Tuesday, February 2. 2010
Considering a trip to the Dolomites and the Veneto this August, with visits to Venice (not again!), Padua, Verona, Castelrotto (Kastelruth), etc. Apparently the people in the Dolomites do not really think of themselves as Italian (they had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until WW1, and Mussolini Italianized the names).
Found out there are many villages up there in the Dolomites where the people mostly speak Ladin (not to be confused with Ladino). Several million people in the Veneto speak Venetian, too. People in Castelrotto speak German.
Photos below of Castelrotto, which looks more alpine-German or Swiss than Italian. It's the south Tyrol:
An education is like exhibiting good manners. If you pretend to have them, it's the same as having them.
Sippican
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.
I am sad to say that The Complete Pogo, Vol. 1, has not yet been released. It's a damn shame.
Rahm Emanuel terms budget doubters and dissenters "f-ing retarded." That would include me, and I'm sure he is correct. Respectful debate on the merits is great, isn't it?
Speaking of f-ing retarded, Punxatawny Phil is. 6 more weeks of winter? Well, duh. Tell me something I don't know, genius.
At most times and places in history, state authorities have had pretty wide discretion to help or hurt folks. People knew to submit to authorities, and to accept occasional arbitrary applications of authority power. Thankfully, such applications were limited by the fact that authorities were distracted trying to keep their power via keeping the peace, meeting revenue targets, etc.,
Today folks proudly bask in a glow of higher status by believing that they have more control over their government. They believe democracy puts them in charge, and that a “rule of law” drastically discourages arbitrary applications of authority power. They are deluded.
Whole piece at Overcoming Bias.
 Found a Wooly Bear caterpillar curled up cozy in the wood pile the other day. I carefully placed him under a hunk of bark in the woods. I have loved these critters since I used to find them with my Mom as a young kid.
They contain a cryoprotectant that keeps them vital during their winter hibernation. When it warms up, they will wake up and eat like crazy, pupate, and become a tiger moth - the Isabella Moth.
Miss Megyn Kelly. Indeed she does. And brains, too.
Monday, February 1. 2010
Government spending on education increases its costs. Of course it does. "Free money" gets spent, plus more.
The Feds have no business tinkering with education, which is properly a local responsibility and for which no responsibility has been given, and over which no power has been granted, by the Constitution.
It is nothing but Fed payoffs to teachers, teacher's unions, and academia. Feeding the Beast.
A quote from Dr. Laura (my bolds):
People don’t actually “grow apart” in relationships. They simply stop taking care of each other. They stop waking up and looking at their spouse with gratitude and awe. They stop finding ways to make that person happy that they are married to each other. They stop behaving as though they love that person with their last breath. They basically stop being the kind of person they themselves would want to come home to.
And then I find myself thinking "Who the heck would want to come home to face themselves?"
 During the 1700s and 1800s the Brits scoured the planet to find cool places to visit (or to make money). Amelia Edwards was one of them, and she wrote about it. It was the era when, if you saw a couple of ladies riding side-saddle in the desert or the mountains, the natives would think "They must be English."
From Amazon:
British writer and Egyptologist AMELIA EDWARDS (1831-1892) was a published writer by age seven. Among her books most beloved by readers past and present are the novels Barbara's History (1864) and Lord Brackenbury (1880), and the travelogue A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877).
She wrote mysteries too.
We have in hand her book about her trip to the Dolomites: Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys.
Her other books here.
Chart above via Dino. It splains a lot. No real world experience.
The new Blaser R8
Peer groups and self-control
Too cold for windmills in Minnesota
100 years of radio broadcasting
Now, Pew Says, Marriage Is a Better Deal for Men Than Women. Maybe that's why gays want marriage?
We do get it, Mr. President; we just don't like it
Russia urged China to dump Fannie, Freddie bonds in 2008
Your Tax Dollars at Work: the Civil ‘Service’ That’s Eating America
More on the Pachauri scandal. Related: IPCC loses all credibility
By all means keep the public out of the health care debates. The people are a real problem for politicans.
The "aspiring classes". Aren't we all? All aspiring for different things, too.
Haitians beg USA to take them over. No thanks.
Record cold grips the planet. What does this mean?
Remember this?
To: Howlin
Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.
In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.
The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90’s. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn’t used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80’s used monospaced fonts.
I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.
This should be pursued aggressively.
47 posted on Wednesday, September 08, 2004 11:59:43 PM by Buckhead
From Tom Bowler's The Decade the MSM Won at Pajamas.
On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.
Will Rogers
 Guess how many Conservatives are in Congress from New England.
We met Dan Debicella this weekend, and will get behind his campaign in CT-4 to unseat a one-term knee-jerk Pelosi acolyte.
Dan is the son of a police officer, grew up in Bridgeport. Wharton, Harvard MBA, and McKinsey on his resume. An impressive young fellow.
Since his opponent has voted according to Pelosi's commands essentially 100% of the time, I offered him my campaign ad line: This District deserves a guy in Congress to speak for the people of CT, not for the people of San Francisco.
He says on his campaign website: "I am running for Congress to restore the values of free enterprise and individual liberty to Washington."
He sounds like a practical, accomplished, Maggie's sort of guy. Why he, or any other fine person, would want to enter the world of politics is beyond me, though.
 NH teacher, 100, gets degree a day before dying
The O admits he lied about "If you like it, you can keep it."
Roger Simon: Climategate: Al Gore and the politicization of science
Spiro Agnew: Prophet
Homosexuality in Afghanistan
Ugh. Awful RINO Lindsey Graham Pushes Climate Policy Because “Congress Needs a Win”
Like the slave trade: Americans arrested taking children out of Haiti
UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
Union greed has dismembered Michigan
The O: Let's work together, you f-ing bastards
Payoff: Sugar Tariffs Cost Americans $2.5 Billion in 2009. I thought we had free trade.
Via SDA:
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Carol Platt Liebau (Harvard Law Review), February 2009 - "[Tom Pirelli] did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he'd leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done."
Byron York (National Examiner), January 2010 - Many observers have remarked that, even when dealing with the most momentous issues facing the country, Obama has seemed oddly removed from the hands-on work of making policy.
Sunday, January 31. 2010
Thanks for inventing the internet. You thought of everything. It never ceases to amaze me how much stuff you managed to put on there.
I just found out that I can buy opera tickets for the Arena di Verona (a vast Roman arena) for August online, now. Looks like a fun outing, but the arena seems to big for opera.
Good site for high quality farm toys: Carter and Gruenewald. What a great business to be in.
One quote:
Zinn’s wretched tract, A People’s History of the United States, is worthless as history, and it is a national tragedy that so many Americans have fallen under its spell. It is a political cartoon which even the socialist magazine Dissent described as an intellectual fraud, which it is. All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill. Like his partner in crime, Noam Chomsky, Zinn was a wicked man and his life’s work was a pernicious influence on the young and ignorant, with destructive consequences for people everywhere.
The whole thing here.
Their stories at the Globe.
Does President Obama “feel your pain” or is he feeling his own, getting kicked in the bottom by the Tea Parties? Do establishment Republicans, late to the party, join the conga line or waltz around the Tea Party theme?
Remarkably, Internet-power Instapundit Glenn Reynolds and MSM Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift sorta agree about the impact of the Tea Parties.
Reynolds, early and consistently encouraged by the people power of the Tea Party movement, writes in today’s Washington Examiner that,
It's one thing when record stores or video rental places get dis-intermediated. It's a whole different ball game when people who rely on politics not only for their livelihood, but for maintaining their considerable sense of self-importance discover that they may not be quite as necessary as it once seemed.
But that hard lesson is becoming apparent. In fact, the Tea Party movement seems to be showing better political judgment than either of the two major political parties.
Reynolds believes the Tea Party movement will have even more power going in to the 2010 elections, as it develops a Contract From America.
It's a set of ideas developed via an interactive Web site, where voting determines which elements are most important. And it's not a top-down contract consisting of promises made by leaders to the voters -- it's more in the nature of a contract of employment from the voters, which politicians may choose to accept, or look for alternative employment.
This is basically a crowd-sourced party platform, with the smoke-filled rooms and convention logrolling taken out of the picture. More dis-intermediation. I'm guessing that the political class won't like it much, either.
But whether the political class likes it or not, this sort of thing is probably here to stay. While 2009 was the year of denigrating and ignoring the tea parties, I suspect that in 2010, they'll be listened to quite closely. Those who fail to do so, are likely to find themselves out of a job.
Dan Riehl comments re: "fragmentation" of Tea Party movement. It is already, and that's a strength, bottom up instead of top down.
Eleanor Clift, columnist at Newsweek, reluctantly recognizes the Tea Parties past successes, despite the Conventional Wisdom (i.e., from liberals like her).
Less than half a year later, the tea-party movement is the tip of the spear shaping the White House policy agenda, putting Obama on the defensive on spending and forcing Democrats to elevate deficit reduction as a priority.
Clift is correct in recognizing the grass-roots pragmatism of Tea Partiers, supporting moderate candidates as long as they represent a turn away from more government intrusion into our pockets and lives. Clift concludes by asking limited government types to reply to President Obama’s newfound interest in hearing from those who oppose him. And, we are to believe that Clift, Obama, and their ilk will now, after never listening before?
To offer your two-cents to the Contract From America, here’s your invite.
My July 4th Tea Party in LotusLand with photos.
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