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.
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)
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.
An attempted palinization of Michelle Bachmann, by Taibbi
In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.
It doesn't matter who you are: if you raise your head up over the trenches, they do this to you. And they are rougher on Conservative women than on the men - although Taibbi would have written a similar hit piece on Reagan - "ignorant and batshit crazy" - I'm sure.
Climate change! 
I remember it well.
Peter Falk
On A Drop Of Dew
One Cosmos: 
It's summertime, and I like to post a few light-hearted summertime items on occasion.
