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.
Steyn: The Fluke Charade - Why should we have to fund a middle-aged schoolgirl’s sex life?
All of us are born with the unalienable right to life, liberty, and a lifetime supply of premium ribbed silky-smooth ultrasensitive spermicidal lubricant condoms. No taxation without rubberization, as the Minutemen said. The shot heard round the world, and all that.
Reminds me of a story a friend told me about enlisting in the Navy during Vietnam as an officer. An interviewer asked him "What is your religious preference?" "Episcopalian, " he replied. "But you wrote down that you were Jewish," said the interviewer. "I am," he said, "but you asked my preference. I would prefer be to be Episcopalian."
"There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy." — PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA, JANUARY 9 , 2009 With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.
20:2 I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;
20:3 you shall have no other gods before me.
20:4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
20:5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,
20:6 but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
20:7 You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
20:8 Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.
20:9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work.
20:10 But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.
20:11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
20:12 Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
20:13 You shall not murder.
20:14 You shall not commit adultery.
20:15 You shall not steal.
20:16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
20:17 You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Every professional reviewer was wrong about this film. See it if you haven't. The Behind the Scenes bit here is good. I knew it was filmed with real SEALS, but didn't realize they filmed it with live ammo. Thus not a movie for the effete.
I can't write movie reviews, but the guy sitting next to Mrs. BD in the theater kept mumbling "Oo-rah." That's a thumbs-up review.
Regarding gelato, all you have to do is point at random. It's all good. The rule is just one gelato per day.
A friend is visiting northern Italy for the first time, in a couple of weeks. Great time of year to go. Asked for food advice. Here are a few of my suggestions (bearing in mind that no menus will be in English):
Antipasto
- Any norceria platter - Any crostini - every place has its own versions - carpaccio - delicious. Usually served on dandelion greens. Sprinkle a little oil on top.
I Primi
- pappardelle al funghi - Any gnocchi - Any polenta, but especially al tartuffo - Any risotto - Sometimes you can find a Spaghetti alla Bolognese - it's nothing like the American version - Bean soup/stew with pasta - Pasta e fagioli - in springtime, Risi e Bisi if they have it on the menu (rice and fresh peas in broth - a Venetian classic primi)
Secondi
- Tuscan steak (they are very proud of that Bistecca alla Fiorentina, generally grilled on a wood fire with lauro or rosemary - rare is best) - Venetian-style liver (fegato) - Brasato - Braciole (stewed beef) - Veal with tuna sauce (vitello tonnato) - Ossobuco - Cinghiale (wild boar) - however they make it is great - Fish and seafood. Easy to forget that Florence, for example, was a major seaport before the Arno silted up. So was Pisa. (One way Florence became wealthy in the Renaissance was by importing shiploads of wool from Britain and turning it into nice stuff. Also, from being a financial center, of course.)
Another tip: Order one antipasto, one primi, and one secondi - and share them. That's really all you need. They are used to people doing that these days. They understand "to share."
Another: If you want a vegetable or green, like spinach with garlic or asparagus, or a salad, it's a separate order as a side dish. In Italy, a secondi is never contaminated with random vegetables on the plate. Except, sometimes, roast potato. You are supposed to savor just one taste at a time.
Another: Barbera is the local and popular table wine up there. Cheap and pretty good.
Feel free to add your northern Italian favorites in the comments -
"Free"? Watch out! It's a government take-over, ultimately, on your tax nickel. It's greed and greed for power. Politicians can never leave well-enough alone. Primum non nocere and all that is not on their agenda.
Possibly, if the government messes up the current way things work. I can guarantee that people will hate government medical care far more than they are disgruntled with free market medical care.
In Alinsky’s view, the only radicalism that had a chance to succeed was the one that could bore inside bourgeois institutions, co-opt the language, and move the mainstream in the radical direction — but only as fast as political conditions would allow. Remaining radical but being coldly pragmatic kept the Alinskyite both effective and viable, allowing him to keep coming back for more. Ayers eventually learned this lesson — the lesson that you can do more for the cause by running the classroom than by blowing up the classroom or occupying the campus. As Ayers himself says, he’s just as radical today as he ever was — he is no moderate progressive. But now he’s actually accomplishing things, affecting thousands of minds. To borrow the words of Van Jones, another radical Leftist turned Alinskyite, he decided “to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”
Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.
Thrills and chills. It's really living. Whistler-Blackcomb is my favorite, though. Only been there one time. It's worth going, and the drive up from Vancouver is remarkable.
Chi-Com Influence Op Revealed - U.S. uncovers Chinese spying and influence campaign to derail Pentagon’s Asia buildup
I have no fear of China. They are an old-fashioned technocratic kingdom struggling to control a vast and diverse population. They just want to be players on the world scene.
Shaping History - Painter Ward Shelley plays with the history of Judaism in ‘The People of the Book,’ a series of giant, whimsical flowcharts that tell a story
Here's our game menu for this year's dinner for 24-28 friends that I and two of my buddies put together every March (we guys do all the cooking). We try to vary the menu each year.
We'll have fires in the fireplaces, and Mrs. BD will do the flowers. I think we'll do two tables for 12-14 this year, and, as we often do, change the place settings after the main course to mix things up.
Hors d'oevres: Smoked pheasant, wild venison filet on crouton with horseradish sauce, maybe something else too
Main buffet: Moussaka made with Oryx (yeah, my buddy shot an Oryx and has a freezer-full, and we are certain nobody here has ever had Oryx Moussaka), wild venison Bourguignon with noodles, rare sauteed Mallard breast with olive and cherry tomato gibier sauce on wild rice.
Dessert: Our traditional Apple Crisp with vanilla ice cream
After-dessert Cheese boards: A good assortment of France's stinkiest, unpasteurized cheeses and baguette with walnuts, dried fruit, grapes, and sliced pears.
Since pregnancy is a disease, then, someone else should pay the premium for insuring against the consequences of a woman’s risky, careless behavior. She shouldn’t even be responsible for grabbing some free condoms at the clinic and taking care of the risk herself.
Look even closer, and we see the real progressive agenda at work: increasing the power and reach of the federal government and its bureaucratic minions by discrediting and marginalizing any other source of authority over our behavior, especially institutions of moral authority such as churches. That way the government can aggrandize its power by relieving people of the responsibility for their choices through palliating their damaging consequences while making others pay for them. Tocqueville noticed 150 years ago this tendency of centralized power to expand by infantilizing the citizenry. Centralized governments, Tocqueville remarked, act as “if they thought themselves responsible for the actions and private conditions of their subjects, as if they had undertaken to guide and to instruct each of them in the various incidents of life and to secure their happiness quite independently of their own consent.”
Above: "almost completely leased before they're complete - if you can manage to get one expect to pay 2000 a month for a small one bedroom and 3400 for a three-bedroom" - Photo of Williston, ND, from this slide show: You've Never Seen Anything Like This North Dakota Oil Boomtown (h/t Carpe)
From Part 5 of Takuan Seiyo's The Bee and the Lamb, a rambling but interesting essay at Gates:
What emanates now from important Christian leaders, not to speak of such bona fide faithful as the Johnson, Carter, Kennedy, Bush, Blair, Brown and Atlee names adduced in a previous chapter, is something entirely different: it is secular solipsism and utopian eschatology masquerading as enlightened Christianity. It harks back to 2nd century Gnostics and not to the great Christian thinkers of the Renaissance or Enlightenment. It’s the lamb lying down with the lion that’s still a lion. It’s redistributive socialism and minorities-exalting Progressive doctrine that has nothing to do with the recognition of God’s presence on Earth.
and
The glow of Jesus has come to us distorted by the distance light has to traverse over 2000 years to reach the here and now, bounced along the way off such cracked mirrors, bent copper pans and dented silver chalices that the Gospel writers and Church leaders have been, and all men are. It’s miraculous that unknown outside a little sliver of a remote, benighted province at its inception, and multiplexed with great noise as it has been since, the transmission has reached us at all. Admitting that we don’t know where the noise ends and the transcendent music begins could rebuild a stout foundation for a new Christian spirituality. “There lives more faith in an honest doubt,“ wrote one of the great 10-percenters of the 19th century, Alfred Tennyson, “than in half the creeds.”
It depends on how you define "thinking." If "thinking" means an effort to form a logical progression of thoughts and ideas, words sure come in handy whether you intend to communicate the thoughts or not. In my experience, most people tend to avoid the effort that this requires unless they are trained to do it in some area of life such as diagnosing a car breakdown or a legal case or a medical complaint.
But if "thinking" refers to all sorts of mental activities, then of course words are not required for most of it. Impulses, gut feelings, images, daydreams, movement, musical ideas, etc. are all wordless mental activity (I exclude mathematics, which is just another language). Furthermore, unconscious mental activity, which may be the bulk of mental activity, is all or mostly wordless.
Speaking only for myself, I find that my words and my thought stream seem to do a sort of dance together, and a fresh new word or verbal concept can add new color or shape to it all. What is most fun is when a fresh word or phrase or concept crystallizes a dimly-thought thought.
Why the Titanic Still Fascinates Us - One hundred years after the ocean liner struck an iceberg and sank, the tragedy still looms large in the popular psyche
Having faith in the invisible hand of Purim - The image of an invisible hand can enable us to bridge the gap between those with merely a faith in God and those with merely a faith in man.
I have some family visiting midday on Saturday en route to pay homage to a newborn member of the clan, and figured we'd provide soup and sandwiches for the crew.
Somebody happened to mention turkey-mango sandwiches to me. It's a wonder how mangos have taken over in the supermarkets in Yankeeland, for good reason (I'll give y'all my mother in law's mango salad recipe some other time.)
Here are two versions, but I suppose one can mix and match. These could either be sandwiches or roll-ups (I have come to prefer roll-ups - less messy, less bread, and you don't need to eat as much if you cut them into 3" lengths).
Thin slices of fresh mango lettuce slice tomato swiss cheese or provolone avocado slices couple of turkey slices mayo
or
slices of Stilton slices of turkey arugula fresh mango, mango salsa or mango chutney lemon juice
or (if one is fresh out of mango)
turkey slices any cheese lettuce tomato very thin apple slices apple butter on one side (or prune butter. I love both of those old-timey things.) mayo on the other side
You can't get these at Subway. OK. I am hungry now.
This is what I term "a real job." These guys have balls. You may have seen this one before. I hate the way he has to make sure to tighten each hand-hold bolt on the final stretch. It's a nightmare for me.
Why moralism spoils the appetite - Adam Gopnik makes a powerful and entertaining case for why we shouldn’t ruin the aesthetic pleasure of food by adding a side order of moralism.
We have often posted here about food cranks and food Nazis, "organic food" nonsense and "natural food" nonsense, and even the concept of "healthy food". The "moral food" fad is just the latest incarnation of cranky food Calvinism - which is another incarnation of cranky Calvinism.
There is no doubt that guys enjoy variety, or at least the idea of it. They are liars if they claim they do not. Nature made them that way. Good character can make some of them acceptable, however, despite their nature.
"Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. . . . Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."
Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943) (h/t Carpe Diem)
Penn Sounds Off on Daylight Savings Idiocy
Instead of preaching kindness, we should realize, as the Bible did long ago, that we’re all bullies—
Here's our game menu for this year's dinner for 24-28 friends that I and two of my buddies put together every March (we guys do all the cooking). We try to vary the menu each year. 
What emanates now from important Christian leaders, not to speak of such bona fide faithful as the Johnson, Carter, Kennedy, Bush, Blair, Brown and Atlee names adduced in a previous chapter, is something entirely different: it is secular solipsism and utopian eschatology masquerading as enlightened Christianity. It harks back to 2nd century Gnostics and not to the great Christian thinkers of the Renaissance or Enlightenment. It’s the lamb lying down with the lion that’s still a lion. It’s redistributive socialism and minorities-exalting Progressive doctrine that has nothing to do with the recognition of God’s presence on Earth.
I have some family visiting midday on Saturday en route to pay homage to a newborn member of the clan, and figured we'd provide soup and sandwiches for the crew.