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.
Of course women want romance, a great sex life, and cheerful and intelligent companionship. Maybe solid husband material too. Maybe not so easy to find.
I can't help it if I am an Italian food snob. Very happy to never see baked ziti again in my life, or meatballs. They make me feel stuffed and just gross and tired. Soak the breadcrumbs in milk for the meatballs. Better that way.
Matt Guthmiller. Because of his get-up-and-go. Anywhere, any time. All this kid needs is Avgas, junk snacks, a friend or two, and a distant destination with cool food at the end. I do things, but he makes me feel like a pitiful stick-in-the-mud.
40:1 I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry.
40:2 He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.
40:3 He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD.
40:4 Happy are those who make the LORD their trust, who do not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods.
40:5 You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you. Were I to proclaim and tell of them, they would be more than can be counted.
40:6 Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.
40:7 Then I said, "Here I am; in the scroll of the book it is written of me.
40:8 I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart."
40:9 I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; see, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O LORD.
40:10 I have not hidden your saving help within my heart, I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation; I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation.
40:11 Do not, O LORD, withhold your mercy from me; let your steadfast love and your faithfulness keep me safe forever.
Consider how many powerful ideas Donald Trump has cast into the national consciousness. He has exposed both major parties as socialist globalist cults more concerned with government health care and foreign nation-building than a policy for American freedom. He has exposed how free trade can never be free when based on slave labor. He has exposed how the silent destruction of towns across the Midwest came not from China's comparative advantage, but from American companies' use of slavery by proxy. He has redirected investment away from Wall Street and toward Main Street for the first time in over thirty years and has unleashed three decades' worth of pent up entrepreneurial energy in the very towns long deemed dead. He has questioned how the federal government can have any legitimacy if it fails at enforcing its very own immigration laws.
Not one Nobel laureate imagined this American renaissance of GDP and stock market surge, record-low unemployment, wage growth, and low inflation in one bubbling cauldron. It took a change agent. Not one foreign policy mandarin suggested unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit of the American oil man in order to destroy our enemies' power over us permanently. It took a change agent. Not one State Department official questioned why the United States was still subsidizing Europe's generous socialist welfare system seventy years after WWII. It took a change agent. Nobody wondered why we were enriching China at our own expense and preparing for a world where a communist dictator would lead. It took Donald Trump...
From The Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass. h/t American Digest
“When liberty goes it is not the first to go nor the second or third to go . . it waits for all the rest to go . . it is the last. . .
When the memories of the old martyrs are faded utterly away . . . .
When the large names of patriots are laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators . . . .
When the boys are no more christened after the same but christened after tyrants and traitors instead . . . .
When the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted and laws for informers and bloodmoney are sweet to the taste of the people . . . .
When I and you walk abroad upon the earth stung with compassion at the sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship and calling no man master…
When we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves . . . .
When the soul retires in the cool communion of the night and surveys its experience and has much extasy over the word and deed that put back a helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel inferiority . . . .
When those in all parts of these states who could easier realize the true American character but do not yet—
When the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no . . . .
When it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart . . . .
And when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape . . . .
Or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth—
Then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.
Apparently the "cannon" of everything academic is about white supremacy. Science, too. I worry about people whose "identity" and career is based on their ancestry.
A Nick Gillespie interview with the always-interesting and fast-talking Amity Shlaes about her new book Great Society: A New History.
Here's the interview podcast. A lot of history of elite experts packed in there, with their social programs to solve everything. Shlaes is one smart cookie, seems like a nice person too.
It's a heck of a tale. Somewhere around the first third of it it dawned on me that I had read it long ago, but that didn't matter because I had forgotten the ending.
He's been away from home since the 1930s. It's encouraging to know that you can be 100 and still turn on the gals. I wonder whether he will figure out how to survive in the wild.
“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living, even submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, failures, and otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.”
Advice from Harold Bloom, shortly before his recent death
What Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
