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.
A blonde pushes her BMW into a gas station. She tells the mechanic itdied. After he works on it for a few minutes, it is idling smoothly.
She says, 'What's the story?
He replies, 'Just crap in the carburetor'
She asks, 'How often do I have to do that?'
SPEEDING TICKET
A police officer stops a blonde for speeding and asks her very nicely if he could see her license.
She replied in a huff, 'I wish you guys would get your act together. Just yesterday you take away my license and then today you expect me to show it to you!'
RIVER WALK
There's this blonde out for a walk. She comes to a river and sees another blonde on the opposite bank 'Yoo-hoo!' she shouts, 'How can I get to the other side?' The second blonde looks up the river then down the river and shouts back,
Feeling old yet? Some days I do, but most days I don't.
Well, I've been to London and I been to gay Paris I've followed the river and I got to the sea I've been down on the bottom of the world full of lies I ain't lookin' for nothin' in anyone's eyes Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear It's not dark yet but it's gettin' there.
Dalio is predicting that heavily indebted countries, including the US, will have to print money to deal with their debts, leading to a collapse in their currency and bond markets, and that late 2012 and 2013 will be another very difficult period. So be warned.
"Another difficult period"? What about now? He is usually right about things, it would seem. He is telling us that he is betting on that.
Trying to organize my personal photo philes, and finding fun trip pics. Riche in life but not in money, unlike the Duc de Berry who got to live off his peasants... Screw the money. Carpe diem. That's the modern way. Put it on a credit card. Obama will pay it.
My family skis. My kids are wonderful skiers, but I just alternate between reckless and timid, and have accumulated a couple of permanent ski injuries. Glad to have them, in a way, though. It's worth it for the cheap expensive thrills.
Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents?
Beautiful art is not just for cultural enrichment but is an important way to experience God and become aware of the human thirst for the infinite, Pope Benedict XVI has said.
I Get My News Direct From The Seat Of Oxford County, And You Should Too: Read The Rumford Meteor
Global Frauding works like a huge criminal racket, and it should be subject to criminal prosecution, like Bernie Madoff. No wonder George Soros keeps funding the left out of the goodness of his heart. For him it has to be a big profit center. According to Center for Media Research, Soros has spent 48 million dollars funding media. Similar amounts of Soros money are funding all the usual fronts for the radical left, from Moveon.org to The Nation. This is going on while the major media like the New York Times are staggering toward bankruptcy. Soros and friends are buying influence on a huge scale.
His transformation into a Messiah of Hate is timely in the worst possible way. A politician's mask shouldn't start coming off during a campaign. Let alone before it. But the unctuous smile is sliding off and what's underneath it is the entitled anger of a man who is always used to getting his way. And who has yet to understand that for the first time in his life, he's about to lose.
Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.
The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.
Thanks for the rare pic, Mr. Vanderleun. The Dylanologist and I figure this is in the late 60s in the Hamptons. Can't say I'm surprised that Bob didn't own tennis whites, but surely he owned a pair of sneakers...
In 1994, in southeastern Turkey, a Kurdish shepherd discovered the remains of one of the most astonishing archeological finds of our times. Göbekli Tepe
19-foot columns expertly carved out of stone, decorated with sculpted animals that do not and may never have lived in the region have baffled the German archeological team who came to unearth this spectacular find. The scientists estimate that the structures at this site are between 11,000 and 12,000 years old.
This would be 8,000 years before Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids were built!
When I was a kid, in the years after WWII, all the boys learned and sang the words to the military branches' anthems. For your children or grandchildren who haven't, you might want to share this video, thanks to Gene Simmons (KISS).
These folks want white people exterminated (h/t Moonbattery.) That's downright mean - and not multi-cultural at all.
Given the hardships and injustices of their slave ancestors, American descendants of Africans should thank their lucky stars that they ended up being born in America instead of the violent, corrupt, crappy AIDS-ridden place that most of Africa is today. Heck, I am grateful that my ancestors were driven away from England by government edicts, and England isn't all that bad even though it's getting worse and worse.
The following excerpts will give you a taste of the book:
Coffee: "For the most part, white people love Starbucks, although they will profess to hate how the chain is now a multi international corporation."
Organic food: "Because of the balance of global wealth and power, there is a general assumption that white people are pretty shrewd. And for the most part, history has proven this to be true. But white people have one great weakness: organic food."
Having black friends: "...an abundance of black friends (defined in white culture as two) also enables a white person to be the resident expert on African-American issues when there are no black people around."
Multilingual child: All white people their children to speak another language. There are no exceptions."
Dinner Parties: Outside of dictatorships and a few murder trials, there might not be a more rigorous judgement process in the modern world."
I love that the bio on the back cover includes the fact that he is a Ph.D dropout.
If you were born pinkish and peruse that book, you will realize how much of your life is a cultural cliche. Ouch. (Sorry - forgot how to write an accent aigue)
And if such racist white-haters have one drop of "diversity" in their hearts, they might benefit from Brookhiser's classic The Way of the Wasp. We WASPs need understanding, tolerance, and acceptance just like everybody else. We're a minority, ya know. Or almost one. Most of my ancestors were serfs, but serfdom and service to the State and the Lords is not my cup of meat.
Honestly, I am so sick of race. It is just plain stupid. I am part American Indian. Nobody cares about race anymore except the race-mongers and the race-hustlers and college admissions offices. It's pathetic.
Anyway, between those two cultural treatises I linked, those angry black people would discover that white folks lead lives of cliche at least as much as they do themselves. Sheesh. I thought racial hatred and anger were out of fashion in the Obama era.
Last year, at the invitation of Family Security Matters, I penned a reflection on 9/11 that focused on my experience with the first 10-years of my son’s life, 9/11 With My Son. This year I told the editor I had nothing to add. However, I do, but rather from others.
My son Jason, now 11, has the habit of taking a subject that interests him and applying himself to becoming the world’s greatest expert. He did that with the Titanic, and then the Harry Potter series, and now with 9/11. The underlying theme seems to be the magnitude of the events and their impacts. The sinking of the Titanic belied the security of technology in the face of a natural iceberg. The unfolding of Harry Potter’s adventures belied the safe childhood we parents struggle to create as children face supernatural evil. 9/11 combines these elements. 9/11 belies the security that we thought insulated America from the bloodthirsty hatred rising to pure evil that we thought only happened remotely in a disconnected elsewhere.
Several prominent blogs have featured links to an essay in the New York Times by Edward Rothstein, Amid the Memorials, Ambiguity and Ambivalence. Instead of our media and the cultural elites it celebrates being confused or even searching for American guilt, Rothstein suggests, “a Sept. 11 commemoration might well be a celebration of democratic culture’s enduring presence.” John Podhoretz at Commentary’s Contentions blog calls Rothstein’s essay, “The most important essay you’re likely to read this week,” for its critique of “the conversion of 9/11 from an act of wanton destruction and murder to a moment requiring an examination of our own sins.”
Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion, celebrates its 30th anniversary by offering an essay that delves deeper that Rothstein’s restricted newspaper word count. In this, Roger Kimball’s New Criterion exhibits its unique value. As Roger Kimball writes in his introductionto the 30th Anniversary Issue,
We have endeavored to provide a home for vigorously written cultural criticism while also building an institution of critical dissent. The two go together. At a time when culture and intellectual life are everywhere beholden to the imperatives of political correctness, even insisting on clear prose seems a daring provocation….Similarly, simply telling the truth about a whole host of controversial subjects is regarded as a challenge to the reigning pieties of established opinion.
Michael Lewis leads off the New Criterion September issue with America resumed: 9/11 remembered, The first entry in its series "Future tense: the lessons of culture in an age of upheaval." Lewis explores the whys behind the cultural confusion that Rothstein highlights. One must, must, read it all, for its exploration of how America’s arts have failed to capture the transformative lessons of 9/11. Some excerpts:
[T]he most vital cultural legacy of any war—or any great national trauma, for that matter—is intangible. It is the comprehensive way it changes our shared attitudes and assumptions, our collective sensibility. Changes in the collective sensibility, being invisible, usually do not reveal themselves until they are expressed in action…. Questions of art and culture seldom are directly involved in a national trauma; they belong to the shadow realm in which great events are digested and replayed after the fact, much as a dream imaginatively rehearses the happenings of the day….
Admittedly, the September 11 Memorial helps give focus and voice to the nation’s sorrow. But sorrow is only one tone in the spacious emotional register of a nation, and there are others, such as resolution, defiance, and even fury, that at certain times might be more appropriate. A person who could grieve but not snarl or even bite would be a strangely limited creature, and the same is true of a nation. Yet, after September 11, the public was given copious outlets only for its sorrow and none at all for its fury. (One must make the necessary exception for country and western music.).
When it came to addressing the harder and more fiery sentiments of the public, the cultural apparatus acted as bridle rather than spur, and rather nervously at that. Anything that might serve to focus national rage, such as showing films of the burning towers and plunging victims, was swept from the airwaves after a few days, only to be shown in short, carefully edited passages during the occasional anniversary broadcast or documentary. This was rationalized as a measure to spare bereft family members further grief, but it is much more the sense that such imagery was deemed incendiary, and likely to stoke the flames of public wrath, as if the most urgent danger—and the only danger—facing America was the prospect of mass mob violence against American Muslims….
The buildings and institutions that were targeted on that day were chosen as symbols of American national identity; those who were murdered were not collateral casualties but were killed in their capacity as Americans. The entire framework of the attack was a deliberate and focused assault on those objects that stood for the American government and American capitalism… But if the context of the event was explicitly American, this was precisely the terrain on which the arbiters of American culture—at least a substantial faction—felt themselves uneasy. Feelings of national solidarity, the sense of personal participation in the fate of one’s nation-state, have so long been disparaged as jingoism that even those artists who felt unaccountable patriotic stirrings found themselves utterly unable to make artistic use of them.
When one comes eyeball to eyeball with a shocking and malignant truth, but is unable to speak frankly and openly about it because of a taboo, one must resort to distortion, evasion, and self-deception….
Yet another lesson of culture after September 11 is that one must not fret or mope. This is hardly the first time that a sizable branch of the cultural establishment has failed to draw the appropriate lessons from new events. Yesterday’s radicals become today’s purveyors of the conventional wisdom and tomorrow’s sclerotic academicians….
Those revelations, administered in the most brutal manner conceivable, have reshaped the collective consciousness of the nation. But they have done so with very little help from art, which through the ages has been the most effective instrument for focusing the cultural consciousness, for framing its questions and concerns in the lucid terms without which no national conversation is possible…. But it is also because of a taboo, imposed gradually and imperceptibly over the past few decades, about expressing strong emotions in national terms—other than that of grief. This offers more concern, for a culture that cannot express, and make sense out of, the longings and passions of the people that sustains that culture cannot remain vital….
Last year, my son Jason offered this comment on what he’s learned from 9/11: “I’m glad the US has people who will fight so another 9/11 or worse doesn’t happen again.” This year, Jason adds: “There are heroes who help others escape. There are greater heroes who rise up regardless of dangers, as the police and firefighters did in the Towers.” Jason adds, "Screw al-Quaida." My son watches and listens to all the cultural detritus on TV and radio. Despite the best worst efforts of the profiting cretins he is exposed to, my son Jason’s quest to understand the facts of disasters and the best of people has independently led him to the conclusions that Rothstein and Lewis bemoan our cultural elites avoiding.
As long as there are Americans growing up like my son, and those like Rothstein, Kimball and Lewis helping to straighten out the confusions of their parents, our fears may be overblown and our hopes encouraged.
They are OK, but I think they would be better if they got out from under the thumb of government and unions and let entrepreneurial schools flourish. Educational monopoly is not a good thing.
Having watched the Left preach all my life, to say they lack zealotry is to ignore the truth. In summary, liberals realize Obama looks hopeless right now and are greeting this news with a great sense of ennui. They should cheer up. In 2013, they get to be the screaming yahoos and unlike the Tea Party, the Left will be embraced by ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC and CNN, as dissent becomes patriotic again.
Liberal critics of Obama, just like conservative critics of Republican presidents, generally want both maximal partisan conflict and maximal legislative achievement. In the real world, those two things are often at odds. Hence the allure of magical thinking.
The misdiagnosis of widespread market failure led congressional leaders, after the 2008 election, to propose radical changes in financial institutions and, more generally, much wider regulation and government control of companies and consumer behavior. They proposed higher taxes on upper-income families and businesses, and extensive controls over executive pay, as they bashed "billionaire" businessmen with private planes and expensive lifestyles. These political leaders wanted to reformulate antitrust policies away from efficiency, slow the movement by the U.S. toward freer trade, add many additional regulations in the medical-care sector, levy big taxes on energy emissions, and cut opportunities to drill for oil and other fossil fuels.
That was "Let no crisis go to waste" to advance the Leftist, statist cause
As the President's approval numbers go down, the manic production of new regulations rises to a fever pitch in case the liberal last chance is afoot. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, 3,752 new rules were created last year and there are 4,225 new ones in some stage of preparedness.
These rules vary from the absurd, such as regulating that dolls of 3 different races must be represented in day care centers to far more substantive power grabs. The list of aggressively abusive implementations of a "social justice" agenda is very long and growing fast.
They think that the O will not be re-elected. Last chance to control every little detail of our lives and businesses.
1950: Your honor, the defendant just snapped and killed three people. 2010: Your honor, I'm innocent, I just snapped and killed three people.
I'm hard-pressed to come up with any segment of the population that doesn't have a pre-medieval answer ready to be trotted out, at flight-deck-McGlaughlin Group volume, for any social ill or misbehavior, and a ready-made template to call any productive behavior a crime, too. There's isn't a dime's bit of difference between Pat Robertson or Al Gore in these matters. (A)Gay people or (B)Ford Explorers cause hurricanes. Take your pick, but there's no (C)
It's a subject that has been on my mind for quite a while - the phenomenon of perpetual psychological adolescence in us decadent and pampered Americans - so I will look forward to seeing what she has to say about it.
I hope she will mention that the post-war worship of youth, which culminated in the late 60s and 70s, provided social permission, if not incentive, for adults to continue behaving like kids. Even college, once the domain of the serious, has become an extension of high-school. Given the human temptation for regression, and the joys of youth when compared with the rigors, duties, sacrifices, and responsibilities of adulthood, it's no wonder that people welcome the socio-cultural invitation. Every psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in America, and probably in Europe, is well-aware of this. And so are our politicians, who feed into it - and feed on it: Take care of me, Mommy and Daddy Government.
Photo: These mill workers in Georgia around the turn of the century were probably more mature than some of the 40 year-olds I see these days. Yes, I am in favor of children working. All of mine did. I did, too - and it was not "fun." However, I had time to work on my tennis too.
...as their financial prospects darken, students’ educational costs are exploding. Like the health care system, the educational system is being overwhelmed by rising costs and rising demand. And as misguided government policies contributed to the real estate bubble by artificially inflating demand, government programs are burdening students with unpayable loans and contributing to relentless and unsustainable inflation in school costs.
And so, dear students, welcome back! Your generation is going to have dig its own way out of the hole my generation has dug for you (thanks for the Medicare, kids, and sorry about the deficit!), but here are a few tips that may help you get the best out of your college years.
Good tips for the students, there. For example:
I’m sorry to bring you bad news, but your generation faces the toughest competition any American generation has ever known.
Your competition isn’t sitting in the next library carrel. Your competition is in China and India – and your competition isn’t hanging out at frat parties or sitting around watching sitcoms with dorm-mates. It isn’t getting stoned and it isn’t putting its energy into chasing the opposite (or apposite) sex. Your competition isn’t taking lots of courses on gender studies; it isn’t majoring in ethnic studies, or (unless it is planning to go into movie making) the history of film.
Your competition is working hard, damned hard, and is deadly serious about learning. There’s nothing written in the stars that guarantees Americans a higher standard of living than other people. Those of you who spend your college years goofing off in the traditional American way are going to pay a much higher price for this than you think.
We link and enjoy many cool and intelligent sites, but Dan Greenfield of Sultan Knish, who we have been reading a lot lately, deserves a special mention. (Here's Why Liberalism is a Reactionary Ideology). Here ya go, Dan:
A quote from that post:
When its flashy clothes are stripped away, liberalism stands revealed as a fear of modernity. There is nothing progressive about liberalism, it is the ideology of a political, cultural and economic elite that reviles everything modern, that longs for a mystical right of kings and well ordered oligarchies, denounces technology as the tool of the pollution devil, distrusts all science that is not in the service of its ideology and is threatened by any sort of debate or opposition.
Today liberalism is the second most backward, most paranoid, most reactionary and totalitarian ideology in the West after Islamism. Both are based on the fear of the modern, the fear of the liberated individual, technology and the nation state. Their great dream is the same, a vast mystical world-state ruled over by the enlightened and providing an inhumanly perfect justice for all. Both believe that the only solution for mankind is to go backward, to crawl instead of walk, to fear instead of know and to obey rather than think. That is Liberalism and Islamism in a nutshell, two reactionary ideologies walking together into the dark ages.
Me? I'm a believer because... well because I've really got Nothing Better to do. That's because measuring myself against even the smallest, most finite, and bounded idea of God I can conceive I'm about gnat size in relation to that. I wish others saw it that way, but among the smart monkeys most of us think of ourselves as some sort of gigantic intellect -- at least in comparison to, say, a clam. Those who are long on stupidity are always short on humility.
America is more than just her president or her federal government. Liberals do not see that. They see government in every facet of life and thus politics everywhere. They cannot see a nation where people do not care about Washington. If people did care about Washington, then the Tea Party would be twice as large and twice as angry. But Americans are a tolerant people whose patience stems from the knowledge that this too shall pass. Barack Obama caved because a president is not omnipotent. He thought he was when he controlled Congress. He no longer does. It is no fun any more being president. He caved because he no longer wants to be president. Expect more, not less, of this stuff over the next year as the man who once smiled becomes a frowning, scornful and mocked man. The beauty of the American system is that, so far, it is bigger than any one man and it can — and will — correct itself.
The modern liberal is wedded to a thoroughly reactionary worldview in which he worships the institutions he controls and is full of paranoia and suspicion of those he does not. He disdains the common man and longs for enlightened leaders to uplift him and to transform his country into a messianic vision of a kingdom of heaven in which no one ever goes hungry and everyone is perfectly equalized-- a pseudo-religious vision of government as religion that is wholly primitive in its conflation of theology and civics.
As with all folk songs, there are many versions. This is the one used by Dylan on 1992's Good as I Been to You. Here's another,
Bob does a great job with it on that record. Nice guitar too. Bob is rooted in English/Scots/Irish folk, despite himself:
Oh, me and my cousin, one Arthur McBride As we went a-walkin' down by the seaside Mark now what followed and what did betide For it bein' on Christmas mornin.'
Now, for recreation, we went on a tramp And we met Sergeant Napper and Corporal Vamp And a little wee drummer intending to camp For the day bein' pleasant and charming.
"Good morning, good morning," the sergeant he cried "And the same to you gentleman," we did reply Intending no harm but meant to pass by For it bein' on Christmas morning.
"But," says he, "My fine fellows, if you will enlist Ten guineas in gold I'll stick in your fist And a crown in the bargain for to kick up the dust And drink the king's health in the morning.
"For a soldier, he leads a very fine life And he always is blessed with a charming young wife And he pays all his debts without sorrow or strife And he always lives pleasant and charmin,'
And a soldier he always is decent and clean In the finest of clothing he's constantly seen While other poor fellows go dirty and mean And sup on thin gruel in the morning".
"But," says Arthur, "I wouldn't be proud of your clothes For you've only the lend of them, as I suppose But you'll dare not change them one night, for you know If you do, you'll be flogged in the morning.
And although that we're single and free We take great delight in our own company We have no desire strange places to see Although that your offers are charming.
"And we have no desire to take your advance All hazards and dangers we barter on chance For you'd have no scruples for to send us to France Where we could get shot without warning."
"Oh no," says the Sergeant, "I'll have no such chat And neither will I take it from snappy young brats For if you insult me with one other word I'll cut off your heads in the morning."
And Arthur and I, we soon drew our hogs And we scarce gave them time to draw their own blades When a trusty shillelagh came over their head And bid them take that as fair warning,
And their old rusty rapiers that hung by their sides We flung them as far as we could in the tide "Now take them up, devils !" cried Arthur McBride "And temper their edge in the morning!".
And the little wee drummer, we flattened his bow And we made a football of his rowdy-dow-dow Threw it in the tide for to rock and to roll And bade it a tedious returning.
And we havin' no money, paid them off in cracks We paid no respect to their two bloody backs And we lathered them there like a pair of wet sacks And left them for dead in the morning.
And so, to conclude and to finish disputes We obligingly asked if they wanted recruits For we were the lads who would give them hard clouts And bid them look sharp in the morning.
Ray Dalio, the quiet, reclusive, distinctly unflashy, and jazz- and opera-loving founder of 
Erickson: Sunday Reflection: 
Those folks who want to exterminate my pale, mottled, and unwholesome skin tone need to learn more about us, and try to understand us better. Empathy, understanding, all that good stuff. Here's a start: 
It's a subject that has been on my mind for quite a while - the phenomenon of perpetual psychological adolescence in us decadent and pampered Americans - so I will look forward to seeing what she has to say about it.
...as their financial prospects darken, students’ educational costs are exploding. Like the health care system, the educational system is being overwhelmed by rising costs and rising demand. And as misguided government policies contributed to the real estate bubble by artificially inflating demand, government programs are burdening students with unpayable loans and contributing to relentless and unsustainable inflation in school costs.
The really good news - I've scavenged a lot of free firewood from the so-called storm. (It was a ton of rain and a stiff gusty breeze.)
As with all folk songs, there are many versions. This is the one used by Dylan on 1992's 