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.
This migratory bird, resembling a miniature Mockingbird in appearance, in habits, and even in song sometimes, summers in the Eastern and Southwestern US. The last one I saw was quite tame, flitting around the top of shrubs along our stream, occasionally uttering his "spee" call.
The BD pupette, finishing her freshman college year in a week or so at her beloved small rural liberal arts college, will be promptly flown down (on the camp's nickel) to her super-most-specialest-favoritest traditional (daily morning flag ceremony with prayers, etc) 100 year-old girl's camp down in the wondrous Smokey Mountains so she can take the NRA shooter training course before camp opens. Her camp counseling duties will include running the shooting ranges and training the gals for competition. I know she is good with a .22. They are paying her surprisingly well, too.
I think they do shotgun and .22. She is no stranger to guns, but has never taken the NRA course for trainers. Wilderness camping and hiking, kayaking, etc. are no problem for her. She can as easily drive a John Deere tractor as she can do the subways of NYC, and brushes off rain and mud on the farm like a true Yankee. Except when she is dressed to do New York...
I thought that this Shakespeare- and drama-intoxicated (and two-time Oxford Shakespeare summer) pup was planning a theater internship in NYC where she could earn some Actors Equity points, but perhaps that is afterwards but before our Danube trip. What do I know? (Nobody ever tells me anything around here - but I am OK with almost anything if it has some vitality and adventure and self-testing in it. Sitting around the house shooting farts into sofas and chairs, as I am wont to put it, is not permitted in the BD household: life is too short for that, and the big world is beckoning, saying "Come on out here and give me your best shot, and take yer chances - and yer punches.")
Well, what I do know is that certainly prospective justice Kagan never took the NRA course. She opposes the Second Amendment, so I doubt she knows how to have fun with guns, or how to defend herself.
Somebody recently opined to me that only governments should be entrusted with the use of force. I just bit my tongue and smiled. Doing a lot of that, lately.
San Diego’s tourism industry leaders are in panic, and some politicians too,as some Arizonans cancel their summer trips due to the San Diego City Council and School Board condemning Arizona’s illegal immigrant enforcement law.
The summertime influx of Arizonans to San Diego’s balmier weather is a major source of tourism revenue. Tourism is one of San Diego’s main industries, off during this recession.
Tourism officials are advertising in Arizona an open letter urging Arizona residents to overlook local politics and come to San Diego just as they always have to escape Arizona's summer heat.
The San Diego Union-Tribune report remarks:
In some cases, it appears that Arizona residents misconstrued the votes taken by San Diego’s elected leaders as calls for an actual boycott of Arizona as opposed to statements of opposition.
The reporter should look back a few days to her paper's own reporting:
At the urging of board Vice President John Lee Evans, the board eliminated an Arizona travel warning that President Richard Barrera had proposed for students and their families out of concern they may be subject to harassment or racial profiling. However, the San Diego Unified School District will develop a policy restricting travel and participation in conferences in Arizona.
The San Diego School Board is in the hands of union tools.It schools, mostly poorly, a high percentage of immigrants, 44% of its students are Hispanic, 75% ethnic minorities.The School Board President says, “Certainly, we know how important tourism is to San Diego, and it wasn’t my intent to impact the tourism trade.” The tourism industry employs many immigrants.
Seems the School Board voted to place the parents of some of its students in the unemployment line.The School Board should have stuck to the Three “Rs” and not the “I” that tourism officials call “political posturing.”Similar for the City Council, not paying attention to the City’s severe budget deficits, largely the result of pensions for unionized workers. One hotelier comments:
“I understand the City Council was being passionate about their politics, but I don’t think they thought it through,” Holladay said. “If it negatively impacts hotel revenue, it impacts the transient occupancy tax, and that goes right into the general fund, so they’ll have less money for their programs.”
P.S.: So far, 93% of those voting in the LA Times online poll oppose similar "posturing" by the LA City Council.
The left wishes to use the illegals as a battering ram against the American polity, the same as they used labor, and blacks, and every other group they ever encountered. Illegals will become a new protected class, with privileges and entitlements denied the rest of the populace (including, ironically, current members of previous such classes). They will be discouraged from learning English, as occurs today under the doctrine of "bilingualism", to assure that they remain a separate presence. A vast bureaucracy will arise to "assist" the new citizenry, funded with billions -- oh hell, make that trillions, this is the Obama era -- and staffed with sociologists, ethnographers, psychologists, and other disciplines unimagined today. All will be of the same political persuasion. A permanent crisis atmosphere will be generated around the new class. The "Amnestee" question will lead to endless problems and ramifications and act as a permanent indictment of the country and its policies. The native population (not to mention legal immigrants) will grow increasingly embittered and angered. The former illegals will be rendered even more miserable than they are today.
From what I have read, Kagan seems a bit wishy-washy on the First and Second Amendments. Not sure what she thinks about the rest of the Constitution, but I think she is of the "I know better than those dead guys" school of thought.
Now I see Redstate has located her Princeton thesis on Socialism. Of course, she was just a kid then. People grow and learn and evolve...with real world experience.
Rush Limbaugh has said for years that opinion polls by news organizations are nothing more than efforts to measure how effectively their reporting has impacted the public's perception of current events. Looks like he was right once again.
A JOB, A DRIVERS LICENSE, SOCIAL SECURITY CARD, WELFARE, FOOD STAMPS, CREDIT CARDS, SUBSIDIZED RENT OR A LOAN TO BUY A HOUSE, FREE EDUCATION, FREE HEALTH CARE, A LOBBYIST IN WASHINGTON BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF PUBLIC DOCUMENTS PRINTED IN YOUR LANGUAGE THE RIGHT TO CARRY YOUR COUNTRY’S FLAG WHILE YOU PROTEST THAT YOU DON’T GET ENOUGH RESPECT * AND, IN MANY INSTANCES, YOU CAN VOTE.
...to be a secular extremist is to be a fully horizontal man, and thus, to commit not only spiritual, but intellectual, suicide. It is the ultimate cosmic inversion, for it is to elevate our fallen state to the highest virtue. It is "to love only terrestrial life, to the detriment of the ascending and celestial path," to be "exteriorized," and to "love only outer things, to the detriment of moral and spiritual values." Ultimately it is "to sin against transcendence, thus it is to forget God and consequently the meaning of life; and outwardness is to sin against immanence, thus to forget our immortal soul and consequently its vocation" (Schuon)
Read the whole thing, and be tolerant of Gagdad's rambling and his idiosyncracies. I like the parts about Truth, and about intelligence.
We often reflect here on what our secular, pop-culture horizontal gods are today: ideologies, Gaia, science, self, governments, etc., even orgasms. When I consider the things that help me locate myself on a point above the x axis, "to fly like an eagle while being chained to the floor," I come up with poetry, song, prayer, moments of communion with others, and random moments of self-oblivious immersion in some aspect of Creation. My links to the vertical and to the things that cannot be touched. It's the job of preachers to assist that link too, isn't it? Alas for me, much of Scripture tends to speak more to my mind than to my soul, and True Beauty only blinds me. Working on those things, though.
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."
An “epidemic”. A “national health crisis“. Got it?
We have a climate crisis. Solution: Big government. We have a financial crisis. Solution: Big government. We have a health care crisis. Solution: Big government. We have an childhood obesity crisis.
Create a “crisis” and then create the solution. Any guess what the solution might be? If you’ve been paying attention lately, you do...
My clients are astonished when I tell them that life is not supposed to be easy, and that we carve out our characters and our souls from the hard times. Further, suffering is the great uniter: It has the potential to connect us to people all over the world. Pain reminds us that everyone is, at times, pierced by grief, loneliness, and sorrow.
- If you are over 18 and haven't learned that life is tragic, you may have a learning problem.
- Most of our problems are of our own creation - often unwittingly. That was just one of Freud's insights - borrowed from the ancient Greeks, of course.
I missed this one, re the now almost-forgotten Times Square bomber, from Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, professor, Washington and Lee University
I think the politics of this incident will turn heavily on who is found to be responsible. If, as seems unlikely, the bomb is linked to South Asian or Middle Eastern terrorists, questions will again arise as to whether the Department of Homeland Security is doing all it can do to keep us safe. If, as I believe is much more likely, the bomb was placed by a right-wing lunatic, it seems to me that questions need to be raised as to whether the right-wing media bear some responsibility for stoking the delusions of such people through their relentless and often unfounded attacks on the Obama administration and the federal government.
We need to consider whether it isn’t time to return to responsible, ethical journalism.
No, we need to consider whether it isn't time for absurd, ideology-blinded profs to shut the heck up, and administer themselves a bit of needed self-criticism. As I recall, Mao always used to send the Profs out to the fields for a while...or a long while, presumably to refresh their minds.
Department of the Obvious, for guys anyway. Quote via Riehl:
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner admits he's not much of a 3-D enthusiast. But he says if there's something people would most like to see in 3-D, it's "probably a naked lady."
Via a Washington Reb post on mature vs immature liberty, quoted from History of American Congregationalism:
March, 1603: A great literature had been evoked; an efflorescence of genius made a single reign as nearly immortal as the temporal can be timeless. Milton, a little later, would see England as an eagle flying proudly into the sun, a puissant people superbly self-confident. But the nation was not inwardly at peace. It had still to carry an unfinished religious and ecclesiastical reformation to some accepted issue within the framework of the English love of liberty, respect for authority, concern for established order, reverence for precedent, and militant tenacity of individual convictions and opinions. In a spacious way, the action and interaction of these essentially English qualities had made English history since Magna Charta and determined its splendid and stormy course, politically, socially, and religiously.
Knowledge grows by not only doubting your beliefs and believing your doubts, but by doubting your doubts and believing your beliefs.
We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt.
The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though - because of powerful intellectual propaganda - they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.
One very clever idea for a site is GraphJam, which puts our crazy American culture in graph format.
From the silly:
To the serious:
To something every blogger can relate to:
There's also a very funny area on the site called "Lol Celebs", where readers can put captions on pics of celebrities:
There's another celeb example below the fold as well as a few originals I whipped up just for the occasion. Go to the site, slap it in your bookmarks, then save it for a rainy day when you're looking for something to do. I went through every single graph and celeb page and had a great time. Some of the stuff is exceptionally clever.
Pelosi Says Illegal Aliens Are... Patriotic? States beside Arizona are planning to deal with illegals. Maggie's supports legal immigration, at a level which the citizens deem appropriate. With so many young folks unable to find work, I am not sure that we need tons of immigrants right now. Really, they should work to fix their own countries so they don't feel the need to come here. That would be the right and patriotic thing for people to do.
'The biggest 'all-in' in the history of poker,' was how Henrik Enderlein, economics professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, described the massive aid package assembled on Sunday night in an effort to save the Euro from collapse.
Many observers see the measure as delaying the end of the Euro, not preventing it.
“[Are you] suggesting that Princeton, Harvard and NYC isn’t the totality of real life?” former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who followed the same academic path, joked in an e-mail when asked about the women’s parallel tracks…
Is Andrew Sullivan Kicking Off A Media Frenzy Over Kagan’s Sexuality? She's not a butch lesbian even though she looks like one, say friends. Who cares?
I have been through four cords of firewood in ye olde office this season, and fireplace season is not over yet. Chilly mornings, chilly evenings, in the low 30s (F). 38 degrees with a cold rain this morning. I do not live on Cape Cod (where I was a young lad for a while when my Dad was in the service), but one good thing about the Cape is that you can use a fire every night, even in August. Takes the damp chill off, or seems to.
My wood supply is down to fresh green wood felled by the Nor'easter a while ago. I cut and scavenged it. Mostly Maple of various types. I haven't even had time to split it yet. However, I figured out how to burn green wood effectively and pleasantly. All it takes is to throw a handful of charcoal briquettes into your starter fire. They get the heat up so that your green wood dries and burns at the same time. A nice, slow fire with plenty of wood-steam and an enjoyable hiss. You may have to freshen it with a new briquette or two now and then.
It works great. Sort-of. A hot wood stove will burn green wood just fine, but a fireplace is trickier. Once you have enough heat with a good bed of coals in there, green burns well.
The BD pupette, finishing her freshman college year in a week or so at her beloved small rural liberal arts college, will be promptly flown down (on the camp's nickel) to her super-most-specialest-favoritest traditional (daily morning flag ceremony with prayers, etc) 100 year-old girl's camp down in the wondrous Smokey Mountains so she can take the NRA shooter training course before camp opens. Her camp counseling duties will include running the shooting ranges and training the gals for competition. I know she is good with a .22. They are paying her surprisingly well, too.
San Diego’s tourism industry leaders are in 
Leaving late tonight for a long weekend, putting the boat in the water, etc. Leaving these links. Y'all fill in for me, heah?
Marketing a mutt: 
Pelosi Says Illegal Aliens Are... Patriotic?