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.
"...in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying."
Socialist politician Adolf Hitler, as quoted in American Thinker's The Democrats' Big Lie
The Democratic leadership’s top priority isn’t to get America’s fiscal house in order. It is, as one aide candidly told The Hill, “to continue to raise resources to grow and preserve our majority.”
I am still up in the mountains, with marginal communications with civilization and rare internet service. A party line phone, and no cell service. I do have a rocking chair on the porch.
So, the days of leaving college to jump around from half-job to half-job, or to travel and “find yourself,” or to just hang out for awhile before joining the rat race are over.If you do it, there are consequences.
There always were consequences. Adult life is not child's play unless you have a good-sized trust fund. Of course, you can always do liberal arts grad study in England: they are desperate for suckers. Afterwards, you can wait tables or join riots to burn down some entrepreneurial Paki's fruit stand or some struggling family's haberdashery.
The academic bubble is not bursting, but it is a slow, steady leak which will leave many would-be paid scholars unemployed. My best advice, which is worth exactly what you pay for it, is to get a real productive job and to pursue your scholarly interests on your own, as most people have done in the past. It's going to be difficult to get paid for a hobby in the near future. No free ride unless you are a Talmud scholar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, married to a rich wife.
A friend sent me this YouTuber, from 1952. As I said, only the names and the dates change.
The YouTube notes are fascinating, below. Remember the ditty, Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On The Bedpost Overnight?
Myrtle Eleanor Cooper (December 24, 1913--February 8, 1999) and Scott Greene Wiseman (November 8, 1908--January 31, 1981),[1] known professionally as Lulu Belle and Scotty, were one of the major country music acts of the 1930s and 1940s, dubbed The Sweethearts of Country Music.
Cooper was born in Boone, North Carolina; Wiseman was from Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Lulu Belle and Scotty enjoyed enormous national popularity thanks to their regular appearances on National Barn Dance on WLS-AM in Chicago, a rival to WSM-AM's Grand Ole Opry. Barn Dance enjoyed a large radio audience in the 1930s and early 1940s with some 20 million Americans regularly tuning in.
The duo married on December 13, 1934, one year after Wiseman became a regular on Barn Dance (Cooper had been a solo performer there since 1932). The duo is best known for their self-penned classic "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?", which became one of the first country songs to attract major attention in pop circles and was recorded by many artists in both genres. Cooper was the somewhat dominant half of the duo with a comic persona as a wisecracking country girl. Her most famous novelty number was "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose It's Flavor On The Bedpost". In 1938, she was named Favorite Female Radio Star by the readers of Radio Guide magazine, an unusual recognition for a country performer.
Lulu Belle and Scotty recorded for record labels including Vocalion Records, Columbia Records, Bluebird Records; and Starday Records, in their final sessions during the 1960s reprising their old hits. They were among the first country music stars to venture into feature motion pictures, appearing in such films as Shine on Harvest Moon (1938), County Fair (1941) and The National Barn Dance (1944).
The couple retired from show business in 1958, excepting occasional appearances, going on to new careers in teaching (Wiseman) and politics (Cooper). Cooper served two terms in the North Carolina House of Representatives as the Democratic representative for three counties. In 1977, she gave a memorable speech in which she revealed that she had been raped on the country music circuit.[2]
Wiseman was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1971. After his death in 1981 from a heart attack in Gainesville, Florida, Cooper married Ernest Stamey in 1983; and in 1985 recorded her first album in 20 years for a small traditional music label.
Picked up my car from service today. They charged me $97/per hour for labor. I remember when auto repair was $17/hour, 20/hr if you watched, 25/hour if you helped.
Well, my gunsmith charges $150/hr, and my local electronics repair joint charges $200 now. There definitely is an economic case for learning how to do something that people need.
Wellfleet Harbor. The owners are tough, muscular, hard-working SOBs with tats and sexy girlfriends. Survivors. They drink and smoke and try not to die by drowning. It is traditional that fishermen cannot swim: there is no point to it. Fishermen do not go to the beach.
The shrinkage of government is supposed to be more severe here than in America, where the supposedly “savage,” “draconian,” etc., cuts recently agreed to mean that for a decade Washington must scrape by on $43.7 trillion rather than $46.1 trillion. Really.
The British state is morbidly obese. For a third consecutive year, government will spend more than half the gross domestic product — partly because half of all jobs created during the 13 years of Labor Party governance that ended in May 2010 were in the public sector.
Britain’s debt, now 62 percent of GDP, is scheduled to rise to 71 percent in 2013-14 before declining. Government devours 47 percent of national income.
Let me speak plain. That’s part of the problem in the black community. And many other communities. But a particular problem in the black communities, we have too many men making too many babies that they don’t want to take care of and then we end up dealing with your children. We’re not running a big babysitting service. We’re running a big government and a great city. Take care of your children. All of them. All of them.
Insty: ON THIS WEEK’S INSTAVISION, I celebrate 10 years of blogging and talk about where the blogosphere has been, and where it’s going.
The Grey Seals are not uncommon along the Cape Cod ocean beaches. Last summer, they were swimming around 15-20 feet from us, perhaps thinking we were some new sort of seal. They are big, curious, and harmless.
On a drizzly day last week, Mrs. BD and I hiked the beach from Newcomb's Hollow to Cahoon's Hollow (and back). We saw quite a few Greys in the water, looking almost like swimming black Labs.
Signs advise people that it is a crime to harass the seals, but there are no signs telling the seals not to harass the people.
One effect of the growing seal populations is that they attract the big sharks, Great Whites, Hammerheads, and others. Big sharks, of course, cannot distinguish a seal from a swimmer, but shark attacks are not really a problem, despite Jaws. When you see fins ("she's getting four stars from the road"), just get out of the water and read Moby Dick on the beach until they go away.
Photo above is a Grey Seal, resting on a beach.
Photo below is the crowded Cahoon's Hollow beach last week, in Wellfleet. Yes, we did have lunch at The Beachcomber. Duh. Sipp told me he used to pretend to play bass guitar in his band there. They specialize in blues and reggae, nightly during the summer. It feels like a Key West bar - quite cheerful and relaxed - and the seafood is pretty good. If you are under 50, be there or be square... but the music is too late at night for me.
A few pics of the Wellfleet Beachcomber below the fold, for Sipp's amusement -
... long experience of impunity has taught the rioters that they have nothing to fear from the law, which in England has become almost comically lax—except, that is, for the victims of crime.
Pond at the South Wellfleet Audubon, last week. This is really a dammed-up small stream, dammed by dirt farmers a century or two ago and not a natural pond. Wellfleet's natural ponds, large enough for sailing Sunfishes, are deep, clear kettle ponds which are eminently swimmable:
It turns out we are the ones who failed Him. We weren't prepared for a mega-dosage of awesomeness. We were too dimwitted to grasp the decency of central planning. And the insistence of troublemakers to engage in debate and vote, in fact, is the most serious threat to this nation's future.
As in the case of the pitiful Maureen Dowd. What asteroid does she live on? I don't have the time or the patience to point out every error of logic and fact in her piece. It is just mind-boggling. She needs to get out in the world a little.
Until marriage is restored as the norm for child-rearing in the inner city, black and Hispanic crime rates and education failure will continue to be disproportionate. No government program can possibly compensate for the absence of fathers in the home and the absence of the cultural expectation that men will be responsible for their children.
Also,
The mayor is eager to talk about marriage for gays and lesbians, but he cannot bring himself to use the word when it comes to black and Hispanic heterosexual couples. His initiative proposes to ensure that both parents are “fully engaged . . . even if they don’t live together.” But men who have fathered several children by several different women—the dominant pattern of inner-city “multipartner fertility” today—are unlikely to be able to engage “fully” with all their children, even if such out-of-home engagement were an adequate substitute for a married father in the home.
Bloomberg, Soros, et al are insane. That's not a diagnosis: it means that they are not in reality. I doubt that either of them have ever sat down and talked to a 16 year-old single high school drop-out mother of three who happily and willingly consigned herself and her kids to a life of dependency and dysfunction. Have a kid? Get your own apartment! And a check from the city! And free medical care and food stamps! Why not? Their moms did the same thing. Normalization of dysfunction and dependency.
The government incentives are perverse, and it's on our nickel.
I'm not an expert about the rioting and looting in England, but I take the reporting from there with a grain of salt. Why? Editors usually have a theme they impose upon stories. The scale of England's will require careful and honest examination.
Meanwhile, a New York Times reporter who covered the riot, violence and looting in Brooklyn's Crown Heights in 1991 just finally broke silence about the shoddy and misleading theme imposed by the NYT editors. It's worth reading: Telling It Like It Wasn't.
One of his best, I think. 1997, such a short time ago. Song brings tears to my eyes. Even if you aren't a fan, give this a try - do it for me, your Editor Dog in Chief:
Sue and Dan gave me permission to post this free ad for Aunt Sukie's, which is the extended BD family's favorite B&B in Wellfleet - or on the entire Cape, for that matter. My parents have stayed there, as have my son and his bride.
When the kids were young, we'd always rent a house (which permitted dogs) for a week or ten days - often large enough to accommodate friends and relatives too. Now, Mrs. BD and I often travel alone and, happily, we like to do exactly the same things (mostly). We don't need a whole house, and 4-5 days suffice for our annual doses of cold salt water swimming, fresh Wellfleet oysters, and touching base with our old haunts plus always adding one or two new ones. (Last year, we went twice to bracket our trip to Austria and Germany - and to drag Gwynnie and spouse up to the Cape).
Anyway, we love to stay at Aunt Sukie's. Why bother owning a place, when you can go where you want anytime and leave the worry and maintenance to others? (And I am always cognizant of Thoreau's admonition about the dangers of one's possessions owning you.) Besides the setting and their antique house with Sue's beautiful cottage gardens, Sue and Dan are truly gracious and enjoyable hosts. They have to be gracious to put up with a neanderthal right-wing nut like me.
One of the best things about Aunt Sukie's (named after Sue's great-great something aunt who once owned the house in 1830) are the guests you meet there at breakfast. I don't know how they get the guests they get, but they are blessed. Interesting, accomplished people from all over the world who aren't looking for a pretentious Four Seasons Resort with a heated swimming pool. The atmosphere is such that, after a breakfast or two together at the big table, you all tend to become instant temporary pals and are exchanging tips about how to spend the day energetically and fruitfully.
It's not fancy (small rooms, no Jacuzzis, etc); it's simple New England-style in the best sense. For those for whom it matters, they do have a Dartmouth College room available too in the old part of the place.
View from our bedroom deck towards your private beach, with Great Island in the background:
Isn't it time for the New York Times to run another 10,000 word essay about how any minute everyone is going to flee the suburbs and flock to the cities, because we all know the quality of life is so low out there in the sticks?
How do these people have any credibility? How do they get away with this? It’s mind boggling that its gotten to a point where the EPA is dictating policy based on what is an obvious fraud, or if you want to be gentle about it, creates enough doubt to back off.
This is looking like another ‘annus horribilis’ for Barack Obama, the ‘hope and change’ president who, on current trajectory, seems destined for failure, with a legacy of declining prosperity at home and dispiriting American weakness abroad.
Frederick James creates 
The 
Since the 1978 
‘Is Marriage for White People?’