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.
“Krugman’s comments are an indication of the nature of one of the problems we face; which is, a lot of people in positions to influence our country really don’t like our country. Krugman (by the way, did you know he is a former ‘Enron adviser’?) is among those who earn well, live well and eat well but really wish they could live among a better sort of people.”
"Red meat and gin" was her rallying cry when the food world's puritans dared to promise long life through nervous nutrition; she scorned grilled vegetables as "burnt and undercooked at the same time". When asked to describe her guilty pleasures [...] she was sure to respond with her usual cheerful defiance, "I have no guilt".
Within days of the attacks, a friend coolly informed me, "the people in the Twin Towers deserved it." Still reeling from that shock, I almost lost it when another friend admiringly compared bin Laden to George Washington. Soon thereafter, a well-known academic in my circle complained that the sudden outpouring of patriotism made her sick.
This utter madness, which I thought would be confined to the fringe, rapidly spread to every corner of elite society. The more we learned about the savagery of the Islamist world, the more our moral and cultural superiors turned their wrath on us, instead of the enemy.
As headlines blared the almost surrealistic brutality of Al Qaeda, Senator Patty Murray told a group of high school honor students that Osama bin Laden was popular in poor countries because he paid for day care centers. "We haven't done that," Murray said. "How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?"
At the risk of sounding insensitive, I always thought the idea of an elaborate 9-11 Memorial was wrong. I always thought what it required would be a plaque on the wall of some new buildings: "On this site, on September 11, 2001, 2700 Americans died in an attack by Moslem Jihadists." Perhaps a statue on a square. NYC is all about survival, endurance, optimism.
I feel this way for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, in a sense, it elevates our enemies. I say this while having personal connections with a number people immediately touched by the attack.
The people I know who lost family and friends in the attack have their own personal memories and rituals, and little need for canned public display. Steyn might agree with me, but I'm not sure.
My own memory/memorial is seeing the jumpers live on TV. It is an indelible nightmare memory. A friend of mine saw them there and then. He at first thought it was material falling from the first building.
Bush said it: "Evil is real. Courage is real." We all know that.
They tell us to get over it, they say to move on, and they mean it well: We can't bring an air of tragedy into the future. But I will never get over it. To get over it is to get over the guy who stayed behind on a high floor with his friend who was in a wheelchair. To get over it is to get over the woman by herself with the sign in the darkness: "America You Are Not Alone." To get over it is to get over the guys who ran into the fire and not away from the fire.
And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask “Why do they hate us?” A better question is: “Why do they despise us?” And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.
Europeans and their colonial descendants may pen laws of war, but only they are constrained by them. In the real world outside the dinner parties of Washington D.C. and Brussels, there are no laws in war. Islamic law which has regulations for which foot to use when entering a bathroom (the left foot) and which side to sleep on (the right) has very few laws of war that cannot be nullified by necessity or even whim. On the battlefield, Islamic jurisprudence is boiled down to, Do what thou wilt in the cause of Allah, that is the whole of the law.
18:21 Then Peter came and said to him, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?"
18:22 Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
18:23 "For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves.
18:24 When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him;
18:25 and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made.
18:26 So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, 'Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.'
18:27 And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.
18:28 But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, 'Pay what you owe.'
18:29 Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, 'Have patience with me, and I will pay you.'
18:30 But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt.
18:31 When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place.
18:32 Then his lord summoned him and said to him, 'You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me.
18:33 Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?'
18:34 And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt.
18:35 So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart."
In California, most cars are from Japan. But, after that, Fords are the most popular. I've driven a 2000 Taurus for the past 12-years. Good, comfortable, reliable sedan. The other day, my neighbor traded in for a Ford, saying she wanted to buy American. There's also another reason that Fords are popular the past few years:
My friend Mark Safranski, at his blog Zenpundit and contributions elsewhere (like Small Wars Journal), provides some of the best digestions of complex matters of national security policies and debates that a layperson can find.
Safranski has turned his attention to R2P, Right To Protect, as its advocates term it. It is the liberal internationalists’ concept of how US foreign policy ought to be. R2P reflects limitations of the US abilities to militarily intervene elsewhere as perceived by our liberal elites but raises our humanitarian impulses selectively by them to justify certain interventions, again, as they perceive which to be worthwhile. Further, R2P raises hazy international law or consensus of international liberal elites to supremacy over national law or consensus.
One of R2P’s main propounders, Anne Marie Slaughter, even advocates each US agency and members of our judiciary to act independently of Executive or Congressional oversight or law to conform to the consensus of foreign liberal elites. Slaughter is not just someone blathering. Slaughter was Dean of Princeton's influential Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002–2009 then from 2009-2011 she served as Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State, now back at Princeton. Slaughter’s thinking is telling in the pieties mouthed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama as they ignore US laws, ignore Syria’s worse repression and threat as they intervene in Libya, and extol a hostile majority in the UN to undeserved credence. Slaughter isn’t alone. Obama administration insiders Samantha Powers and Susan Rice are R2P foxes in the henhouse.
As Safranski sums up:
Slaughter is a revolutionary who aspires to a world that would functionally resemble the Holy Roman Empire, writ large, with a diffusion of power away from legal process ofstate institutions to the networking informalities of the larger social class from whom a majority of state and IGO officials are drawn, as a global community.
At first glance, disaggregating the state and granting at least a measure of sovereignty to its component parts might appear to weaken the state. In fact, it will bolster the power of the state as the primary actor in the international system…Giving each government institution a measure of legitimate authority under international law, with accompanying duties, marks government officials as distinctive in larger policy networks and allows the state to extend its reach.
Actually, it extends the uncontrolled reach of liberal elites within our government to act regardless of our laws or popular will.
Safranski comments:
R2P will require the imposition of policy mechanisms that will change the political community of the United States, moving it away from democratic accountability to the electorate toward “legal”, administrative, accountability under international law; a process of harmonizing US policies to an amorphous, transnational, elite consensus, manifested in supranational and international bodies. Or decided privately and quietly, ratifying decisions later as a mere formality in a rubber-stamping process that is opaque to everyone outside of the ruling group.
Who is to say that there is not, somewhere in the intellectual ether, an R2P for the environment, to protect the life of the unborn, to mandate strict control of small arms, or safeguard the political rights of minorities by strictly regulating speech? Or whatever might be invented to suit the needs of the moment?
Well, there is such in the “intellectual ether”, as in this example from William Magnuson, lecturer on international law at Harvard, and a graduate of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs:
While it is undoubtedly true that the loss of life is a greater harm than the loss of free speech rights, the major arguments (moral, legal, and consequential) in favor of the responsibility to protect doctrine apply equally to free speech as to crimes against humanity. Freedom of speech is a fundamental right. The widespread suppression of speech may cause us to doubt that state sovereignty is worthy of respect under Rawls’s and Walzer’s discussion of well-ordered societies. An obligation to intervene to protect free speech may persuade states to refrain from muzzling the media or jailing dissidents.
Transnational self-elected elites making “the world safe of democracy” or for their own supremacy? How many have children serving in the military, I wonder. Just look at how few in our State Department were willing to serve in civilian reconstruction in Iraq or Afghanistan. Yeah, “leading from behind”, as in Groucho Marx saying, “follow me, you go first,” making a tragic joke of core national interests in security that are actually recognized by average Americans, substituting instead rationalizations for scattered interventions although nice not essential and frittering away our lives and resources.
Added: Mark Safranski posts on this post, adding the key conclusion:
This is not an argument over whether genocide is bad and should be prevented or the positive good of Western liberal societal values but rather over how power will be exercised in our name, for what reasons and by whom. Any good ends sought under a putative R2P doctrine can be done today if the political will for intervention is present. That will is crystalized when the ends, ways and means are scrutinized in open, free, debate under our constitutional norms, not by a self-appointed vanguard.
Also, read Saints Go Marching In in The National Interest: (H/T: American Power blog's Donald Douglas)
. The conclusion:
As Libya shows, war and utopia should not be mixed up. War is too serious, utopia too unserious, for that.
Perhaps the SAT does roughly correspond to IQ, but the reason to use IQ is to take into account unrealized potential in those who have had the misfortune of not being exposed to adequate education or of stimulating environments.
Admittedly, most people with intellectual ambition and special ability find a way to pursue it in youth, but there are surely plenty of diamonds in the rough out there with undiscovered glitter. If I were a college admissions officer, I'd want a kid with a 160 IQ and mediocre SATs over an over-achiever with decent SATs and a mediocre IQ.
Mind you, this is all about academic potential, not life potential. That's an entirely different topic. Only God can measure a life.
The other day I went into my favorite Mexican restaurant, favorite because it doesn't serve the usual Americanized border food of just tacos and burritos but real(er) Mexican food. I had the goat meat soup, lifting with my hands the flesh covered bones to chew on. Mexican chicken soup is particularly tasty, so I suggested to the owner adding chicken feet to nibble on. He replied that it was also a favorite of his, we both remembering a restaurant in Ensenada that served it and was always packed with locals and foreigners (like my father and me, who like other poor people in our youth made good use of every part of the chicken), but has been displaced by tourist food for the nearby cruise ship port.
There's a post that is circulating that humorously and realistically describes the staples of immigrant Jewish foods. I grew up on them all, and delight when I make some of them or rarely find a restaurant that gets one right. My boys dig in and ask why they haven't had more of this. I joke that McDonalds is not named McDonaldwitz. Many complain that such foods are cardiac arresters. I just finished a series of extensive heart tests, the cardiologist surprised that my heart is much younger than I am.
Lean cuts of beef, like top round and flank steak (London Broil), are not worth grilling, and should not be grilled, without marinating them overnight first. Cooks say 10 hours at bare minimum. Otherwise, these dense, wood-like cuts are like chewing gum when grilled rare, and like leather when overcooked.
In other words, something you could easily choke on, requiring an annoying Heimlich Maneuver.
They have to be marinated in enough acid - vinegar or citrus -to loosen up the meat. Some alcohol - wine or beer - helps in addition to the vinegar. Many people seem to like to simply marinate these cuts overnight in pre-mixed Italian dressing. (I use plastic garbage bags for marinating things in.)
Even with a good 20 hours of marinating, London Broil needs to be sliced thin after grilling.
At dinner last night, with my lad, we observed the bartender administer the Heimlich Maneuver, successfully, to a person choking on a bite of steak. Seemed like quite a coincidence with our Heimlich post yesterday.
Turned out that the bartender, Manuel, is a part-time EMS guy and had performed this a number of times. Perhaps everybody thinks they know how to do it, but it doesn't hurt to review it all. Of course, the trick is to determine whether choking is a person's emergency, or whether it is something else.
They call choking a "Cafe Coronary" for good reason. Can look like a bad heart attack. Choking can kill you quicker than a heart attack.
Here's a quick reminder of how to do it. Need to use plenty of upward force with one hand as a fist. Don't worry about hurting them.
Does a restaurant have a duty to choking patrons? No.
What if a chunk of something is so stubbornly stuck that Heimlich doesn't work, and help is not quickly forthcoming? You can perform an emergency tracheotomy. A ball-point pen comes in handy.
President Obama tonight seemed simultaneously angry and nervous as he rushed through a speech that was transparently not worthy of a joint session of Congress. His great idea: Cobble together a mish-mash of old ideas (infrastructure spending, a payroll tax cut) and pay for it later, by asking the debt commission to come up with additional deficit reductions later, preferably by hiking taxes on the rich. The second half of the speech was a heated campaign rally aimed at a cartoon version of his future opponent.
Is there a meaningful difference between an 800 and a 770 on the Math section of the SAT?
My proposal for the SAT exams (which, for our overseas readers, is used to measure something called "college readiness" - although in the US today college readiness can mean ability to pay or to obtain loans and grants to pay. American colleges are full of kids who cannot even do basic trigonometry) is to make three sections, each with a fairly steep slope of demands from basic to subtle and advanced:
- Scientific and quantitative
- Literary, reading comprehension, and writing
- General academic information (ie history, the arts, religion, geography, etc)
Then to score each section with the usual academic letter grades, A+ to F (with A+ reserved for a perfect score because that means you know it all and can execute it without sloppiness).
If I had my druthers, I would add a regular IQ test also, but in the current atmosphere I don't think that would be accepted despite the fact that plenty of grad schools do require it. (I had to take an IQ twice, once for the army and once for grad school. I think maybe we had to take one in grade school too in order to assess our academic potential.)
...the sentimental idea that the intellectual differences between children are not real - or that they are real, but too upsetting to acknowledge - has taken hold of the popular imagination, whereas once such nonsense could only have been believed by a sociologist.
My son went to one of the comprehensives that replaced academically selective grammar schools. He is now studying law at university. Since he was likely to be correct about which of his peers would have passed and failed the eleven-plus had it still existed, I asked him if any of the likely failures had gone on to do surprisingly well under the comprehensive system.
Not one. I then asked if any of those whom he would have expected to pass the eleven-plus had gone on to do less well than he would have expected.
Several.
And then of course there is the question of the content of the education, even for those who “do well”. My son would be quick to acknowledge that he is an academic success but that he knows virtually nothing of British or European literature prior to the twentieth century. Indeed, he knows little of British or European history, even including the twentieth century. He knows nothing of the Bible, or the Christian tradition. Luckily, he is genuinely intelligent, and has a magpie-like gift for intellectual theft, seeing much of an idea from even the tiniest stolen morsel.
Read the whole thing. It's about "enforced compassion" and egalitarian ideology.
“[T]herapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning capacity for self-help . . . between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence.”
The Edge: 
Photo: The USS New York, built with WTC steel, arrives in NYC on Thursday
Lean cuts of beef, like top round and flank steak (London Broil), are not worth grilling, and should not be grilled, without marinating them overnight first. Cooks say 10 hours at bare minimum. Otherwise, these dense, wood-like cuts are like chewing gum when grilled rare, and like leather when overcooked. 
