that matters in the Constitution, and that is the Commerce Clause, and this one brief clause renders all 4400 other words in the Constitution null and void, because the Commerce Clause says, it is contended, that the federal government may do anything so long as, in the aggregate, it "affects interstate commerce," which, as is often pointed out, applies to everything.
"The global green treaty movement to outlaw climate change is the most egregious folly to seize the world’s imagination since the Kellog-Briand Pact outlawed war in the late 1920s." Mead'sThe Failure of Al Gore: Part Deux
"Government should not tell you what to do unless there’s a compelling public purpose." It's difficult to believe that the Nanny Of All Nannys Bloomberg said that. Perhaps he was quoting the US Constitution?
Everybody makes fun of poor Paul Krugman, who is widely known as having become a real flake, a partisan hack, and a mind-numbed robot for the Left. Has he written a single thing in the past ten years that has not been predictably straight Left-wing Dem party line apologetics?
Wal-Mart’s profit to shareholders is about 3.6% of sales. This means that for the majority of the country, on the items you buy at Wal-Mart, they are earning less than half of what the government takes in sales tax on the same item.
His mother hated the USA, his dad hated the USA, his step-dad hated the USA. His schools in Indonesia hated the USA. His college buddies hated the USA. His pastor of 20 years hates the USA and his associates in Chicago hate the USA.
It's Radical Chic. Loving freedom is not cool. Lenin and Che were cool.
The Nikko Blue hydrangea and its variants are classic plants in Yankeeland. Mine are in their full glory today.
Hydrangeas are the sorts of things that make a house a home.
Here are three important tips for those who grow hydrangeas of any type: first, they like moist (but well-drained) soil, hence their name. Second, full-day direct sun is too much for most of them unless you have irrigation. Third, prune them with caution: you have to first determine whether they are macrophylla or paniculata, etc. Prune them wrong and you get no bloom. Better yet, don't prune them at all unless you have to.
(More general shrub pruning info: Except for hedging or shaped shrubs, mature shrubs can or should be pruned at ground level - not from the top - removing 25-30% of the woodiest growth to keep the plant young and vigorous. This is especially important with shrubs like Lilacs. I will try to dig out my old pruning posts. Always study the correct pruning technique for a given plant before attacking anything with a sharp tool. Never prune young shrubs.)
Two weeks ago, my friend Gerald Robbins -- Turkey expert and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute -- brought us his quick analysis of the results of the election in Turkey. FPRI asked him to enlarge upon it for FPRI's readers. There's much more interesting detail and discussion of prospects and difficulties for Turkey.
A fascinating addition is Robbins' raising the possibility of "a bold, controversial move" to resolve the "long-festering" and violent Kurd rebellion. "If Mr. Erdogan can skillfully manage the process, he’ll be remembered as the person who settled the Kurdish issue, Turkey’s most burdensome problem." That may, also, help him recover from his proven "inane" regional policy of a bridge among the Arab and Iranian Moslems that has come a cropper as evident with his "badly miscalculated" dealings with Syria. Erdogan would be seen more as a venturesome uniter rather than an opportunistic dreamer of semi-Ottoman fantasies.
Among the likely winners of the Republican race (yes, that excludes Sarah Palin and Rand Paul), none have yet come even close to sewing up the nomination for president. That’s a good thing.
I’m a firm believer in the worth of long campaign seasons. Democrat or Republican partisans alone are a minority of the electorate. The crucible requires potential candidates to demonstrate their ability to craft a national coalition of their political party that will reach beyond to enough leaners (otherwise often called Independents).
The long campaign crucible, also, demonstrates the potential candidates’ ability to present themself and to encourage positive feelings with articulate, persuasive, sound proposals, while avoiding seriously alienating leaners or committing major gaffes that raise crippling doubts among the open-minded (not just opponent scalphunters).
At this point, there’s enough good to say about the leading Republican contenders to believe they’d all make fine vice-presidents, but as yet none have earned the higher expectation.
All will be in good stead as a better alternative than President Obama. However, that is not enough, for me anyway.
Once these high-school graduates hold a diploma in their hands, however questionable their skill level, they are deemed college-ready. Since America has a college for everyone and the society is committed to mass education, students who can read at only a marginal level or who cannot solve quadratic equations are seated in institutions of higher learning. Surely something has to give. Invariably remediation must take place, but that is insufficient to deal with widespread incompetence. Obviously course content and requirements are modified. A physics instructor at the City University in New York told me recently it is impossible to teach real physics when your students are incapable of engaging eight-grade math.
My seven men must yearn to see some fine, strapping, young body-in-its-prime with some specific ailment to which they can apply something quickly sovereign, doctor and patient both ending up refreshed. But no, they face daily the procession of an ever older, more decrepit, more grotesque, unsavory parade of bodies-- of those who have lived too long.
Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable. The only question was whether the comprehensive green meltdown would occur before or after the movement achieved its core political goal of a comprehensive and binding global agreement on greenhouse gasses.
and
It is a waste of time to talk science with Al Gore. It is a waste of time to listen to him at all. That, apparently, is what the world at long last is beginning to understand. The policy makers and the heads of state who only two years ago were ready to follow Gore up the mountain have softly and quietly tuned him out.
These days, he can’t even get his picture on the cover of Rolling Stone.
As Mead points out, the entire enterprise was close to insane from the beginning, despite all of the money to be made from it.
Off topic: Mead, Steyn, and VDH are so hot these days that it is difficult not to simply link all of their stuff.
He looked me directly in the eye, with a cold blue eyed stare and said, “Young with a bit of life and not too wide in the back. Should be a sure footed mare that can move fast and smooth with rhythm, without being scared of every little thing.”
Whoa now, that was a different request; I started to ask him if he was referring to a woman or a horse, but you can’t count on everyone appreciating my sense of humor.
Dr. Thomas Sowell wrote about "seductive beliefs" in a two-part article (second part here). He touched on some of the incorrect beliefs guiding President Obama. In short, Obama is an ideologue, narrowly (and poorly) educated. As a result, he is ignorant in the ways of the world.
and
Instead of having a superior intellect, we likely have the most ignorant, ideological, brainwashed dupe this country has ever elected to high office. The man's intellectual development never progressed beyond the stage of all-night freshman bull sessions where all the world's problems were solved (with help from adequate amounts of beer of course).
Beer, or pot and coke. Whatever. True or not, I guess that piece counts as a rant.
That's the title of a fascinating essay by Aaron at FP. (link fixed). A quote:
... a moral resurrection was essential. This meant not merely an overhaul of the Soviet political and economic systems, not merely an upending of social norms, but a revolution on the individual level: a change in the personal character of the Russian subject. As Mikhail Antonov declared in a seminal 1987 essay, "So What Is Happening to Us?" in the magazine Oktyabr, the people had to be "saved" -- not from external dangers but "most of all from themselves, from the consequences of those demoralizing processes that kill the noblest human qualities." Saved how? By making the nascent liberalization fateful, irreversible -- not Khrushchev's short-lived "thaw," but a climate change. And what would guarantee this irreversibility? Above all, the appearance of a free man who would be "immune to the recurrences of spiritual slavery."The weekly magazine Ogoniok, a key publication of glasnost,wrote in February 1989 that only "man incapable of being a police informer, of betraying, and of lies, no matter in whose or what name, can save us from the re-emergence of a totalitarian state."
A rescue from the "spiritual slavery" of Socialism.
Way back in 1988, at the beginning of the climate crusade, Se. Wirth remarked "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing--in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." There, in one sentence, is a succinct display of the serial bad faith and will to power of modern environmentalism. Even if catastrophic global warming turns out to be correct, would you trust control of America's economy to people like Gore and Wirth? Neither would I.
It's been a bad month for the New York Times. The feeding frenzy it tried to stir up over Sarah Palin's e-mails left the sharks unfed. (Snip) But none of that will change the Times' behavior. The Times is preparing itself for a huge push to re-elect President Obama and will leave no story unpublished that could possibly help Obama or hurt his opponent, regardless of who it is.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MCCAIN, WE’D HAVE ONGOING WARS ALL OVER THE WORLD, AND FAT-CAT DONORS ENTERTAINED RIGHT IN THE WHITE HOUSE. And they were right!
It's the end of April, the Bluefish are beginning to show up and the Spring Spawn stripers cannot be far behind.
East Coast stripers (called Rockfish on the Left Coast) are an anadromous fish meaning that they spawn in fresh water, but live their adult lives in salt. There are four breeding stocks on the East Coast - Chesapeake Bay, Delaware River, Hudson River and Cape Cod. These four main schools provide most of the striper population along the East coast.
Recently, there has been some investigation about the Thames River (New London and Norwich, CT) over winter school being an addition feeder school to the Cape Cod stock. It is not unknown for the Thames River school to reach tremendous populations over winter and spawning up the Thames into the Yantic and Shetucket Rivers in the Spring.
Striper fishing is one of my passions - fresh water impounds down south or inshore in New England, stripers provide me with the best and the most honest type of fishing. I say honest because striper fishing isn't a case of chasing down a fierce predator like any of the bill fish or tuna. Stripers are basically lazy and thus require patience and knowledge of the bottom structure to obtain the best size.
A few of my favorite spots and techniques are below the fold -
So what is socialism? It is a sort of modern version of Louis XV’s “Après moi, le déluge” – an unsustainable Ponzi scheme in which elite overseers, for the duration of their own lives, enjoy power, influence, and gratuities by implementing a system that destroys the sort of wealth for others that they depend upon for themselves.
Once the individual develops a dependency on food stamps, free medical care, subsidized housing, all sorts of disability or unemployment compensation, education credits, grants, and zero-interest loans — the entire American version of the European socialist breadbasket — then expectations for far more always keep rising, with a commensurate plethora of new justifications, usually in the realm of someone else having more than the recipient, always unjustly so. The endangered aid recipient is always seen as being pushed off a cliff in a wheel chair — therefore, “they” can afford to give “me” more; things are not “fair”; there is no “equality.”
6:12 Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.
6:13 No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.
6:14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
6:15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!
6:16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
6:17 But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted,
6:18 and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.
6:19 I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.
6:20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.
6:21 So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death.
6:22 But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life.
6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The founders recognized that the political power of groups or factions would become largely the basis for rewards from the state. Thus, they deliberately sought to circumscribe spoils and rewards from government. The difficulty they anticipated in controlling factions was exacerbated by twentieth-century progressivism. In The Rise and Decline of Nations(1982), Mancur Olson shows that factions seek to redistribute rather than create wealth and, over time, impose social and economic rigidities and costs which cause nations to lose vitality and reduce their rate of economic growth. This is America’s early-twenty-first-century affliction, and government-controlled sustainable development would further amplify the role of politics and factions in redistributing scarcity rather than creating wealth. Olson further warned that factions drive political life away from considerations of widespread common interests and spur divisiveness that can even make societies ungovernable.
Our colleges and universities, and the teachers they have educated, have undermined the understanding of, and attitudes towards, Western and American systems of economics and governance, guiding students from public schooling onward to become true believers in the reverse metamorphosis of sustainability. The concept of sustainable development would repeat the historical errors and failures of socialism and communism in the name of protecting nature.
Can I say that Rush was right about all this, back in the 1980s? He saw the Left's need for a new meme, a new narrative. That's around the time when many of us Maggie's folks took the Conservationist path of stewardship instead of the Greenie path of hidden power agendas.
Finally watched Glengarry GlenRoss. Despite the cast and the fine acting especially by a wonderfully-obnoxious Jack Lemmon, I thought it was just OK, and that Office Space was a better movie with a similar theme.
In part, the thing is that in Glengarry, they are all sociopaths. In Office Space, they aren't. In any event, movies tend to bore me. I am more of a book guy, with only around 25% fiction lately. Daily life offers enough fiction despite my enormous appreciation for well-crafted sentences.
I like this guy's cooking method. And ditto to him re the ribeye - it's the best cut of a dead cow. Those thick Costco ribeyes are dynamite. Have to be rare, though. If I'm just making one, I do it on a max-heat cast iron pan on the stove, and open the door so the smoke can try to exit. Why bother with the grill for just one fairly small steak?
I like crust on the outside, raw in the middle. You can throw them in the pan frozen, and it's easy to get that result in 20 minutes but you might have to cover it for a few minutes.
Gin for the martini, not vodka - and three olives - not one. After all, that's your vegetable course.
It felt like it had been the longest week of my life. I was filling in at some big apartment complex while the building's handyman was on vacation, and I ran my tail off all week long fixing things. I came home that Friday and did something I'd never done before, and have never done since:
I flopped into my easy chair.
Normally, I plunk myself down in front of the computer and get caught up. But I was so beat that I just wanted to hit the La-Z-Boy and relax.
Out of boredom, I turned on the TV.
It was kind of a bizarre sight. On a completely empty highway, a white SUV was cruising down the fast lane going about 45 miles per hour, trailed by a zillion police cars. It eventually turned off and as it drove through the neighborhoods, people stood on the side of the street with signs reading "Go, OJ!", "We Believe In You!", "Run, OJ, Run!"
As I said, it was pretty bizarre.
And thus started a nine-month journey as I watched every word of testimony and every cable talk show that evening, VCR at the ready for overlapping shows. And yes, I was there, a few weeks after the trial ended, watching the final talk show on the trial's aftermath, and when they signed off, that was the last of the 'OJ Special' shows.
So I obviously consider myself something of an expert on the subject.
The other day there was an article on Hot Air claiming that OJ was going to 'fess up and admit to Oprah that he did, indeed, kill Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. It's probably a hoax, but we'll see.
You might agree with some of the comments:
The verdict had NOTHING to do with the murders. It was a racial vindication that a black man could kill two white people and get away with it if the jury was black. It’s called jury nullification and it’s happened many times throughout history. It doesn’t make it any less disgusting but it is a fact.
They didn’t believe he was innocent, they just refused to process the facts of the case. They went into this jury duty with a pre-determined outcome.
Stupid judge. Stupid, stupid, stupid jurors.
Wasn’t the composition of the jury all black females? Not that it would make any difference in their decision-making of course.
The jury was not all black. It was, however, all dumb. In fact, it was what they call a “downtown jury” meaning they are stupid and prosecutors are less likely to get convictions.
Actually, these people are as wrong as wrong can be.
‘Gunwalker’ Goes Pravda: White House Unleashes MSM - The Post prints an attack on Issa that no other paper saw fit to run: an anonymous hit job concocted by the Obama administration. And The Times finally talks Gunwalker ... by attacking the GOP. With a debunked lie.
The US Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline to millions of struggling homestead farmers. Instead, it is a vast, self-perpetuating postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion -- a sum far greater than the nation's net farm income this year. In fact, the more the Agriculture Department has pontificated about family farmers, the more they've vanished -- comprising now only about 1 percent of the American population.
See how the Orient Dew, Shed from the Bosom of the Morn Into the blowing Roses, Yet careless of its Mansion new; For the clear Region where 'twas born Round in its self incloses: And in its little Globes Extent, Frames as it can its native Element. How it the purple flow'r does slight, Scarce touching where it lyes, But gazing back upon the Skies, Shines with a mournful Light; Like its own Tear, Because so long divided from the Sphear. Restless it roules and unsecure, Trembling lest it grow impure: Till the warm Sun pitty it's Pain, And to the Skies exhale it back again.
So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day, Could it within the humane flow'r be seen, Remembring still its former height, Shuns the sweat leaves and blossoms green; And, recollecting its own Light, Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater Heaven in an Heaven less. In how coy a Figure wound, Every way it turns away: So the World excluding round, Yet receiving in the Day. Dark beneath, but bright above: Here disdaining, there in Love. How loose and easie hence to go: How girt and ready to ascend. Moving but on a point below, It all about does upwards bend. Such did the Manna's sacred Dew destil; White, and intire, though congeal'd and chill. Congeal'd on Earth: but does, dissolving, run Into the Glories of th' Almighty Sun.
Charles Krauthammer is usually an astute analyst of issues and often crafts perceptive and practical resolutions. In his column Who Takes Us To War?, however, Krauthammer’s resolution of the current impasse between the president and Congress over Libya would take us from the frying pan to the fire. Further, Krauthammer (acceptably since this isn’t the focus of his column) ignores the real underlying issue, how to wage war.
Krauthammer describes the impasse between President Obama and much of Congress and the public over his handling of the US involvement in the half-baked “kinetic’ operations with NATO in Libya. But Krauthammer advises to make the problem even worse by creating additional laws via a new grand commission to govern presidential-congressional relations over issues of armed actions. Such would, like all regulations, spew forth added complexities and wrangling, and possibly invite the courts into adjudicating matters of national security that to now they have avoided as properly “political” issues to be worked out between the president and Congress.
Krauthammer calls President Obama’s neglect of consulting with Congress over Libya and denying that we are actively involved in hostilities as “transparently ridiculous” and a “show of contempt for Congress and for the intelligence of the American people.”
Things came to a head today in the House, by bipartisan majoritiesrejecting both a resolution of support for the president’s course and a cut-off of funds for hostile operations. Congressional inaction leaves the president to proceed and leaves critics of his unilateral actions and the underarmed NATO campaign to fume.
As much as I hate that wind turbines have become this symbol of youthful "green action" and as much as I love birds....
They kill an estimated 40,000 birds a year -- compare that to the hundreds of millions that domestic and feral cats kill, 174 million killed by power lines, 1 billion killed by windows, 70 million killed by pesticides, 80 million killed by cars, and 50 million killed by lighted communication towers. I know you're targeting the hypocrisy of the green movement, but there are better hypocrisies to target.
You might as well be protesting windows here, BD.
If you want green hypocrisy and stupidity, check out the green plastic hard hats distributed at "Power Shift" and all the students who drove across the country to go the event (as I'm sure you'll be excited to target young, misinformed enthusiasm). A ton of my friends went to that inane, completely masturbatory event... Ridiculous. This is the kind of thing I hate: http://i.imgur.com/UTHSn.jpg
Or even look at the "greenwashing" of GE, AEP and Exxon.
Turbines are not effective energy in urban areas, but are entirely helpful in at least reducing nuclear waste in rural ones. You would need something like 1700 turbines to generate the same power as a nuclear power station, but doesn't that make sense in a smaller setting?
In 1932 Yale accepted seventy-two per cent of its applicants. In 1940 Harvard accepted eighty-five per cent. Of the four hundred and five boys from Groton who applied to Harvard between the years 1906 and 1932 only three were turned down.
He concludes:
When my kids get “literature” in the mail from a college claiming that it will help them enter into the fullness of their humanity and teach them to insure in perpetuity the life and health of the world, I will stop using the word “racket” to describe “higher” education. But until that time I’m afraid I will be an accomplice to something I cannot wholly admire—if also, I hope, an enemy within it, a kind of Trojan horse.
Only the prosperous could afford fancy private higher education before WW 2. It is getting so that few can afford it now. At $50,000+ per year, they are back to looking for the rich kids again whose parents can pay full freight.
What is unusual in the human record is not men stepping out on their wives. What is unusual is the model of faithful monogamy, a model that takes for granted the importance of women’s experience, not just men’s. Before the 18th century and outside of Western Europe, marriage was a social and economic as well as sexual arrangement; it had little to do with love and companionship, and no one much cared about whether women were fulfilled or not. But with the emergence of what sociologists and historians refer to as companionate marriage, intimacy became the marital ideal. Instead of arranged unions, the young made their own choice of mate based on shared interests and deep affection rather than on social requirements. Fidelity followed naturally, or so it was hoped, and it meant that, yes, people gave a merde.
While giving all your power to unelected and unaccountable leaders is one of those ideas so profoundly stupid that only the very well educated and conventionally intelligent could believe in it, many accepted the root idea that all which stood between Portugal and competitiveness was its lack of size. If Portugal joined with the other countries of Europe, all of Europe would show America a thing or two.
If my family and friends became a stone-age tribe, would the government leave us alone? I'd be willing to grow my hair down to my knees so strange, I'd look like a walking mountain range...
Remember when Hillary said that the government shouldn't be concerned with "every undercapitalized business"? These people are not aware that the majority of Americans work in or for small businesses, and that, in this economy, they are all undercapitalized to the point that higher taxes can destroy them.
Actually, no blood relation to Andrew Breitbart, today’s investigative PR Superman at leaping tall piles of Leftist BS. Zisha (stagename Siegmund) Breitbart was a poor Polish Jew who in the early 1900s was heralded by schtetl dwellers, and by gentile audiences in Europe and America, as “Superman of the Ages” and “Iron King” for his feats (and tricks) of strength.
But of all the speculative theories surrounding the creation of Superman, one exceedingly likely influence has been virtually ignored—a real-life Jewish strongman from Poland who 1. was billed as the “Superman of the Ages”; 2. advertised, on circus posters, as a man able to stop speeding locomotives; 3. wore a cape; 4. looked—with his chiseled movie-star face, wavy hair, and massive upper torso—like the future comic book idol; and 5. performed his death-defying feats in 1923 and 1924 in Cleveland and Toronto, Siegel and Shuster’s [the conceivers of Action Comics Superman] respective hometowns, when they were impressionable nine year olds.
Master German filmmaker Werner Herzog made a biopic of Zisha Breitbart's life in 2000, Invincible. Herzog takes some film liberties, but “Herzog did accurately portray Breitbart as a sensational popular variety artist and a proud Jew who inspired hero-seeking Jewish children—likely among them Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.”
Here’s the trailer for Invincible.
Zisha Breitbart died in 1925 from the after-effects of a rusty nail in one of his acts.
Breitbart’s funeral, an Orthodox ceremony, was attended by thousands of Yiddish and German-speaking Jews as well as gentiles from the circus and variety stage world. One moving obituary quoted a passage from Zechariah: “Wail, O Cypress, for the Cedar has fallen.”
If you have sons or a bunch of boys on your block, you've seen these nerf wars. Now, pops and moms in boring office jobs have something better to do in those last minutes of the workday. (H/T: the son of Mark Safranski, the Zenpundit)
I saw a Killdeer with three teensy, just-hatched miniature Killdeer chicks running around a large gravel parking lot during my morning walk today.
That was a sight which gladdened my heart and sweetened my soul.
The Killdeer is found, either breeding or wintering, in all states of the US. It's a plover of open ground, and not particularly associated with water like most plovers.
You will never find them in tall grass or woodlands, but you can occasionally see them doing their run-and-pause bug-hunting technique on pebbly shorelines.
Their "killdeer" call, sometimes heard at night, and the rusty flash of tail, are distinctive.
You can read about this not-uncommon bird here. Every good person loves the Killdeer.
They need to get out of the EU and be free to destroy their lovely country's marginal economy however they chose to do. The German Empire's rules do not suit them, and they don't care much about their economy. "Free the Greeks!" (I can't decide whether to nickname the EU the German Empire or the Holy Roman Empire ll.)
“But liberalism, Mamet thinks, is dismantling culture. The problem is that “the Left today is essentially an elitist movement, and it has invested a lot of time and money in the idea that they know better.” Elites have been led to think “by getting the grades, and getting into good schools and think-tanks and government positions that they are fit” to reorder society more rationally. But this requires first demolishing the order produced by the organic processes of tradition, democracy, and markets — the culture. Why are some so susceptible to this fatal conceit? “They get out of elite schools being told nothing but, ‘You’re the best.’” Hubris — a dramatist’s area of expertise. (The liberalism of his own elite group, the literati, he blames on “devotion to fantasy — this sort of Manichean view.”)
Left or right, the elites always know what's best for you - and what's best for themselves.
This isn't a particularly exciting post, just a follow-up.
Photo from 
Classic silent films,
From Mead's brilliant analysis of 
Climate change! 
Here come the stripers. Not the strippers.
I remember it well.
Peter Falk
On A Drop Of Dew
I saw a Killdeer with three teensy, just-hatched miniature Killdeer chicks running around a large gravel parking lot during my morning walk today.
It's summertime, and I like to post a few light-hearted summertime items on occasion.
